It is not difficult to believe the that Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Interactive Design Architects conceived the ominous obelisk known as The Obama Presidential Center with the intent to externalize Obama’s inner despot. If not, the irony of the Freudian architectural inference steeped in the gulag-like medieval menace emanating from the windowless, monolithic granite facade will undoubtedly be lost on the fawning celebrities and liberal minions who purport Barack Obama to be such a “decent” man in comparison to the oaf-like Trump. With his grandiloquent speeches and carefully orchestrated folksiness, Obama exudes decency, pontificating that “qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.” But that decency only runs skin deep, an artifice obscuring public policy and political jockeying that consistently betrayed his deceptive and flowery speeches, as his self-indulgent oratory marking the opening of his vanity project albatross on Chicago’s south side proved in its casual contempt for the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Because while Dr King might have been shocked to see a black president elected in a country founded upon white supremacy, after witnessing Obama’s cruelty to black and brown people here and around the world he would have labelled Obama as yet another “moderate white liberal.” King had a specific notion regarding the deceptive tactics of the moderate white liberal, the first being that they preferred a "negative peace" (the absence of tension) over a "positive peace" (the presence of justice). Time and time again, Barack Obama opposed movements for justice and failed to support workers movements and revolutions around the world, choosing to ignore the presence of justice by either ignoring or extinguishing it. One of the most glaring examples were the historic 2011 and 2015 workers’ protests in Wisconsin, when hundreds of thousands converged upon the state capitol urging then Governor Scott Walker not to sign union-busting Right to Work legislation. Through weeks of unrest with uprisings covered around the world, Barack Obama failed to say a single word in favor of striking workers, or even to mention the protests themselves, until he was campaigning for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at the end of 2015. Obama would never use his bully pulpit to take a stand for workers and marginalized populations, but he was not above using those movements to his political advantage. Organized labor and workers rights were the cornerstone of MLK’s gospel, but proved anathema to the Obama administration’s “free trade” deals. This was the Obama who during his 2007 presidential campaign promised to “walk on that picket line” with workers denied their collective bargaining rights. During his presidency five states, including Wisconsin and Michigan, became “right to work” havens, and needless to say Obama never walked a picket line or joined in a protest to prevent union-busting legislation.

Perhaps even more egregious was his feigned ignorance regarding the indigenous peoples’ standoff with Energy Transfer and their private security contractors who were digging up sacred burial grounds in Standing Rock for the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Images of Native American activists being assaulted with firehoses and being bitten by security canines went viral in May of 2016, but Obama was silent on the matter until a town hall in Laos in September of 2016 during which an indigenous woman inquired as to how he would ensure drinking water was protected during the Standing Rock protests. As could be expected, Obama’s bold response was "I’d have to go back to my staff and find out how are we doing on this one."

<The bullshitter-in-chief tries to hem and haw (and um) his way out of failing to stand up for Native Americans being firehosed and attacked by security dogs in their attempts to protect a sacred burial ground from the bulldozers of Dakota Access, LLC. On July 29, 2013, Obama held the first Council on Native American Affairs , a body established by his executive order--without one single tribal leader being present. Dr King aptly noted “…the price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro and other minority groups is the price of its own destruction.”>

Obama defined the essence of neoliberal moral decay in what King coined as the condemnation of methods over goals, speaking loftily of aspirational change while condemning, and even prosecuting, activists and journalists alike. As Obama waxed philosophical over the exhibits at his Presidential Center, claiming they would remind us “that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust, free press,” it would be safe to say there is no mention in those hallowed halls of his presidency setting the record for the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers. And Obama’s indelible quotes damping down organized attempts at meaningful change are nowhere to be found in his Presidential Center as well. If young black activists visit, they will not see Obama’s call for the Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson who were being brutalized by his militarized police to “stop yelling” because “you can’t just keep on yelling at them and you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position.” Nor will his response to Occupy Wall Street activists, who he compared to the Tea Party on the right, be enshrined on the walls of the $850 million monument to his brilliance in asserting that “The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded.” This cynical construct is a rewording of the Republican mantra of “personal responsibility,” Obama instructing that if we are sufficiently responsible and if we color within the lines and if we work hard enough (two or three jobs?) then the government will look kindly upon us in allowing us to run like rats on the ever-spinning wheel of cancer capitalism. “Doing what we are supposed to do” means not questioning state power with protest while complying with the wishes of an ever more intrusive and militaristic state. In essence Obama was making activists and journalists an offer they couldn’t refuse.

In the face of record wealth and income inequality exacerbated by Obama’s Wall Street bailout median household income declined, and for the first time in history the top 0.1% held as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. If all of his insidious opposition to the Occupy Wall Street protests against his bankers and billionaires was not enough to place him in direct opposition to the gospel of MLK, documents from Wikileaks prove that Obama let Citigroup, one of the crooked financial institutions he was bailing out, choose the vast majority of his cabinet positions. Stealing from the poor and giving to the rich was not one of the tenets of MLK’s vision of socioeconomic justice, and such rejection of direct action towards change was one of his major concerns regarding the stagnation imparted upon oppressed populations by the moderate white liberal.

If there should be any doubt about Obama’s desecration of King’s legacy, the 92,000 bombs he dropped on the Middle East during his two terms should serve as proof positive. King was not only courageous, as he knew his stand against America as “the greatest purveyor of violence today” would result in state violence directed against him, but he spoke prophetically and accurately foreseeing that the bombs we send overseas “will destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” Obama enthusiastically expanded what King called “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long,” an arrogance manifest in Obama’s boasting "Turns out I'm really good at killing people. I didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." Turns out Obama was better at killing than anything else, for when he was asked in a recent ABC interview what his greatest accomplishment was he answered “ a reset in tone” and a “message of unity.” But what tone is set and what message is sent by bombing at least seven different countries, spending $5 trillion on war and killing approximately 600,000 people, the vast majority civilians? Both his expansion of imperialist wars and his Wall Street cabinet assured that he would do virtually nothing for the black population that rightfully took so much pride in his election.

<A portrait of bipartisan sociopathy. Over 10,000 children drank contaminated water due to a racist stunt by Governor Rick Snyder’s “Emergency Manager” switching the water supply of poverty-stricken Flint from Detroit to the Flint River. Two years later, Obama came into town and did a stand-up comedy routine assuring the parents of Flint that the children exposed to high lead levels “will be fine” as he pantomimed drinking Flint water. Since the water crisis in 2014 special needs students now comprise 28% of Flint’s schools. The national average is 13%. Obama never mentioned Flint again.>

But Obama’s victory ultimately meant no tangible gains for black and brown people here in the United States or those around the world, apart from the scoldings he would hand out to black fathers in Chicago, Black Lives Matter activists across America and the leaders of African nations. When Obama took office in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, black households owned just 5% of the wealth of white households. When he left office in 2016, supposedly solving the financial crisis according to MSNBC and the Democratic Party, that number was 8%, a 3% gain. Yet white Wall Street executives saw their wealth increase by over 100%, CEO-to-worker pay ratio peaking at a record 300-to-1 during his administration. Obama’s personal wealth increased almost 70 times from the beginning to the end of his administration. Obama’s most potent weapon was and is his silver tongue, the tongue of a snake who would placate his base with performative participation in African ritual and prayer while he bombed multiple countries in Africa and unironically berated leaders about corruption in their countries.

In the eyes of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X, this deception of the black community and crushing of black protest is the tool of the moderate white liberal. Just as Obama told Black Lives Matter activists to “stop yelling” and have a seat at the table, white moderates urged King to cancel his speeches and marches and negotiate with white civic leaders. Just as Obama stressed the importance of “incremental change” in lieu of fawning over “shiny new objects” that promise radical change like Bernie Sanders, moderate white liberals told King to stop his demonstrations and wait for a “more convenient season.” Just as Obama called for law and order in Baltimore following the police murder of Freddie Gray, blaming the victims of centuries of institutional oppression and state violence:

“There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing. When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities. That robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area.”

Evidently Obama has not witnessed the blight Baltimore, blight that he did absolutely nothing legislatively to address, or he would understand that the reason for the unrest is the continued victimization of that poverty-stricken, underserved community by the state in the complete absence of opportunity and structural support. While Obama parroted the racist trope in calling rioters in Baltimore “thugs,” King understood the impacts of police violence on black communities, asserting “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality,” yet it’s Obama who not only excused it but enabled it by claiming to implement a program to reduce the amount of used military equipment being transferred to local police departments. Subsequent investigations proved that the year following Obama’s performative ban, transfers of military equipment to police departments actually increased. While Obama assured police officers that “we have your backs” he gave no such assurances to black families in Chicago, instead recycling the racist trope of the absent black father and advising that "Brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What's wrong with that?” He most certainly did not have the backs of the thousands of black men and women who were gunned down by police during his eight-year term. Perhaps Obama neglected to read this Dr King speech from 1968 addressing the riots in Watts:

“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. . . A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

It is tragic that millions of liberals remain in awe of celebrity millionaires and billionaires throwing a party for their hero—a mass murderer, war criminal, pathological liar and austerity king—while he praises his former vice-president Joe Biden, an ardent segregationist and enabler of a genocide. At the opening of the Center, Obama spoke of the threat to democracy posed by Trump, yet during his two terms as president the inequality that nullifies democracy itself jumped dramatically, particularly among black and Latino demographics. Liberal media touted the economic recovery overseen by Obama as a success because it added to the wealth of the top 10%, but the reality for the bottom 90% was that the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013. Reflecting upon who actually benefitted from Obama’s policies is a devastating commentary on the delusional state of our media and the Democratic Party base, as the top 1% of black families gained $275,000 in wealth, while the median black family lost $40,000. The median white family under Obama lost $26,000 while the top 1% of white families gained $1.4 million. In his exacerbation of wealth inequality, particularly in the black community, Obama validates King’s damning observation some 50 years after he made it— “the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Instead of doing anything to address that poverty, our first black president exacerbated it with expansion of war, mass surveillance and handouts to the ruling class.

Perhaps the most chilling impact of Obama’s presidency is the reality that the cult of celebrity around Obama effectively crushed any authentic notion of civil rights or black revolution, instead increasing support for wars against black and brown nations that the black Democratic base previously did not support. Several polls prior to George W Bush’s Iraq War showed that a mere 7% of black voters supported it as opposed to 77% of white voters, but Obama’s equally spurious war on Libya garnered support from 40% of black voters. In 2014 the majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue to supply police departments with military equipment. In 2020, James Clyburn endorsed Biden, an ardent segregationist who is responsible for incarcerating millions of black males via his 1994 Crime Bill, and black voters voted for him in droves effectively ending Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid. In 2026 half the Congressional Black Caucus voted to oppose an amendment to end military aid to Israel, enabling the continuation of a genocide. Think about this for a moment. A central tenet of King’s teachings, and of the civil rights movement itself, was the civic and moral damage that wars abroad do here at home, and that equality and civil society are unachievable in the face of war. King said it outright:

“This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies. Despite feeble protests to the contrary, the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.”

“While the anti-poverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised and required to be an instant success, billions are liberally expended for this ill-considered war. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home, they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”

Yet black voters chose the segregationist over the Democratic Socialist who was aligned with King’s values, largely because of his close association with Barack Obama.

There is no reconciling Obama’s military strikes on seven different countries with the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, there is no reconciling anything that Barack Obama did as president, including The Affordable Care Act, with King’s vision of equality and justice. The contortions made by many in the black electorate and the Congressional Black Caucus to uphold the image and legacy of the first black president have devastated not only the black constituencies but the entirety of the working class and the poor. Obama has excused away the Democrats’ genocide in Gaza, never naming Biden or his henchmen in any discussion, always prefacing his comments by citing the “brutal” October 7th attack on Israel, but never using such a term to describe what Israel is doing to Palestinians and parsing descriptors like the sympathetic “Israeli families” versus the detached “people of Gaza.”

It is not that King’s “dream” is some radical leftist ideology. It is firmly planted in the center of a moral universe. But our moral center has been whittled away by a toxic bipartisan pundit class that places party over people and the whims of the ruling class above the truth. Morality and humanity have been replaced by the cult of celebrity, the propping up of mercenary, deceptive sociopaths as idols to be worshipped, or at the very least not to be criticized, lest the spell of mass delusion be broken. We are now supposed to serve the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Obama and Trump regardless of their actions. If we do not, if we dare to call out the mass murderers and deceivers in the Democratic Party for who they are, the liberal cabal will accuse us of being in league with Putin, or (gasp!) of being a Republican. If we dare to call out the far-right Republicans and Trump, we are Communists. Democrats and Republicans have joined hands to resist the movement towards King’s brand of Democratic Socialism, for the moral center has no place in American politics or culture.

The Obama Foundation was given a 99-year lease on the protected public parkland it occupies for a mere $10, yet the $470 million dollar fund it was supposed to maintain to guard against maintenance and upkeep costs for the city of Chicago thus far has all of $1 million allotted. Developers and investors are snatching up homes in the area and rents have increased by up to 100% since the Center’s inception. Admission to the Center is $30 for adults, and if you want lunch it’s $17 for an Obamaburger. This monument to the unassailable ego of a sociopath offers little benefit to the community at large, but it’s ominous aura does serve as a sinister reminder of Obama’s unprecedented use of The Espionage Act to disappear journalists, his continued use of black sites to sequester and torture terrorism suspects, and his expansion of executive power to allow for the president to murder anyone, American citizens included, without a court order. It looms as a massive headstone, an unfortunate accident of candid architecture recalling the windowless, monolithic black sites in which Obama and his proxies held and tortured untold thousands. It is a tribute to his expansion of family detention in 2014, during which he incarcerated thousands of asylum-seeking children and mothers who were fleeing extreme violence in Central America. It is a tribute to a man so cold and calculating that he would misuse a Martin Luther King quote to justify his own cowardice—“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”— in bending that arc away from the justice that King died for.

Hopefully someday Obama’s obelisk will become obsolete. Perhaps it will be vulcanized into an authentic community center offering free vocational training. Or perhaps it will stand as a monument to the hazards of forgetting. Not only forgetting the reasons that we were all working so hard towards electing the first black president, and for me it was not expanding the war in Afghanistan or privatizing the health care system, but the forgetting of the truths told by courageous black philosophers like Martin Luther King Jr. We cannot pretend to aspire to the humanistic goals of such prophetic minds and pay tribute with sanctimonious holidays while we cover up the crimes against humanity of those who proselytize using the color of their skin as a shield against judgment. Liberal adulation for Obama, embodied in the vacuous celebrity-laden opening of his presidential center, makes a mockery of King’s sacrifice—all the things he stood for and all the things he died for snuffed out by millionaires and billionaires holding a mutual admiration society meeting. History rewritten as a prerequisite to a $100 lunch at “Tafari’s Kitchen,” all in the interest of trivializing Obama’s terror campaign against black and brown people here and around the globe to the level a tourist attraction, lauding his DACA executive order but somehow failing to mention his “expedited deportations” and ICE raids in record numbers. For Obama’s reduction of King’s words into mere political expediency, and for his violation of King’s legacy on so many levels, we have been punished with the ascent of Trump.

The day after the lavish opening of the Presidential Center, which was Juneteenth, 14 people were shot in a single mass shooting on Chicago’s south side. Over the Juneteenth weekend over 40 people were shot primarily on the south and west sides of Chicago. The first black president who had a supermajority in Congress and failed to pass any legislation on gun control, civil rights or voting rights flew home from his $850 million presidential center to his $12 million dollar mansion in Martha’s Vineyard secure in his $70 million net worth. This is more like Dr King’s nightmare than his dream. The primary purpose of the Obama Presidential Center is not to serve the community but to assuage the ego of a celebrity who used his office to amass a personal fortune at the expense of those he was elected to serve. The monolithic design of the center would be better served if it were to house cells in which Obama and all of the presidents who attended its opening ceremony would be on display to the public, relics of a time when presidents were not held accountable for their crimes against humanity. At the very least, if not prosecuted those who have murdered with impunity and gained so mightily from our collective suffering and stress should not be celebrated. They should not be showered with praise and music and admiration for remarking as to how adept they are at killing innocents. Barack Obama is a leader in crushing activism and putting his thumb on the scales of democracy against Democratic Socialists working to restore the moral center that Dr King (a Democratic Socialist himself) personified.

Less than one year prior to his assassination, Dr King made a plea for “a revolution of values.” That revolution will never come if we glorify the most bloodthirsty and self-serving among us. It is time to stop pretending that those who inflict harm on a mass scale are heroes. It is time to stop basing our politics on relativism and start prioritizing a political system that revolves around a moral center. King’s ideology, steeped in the compassion of Democratic Socialism, is the antidote for the oppression and violence perpetrated against us by the state. Let Obama’s gulag stand as a memorial to the perils of identity politics, and to a time when we were delusional enough to believe that the color of a president’s skin serves as a measure of their courage or moral integrity. Let us stop enshrining those who have betrayed the principles of equality and human dignity espoused by Dr King and move towards a political system that prioritizes humanitarianism over capitalism. One that prioritizes moral integrity over gender, race or sexual orientation. Instead of complying with a legacy media that persuades Americans to compromise their dignity in supporting the vile behavior of duplicitous leaders, we must find representatives who openly reject the reins of their party masters.

Dr King followed the courage of his convictions in exposing the uncomfortable truths about America, leading to his assassination. Obama followed the path of least resistance to personal enrichment via compliance with the class he aspired to be a member of, leading to obscene wealth and a whitewashed monument to his celebrity. We followed the distraction and divisiveness of identity politics and celebrity worship into the oblivion of Trumpism. Without a “revolution of values” there can be no turning back.

Americans are delusional to the point of terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome on one side of the political spectrum and inbred MAGA white supremacy on the other, yet both sides are equally afflicted with the jingoistic American Exceptionalism amplified by their respective political mafias. Such affliction makes for short memories and a Venn diagram in which the militaristic, nationalistic and hegemonic aspirations of the ruling class are manifest symmetrically in the tireless warmongering of both political parties. While Biden/Obama liberals shake their collective heads at Trump’s latest bombing campaign against Iran, they wholly support and repeatedly vote for Democrats who have called for war with Iran and who gave Trump a standing ovation during his deranged State of the Union rant about bombing Iran.

While it might offer short-term satisfaction to point fingers and pretend the other side is worse than yours, the reality is that liberals are enablers of the very perpetual war and regime change folly that helped Trump get elected in the first place. It was Trump in both 2016 and 2020 who campaigned against bipartisan regime change wars, humiliating Jeb Bush by calling out his father’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 2011 Trump made a video berating Barack Obama for being so “weak and ineffective” that he was going to start a war with Iran. But of course, like Obama and Biden and George W Bush he too is a tool of the CIA and Benjamin Netanyahu, bombing as many countries as Obama did during his two terms at the behest of Israel’s terrorist leader. Liberals seemed unconcerned as Biden did the bidding of Bibi, supplying $30 billion in US munitions to eradicate the Palestinian people, at times circumventing Congressional approval to supply weapons to eradicate the Palestinian people and their history. Of course, Hamas and the Palestinian people posed no threat to the US—Hamas doesn’t even have a military while Israel is the 16th most powerful military in the world.

Flash forward to today. Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee speaking about Trump’s bombing of Iran, told reporters “When we are talking about putting American soldiers in harm’s way … there needs to be the proof of an imminent threat to American interests. I still don’t think that standard has been met.” Yet Warner was all for keeping troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the fact that there was no proof of either country posing an imminent threat to American interests. He was fine with sending munitions to Israel although Hamas and Palestine posed no threat to the US. When faced with claims that Israel was intentionally targeting women, children and journalists, Warner protected Israel asserting that their bombing in Gaza was “very targeted,” unable to see the irony in his heartless response. He went on to continue spreading pro-Israel propaganda claiming “I think now that the troops have surrounded Gaza City, I think they are getting more targeted.” Then Warner said something truly shocking, exposing the fact that both political parties are merely playing off each other for the benefit of their delusional bases. “If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we’re in uncharted territory.”

The fact is that for over 30 years Israel has run American foreign policy regardless of the administration holding power in Washington. Whether it was the bipartisan rush to invade Iraq despite the obvious lies of the Bush administration, spearheaded by none other than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, or Obama’s illegal US/NATO bombing of Libya which saw Hillary Clinton cackling about the assassination of Gaddafi, our Congress and presidents have bent over backwards to appease Israel’s thirst for Muslim blood and regional dominance. Democrats have been more than willing to do Israel’s bidding when it comes to Iran, and in doing so helped to set the stage for Trump’s latest bombing campaign. During her 2024 presidential campaign, not only did Kamala Harris celebrate US military adventurism with her borderline fascist “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” propaganda, but she proclaimed repeatedly that the greatest threat to American security was Iran which has turned out to be a most dangerous lie. The 2024 DNC platform mocked Trump for being to lenient with Iran, noting that when “Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops, Trump again took no action.” The platform fails to mention that the ballistic missile attacks were in direct response to Trump’s drone strike assassination of Iran’s major general Soleimani. In 2008 during her presidential primary against Barack Obama, madwoman Hillary Clinton threatened “Because whatever stage of development they <Iran> might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Only Iran had a Fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons since the mid 1990’s, meaning it would have been sacrilege to develop such a weapon.

<Liberal hero and warmongering liar Hillary Clinton working it for Israel during her 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama proclaims she would “obliterate” Iran and its people if they developed a nuclear weapon, which sounds identical to Trump’s threat. Liberals and fellow Democrats were fine with Hillary Clinton’s declaration of the war crimes that she would commit against Iran, but somehow Trump saying the same thing is an outrage. The liberal response to this video today is “she would have followed proper protocol”...in her obliteration of Iran.>

For all those liberals who would defend the Democratic Party by pointing to their current push to pass the War Powers Act, it is not only too little too late but it is another performative effort to convince a sagging and demoralized base that they are actually “fighting Trump.” And it is no accident that the original more potent version of the bill was watered down from immediately ceasing military intervention to allowing Trump to continue his bombing for 30 days. Which just provides more evidence that Democrats can’t fight Trump because they largely agree with his military aggression if not his specific tactics. What most Democrats appear to be objecting to is that Trump did not consult with Congress prior to military action. Nancy Pelosi justified Obama’s illegal bombing of Libya and assassination of Gaddafi, making the excuse that “The limited nature of this engagement allows the president to go forward. I’m satisfied that the president has the authority he needs to go ahead.” Even though he most certainly did not, and his “limited” engagement involved the dropping of one thousand bombs. Amy Klobuchar claims “He <Trump> must not, and under our Constitution cannot, take these actions without congressional authorization and a full debate in Congress over the goals, risks, and implications,” yet she fully supported Obama’s bombing of Libya as well. Klobuchar’s website, adorned unironically with the assertion that she is “Working for the People of Minnesota,” sports a laundry list of nationalistic hegemonic ambitions, not the least of which is her assertion that “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is one of the most important objectives of our national security policy.” It is no surprise that she and the vast majority of Democrats supported the crippling sanctions on Iran that devastated its economy bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets, justifying Trump’s current indiscriminate bombing campaign. It is also no surprise that her website repeatedly boasts about her support for funding Israel and the need to contain the terror of Hamas, but zero mention or condemnation of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

The Democratic Party’s genocide along with their escalating rhetoric against Iran serve as proof positive that their allegiance to Israel dwarfs their commitment to the American people. The only standing ovation Democrats gave Trump during his lunatic State of the Union tirade was when he threatened aggression against Iran and insisted they could not obtain a nuclear weapon. Of course, it was Trump who at Israel’s behest pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), but Biden made no effort to reinstate it as he and the Democrats supplied Israel with tens of billions in munitions to aid and abet Israel in its genocide. Instead of debunking Trump’s warmongering propaganda by using their positions of power to broadcast the truth to the American people, the truth being that Iran did not have aspirations towards a nuclear weapon and that it was Trump who even made it a possibility in the first place, Democrats doubled-down on their Islamophobic fearmongering. Such honesty would go a long way in debunking corporate media propaganda and changing the narrative in favor of what is best for the American people, but instead Democrats chose to stand with Israel and reinforce Trump’s lies about the threat Iran posed to the US.

Liberal media has convinced the “vote blue no matter who” crowd that the faction which refuses to support the Democratic Party’s regime change wars and genocide are guilty of exercising a “purity test,” as if those who decline to vote for mass murderers of innocent women and children somehow demand an unreasonably high standard of moral integrity in their representatives. Our politicians and the pundits who enable them have become so conditioned to promoting the interests of the state, so biased towards protecting the interests of their own festering political parties, that they will support (or ignore) everything from proxy wars to genocide in order to protect the most amoral and hypocritical of politicians. Democrats have been fearmongering about Iran for 50 years, repeatedly warning that they would use force against Iran if it were on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon. It is no secret that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and that they have been massacring Muslims with bipartisan congressional support for decades, so it would stand to reason that the country Netanyahu has been looking to attack for 30 years would want a nuclear weapon as a deterrent.

Even after Trump and Israel’s tag team bombing of Iran, virtually all Democrats continue to propagandize Iran as a primary security threat to America. From Hakeem Jeffries to “progressive” Ro Khanna to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, every one of them prefaces any statements against Trump’s failure to obtain Congressional authorization for “war” with the fact that Iran is an immediate threat, the number one sponsor of terrorism around the world (which it is not) and cannot under any circumstances obtain a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, Israel who has bombed no less than seven countries in the past year is tacitly allowed to have nuclear weapons with no mention of their arsenal, or concern regarding a lunatic Zionist country possessing such weapons, to be found among Democrats. The depravity of Democrats playing to their Trumpaphobic base by sending a letter demanding answers from Trump administration regarding the US massacre of over 150 Iranian schoolgirls is the ultimate gaslight considering that many of these same Democrats were covering their ears entering the 2024 DNC convention in Chicago when activists were reading the names of over 15,000 children who had been killed in Gaza by the bombs these same Democrats voted to send to Israel. Elizabeth Warren signed onto that letter about the Iranian schoolgirls, yet gave Trump a standing ovation when he went on a tirade threatening Iran during his State of the Union address. Under the Biden administration Warren voted in favor of funding tens of billions in munitions for Israel, which everyone knew were being used to carry out a genocide whose victims were mostly women and children. In January of 2026, 70% of House Democrats voted in favor of Trump’s $830 billion military spending bill, and 90% of Senate Democrats still accept donations from AIPAC.

Democrats are no more our friends than Republicans or Trump. They spread state propaganda in favor of endless war and genocide, then pull back when public sentiment turns against them or the opposing party capitalizes upon that propaganda, but ultimately their actions are either performative or intentionally far too late. Cities were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced before their hearings on Trump’s bombing of Iran began. And how many of their “hearings” in regards to Trump or 9/11 or ICE or anything impactful to the American people have resulted in any concrete action or changes in policy? That would be zero. The bombing of Iran is a bipartisan endeavor, a tragedy resulting from the soft fascism of an entire government being run by a country of nine million people. The fact that 41% of Americans support Trump’s actions in Iran shows that something is terribly wrong with our country that runs much deeper than merely the pervasive ignorance of a society bombarded with propaganda via every imaginable platform, whether it be scrolling through social media, state-run corporate news services, or political podcasts such as Pod Save America which are hosted by former political party operatives. The days of accusing the handful of progressives who remain of exercising a “purity test” are long gone, because our political system and the media that supports it are so thoroughly corrupted that finding any politician or any information source with a shred of morality or integrity is nearly impossible. Pretending that somehow your side is virtuous while the other is evil only allows that evil to become even more malignant

Biden/Harris/Obama liberals continue to sing the virtues of their neoliberal heroes posting memes about their decency and how things would be so different if Kamala Harris were elected president. The only real difference would be that her sociopathy and misdeeds would be hidden from plain sight by MSNBC, Robert Reich and the rest of those who make their living providing cover for the ruling class. A lot was made of 70% of Democrats calling for a cease fire in Gaza, which of course neither Biden nor Harris worked on for one minute despite claims to the contrary. But those Democrats did not want a cease fire because they cared about the Palestinian people—they were concerned it would make Biden/Harris look bad and lose the election. And they were right. But to this day they blame people like me who refused to vote in favor of genocide rather than holding those in power responsible for their crimes against humanity. MSNBC liberals have been trained to tolerate the mass murder of Muslims and black and brown people in general at the hands of their party leaders, but are adamant about Putin’s bombing of white Ukrainians. Their outrage is indeed selective, for if they had a shred of integrity they would be equally outraged at Obama, Biden and the Clintons who have all bombed and/or occupied sovereign nations for no reason other than that’s what Israel or the CIA or the ruling class told them to do.

As we speak the hundred million dollar woman Rachel Maddow, whose Russiagate conspiracy has fallen flat with Trump sending military aid to Ukraine and sanctioning of Russian oil, is now manufacturing yet another conspiracy rationalizing that Trump is bombing Iran because he is beholden to the leaders of the UAE. Somehow Maddow and the vast majority of liberal media has failed to notice that it is the leader of Israel who has been campaigning for the elimination of Iran for the past 30 years, and that Trump has joined with Israel in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the West Bank as well as their bombing campaign in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen. So if we want to consider a country’s interests that Trump has placed above those of the US, that would be Israel not the UAE and Arab nations. Perhaps the reason Maddow, Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich and the millionaire liberal pundits fail to mention Israel is because Biden and the Democrats are equally beholden to Israel and the ruling class, and these pied pipers laugh all the way to bank distracting their disciples from the reality that their party is run by the same handful of madmen as the other. It’s just that Democrats are kinder to the LGBTQ community—until it loses them elections. Then ruling class sycophants like Gavin Newsom parrot Republican anti-trans talking points about the 10 transgender athletes among the 500,000 athletes who participate in college sports. Yet liberals are championing Newsom, who posted a chilling video of him proudly disposing of the belongings of the recently displaced homeless due to his adopting a Trump policy permitting officials to destroy their personal property (what little they had). Not to mention his disturbing passive-aggressive response when asked about AIPAC by podcast host Van Lathan, during which he sternly said seven times in less than a minute that it was “interesting” Van Lathan would ask him about AIPAC. Because he didn’t know they had influence in the political system. The next month he was calling Israel an “Apartheid state,” but it only took two weeks for him to apologize for that statement, claiming he was speaking of what Israel could become in the future. In speaking to Politico, Newsom proclaimed his undying love for Israel:

“Do I consider myself a Zionist? I revere the state of Israel. I’m proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership.”

The focus of Netanyahu is a way of maintaining support for a genocidal Jewish ethno-supremacist state while appearing to be against it. The reality is that over 80% of Israelis support the mass displacement of Palestinians, and 47% approve of the extermination of all Palestinians. So by supporting the state of Israel, whose government is completely infiltrated with right-wing Zionists, you support genocide.

As Kamala Harris and Newsom jockey for position to a Trump obsessed base, it is apparent the change that is coming will not engender any relief for the vast majority of the American people. The simple fact is that these people so not work for us at all. They work for the same warmongering, hegemonic, depraved billionaires and intelligence agencies who have kept us massacring innocents around the globe for “fun” (as Trump recently admitted) and profit for 75 years. As we speak Washington state’s Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson is “proud to welcome” over 700 war profiteers and AI surveillance companies to Seattle for a convention of the same death dealers who supply the US with munitions and intelligence for the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s bombing of Iran. Attendees include top US military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, and Boeing and AI/surveillance giants Palantir, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Textron. So Democrat Ferguson is “proud to welcome” the same companies that Trump is now using to blow up the Middle East just like his predecessors.

Liberals are often offended by the reality that their party is just as depraved and deceptive as the Republican Party, only they defend LGBTQ rights when convenient and are more polite about their regime change wars and their brand of genocide. But the unfortunate fact is that the majority of Senate Democrats voted in favor of Trump’s 900 billion dollar military budget. Nearly a trillion dollars for a madman they supposedly despise to wage war on the world. Now they are grandstanding about refusing to approve $200 billion in supplemental funds for his war in Iran. But what tangible good does refusing to approve $200 billion when you’ve already voted in favor of enough funding to incinerate half the Middle East? What kind of a political party embraces the most heinous of war profiteers, welcoming them to their cities and giving them all manner of tax breaks and subsidies, and then speaks out against Trump utilizing those profiteers to assist Israel in its suicide mission?

I’ll tell you what kind of party. The kind of party that can fund the massacre of 50,000 children under their own leadership, and then express outrage that the other party massacred 150. The kind of party that changes regimes, or attempts to, in Libya, Ukraine, Syria and all across the Global South, then puts their foot down when Putin or Trump do the same. The kind of party that uses ICE for Christmas Eve raids on migrant women and children, keeps unaccompanied minors sleeping on the floor in cages and employs CBP to enforce unconstitutional “expedited deportations” expelling migrants in record numbers then expresses disbelief when Trump uses these same agencies to abuse migrants in broad daylight. The kind of party whose 2028 presidential prospects, from Gavin Newsome to JB Pritzker, use talking points to deceive their base when it comes to their unerring support for AIPAC and Israel, both now targeting how “right wing” Netanyahu has become in its association with Trump, never mentioning the genocide or the Palestinian people out loud. Of course, Israel has been “right-wing” as a Jewish Supremacist State since its founding, but Zionists like the majority of Democrats only care about the electoral implications of their association with Israel, not the moral imperative of stopping the oppression, murder and displacement of the Palestinian people.

Neither of our political parties have any semblance of a moral compass. Their sole purpose is to deceive their respective bases into believing they are representing their interests while they do the bidding of the depraved Epstein class. If their is any doubt amongst Biden/Harris/Clinton/Obama loyalists, or among the MAGA faithful, the release of the Epstein files is proof positive of the bipartisan rot amongst the ruling class that controls our government. So consider for a moment that the Democratic Party that we are depending upon to “fight Trump” is part of, or at the very least beholden to, the same Epstein class that Trump embraces. There are occasionally degrees of separation, as in Hyatt billionaire and Epstein loyalist Thomas Pritzker being the cousin of fellow billionaire JB Pritzker, but it is no coincidence that billionaire families have the same “friends” and confidants. And Pritzker himself, talking tough against Trump warning “if you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law,” completely failed to protect “his people” against ICE, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel live joking about Trump’s calling Chicago a “war zone” while we were out in the streets getting beaten and teargassed and shot. TO show his solidarity with “his people,” Pritzker sicced his own State Police on protesters outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. For the record, Pritzker is also on video at the 2024 DNC sitting only a few seats away from a Palestinian woman being beaten over the head by union members, first glancing over for a few seconds and then casually turning away. Just another aloof Epstein class sociopath who, like many Democrats, will throw a few scraps to the peasants and thus is considered a “good guy” by most liberals. Our frame of reference has been shifted so that instead of assessing a public servant’s performance on how well they serve their constituents we judge relative to the outward sadism and ignorance of the Trump administration, which means that today’s Democrats are pining for the days of more amicable war criminals like George W Bush and Dick Cheney. The same pundits and Democrats who lionized Cheney for his disdain for Trump and endorsement of Kamala Harris called him Hitler a mere 20 years ago. So it seems the liberals’ Hitler of yesteryear is today’s hero, if only because he was endorsing their anointed candidate instead of the “Orange Hitler.”

Our current economic and political systems naturally select for candidates who are already corrupt or easily corrupted away from doing the work of the people and towards doing the work of the ruling class. Perhaps it is human nature to take the path of least resistance, which within our current politics is to assimilate into the power structure of political parties that are nothing more than mafias dueling over which friends and donors will ultimately rule our government. In the 2026 Illinois primaries, Evanston mayor and winning candidate for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District Daniel Biss bemoaned the influence of big money donors on our political system during his acceptance speech and then said the quiet part out loud—“This victory belongs to J Street.” J Street is another Israeli lobbying organization, not as right-wing as AIPAC but still a Zionist organization against the BDS movement, vocal about Israel’s right to “defend itself,” and calling for the elimination of Hamas. In the same Illinois election, Governor Pritzker bought the Congressional seat for his former Lt Governor Juliana Stratton with a 5 million dollar donation, and as Pritzker amplified the Democratic Party’s false narrative about AIPAC not influencing the outcome of the election, Stratton was indeed receiving dark money donations from AIPAC.

Those Democrats grandstanding about the Trump administration’s subversion of democracy are not too proud to subvert democracy when it favors them electorally and financially. The vast majority of Democrats and their Bush/Cheney loving base jumped right on the Kamala Harris bandwagon without a primary and with no concern that their own party deceived them regarding Biden’s cognitive state. With the complicity of the vast majority of Democrats, the country has lurched so far to the right that the term “progressive” is conflated with “liberal” because today’s liberals are no more than right-center Republicans, and progressives today are yesterday’s Clinton/Obama right-center liberals. The obsession with electoral dominance at all costs, spurred on by the very rightward shift it has catalyzed, has obliterated the moral center of not only our political parties but their respective bases as well. The pivotal question surrounding the 2024 election for liberals was not that their party was aiding and abetting a genocide, but that Trump would be worse. They had no interest in finding a candidate who did not support genocide, and in fact demonized those who considered Kamala Harris unacceptable, accusing anyone who refused to jump on the bandwagon of faux enthusiasm for her, all for the petrifying fear of Trump, racist and/or sexist. Of course, it’s not racist to dismiss your own party’s massacring and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Muslims by saying Trump would be worse while you blithely wave the Ukrainian flag to save white people from that boogeyman Putin. But even then your party eschews peace and diplomacy, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a futile war that you have been convinced is noble.

It appears that liberals and the Democratic Party so dismissive of the progressive “purity test” can easily pass their own “impurity test.” Mass murder? Fine. Genocide? Perfectly acceptable (just try not to talk about it). The human rights and constitutional violations of ICE and CBP? Not a problem until Trump lets them out of their cages and they start threatening white people. Billionaires buying elections, holding higher office and influencing politicians? No problem, as long as they are our billionaires. Interventional wars and regime change? We won’t say a word, unless it’s Trump or Putin doing it. The day Barack Obama dismissed what at that time was to be the war crime of the century, until Biden and the Democrats sponsored Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was the day that liberals were permitted to look back fondly upon the relative wisdom and restraint of Iraq War criminal George W Bush and his sadistic co-conspirator Dick Cheney. It was the end of any vestige of accountability within a festering political system. The fact that Obama was barely called out for such an egregious a violation of his legal and ethical obligation as president has proven to be the ultimate barometer of liberalism’s moral vacuum. That progressive “purity test” liberals find so repulsive is merely a demand for honesty and moral integrity, but it makes sense that today’s liberals would find such a demand infuriating. For their leaders are devoid of both, which means those supporting them must be as well. There must indeed be some serious pathologies in those who would respond to their own party’s genocide by shrugging their shoulders and saying “Trump would be worse.” As Israel announces it will not begin extrajudicial executions of Palestinian prisoners, Democrats from Adam Schiff to Elizabeth Warren still call Israel the only “democracy” in the Middle East, but of course that isn’t at all true and hasn’t been for decades. Liberals posting memes reminding us of how “classy” the Obamas and the Bidens are/were should ask those in Libya, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan what their definition of “classy” might be. Can an individual who drops 50,000 bombs on innocents in the Middle East be “classy?” In today’s world of liberalism, they can. And if killing hundreds of thousands of civilians is “classy,” if eliminating the history and the lives of the women and black and brown people your party ostensibly represents is somehow “better than Trump,” then there will never be a time in the future when we are not under threat of authoritarian rule. If you cheerlead the careerists who strengthen mass surveillance, militarize the police, generously fund and support ICE and CBP, extend dual loyalty to Israel, privatize public institutions and prioritize the needs of their donors over those of their constituents, you are setting the stage for authoritarianism. In their abrogation of moral integrity, your kings are no better than theirs.

The Overton Window on health care has become so narrow that the conversation regarding health care in America has shifted to the spectrum of disastrous consequences of the expiration of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to the for-profit insurance industry rather than the absurdity of a system that forces us to spend our tax dollars propping up corporate middlemen that make billions in profits by denying us the care that we are paying them for. While Trump floats his “Great Healthcare Plan,” a sundry mix of price transparency and cost controls which like the ACA mistakenly assumes obtaining healthcare is akin to buying a car, Democrats like Elizabeth Warren take the opportunity to accuse Republicans of creating “the health care crisis” in their refusal to renew ACA taxpayer generated subsidies. Warren proves herself once again to be just another political expedient, not offering any tangible solution to the suffering and confusion within the health care system that she and the Democrats foisted upon us. There is a reason that Republicans have no plan other than tweaking price transparency and shifting funds around within the system and that Democrats are looking to blame them for a crisis they themselves created via legislation that sees Americans funding multibillion dollar transnational corporations with their tax dollars.

Not only do we ensure the well-being of the insurers through subsidies provided through the ACA, but we then pay the same insurers an out-of-pocket average of $28,000 per year in premiums for a family of four or $10,000 for individual coverage. Yearly premiums do not include other costs which can be astronomical, including services that are not covered, out-of-network providers, coinsurance and pharmaceuticals, which is why over 40% of Americans are burdened with medical debt and 14% are in collections. The reality is that we are paying insurers twice for our health care—once through our taxes for subsidies to the ACA and Medicare Advantage, and again via exorbitant premiums and coinsurance as high as 40%. Were it not for the subservience of Democrats to the ruling class, and their resultant hostility to sound public policy, we would not be going bankrupt and putting off retirement because we have been legislatively forced to enrich the coffers of some of the wealthiest companies and individuals on the planet.

Because the health insurance conglomerates are investment firms which generate profit by limiting their payouts, the ACA was fatally flawed in putting financial institutions motivated solely by their bottom line in charge of our very existence. To the health insurance companies dispensing care is considered a loss, so their natural incentive is to withhold care. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden appeared in ads talking to Americans who loved their “private” health insurance so much that they couldn’t imagine losing it to Medicare for All, an absurd notion presented to shield Biden’s million-dollar industry donors like UnitedHealth Group. The groundswell of support for Luigi Mangione after his alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thomas, and society’s collective shrug of “it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” proved beyond a doubt that Americans in fact despise their for-profit insurance. Thomas served as a lightning rod for the rage against a health care industry that makes our lives miserable, or indeed terminal, by creating an unnavigable maze of inclusions, exclusions, copays, coinsurances, out-of-network surcharges, out-of-pocket maximums, deductibles, pre-authorizations and denials. Very few if any Americans “love” their for-profit health insurance plans. It’s just that they don’t know anything else, so the discussion is narrowed to the absurdity of “good insurance plans” versus “bad insurance plans,” when in reality even the “best” plans have thousands of dollars in deductibles and the same potential for denials and bankruptcy as the “bad” plans.

And if liberals still insist on defending the Affordable Care Act, consider that since its implementation the field has been whittled down to a mere ten major for-profit health insurance companies, with United Healthcare covering over one-fifth of commercial insureds and a whopping 40% of the Medicare Advantage population. In 2023, UnitedHealthcare denied 33% of its claims, and has been the subject of dozens of investigations and thousands of lawsuits related to not only denials but upcoding and overbilling, anticompetitive steering of patients and providers, and corrupt practices. The next three largest insurers, Elevance, CVS/Aetna and Humana, are currently under investigation by the DOJ for alleged payment of illegal "kickbacks" to Medicare Advantage brokers. These kickbacks were bribes designed to steer beneficiaries to their plans, listed on the balance sheet as "marketing" fees with the secondary intent of keeping patients needing more care, particularly those with disabilities, out of their plans. All of the major health insurers are guilty of denying a disproportionate number of claims for medical services, with United Healthcare topping them all at 32% while on average in the ACA exchanges the denial rate averages 20%. Not only do these denials result in financial hardship including bankruptcy, but the delaying of care due to denials increases patient morbidity and mortality not to mention the overall cost of care.

<This Biden campaign ad from 2020 conflates health insurance with health care, using this poor woman in an emotionally manipulative fashion to say “everybody deserves the right to have health insurance.” Wrong. Everybody deserves the right to have health care. Democrats and their consultants take Bernie Sanders slogan “health care is a right” and vulcanize it to favor the health insurers.>

It doesn’t seem possible that we would collectively agree to pooling hundreds of billions in our hard-earned tax dollars to subsidize for-profit corporations which intentionally withhold health care to improve their investment portfolios while they use only a fraction of those tax dollars in the dispensation of care. United Healthcare reported revenue of $448 billion in 2025 alone with profits of $85 billion, with a whopping 80% of their revenue coming from us, the taxpayers. Of the $400 billion in profits ranked in by private insurance companies since the implementation of the ACA 10 years ago, forty percent of that went to United Healthcare. All of the major insurers have seen their stock prices increase by over 1000 percent since the ACA went into effect, while the market indices for remaining companies increased 250 percent on average. One major factor in this windfall for health care conglomerates is the ACA’s highly touted expansion of Medicaid, which turns out to be another of many profiteering scams embedded within the ACA. While the federal Medicaid subsidies are 90% of what states use to pay for their Medicaid programs, the ACA shifted most Medicaid programs to managed care entities managed by private insurers who were more than happy to expand the number of Medicaid enrollees. But because these are managed care programs, access to care and particularly specialists is severely restricted, leaving Medicaid enrollees who often suffer lack of resources and social support to drive hundreds of miles to see a covered specialist. With over 70% of Medicaid enrollees now subject to managed care programs health insurers are profiting more than ever on the backs of the poor and disabled.

The answer is absurdly simple, but something that “will never, never happen” according to Hillary Clinton during her presidential run against Bernie Sanders in 2016. It’s not because a single-payer, Medicare for All type of health care plan is difficult to implement. In fact, it’s so much easier to administer and navigate than our current system that most industrialized nations have some form of single-payer healthcare and the majority of Americans favor it in poll after poll. Hillary Clinton was alluding to the forces that she and the vast majority of politicians are aligned with, forces with so much influence and power that politicians like Clinton are literally willing to commit murder for them. Then so what if the for-profit insurance industry is killing and maiming hundreds of thousands—or perhaps millions—of Americans every year? It is no coincidence that when the ACA was passed Democrats were the recipients of tens of millions of dollars from the health insurance industry. In 2013 the healthcare sector spent a record $243 million in lobbying and in 2024 the top recipient of United Healthcare dollars was Kamala Harris. This is why the ACA was passed without a public option as promised, and at the Senate finance Committee’s roundtable discussion on healthcare access and coverage in 2009 physicians demanding that single-payer be on the table for consideration within the context of the ACA were summarily prosecuted. It is why all Democrats do is threaten to hold performative votes on Medicare for All, the latest attempt at a vote killed by that great progressive (according to the world’s leading “progressive” talker Thom Hartmann I kid you not) Nancy Pelosi in 2021 who claimed that her support for Medicare for All in 1993 “preceded the enactment of “the Affordable Care Act” which she asserted “has better benefits than Medicare.”

Despite the sycophantic ramblings of faux progressive pundits like Thom Hartmann and Robert Reich, and neoliberal multimillionaires like Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper, the ACA was written by the health care lobby for the health care industry, leaving us with a gun to our heads as we are forced to prop up industry profits so that 10% of the population might be able to access health care within a system dominated by privatization and private equity. It’s no surprise that Thom Hartmann hung up on me after accusing me of being a Republican plant when I called his radio show to let him know that ACA enrollees were being forced to change their physicians (first hand accounts from my own patients ) despite Obama’s promise to the contrary. All of these pundits and celebrity news anchors were diligently representing the interests of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama’s legacy when they sold us the ACA. The Democrats were the kingpins pushing through legislation rubber-stamped by their bosses in the health care industry, passing fatally flawed and poorly written legislation mandating that leaves the vast majority of us to have no choice but to pay skyrocketing deductibles and/or premiums. As evidence of how shameless Democrats were in forcing us to prop up the health insurance industry, up until 2019 the ACA imposed a penalty on Americans who did not purchase government sanctioned insurance policies. The ACA reduced Democrats to glorified health insurance agents who made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

Instead of expressing outrage that Republicans are blocking ACA subsidies we should be waking up to the fallacy of the regulated for-profit model serving as a sustainable health care infrastructure. The American health care system is on the brink of collapse because the Democrats and their pundits caved to industry interests 15 years ago. Because of their deception regarding the sinister underpinnings of the Affordable Care Act, and their superficiality in touting how more Americans would be “covered” without considering the real-world value of that coverage, we find ourselves once again playing pretend. Pretending that Democrats have some moral advantage over Republicans in fighting to use our tax dollars to maintain the lavish lifestyles of the executive class while we fight for scraps in a health care system being coopted by private equity. Pretending that Democrats are morally superior to a Republican Party whose plan is just another money-laundering scheme to funnel revenue through our bank accounts to for-profit insurers, or in the case of Medicare Advantage dipping into the trillions in Social Security they were unable to privatize directly.

Hillary Clinton told the truth at least once during her presidential campaign against Bernie Sanders in 2016. In this political system, a single-payer plan will never, ever happen. And if it does, like all Democratic Party legislation, it will be means- tested pitting the winners against the losers (as does the ACA). The solution is simple and the infrastructure is already in place. Make everyone eligible for Medicare. Those who are working and/or a certain level above the poverty line contribute to a single, centralized pool of funds instead of paying tens of thousands in premiums, navigating dozens of complicated plans, being blindsided by unexpected medical bills and being screwed by unaccountable investment firms whose mission is diametrically opposed to the dispensation of health care. Democrats have us subsidizing an industry that last year saw UnitedHealth, CVS Health, Elevance, and Cigna post average annual stock buybacks of $3.7 billion, simultaneously raising stock prices and insurance premiums using our subsidies. Instead of paying to make the rich richer and us poorer in both health and wealth, we should be pooling our resources to subsidize one another’s health care. That is what a civil society would look like. It is unfortunate that our media and pundits discourage civil discourse, pitting one political faction against another by taking advantage of a distracted and depressed population, extracting context and history in favor of conflict and audience capture. We have been misled into believing that propping up billion- dollar conglomerates will somehow reduce health care costs when all it has done is to exponentially increase out-of-pocket costs and further limit access to care.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans can possibly have the answer while they thrive on bribes from the health care industry. If we do not unite to demand a single-payer health care system from our elected officials, the hundreds of billions we spend on subsidies will seem inconsequential next to the increasingly limited access and poor outcomes the vast majority of us will suffer. With over half of patients in America unable to afford prescribed medication, 850 million claims denied each year, 100 million Americans impacted by medical debt and over 100 million unable to afford care, it is only a matter of time until emergency rooms are overwhelmed and delays for care become so extreme than far more than 200,000 Americans will die each year due to the inequities of an entirely profit-driven system. In a time of such massive wealth inequality and social division, pooling our resources to take care of one another’s health is one way to reduce the dehumanization fostered by misinformation, device addiction and social media. As the ruling class and their disciples in Washington look to divide us so that we are forced to suffer under the cancer capitalist systems that benefit them, it is up to us to let them know that we refuse to suffer a slow death under the neoliberal donor-driven deception of the Democrats or a more rapid one at the hands of the crazy-making Christian nationalist Republicans. Contact your representatives directly using the information below and tell them you want a single-payer healthcare program and relate your healthcare horror stories. It is not hyperbole to say that our very existence depends upon it.

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

https://www.ucop.edu/federal-governmental-relations/_files/Advocacy/Federal-Research/guide_to_calling_your_legislators.pdf

Capitol switchboard to call congressional offices: (202) 224-3121

With so many devastating of images of America’s demolition of Gaza burnt into my brain, Trump’s leveling of the East Wing of the White House looks like just another casualty of war. And it is. For decades America has assumed it has a right to inflict the most iniquitous of suffering on any population around the world, whether it be propping up sadistic right-wing dictators in Latin America or carpet bombing innocents in the Middle East. And when the people of the countries we have ravaged seek refuge at our southern border they are treated like criminals and denied their right to asylum. Both political parties push towards harsher immigration policy, dehumanizing the very people whose lives our feeble attempts at world domination have upended. The bipartisan escalation of hegemonic foreign policy has culminated in the Democratic Party’s endorsement of the genocide in Gaza, with Biden and the Democrats lying to the American people on a daily basis, justifying their unfathomable immorality with Islamaphobic propaganda. But as Democrats rightfully call out the Christian right for their hypocrisy, and as I will prove it is hypocrisy of biblical proportions, it is the Democrats who brought the diabolism of Trump upon us.

For it is the Democrats who initiated the genocide and their base who dismissed it saying “Trump would be worse.” It is the party’s base who shamed Palestinians for their failure to support a warmongering and condescending Kamala “I’m speaking” Harris. It is the party’s media from CNN to The New York Times who spread propaganda accusing Hamas of mass rape and and beheading babies, and President Biden who amplified it, to justify Israel’s holocaust when there is no forensic evidence of those purported crimed but abundant video footage of IDF troops participating in rape against the Palestinians whoch goes unmentioned by the establishment. It is the Democrats themselves who literally covered their ears so as not to hear the names of Palestinian children killed by the bombs they voted in favor of sending to Israel. It is Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who stood in front of the media and lied to them every single day about Hamas stealing food aid, obstructing cease-fire agreements and even about their working towards a cease-fire at all. Anyone who told the truth about the Democratic Party’s genocide in Gaza or even simply discussed it openly was considered a threat to the party and labeled a Trump supporter, an agent of Putin or a Hamas sympathizer.

Unfortunately, the reality that Democrats, and now the rest of us, have been forced to confront is that the only thing more evil than a genocide is having the power to stop it but refusing to do so. Those who participated in such a charade while children were being maimed and slaughtered and their parents tortured certainly must be the most evil of all, for in Exodus 20:13 that states “Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked.” As for Biden’s signing onto shipments of $17 billion in munitions to slaughter an already oppressed population, “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: …”hands that shed innocent blood.” As it has become irrefutable that Israel is the depraved oppressor and the Palestinians are the righteous oppressed, Proverbs 17:15 dictates “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” So there is some redemption in the biblical classification of all of these defilers of truth and humanity, from Biden to Harris to Antony Blinken to Dana Bash, as the abominations that they are. And while all of them are prime candidates for a special place in hell, it’s not likely there is enough room for all the pundits (Robert Reich, Thom Hartmann, Jon Lovett ad infinitum) who either completely ignored Biden’s genocide or inverted the power dynamic to portray Israel as the victim. It is their justification, or in many cases completely ignoring, of the pure wickedness of Israel that has relegated their kind to the hell of narrating Trump’s transgressions in the interest of selling dog food or ringing up another five dollar subscription. It’s no surprise that this insular syndicate of slavish liberal punditry would be so arrogant as to think their spiritual bankruptcy would be mitigated by the cash reaped by audience capture.

<Six months after the genocide in Gaza began, America’s #1 “progressive” talker makes a video musing if “The Flour Massacre” constitutes genocide. Up to this point Hartmann had mentioned the subject of Gaza only when callers did and had repeatedly refused to call it a genocide, all the while talking up the wonders of Joe Biden and not allowing any criticism of Biden on his show. This grotesque inversion of morality is what progressivism in the commoditized US has become—parsing semantics in order to keep selling dog food and Substack subscriptions.>

As the coming of the Antichrist, the second coming of Trump brings all of America’s sins into the light of day. All of the ungodly acts that have been shielded by calculating politicians operating under the protection of a compliant media and supported by oblivious partisan bases have been brought into the light of day by a president unconcerned with keeping up appearances. Long before the election of Trump the bipartisan evils of the mass murder of innocents, an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth, white supremacy and yes even genocide have been allowed to fester and become more and more malignant election cycle after election cycle. This apathetic approach to electoral politics has spiraled downward into the depths of moral bankruptcy to the point that Democrats were excused for their complicity in genocide, a transgression so impious that it made the second coming of Trump inevitable. By fostering such an extreme application of the “lesser of two evils” strategy, we have failed to heed the warning of Timothy 3:13 “While evildoers and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” Our leaders have deceived us time and time again, each deception worse than the last, and yet we embrace that deception, delusional in putting the worst among us on a pedestal while turning a blind eye to the mass suffering inflicted by their lies. The liberal base was fully aware of their party’s enabling of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, yet instead of speaking out too many were on the side of suppressing protest and allowing anti-Palestinian propaganda to take hold until the 2024 election was over. Of this deafening silence, Proverbs 10:19 asserts “Sin is not ended by multiplying words, but the prudent hold their tongues.”

The reluctance of the Democratic Party base to hold Biden and Harris accountable for genocide, while hundreds of innocent Palestinians were being slaughtered on a daily basis, has consequences according to Ephisians 5:11:

“‘If anyone sins because they do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify regarding something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.”

And we are indeed being held responsible. The expectation that we were supposed to hold our noses and support a candidate that refused to oppose the genocide of innocents, one that her own party was aiding and abetting, was so spiritually bankrupt that those who supported Kamala Harris would inevitably be punished.

And we are all suffering their punishment under the second coming of the Antichrist in Donald Trump, who neatly fulfills all biblical prophecies regarding the ascent and reign of the Antichrist. He can only come to power amidst an atmosphere of complete moral lapse engendered by a rejection of truth, as we have seen manifest in those who make themselves minions of our depraved political parties. Paul delineates this in “The Gullibility of the Deceived”:

“They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” (2:10b-12)

And if Trump’s use of federal forces and our military are merely extensions of the atrocities committed by presidents before him, his unleashing of federal forces upon urban centers is prophesized in Daniel 11:39 which speaks of a “unique king” who will see themselves above all other deities, using the military to conquer the largest of cities:

“Furthermore, he will take action against the strongest fortified cities with the help of a foreign god. To those who cause him to receive recognition, he will cause honor to be increased so that he will cause them to rule the masses. Also, he will distribute land for a price.”

The last sentence alluding to the distribution of land would be applicable to Trump’s personal plans for Gaza renovation, which displaces millions of Palestinians to construct his “Riviera of the Middle East,” a luxury playground for the obscenely wealthy driven by real estate developers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and billionaire developer Steve Witkoff. The justification of the ethnic cleansing of a historically oppressed population as being a boon to the American investor class is the endpoint of cancer capitalism and definitive evidence of the depravity of a ruling class unleashed by a distracted and desperate populus. In Timothy 6:9-10, Paul warned Timothy that the seed of greed would fill his life with “many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction.” Daniel 11:45 is more specific in its prediction that “He <the Anitchrist> will pitch the tents of his royal pavilion between the seas and the beautiful Holy Mountain; yet he will come to his end, and no one will help him.” But it is the Book of Revelation that predicts the advent of the Antichrist in response to the mass murder of innocents, as delineated in 13:1 “The Beast was allowed to wage war against God’s people and to conquer them,” The Beast being a metaphor for the Antichrist as a political leader and God’s people representing the innocents. Revelation 13:5 states that the second beast “was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed,” a direct reference to Trump’s second coming and the violence he has imparted upon those who refuse to bow to him.

The Bible cautions against greed as a form of idolatry that is incompatible with following God, and characterizes the Antichrist as a figure who will use greed, avarice and worldly power to mislead people. Trump is the culmination of decades of the lionization of the ruling class and their obscene accumulations of wealth that began with Ronald Reagan. And while Reagan used the promise of hitting the jackpot to advance an agenda of wealth idolatry and demonization of the poor that qualifies as evil, he did not have oligarchs and corporations groveling at his feet to build his guilded palace in which all of them can hold their opulent rituals during which they satiate their gluttony and conspire against the peasantry. All of these donors who stand in support of Trump’s destruction of the people’s house, The Temple in the bible, are direct participants in the mass surveillance, wealth inequality, genocide, warmongering and austerity and have led to this “abomination of desolation,” the defiling and destruction of the Temple as prophesized in Daniel 9:27. The wanton destruction of the peoples’ house, and the depravity of preying upon the poor and vulnerable, Thessalonians 2:4 adds that this “man of lawlessness” will sit in the temple, proclaiming himself as God.

We live in a society where depravity has become virtue, greed has become altruism, and war has become peace, inversions of divine law and truth which represent the sacrilege of the Antichrist. Minions of a spawn of such an inversion of values, Elon Musk, voted to give him a one trillion dollar pay package if certain benchmarks are met towards Tesla’s quest for absolute power, further evidence of the Satanic inversion of a core tenet of Gospel of Jesus found in Matthew 19:21:

“If you want to be perfect, go sell your belongings and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

The dehumanization of the poor and the non-white in favor of the greediest and most dishonest among us is manifest in the morphing of the US-backed genocide in Gaza into US government mandates to brutalize and starve its own population, karma of biblical proportions serving as collective punishment against a society drained of empathy from too many hours of scrolling and streaming to escape the suffocating effects of austerity and guilt borne of funding and ignoring our crimes against humanity. We are numb to the advent of the Antichrist because his minions, who many have been deceived into thinking are noble stewards of humanity, have been serving his interests in less blatant but equally devastating fashion.

The current escalation towards nuclear confrontation was ignited by the Biden administration in their refusal to negotiate with Putin before and after his invasion of Ukraine. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is certainly one of the disciples of the Antichrist leading the march towards the day when “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” as described in Peter 3:10-13. Coming straight off a multimillion dollar stint at military contractor Raytheon, he rejoiced in the Russia/Ukraine conflict becoming a “long, drawn-out war” so he could sign off on billions in munitions including javelin missiles contracted to his former employer. Biden and the Democrats made certain to crush any suggestion of diplomacy, unconcerned that Biden’s successor could be the most impulsive and evil president the US has ever known. That prospect alone would seem to dictate that anyone not working towards Armageddon would rise above Red Scare propaganda and McCarthyism in order to resolve the conflict. But now Trump moves closer and closer towards the end times as predicted in the book of Revelation, indicating that he wants to restart nuclear weapons testing after a 30 year moratorium. Many end-times beliefs are linked to the rise to power of the Antichrist who will lead the final conflict, which many Evangelical Christians envision as nuclear war. In Matthew 25:41 Jesus says “Go from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.”

Would there be some manner in which to assure that only those who are disciples of Satan on a mass scale, such as Biden, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and CBP/ICE “officers,” could be thrown into the eternal fire such biblical prophecy would not be so troubling. But while the Antichrist targets the vulnerable and the marginalized, in the instance of Trump we would be joining the diabolical monsters in their much deserved incineration at the hands of the Lord. It is up to us to find a way to move away from the leaders that are being forced upon us for it is them, not us, who are the deceivers. It is the lionizing of American pigs like Trump, genocidal sociopaths like Biden and drooling torturers like Dick Cheney by our morally bankrupt political parties and their deceptive media that has compromised our spiritual integrity to the point that we are able to shrug our shoulders at participating in a genocide and ignore the sadism of ICE and CBP until it threatens us personally. Stopping the rampage of the Antichrist will require much more than electoral victories as it is the Democratic Party that unleashed the Antichrist upon us, and while their rhetoric is pristine their souls are corrupted.

We will have to rely on something more than the organized religion of old, because the religious right has coopted the Gospel of Jesus and inverted it into a false gospel manifest in barbarous action consistent with that predicted of the Antichrist. Here in Chicago, we have practiced acts of kindness to our neighbors, solidarity with all and non-violence against his invading armies, and lo and behold with the help of local journalists, the ACLU and the courts we can celebrate the news that lying heathen Greg Bovino and his degenerate disciples have left our city for now. As our government has turned against us, they have defied the “benevolent gospel of Jesus” which is traditionally expressed through the common practice of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and showing mercy. The practices of ICE and CBP on the other hand fly in the face of the Gospel of Christ. Leviticus 19:33-34 urges “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Deuteronomy 10:18-19 instructs “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” These and other passages leave no doubt that the acts of Trump and his federal henchmen are a direct inversion of all that Christ stands for, along with the unfathomable evil of the Democratic Party’s genocide and the prioritization of illusory electoral politics over the very real suffering of millions.

As with all the transgressions against humanity inflicted upon us today, from federal masked marauders brutalizing us in the streets to the crippling effects of an escalating upwards transfer of wealth, the institution that is supposed to be the exponent of Christ’s message is the one most forcefully supporting the advent of the Antichrist as 74% of Christians support Trump and his agenda. It is up to those of us not afflicted with this bastardization of Christ’s compassion to exorcise the demons of white supremacy and greed by directly confronting those who perpetrate it within our own political parties. This is not advising anyone to think they are going to change the Democratic Party from within—this strategy has been in practice for at least the past twenty years and we are in a far worse place today with progressive heroes like Zohran Mamdani endorsing genocidal maniacs like Hakeem Jeffries and stoking the flames of war against Venezuela. We must perform an exorcism on the Democratic Party and our entire political system via mass resistance and confrontation, pushing them towards a literal “come to Jesus” moment. We must cast out the careerists of moral decay like Hillary Clinton who would have us believe that young Americans protesting Israel’s genocide are the ones that are “ignorant” as she sits in the den of iniquity speaking at an event funded by Zionist devil and Trump megadonor Miriam Adelson. We must reject the gospel of political expediency promoted by sycophantic and amoral pundits like Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Sam Seder and so many others putting the personal reward reaped from audience capture over the truth.

The Kairos Institute convened the Patriarchs and Heads of Christian Churches in Palestine in November to draft a document addressing the theological and political conditions Palestinians are facing, as as well calling for Palestinian resistance and Christian solidarity. In the document known as Kairos II the genocide and the world’s response, or lack thereof, is assessed unflinchingly through a theological lens. Kairos II rightfully asserts “the genocidal war has laid bare the hypocrisy of the Western world, its hollow values and its empty boasts of commitment to human rights and international law. In truth, the Western world has sacrificed us, revealing racism and double standards toward our people.” It goes on to directly address the role of Christian Zionists:

“Christian Zionism calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing, teachings utterly alien to the core of Christian faith and ethics. Christian Zionism must therefore be named for what it is: a theological distortion and a moral corruption.”

Kairos II makes a final plea, one that will likely fall on deaf ears, but is likely the only answer to our collective cultural devolution into barbarism as orchestrated by the ruling class:

“Believers in God from every faith and persons of conviction… join together in coalitions that safeguard humanity from further descent into the reality of injustice, tyranny and domination.”

In the end, we do not stand together to support sociopathic political parties and their spiritually bankrupt pundits and media, but we stand in solidarity to support one another:

“By its very nature true solidarity is costly. It has a price. It is a faith-based stance, a human commitment and a moral responsibility. True solidarity is also the embodiment of our shared humanity and fraternity. Either we live together—or we perish together. Today it is Palestine. Tomorrow it will be other marginalized and oppressed peoples.”

In a time when masked goons can invade urban areas and ziptie half-naked children in the still of the night, there is really no choice left. Chicago has four million inhabitants, a significant percentage of whom adamantly reject ICE’s terrorizing of random victims, whether those are victims of abduction, teargas, rubber bullets, real bullets or the bullying of stocky males throwing women to the ground. In the time that ICE has been occupying our city, Chicago has mobilized to create immediate response networks to relay sightings of ICE vehicles so that residents can rally in sufficient numbers to protect potential victims of ICE malfeasance. Chicago Public Schools have established a network of checkpoints and security teams designed to assure safe passage of vulnerable students. Social media is brimming with neighborhood watchdog groups and opportunities to organize in solidarity against federal occupying forces (social media groups which DHS is attempting to shut down). In response to our collective resistance ICE has gone so far as to hurl teargas in the streets of our neighborhoods, attack journalists, shoot unarmed residents, crash into vehicles and handcuff our local representatives for questioning if they have a warrant to take someone into custody (which they never do of course).

Chicagoans are at war with ICE agents, as are inhabitants of urban areas across the country. Our elected officials like Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Johnson have gone through the motions of filing lawsuits and signing executive orders, but none of that has yet to prevent the federal government’s assault on our individual freedoms. Our local elected leaders and their law enforcement agencies have merely been reactive to the threat, while it has been left up to us to be proactive in stopping ICE abductions and assaults before they happen. While a myriad of court orders have been passed to restrict ICE’s lawless behavior, from no more masking of federal agents, no more excessive violence against journalists, the general public, and protesters and no arresting people without a judicial warrant, ICE continues to wear masks, perpetrate the same violence, and make arrests without a warrant. Our elected leaders are fighting ICE with slips of paper while they are using guns, fists, teargas, rubber bullets, handcuffs and zipties. Apart from the banality of telling us to use our phones to record ICE’s illegal activity, JB Pritzker offers hilarious videos like “JB Pritzker reporting from War Torn Chicago.” If you think that one’s funny, you should try his previous hit from February about renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Illinois.

Pritzker’s mock video wouldn’t be funny even if he were doing anything other than doing standup on Jimmy Kimmel and inviting Trump to “come and get me” as if he were a 10 year-old in the playground. We are left fighting in the streets while the four billion dollar man makes jokes and goads Trump on to his political advantage. It was Pritzker who warned Trump that “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me—not time or political circumstance—from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law”. Yet masked federal agents continue with their raids and abductions, and they have hurt hundreds of JB Pritzker’s people. Father of two Villegas Gonzalez was shot in cold blood by ICE agents. He had no criminal record. Another woman was shot and survived, but the protests following her shooting were met with deployment of tear gas. At the Broadview ICE facility west of Chicago many protestors have been injured with pepper balls, including a priest who was deliberately shot in the head. The list goes on, but suffice it to say “Ptitzker’s people” have been hurt on many levels. Yet outside of legal action the only thing he has actually done is make a video parody. And there is nothing funny about what is happening here in Chicago. Everything that Pritzker says is spot on, but his actions don’t reflect the urgency of his messaging.

*There is no doubt that ICE has blatantly and repeatedly violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. ICE officers have been captured on video firing pepper balls at journalists, one sitting inside of her car, assaulting non-violent protestors and abducting US citizens, and throwing women to the ground for no apparent reason. Pritzker has jurisdiction over the Illinois State Police, who he should be sending into Chicago to prosecute officers for assault, kidnapping and murder, among other sundry charges. If Trump is using all the resources at his disposal to terrorize “Pritzker’s people,” why doesn’t Pritzker use all the resources at his disposal to fight back? If Pritzker is too politically expedient to prosecute ICE officers, which he should, at the very least State Police should be deployed to monitor ICE activity and protect Chicagoans from their random abductions and violence. Mayor Johnson should be directing Chicago Police to do the same. There are 3,000 State Police and nearly 12,000 Chicago Police, so it is suspect that the idea of their use even as a deterrent to ICE’s onslaught hasn’t been floated. Federal agents are acting no different than street gangs. If there was any justice, they would be treated as such.

Many have been shocked by the sight of masked cretins pushing whoever is within arms’ reach into unmarked SUVs and vans, taking their unsuspecting prey to black sites and impenetrable detention centers. Unfortunately, I have not been. It’s not that the sight of innocents falling victim to the US Gestapo isn’t deeply disturbing. A photo of an immigrant family in Chicago’s Grant Park being surrounded by ICE thugs, the 5 year old crying and clutching her doll while her father tries to protect her, had me driving to the Broadview ICE facility and chasing ICE down Chicago streets. But I am not shocked or surprised because those of us who found solidarity in the Abolish ICE movement in 2018 knew it would come to this. We had conversations with representatives and sent e-mails to Democratic Party leadership citing specific concerns as to the potential of ICE being unleashed onto our streets by an authoritarian like Trump. We warned them that ICE was a rogue agency and that if they were not abolished they would someday be coming not only for immigrants but for the rest of us. To her credit, at the time a newly elected AOC was on our side and brought the issue to the fore, but the Democratic Party was more concerned with their image of being soft on immigration than the well-being of the immigrants themselves and put out bullet point memos calling for the “reform” of ICE.

Needless to say, reform never came. Instead, ICE became more emboldened after Democrats showed no interest in holding them accountable. At the for-profit Irwin County Detention Center at least eighteen women detainees underwent forced hysterectomies between 2017 and 2019. Further investigation of this center revealed systemic withholding of medical care, squalid living conditions and at least forty more incidents of unnecessary gynecological procedures on vulnerable detainees. As those who came forward were threatened with deportation by ICE officials, it is likely as with all other abuse at the hands of ICE the incidents of medical malfeasance have been underreported. Because the media is not allowed inside ICE detention centers, and because there has been little to no legislative push for transparency, the same inhumane conditions and rights violations have been uncovered at for-profit detention centers across the country by civil rights advocates and law school students communicating with detainees. While the Irwin Detention Center was shuttered in 2021, the Trump administration has reopened it to house the overflow of victims abducted in ICE’s latest rampage.

JB Pritzker likened the tactics of swarming ICE agents randomly brutalizing and abducting Chicagoans to those of Nazi Germany prior to the rise of Hitler. In the early 1930s, Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement Hans Frank was often consulted by Hitler as to the ease of dismantling elements of Germany’s Weimar Constitution. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. So Pritzker is right to an extent, except that the Trump administration is even worse in that they are completely unconcerned as to putting on appearances of adhering to the Constitution. Because unlike Germany in the 1930s Trump and his cabal understand that no US administration is held accountable for anything. From Biden’s genocide to Bush and Cheney’s Iraq War to Obama’s extrajudicial drone killings all involved have been rewarded and coddled for their crimes against humanity. Similarly, only we “radical leftists” have shown interest in holding ICE accountable, but since Democrats work as hard against our causes as Republicans ICE has only been praised up to this point for running roughshod over the Constitution. Trump knows all too well that in the US those who are wealthy and powerful rarely if ever are brought to justice, and his experience with the unwavering political expediency of the Democratic Party would give him no pause in completely commandeering the instruments of government. Trump is not afraid of rhetoric and legal challenges, and he knows that’s all Democrats have to offer.

If Pritzker understands that ICE’s actions portend Nazi Germany during the rise of Hitler, then he knows what will come next. If that’s the case—if Pritzker really believes what he is saying—then why isn’t he using all measures at his disposal to protect us? Why are we being left to fend for ourselves against the American incarnation of the Gestapo? ICE has broken dozens of laws, from assault with a deadly weapon to first degree murder, yet local and state law enforcement fail to mobilize. One can’t help but wonder who they are chartered to “serve and protect.” Yet the dystopian images showing roving gangs of masked ICE agents using military tactics against Chicago residents just keep pouring in. While it is inspiring to see neighbors flooding into the streets, some in their pajamas, to protect their brothers and sisters from ICE violence, the reality is that ICE has military-grade weaponry and we do not. Now they are using their vehicles as weapons and escalating the use of chemical agents. It won’t be long until they face sufficient backlash that they will start using those rifles they so brazenly brandish. What will Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson do then? Sign another executive order forbidding ICE to mow us down? Or put signs up telling ICE they are violating the law by shooting us? We will never stop trying to repel them. But when the federal government sends the worst of the worst to Chicago, we could use a little help.

The murder of Charlie Kirk should not be celebrated. Liberals who find some sort of schadenfreude in his assassination are mistaken. It’s not that he wasn’t a callous self-promoter drawing from the well of toxic nationalism designed to misdirect the angst induced by decades of deindustrialization and economic strife away from the ruling class and towards blacks and immigrants. Kirk was a 12 million dollar man who did all that pundits do to erase history and scapegoat vulnerable populations for the woes cast upon them by the ruling class that he was a part of. He was a grotesque caricature of a political pundit class that whether conservative or liberal takes advantage of fear of the other, pitting one side against another based on warped interpretations of history and deeply embedded cultural differences. Funded by a Zionist lobby that he turned against in his final days, Kirk blithely spread hateful rhetoric that ate away at the fabric of civil society. Like Trump his success was just a symptom of the deep-seated anger induced by decades of bipartisan transgressions against the working class and the poor. In the face of the distraction and division they have been able to sow through culture wars and social media misinformation with the help of pundits like Kirk, both parties have effectively replaced the notion of governance with an unwavering loyalty to American empire manifest in a prioritization of war and violence over sound public policy. This inversion of priorities has led to the cultural and psychological devolution of those who remain committed to political leaders supported by self-serving pundits and social media influencers.

In response to Kirk’s assassination, genocidal conspirator Joe Biden had the nerve to Tweet the exact same phrase he used after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump back in July of 2024. At that time in 2024 Biden put on his Dirty Harry act with an asymmetric squint and crooked scowl insisting “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence.” He went on to say “It’sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons we have to unite this country.” It’s sick alright. Sickening to see the guy who was propagandizing for the invasion of Iraq years before George W Bush was president, who is an accomplice to Mohammed Bin Salman in the blockade leading to the starvation deaths of tens of thousands of children in Yemen and who supplied Benjamin Netanyahu with over 20,000 tons of bombs for their joint genocide of the Palestinian people preaching to us about “this kind of violence.” Of course it is possible that due to his impaired cognition Biden was not even aware of the Tweet about Kirk, but it does bring to the fore the audacity of the most violent people in the world, and those who enable it, telling us “there is no place in Ameriresorting to violence.” So while they can bomb countries at will and spend more on weapons of war than the next nine countries combined, we are forced to be complicit in supporting their brutality when we vote for them at the ballot box. Somehow they expect us to support, or at least tolerate, their global violence while they condemn the “kind of violence” that they perceive as threatening.ca for this kind of violence.” Barack Obama, who dropped over 50,000 bombs on the Middle East, chimed in with “The central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without

Because the “kind of violence” that Biden is referring to, the kind that has no place in America, is a very specific brand of violence. It’s the violence directed against the state by the citizenry that he and his ruling class condemn, but not the violence he and so many politicians like him perpetrate against the black community, immigrants, indigenous peoples, the Global South, the working class and political activists. Violence that threatens the status quo of perpetual war, police brutality, mass surveillance, suppression of protest, austerity, institutional racism, massive wealth inequality and the illusion of democracy is the violence that establishment politicians warn us against. Which is why every time right-wing politicians like Biden or Obama refer to activism, whether it’s the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in response to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police or college students demanding their universities divest from Israel, the caveat is always that protest is fine but “violence and looting” or “lawlessness” are not. To Democrats and their imperialist cabal, speech against the crimes of the state is a crime in itself, thus the knee-jerk propagandistic association of anti-establishment action with “violence” and “lawlessness.” It’s a form of gaslighting that has been in full force by the establishment and their media for decades, gaslighting that sees Democrats conspiring with Republicans to pass legislation limiting free speech and propagating brutality against protest. So when the US paramilitary throws Jewish student protestors down the stairs and peppers them with rubber bullets, Democrats will call the protestors antisemitic to justify the violence perpetrated against them by the state. When Zionists assault protestors with metal pipes and wood planks to break up their encampment, Chuck Schumer will shake and shudder about the “lawlessness” of pro-Palestinian student activists. But there is no comment from the establishment when police body slam a Washington University professor to the ground breaking his hand and multiple ribs. That violence perpetrated by the state to silence those who oppose state violence is committed with a whimper. No outrage from the likes of Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow and the faux progressives who are too busy serving their own vested interests by obsessing about Trump while ignoring genocide, the health care crisis, our wars around the globe, and the Democratic Party’s complicity in the rise of fascism. So now Trump and his cabal can play the same game with Kirk’s assassination, painting those who are “against” him (eg telling the truth about his legacy of hate) as “violent leftists.”

America is the most violent country in the world. Since 9/11 alone it is estimated that our wars have caused over 4 million deaths in the Middle East alone. To put our priorities in perspective, for decades on the federal level education spending has been dwindling until it’s now a mere 10% of our military budget. Every single war since World War II whether initiated by a Democrat or Republican has been based on a lie. As such Trump’s renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War couldn’t be more apropos, particularly because the “anti-war” president is setting an example by bombing Iran, Yemen, Somolia and Venezuala, trying desperately to start wars in order to distract from the looming economic crash and his personal scandals. We allow our leaders to kill with impunity, with both sides of the aisle, the celebrity news media and supporters of both warmongering political parties preoccupied with the political fallout of their unchecked violence. For liberals, the human toll of Gaza was trivial compared to the threat of Trump, so it was all the rage to excuse Biden’s genocide by speculating that Trump would be worse. For conservatives, fear and loathing of Hamas was sufficient to justify genocide, although the Islamaphobia of most Trump supporters will only be satiated by the killing of Muslims for the fulfillment of prophecies laid out in ancient books of fiction.

George W Bush and Dick Cheney massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in a stunning display of senseless state-sponsored violence championed by liberal heroes like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Instead of serving as an exponent for remorse and empathy for the innocent Iraqis we slaughtered without cause, Barack Obama urged us to forget about them and the crimes of the Bush/Cheney cabal with the flippant suggestion that we have to “look forward instead of backward.” We killed thousands of innocents in Afghanistan accomplishing nothing over 20 years of US occupation apart from confirming that the military lies as much as the politicians who provide cover for them. Biden asserted that the assassination attempt against Trump was “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation,” yet Biden has been directly involved with the illegal assassination of leaders and presumed “terrorists” around the world. Virtually the day after Hillary Clinton joked “We came, we saw he died” regarding her murder of Gadaffi in Libya. Biden chimed in “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.” It was Biden who perpetrated violence upon the black community throughout his career, first by opposing desegregation in the 1970s, and then with his Crime Bill of 1994 signed into law by Bill Clinton. In one fell swoop Democrats massively expanded our carceral state, established the for-profit prison industry and imprisoned millions of black males for low-level drug offenses. Biden chose war in Ukraine over a peace that was negotiated between Zelensky and Putin in Istanbul in March of 2022, and his supporters waved the Ukrainain flag enabling Biden and his warmongering cabal to use the Ukrainian people as canon fodder as as a means to weaken Russia. Pundits revived McCarthyism and the Red Scare to assure compliance with Biden’s sending tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine while shouting down a timid letter from the Democratic Progressive Caucus suggesting that diplomacy might be preferable to massacring 100,000 Ukrainians.

We have come to a place where electoral politics have taken priority over human existence. Where the ruling class can literally hypnotize their subjects into cheering for the forgetting of their crimes against humanity. Nowhere was this more evident than the infamous Kamala Harris campaign rally in which she, like a power mad schoolteacher scolding her second graders, shushed Palestinian women protesting her support for the slaughter of their families in Gaza. Her response to the protestors, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” drew deafening cheers from her Trumpaphobic crowd, while the protestors were swiftly ushered out of the rally. The base loved Harris shutting down Palestinian women whose children were dying at the other end of our bombs so much that a popular campaign T-Shirt with a “Hope and Change” color design was produced with Harris’s glorified visage and the caption “I’m speaking.” Five hundred million dollar man Stephen King famously posted on social media wearing the shirt giving a big “thumbs up” to not only Harris’s silencing of Palestinian women but her assertion that bringing to light the Democratic Party’s war crimes would result in the election of Trump. Ultimately the opposite was true, with millions who voted for Biden preferring to stay home rather than vote in favor of genocide. But 75 million Americans did vote for genocide out of fear of Trump. This is the way we are forced to endorse the boundless violence of the ruling class, which in itself is a form of violence that chips away at our collective sense of humanity.

Charlie Kirk asserted that deaths due to gun violence are a “price worth paying” to safeguard our Second Amendment rights. While in his specific case that might be true, on a broader level it is spiritually bankrupt right-wing rhetoric such as his that has helped the US to be in the top 5% of countries worldwide when it comes to gun violence statistics. While American Exceptionalism puts us at number one among all industrialized nations in gun violence per capita, consider that states like Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico have higher gun mortality rates than Guatemala and Honduras. Gun rights outflank human rights as priorities in electoral settings. We blithely accept a Second Amendment written by rapists, sex traffickers, torturers and oligarchs who made their fortunes on the back of stolen labor as gospel, saturating a misinformed and fearful society with over 400 million guns. Kirk’s twelve million dollar fortune was easy money, glorifying the barbaric white supremacy of our floundering fathers by wrapping it in the whimsy of ancient books of fiction. Democrats grandstand about gun control while deferring to the Second Amendment, doing absolutely nothing meaningful to reduce gun violence. Simply put, Republicans consider murder weapons tantamount to freedom and Democrats see gun control legislation as a political liability, although of course it was Kamala Harris during her 2024 campaign who was bragging about her firearm ownership and how if somebody broke into her house “they’re getting shot.” As we are literally picked off by anonymous assassins and first-graders have to learn lockdown protocols in their schools, it seems is never the time for legislators to take action to protect us from the violence and division they promote.

There is no reason to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be plenty more Charlie Kirks out there reflexively spouting their right-wing talking points in favor of the ruling class they are aspiring to become a part of while sowing the seeds of distraction and division that are integral to the undermining of organized opposition. Assassinating Kirk only gives the religious right a martyr, and martyrs are powerful weapons for movements looking to justify their violence. Of course, if we want to get biblical, Matthew 7:12 dictates "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." If Charlie Kirk really wanted people to speak kindly of him after his death, then the Bible dictates he should not have led people to believe that “I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.” Empathy was coined in 1909 and we are seeing the results of its demise. Kirk was working towards becoming part of a ruling class that is devoid of empathy for anyone, spreading a gospel of dehumanization and racism to create Christian fascist minions who would do the dirty work of a ruling class they will never be a part of.

The gun violence that Kirk dismissed as a necessary evil is just a fraction of the violence Americans encounter on a daily basis. We suffer it in an inaccessible, unaffordable privatized health care system that is the third leading cause of death in the US. Black and Latino communities suffer it at the hands of a militarized police force and the US Gestapo known as ICE. We suffer it by being forced to pay $5,000 per year in taxes to support the mass murder perpetrated against our collective will. We suffer it in the blighted urban centers that Democratic leaders perpetually promise to improve but instead oppress with disproportionate police presence, school closings and surveillance. We suffer it in the gaslighting of a Democratic Party in which all but two white Democrats in the House and Senate voted to approve Charlie Kirk day, a resolution which included language propagandizing Kirk’s “steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth” that “inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty” and asked Americans “to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.”

Charlie Kirk day will be “celebrated” on October 14th, which coincidentally happens to be George Floyd’s birthday. The state-sponsored police violence that murdered Floyd mobilized one of the largest protest movements in history. In the wake of the worldwide uprising against police violence Joe Biden promised to pass The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a tepid legislation which most significantly would have limited (but not eliminated) qualified immunity as a defense to liability in a private civil action against a police officer. With Democrats in control of all three branches of government in 2021, the legislation never even came up for a vote. So 98% of white Democrats will vote to honor a hatemongering white supremacist but they can’t even bring the most milquetoast of criminal justice reform to a vote. If this cowardly vote on the Charlie Kirk resolution is not evidence enough, consider that the vast majority of Democrats have been complicit in untold violence against Arabs and most countries in the Global South while they grandstand about protecting Ukraine (killing hundreds of thousands in the process). In choosing violence over peace, siding with Republicans over progressives and using blacks and immigrants as a political cudgel while openly betraying those communities time and time again, Democrats prove why they cannot “fight Trump.” Because in violent white supremacists by default, speaking out against “political violence” only when it portends a threat to the ruling class or their personal safety as political figures.

As the most violent among us tell us there is no place for political violence in the most violent country on the planet, they need to be reminded that people can only be pushed so far. The bipartisan push towards deregulation, deindustrialization, privatization and consolidation has left the majority of Americans vulnerable to stagnating wages and frayed social safety nets. Charlie Kirk was the physical manifestation of the festering anger and hatred of a working class betrayed by both Democrats and Republicans. The unfathomable violence perpetrated by the ruling class has come home to roost, the assassinations of Aetna CEO Brian Thomas, Minnesota House Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and now Charlie Kirk evidence of the boiling point we have finally reached. Of course, violence is not the answer as the that is the language of the state. But what are we left to do when there is nobody left to protect us against the violence of the state?

Prior to the amping up of ICE operations in the Chicago Metropolitan Area, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker warned “if you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” Yet after ICE murdered Silverio Villegas following a traffic stop, abducted hundreds of immigrants from their homes and workplaces, and assaulted activists with pepper bullets and tear gas, Pritzker continues to release statements like “Illinois will always defend Americans’ right to peacefully protest and make their voices heard. We denounce any violence against the general public, members of the media, and law enforcement or first responders.” But ICE actions continue unabated, with no action taken by any authority to stop them from abducting immigrants, including those legally here. Their black sites remain impenetrable. Democratic Party rhetoric offers zero protection from their Gestapo tactics, more evidence of their politicization of the violence directed against us by the “opposing” party. Similarly Charlie Kirk’s casual attitude towards gun fatalities and his rejection of empathy are merely symptoms of the death of civil society at the hands of a mercenary ruling class—a trickle down of dehumanization. And thus far all Pritzker has done is advise us to record federal agent activities on our phones and post them to social media. Thanks for the tip JB.

If Kirk’s mantra that we have to accept loss of life to uphold the Second Amendment is true, then he is merely a casualty of the American compulsion to sanction violent behavior. He must be proud to have made such a contribution to upholding the Second Amendment. Just as proud as Biden and Trump have been to work with Netanyahu to erase the Palestinian people and their culture. Just as proud as Bush and Cheney were to inflict “shock and awe” upon the people of Iraq. Just as proud as Obama was to bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Just as proud as we will be to stop their rampage, making the sacrifices necessary to save our brothers and sisters from state-sponsored violence. Self-promoters like Kirk who make their millions reinforcing the fear of a confused and angry base are sure to find the violence they foment coming home to roost. The same can be said for the most violent men in the world in Biden, Obama, George W Bush and Trump, except that the violence they spread comes back to haunt us while they live the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Kirk made the ultimate sacrifice to uphold the Second Amendment and the right to incite violence against non-whites. In his own view he died for a good cause—the propagation of violence. Hopefully we will not suffer the same fate as we find solidarity in refusing to capitulate to the gaslighting that would have us believe that purveyors of violence against vulnerable populations somehow deserve our respect or grief.

Dear Senator Sanders,

Let me first say I have been an active supporter of yours since the day you announced your presidential run in 2105. Not only did I hold one of the first organizing meetings supporting your campaign in the Chicago area, but I recorded nearly 100 podcasts defending you against the lies of the Democratic Party and their media who were doing everything to make certain you were not the 2016 Democratic Party nominee. Although the Democratic Party ultimately subverted democracy in assuring your defeat to the warmongering queen of Wall Street Hillary Clinton, the experience in the political system opened my eyes to the depth of the corruption in the Democraic Party. Canvassing door-to-door confirmed that the majority of Americans (or Chicagoans at least) were indeed sick of politics as usual and were looking to you as well as Donald Trump as two “outsiders” who were channeling their frustration at a system that was increasingly working against their interests. My support for you was based on your unwavering commitment to organized labor, the working class in general and your prioritization of the interests of the people over the donors in the form of humane public policy like Medicare for All and paid family leave.

So I was not surprised to see you openly and aggressively calling out your colleagues on the Senate floor for their deafening silence on the matter of our involvement in the genocide in Gaza. Your speech was indeed stirring, a catharsis amidst a sea of Zionist politicians representing AIPAC in proportion to the cash bribes they have received from that Israeli lobbying network. While it was inspiring to hear you speak the uncomfortable truth to your colleagues regarding their support for billions in military aid to Israel used to kill women and children in light of millions of Americans sleeping in the streets, your honesty was effectively neutralized by the prefacing of your condemnation of our complicity in Israel’s genocide with Zionist political rhetoric. It was disheartening to hear you parrot the rhetoric that “Hamas started this war on October 7th,” propaganda that only serves to reinforce the disregard for history that has effectively dumbed down our population to the point where amoral monsters like Joe Biden and Donald Trump can be seen as heroes to their respective bases. Your erasure of history and context was all the more shocking because your full statement was “There is no doubt that Hamas started this war.” What there is no doubt about Senator Sanders is that your assertion is a lie that has been used by Zionists to justify their actions for decades. It’s not really even a “war” per se as Hamas does not have any vestige of a military. This conflict did not start on October 7th but in 1948 when the state of Israel was established through the forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians and the massacre of 15,000. In 1967, Israel accelerated its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank by establishing “settlements” which allowed Jews to displace Palestinians from their homes at will. This illegal occupation escalated into the formation of an open-air concentration camp in the 1990s, allowing the IDF to intermittently bomb Gaza or “mow the lawn” as the Israeli government euphemized in order to reduce the Palestinian population. Thousands of young males were abducted and imprisoned without charge, hostages never mentioned by the US media or the Democrats. The IDF has assassinated journalists with impunity, blockaded farmers from their land, and shot protestors along with health care professionals on a regular basis. I’m certain you know the history Senator Sanders as in 2016 you were the first Democratic presidential candidate to refuse to speak to AIPAC, so it’s concerning to see you reinforcing false narratives regarding the genuine source of this “war” that only serve to justify Israel’s genocide.

When you preface your stand for the Palestinian people with the trope that “Israel has a right to defend itself” it instantly inverts the power dynamic that fueled the election of Hamas in 1987 as well as their retaliation on October 7th. As a people under the oppression of an illegal occupation, the Palestinians have been denied all six key rights established under International Humanitarian Law in the wake of World War II. While this does not confer the right upon an occupied population to attack civilians, the oppressed body does indeed have the right to retaliate against occupying forces. It would seem to me if you are center stage on the floor of Congress and appealing for the human rights of the oppressed Palestinian people that it would be advantageous to offer proper context. Hamas and the Palestinians have the right to defend themselves from the suffocating Israeli oppression, but according to international law Israel is not defending itself at all. I can’t help but notice that you supported our bottomless military aid to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, but for some reason you are unable to recognize that Palestine has been invaded by Israel for 75 years. And before you say Ukraine didn’t kill Russian civilians, in the 2014 Obama-backed coup in Ukraine 46 pro-Russian activists were burned alive and over 200 injured by Ukrainian militias. As for Hamas, it is the governing body of the Palestinian people, forced into hiding by the terrorism of the Israeli government and its Gestapo known as the IDF. Over 80 percent of Hamas members are males orphaned by Israeli/US attacks, thus if Hamas is considered a terrorist organization it is only so in response to decades of US sponsored Israeli terrorism and torture against Palestinian civilians.

Your reinforcement of the imperialist notion of American Exceptionalism doesn’t stop with Israel. Instead of educating Americans on he history and context of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and trying to stop it, you are joining Democrats in reviving Red Scare propaganda and McCarthyism as evidenced by the warped history lesson you penned for VermontBiz entitled “Meet Trump’s new best friend, Vladimir Putin.” In that OpEd, you fail to mention NATO encroachment or Obama’s coup in Ukraine in 2014 as well as the previously mentioned Odessa trade union massacre. Instead you adopt the Democratic Party line that Putin and Trump are somehow conspiring to take over the US government when Trump, as we see with the current negotiations regarding a ceasefire, treats Putin as he would anyone else—with disdain and threats if they don’t do as he demands. Trump and Putin are certainly less in cahoots than Biden was with Netanyahu or Mohammid Bin Salman, both dictators as or more ruthless than Putin, yet there was no talk of Biden being influenced by foreign authoritarian governments by anyone in Congress or the media. Last I checked Putin was not responsible for our failing institutions or the election of Trump twice against awful Democratic presidential candidates that you capitulated to after your presidential campaigns were thwarted by the Democratic Party. So while you campaign against dictators and the threat that Trump poses to democracy, when the Democrats subvert democracy your choice is to support their servants of the oligarchy rather than offer an alternative to a party you know is completely corrupted.

Senator Sanders I wonder if you are aware of the judge’s ruling in the class action lawsuit we brought against the DNC in 2016 when they rigged the primary against you. While the judge agreed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC colluded against you to anoint Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, he also agreed with the DNC lawyer that the DNC is a corporation and as such “The choice—and attendant consequences—between ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ and Tammany Hall politics lies in the province of the DNC, not the judiciary.” The ruling confirmed that the Democratic Party is a corporation, and those who ascribe to being “Democrats” are merely subjects of that corporate entity without recourse in regards to the notion of “free and fair elections.” While you openly called for a “political revolution” in 2016 when so many millions joined your movement, your actions reflected you were merely out to reform the Democratic Party as you surrendered to the Democratic Party’s election interference and supported the most corrupt of establishment cancer capitalist candidates in Hillary Clinton. Your logic was that the choice was between Trump and Clinton, proving to me that you were so firmly entrenched within a hopelessly corrupted system that there was no way any of your public policies, from Medicare for All to a $15 minimum wage, were going to be codified into law at the federal level. If you had really wanted a “political revolution” you would have run as a third party candidate or at the very least as an Independent. And for the compromising of your integrity your reward was a Trump victory, as it was in 2020 when Obama and the Democrats once again conspired against you and you again capitulated by providing cover for a Parkinson’s-addled Joe Biden.

After the subversion of democracy by the DNC in 2016 and your leading us back into the fold of oligarchs like the Clintons, I wanted a refund of the thousands of dollars I donated in good faith to your campaign, but as usual the courts ruled in favor of corporate power. In 2020 I wisely chose not to donate to you or work for your campaign because it was obvious that the Democratic Party and their media were going to find a way to make certain you were not the nominee, and again the forces of oligarchal capitalism conspired against you. Undaunted you blithely went out stumping for an ailing Joe Biden, providing cover for his rapidly progressing cognitive decline, and then an incompetent Kamala Harris. Once again, we had a choice of Trump or Biden/Harris, but your strategy of protecting toxic candidates left us with Trump winning the election. Again. And while your honest assessments of the Democratic Party losing the working class and the corrupting influence of oligarchy on our political system are energizing but seem to come after the elections. Touring the country with AOC selectively calling out the oligarchy, with the occasional nod towards the failure of the Democrats, that controls the Republican Party just leads us back into a Democratic Party that is equally controlled by oligarchs. When you boast about the tens of thousands showing up for your oligarchy concert tour, what precisely are those attendees going to do to fight the oligarchs that are not only controlling our system but have infiltrated it? Getting involved in the political system is sound advice on the local level, but any “new talent” seeking to change the priorities of the Democratic Party towards good governance or any speck of integrity is certain meet with the same fate as current DNC vice-chair David Hogg who had the nerve to suggest running young, authentically progressive candidates against the old guard of the Democratic Party. For recognizing that establishment Democrats have failed us on every conceivable level the DNC ousted Hogg as DNC vice-chair on “procedural” grounds. While your promised “political revolution” turned out to be merely a “political reformation,” even reform is anathema to the oligarchs running the Democratic Party.

Which brings me to your oligarchy tour. It seems to me you are saying the exact same things we heard on the campaign trail in 2016 and 2020, the difference being the primary target is Republican oligarchs and Trump. Yet somehow the media is acting as if the influence of the oligarchs on our political system is a revelation to the very same liberals who chose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over you in 2016 and 2020 respectively. The same Democrats who slammed the door in my face in 2016 saying that you weren’t a Democrat but a socialist with no chance of being elected now show up by the tens of thousands to hear you calling out Trump and his billionaire influencers. They’ve come to hear Bernie’s greatest hits, because instead of being aimed at their heroes Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden most of the barbs are being hurled at Trump and the Republicans. But as you well know the Democrats have their oligarchs as well, some of them inside the party like Nancy Pelosi, the Obamas and the Clintons and others outside the party like ardent Zionist Haim Saban, Michael Bloomberg (who has spent more on federal elections than anyone in history), “Paypal mafia” billionaire Reid Hoffman and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskowitz to name a few. So while it is admirable that you are recruiting us “little people” to get involved in the political system, anyone interested in anything more than city council or school board will find themselves suffering the same fate as you or David Hogg or Minnesota’s mayoral candidate Omar Fateh at the hands of the powerbrokers who run the Democratic Party. Informing the people about the undue influence of oligarchs on our political system while at the same time recruiting them into a system run exclusively by oligarchs and transnational corporations would seem as effective a strategy as amassing millions behind your political revolution in 2016 and then urging them to support Hillary Clinton. You effectively wiped out your entire movement in 2020 when you used the same strategy with Joe Biden. There is no possible way to implement true progressive public policy or accomplish the systemic change necessary to do so while supporting anti-worker warmongers like Clinton and Biden.

On the one hand, I shudder to think where the country would be if you hadn’t run for president in 2016 and brought to the fore issues like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave and wealth inequality. On the other hand, at the federal level none of these issues have been even partially resolved, and in fact the health care crisis has become terminal with nearly 80 million Americans facing medical debt. Between lack of access and medical errors the health care system now kills over half a million Americans per year. As the Democrats continue their politically expedient tweaking of crumbling institutions by passing means-tested, ineffectual legislation to tout to their electoral advantage, the gap between the rich and the poor widens with Americans holding a staggering $1.2 trillion in collective credit card debt with nearly half holding zero retirement savings and 60% living paycheck to paycheck. All of the major indicators of our well-being as a society continue to trend downward, including average life expectancy and maternal mortality rates. Your oligarchy tour certainly gets the diagnosis for our cultural decay right, but you have always been right about this. Your 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns were all about the oligarchy. In your oligarchy concert tour with AOC you are saying the same exact things everyone has heard a thousand times. The cheering crowds now come out not to join you in changing the systems that have led to our collective cultural and spiritual decay, but to cheer on your joint castigation and mocking of Trump and his cronies. Those attending are not looking to change anything apart from putting Democrats in power. They are coming for entertainment and catharsis. They are coming to jeer and boo in solidarity against Trump, Putin and Republicans. They are coming for fulfillment of their fantasy that Trump is the problem and once he is gone somehow the bipartisan rot that has stifled our government will magically disappear.

At one time Senator Sanders I proudly wore a t-shirt portraying you as a Jedi warrior holding a light saber that read “Help us Bernie Sanders, you are our only hope.” As the leader of our political revolution, you were indeed our only hope as nobody else in Washington was authentically espousing public policy that worked in the interest of all Americans. Nobody dared go against the Clinton dynasty except you and a handful of rebel Democrats. But those days are gone. The final nail in the coffin of your movement was your siding with ICE and the Los Angeles police in accusing protestors who were victims of state sanctioned violence of being violent themselves. As in the case of Israel and Gaza you adopt the side of the oppressor and the oppressed. In applying Martin Luther King’s doctrine of non-violent protest as the preferred method of combatting unconstitutional military incursions into Latino communities you and the likes of Eric Adams infer that those resisting are inciting the violence when it is the state that is doing so. At the same time you make the rounds on the cable “news” programs condemning Trump’s authoritarianism you reinforce his rationale for a militarized response to protest. In admonishing those who are victims of state sponsored violence, whether it be by spreading Zionist propaganda or parroting the Democratic Party’s talking points on the rise of antisemitism and the violence of protestors you stand with the oppressors and caricaturize the oppressed. Every single time you mentioned the student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza you found it necessary to condemn antisemitism, which was not a part of the student protest movement at all and is only on the rise (if it really is) because of the violence being perpetrated by the Jewish state. You failed to mention that it was a mob of Zionist Jews who were on video attacking protesters at UCLA and acting as agitators. Instead you euphemized them as “the group of individuals at UCLA in California who violently attacked the peaceful encampment of anti-war demonstrators,” another zero-sum statement accurately identifying the protestors as peaceful but then protecting the Zionists who attacked them.

It is admirable that you introduced a bill to cut off funding for offensive weapons to Israel, but the fact that you chose to end funding for offensive weapons only is more evidence of the manner in which you play both sides to no effect. The compromise to stop funding for only some of the weapons we supply to Israel implies that we are still responsible for protecting Israel from blowback for their crimes against humanity, but it is precisely our “unwavering support” for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system that has enabled it to bomb Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran since October 7th and suffer precious little retaliation. Even if your resolution garnered more support than the pitiful 54% of Senate Democrats who voted in favor, it still would not effectively stop the genocide. In attempting to garner support for your legislation to end funding for offensive weapons, you used the Iron Dome as a carrot guaranteeing your support if your colleagues voted for your bill. Yet even when the vote fell short you still voted “yea”to $500 million in spending for the Iron Dome.

So ultimately the legislation is a political stunt designed to save face for the Democrats who joined with Israel to start the genocide and then lied about working on a ceasefire and pressuring Israel regarding humanitarian aid. Most of your Democratic “colleagues” should be in the Hague for both covering up and being an accessory to genocide. They have done the bidding of the very oligarchs and donors you have been speaking out against for decades in the most malignant fashion imaginable. So as you tour the country ostensibly recruiting Americans to be active participants in the political system, this noble effort is destined to be catalogued in the annals of yet another of your quixotic tasks. The young people who are taking your advice and running for office will be (and already have been) left flailing trying to infiltrate a Democratic Party that subverts democracy at every turn at the behest of their oligarchs. Even if a candidate like Mamdani can occasionally slip through the cracks in the rigged system on a local level the fact is that in the 2024 election cycle 94% of the candidates who were victorious in the Senate and 88% in the House outspent their opponent with the help of SuperPACs and the oligarchs. Which is further proof that everything you say about the political system and both political parties is absolutely right. But at every ‘oligarchy tour” performance you use the line “Israel has the right to defend itself” citing October 7th and parrot establishment Red Scare propaganda about Trump and Russia down to the debunked Russiagate scandal. To your credit you do criticize the Democratic Party, not nearly as harshly as you rant about Trump and the Republicans, but then ultimately lead people right back into it.

Your impassioned speeches and drive for a more benevolent government free of corporate control is admirable Senator Sanders, but your unwillingness to genuinely engage in the political revolution you promoted in 2016 and 2020 has doomed us to genocide, perpetual war, record wealth inequality and fascism. By capitulating to a party of the oligarchs that has tirelessly sabotaged your legislative proposals and presidential runs you have helped to usher in the era of Trump. By promoting key tenets of American imperialism you contradict the validity of your own arguments. And by leading your tens of millions of ardent supporters into the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, you have splintered your movement into disorganized factions, with movements like Democratic Socialists of America and Our Revolution becoming clandestine branches of the Democratic Party. If you were serious about fighting oligarchy you would be touring the country with the goal of establishing a third party or at the very least urging Americans to run as Independents like yourself.

It is tragic to watch you working so hard to change the system while you promote the most slavish servants of that system. It is horrifying to watch you call out only Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza while blithely promoting the tenets of Israeli apartheid. It is infuriating to see you advising Zohran Mamdani to “tone it down” when speaking about a genocidal Jewish state. You “toned it down” in 2016 and 2020 Senator Sanders and look where we are in 2025. You are now a sheepdog for the Democratic Party, holding rock concerts to pacify those petrified of Trump and lead them back into the very party that catalyzed his ascent. The neoliberal elite love you now that you no longer represent a threat to their power, and the same people who were slandering you for dimming the anointed Hillary Clinton’s prospects for becoming the first woman president are now attending your rallies in droves because their own party is so beholden to special interests that it can’t even put on a proper performance of resistance. So now it is up to you to put on that performance, to channel the base’s outrage at Trump and an impotent Democratic Party and the oligarchs who control them. Convince the liberal throngs that if they become politically active they can change the Democratic Party from within. Yet as we speak the DNC and its subsidiaries are working harder than ever to push progressive candidates out of their races to assure the ruling class gets the candidates they want. This is the Democratic Party’s strategy to regain control of the House and Senate in the midterms. It’s a cycle that perpetuates the whittling away of the institutions and social safety nets that support a civil society. The cycle can only be stopped by a third party that threatens the stability of the oligarchs and their political pawns.

This letter is not to blame you for the condition we are in today Senator Sanders as the Democratic Party is the instigator of the subversion of democracy that led to your defeat in the primaries and the ascent of Trump. You are certainly the most humane representative we have in Washington and one who will properly diagnose the systemic issues even if it is often after the fact. But your compliance within the ranks of cancer capitalism, and your lack of seriousness about the “political revolution” you promised because you didn’t want to become Ralph Nader, has effectively fractured a progressive movement that coalesced in the hope of changing systems, systems that cannot be changed when you call a genocidal sociopath like Joe Biden your “good friend” and emphasize how much you respect a pathological liar and warmonger like Hillary Clinton. Your insistence on motivating Americans to rise up against a “rigged system” falls on deaf ears as you refused to do so when you had the chance, instead pushing us to support the very crooks who rigged it. It’s with melancholy I reflect upon the countless hours spent in the hopes you would be Commander-in-Chief in 2016. Yet now in 2025 in the face of the Democratic Party’s genocide, continued subversion of democracy, Zionism, McCarthyism and the Democratic Party’s dedication to opposing even marginally progressive candidates, it has become painfully clear how counterproductive it is to support a Capitulator-in-Chief.

The “Fight Oligarchy” rallies you are holding are just what the Democratic establishment ordered in providing controlled opposition that prevents real change by channeling the rage of liberals who feel their party is not doing enough to fight Trump. But as the Democratic Party continues to shed registered voters and millions like me question if they ever will vote for a Democrat again, it is time to stop pretending that jockeying within the system will somehow change it. You need either to tell the crowds to become Independents and run for office outside the Democratic Party or use your resources and mailing list to start a third party. Repeating past speeches and strategies is absurd at this juncture. The strategy of trying to change the Democratic Party from within has gotten us a party that aids and abets genocide on “your” side and on the other side a party that embraces fascism. What will it take for you to realize that reassuring us that your policies are not “radical” is ineffective because what is needed to change our political system is radical. It’s time to stop worrying about your career and what the Democrats will do to you and start worrying about us. Stop allowing Democrats to walk all over you and us by proxy. It’s unfortunate that it takes genocide and fascism to get Americans ready for a political revolution, but now would be the time to take advantage of the chaos and desperation by offering a real alternative to the parties of cancer capitalism. We are ready Senator Sanders, but I fear we missed our moment in 2016. Perhaps it’s too late, but at the very least, as Pink Floyd put it, “leave those kids alone” and let them tell the undiluted truth. Don’t let the political system do to them what it did to you.

In solidarity,

Barry J Kaufman DO

The Democratic Party and its media had better get the message being sent by voters in America’s most densely populated city. While all but four Democrats in the House voted against reducing funding to Israel for their “Iron Dome” defense program, voters of all incomes and ethnic backgrounds united to send a clear message to Democrats by overwhelmingly supporting a young Muslim who said outright he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he stepped foot in New York. Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary running on an explicitly anti-Zionist platform bolstered by specific demands including free bus fare, universal pre-K childcare, and a cap on rent for affordable housing units to name a few. The overarching message of his campaign was that government should use its power to support the health and welfare of its constituents, not to gaslight Americans into supporting genocide and escalation towards nuclear confrontation. But instead of making any attempt to change their tune, the Democratic Party continues its tone-deaf fundraising, proclaims its unwavering support for Israel, and opposes Trump’s assault on immigrants primarily in the context of fundraising off ICE’s intimidation of Democratic members of Congress or high-profile abduction cases. Instead of understanding that voters are desperate for a leader who stands up for what is right instead of what is politically expedient, and that those who don’t vote would participate if they had someone to vote for and not against, Bernie Sanders is advising Mamdani to “tone it down” when it comes to Palestine. If there is anyone who should understand the dire consequences of capitulating to power it is Bernie Sanders, who was not only sabotaged by Democrats twice in his presidential bids but abandoned his “political revolution” in favor of attempts at political reformation which have garnered zero legislative successes. By telling Mamdani to capitulate to wealthy Zionists, Sanders is virtually assuring that Mamdani sheds those idently he does not want Mamdani to achieve any of his demands for the working class either.

It was less than 30 minutes after Democratic congressman Padilla was assaulted by officers during Secretary of State Kristi Noem’s press briefing that I received a text message from the DCCC feigning outrage and begging for donations. Then of course came texts from the PCCC, and e-mails from multiple Democratic Party organizations including Fight for Kamala telling me how my dollars would go to stopping Trump’s assault on “democracy.” Kamala Harris has sent me five e-mails in the past 2 weeks urging me to donate to the Democratic National Committee, a corporate entity merging a political party with corporate interests which is part and parcel of the fascism Democrats claim to be fighting. This is the same barrage of fundraising communications they sent minutes after Trump was elected, begging for more donations to fight the menace that they lost to with a billion dollars worth of donations, as if they had staffers with their fingers on the keys ready to strike far in advance of the results. It’s not much of a stretch to say the Trump is the Democratic Party’s gravy train, raising billions from liberals desperate to rid themselves of Trump’s threat to an illusory democracy. For liberals who have been fed a steady diet of Russiagate, Maddowism and neoliberal nationalism, Trump and Putin serve as the boogeymen who are to blame for our country’s crumbling institutions and lack of moral integrity. Liberals have been conditioned by their party and its pundits to disregard the moral imperative of Israel’s genocide, the US proxy war in Russia and the Democratic Party’s continued lurching to the right as necessary evils to prevent Trump from dismantling institutions long compromised by deindustrialization, privatization and commoditization.

We come to a moment in which the fantasy world of audience capture, the anti-journalistic, democracy-eroding practice of placing subscribers and clicks above context and history, and the lack of accountability that audience capture entails have coalesced to create an atmosphere in which the institutions established to protect us have been rendered impotent or even hostile. While Republicans largely embrace Trump’s abuse of power, the Democratic base that purposefully ignored their party’s own mass deportations, ICE raids, massacres of untold numbers of Muslims and Biden’s genocide in Gaza are now taking to the streets for “hands off” and “no kings” rallies. If it is a relief to see so many thousands mobilizing to counter Trump’s conspicuous cruelty, it is telling that there were no such protests when their own vaunted leaders were abusing executive power in the most unscrupulous of ways. This “better than Trump” complacency sanctioned a cascade of escalating violations of Constitutional and international law that saw ICE, CBP, the military and our intelligence agencies doing everything that Trump is currently doing but without the pundit outrage or obligatory press coverage because the likes of Obama, the Clintons and Biden were seen as stewards of “stability” for these rogue institutions. Stability for cable news networks and the punditry has little to do with our collective well-being and everything to do with the oligarchal jackpot known as economic growth. That abandonment of the moral imperative of governance in favor of appeasement of the ruling class has thus trickled down to those who are governed, dazed to the point of delusion by an endless cycle of “breaking news” stories presented without historical context.

Yet even in the face of Democratic representative Melissa Huffman being shot and killed and her husband injured in a politically motivated attack, the e-mails begging for donations persist. Pramila for Congress sent an e-mail the day after the shootings entitled “It’s been an eventful week,” but nowhere in her e-mail is the assassination of a Democrat mentioned. Instead, highlighted bold text panders to the base with he said/she said nonsense like “Republican Senator John Kennedy attacked Democrats speaking out against the raids, saying they need to ‘pop a Zoloft’” and “THEN Stephen Miller went after Pramila, claiming Democrats are “in open rebellion” against the country.” The Progressive Turnout Project, a slush fund of PAC money and individual donations, wanted me to know that “MSNBC is plummeting?!” demanding “Will you click here to confirm your MSNBC viewership?” The Harris Fight Fund wants to let me know that for a donation of just $5 to the DNC I have a chance to meet Barack Obama. As if to say “forget about everything of relevance,” Team Kamala implores me to “Imagine meeting him. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.” What I have never forgotten is that Obama dropped some 50,000 bombs on the Middle East during his term, and though the e-mail assures me that my $5 will go “to help stop Donald Trump's plan to slash Medicaid and nutrition assistance programs” I do recall that that it was Obama who cut food assistance by $8.7 billion in 2014 impacting nearly one million low-income households.

What is conspicuous in all of these fundraising e-mails is the absence of the most important issues of our time. Why would the Democrats who are ostensibly so outraged by Trump’s authoritarian tactics not mention anything regarding ICE’s abductions of immigrants off the streets or his mass deportations? Why would they not even mention the specter of direct a US led war with Iran? Could there be any reason “progressives” like Pramila Jayapal would not find Trump’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza to be a cornerstone of mobilization for the liberal base? Whatever happened to the obsession with defending that last bastion of democracy Ukraine and the threat of Putin conquering the world? Democrats only mention ICE if it involves a member of their party, single high profile cases or a Republican attacks them for speaking out against ICE abductions. 75 Democrats of voted in support of ICE while only three signed onto legislation holding police accountable for their brutality against anti-war protestors. Historically Democrats have funded ICE more aggressively than Republicans, and Democrats shut down the movement to abolish ICE in 2018. It was Biden who initiated an “unprecedented” expansion of for-profit ICE detention centers. Democratic Party operatives are nervous about the perception of protests targeting ICE being used against them by Republicans as prominent establishment blogger and Democratic Party propagandist Matthew Yglesias recently outlined. In his alarmingly detached piece “Why I’m obsessed with winning the Senate,” which carries a tagline “You can’t defend democracy if you don’t win elections,” Yglesias offers this insight into the consultant-addled mind of right-wing Democrats:

“Which is to say that while progressives want it to be the case that “sounding the alarm” causes an increased level of anti-Trump political engagement, for lots of stakeholders, it has the opposite effect…But the final, related, reason that I’m not “sounding the alarm” more is the same reason I’m leery of anti-ICE protests and a lot of other activity happening on the left: I am profoundly obsessed with the Senate map.”...

This brand of couch punditry places electioneering and political expediency above governance and protection of the vulnerable, which is precisely what got Trump elected. Twice. If liberals are ostensibly so outraged about Trump’s authoritarianism, and ICE is one of the main exponents of that authoritarianism, how does one fight Trump without pushing back directly against ICE? Does Ygleisias, or any Democrat for that matter, understand that it is Biden/Obama/Clinton liberals and their audience-capture media who want to exclusively “sound the alarm” about Trump? Progressives are the ones who are and have been fighting against ICE, chronic war, privatization and genocide—all those transgressions against the public interest that ushered in the era of Trump. But unlike liberals progressives do not take their cues from corporate vermin like Yglesias, Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow or Dana Bash. We do not believe that Democrats are defending our illusory democracy any more than Republicans are, because we see Democrats channeling their energy into shutting down the most marginal of progressive challenges and legislative proposals. Elected DNC co-chair and former Democratic Party darling David Hogg is resigning due to party leadership calling for new co-chair elections once Hogg started fundraising to primary “ineffective” incumbent candidates. Leadership is furious that Hogg would suggest a primary challenge to any incumbent, which is not exactly tantamount to democracy. One would think that after two losses to Trump, being exposed as a complete fraud for covering up Biden’s Parkinson’s Disease and aiding and abetting a genocide the Democratic Party would be shocked into changing their ways. Yet establishment Democrats like Bill Clinton, Jim Clyburn, and Ritchie Torres (to name a few) endorsed Andrew Cuomo, while following his election New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand demanded that Mamdani retract statements supporting “global Jihad” and Hamas (which he never made of course).

The majority of Democrats remain silent or support Trump’s bombing of Iran while nearly 80% of Americans oppose US military intervention in Iran despite the corporate media’s parroting of Netanyahu’s/the State Department’s rerun of Iraq War propaganda. Because it’s currently a Republican administration doing Netanyahu’s bidding there are a handful of Democrats who are pushing back, but it was these same Democrats had little to say about Biden’s complicity in genocide (or who provided cover for it) and who were shut down with a vengeance when they wrote a letter meekly suggesting diplomacy with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. In our current political system, there is no anti-war party. Democrats were pushing for aggressive action against Iran in their 2024 platform, and it was Kamala Harris during her dreadful 2024 presidential campaign who pointed to Iran as America’s “greatest adversary” and that in dealing with Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions “nothing is off the table.” For those liberals wagging their fingers at those who did not vote for Harris in light of Trump’s bombing of Iran, here is what Harris said about Iran in October of 2024:

“Iran has American blood on their hands – this attack on Israel, 200 ballistic missiles. What we need to do [is] to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities.”

Because Americans fall for the propaganda disseminated by the establishment politicians and their media with such regularity, these unscrupulous servants of the oligarchs now parade across the Sunday network shows and cable news outlets spouting misinformation with reckless abandon knowing only a tiny fraction of the audience will have sufficient grounding in history and context to resist the drumbeat of bullet point repetition. Despite a growing number of independent news outlets that dispel such misinformation, the predominant voices are those that genuflect to the cult of celebrity that protects the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The estimation of which party or leader is “better” or “worse” precludes any meaningful reflection on the indelible harm that both have done. Biden liberals spend their time chastising those who refused to vote for Kamala Harris, suggesting that Trump’s bombing of Iran is somehow worse than the genocide that contributed to Harris’s loss. Their concern at the behest of the pundit class populated by the likes of Robert Reich, the aforementioned Yglesias, Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow is not the devastating impact of our bloodthirsty militarism but the politicization of Trump’s actions. They are outraged that Trump didn’t obtain congressional approval for his bombing, yet no such outrage was expressed when Obama dropped 50,000 bombs on the Middle East or when Biden bombed Yemen and circumvented Congress to send munitions to Israel. The War Powers Act requiring Congressional approval for military intervention must be reinstated, but the repeated push for its passage now appears to be just another performative act of political expediency.

It is virtually impossible to envision the Democratic Party doing the things that are necessary to reverse our country’s course to fascism. Fundraising, political expediency and warmongering are tools of fascism, not counterweights to it. If the Democratic Party really wants to stop fascism, here is the agenda they need to adopt in order of importance:

1. End US military interventionism. The intersection of militarism with social unrest, poverty, wealth inequality, violence and oligarchy dictates that Democrats come clean regarding their own transgressions and separate their party from the war contractors and transnational corporations. Fascism is a by-product of the nationalism necessary to justify false wars, and the US is the king of false wars and the misuse of war as an instrument of peace, the latest incarnation being the Trump administration’s calls for Iran to return to diplomacy after dropping bombs on their underground nuclear sites. We must make it clear to the Democrats that we understand it is not the fault of other countries that our military and intelligence agencies are completely inept, and it is not our right to invade sovereign nations to extract their resources and change their regimes (as we did in Iran in 1953 and 1979).

2. Implement a national health care system. No more performative votes on Medicare for All. Campaign on a Medicare for All type single payer program that will be implemented in the case of a Democratic majority. Biden campaigned on pushing for a public option to the Affordable Care Act as his first legislative act then never mentioned it again. Stop duping the American people with a privatized health care system. A national health care system would go a long way to reducing personal debt, financial stress, morbidity, mortality and the anger generated by an inaccessible, unaffordable rat’s maze of a health care system.

3. Pass a federal minimum wage of $20 an hour. Biden and the Democrats caved to the Senate Parliamentarian in withdrawing a $15 minimum wage from the COVID Relief Bill and never tried again. Prove that you are representing workers and not those who profit from abusing them.

4. Increase taxes on high income earners (finally). Every single Democratic Party presidential candidate since Bill Clinton has promised to raise taxes on multi-millionaires and billionaires, but thus far none have sone so in any meaningful way. Democrats can prove they are no longer working for the donor class by improving services for all other classes by implementing a significant tax increase on the top 1%. When instead of promising a roomful of billionaires that “nothing will fundamentally change” for them as Biden did during his 2020 campaign Democrats are cautioning them that things are going to substantially change we will know that Democrats are at least on the road to recovery. In the context of standing up to their masters, that will be a long and winding road indeed as ”benevolent” ostensibly liberal billionaire Mark Cuban rages over Mamdani’s demands for workers, claiming Mamdani’s tactics are just like Trump’s and, as Cuban delicately puts it, “None of that shit has a chance. Doesn't matter.” that’s why we cannot work with billionaires to implement meaningful change. They work against us at every turn, so we need to work against them.

5. Reject Zionism and AIPAC. Mamdani never backed down regarding his use of the term “antifada” or his intent to arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot in New York. The conspicuous attempts to conflate Mamdani with Hamas and antisemitism, the most absurd being the NBC debate moderator asking the leading question as to which foreign country the New York mayoral candidates would visit, and Cuomo’s reliance on allegiance to Israel as his primary selling point were offset by an electorate weary of war and burdened with unrelenting financial strain. The vast majority of Americans would prefer that they were the recipients of the “unwavering support” their representatives pledge to Israel. At this juncture, while there are some Democrats who might not show up for an address to Congress by Netanyahu, there are precious few who will not only call out Israel but take action against it. If Democrats want to increase their 27% approval rating among the American public, they will need to end their “unwavering support” for genocide, ethnic cleansing and interventional war.

I do not believe for a minute that Democrats are going to do one of these things much less all of them, for there are precious few in their ranks who place the interests of the working class and poor above their own. But Mamdani’s victory further exposes the truth that Democrats are more committed to doing the bidding of the donor class, and to cancer capitalism, than they are to even considering our collective needs as a civil society. Democrats at all levels of government are implicating him as a terrorist, amplifying Islamaphobia in precisely the same manner that Republicans do. They are demanding that he disavow the term “globalize the intifada,” with Hakeem Jeffries asserting that "Globalizing the intifada, by way of example, is not an acceptable phrase” and that “I think our nominee is going to have to convince folks that he is prepared to aggressively address the rise in antisemitism in the city of New York, which has been an unacceptable development." Jeffries has taken $1.6 million from the Zionist lobbying network AIPAC and has spouted hawkish propaganda regarding war with Iran. As Mamdani speaks with leaders like Jeffries and Chuck Schumer let us hope he does not capitulate as AOC has done with Pelosi or Bernie Sanders has done with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

The Democratic Party and their media, including “progressive” pundits like Thom Hartmann and Robert Reich, have been forced to timidly jump on the Mamdani bandwagon but have been very careful not to mention the prime model for fighting the establishment in Socialist Kshama Sawant of Seattle. Sawant refused to play nice with Seattle Democrats and billionaires who worked against her at every turn, yet she was able to build a workers’ coalition that pushed through a $15 minimum wage, an Amazon tax, and stopped a citywide push by Democrats to eliminate affordable housing. Now that Sawant is running for Congress, media outlets have effectively blacked out her campaign, offering no comparisons to the upstart campaign of Democratic Socialist Mamdani. Sawant won material improvements for the working class and held Amazon accountable by amassing a broad coalition of workers bridging the superimposed media/pundit class lines of “right” and “left” and thus successfully fighting both the Democratic Party and the billionaires. Mamdani must understand that playing nice with Democratic Party leadership and the billionaires will get him nowhere with his agenda. While some Democrats are jumping on Mamdani’s bandwagon after he dominated in the primary election, most of them will jump ship to criminals like Cuomo or Eric Adams if they see his popularity declining. Making friends with Democrats and calling people like Joe Biden your “good friend” as Bernie Sanders does gets you in the position Sanders is presently in—lapdog of the Democratic Party providing controlled opposition within the narrow spectrum of ideas sanctioned by the Democrats and their media. He is absolutely right when he assesses that “the Democratic Party has turned its back on the working class,”

Workers struggling to pay their medical bills, student loans and just to put food on the table cannot survive on rhetoric alone. For all their campaigning and electoral struggles, Sanders and AOC have gotten zero of their progressive policies passed. Not one of Sanders main initiatives has been codified into law on a federal level. We can no longer be satisfied riding the same carousel of progressive leaders and hopefuls who then assimilate into the Democratic Party and then will only go so far to implement their agenda, preferring to have a “friendly” relationship with their “colleagues” who stump for genocide, austerity, and war. We must make it clear to the Democratic Party that the era of Zionism and antisemitism being used as weapons of political character assassination is over. The jig is up when it comes to Israel as well as the “Bush Doctrine” of interventional war that the Democrats so enthusiastically ascribe to. A coalition of the working class supporting candidates like Mamdani and Sawant can and must overwhelm the establishment with clear demands, work stoppages, and massive numbers that vocally threaten the careerism of all Democrats. We must be clear in recognizing that it has been the Democrats who have vehemently opposed progressive policies and candidates, often using Republicans as cover while they act like Republicans themselves.

Do not forget that Democrats joined corporate America in spearheading a recall campaign against Sawant in 2021…and lost. Her working class agenda was successfully implemented with the most powerful corporate Democrats working against her as she used her governmental office to organize a mass movement. Mamdani won decisively in New York by rejecting ruling class talking points and making specific demands in favor of the working class, never wavering on his commitment to public policy that is aimed solely at helping the people directly through government action. No public/private partnership nonsense and no means-testing as to who gets free pre-K childcare or free public transit, which means the billionaires will not be getting any piece of the action. This is the only manner in which the advent of oligarchal fascism can be reversed. It must be cut off at its roots. There can be none of the “compromise” called for by pundits and centrists. No smiling selfies with Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer. The metric of success can no longer be rooted in the rhetoric of performative politics but in a militant resistance to the ruling class that controls our political parties and their media. The only donations that will make a difference will be made to candidates like Mamdani and Sawant who do not take corporate PAC money—the rest will go the slush fund for perpetual war and fighting against progressive public policy and the candidates who espouse it. Democrats are panicking about Mamdani because his victory means they will have to make a choice between working for the billionaires while pretending to work for the American people or actually working for the American people. Which I personally do not think they will ever really do. After all, they have gotten away with faking it for fifty years.

Perhaps the nail in the coffin of their treason is their wanton engagement in an open genocide and the lies of careerists like AOC in claiming they were “working tirelessly” to try to end it. Mamdani’s victory shows that the tide is turning against Zionism, militarism and nationalism and towards humanism, but also that it will indeed take a coalition of the working class from across the political spectrum to the ruling class. Mamdani must take a page out of Sawant’s playbook in understanding that the New York billionaires and corporate Democrats like Kathy Hochul, who has already said she is against taxing the rich, will never capitulate to his demands for the working class. For anyone who questions this strategy consider the fate of Bernie Sanders’ budget initiatives as head of the Office of Budget management under Biden. When the time came to construct Sanders human infrastructure bill, Democrats did not negotiate with him or “The Squad” but instead with Joe Manchin and Republicans. When AOC came to the White House with The Green New Deal, they shrugged and instead passed climate initiatives adding up to less than 15% of what we spend on our military, placating the fossil fuel industry in lieu of the Progressive Caucus. Democrats are firmly entrenched in a warmongering, anti-worker capitalist system that will never give the working class what it wants willingly. The fight for working class demands will never be won with smiles and handshakes for the billionaires and the Democratic Party. Mamdani should not be announcing his desire to work with Governor Hochul but instead publicly shaming her for coming out against taxation of the obscenely wealthy.

Alas if Mamdani extends and olive branch to the Democratic Party by hiring DNC operatives to his campaign at the very least his primary victory in a hub of powerful Zionists like New York city sends a message, one that will be amplified by his grassroots fundraising and that of authentic warriors against capitalism like Kshama Sawant. It is obvious that the Democratic Party does not care about the misery caused by Trump and the Republicans apart from their fundraising and electoral prospects. Refusing to donate to the Democratic Party corporate slush fund is the most powerful message we can send to Democrats that their conspiring with the donor class against our collective interests will no longer be tolerated. Even if Mamdani falls victim to the imperialist stranglehold of the Democratic Party just the notion that he can raise more money than an establishment Democrat will make the Zionists think twice. Showing that an avowed socialist like Kashma Sawant can effectively fundraise with a platform of ending military aid to Israel, shutting down ICE detention centers, taxing the rich to help fund a national health care system and a $25 an hour minimum wage has the potential to influence some Democrats to stand up for what is right instead of what is politically expedient. Bringing to prominence voices that are truthful, morally grounded and who are not speaking through the megaphone of the donor class can help to drown out the ruling class propaganda perpetrated by the Democratic Party and their media. The Democrats are the seed from which Trump and his fascism was spawned. They used to at least give us the scraps that their billionaire donors would allow—now they are balking at giving New Yorkers free bus rides, some rent-controlled apartments and free universal pre-K child care. Considering that billionaires got $1.5 trillion richer during Biden’s term, one would think Democrats could at least give us the modest gains for working class New Yorkers that Mamdani is demanding.

But no. Because he is Muslim and speaks the truth about Israel, and because his ability to mobilize the working class petrifies the billionaire class, Democratic Party leadership will not get behind him. Once again they would rather have corrupt police-state Republocrats like Eric Adams, who stood hand-in-hand with a beaming Joe Biden while he promised to “fund the police” by “adding 100,000 officers to the force,” or serial sexual harasser and Emmy Award winner for Best COVID Reality Show Andrew Cuomo than a Democratic Socialist. Mamdani will not save us, but like Bernie Sanders he represents an opportunity for a mass movement, this time not to turn back to the Democratic Party but to turn against it. If Mamdani sees fit to play nice with Democrats, we no longer have to. Over the past 50 years, the Democratic Party has given us virtually nothing but privatization, deindustrialization and consolidation of corporate power. All their promises of affordable health care, criminal justice reform, a humane immigration system, student debt relief, protecting women’s reproductive rights and climate justice have been supplanted by genocide and performative politics. Democrats have given us scraps and now it is obvious from their reaction to Mamdani’s success that they want to give us nothing but war. It is high time we return the favor.

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/

https://www.kshamasawant.org/

https://abdulforsenate.com/

https://www.workersstrikeback.org/

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As Trump goes on his rampage to bully the most powerless and marginalized among us, it is puzzling to see the liberal groundhogs coming out of their holes to grandstand against his rapacious cruelty in sending the US Gestapo known as ICE to round up immigrants, documented or otherwise, to deport. It is impossible not to wonder where these liberal warriors for immigrant rights were when their party leaders were enacting mass deportations, holding migrant children in cages, abducting immigrants for “expedited deportation” and expanding harsh Trump era immigration policies. Now come the memes accusing us of being less than human if we are not showing some sort of resistance to Trump. Of course his fascistic choas has to be resisted, but those engaging in that brand of simplistic discourse are the ones who defended Democrats because they didn’t want to, as dog-food salesman and Democratic Party sycophant Thom Hartmann put it, “circle the wagons,” as protecting the electoral prospects for Democrats was deemed far more important than bringing attention to the abject cruelty immigrants have been subject to under Democratic Party rule. Yet here we are, with Republicans controlling all three branches of government and Trump amplifying the bipartisan disregard for the humanity of immigrants and refugees. Immigrants are in a terrible bind as Republicans revel in unlawful detention and expulsion of immigrants so they will never speak against Democrats on the issue while Democrats and their media will only audibly step up if it is Trump who is dehumanizing immigrants. Immigrants are the ultimate political football, ideal fodder for Democrats come election time but otherwise relegated to the grandstanding of local Democratic leadership that offers temporary and makeshift sanctuary, wholly unsupported at the federal level. Even Bernie Sanders is spreading misinformation conflating illegal immigration with Fentanyl deaths, parroting the Republican fearmongering linking undocumented immigrants to crime. When the standard-bearer for progressivism in Congress joins in the chorus of criminalization of immigrants the degree to which desperate human beings can be reduced to racist political rhetoric becomes shockingly clear.

At the federal level, Democrats who were calling Trump the “orange Hitler” joined Republicans in January to pass The Laken-Riley Act, legislation that expands mandatory detention for non-violent undocumented immigrants and allows states to sue the federal government when they disapprove of immigration policy. The question is not how did we get to a point where the mercenary racists staffing rogue agencies like ICE, CPB and the Secret Service are encouraged to stalk schools and churches looking for non-white people to detain and deport, but how did immigrants become such a casualty of electoral politics that both parties participate equally in their criminalization, dehumanization and denial of asylum rights?

It was Bill Clinton in 1996 who oversaw passage of the harshest immigration legislation up to that point in modern history. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was the first major step towards criminalization of immigration prior to the establishment of DHS, as it markedly expanded which crimes made an immigrant eligible for deportation and it was applied retroactively to criminal records. Any suspected undocumented immigrant apprehended within 100 miles of the southern border was also subject to deportation before they could appear before a judge, a stealth variation on Trump’s use of ICE to abduct and deport temporary visa holders for their pro-Palestinian activism. Even immigrants convicted of a DUI or shoplifting were slated for expedited deportation without any prospect of a deportation hearing, a direct precursor to Trump’s circumvention of the courts to enforce unconstitutional deportations. Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill (authored by Joe Biden) compounded the criminalization of immigrants by implementing “stop-and-frisk” abductions as well as harsher sentencing for low-level infractions resulting in a massive increase in racist policing and mass incarceration of immigrant communities.

In 2002 George W Bush embarked on one of the most ambitious restructurings of our government in history, piecing 22 offices from five departments into one massive and largely unaccountable bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The legislation creating this sprawling department included the creation of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) which has proven to be perhaps the most heinous and racist agency in our government’s history. But it was not Republicans who authored this bill at the behest of George W Bush. The vast majority of it was written by Democrats who knowingly transformed immigration from a justice issue, as immigration was handled under the watch of the Department of Justice, to a security issue in the wake of 9/11. No matter that 9/11 had nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the lax oversight of the Bush administration and the chronic failure of communication between intelligence agencies, Democrats wanted to score political points with those legendary “swing voters” who they were told by Republicans and Fox News that they were soft on terrorism. Only eight Senate Democrats voted against this sweeping expansion of the surveillance state and militarization of law enforcement. What Congress did was eliminate the relatively benign Immigration and Naturalization Service and transferred its functions to three new agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). CBP was assigned to secure the border and the area within 100 miles of it and USCIS processed requests for immigration benefits, such as naturalization applications and asylum requests. ICE was created with two primary divisions: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO enforces immigration laws, including detaining and removing the people violating them. HSI investigates international criminal operations and organizations, including the illegal trade of goods, weapons, and drugs, and the smuggling or trafficking of people into the U.S. A paramilitary operated with little oversight, ICE now has over 20,000 officers with 400 offices in the U.S. and in 46 countries.

Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration deported a record 2.5 million immigrants, and that doesn’t include the millions who were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by CBP. For the first six years of his administration, Obama’s policy was to expel any undocumented immigrant convicted of almost any crime regardless of its time of occurrence, including DUI, shoplifting, entering the country illegally and a variety of misdemeanors. The vast majority of expulsions from the country were carried out under “expedited removal,” which means deportations were executed without an appearance before a judge. In 2013, Obama signed off on a record 383,000 “expedited removals” comprising over 80% of the record 438,000 deportations that year. While 200,000 of those deported were convicted of a crime, 230,000 were not, meaning over his two terms Obama habitually violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention as declared by the UN, as well as The Refugee Act of 1980 passed by Congress to guarantee asylum hearings to those refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution.” In true neoliberal fashion Obama expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2104 to provide a temporary reprieve from deportation to qualified unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children while simultaneously building cages for and deporting the Central American child refugees fleeing violence sparked by US interventions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In fact, Obama expanded the policy of family detention and expedited removal, prompting the ACLU to publish a piece in 2015 entitled “President Obama Wants to Continue Imprisoning Immigrant Families.” It was six years into his presidency when Democrats widened their opposition to his policies, primarily because election season was less than a year away. Rachel Maddow was comparing Obama to FDR and lauding his expansion of DACA but had little to say regarding his unprecedented use of expedited deportations. Five years later Maddow famously used images of Obama-era kids in cages to call out Trump for his family separation policies, unwittingly bringing attention to the fact that it was Obama who ordered construction of the cages and who placed unaccompanied children in them, some for months at a time, even if Maddow and her fellow MSNBC celebrity pundits did not find the cages newsworthy when they were Obama’s doing.

Trump took the torch of Draconian immigration policies from Obama in 2016 and pushed them even further towards barbarity, implementing a policy of separating children illegally entering the country from their families as a deterrent to future refugees. Using criminal records accumulated from the Obama and Clinton years, like them he is indiscriminately targeted immigrants accused of any crime, even those with misdemeanors who had served their sentences. He famously banned Muslims from entering the country, a ban which was deemed unconstitutional and eventually overturned. But it was only four years before Trump’s ban that Obama implemented the Countering Violent Extremism program, a highly controversial community initiative aimed at identifying potential terrorists before they became “radicalized.” Of course, this unconstitutional intelligence gathering was devastating to Muslim communities as it stigmatizing Muslims and reinforced Islamophobic stereotypes, facilitated covert intelligence-gathering, suppressed dissent against government policies, and sowed discord in targeted communities with virtually no pushback from the same liberals who express outrage at Trump’s Muslim ban. During the implementation of Obama’s xenophobic program, schools employed surveillance officers to monitor the activities of Muslim students using debunked methods that assume potential terrorists have indentifiable predisposing markers. Study after study has proven that there is no accurate way of predicting if someone is going to commit a terrorist act, yet to this day our government uses unscientific methods to target what they perceive to be “at risk” communities. Yet the fear imparted by a political class and media so inherently steeped in white supremacy and so intent on distracting from their own contributions to the ascent of fascism easily overwhelms any logic or sense of humanity that might protect the Muslims and immigrants we impetuously single out.

During her 2021 trip to Guatemala as Biden’s border czar Kamala Harris took the tact of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign in regards to those victims of the violence and instability resulting from the CIA’s regime change in 1954 and subsequent US funded genocide in the late 1990s. "Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders." Harris cautioned potential refugees: "If you come to our border, you will be turned back." In 2014 responding to a surge in unaccompanied migrant children from Central America, Hillary Clinton stated that the children should be sent back after contacting their families. This heartless proposal is in direct violation of the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which prohibits expedited removal from being used on children under 18, and also a violation of UN refugee charters designed to protect children from such cruelty. It was under Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton’s State Department paid Mexico $90 million to "interdict the flow of illegal migrants from Central America bound for the United States,” resulting in thousands of children being detained in unsafe conditions and returned to the countries they were fleeing without due process. When the ACLU filed cases on behalf of Central American refugees fleeing extreme sexual violence and death threats to seek asylum in the United States, the Obama administration insisted that it can deport asylum-seekers without any oversight or review from the federal courts. Using ICE in the same unconstitutional context as Trump, Obama thought it was his right to sweep refugees off the streets and from shelters for deportation without any due process. Where were Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann and Michael Moore when Obama was violating the constitutional rights of refugees and immigrants, sending them back to their countries of origin to face the likelihood of death or sexual violence?

They were remaining silent as they did in January of 2023 when Biden announced sweeping policies drastically restricting access to asylum for refugees at the southern border. With little fanfare Biden expanded Trump’s illegal use of Title 42, an obscure public health law that was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities over anyone, including US citizens, arriving from a foreign country. Title 42 was a quarantine law never intended to determine which non-citizens would be admitted or removed from the country—Congress avoided any reference to immigration in the legislation to prevent public health officials from discriminating against immigrants. Not only did Biden apply Title 42 to Venezuelans as Trump did, but he broadened its application to expel asylum seekers from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, resulting in squalid, overcrowded conditions at the Mexican border exposing vulnerable migrants to widespread kidnappings, rape, torture and murder. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers were denied their right to due process. The coverage of this dehumanizing policy disaster was covered on a regular basis by FOX News, but only in the context of the Biden administration’s incompetence. There was mention of a “crisis” at the southern border, but the emphasis was on the overwhelming number of number of migrants presenting at the southern border (a variation on Trump’s “invasion” theme), but little interest in Biden’s illegal use of Title 42 or the plight of the asylum seekers whose constitutional rights were being violated. Like Trump, Biden directly violated the Refugee Act of 1980 which prohibits penalizing asylum seekers based on their method of entry. MNSBC, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have all mentioned Trump's violation of the law, but somehow failed to acknowledge Biden’s.

Even more shocking was Biden’s response to Fox News/Trump’s condemnation of his handling of the border during the 2024 presidential campaign. Biden not only completely shut down the southern border once the average number of daily encounters has reached 2,500 between legal ports of entry (which was a daily occurrence), but waived federal laws including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act to expedite construction of Trump’s southern border wall. Across the spectrum of liberal media one could find little condemnation of his further capitulation to racist right-wing ideology, only hand-wringing that it might affect his electoral prospects with immigrants. There were no protests from the “Hands Off” liberals who were in the streets by the thousands to show solidarity against Trump and Musk, just a hardening of their social media account rhetoric when it came to undocumented immigrants. After the Democratic Party could no longer cover up Biden’s obvious years long cognitive decline, Kamala Haris took the right-wing immigration reigns in her wanton criminalization of immigrants. In her passionate embrace of war criminals and racists, Harris parroted their propaganda equating immigrants with increased violence, repeating at her rallies that she “went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I've prosecuted them in case after case and I won. So, I know what I'm talking about.” A Harris campaign ad showing weapons superimposed over immigrants blared “as a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border.” Instead of pushing back, the crowds at rallies would cheer “USA, USA, USA”…just like at rallies for the “orange Hitler.”

Now that Trump is using ICE to abduct anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian students protestors off the street, the same liberal cabal that had nothing to say when Biden and his minions were framing these student activists as “antisemitic” and “lawless” and standing by while our paramilitary brutalized and arrested thousands of them is now aghast at ICE’s unconstitutional actions. But ICE has been engaging in illegal surveillance, abduction, deportation and torture since its inception, practices that have only escalated with each successive administration Republican or Democrat. It took Trump’s child separation policy in 2016 to finally spark a movement to abolish ICE. In 2018 Alexandria Ocasio Cortez upset establishment Democrat Joseph Howley in Ney York’s 14th Congressional district running on a platform included the abolition of ICE. Progressives in the House introduced a bill to effectively shut down ICE, but Democratic Party leadership balked at the idea when Republicans accused them of failing to support law enforcement. It is remarkable that even as Democrats Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal sponsored the bill their pretense was Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating immigrant children from their parents and the use of “tender age shelters” to house these children. But many of those shelters were constructed by the Obama administration in which unaccompanied children were left for weeks or months at a time. One has to wonder where these concerned progressives were under Obama when he was violating the rights of child refugees. While a handful of Democrats briefly jumped on the “abolish ICE” bandwagon, it only took Trump’s Tweet “The two biggest opponents of ICE in America today are the Democratic Party and MS-13!” to make Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the majority of house Democrats block a vote on the bill to abolish ICE. It was dropped in favor of a Republican bill supporting ICE which predictably passed 244-35.

Democrats and their liberal base historically are not for immigrants. In 1939 FDR turned away thousands of Jews for fear of Nazi spies and then in 1942 etablished the Japanese internment camps. Liberals are currently against what Trump and the Republicans do to immigrants, even if their party engages in virtually the same unconstitutional and xenophobic behavior. Liberals are mobilized against ICE only on the basis of Trump’s 2016 “zero tolerance” child separation policy and his current use of ICE to ambush and deport anti-Palestinian protestors with temporary visas and green cards. All of ICE’s other inuhumane violations, from forced sterilization to intentional deprivation of medical care to thousands of incidents of unwarranted extended solitary confinement, have been met with relative silence from the liberal base. There were no calls for abolishing or even reforming ICE from “Hands Off” protest organizers, but one of their listed issues was the defense of NATO, a weapons clearinghouse that has been responsible for displacing millions in the Middle East. While ICE rapidly grew into a gestapo bent on terrorizing immigrants and stripping them of their rights, liberals and Democrats largely remained silent, exhibiting the same moral bankruptcy when it comes to the genocide in Gaza or any of the disastrous regime change interventions in the Middle East and Central and South America cooked up by the Clintons, Obama and Biden. During the 2024 campaign, it was Democrats who were joining Republicans in the call for immigrants and refugees to enter the country legally, ignoring the fact that the massive resources poured into private detention and rogue agencies ICE and CBP instead of the humane processing of immigration cases has resulted in backlogs averaging 3 years for a family green card and 5 years for asylum cases. It is estimated at the current rate of processing it would take over 20 years to adjucate all the pending immigration cases if no additional cases were added.

The notion that Trump is somehow an anomaly in his defiance of the Constitutional rights of refugees and immigrants aligns with the ineffectual liberal strategy in fighting him. Trump is merely a continuation along the spectrum of institutional white supremacy that liberals have supported or ignored since Bill Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (as well as his wholly racist “Welfare Reform” and “Tough on Crime” bills). Failing to even go so far as to acknowledge the barbarity of ICE until Trump is in office leaves little moral or political ground to stand on. The extent to which liberals have ignored or even supported the unconstitutional treatment of refugees has enabled a network of nativist abuse built upon an ignorance of history which assuages our collective guilt in destabilizing the countries that these refugees are fleeing from. As we do with slavery and our genocide of the indigenous people and now the Palestinians, we dodge our accountability by marginalizing the victims and projecting blame onto the individual, in this case Trump, instead of the institutions that we have allowed to become malignant in our purposeful dismissal of history and context.

While Trump directs ICE to sweep immigrants off the street for the crime of pro-Palestinian speech, Democrats are investigating him for insider trading. They will not mention the name of Mahmoud Khalil any of the other pro-Palestinian activists being detained in an ICE facility in Louisiana, a facility notorious for sexual abuse and torture of detainees. When Bernie Sanders supporters approached him regarding the fate of Mahmoud Khalil, he was very cordial until they mentioned Khalil’s name after which he angrily stormed off shouting that he had an upcoming rally. Why would Chris Van Hollen bring so much attention to the case of erroneously deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia yet ignore the cases of Khalil, Hash Tayeh and so many others who have fallen victim to Trump and ICE? Because Garcia’s case might score political points with their base and defending his unconstutional deportation does not threaten AIPAC donor cash. Democrats have failed to take any concrete action to protect those who ICE has abducted under Trump, but they failed to do so under their own administrations as well. They could demand judicial review, genuinely filibuster Republican legislation or appointments (Cory Booker’s grotesquely hypocritical performance was not a filibuster), or even call for an impeachment which in this case would be legitimate. But Democrats and even the few fossilized progressives left in Congress are not interested in protecting immigrants as they applaud monsters like Booker who enable genocide, sell out black college students to AIPAC and instead of protecting “democracy” they are reinforcing its decline. And while it is obvious that Trump’s violations of their rights must be stopped, Democrats are once again left impotent to oppose the xenophobia that they catalyzed back in 1996, then codified institutionally with their eager cofounding of the Department of Homeland Security. Stopping Trump changes little when it comes to the unconstitutional and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, but he is an easy target for liberals who are haunted by the spectres of their party’s regime change wars that create refugees and the impetus for mass migration. The instant gratification derived from mocking Trump and his obvious transgressions dwarfs the long-term need for the institutional change that Democrats themselves consistently berate.

The American Gestapo known as ICE does indeed need to be abolished. The Department of Homeland Security needs to be changed into The Department of Immigrant and Refugee Justice, ramping up administrative, outreach and processing programs which will ultimately lead to much lower demand for “enforcement” and detention. The myths regarding Fentanyl and illegal immigration need to be debunked and the criminalization of immigrants and refugees forcefully rebuked. Unfortunately, such myths serve both parties well in their justification of the systemic failures of our immigration and law enforcement systems, and in their complicity in the use of immigrants as slave labor in the agricultural, foodservice and hospitality sectors. Trump can get away with literally defying the Constitution because the Democrats have not only allowed but embraced the unconstitutional expansion of executive power and the disingenuous application of legal precedent. Getting rid of Trump will not protect South and Central American countries from the CIA’s regime change wars nor will it improve the treatment of immigrants domestically. As long as ICE and CBP exist in their current incarnations, and the inept military-intelligence complex enhances the flow of refugees to our southern border, migrant populations will face intolerable instability at home and be forced to flow to our southern border. It is indeed unfortunate that the “moderate white liberal” much like the “right-wing conservative” is only motivated to take action when they are personally threatened, because in the case of immigrants those liberals have supported the most egregious of human rights violations in the interest of electoral politics.

Trump has taken the torch from Democrats and is pushing the envelope in detaining and deporting green card holders. He has taken the bipartisan precedent of unconstitutional detention and deportation and applied it to those who are here legally but not lawful permanent residents, taking an incremental step forward from his predecessors in open defiance of the constitutional. Liberals who have shrugged at such jingoistic behavior from Democrats are now clutching their pearls as the reach of Trump’s ICE threatens their personal bubble. A media that covered refugees presenting at the southern border as a “crisis” and focused on the inevitable accusations lobbed between the two political parties is now expressing disbelief at Trump’s use of ICE to detain and imprison pro-Palestinian student activists with virtually round the clock coverage. What is being revealed is merely the tip of the ICE—berg as it pertains to that agency’s degenerate behavior, but it is rapidly changing public opinion of ICE. Still, courtesy of Amazon, Google and Microsoft ICE holds a massive cloud database of nearly every US citizen with particular attention to immigrants. This decades long project has been greenlighted by every administration since its inception. If there had been pushback against ICE when there were calls for it to be abolished, or if Democrats had the integrity to call for its abolition, Trump could not use it in such an indiscriminate manner today. But the utter lack of concern for the welfare of immigrants, apart from the brief outrage at Trump’s child separation policy, has led to a moment in which ICE is coming for legal residents who have spoken out against Israel. The bipartisan dual loyalty of our Congress to Israel has placed us in a precarious situation in that the Democrats who demonized and failed to protect student protestors are now unable to protect us against virtually any threat including illegal abduction and detention. As there has been no accountability for previous presidential overreach in the surveillance, detention and deportation arenas, Trump and his ICE henchmen are now free to disobey the courts and detain any of us who speak the truth about Israel or any subject the right-wing finds threatening to white supremacy or ancient books of fiction.

If Democrats had a shred of integrity, ICE would have never been invented. But they didn’t and they don’t, and immigrants have been paying a devastating price ever since. Now that they could be coming for “us” and not “them,” liberals are suddenly taking to the streets. As usual, they are too late and their hypocrisy is trying to fight what they previously supported just because it has the potential to affect them personally reveals the fatal flaw in the “sports team” approach to electoral politics. The casualties of the “us versus them” ideology promoted by our media and political parties used to be marginalized communities—not so threatening to the moderate white liberal. Now that ICE could be coming for all of us at the behest of Trump they stand up and take notice. Democrats do nothing. The courts have become irrelevant as there is no enforcement of their rulings. Any politician with integrity, any political party that genuinely wanted to protect us, would have pushed for the abolition of |ICE years ago. We could soon feel the horror that masses of immigrants have felt at the hands of ICE under Democrats and Republicans alike. Maybe then we will unify to actively change the racist systems of enforcement and incarceration that serve against the interests of humanity and common decency. Maybe then we will stop using the excuse that Biden or some other monstrous Democrat is better than Trump, and instead demand a political system independent of the dubious weighing of relative evils that protects the most vulnerable instead of tormenting them. Maybe then we will stop protecting the mass murderers we lionize in our political party in the hopes they will stop the mass murderers we fear from the “other” party. Maybe someday Americans will treat immigrants as a stabilizing asset to our culture rather than a fabricated security threat that serves to fuel fearmongering rhetoric come election time.

Until then we will have to confront the reality that our political system has created a monster in the form of a malignant security state which has turned against us. This is what we deserve for failing to defend the millions of Muslims we have slaughtered overseas and the millions of immigrants whose Constitutional rights have been violated over the past 50 years. Those who didn’t want to “talk about politics” or who claimed they were “fine” with immigrants as long as they were “legal” or who excused the rogue behavior of ICE and CBP because “Trump would be worse” or failed to defend pro-Palestinian student protestors now find themselves potentially on those same crosshairs they disregarded in favor of political expediency. And because of that complicity in immigrant abuse and genocide, the institutions that would protect “them” have been whittled away to the point that they no longer protect “us.” The lack of moral integrity in our politics and punditry leaves us all vulnerable to the same forces that would aid and abet genocide, criminalize anti-war protest, and foment xenophobia.

Politicians who kill Muslims and allow the torture of immigrants with a smile on their face are not going to protect you either. Pundits who ignore genocide and the systemic unconstitional treatment of immigrants are protecting their respective political party and that party’s capital holdings, not us. Unless we are able to unite against the institutions that violate the Constitution and legal precedent all the rallies and “Hands-off” protests will be for naught. As our law enforcement agencies are hell bent on protecting the capital of the ruling class, and the courts are either rigged or have been left bereft of agencies with the integrity to enforce their rulings, it will require violent uprising, mass work stoppages, millions occupying the centers of power in Washington and/or a concerted threat to our representatives working for AIPAC and the private detention industry to change a trajectory of mass surveillance, demonization of protest, unconstitional treatment of migrants and “patriotic” mass murder of innocents overseas that was set in motion decades ago. Cowering to the fear of being disappeared or prosecuted for standing up to protect oppressed populations will only lead to more oppression, just as cowering to Trump has led to his empowerment.

We need to be not only calling out Trump but flooding our representatives with demands to completely revamp and rethink the DHS and their enforcers CBP and ICE, as well as to stop their politically expedient criminalization of immigrants. If we had the foresight to do so decades ago, perhaps Trump’s transgression would “only” be putting kids in cages like Obama, and not deporting legal immigrants for their political ideology. We could never have arrived at this tipping point if liberals and Democrats would have stood up to all unconstitutional treatment of immigrants and not just that of the opposition party. If the Democrats were actually an opposition party we would not have legal residents being abducted for pro-Palestinian speech much less an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. As we speak Democrats are managing protests against Trump to defuse the prospect of civil unrest, anarchy and work stoppages because their oligarchs want a return to the warmongering, anti-Zionist, militaristic austerity liberalism that brought Trump to power in the first place. The cycle of selective moral outrage, rejection of history and context and the protection of politicians who are supposed to be protecting us must end if we truly desire a civil society. To illustrate the futility of the Democratic Party, Senator Chris Murphy has been making the rounds on cable and network “news” condemning Trump’s attacks on universities and journalists and musing that the possibility of civil unrest might serve as an antidote for Trump. This is the same Senator Murphy who amplified Biden and the Republicans accusations that there was a “direct line” between pro-Palestinian protestors ant violent anti-semitism on college campuses, pushed for Biden’s Draconian 2024 immigration bill that gave DHS the ability to shut down the southern border (all in the interest of obtaining billions more in funding for the Gaza genocide and our proxy war in Ukraine), and spread propaganda condemning university administrations for failing to defend Jewish students from antisemitic pro-Palestinian activists (then sided with the firing of unversity presidents!).

Just like Republicans, Democrats use immigrants to their own political advantage. That’s why Chris Van Hollen is meeting with Abrego Garcia who was illegally deported by Trump. Democrats are not doing anything tangible to defend against Trump’s unconstitutionality because they have engaged in similar activities and promoted identical narratives about the threat of immigrants, so Van Hollen is bringing Garcia’s case to the fore in the interest of “fighting Trump.” Democrats have let millions like Garcia fall prey to illegal deportation under Obama and Biden, and have sent children back to almost certain death in their unstable countries of origin, so they have little authentic concern for the human toll taken by such vindictive policies. In affording the illusion of fighting Trump through actions that are not directed towards systemic change, Democrats will continue to make migrants and marginalized populations mere political footballs to be kicked around at opportune moments to optimize the optics of opposition. It is high time the liberal base stops playing pundit and starts to make their representatives aware that their concern is the well-being of immigrant populations and not how benevolence to desperate populations plays with Fox News, The New York Times or Republicans. For those who idealize America as some sort of beacon of democracy, the inscription by Emma Lazarus at the base of The Statue of Liberty did not read "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free and we will deny their asylum rights, torture them and illegally deport them." But that is the bipartisan ideology that has led to this moment partially thanks to precious little pushback from the liberal base. As we coalesce to “stop Trump,” we must be realistic in our assessment of a Democratic Party that has engaged in the most heinous of acts against migrants and marginalized populations here and abroad and understand that if they can completely disregard the humanity of what liberals consider the “other” in their quest for power they will conveniently disregard “ours” as well if it serves their own vested interests. Until we stop compartmentalizing humanity to minimize our dereliction of duty in protecting those displaced and impoverished by our imperialist delusions our collective conscience will be clouded by the guilt of our selective outrage, lashing out against fabricated threats spread by those whose ascent to power belies having any conscience at all.

This is the model practiced by both political parties and their respective medias who are suddenly outraged at the unconstitutional treatment of immigrants. Their moral rot needs to be severed at its root, and the root in our era is the creation of the DHS and its deputies ICE and CBP. Unfortunately, due to the bipartisan demonization of immigrants reinforced by state-run media from NPR to MSNBC, holding rogue enforcement agencies accountable (including the defunding the police) would be deemed political suicide. It is up to us to reset their consciousness, to push back against false narratives about immigrants intended to bolster electoral support through fearmongering and to let your representatives know their substitution of squalid for-profit detention and denial of asylum rights for adequate administrative and security resources is no longer acceptable. Keeping the plight of refugees out of sight and out of mind until the political atmosphere dictates that a case or two be plucked out of the headlines to make an example of the opposing political party has put all of our lives in peril. We either stand up for human rights and dignity or we don’t—there is no middle ground in rationalizing that one person or party would be worse than the other. Liberals who propagandized in favor of genocide and ignored the rampant abuse of migrants are now clutching their pearls because they could indeed be the next sacrifices to the Gods of American Hegemony that they themselves have empowered to the point of impunity. It doesn’t matter and it has never mattered which president or which party is “worse.” But it does matter that both support institutions and that both continue to line up at the teller window of private prison conglomerates, AIPAC and the war profiteers to spread the festering cancer capitalism and white supremacy that has remained unchecked by the courts or the Constitution for decades. Only standing up for the victims of these rogue institutions can turn the tide of inhumanity that has risen to excuse the war crimes and unfathomable cruelty of our ruthless political elite.

We are suffering the blowback of protecting our politicians instead of protecting those they prey upon for political and personal gain. Suddenly “progressives” like Thom Hartmann, who completely ignored Biden’s expansion of Trump’s Title 42 or Obama’s mass expedited deportations (not to mention the genocide in Gaza), are calling for constituents to contact their representatives to “demand oversight hearings on ICE enforcement.” Oversight hearings. Really. I’m contacting my representatives state and federal to demand they abolish ICE and hold hearings on CBP in the interest of completely revamping and restaffing that department. Just like the Democratic Party’s cowardly response to black activists’ demands to defund the police, with Obama brushing off their policy proposal as a “snappy slogan,” their rejection of demands to abolish ICE morphed into unconditional support for ICE. With the ICE Gestapo even more empowered under Trump, neutering ICE will require far more solidarity than it would have in 2018. Perhaps the fear of being swept away like millions of immigrants over the past 30 years will motivate Biden/Obama neoliberals to re-evaluate the costs of playing pundit to electoral ends versus standing up for justice. It is obligatory to stop Trump of course, but to assure another would-be authoritarian cannot build upon his subversion of due process it is imperative to eradicate ICE, defund the police, and transform our law enforcement institutions from punitive to rehabilitative. The circle jerk of “humorous” memes mocking Trump and Republicans and obsessing about his association with Putin must be replaced by explicit demands to eliminate the institutions that are used to suppress free speech and dampen democracy. This might require anarchy, occcupation of government buildings, massive work stoppages and/or direct intimidation of government officials, but just marching through the streets with signs at the behest of the Democratic Party will not get it done.

The thousands in the streets should have been storming ICE and DHS offices around the country. Maybe next time immigrants are suffering forced sterilization, unconstitutional expedited deportation, living in squalor at the Mexican border, placed in solitary confinement for months at a time, systematically denied their right to asylum and abducted without due process under Democratic presidents liberals will take a stand on moral grounds rather than remaining silent for fear that “Trump will be worse.” Perhaps they won’t so easily dismiss the next genocide or proxy war because “Trump will be worse.” The ignorance fostered by ignoring has been nurtured by a careerist media and political media that has worked exclusively in the interest of oligarchs and transnational corporations, gladly using immigrants as their reserve workforce while opportunistically scapegoating them. It is the windup to the collapse of cancer capitalism that has brought us to the era of Trump and the prospect of outright fascism. Hopefully those who blithely call for the return of Obama or Hillary Clinton will not experience the suffering of those whose plight they blithely ignored because of the looming threat of Trump, but that brand of cowardice leaves us all vulnerable by rewarding those in power for dehumanizing populations and invading countries that are unable to fight back. Those who are currently being abducted by ICE and deported are victims of such cowardice. as well as those in the global south and Middle East subject to bipartisan resource extraction and colonization.

For the game that you have played in pretending your party is morally superior to theirs, in brushing off the demonization of “the other” in the interest of playing cheerleader for a team coopted by the very oligarchs that Bernie Sanders and AOC are currently ostensibly “fighting,” you’re next.

Are you a paranoid ultra-nationalist who could serve as a charter member of Joseph McCarthy’s House on UnAmerican Activities committee? Or are you just an innocent victim of state-run media propaganda that presents America as the “hero” and everyone else who does not agree with us as “the villain?” Could it be that you are a Democrat who must keep Russiagate alive so you can believe that Putin is the cause of your party’s loss to the worst presidential candidate in modern history…twice? Or maybe you just believe that “America First” means that your country has the right to bully other countries to ascribe to its geopolitical ideology and trade demands. Whatever the origins of your delusional thinking might be, this quiz only takes 10 minutes but could jolt you back into the reality necessary to make political decisions that will benefit us and protect the rest of the world from our jingoistic “liberal world order.”

Health Advisory: Taking this quiz could result in involuntary and persistent outbursts of “Putin bot,” “Commie,” or “Trump supporter.” If these last more than four hours, turn off Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann. The author is not responsible for any psychotic breaks induced by reliable references or the mention of actual historical events that might implicate Democrats, Republicans or America in general as a disruptive global influnce.

UKRAINE FOR DUMMIES Quiz:

1. President Zelensky of Ukraine is a dictator. True or False.

2. The Biden administration has sent $100 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine because:

   a) It wants to protect democracies around the globe

   b) It has a special place in its heart in saving the lives of the Ukrainian people

   c) This is the opportunity neoconservatives and neoliberals have been waiting for to weaken Putin.

3. Peace talks between Zelensky and Putin in April of 2022 failed because:

   a) Putin is a madman who can never be negotiated with

   b) Zelensky wanted to be remembered as the second coming of Winston Churchill

   c) Trump called Putin and ordered him to withdraw from the negotiations

   d) The Biden administration sent Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky he was not allowed to accept any peace agreement with Putin

4. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was completely unprovoked. True or false.

5. The war in Ukraine has gone on for three years because:

   a) According to military experts Ukraine’s chances of emerging victorious over Russia are good

   b) Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin came to his position after making millions as a board member at military contractor Raytheon

   c) About $75 billion of the aid assigned to Ukraine has gone to domestic war contractors who spend millions lobbying Congress

   d) “b” and “c” above

   e) None of the above

6. Putin must be stopped because he has aspirations of taking over all of Europe and the United States. True or false.

7. In 2014 the US supported a coup in Ukraine to oust democratically elected president Victor Yanukovych because he insisted on Ukraine’s neutrality regarding the west and NATO membership and rejected a European Union trade deal. Which of the following about this coup is false?

   a) Following the coup Russians in Ukraine were treated as subhuman, stripped of their rights including speaking Russian in public

   b) The leader of Ukraine who succeeded Yanukovych in Ukraine was democratically elected

   c) Dozens of pro-Russian protestors were burned alive in Odessa in 2014

   d) The groups that led the US-backed coup and appeared in photo-ops with American politicians were neo-Nazi battalions adorned with “SS” insignias

8. Zelensky has directed “conscription squads” to abduct low-income males off the street to fight on the front lines against Russia. True or False

9. Putin has repeatedly claimed that during the discussions to re-unify East and West Germany in 1990 the US promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.” Which of the following is false?

   a) Putin and everyone else who claims this meeting took place is lying

   b) Since 1991 fifteen countries have joined NATO

   c) Putin has repeatedly stated that he would consider eastward encroachment of NATO as an act of war

   d) There is a concerted media campaign to invalidate Putin’s security concerns regarding NATO missiles stationed at Russia’s border

ANSWER KEY:

1. True. While there can be semantic debates, Zelensky has proven himself to be what the US has repeatedly classified as a “dictator” in African and Middle Eastern countries. The qualifications include martial law precluding presidential elections, shutting down of media outlets with dissenting views, banning of a “foreign” language (Russian is not really foreign as these territories are historically majority Russian), shuttering of religious institutions, prosecution of journalists and the abduction of citizens forcing them into military service.

   

2. c) In order to dispel the notion that the US bombs, occupies, invades and changes regimes in the interest of democracy, consider that over 60% of the weapons Biden sold/gave to foreign nations went to autocracies. As Ukraine is currently under martial law and does not have a free press or freedom of religion, it cannot be considered a democracy. If the Biden administration was interested in saving Ukranian lives, Biden either would have engaged in diplomacy prior to Putin’s invasion in February of 2022, would not have interfered in a peace agreement reached between Zelensky and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin in Istanbul in April of 2022 and/or would not have cut off all diplomatic ties with Russia leaving zero chance of diplomacy. US military contractors have made at least $75 billion off the three year slog in Ukraine, and they are currently propagandizing for more. If you’re pushing for more weapons to Ukraine then you are working to empower Trump’s oligarchs.

   

3. d) It was widely reported Ukrainian and Russian newspapers in April of 2022 that a peace agreement had been reached between Zelensky and Russian representatives of Putin. The agreement was never mentioned by broadcast media or corporate news sources until the New York Times alluded to it in June of 2022, two years after the fact. If the fact that US media refused to even mention this peace agreement seems suspect, when asked last month about it Zelensky denied it ever happened. Now he has denied many things including the abduction of Ukrainian citizens as a military recruitment tool, but there are photos and video of Zelensky and Johnson less than 48 hours after the agreement was reached. There is also the testimony of those “in the room” that a preliminary deal was reached. As for Putin being a “madman” who can’t be negotiated with, Putin has signed many favorable agreements with the US not the least of which were the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in 2002 and the New Strategic Arms

   Reduction Treaty in 2010. The narrative that Putin is completely irrational serves the interests of the oligarchs who run our government, thus enhancing the prospects of authentic fascism taking hold in the US.

4. False. This was a propaganda campaign by the State Department, the Democratic Party and US media outlets in their initial coverage of Putin’s invasion. “Unwarranted and unprovoked” repeated every single headline and broadcast news outlet over and over again. In one week The New York times used “unprovoked” in 26 separate articles including five editorials, 14 opinion columns by staff writers, and seven guest op-eds. Unwarranted yes, but unprovoked no. Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine, in which the US funded the neo-Nazi brigade the Azov Batallion (among others) to oust democratically elected president Yeshenko, infuriated Putin in that the west removed a Ukrainian leader who refused to join the EU and who wanted no part of NATO. Republican John McCain, Democrat Chris Murphy and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland were in Ukraine giving speeches to crowds urging them to take to the streets and handing out cookies to protestors, while Nuland herself was heard on leaked phone call choosing who was to become the new Prime Minister of Ukraine. Murphy appeared on C-SPAN in 2015 bragging about his contribution to regime change in Ukraine. In addition to expansion of NATO to Russia’s western borders, this 2014 coup violently overthrowing an elected pro-Russia leader to install a Russiaphobic could certainly be considered a provocation characteristic of US hypocrisy and hubris.

   

5. d) Biden hired Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin straight from a stint as a board member of war profiteer Raytheon who paid him millions. The day after Boris Johnson went to Istanbul to strongarm Zelensky against signing a peace agreement with Russia. Austin could be seen beaming in a press conference assuring the world that this would be a “long, drawn-out conflict and admitted outright that this was a proxy war to weaken Russia’s military. Two months later he was signing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to replenish dwindling stockpiles of javelin missiles for his previous employer. In 2024 the war profiteers contributed $150 million to political candidates with equal amounts going to Democrats than Republicans, which explains why liberal pundits like Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann are supporting their bought off candidates by parroting Cold War propaganda.

6. False. Speaking of Cold War propaganda, US media has revived the ever-popular “domino theory” which was also used to justify our war crimes against the people of Vietnam. The theory asserts that if one country falls to Communism, the surrounding countries would inevitably follow. Zelensky even used the prospect of Putin’s armies invading American shores as leverage in his Oval Office showdown with Trump and Vance. Not only has Putin expressed zero interest in the territory of any other country than Ukraine, but liberal media and their minions were having a field day during the first few months of Russia’s invasion mocking their military as a paper tiger. It stands to reason if Putin can’t even take over a small country like Ukraine how would he possibly take over Europe much less “invade” the US. The notion is so absurd that it speaks volumes as to how irrational the liberal base has become in its McCarthyism and Red Scare paranoia. If Russia makes it to our shores, it will be in the form of a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, not an invading army.

7. b) As outlined above, it was Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland who in a leaked cell phone call strategized as to how to strong-arm the EU into appointing her choice for the next leader of Ukraine. The treatment of Russians in majority ethnic Russian territories in Ukraine became even more harsh than it was prior to the 2014 coup, with their religious practices and language banned under threat of prosecution with a life sentence (or extrajudicial execution).

8. True. Part of Zelensky’s martial law proclamation in February of 2022 mandated that males between the ages of 20 and 60 were not to leave Ukraine. With the draft effort yielding only a fraction of the expected results, Zelensky enlisted “conscription squads” (eg Ukrainian mafia) to kidnap low-income males, abducting them in vans and putting them virtually untrained on the front lines to face almost certain death. There are dozens of videos circulating on social media showing mothers pleading with the kidnappers while their sons are dragged away.

9. a) It’s incredible to consider the gaslighting we have been subjected to by a liberal media that summarily dismisses both Putin’s concerns regarding NATO encroachment and the very existence of a widely witnessed agreement between then Secretary of State James Baker, Vice-Chancelor of Germany Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Russia president Mikhael Gorbachev that following the reunification of Germany NATO would not move eastward. In order to distract from the core issue of wholesale corporate dominance of the Democratic Party liberal media denies this agreement was ever reached to keep Putin as their boogeyman and scapegoat, however there are images of the original minutes of the meeting that were unsealed in 2017 which prove that this promise was indeed made (among others that were broken by the US). Americans are so conditioned to perpetual war and their “right” to control other countries, as well as so petrified of Putin’s looming “invasion” of Europe and the US, that they refuse to look at it from a Russian security perspective (Bernie Sanders suggested adopting this perspective in 2022 and was roundly ostracized). The US would never tolerate China or Russia having missile bases within of our borders. If Mexico were to harbor such weapons from either country aimed at the US, what would be the US response? For whatever reason Americans continue to trust the very same cabal that got us into Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya under false pretenses, apparently assuming that we have the right to bomb or occupy but Putin does not.

Scoring key:

ZERO correct—you are ready to take up arms and head to Ukraine to fight for democracy, just as Zelensky suggested. But you have little authentic concern for the welfare of the Ukrainian people and empower the oligarchs you claim not to want infiltrating your government. You have been an integral part of getting Trump into the White House again.

THREE OR LESS correct—you watch Rachel Maddow, listen to NPR, or read The New York Times or The Washington Post. And you are an ardent supporter of the Democratic Party, but in not being completely delusional there is hope that someday you will recognize that war should be a last resort and not a substitute for diplomacy. But you’re still a servant of Trump and the ruling class.

THREE TO FIVE correct—you have a partial grasp on the realities of the situation but are still Russiaphobic and misinformed. A reasonable chance you will stop doing the dirty work of the oligarchs and transnational corporations in their quest for geopolitical dominance.

FIVE TO SEVEN correct—there is hope that you will be able to understand the context of the situation in Ukraine sufficiently to push for peace in the region.

SEVEN/EIGHT correct— you are for peace more than you are for war, which means you can help to end the scourge of US hegemony.

NINE correct—you didn’t need to take this quiz, which is a reason for hope towards an end to the killing of Ukranians and the destruction of their country.

It’s telling to see the liberal base up in arms about Trump and Vance’s treatment of Zelensky during their Oval Office confrontation. The focus on the unfiltered behavior of our president and vice-president distracts from the harsh realities exposed by Trump’s campaign to enact diplomacy with Putin. A consolidated American media’s fixation on the hegemonic goals of their board members and sponsors has spawned a culture of Cold War paranoia not seen since Joseph McCarthy’s House on Un-American activities witch hunt of the 1940s and 1950s. Although this fearmongering committee was finally abolished in 1975, it exists today in the public floggings of anyone who shocks any one from the Democratic Party or their Trumpaphobic base out of their NPR/MSNBC McCarthy era mindset and into the damning reality of recent history. While it is more likely that Trump wants to end the conflict simply because it is a losing proposition for the US, it is always preferable to follow the path of diplomacy through peace than peace through war regardless of the motivation for it. Americans can congratulate themselves for being so woefully misinformed that they have allowed our war profiteers and ruling class to kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians for no apparent reason, because the deal that Zelensky will ultimately agree to will look a lot like the one he walked away from in April of 2022. The only difference will be that Zelensky will likely not get the security assurances that he would have gotten three years ago had he not obeyed Biden and Johnson in their quest for a proxy war with Russia. And that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive and one-third of Ukraine would still be standing. How have we been brought to a point where millions of Americans believe that peace is more threatening than war?

So stop with the memes lionizing Zelensky and warning about Putin’s takeover of Europe and start urging for peace. Support for continued war only serves to empower the very oligarchs that liberals are up in arms about. Although much of what Trump does is chaotic and destructive, peace for Ukraine and improved relations with Russia are something to be feared only in the eyes of those who want to control Ukraine and think the ouster of Putin is some sort of remedy for our crumbling institutions and devolving culture. But Putin is not responsible for our inaccessible and unaffordable health care system, the million Americans who are unhoused, an atrophying public education system, or the record wealth and income inequality that popularizes autocrats such as Trump. We are collectively responsible in our support for political parties who do not prioritize our welfare and in our amplification of oligarch run media’s misinformation on both sides of the political spectrum. If we were not being intentionally deceived, it would be Israel and not Russia that would be targeted as a threat to our “democracy.” It is Israel that has dictated our foreign policy for at least the last thirty years, and liberals have even gone so far as to make excuses for Biden and the Democrats’ genocide (“Trump would be worse”) while they grandstand about Trump and Putin’s plan to conquer the world. Netanyahu has tangibly altered the functions of our government and out electoral outcomes far more than Putin, so why aren’t liberals obsessively posting memes about the manifest threat that Israel poses to our “democracy?” Why are liberals compelled to rage at Putin for his invasion, which the US provoked by staging coups and funneling money to Nazi brigades in Ukraine, yet so reticent to even mention Netanyahu’s occupation and subsequent genocide of the Palestinian people? The reason is so obvious and anachronistic that it’s black and white.

As Trump shocks the world by openly calling to escalate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, those of us who have been vocal in our opposition to the unholy US/Isreal alliance against the Palestinian people, and the xenophobia against Muslims in general, are shaking our heads. Because Trump in his typically unfiltered fashion is merely openly stating what Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and the cadre of Zionist ghouls have been covering up for the past fifteen months. Lying every single day about their “hard work” in negotiating a ceasefire being obstructed by Hamas, when in fact it was Netanyahu who openly stated he would never agree to a deal with Hamas and Jake Sullivan who stated “we don’t negotiate with Hamas,” Biden and his cabinet did everything they possibly could to supply Netanyahu with munitions that would destroy as much of Gaza and kill as many civilians as quickly and efficiently as possible. Biden sent Israel a record-breaking $17.9 billion in weapons from October 2023 to October 2024 alone, temporarily halting the shipment of 2000 pound bunker-buster bombs in May of 2024 but continuing the flow of all other munitions. Liberal media sat in briefing rooms listening to Biden, Bliken and Sullivan’s racist lies while the few brave journalists who called them out were escorted from the room. “Progressive” pundits like Thom Hartmann never even mentioned Gaza in their daily Substack updates, claiming what was happening in Gaza was not a genocide, taking over six months to ask his followers “Israeli Defense Forces shot down over a hundred starving Palestinians.... Can we call this an attempted genocide now? If that’s not sufficiently racist, others like Robert Reich played the “two-sides” game to minimize the political fallout for Biden during election season. Neoliberals from Pod Save America to 50 million dollar woman Rachel Maddow amplified party talking points like “Israel has the right to defend itself,” all voices joining together to lay the groundwork for Trump and Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing and the for-profit development of Gaza and the West Bank. In the time-honored tradition of bipartisan American Exceptionalism, one administration does the demolition for the benefit of war profiteers and another does the rebuilding for the benefit of US developers and contractors, enabled by a media fronting for a mercenary Zionist Democratic Party.

Now we see the chilling effect of the bipartisan push to stifle free speech defending Palestinian humanity and calling out Israel’s undue influence on our government. More important perhaps is the blowback from the deafening silence of the media and the liberal base to the Biden administration’s violent and Islamaphobic response to anti-Palestinian protests and its daily lies about working towards a ceasefire and supplying humanitarian aid. Democrats joined Republicans in grilling university heads in the tradition of the House on Unamerican Activities Commmittee as to their allegiance to Israel and the Biblical fiction, resulting in the criminalization of anti-Israel political speech on college campuses and the threat of loss of federal funding. This unconstitutional gag order has enabled Trump to merge two of his favorite targets, immigration and progressive activism, and sign an executive order directing ICE to deport noncitizen college students and other international visitors who speak out against Israel. This includes monitoring of all educational institutions from kindergarten on up for what the White House would consider anti-semitic activity but is of course constitutionally protected political speech. Let’s not forget after hundreds of students were arrested at Columbia University in April of 2022 it was Joe Biden who said "I condemn the antisemitic protests. That's why I've set up a program to deal with that.” |His program was thousands of arrests, police brutalizing students and professors alike, and Soviet-style Congressional “investigative” committees making public examples of university presidents. There was precious little pushback from within the Democratic Party and full support of his actions from the liberal media now expressing outrage at Trump’s actions.

<Biden’s “program” to deal with “antisemitic” protests calling out his partnership in Israel’s genocide was to have police trap students in university buildings, beat them out of the media’s view and then embark on mass arrests. Sounds just like something Trump would do, but liberals supported Biden’s demonization of college students and his violent shutdown of protest, making it even easier for Trump to stifle free speech.>

So as our executive branch and Congress have openly launched a treasonous bipartisan dual loyalty campaign, with the revolting Pennsylvania buffoon Democrat John Fetterman stating that his “voice and his vote” are with Israel, it is no surprise that Trump can take Biden’s lead and call for the ethnic cleansing and remodeling of Gaza. It’s what both parties have supported for decades when it comes to Muslim countries. It’s what then-Secretary Clinton proposed at a 2011 at an “engaging roundtable discussion on investing in Iraq with senior executives from 30 U.S. companies and senior representatives from the U.S. and Iraqi governments” when she said, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.” Clinton specifically mentioned JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, both of which signed deals with the U.S. government—JPMorgan to run an export-import bank in Iraq and ExxonMobil to redevelop Iraqi oil fields. And all this while she was Obama’s Secretary of State, but nobody seemed particularly concerned at the time apart from journalist David Sirota who broke the story. The vast majority of Democrats towed the party line during Biden’s 15 month genocide, viewing the destruction of Gaza as an inconvenience during an election year. Now that Gaza is 75% destroyed, Trump can legitimately describe Gaza as a “demolition site” and begin his “redevelopment” program. Biden and Bibi have transformed Gaza into a hell even worse than the one the world ignored for the past 75 years with the consent of both political parties, their bases and the corporate media. Biden and the Democrats have bulldozed Gaza for Trump’s redevelopment program, fully endorsed by AIPAC and the people of Israel.

But now of course Democrats are aghast at the notion of the ethnic cleansing they fully supported. We are forced to sit through the spectacle of a pair of criminal caricatures in a performative press conference smirking about the displacement and annihilation of two million people. Trump and Netanyahu fielded questions from a comfortably numb media about the logistics and legality of moving Palestinians to other Arab countries while developing Gaza as vacation property for yuppies and oligarchs. The prosecution of whistleblowers by Obama and Biden, bipartisan grilling of Tulsi Gabbard demanding she call Edward Snowden a traitor, and ejection of journalists who spoke out for Palestinians from State Department press conferences cast a palpable pall over the proceedings. Apart from an isolated shout or two, the press sat silent and obedient, acting as if the proposal of ethnic cleansing was as routine as any mundane White House press briefing. And in a tragic way it was. Because the same press supports the notion that Edward Snowden is a traitor, focusing on the premeditated theatrics of Democrat hypocrites like Mark Warner and Micheal Benet instead of pointing out that Snowden was a hero who proved that our intelligence agencies are treasonous in their warrantless spying on Americans and push for war under false pretenses. The same delusional security state groupthink applies to Israel. Israel is a democracy with the right to defend itself while Palestine is and autocracy led by a terrorist organization. The reality is that Israel is a terrorist theocracy which has been an illegal occupying force in Palestine for 75 years and was consequently met with resistance from Hamas. Biden repeatedly claimed Israel’s assault on Gaza was “targeted” against Hamas, yet the reality is their attacks were and are wholly indiscriminate leaving Gaza in ruins with at least 62,000 dead and hundreds of thousands maimed.

The reality is that a religious organization has already taken over our government. It has reinforced a bipartisan state of belief akin to opposites day and paved the way for another religious organization, the Christian right, to spread its influence and further subvert governmental institutions. Wealthy white men stand in front of us smirking and scolding while they spout malignant nonsense dreamt up by belligerents in the military and intelligence agencies. Despite always being proven wrong, both political parties and their media do not question the inverted logic of our military intelligence complex. While Democrats and their media took offense to Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza, they barely raised an eyebrow as Biden and Bibi massacred tens of thousands of innocents over 15 months. In fact, in the world of Democratic Party opposites day, it was more important not to mention Biden’s genocide for fear of electing Trump. The narrative was that Trump would be worse, but Biden did nothing but support Netanyahu’s racist massacre, providing political cover and weapons for him to kill as many innocent Palestinians as was possible in the shortest amount of time, Party leaders and their media convinced the liberal base to ignore history and reality in favor of Zionism, just as they used and are still using McCarthyism to project blame onto Putin as a distraction for their own utter incompetence. One half of the electorate still believes that Putin and Trump are in cahoots to overthrow American “democracy,” while Russiagate has been thoroughly debunked and Trump like Democrats is apparently run by Zionist donors and Israel. We already have been subverted by a foreign power, as Zionist fascism crushes what remained of the resistance on the left and persuades millions of liberals to not only remain quiet about but support a real-time, blood-spattered, IDF-sponsored holocaust against the women and children of Palestine. No excuses like Vietnam “oh we didn’t know until we saw the pictures” or Iraq “oh we thought there were WMDs because George W Bush said so.”

In the most fundamental way, the manner in which the horrors of Gaza have transpired proves how in their souls both parties align when it comes to guarding the myth of American Exceptionalism. At the beginning of February, amidst all the turmoil over Trump’s dismantling of government agencies and Elon Musk’s access to federal payment systems, it was Hakeem Jeffries who asserted that Iran was weak and the U.S. “can’t take its foot off the gas until Iran is brought to its knees” using “all available mechanisms.” This warmongering against Iran was part of the DNC’s 2024 platform, echoing Lindsey Graham who has been making the rounds warning against Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Both parties are engaging in rhetoric identical to that which led to the war in Iraq, perpetrating propaganda unchallenged by their ahistorical bases and the media at large while stirring their bipartisan pot of intoxicating nationalism and Islamaphobia. In the midst of the reality show theatrics pitting Democrats against Republican cabinet nominees, both parties are crawling all over one another to prove their unwavering commitment to Israel, with Democrats who are expressing outrage at Trump’s calls to develop Gaza into resort property plastered across the website of the Democratic Majority for Israel, their cheery head shots supported with attestations like “The message I bring to Israel is this: you may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but as long as America exists, you will never ever have to.” The only difference between Democrats and Trump in the matter of Gaza is optics. If Biden were in office and Netanyahu were to announce the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Biden would condemn the move warning that Netanyahu had crossed a red line and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it. Trump is impolite in his open support for the notion of ethnic cleansing, forcing the establishment media to feign outrage at the displacement of those they failed to stand up for. So delusional are Democrats and their media that on February 9th the Washington Post editorial page headline read “Democrats, forget 2024. Defending democracy in 2025 is what matters.” As if a political mafia that twice was unable to defeat a reality show buffoon will suddenly face of the learned helplessness they have been paralyzed by after so many decades of having their work done by lobbyists, state-run consolidated media and the military/security complex.

The Washington Post exemplifies the fantasy world our representatives have been coddled into insulating themselves within. They are playing pretend, hapless buffoons who show more decorum than their ultra-right fascist counterparts but who unlike Trump and his henchmen are ineffectual and performative. Democrats were already faced with a crisis and their response was to show allegiance to another country, to far more devastating results than anything that actually materialized out of the propagandized threat of a Trump/Putin partnership. In fact, after the countless hours of energy put in by Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann, Pod Save America and the rest of the faux nationalists who helped Trump get into office, it turns that Trump’s primary allegiance thus far is identical to that of the Democrats. Maddow to this day is telling her judgment-addled viewers to “just wait” for the moment she has been obsessing about for eight years when Putin and Trump take over the US and the world. That is not to doubt that Trump admires autocrats like Putin, but someone needs to tell party-run media that Russiagate is old news, and that Trump has spoken to Putin about ending the futile war in Ukraine. Opening up the diplomacy that the Biden administration shut down with a nuclear superpower is a good thing. It’s the lack of diplomacy leading to war that is a bad thing. Opposites day again. Working against the interests of Ukranians and the American people alike by pushing for a continuation of a war that Ukraine could never win.

When Trump does end it, and he will, Democrats will tear their hair out about giving land back to Putin that he already had and about how Putin is going to take over the rest of Europe and then the US. That is not a joke, for that narrative has been propagated on MSNBC as well as by the likes of Reich and Hartmann, who like the liberal base have become delusional in order to support a party drifting into the furthest corners of The Twilight Zone. The truth will eventually come out that Putin didn’t want a war, he just wanted NATO and the US to stop treading on his borders and to keep Ukraine out of NATO. And that will be the end result that Trump achieves, after Biden helped to destroy more than half of Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands. Just as the truth is coming out about the fact that a terrorist nation like Israel has been running our country, infiltrating not only our government but our news media. It is Israel, not Russia as the Democrats would like to have their paranoid base believe, that has coopted out government. It is Israel that covertly used social media to spread propaganda and influence lawmakers and voters alike. In the real world, Democrats should be fighting against the extremely dangerous prospect of a direct strike on Iran from US forces, but in our opposites day universe it is Trump for now who is refusing to bomb Iran.

As Democrats and their base are now George W Bush Republicans, they will show little interest in fighting against what could be a fatal war with Iran. Just as they dismiss concerns about dual loyalty to a terrorist theocratic state. Democrats can’t fight against the theocratic fascism of Trump and his henchmen because they are beholden to the theocratic fascism of Israel. They can’t fight against his dismantling of governmental agencies because they were fine staffing them with corporate stooges and agents of Wall Street, effectively neutering them into fronts for privatization schemes and the upwards transfer of wealth. They can’t fight against his defiance of democracy because Democrats know that democracy is an illusion as evidenced by their fronting for the corrupted intelligence agencies that exercise mass surveillance, extradite journalists who reveal their crimes against humanity, and themselves are delusional in their use of violence to “persuade” other countries to fall in line with our political demands. Such loyalty to a military/intelligence complex that has stripped away our social safety nets, whittled away our right to free speech and protest and persuaded so many representatives to play opposites day to protect it has led to a Democratic Party that is swatting at ghosts in its own oblivious reality show. Illinois governorJB Pritzker, in line with his hopelessly banal AI-infused speeches, puts out an unfunny “comical” video to parody Trump, presented as a “serious” press conference in which he announces renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Illinois and annexing Green Bay. It’s all a joke to Pritzker and most of the Democrats. As a billionaire, whatever happens to the rest of us, Pritzker is relatively insulated. None of these upper-level Democrats have to worry as the vestiges of governmental agencies that benefit us are canceled. They can continue campaigning and putting on “fiery” displays at nomination hearings raging against Trump’s cabinet picks while blocking none of them. Chuck Schumer can stand in front of the Treasury Building in protest of Elon Musk’s access to government computer systems chanting “We will win” as if he’s at a high school football game, while in action unrelated to the Democrats’ photo-opposition the courts have temporarily restrained Musk from access (which will not stop him).

<Starting his presidential campaign early, billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker feels it’s urgent to put out a moronic parody video in typically naive neoliberal style. More entertainment for pro-genocide Democrats who are impotent in their response to Trump’s immigration raids and dismantling of the government but will always take time out for a cheap laugh.>

MSNBC’s answer is for Democrats to stop associating with the “far left.” They are telling their viewers that “she <Harris> ran a strong campaign and drew even in the polls” and that “it’s now clear she was doomed from the start by politically fraught stances she took to appeal to the interest groups active in the 2020 Democratic primary.” Their conclusion is that “Democratic candidates should never again fall prey to the siren song of far-left groups who claim, without evidence, to speak for our coalition and offer a path to the nomination.” The key to electoral victory is to submit to the demands of right-wing media and Republican attack ads, not to stop conspiring against the public interest. Like all of corporate media, MSNBC’s message is to work directly against the public interest as long as it translates to electoral victory. “The irony is these positions — decriminalizing the border, instituting "Medicare for All," abolishing student loan debt, banning fracking, and more — were all losers even in the 2020 primary.” MSNBC will not face the reality that these ideas were unpopular because their own multimillionaire pundits and oligarch bosses made them that way. What lost the 2020 primary for Bernie Sanders was Obama’s conspiracy against Bernie Sanders, forcing all of the middling centrist candidates to drop out leaving just Sanders and Biden. But now MSNBC viewers will believe that Democrats need to lurch even further to the right, which is actually what lost them both the 2016 and 2024 elections. Now that Trump is talking about Gaza as an investment opportunity, CNN is suddenly showing a modicum of concern for Palestinians while during the entire genocide it almost exclusively presented personal accounts and reporting from ardent Zionists (Dana Bash comes to mind). It’s not that CNN suddenly sees the Palestinian people as human, or that Democrats are hesitant to see more women and children slaughtered in Gaza and The West Bank. They don’t care about the women and children in Gaza or about those here in the US. They care about putting Israel first, and the only reason they are expressing outrage is because it’s Trump who said the quiet part out loud.

As for the Democrats outrage at Musk/billionaires infiltrating our government, Democrats have been letting their oligarchs run the show for decades. Obama staffed his cabinet with Wall Street hundred millionaires like Larry Summers and Timothy Guytner who proceeded to bail out their buddies in the big banks and leave homeowners in the dust. The Clinton’s favorite billionaire is rabid Zionist Haim Saban who not only gave tens of millions to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and rebuilt the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill (among dozens of other “favors”), but wrote an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post in October of 2024 endorsing Kamala Harris over Trump, citing that “Since her early days as a US senator, in which the first resolution she co-sponsored sought to combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, Harris has demonstrated unwavering support for the US-Israel relationship and Israel’s security.” Joe Biden reassured his roomful of billionaires in 2019 not to worry because if he were elected president “No one’s standard of living will change,” but he lied as under his presidency the 100 wealthiest Americans gained $1.5 trillion in wealth with tech tycoons Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison leading the way. During his farewell speech at the White House in January of 2025, Biden pretended to be Bernie Sanders when he warned “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” In typical Democratic Party gaslighting form, it’s Biden’s policies (and Clinton’s and Obama’s) that have created the “dangerous concentration of power” that is now openly infiltrating our government. It was Barack Obama who in 2009 crowned Wall Street embezzler Larry Summers as his “Economics Tsar,” allowing Summers to run the Treasury without having to be questioned by Congress in a formal confirmation hearing. Sounds familiar no? The only difference between Summers handing out hundreds of millions in mortgage relief funds to his banker bros and Musk’s infiltration of the Treasury is the optics and the fact that Obama gave nice speeches and was compliant with corporate media.

Democrats are fighting in vain the ghosts of their dual loyalty, which is why their blows against Trump have no impact and their words mere wish fulfilliment serving only to placate idle liberal minds. Representing Israel and their billionaires leaves the liberal class naked in their wont to fight against the very things that they so loyally serve support. Both parties embrace deregulation, fossil fuel extraction, privatization of health care, mass surveillance, the private prison industry, Draconian immigration policy, rogue law enforcement agencies like ICE and CPB, the military/intelligence complex over journalists and genocide. Democratic Party leadership across the board is comprised of the most Zionist politicians in the country, not the least of which are House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. Their loyalty is to the theocracy of Israel at the behest of the billionaires that they are now “shocked” to see openly commandeering our government. They quote with indignance the accumulated wealth of Trump’s cabinet, ignoring that Obama had at least 15 Wall Street hundred millionaires in his cabinet and Biden has served the ruling class his entire career, representing Wall Street so loyally that he was nicknamed “the MBNA senator.” They were more discreet than Trump and his merry men, and their rhetoric was more filtered than Trump’s, but Democrats have allowed oligarchs to rob us blind for decades. Their allegiance has been to special interests and now to another country, prioritizing the demands of AIPAC and Israel over those of their constituents and preferring to lose to Trump rather than defy Netanyahu and stop killing innocents for his and Israel’s pleasure. How is it that only now liberals are so concerned about oligarchs, when it was Democrats and their oligarchs who crushed the presidential candidate who was actually going to take on the ruling class twice? How is it that “progressives” like Thom Hartmann are still writing propaganda about Ukraine and Putin with headers reading “No American leader has ever pledged loyalty to a foreign dictator — until now…,” ignoring the dual loyalty of the Democratic Party to theocratic fascist Netanyahu, an alliance that has had far more drastic consequences domestically than Putin’s largely factitious “interference” and/or “collusion” with Trump.

More swatting at ghosts. More energy expended on an alternate reality while Democrats front for treasonous intelligence agencies in protection of their own vested interests under the false pretense of “national security.” More delusion that somehow a political party that prioritizes Israel’s demands and those of virtually every dirty industry over that of its constituency has any interest in humanity or democracy whatsoever. There are only the echoes of empty rhetoric and the stammering and joking of a compliant media to defend us against the threat of Trump and his henchmen. The courts can make their rulings against Trump’s defiance of the Constitutional order of things, but who is going to enforce those rulings? In matters of war, regime change, mass surveillance, torture, detention, and suppression of free speech and protest the Constitution has been irrelevant for decades. The slaveowners and rapists who wrote that Constitution, that sacred document of the founding of America, were oligarchs themselves, with an accumulated wealth thousands of times of that of their constituents. The core principles within that document enshrined white supremacy, human bondage and the absolute protection of capital as the law of the land. We now live a caricature of that document that is being played out as a performative struggle between two parties who share those core principles and jockey for power with little regard for our collective welfare, those “checks and balances,” the “separation of church and state,” and all the other lofty ideals that were window dressing for the building of an economy on the backs of stolen labor were never really enforced and have always been inconsistent with the concept of American Exceptionalism baked into a document intended to protect the capital of the ruling class at the expense of the indigenous people, the poor, the working class and a stolen black population.

The floundering fathers have just evolved into the robber barons, then the bourgeoisie and industrialists, and now the oligarchs. Trump is only going further down the spectrum of fleecing the American people and inviting oligarchs to openly infiltrate our governmental agencies, the result of which will be the continued upwards redistribution of wealth that has occurred under every president since Reagan. Liberalism mirrors Trumpism in its prioritization of socially divisive virtue signaling over intellectualism, historical context, sound public policy and transparency, creating an echo chamber that is purposefully insulated from the day-to-day struggles of the average American. Which is why Democrats are completely impotent in their “fight” against Trump—they are so bent on protecting the conjured demons of the identity politics driven by the managerial class that they have become purely reactionary. For all the talk comparing Trump with Hitler, Hakeem Jeffries now shrugs and rationalizes "They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It's their government." Seventy million-dollar man Chuck Schumer capitulates "We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights." Railway workers take note.

This brand of finger-to-the-wind, throw anyone under the bus political expediency is manifest in an appearance by Obama/Clinton campaign manager now Democratic Party consultant David Plouffe on the neoliberal party propaganda podcast Pod Save America. Plouffe was asked why Democrats didn’t fight back against a viral Trump campaign ad that stated “Harris is for them/they, Trump is for US.” His answer was that “It’s very easy these days to understand who has experienced an ad, so we were feeding a lot of digital ads to people who might have saw that spot. But at the end of the day, we were spending a lot of time with voters in these battleground states both quantitatively and quantitatively, and this trans ad was not driving votes.” If the test-marketing shows it’s not an electoral issue, the managerial class does not care. If Gaza is the intersectional issue of our time, exposing the dual loyalty in our political system imposed by lobbying and religion while proving how that inverted loyalty drives xenophobia, inequality, dehumanization, cancer capitalism and social division, then liberal media and the Democratic base that supposedly cares about racism, abortion rights and LGBTQ issues should have been challenging the party instead of reinforcing the integrity of its bubble.

There is a sense of poetic justice in a party that has reduced politics to consultant-driven sorcery, conjuring culture wars dog-whistles and inconsequential macroeconomic indicators, being defeated by their own misdirected avarice. Their core tenets of right-wing Zionism and DEI culture wars are mirror images of Trump’s right-wing Christian fascism and his DEI culture wars. They refuse to fight the private equity that is transforming our public institutions into subscription services while they double-down on their loyalty to Israel and the donors, subsidizing wars of choice and all manner of legislation in open defiance of the public interest. They are supported in their distraction of destruction by “progressive” media outlets like MNSBC, Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Pod Save America and Micheal Moore who continue to reinforce liberal delusional thinking, neutering the few authentic progressive voices who push back against the managerial state’s scolding of the working class for not complying with their culture wars bludgeoning. In their privileged economic status and insulation from the ravages that dual loyalty imparts on all of us, the political and pundit class must be working for the right people. It’s just so painfully obvious that those people are, as the Trump campaign ad accurately pointed out, not us.

Democrats are livid at progressives like me who would suggest their center-right turned right-wing politicking has not been effective and that they need to stand up for systemic change in order to stop Trump’s Christian fascist movement. Those of us who remain grounded in reality need to continue to expose both parties for the dual loyalty traitors that they are in all public spaces and forums. They must not only be humiliated, but in some manner made to feel the pain they have inflicted upon innocents around the globe and here at home. They are too comfortable. Too secure in their arrogance that they are protected from the imminent fall of the empire and too set in their cycle of electoral chicanery and lobbyist luxuriating to care about anything but their “messaging.” We have to do whatever is necessary to assure they get our message that our loyalty is to one another and not to them. Those of us left who have not been lulled into the cult of partisanship must coalesce as the opposition party, in agreement at the very least that neither of these dual loyalty political parties is willing to stand up for our actual collective needs, which are the opposite of massacring innocents overseas, supplying authoritarian leaders with weapons, weakening a Putin who can’t even take over 20% of Ukraine, sabotaging the Nordstream Pipeline, and privatizing virtually all of our public institutions and resources. Seek out accurate non-partisan information sources of information and use that information to disrupt the pundits Substack, social media and Youtube channels. Send letters and comments to corporate newsmedia with verifiable refutations of their propaganda, raising awareness that there are indeed some of us whose minds have not yet been snatched by the delusion that centrism, the middle-ground that lies between Christian oligarchal fascists and Zionist corporate fascists, is the ideology that will save us.

If the proper diagnosis is delusion wrought by the deception inherent in dual loyalty, the treatment is a bucket of cold water in the face of the ruling class. So that when our government is rebuilt following the Trump administration’s haphazard deconstruction its foundation will be the welfare of humanity and the planet rather than the nostalgic white supremacist reveries of cancer capitalism and infinite empire. The potential for a second enlightenment offers hope in a time of terminal ignorance in which a society blighted by interminable streaming, binging, consumption, propaganda, attention-seeking and addiction will finally be shocked out of their Pavlovian scrolling and trolling by a Great Depression, civil war or coup that affects its citizens directly. Perhaps then those who keep pretending that Democrats are going to do anything meaningful to stop Trump will finally feel the anger and sorrow that progressives have at the sight of innocents being slaughtered, tortured and raped by our “friend” Israel. The impending collapse of empire will likely see casualties but has the potential to herald the coming of a better day when we face the truth that our country, America the Beautiful, is the one that has ravaged the planet and in doing so has denied its own population the services and support necessary for a civil society. The trauma of Trump might be the saving grace in forcing Democrats and liberals, and perhaps even some Republicans, into emerging from the Twilight Zone of dual loyalty and the propaganda that entails and returning to the reality in which the rest of us exist. We must heed the words of the great thinkers of the modern era, the philosophers and activists of the Civil Rights movement, to reset our priorities and objectively evaluate the priorities of our leaders. For it is Martin Luther King Jr who foresaw our dilemma when he said “Man is forever trying to escape the realities of life. He is forever trying to make the false seem true; the evil seem good; the ugly seem beautiful; and the unjust seem just.” Out of the ashes of false democracy and the unjust and ugly liberalism that defends it rose Trumpism. Only the upending of liberal dual loyalty and its malignant delusion will save us. And perhaps recalling not what it is to be Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative, but what it is to be human.

Suddenly the fight is on. Every day my e-mail inbox is filled with desperate pleas from liberal organizations to send money to this organization or that in order stop Trump. The faux progressive pundits who covered up Biden’s Parkinson’s Disease and refused to fight against genocide are urging their audiences to start signing up to be warriors against Trump. Much like Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, it’s all about stopping Trump and the Republicans. But truth be told over the past several decades Democrats have not seen much success in fighting anything much less Trump. In fact, since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008 Democrats have lost over 1800 legislative seats nationwide and an untold number of judges. As a result of Obama’s intentional inaction liberals have seen Roe v Wade overturned (with precious little actionable response from the Biden administration) with 13 states under complete abortion bans and another 15 seeing abortion bans contingent upon gestational duration. Gun violence continues unabated, with Democrats campaigning year after year against Republican acquiescence to the NRA with Barack Obama proclaiming “now is not the time” to discuss gun legislation in the wake of the 2012 Newtown massacre. But at least the great orator did say we should “hug our children a little tighter.” Wealth inequality has continued to escalate unabated, amplified by attrition in union membership, regulatory loopholes for the very wealthy and stagnation of wages. Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street and Obama bailed them out, offering a mere slap on the wrist for devastating the fortunes of retirees and the working class. Democrats have contributed mightily to the surveillance state, passing legislation to stifle free speech and expand executive power even as they panic their base about Trump’s abuse of such power. Liberals have ushered in fascism, allowing AIPAC and the state of Israel to dictate our aiding and abetting an open genocide in the hopes of electing candidates who they laud on the basis of celebrity endorsements.

In their blithe embrace of Third Way neoliberalism the Democrats left us behind decades ago. The party’s strategy of mobilizing a base to fight against social issues that the party itself shows little concern for has created a liberal beast that devours electoral propaganda and regurgitates the excuses fed to it by an incompetent and fascist party leadership. They implore us to march to the ballot box for the sake of democracy while literally stuffing the ballot box by encouraging lobbyists and SuperPACs to campaign against progressive candidates in primaries or effectively anointing candidates vetted by the donor class. But march to the ballot box loyal liberals do, filling in the box for candidates who support the most heinous of crimes against humanity in defiance against the potential crimes against humanity that will be committed by Republicans. This brand of liberal takes their marching orders from the party and its pundits, disregarding any concern for integrity or morality as they clench their fists against Trump and his lack of integrity and morality. The Democratic base sinks further into a spiritual quagmire that leaves them without moral ammunition against Trump as they wax nostalgic for the statesmanship of Republicans like George W Bush and Dick Cheney who were raging racists and mass murderers but just more polite about it than Trump (and willing to condemn him publicly, the most vital tenet of /liberalism today). Trumpaphobic liberals laud hundred millionaire and billionaire celebrities for endorsing their candidates, side with “benevolent” billionaires like Mark Cuban and Melinda Gates, ignore Democratic appointments of CEOs and Wall Street insiders to cabinet positions and are happy to accept any amount of SuperPAC donations that might allow their candidates to buy an election but fret about the undue influence of Trump’s oligarchs.

As Malcolm X once put it “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” As Democrats see their party become the exponent of genocide and unfettered militarism, they fail to stand against it so they stand for nothing. They fail to stand up to their party’s grave transgressions against immigrants, Muslims, workers and anti-war activists. In 2018 when Mark Pocan introduced a bill in the House to abolish the most rogue and racist of governmental agencies ICE, Chuck Schumer and Democratic leadership shot it down, stating ICE does things that are “very much needed.” This would include dozens of forced hysterectomies on migrant women, 14,000 held in solitary confinement for weeks or months (most accused of no crime apart from border crossing), buildings rampant with black mold and piles of human excrement, random strip searches and pat downs, and denial of medical services. Most of these human rights violations were found present in every single ICE detention center that was investigated, with Biden in his 2020 campaign promising to end the cruel practice of solitary confinement by ICE but ultimately taking no action following his election. When Black Lives Matter made the demand to defund the police, Barack Obama dismissed it as a “snappy slogan,” failing to acknowledge the $222 billion spent on policing that fails to prevent crime or solve murders but does result in over $3.4 billion in misconduct lawsuits and over 1,000 Americans murdered by the police every year. We spend more on policing than any other industrialized nation and get far less for it, so it should be obvioous to those running the country that systemic change is required. Instead, Biden stands with New York’s criminal Mayor Eric Adams and announces he is going to “fund the police” and add “100,000 police” to departments nationwide.

That is precisely what Trump would do in the face of escalating police brutality and mass incarceration. It is a grave policy error based not on what we need but what the consultants believe the Democratic Party needs in order to win elections, but it was Kamala Harris’s brutishly militaristic and “tough on crime” campaign that helped her to win a resounding loss. Study after study over the past 60 years has shown there is no correlation between police spending and the rate of crime, with many studies showing increased police presence linked to increase violent crime rates, so if Democrats wanted to serve the public interest they would indeed “defund the police” and utilize that funding for social services like job training, education, and poverty reduction programs which have been proven to reduce crime. In lieu of standing up to right-wing fearmongering about being “soft on crime” Democrats once again chose to ingratiate themselves with Republican and those legendary “swing” voters, failing both to connect with Republicans who would never vote for an establishment Democrat and to quell the accusations from right-wing media sources. In the last month of his presidency Biden (or whoever is telling him to do at this juncture) commuted the sentences of 36 death row inmates to life in prison, significant in its prevention of more state violence but a drop in the ocean of the morass of mass incarceration and for-profit detention that Biden himself created with his 1994 “Tough on Crime” bill. Such a move allows for politically expedient praise of Biden personally but does nothing to change a criminal justice system that drains us of our humanity while feeding into the racism and brutality that both parties legislate.

Standing up to the health care conglomerates would be a primary action in restoring the confidence of the American electorate, yet Democrats continue to do the opposite. Recently Biden’s $2,000 cap on Medicare Part D out of pocket prescription drug spending has been touted by party propagandists as some landmark accomplishment, but it is a means-tested micropolicy that will have little overall effect in actually reducing the amount of seniors’ Social Security earnings that are being funneled into medical expenses. This cap is not only marked to increase every year, but it only applies to medications covered under that patient’s particular Medicare Part D plan (there are 48 Part D plans to choose from), medications that are covered by Part D which excludes the most expensive medications that are infusions or injectables, But the core issue remains in that Medicare prescription drug formularies are limited by the cost of the medications themselves, so a covered formulary medication might not always be the optimal choice. The same can be said for Biden’s highly touted passage of Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, a legislative blip that allows for ten medications out of the 20,000 prescribed in the US to have their prices lowered due to “bulk” government purchasing. This infinitessimal step does not even go into effect for 3 years and while it does include expensive medications that could cut total Medicare drug spending by 15%, it is conditional upon future administrations to enforce it (which seems unlikely at this juncture). Even if it were enforced, the average senior takes at least five prescription medications and 11 million take ten medications or more, so once again the impact felt by the targeted population will be marginal at best. While pharmaceutical companies raked in $116 billion in profits last year alone, the savings to our government from Biden’s drug negotiation plan in the first year will be an estimated $17 billion. This is not a bad thing of course, but these macroscopic economic savings are a drop in the bucket compared to the savings that could be garnered from a national health care system and are meaningless to those juggling the costs of multiple medications with housing, food and health care premiums.

And even if all the means-tested lobbyist-authored conditional legislation were suddenly transformed into sweeping legislation ushering in systemic change, it would be virtually impossible to fight Trump when liberals and conservatives alike support leaders who make America the most violent country on the planet. The consequences of this violence that we wreak overseas and upon populations here at home are manifest in the desperation of the assassination of a CEO, a truck plowing into a crowd of innocents, chronic mass shootings, escalating suicide rates, declining life expectancy, loss of civil rights, reduced access to health care services, mass surveillance, a rise in homelessness and urban blight. Trump is the monster created by dehumanization, capitulation, rationalization, political expediency and compromise. He cannot be fought in the courts, because the laws have been passed primarily by those who spawned his brand of fascism. If there are victories in the courts against his pollicies, they will be as microcosmal as the Democratic Party’s legislation in their reach and lasting effect. Legislation that follows the well-documented 80/20 rule, that is 80 percent of the benefits go to the ruling class and 20 percent go to us, have only made Trump and his movement stronger in proving the maddeningly bureaucratic and largely ineffectual nature of governmental institutions. Whatever the reality of his alignment with the establishment and the very wealthy, Trump demonstratively rejects these institutions and builds a movement while Democrats insist on reinforcing their enmeshment with those same institutions, impotent in their use of the courts and executive power to deny him access to office or deter his followers. In fact their prosecutions and impassioned speeches have only served to expand Trump’s base as Democrats fulfill his prophecy of selective prosecution via politicization of the justice department.

While Democrats constrain themselves to regurgitate whatever rhetoric their donors will allow, Trump honors no such constraints. He speaks freely against the establishment, drawing the ire of Democrats and their liberal base by promising to prioritize the needs of Americans in putting an end to the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. He has openly admitted that we are in Syria for their oil and has said in response to the notion that Putin is a killer that “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” CNN, NPR and liberals were shocked at this statement, as if the United States is so far superior to Russia in its imposition of its will upon its people or other unwilling countries. If Putin has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Biden has partnered in the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis and Ukrainians, and that’s just during his term as president. Stating truths such as these distinguishes Trump from the quagmire of establishment politicians who front for mass murder based on lies and public policy that erodes the social safety nets that bind us. Americans will choose a leader and a party who bucks an establishment that has betrayed them even if their actions betray that rhetoric. Because both parties lie incessantly, there is little use in obsessing about Trump’s lies. Because both parties subvert democracy, January 6th becomes a shrug for those not afflicted with Trumpaphobia. Because both parties work in the interest of ruling class masters, anyone outside of the fraudulent duopoly, whether it be Bernie Sanders (Independent) or Donald Trump (apolitical), will appeal to those unfazed by consolidated state-run media.

Beating Trump requires stepping outside of a system and political methodology that Democrats are so hopelessly entrenched in they would prefer to assimilate with the neoconservative Republicans than cut off their Third Way gravy train. The fight they took to Trump for the 2024 election was comprised of a smattering of means-tested legislative proposals, harsh immigration rhetoric and nationalist propaganda. Democrats and liberals continue to congratulate Harris on such an excellent campaign. Chuck Schumer appears on the Sunday shows insisting that Democrats did not cover up Biden’s Parkinson’s Disease. Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries answers Mike Johnson’s inaugural speech as Speaker of the House by proclaiming he will work with anyone to “secure our borders,” offering nothing but warmed-over xenophobia about immigrants. None of this will “stop Trump” or change the trajectory of a hapless Democratic Party.

Perhaps it’s too late. Because the way you beat Trump is by passing The Affordable Care Act with a public option. Or lowering the Medicare enrollment age to 55 to indicate a transition towards a single payer health care system. Or engaging in diplomacy with Putin prior to his invasion of Ukraine. Or telling Israel you will not send another dollar or another bomb until they guarantee the human rights of the Palestinian people and stop the genocide. Or being honest with Americans that Biden’s health was declining before election season started in earnest. How about an across the board $10,000 reduction in all student debt, not an application-based convoluted program that picks winners and losers and is rife for legal challenge? Or better yet just wipe all that debt out with the stroke of a pen as Bernie Sanders would have likely done as soon as he got into office. There are so many ways in which Democrats could easily prove to Americans that they were indeed on their side, but instead they choose to double-down on wars of choice, genocide and politically expedient lies. Nobody but the most devout Trumpaphobes and Maddowites are listening anymore. In the absence of the integrity necessary to counter Trump’s deception, the Democratic Party will continue to flounder, basking in the inconsequential glory of Trump’s felony sentencing while he runs roughshod over their milquetoast legislative agenda and reverses Biden’s executive orders.

The day that Democrats stand in front of the American people and say we have been wrong about Israel, wrong in our handling of the situation in Ukraine, wrong about The Affordable Care Act, wrong in our covering up for an ailing president, and wrong in our alignment with Wall Street is the day the electorate sits up and takes notice. Bernie Sanders is not even a Democrat yet he salvages what’s left of their party by standing up for what is right, and even if there is disagreement with his political tactics proposing a 10% cap on credit card interest and meaning it is the prime example of how you beat Trump but more importantly Trumpism itself. If Democrats had listened to Sanders regarding the human infrastructure bill, instead of listening to Joe Manchin and whittling a $6 trillion bill which included expansion of Medicare, Universal pre-K, paid family leave and increased taxes on multi-millionaires down to $3.5 trillion and then down to $1 trillion, Trump might not have been elected. Biden’s awarding the Medal of Honor to Liz Cheney for helping Kamala Harris lose the election will not inspire those outside of the playground level “45” or “orange menace” fight-Trump liberals, nor will his last minute largely symbolic ban on oil drilling in areas where drilling has already all but ceased. Trump cannot be fought utilizing the same corrupted institutions that spawned him, nor can it be contained by chipping away at the edges of the flawed legislation that has compromised our support systems.

FDR certainly had his failings but during the Great Depression when he openly targeted "the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering" and then declared "They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred," a new day dawned in the US political system. Out of his frankness, including frequent “fireside chats” in which he gave Americans hope through rational and bold new ideas emobodied in systemic change, came everything from The Securities and Exchange Commission, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and The Wagner Act. Faux progressive pundits like Robert Reich and Thom Hartmann who were labeling Biden as “the next FDR” for passage of a couple of lobbyist-approved bills fail to grasp that FDR mobilized millions to back his agenda because he promised to protect them against the greed and sociopathy of the ruling class. And he did. Biden and the Democrats work with the ruling class, rejecting systemic change to do their bidding by giving the appearance they are working for us through hopelessly complex proposals that are wither destined to fail or at least will not affect the portfolios of their donors. It was Biden who promised a room of billionaires in 2019 that if he because president “No one’s standard of living will change,” which wounds more like Reagan than FDR. While Biden did the opposite of the majority of his campaign promises to we the people, he made good on his vow to the billionaires, assuring that Trump would be our next president.

Where are the Democrats who will “welcome their hatred?” Will anyone in the party take a stand against AIPAC, the health care conglomerates, the military industrial complex or the fossil fuel industry? Who will stop praising Biden and Harris and start promoting candidates who are not afraid to represent our collective interests? It won’t be “The Squad” because they have been neutered by a party leadership that disciplines their membership for speaking the truth. Democrats joined Republicans to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress, for speaking the truth about the terrorist state of Israel. They censured Ilhan Omar for speaking out about the undue influence of AIPAC on our political system and demanded members of the progressive caucus withdraw a letter suggesting that the Biden administration consider diplomacy in Ukraine. Chuck Schumer insists that Democrats have not been covering up Biden's Parkinson’s Disease while Biden awards the Medal of Honor to the likes of Bono and Hillary Clinton. The show must go on. Swear your loyalty to the ruling class and you will be richly rewarded. Read the script about the horrors of Trump and your uninformed base will think that refusing to say his name is some sort of activism. Silence those in your party who stand up for the truth and that million dollar lobbyist or consulting job is yours for the taking. Fighting Trump is tantamount to careerism and fundraising for Democrats. But beating him means you actually have to stand for something—the “purity test” that Biden/Harris liberals rage at progressives about.

Kamala Harris summed it up perfectly with what the media found to be a quaintly humorous jab when prior to her swearing in of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson she pointedly remarked to Bernie Sanders "Stand right here. Although that is not your nature to just stand where you're told to stand, but give it a try. " That’s not a joke. Democratic Party leadership was livid at Sanders for telling the truth about why they lost to Trump a second time when he opined "First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic Party defends the status quo, the American people are angry and they want change. And they’re right.” The party joined forced to crush Sanders twice in his presidential bids, eliminating the only candidate with the authentic populism that could serve as an antidote for Trump’s faux populism. Apart from public criticism of campign strategy Sanders has become the lapdog of the Democratic Party, effectively neutered like all progressive Democrats who have been ordered by party leadership as to where they are to stand and what they can say. And even when they do follow orders, as AOC did in fronting for Biden, Harris and genocide during the 2024 campaign, they are rejected as AOC was for head of the Oversight Committee by two hundred million dollar woman Nancy Pelosi. When Biden awarded Liz Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal, Democrats cheered and screamed during their several minute standing ovation as if they were bobbysoxers at a Frank Sinatra concert in the 1950s.

Democrats will continue to succumb to Trumpism as long as they embrace the hollow consultant-driven politics of their corporate masters. All the theatrics of the January 6th hearings, the Red Scare Russiagate scandals, the indictments that liberals gloated over and the monstrous Republicans they lionize have only served to expand Trump’s base. Until someone in the party welcomes the hatred of corporate America instead of welcoming their input Democrats will be neutered in their fight against Trump. Some might even assimilate as we see 48 Democrats join Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act, a draconian bill which will allow undocumented immigrants to be detained by local law enforcement for non-violent offenses without a conviction, opening up another legal pathway for the Trump’s mass deportation plan. In their Orwellian whittling away of due process Democrats prove not only are they disinterested in fighting Trump on a systemic level, but that they are willing to choose political expediency over justice in joining in the very assault on democracy they claim to be against. Instead of standing up to fight the despair that fuels Trump’s movement Democrats cower under a blanket woven of denial and donor-driven rhetoric, losing every battle from the courts to culture wars. Bernie Sanders is the only politician in Washington who legitamately channels the anger of the working class and the poor, an FDR Democrat who isn’t even a Democrat, but he is consistently chided and neutered by the party he is trying to reform. While pundits like Thom Hartmann are asking “Where the Hell Are the Democratic Warriors Ready to Take the Fight to Trump’s Fascism & the GOP Machine?” I would ask “Where the Hell are the Democrats Ready to Take the Fight to the Machine that Created Trump?”

The Democrats have already played their institutional hand and lost. Until they choose to listen to Bernie Sanders and stand up to Trump by standing up for the working class, until they validate the angst that their policies and political theatre have wrought, they will continue to lose. There is no possible algorithm in which Democrats can stick with their donor-based model and gain ground legislatively, apart from the short-term vacillations that result from the kneejerk reaction of the electorate to promises not kept by the party in power. The question of our time is “Will the real FDR Democrat please stand up?” but even if they did, Kamala Harris or some other corporate stooge would tell them to “stand where you’re told to stand.” Democrats will have to step outside of the intransigent system of delusional excuses and coverups they have trapped themselves in. Their liberal base will have to recognize that the likes of Biden, Harris, Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have proven incompetent in protecting them or anyone against the onslaught of theocratic fascism. Liberals will have to suspend their Russiagate delusions and demand leaders who will not succumb to the vagueries of polling, million-dollar consultants and manufactured consent. The devastation wrought by partisan theatrics of distraction are indelibly manifest in California wildfires, surging homelessness, declining life expectancies, genocide, record personal debt, the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, chronic war and the shooting of United Health Care’s CEO. Democrats cannot continue to play pretend to a shrinking base, lionizing Biden’s accomplishments in the face of suffering on such a massive scale, and “fight Trump.” Someone apart from Bernie Sanders is going to have to step out and convince Americans that they are fighting for their interests and not those of Raytheon or UnitedHealthCare. Neoliberals like Gavin Newson and Kathy Hochul are not the answer. We must demand an end to the wars and genocide, implementation of Medicare for All, taxing the rich as they promise every campaign season, the strengthening of Social Security, and a twenty dollar minimum wage. The probability is high that if you’re one of those liberals who refuses to say “his” name you’re empowering “45” by protecting those who fueled the despair that made him a demagogue. Trump cannot survive in a healthy, thriving habitat—it is the stifling plague of propaganda, political expediency and partisan theatrics that has expanded his base. The daunting task of stopping the march of American empire is the one that will stop Trumpism in its tracks.

Trumpaphobic pro-Biden/Harris/Obama/Clinton liberals should heed the great philosophers of the Civil Rights movement, the leaders they feign respect for but never, ever actually listen to. The identity and gender politics they cling to have enabled thievery by Wall Street, war crimes, ever-expanding war, the erosion of our civil liberties, the decay of public education, privatization of public resources, and the catastrophic exploitation of our ecosystems. Their vaunted leaders sign a few executive orders on the way out of office, pass trillion-dollar legislation doomed by compromise with lobbyists, appoint industry insiders including military contractor board members to key cabinet positions, and consistently fail to respond adequately to crises, yet for the most part they act within the boundaries of what is deemed to be acceptable by donors and corporate media, making them preferable to the less well-mannered Trump surrogates and appointees. Both sides continue to lie to themselves, aided by sycophantic pundits who think they are protecting us from Trump, while the world implodes and burns before our very eyes. You want to stop Trump? Stop lying to yourself. Stop acting like children in a playground commiserating and feigning outrage over every single inconsequential Trump conviction or cabinet appointment. Because you supported an incompetent and amoral political party, you have zero power to challenge those appointees. And those convictions you spent thousands of hours obsessing about while the 120 million dollar woman Rachel Maddow did her eye-rolling schtick? A complete waste of time and energy, energy that Maddow could have expended pushing Democrats to pass a $15 minimum wage or a national health care system or eliminate student debt, things that would have mobilized a wider base to support Democrats. It is impossible to be against the “evil” of Trump while you selectively ignore the identical evils in your own party. Both parties are driven by the aspirations of consumptive empire, the spectrum of the evils they do debated by millionaire pundits protecting their own vested interests while Obama, who campaigned on the existential danger posed by a dictator like Trump, yuks it up with the “orange Hitler” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

Malcom X addressed the perils of moral relativism, delineating the futility and hypocrisy of parsing the evils you oppose:

“We’re anti-evil, anti-oppression, anti-lynching. You can’t be anti- those things unless you’re also anti- the oppressor and the lyncher. You can’t be anti-slavery and pro—; you can’t be anti-crime and pro-criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhhamad teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light of true history, they would be anti-white themselves.”

Five days before Trump’s inauguration a ceasefire is suddenly a reality in Gaza. Four hundred sixty-five days after Israel and the Biden administration joined in a genocide of the Palestinian people and all-out war on Arab nations. Six months after Biden promised the same ceasefire agreement would be implemented “on Monday,” only to have Netanyahu refuse it as he did every ceasefire deal leaving Biden’s ghouls Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to repeatedly lie and blame Hamas for rejecting ceasefire proposals. One stern conversation between Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Times of Israel, did “more to sway” Israel towards a deal than a year of discussion with the Biden administration. A Biden official told reporters that Witkoff played a “very important role” in negotiations that lasted less than three hours. This is not to pretend Trump is some sort of hero. His administration will be just as favorable to billionaires and corporate America as Biden’s. But it does show that the guy liberals supported to “fight Trump” is just as evil as the “orange Hitler.” Biden’s administration lies, cheats and steals and murders at the behest of the ruling class just as Trump’s will. There is little difference in being lied to and robbed by someone who puts on appearances for the media versus someone who doesn’t. The court jesters for the “liberal world order” might continue to propagandize in the Democrats favor, but their vested interests do not align with ours. Propping up one evil to fight another perceived as worse has only propagated the evil that so many liberals think they are stopping with banal memes and hushed whispers about the “orange menace.” The liberal self-righteous and hypocritical crusade against Trump now puts the rest of us in danger, as his second term will likely be far worse than his first. Liberal delusion and evil has put us all at a terrible risk. Can any liberal leader, any prominent media figure, any Democrat on the national level be awakened from their delusional stupor? Do we choose to fight misinformation by censoring and banning social media platforms or letting the public in on the truth? Stop talking about the messaging and start talking about the message, because the one the American people are getting is that Democrats are warmongering, grandstanding hypocrites who will do anything to mislead the electorate. The power to fight Trump is in the truth, but we are seeing the consequences of the increasingly futile task of pretending Democrats in their current incarnation are somehow benevolent. We are currently witnessing the devastation wrought by BHLDS (Biden/Harris Liberal Delusion Syndrome). And that’s the truth.

Sources of information outside of the American media empire bubble to assist in facing reality:

MideastWire.com

Haaretz.com

Mannnews Palestine

Eurasianet

Arab News

The Kyiv Independent

Green Left Australia

The catchphrase of The Washington Post for the past eight years has taken on a meta context as it becomes clearer and clearer how it and so many other media sources have intentionally kept Americans in the dark to subvert the wishes and needs of those it pretends to be serving. Let’s be clear that The Washington Post has been working against democracy for decades, the most recent relevant example being an opinion column by Leana S Wen entitled “The only appropriate reaction to the murder of a healthcare CEO.” If the headline doesn’t say enough about the arrogance of corporate media, it is evidence of a newfound desperation among their ranks in its presumptive manufactured consent dictating to Americans that the only appropriate way to feel is how they feel. The author uses examples of vigilantism against physicians in China which have nothing to do with the systemic injustice and injury inflicted by the US health care system to make a case that the only proper feeling in empathy for Thomas. A second Washington Post opinion piece by Drew Goins sarcastically asked “Americans really hate the health insurance system. Right?,” and references yet another Washington Post piece by Megan McCardle designed to convince us that “there’s not much evidence that many Americans share ardent anti-insurance-industry views at all,” proving like almost all “journalists” today she is comfortably numb as she claims out healthcare system might be “frustrating” and “annoying” while trying to convince us how unsatisfactory national health care systems in other countries can be.

The only problem with her attempt to demonize national health care systems as pointed out in my last Substack entry “The American Health Care System is Murder” is that the statistics bear out that the US is last among wealthy nations last in accessibility and affordability and first in maternal mortality rate and morbidity and mortality within the system. So why is the Washington Post and virtually every other major media outlet trying to convince us that we the people are all wrong in our lack of empathy towards a healthcare CEO who not only had no empathy for us but killed and sickened us by the millions to amass his fortune? Why is McCardle like the rest of the establishment compelled to condemn Elizabeth Warren for her historically proven statement “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they … start to take matters into their own hands,” which she prefaced with the reminder “violence is never the answer.” It is telling that Warren was forced to walk back even this reasonable observation with an apology that she should have been “much clearer” in stating that murder is never justified, even though she did already say that violence is never justified. Why did The New York Times shut down responses within several hours of its publication to an op-Ed by UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty claiming he was "willing to partner with anyone" to find ways to provide high-quality care at a lower cost? It couldn’t have been because the vast majority of comments were frankly damning of Witty’s predictably pacifying reassurance that he would strive to improve the system by partnering with who—private equity? Or that so many of the comments included incriminating evidence against United Health Care ranging from denials of coverage for spinal surgery to denying an elderly woman gap health insurance due to the preexisting condition of arthritis? It is vital to note in the December 10th New York Times piece “Reaction to C.E.O. Killing Exposes Frustrations With Health System” in which Dionne Searcey and Sarah Kliff rationalize those frustrations with input from opposing views from which they conclude ”While insurance companies cover millions of claims a year, their denials can seem unjust.” In other words, the authors make certain to mention that insurers cover millions of claims but do not mention that they fail to cover millions of claims as well, and even then to The New York Times the sickness and death that results is not really unjust it just “seems” that way.

As I laid out in “Ding Dong the Democrats are Dead,” the only way to alter the bipartisan imposition of fascism is for us to band together across the arbitrary political divides against the forces of cancer capitalism. It has become apparent to an establishment that has led us to the slaughter for decades that we are onto their gaslighting game. They are desperate to have us believe that our rage is somehow unwarranted or at least misdirected by pointing to the assassin’s alleged mental illness as somehow invalidating the truth that the health insurance companies are making a killing not only in the fiscal sense. They are enraged that a 26 year-old murdered a powerful oligarch who sentenced thousands of us to death, yet show no such moral outrage for the homeless black man Jordan Neely who was strangled to death by 26 year-old ex-marine Daniel Penny. It’s typical of their kind to stick up for the rich and powerful while leaving the marginalized, the working class and the middle-class to fend for themselves. The $12 million dollar man Chris Cuomo channeled the feelings—or lack thereof—of the ruling class when on Fox News wannabe News Nation he lamented the “appropriation of oppression” by those who protest against the war in Gaza and against the for-profit health insurance industry, essentially making the case that we shouldn’t have empathy for anyone we don’t know personally (thereby crushing the spark that ignites revolution). To discuss the health care insurance industry crisis Cuomo then brough on former AETNA CEO David McNichols (a mass murderer himself) and the $200 million dollar sex offender Bill O’Reilly. A Fox News panel with 14 million dollar woman Jeanine Pirro and 95 million dollar man Jesse Waters sexualized public support for Mangione as a “bad boy” crush with women’s fantasies about “conjugal visits” fueling the discourse.

CNN’s four million dollar man Jim Acosta inadvertently made the case for Mangione’s actions when he scolded “young people” for lionizing Thomas’s assassin and suggested that they redirect their energy towards organizing and getting Congress to pass a Medicare for All plan via our political system. Evidently Acosta forgets that young people did that twice through organizing for the one person they could trust not to give them the bait-and-switch on Medicare for All as Obama or Harris did, only to have the Democratic Party and their media crush their participation in “democracy.” Acosta also forgets that in a 2024 CNN interview Biden promised even if by some “miracle” Congress passed Medicare for All he would veto it. In 2016 it was Hillary Clinton running against Bernie Sanders who insisted that Medicare for All would “never, ever happen.” So traditional political pathways to eliminate the for-profit health insurers and implement a national health care system have been effectively shut down by the Democratic Party. Acosta and his corporate media henchmen are part of the syndicate putting CEOs like Thompson on a pedestal for his uncanny ability to increase profits year after year while they demonize those who would find satisfaction in the death of a CEO who would use $60 billion for stock buybacks in lieu of paying for patient care.

Such a marked schism in class perception finds we the people falling victim to what Frederich Engels in 1845 called social murder, a term he coined to describe the deliberate exploitation of workers and the neglecting of their needs to the point of illness and death in the service of capitalism. With our media and political system so thoroughly saturated with corporate messaging and sponsorship, when the “experts” chosen for cable news panels on Thomas’s death are CEOs, what recourse do we have? It was Acosta who also called for tears and tributes to Thompson as a “family man and father,” sputtering that his death was “uncalled for.” But he is wrong. It was called for and the people are reaffirming that by calling for the elimination of these CEOs and their social murder campaign disguised as a “health insurance” business model. We are calling for an end to the entire for-profit insurance industry, and we have come to a boiling point at which we will do what it takes to make that clear to Acosta and the rest of the ruling class sycophants who are too entrenched in the tenets of American Exceptionalism and cancer capitalism to hear.

The NYPD’s indictment of Mangione is brimming with the irony of a legal system that by design protects capital while devaluing our humanity. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims Mangione’s acts "were intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping." And he’s right. They were to coerce our government to do it’s job and stop CEO’s like Brian Thomas from killing and sickening is for his personal pleasure and profit. It is a just cause, but the legal system along with the ACA are set up to allow for the very wealthy to infringe upon our rights without any recourse allowing us to infringe upon theirs. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch went even further, scoffing "Social media has erupted with praise for this cowardly attack," followed by an absurdist rant claiming “We don't celebrate murders, and we don't lionize the killing of anyone, and any attempt to rationalize this is vile, reckless and offensive to our deeply held principles of justice.” But we do celebrate murders when they are of perceived enemies of the state, and it is the police who are responsible for protecting the wealthiest among us while they demean and murder the marginalized. The 10 million-dollar woman Tisch should know as her billionaire family is the 43rd wealthiest in the country, so it is apropos that she should speak in defense of the sociopath class unconcerned with the welfare of the peasants. Mangione will doubtless receive the death penalty in an attempt to deter future defenders of humanity from continuing the purge of capitalist sociopaths from the ruling class, so if we do not want more justice warriors to die we must find ways to let the rulers know in no uncertain terms that their survival and thriving is as precarious as ours.

The multi-millionaires who have kept us in the dark are doing anything they can to keep us quiet. As they don’t want to be the next victims of the vigilantism that they selectively condemn, they misdirect our ire in order to cover up for their propaganda against Medicare For All during Bernie Sanders two presidential runs. The media bullet point was to portray Sanders national health care system proposal as one that had the potential to “bankrupt America,” while never showing any concern about the trillions spent on killing innocents overseas or the billions spent on policing that kills 1,200 Americans per year. All of these pundits and celebrity anchors actively promote and defend the murder of innocents by the tens of thousands on a daily basis, so why would we expect them to speak out to defend us? All of these staff writers, pundits and Democrats who are so pious about the sanctity of life when it comes to Brian Thomas express zero concern for our lives or those of innocents overseas. To these stenographers for corporate America moralizing is reserved for the loss of those in their social circles or socioeconomic class, as exemplified by their 24/7 coverage of Mohammed Bin Salman’s execution of one of their fellow journalists Jamal Khashoggi for weeks while whey all but ignored Obama’s aiding and abetting Bin Salman in his starvation and massacring of tens of thousands of Yemeni children. When I pointed this out to NPR’s Steve Inskeep in 2018 on Twitter, his smarmy response was “well now we’re covering it.” In 2020 it was NPR’s Mara Eliason chuckling at the end of a report on Sanders Medicare for All proposal because he supposedly did not have a funding source on his website (which he did of course).

Whether it’s NPR or MSNBC or The Washington Post or even Thom Hartmann or Robert Reich they are all fronting for a health care system that Democrats have privatized to the point of no return. Hartmann just posted a piece today entitled “Were it not for white supremacy, America would have Single-Payer Healthcare,” a charming history lesson covering the turn of the century to 1929 and largely blaming Prudential for charging black insureds more than whites. But of course this is the Democratic Party echo chamber avoiding the undeniable reality that the Affordable Care Act has failed to make health care more affordable or more accessible for the vast majority of Americans. And that’s not the fault of Republicans in the deep south in the 1920s but of the Democratic Party in the 1990s up to today, because they chose to offer up a vulcanized version of a Heritage Foundation conservative thinktank proposal devised to place the health insurance industry squarely in charge of the health care system. Not for a moment were Democrats considering Medicare for All, much less the public option which was dropped at the first hint of a challenge by Joe Lieberman (2008’s incarnation of “bad cop” Joe Manchin). It is The Affordable Care Act and the Democratic Party’s allegiance to the health care conglomerates that served as a major catalyst to the rise of Trump, a 2,000 page albatross that liberals and their media tout as Obama’s legacy. But his legacy is one of an unnavigable maze of a health care system that is so frustrating and inhumane that it has resulted in the assassination of one of its overlords and a resultant revolt of the masses.

At a recent concert in Boston the crowd of several thousand cheered at a projected image of Luigi Mangione. Every news story and social media post on the subject has been dominated by rage and sarcasm directed at Thomas and the health insurance industry. It is cathartic to see solidarity on such a grand scale against an establishment that would have us mourn the death of a greedy sociopath while disregarding the thousands of deaths he was responsible for. They are uncomfortable because we are not doing as they say, and ultimately if we are mad as hell at the health insurance industry that anger could be directed at the media that misled us in favor of their ad revenue. Cancer capitalism takes on an entirely new meaning when considering corporate media’s collusion with the Democratic Party in enabling CEOs to amass their fortunes by exacerbating chronic and terminal illness. The guilty parties are trying to silence our dissent by making our outrage seem “inappropriate,” but in their gaslighting they are only intensifying the unrest. If they fear for their safety because we are rising up against them, we have been fearing for ours at the hands of the health insurance companies for decades. It’s time for them to get a taste of their own medicine. Violence begets violence, and while Thomas was indeed a father so were thousands of the insureds who he sickened or killed. What makes him any more important than them? Why does he have the right to kill so many children’s fathers and live a life of luxury, much less live at all?

One can only wonder as to what it would take for corporate media to start validating the public outrage in lieu of trying to stifle it. As Elizabeth Warren accurately pointed out there is only so much injustice people can withstand before they are forced to take matters into their own hands. Historically the major levelers of economic inequality have been violent shocks, whether it be the world wars or the French Revolution. The stability sought by corporations and the politicians who serve them is in the interest of maintaining the wealth inequality that empowers sociopaths like Brian Thomas. That’s why from Biden to Obama to George W Bush they all remind us that protest is fine as long as it’s “peaceful,” because “peaceful” protest is barely audible to an establishment that only covers protest broadly if it is violent and poses no threat to the status quo. Once resistance to their propaganda and parasitism becomes violent, out comes the paramilitary and the stenographers for the establishment to paint the resistance as antisemitic or ghoulish or hateful or Putin bots in cyberspace, adding tear gas, flash bombs, rubber bullets and fire hoses if too many of us assemble in physical space. But in this instance the response is too widespread for them to marginalize it. Virtually all working class, middle-class and poor Americans have nothing but spite for the health insurance industry as we are all getting screwed by it in one way or another. It is yet another example of escalating class warfare, the type that inevitably occurs in societies with such massive wealth inequality.

The problem is that our media and our government have been coopted by the multimillionaire and billionaire “body snatchers.” As in the famous 1956 paranoid sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the ruling class have created their own “pod people,” all of a single mind in their complete lack of concern for the well-being of anyone less privileged than them and in their fear of our disobedience. It’s all in a days work for $30 million dollar woman Kristen Welker to breathlessly ask Bernie Sanders on Meet the Press if “now is the time” to discuss healthcare policy in the wake of Thomas’s assassination, inferring of course that the ruling class would rather table the discussion. It is up to us to let them know that now IS the time. Whether it’s the villagers wielding torches storming the castle or the Sons of Liberty throwing tea into Boston harbor we must continue our assault on those who make their fortunes of of our suffering. They should feel the fear invoked by wanted posters with their smug faces on them. They need to hear every single health insurance horror story and from he millions of Americans who have awakened to the urgent need for an elimination of the for-profit health insurance industry and the implementation of a Medicare for All single-payer system. As for empathy, we will show them the same empathy they have shown us in serving as sales reps for a profit-driven system that favors survival of the richest. We should not feel shame or guilt for celebrating the solidarity that Mangione has uncovered with his selfless act. He understood that if we kill one of them, we lose everything. But if they kill thousands of us, they have everything to gain. Thank you Luigi Mangione for sparking a movement that will make it clear to the CEOs, the milquetoast politicians and the mealy-mouthed multi-millionaire pundits that from now on if they kill thousands of us they might be compelled to understand what it feels like to be us. Which at the mercy of the degenerate health insurance industry they have kept us in the dark about, that’s either scared, broke or dead.

Contact these media outlets and faux journalists to let them know your sentiments regarding the health insurance industry and America’s health care system. It would be helpful to include your support for a Medicare for All system:

News Nation/Chris Cuomo: programming@newsnationnow.com or 1-844-968-7720

Fox News: 1-888-TELL-FOX or 1-888-369-4762

Leana S Wen MD at The Washington Post

Drew Goins at The Washington Post

Megan McCardle at The Washington Post

Dionne Searcey at The New York Times

Sarah Kliff at The NewYork Times

E-mail CNN at tips@cnn.com

NBC news Meet the Press and MSNBC

As Christian theocracy and the sins of our founding fathers return our country alternately to the Dark Ages and the wild west, Democrats are already electioneering on the backs of the poor black and brown women who will suffer the most under the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v Wade. Joe Biden was glumly announcing “Roe is on the ballot” within minutes after the decision was official. Nancy Pelosi tried to rile up the base by reminding us that “A women’s right to choose…is on the ballot in November.” Barack Obama was out there dutifully Tweeting, missing the perverse irony in his encouraging liberals to work with organizations like Planned Parenthood and others who have been “sounding the alarm on this issue for years.”

It is impossible to recall a national election over the past 50 years in which Democrats did not use women’s reproductive rights as their social issue cattle prod, alerting liberals that if they did not show up at the polls Republicans would overturn Roe v Wade. Yet somehow over that span of time during which Democrats had legislative majorities, they failed to codify Roe into law. The worst offender in this context was Barack Obama, who promised Planned Parenthood, the organization he lauded in his Tweet of June 24th, that his highest legislative priority would be to sign “The Freedom of Choice Act” which would codify Roe v Wade as the law of the land. In fact, he promised at his campaign speech before Planned Parenthood that the “first thing I would do as president is sign The Freedom of Choice Act.” As could be expected, this promise was made during his presidential campaign because the centrist thinktank The Third Way knows all too well how social issues like abortion mobilize the base but don’t cost their billionaire overlords a dime. By the same token, when it was time to bail out those same billionaire overlords in 2008, a mere five months after he made the promise to Planned Parenthood, Obama declared that The Freedom of Choice Act was “not his highest legislative priority.” And Democrats loved him for it.

Somehow there was no accountability for Obama’s bait-and-switch among the liberal base or Democratic Party media. Planned Parenthood took the slap in the face to women across America in stride and continued to align with Democratic Party fundraisers rather than the handful of Democrats who actually stood for justice, supporting Obama in his next bid for the presidency and then choosing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders despite her choice of anti-abortion vice-presidential running mate Tim Kaine. If womens’ reproductive rights were a real priority for Democrats, if they really wanted to protect the black and brown women they believed were obligated to put them into office, this bill would have been passed during the several months Obama had a Democratic legislative majority, or at the very least there would have been some outrage and pressure from Planned Parenthood and its allies to force Obama to enact his “highest legislative priority.” But the presidential campaign was over and Democrats achieved their electoral goal, so there was no need to talk about women’s reproductive rights until the next election cycle. In fact, had Obama passed The Freedom of Choice Act, Democrats would only have gays and guns (and Trump) to campaign on, so the most cynical take on this historic and apparently intentional failure would be that Democrats prioritize electoral politics over the health and safety of women.

Because it goes without saying that Democrats would never compromise the health of Americans in favor of their donors and consultants. Obama wanted a public option in the Affordable Care Act, but it was Joe Manchin…sorry, Joe Lieberman…who got in the way back in 2012. Even with a public option, Obama’s signature health care legislation was harmful public policy, placing the health care conglomerates squarely in charge of our well-being. Since the ACA’s implementation, infant mortality remains higher in the US than in any other industrialized nation, life expectancy continues to plummet, and the cost of health care for patients continues to escalate while access diminishes. Obama played the Establishment game, telling Americans he was finding the “middle-ground” between private sector greed and a “government takeover” of health care, parroting Republican propaganda regarding a single-payer health care system.

The irony is that Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation had within it provisions that guaranteed women’s reproductive health care and effective codified Roe into law. Of course, Democratic leadership and their thinktanks launched propaganda campaigns with glazed over union members making videos telling us how much they loved their private health insurance, while Hillary Clinton went around the country in 2015 claiming that in a single-payer system you would lose your Medicaid and Medicare. Once again, the lies of the Democratic Party come back to make us sicker and more stressed as a society, this time the double whammy of effectively reducing access to health care for the majority of Americans and once again failing to codify access to reproductive health care into law. Not only would Medicare for All guarantee access to abortion and contraception to all women, it would have overriden The Hyde Amendment, an appropriately named misogynistic rider restricting government funds from funding reproductive health care. It is worth noting that Joe Biden was one of the most vocal supporters of The Hyde Amendment up until his 2020 run for president, and in 2021 he put language in budget legislation to reverse it, which Kevin McCarthy and Republicans promptly reinstated without opposition from Democrats.

The impact of the Democrats poor judgment and their inexplicable persistent attempts at “reaching across the aisle” to Republicans has also enabled this return to theocratic rule, as one of those rulers was placed on the Supreme Court by none other than Joe Biden. The justice who wants to go even further than overturning Roe, Clarence Thomas, was effectively appointed to the court by Joe Biden himself, who publicly humiliated Anita Hill with his abusive questioning and then denied her a proper hearing by refusing to allow her witnesses to testify. It is Clarence Thomas who now wants to ban contraception and gay marriage, and it is Joe Biden’s misogyny and racism that enabled perhaps the most toxic justice in modern history to be appointed to the court, not to mention by proxy promoting the ascendancy of Ginnie Thomas who was a major player in the January 6th insurrection. The impact of the political expediency of Democrats and the unwillingness of their rabid echo chamber base to hold them accountable echoes throughout the empty hallways of our democracy.

But the Democratic Party is set in its ways. They will only work within the corrupted two-party system, never seriously entertaining abolishing the filibuster to save Roe v Wade or us from an epidemic of gun violence. They do not want people to band together as someone like Bernie Sanders does, because their objective is only to perpetuate the culture wars that divide us as wealth inequality escalates to unprecedented levels. Nancy Pelosi’s response to the reversal of Roe v Wade is to send me an e-mail through the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) asking me to stand with her and rush $19 and “EXPAND” her pro-choice majority. Not only is this problematic in repeating the same tired fundraising tactics that obviously have not been working, but I must doubt Pelosi’s sincerity as her PAC sent money into Texas (along with Republicans) to defeat progressive House candidate Jessica Cisneros in favor of anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-union candidate Henry Cuellar. There is simply no way to reconcile Democratic leadership’s support for a male anti-abortion candidate over a female progressive while soliciting me to send money to support a pro-abortion majority. Pelosi’s virtue signaling might be red meat for MSNBC watching Democrats, but the reality is she is part of the cabal that has allowed women to return to the status of barefoot and pregnant.

The Republicans at least are out in the open regarding their allegiance to corporate America and the patriarchy for which it stands, while the Democrats deceive their electorate, especially the black and brown constituency, into voting for them and then largely doing the opposite of what they promised, blaming external forces for their failure to deliver any meaningful change. Democratic leadership repeatedly backs centrist and center-right candidates over progressives in congressional races, then wonders why centrists in their own party are obstructing their agenda. Democrats make these donor-aligned choices then throw up their hands when they can’t pass legislation that they seem none too interested in passing. They try to hide the fact that their legislative priorities are for the wealthy by stoking culture wars, a tactic used for decades as delineated by Malcom X:

“The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.”

How bad will it have to get until the withering 29% of the electorate that calls itself Democrat understand how their party has actively brought us to this unthinkable moment? How many times can the Democratic Party tell us the sky is falling and the only remedy is to vote them into office, only to have the sky fall when they are voted in? They have been in power for the last year and a half, and all I have seen in unfettered militarism, mocking rejection of Black Lives Matter and black youth with a president bragging about “funding the police,” massive deportations of Haitian refugees and escalation of immigrants held in private for profit detention centers while we welcome in 100,000 white people without question, Americans gunned down in our streets and schools, increasing wealth inequality, rejection of science during the pandemic with over 600,000 dying on Biden’s watch, a health care system in crisis and now the loss of a Constitutional right in the reversal of Roe v Wade. I also see a party and a president whose moral compass is steered by political expediency, with a president who fails to invite Venezuela and Cuba to the Summitt of the Americas due to their human rights violations yet grovels at the feet of “pariah” Mohammed Bin Salman, one of the world’s most egregious violators of human rights, of Saudi Arabia for oil. And liberals and their media will make excuses for it all, blaming progressives, Trump, Putin, Republicans, Joe Manchin — anyone but the sly foxes fooling them with performative political grandstanding.

The truth is that the Democratic Party does not really want systemic change at all. Biden explicitly made the promise to a roomful of billionaires during the 2020 campaign promising them “nothing would fundamentally change.” And for them it’s only gotten better. After Wall Street crashed the economy in 2008, Obama took the banksters into a room and warned them that they’d better let him pass a token banking regulations bill to save them from our “pitchforks.” The Democratic Party does not want revolution. In fact they mock activism. In speaking to Planned Parenthood in 2007, Obama told activists their tactics were too provocative and that “the culture wars are so 90s.” In 2016, he said that movements like “Black Lives Matter” “can’t keep on yelling” and they need to have a “seat at the table.” In 2021, he trivialized Black Lives Matter’s policy demand to Defund the Police, reducing it to a “snappy slogan.” In every single speech Biden made about criminal justice reform following the police execution of George Floyd he associated “protest” with “rioting and looting,” amplifying the Fox News stereotype of black people as rioters and looters. Democratic leadership reminds us time and time again they are fine with “protest,” but there is no place for violence. Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was not outraged when it was leaked the Supreme Court was set to overturn Roe V Wade, but he had a stern warning for those protesting the kings and queens taking away their Constitutional rights:

“The rise of violence and unlawful threats of violence directed at those who serve the public is unacceptable and dangerous to our democracy,” Garland said. “I want to be clear: while people vote, argue, and debate in a democracy, we must not — we cannot — allow violence or unlawful threats of violence to permeate our national life.”

The Democrats sees our unity against those in power who are violating “democracy” as a threat, but not the Supreme Court ruling itself. Trump and his minions are framed as a threat to democracy, but apparently so are we if we protest the reversal of advances in human rights and medical science. To Democrats, both have to be stopped equally, thus immediate passage of a bill in the Senate to increase penalties for such protest and to protect family members of justices passed immediately in the Senate and is currently being considered in the House. Democrats are just fine with protest, as long as there is no property damage. “Law and order” must be followed by us, but not by our legislators or The Supreme Court. The immeasurable suffering of women and black people slaughtered in the streets, that Democrats can tolerate. Handguns being carried around casually as a matter of course while nearly 50,000 Americans per year are murdered by gun violence, no big deal. But a broken window or a smashed ATM, that destruction of capital is simply going too far. That apparently is what draws action to draft public policy from Democrats and Republicans alike. As Democrats urge us to remain polite in the face of intolerable state-sponsored violence and injustice against us, it appears that nothing short of mass civil disruption will save us.

It is true that Democrats can’t control the political agenda of the unelected kings and queens on the Supreme Court. But of course they are aware of that, which is why they have used the balance on the Supreme Court as election fodder for decades as well. But the actions of the Democrats, or lack thereof, suggest they really don’t really care, and with a base that rewards them for aligning with Wall Street, defense contractors and health care conglomerates, they don’t have to. Millionaires and billionaires don’t have to worry about access to reproductive health care or health care in general, so this Supreme Court decision really doesn’t affect them at all. They just have to convince you they are outraged so you send $19 and pay their way into office one more time, so they can show you how “pragmatic” they are and how that “incremental change” is so much better than nothing at all. After 40 years of liberal incrementalism and “pragmatic progressivism” we can conclude that nothing at all might have been better after all, unless you find a way to explain away the Democratic Party’s intentional inaction and utter failure on their signature issue.

Democrats assure us if we vote them in just one more time it will be different. Yet even in the most desperate of situations, amidst the loss of health care for tens of millions of women, Democrats can’t change their tune, pouncing upon this tragedy as an opportunity for fundraising and electioneering. These reruns are too depressing, their rhetoric too empty, and their hypocrisy too blatant. Their choreographed version of God Bless America on the Capitol steps was deafeningly off key, their monotonous tune grating in its litany of excuses and lack of authenticity. They might be able to fool most of the 29% of the electorate who are registered Democrats, but this withering and panicked base is increasingly acting out with rage worthy of a Trump supporter against anyone like me who points out the historic inability of their party to protect us against virtually anything. Biden liberals avoid discussing the issues and public policy while vote shaming those who won’t show up at the polls for a party that works actively against progressive candidates while embracing the centrists who will do the bidding of the donor class regardless of their potential to block a legislative agenda. Because Democrats don’t care about the legislative agenda, and they don’t have to with pundits across the country comparing self-declared “capitalist” Biden to FDR and their MSNBC base dutiful in the face of their country crumbling around them.

In the same way that Democrats are incredulous that so many Republicans believe Biden stole the election, I cannot comprehend how so many Democrats believe their party is in any way humane or heroic. Over the past 40 years all I have seen is excuse after excuse for all the things they have failed to do, or the toxic outcomes of their legislation from Clinton’s Welfare Reform to Biden’s Tough on Crime to Obama’s “Affordable” Care Act. Even the negative impacts of their half-assed, means-tested, donor-approved programs somehow become the fault of Republicans or are merely a product of the time they were conceived (much like the excuse for our floundering fathers and slavery). And it is worth noting that like their failure to codify Roe into law, Democratic Party legislation over the past several decades has ended up disproportionately harming poor and marginalized communities, which is very much in line with Malcom X‘s assertion. Incrementalism cannot counter the forces working against theocracy and fascism — in fact, its impotence fosters the submissive political environment that allows more openly hostile influences, such as Republican court-packing, fascism and theocratic doctrine, to shape the legislative agenda.

Until Democrats stop crushing the progressives who have the courage to stand up for justice, until they stop capitulating to billionaires and allowing Fox News and Republican propaganda to shape their messaging, and until they stop sending e-mails with bright red fonts urgently asking for $19 thinking it will remedy every crisis they help to create, our downward spiral will continue. State-run media will not protect us, so we must get the message out and help those who do not accept corporate PAC money and who are not aligned with Democratic Party leadership to win their elections over the Democrat’s chosen anti-abortion, anti-labor, pro-gun candidates. I am actively working against Congressman Danny Davis in my district, who told me in 2009 when I went to his office to push for a single-payer health care program “now is not the time.” The same thing Barack Obama said when asked about pushing for gun control legislation after the Sandy Hook school massacre, and the same thing he said just months after promising to codify Roe v Wade into law. Right now House Democrats need to be drawing up articles of impeachment for Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett for lying under oath during their confirmation hearings. Progressives will call for it, yet I doubt Nancy Pelosi will take such “radical” action as she is too preoccupied with $19 donations.

Biden needs to immediately open up federal lands for abortion services, initiate a non means-tested voucher system allowing women to obtain funding for travel and reproductive health care expenses, and look for border towns in which to open new reproductive health centers with the guidance of state and local governments. These actions should have already been in the works of course, but even in these dire straits Democrats will do the right thing only if there is sufficient pressure from its base. Now is the time to call your representative and in no uncertain terms (no you don’t have to be “polite”) let them know this is the end of the line for current Democratic leadership and on your way out you’d best so something to atone for your incompetence and protect the women you’ve been exploiting to your electoral advantage.

With this performative election-obsessed Democratic Party, it is never the time for change. It is never the time to do anything that the media or the Republican party might call “radical” because it’s always best to meet in the middle to appeal to those legendary swing voters as that is the way the ruling class wants it. When public policy that will actually help the majority of Americans is proposed, like Medicare for All or free public college, Democrats mock these ideas as radical. Obama dropped the Freedom of Choice Act in his desire to appease Republicans and religious leaders. Democrats opposed Medicare for All at the command of the health care conglomerates. Joe Biden ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court because he was and still is a devout servant of the Establishment. This history does matter, but the abandonment of critical thinking, the hesitancy to “circle the wagons” in telling the truth about the utter incompetence and failure of the Democratic Party, is ushering in horrors from which we might never be able to recover. If we cannot find a way to infiltrate the hardwired belief system of Democrats who have been driven to defend Biden and the Democratic Party at all costs, the depth of which we are currently experiencing, then we will never get progressives into office who will have the courage and sound public policy to reverse course. It might be too late to change things within the system, as the shellacking they will be taking in the midterms will coincide with an escalation of the horrors that theocracy and fascism bring. Horrors that $19 cannot even begin to mend.

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson a viral meme has made the rounds showing UHC being first in denial of care among the major insurers with an astounding rate of 35% of requests denied. But as incredible as it is this statistic sounds it does not include services that UHC covered but were still unaffordable and thus inaccessible to the patient. Insurers can “cover” medications or other health services, but that medication with a retail price of $1000 per month might be “covered” at a cost to the patient of $600, making it inaccessible to the patient while the insurance carrier can check off that it covered that service. “Covered” services can come with a coinsurance of 20% which result in thousands of dollars of additional expense to the patient. Presenting to the emergency room carries a copay of $250 or more for the majority of private plans. Over 15% of hospital stays involve out-of-network services administered without the patient’s knowledge, resulting in massive out-of-pocket expenses euphemistically known as “surprise billing.” Nearly 10% of my patients have a copay of $100, more than the cost of an intermediate follow-up exam. Regardless of the specific insurer and their rate of denials, every single for-profit insurer finds ways to circumvent the lax regulations in the Affordable Care Act to make patients pay more and more out of pocket. If you have a lower premium up front, you will pay more in copays, deductibles and coinsurance when you require health care services. If you have a higher premium, you will pay more up front and less (but still on average thousands of dollars) when you require care. This unnavigable maze of a system has resulted in an accumulated $220 billion of collective medical debt, with 40% of working Americans saddled with $500 or more of medical debt and 14% in collections. So when we look at the chart of denial rates by the major health insurers, that number is much higher if “covered” services that the patient was unable to access are included. It’s likely that Brian Thompson’s UHC denied care to its insureds over 40% of the time.

There is a reason that CEOs like Thompson can get away with murder. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act sold our health to for-profit insurers. The 2,000 plus page legislative albatross devoted over 1,000 pages to reining in the health insurance industry, its legalese dense with regulatory jargon much of it written and approved by the health care lobby. In 2009 before I had the opportunity to read the ACA I was on the Ed Schultz show on MSNBC defending it against Republican Senator Tom Price who propagated a fax campaign marked by lists of physicians who ostensibly supported his stance against “government run health care,” which the ACA was most definitely not. But after Obama instantly dropped his vaunted "public option” during preliminary negotiations and physicians speaking in favor of Single Payer healthcare were arrested during the Senate finance Committee’s roundtable discussion on healthcare access, it became obvious the ACA was just another neoliberal ruse that would be celebrated by liberals and their media merely because Democrats rammed it through without any of them actually reading it. Stumping for the bill’s passage during his ACA propaganda tour, Obama famously promised that premiums would not go up, that patients could keep their doctor as well as their plan, and that those with pre-existing conditions would be protected. Since I read the bill I knew Obama was either lying through his teeth or had no idea what was really in it. The purpose of the ACA was to protect the health and welfare of the health care conglomerates, laundering our tax dollars and Social Security through the government and back to the for-profit insurers.

Since passage of the ACA premiums have skyrocketed by nearly 150 percent on average and out-of-pocket costs have gone up by 40%. As for the “Obamacare” exchanges which are utilized by 10% of the population, its primary policy known as AmBetter is accepted by less than 20% of providers and only fully covers routine preventive care. AmBetter has been accused of intentionally misrepresenting how many providers accept their policy and online customer reviews are uniformly abysmal. The ACA effectively privatized the health care system, offering no viable safety valve for those who are unemployed and not eligible for Medicaid and definitively proving that the for-profit health insurers who wrote the legislation cannot be regulated. Even worse is the ACA’s expansion of Medicare Advantage, a meta-fraud in that the government undermines its own much less expensive health care program by funneling our tax dollars to the private insurers in order to subsidize their profits. In 2014 the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services put out a press release bragging about the massive increase in Medicare Advantage enrollment to 38% of all Medicare recipients due to implementation of the ACA. Today the very existence of Medicare is threatened as over 50% of enrollees are now beholden to Medicare Advantage, subject to rising premiums and denial of care just like any other private insurance plan. Wall Street could not privatize Social Security so they are stealing those earnings from seniors via Medicare Advantage, a stealth privatization of Medicare spearheaded by UnitedHealthCare which leads all providers in “covering” 29% of Medicare Advantage enrollees.

The overwhelmingly celebratory and sarcastic social media reaction to Thompson’s death has met with predictable criticism from the multimillionaire pundit class. The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC have labeled the smiley emojis in response to UnitedHealthCare's homage to its CEO as "irresponsible" and "hateful." CNN anchors acknowledged that denial of care “can make one sad,” yet have shown scant empathy for those who are not millionaires for whom such rejections could mean bankruptcy, sickness, or even death—consequences that extend beyond mere sadness. Shamed tough guy 12 million-dollar man Chris Cuomo, formerly of CNN and now with NewsNation, has stated that those rejoicing in Thompson's death are "worse than what they denounce." Cuomo, in a moment of confidence, referred to a relative's struggle with a health insurer turning the family “sideways,” but considering his 12 million dollar net worth it’s doubtful his family will suffer being turned upside down. Whether it's Cuomo, Rachel Maddow, Dana Bash, or other celebrities who portray news anchors, they have collectively violated the public interest by endorsing the health care behemoths that saturate their networks with commercials. These celebrities benefit personally from the 30 billion dollars in advertising revenue channeled into the treasuries of cable and network news by these health care titans, content to bask in the influx of ad money while acting as surrogates for their corporate benefactors.

UnitedHealthCare has run the gamut when it comes to unfathomable denials of care, from denying payment for emergency room visits because they do not consider heart attacks to be emergencies to initially approving then denying payment for cancer surgery the day prior to treatment. It has been under investigation for using faulty AI to automatically deny care to seniors for an even higher rate of prior authorization denials to its Medicaid patients (the population least likely to challenge denial of care). Thompson accumulated his $43 million in net worth using these and other nefarious tactics, taking the tried-and-true industry model of improving profits and stock prices through withholding care to new heights of inhumanity. While the inherently evil business model of profiting off death and suffering was not invented by Thompson, his capitalizing on that model to live such a lavish lifestyle makes him an enemy of the people.

The shooting of Brian Thomas is an escalation of the class warfare manifest by the 2024 election results. Those who have been oppressed by a system coopted by corporations and billionaires working against their very existence have reached their limit. Brian Thomas is a lightning rod for a systemic issue that cannot be solved by the by the industry reforming itself or tweaking the ACA as has been suggested by CNN, MSNBC and NPR and Democratic Party leadership. Neither political party will protect us from the ravages of the commoditization of our minds and bodies by the investor class. It was Barack Obama who Americans with his ironically named Affordable Care Act who sold our souls in order to cement his “legacy,” a legacy which is one rife with pre-authorizations, obstruction, delay, denial and death. It was Hillary Clinton running against Bernie Sanders in 2016 who turned Americans against Medicare for All by falsely claiming it would eliminate Medicare and Medicaid as well as turn over health care to Republican governors. evidently unaware of the irony that the ACA turned over Medicaid expansion to Republican governors who promptly refused to fund it. It was Joe Biden who ran campaign ads against Bernie Sanders in 2020 using a union worker as a stooge who was told to lament over losing the for-profit private employer-based insurance that he “loves,” presenting the cruel private insurers as benevolent while framing Medicare for All as a threat.

All of these liberal politicians and media outlets bear responsibility for the gaslighting and suffering that led to Thompson’s assassination. This is not to suggest they should suffer Thompson’s fate, but his death appears to be a shot heard ‘round the world by the greedy elites getting away with murder. Health care corporations including UHC, CVS and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield are scrubbing executive board information from their websites and social media. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield walked back a new policy that stated it charge patients for anesthesia during procedures that went longer than estimated after Thompson’s murder. So perhaps it will take acts of violence against them to defend ourselves against the violence they are perpetrating against us. If they will not listen to civil discourse, if organizing is crushed by state-run media and a militarized police force, if our representatives refuse to execute our will in implementing a national health care system, if we are being picked off by private insurers with nobody defending us, then actions like the execution of Thompson can be considered a form of self-defense. Historically it is only violent revolution that the ruling class responds to, and if they persist in perpetrating violence on such a massive scale between genocide, brutal policing, surveillance, perpetual wars and leaving us at the mercy of the investor class for our health care then retaliation is justifiable. Our government is literally asking for it by allowing our culture to be saturated in guns, enabling escalation of record wealth inequality, penny pinching when it comes to social safety nets while wantonly funding random wars, and depriving us of access to health care while they boast about more Americans having health insurance than ever before.

The statistics bear out the desperation of the situation as the major markers of societal health continue their downward spiral. Life expectancy in the US has been on the decline for the past five years, and maternal mortality is nearly seven times higher than the OECD average. Both of these peramaters are considered gold standards for assessing the performance of a health care system. A 2024 Commonwealth Fund study found the US to be last among high-income nations in access to care and health outcomes, and first by far in health care expenditures with the US spending 16% of its GDP on health care. When it comes to health care system performance compared to spending, all of the other high-income countries are clustered closely together — except for the U.S., which spends far more of its GDP on health care yet has by far the worst overall performance. We have been told for too long that this is the system we need to embrace, while Medicare for All will bankrupt us. This terminal gaslighting from the ruling class results in half a million deaths per year due to lack of access to care and 3.5 million Americans being saddled with $10,000 or more in medical debt.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. While the demise of Robert Thompson at the hands of someone who was wronged by his mercenary business model seems like justice, Thompson was more fortunate than the thousands who suffered agonizing deaths due at the hands of United Health Care. His death was sudden. He didn’t have to spend days on the phone pleading for his life or the life of a loved one. He was spared the agony of knowing there was a treatment available to save him but due to the greed of others he was unable to access it. The 0.1% might mourn Thompson’s death, but it is obvious the 70% of Americans pining for a national health care system consider it serendipitous. After the assassination attempt on Trump, Biden made a national address in which he asserted that “there is no place for political violence,” yet our political system perpetrates violence upon us and around the world every minute of the day. My concern is not for the lives of those who systematically murder us, but for the safety of those who retaliate against state violence. We must recognize the privatization or our health care system and the media’s propaganda favoring it are tantamount to state-sponsored violence, and that it is appears the only thing the state will respond to is violence. If Thompson’s assassination does not foment structural change in our health care system, and I doubt it will, we will have to find the means to make the message to the ruling class clear. It might sound too radical for some, but between escalating wars and rogue health insurers our very existence depends on letting the ruling class know they can’t get away with murder. And while I’m not laughing at the murder of Brian Thomas, it is an important step forward in the fight for health care justice, if just for bringing to light the solidarity of Americans in their disdain for the current health care system. And in the karmic sense even if Thomson’s death was swift he ultimately got a taste of his own medicine.

Contact your representative now and tell them you want and end to for-profit health insurance and a Medicare for All system implemented:

Find Your Members in the U.S. Congress | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

Organizations working towards a national health care system:

Physicians for a National Health Care System

Medicare for All National Nurses United

Healthcare Now!

I worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. It was an eye-opening experience, witnessing firsthand the growth of a movement of the working class, the young, and the poor coming together in a groundswell of support for a leader who was unafraid to speak and act against the cancer capitalism and militarism that was eroding civil society and American culture. Finally there was someone breaking out of the rigid corporatist mold that was preventing government from working for the people, transforming a relative unknown in the political sphere to a savior drawing tens of thousands to rallies that had to be broadcast on supporters’ cell phones because the media was too busy manufacturing consent for their candidate Hillary Clinton and fixing their cameras on Trump’s empty podiums. Finally there was a candidate who did not blame workers and the poor for their plight at the mercy of corporate rule. And while the Bernie Sanders campaign brought policies to the fore like a national health care system, a $15 minimum wage and free public higher education that the majority of Americans favored, the Democratic Party was predictably more interested in what the donors wanted and deliberately crushed the Sanders campaign while actively promoting Trump to be the Republican nominee. Democrats and their media worked more diligently to assure that Sanders did not become the nominee than they did against Trump, a point reinforced by their collusion to elevate certain Republican candidates while teaming up against progressive candidates in Congressional races.

During his presidential campaigns Bernie Sanders drew the ire of the Democratic Party because he appeared on Fox News and drew the endorsement of Joe Rogan. They claimed to be appalled that he would associate with pundits and podcasters who expressed opposing views on social issues, with liberal outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC predicting that these appearances would effectively end his campaign. But what they really didn’t like was that Sanders was not beholden to Wall Street, allowing him to connect with Independents and Republicans who were looking for someone outside of the system—someone who spoke directly to the issues that affected their lives on a daily basis. He was in favor of what poll after poll confirmed—the American people were overwhelmingly in favor of benevolent policies like Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security, an increase in the minimum wage, free public college and university education, paid maternity leave and government funding for child care. And Sanders really was FOR these things, not just spouting rhetoric about means-tested minutia during election season. Even if he could not implement his entire agenda, people knew Sanders was authentic in his vision and would use the bully pulpit to mobilize Americans to push for the things they wanted. That is how presidents work with the people to elicit change when they genuinely want change, as FDR did by urging Americans to send letters to their representatives telling them to do as he wanted or else. And they did. Democrats and their multimillionaire pundits wanted anything but a leader who would unite progressives. independents and conservatives into a coalition that would whittle away the obscene profits of the ruling class and counter the neoliberal new world order. Which is why these establishment forces worked so hard against Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and anointed a milquetoast fundraising flunkey like Harris in 2024.

When elite pundits like Robert Reich or Rachel Maddow make excuses for Harris’s infamous “word salad” responses to virtually every question she was ever asked—excuses like she only had three months and needed time to introduce herself to the public—Sanders was unknown to the public when he ran in 2016 but was articulate in his vision when the corporate media was finally shamed into covering his campaign. He was able to answer questions directly the minute thr spotlight was on him because he had an established ideology that was not tainted by the whims of corporate donors and consultants. Harris had been Vice President for almost four years, a California senator prior to that, and a presidential nominee in 2020. So Harris had plenty of opportunities to “introduce herself” to an American public that had no interest in her as a presidential candidate or vice-president because she stood for nothing. As for the “great campaign” she ran, if cozying up to Dick Cheney, embracing right-wing Republicans and torturers on a mass scale while rejecting progressives (including refusing to let Bernie Sanders campaign with her), silencing Palestinian voices, parroting Trump’s harsh immigration rhetoric, having surrogate Barack Obama waving his finger at black males who weren’t choosing to vote for Harris, trotting out Bill Clinton in Michigan to justify to Palestinians why Israel has the right to slaughter them, and vote-shaming Americans because they wouldn’t support a candidate based solely on her race and gender is the liberal vision of a “great campaign” it comes as no surprise that they did far worse on all levels and with all demographics apart from wealthy women than in 2016 and in 2020.

As for the scolding of Latinos, black males and Muslims for not being ready to elect a black and/or woman president, that petty squabble is disproven by the fact that these populations voted in droves for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and helped Hillary Clinton win the popular vote in 2016. By the same logic, Democrats and liberals made certain a Jew did not become president in 2016 and 2020 so they must be antisemitic. And perhaps they are because for some reason they did not find it historic or worthy of note to coronate the first Jewish president. Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, including those who are now Trump supporters, because he promised universal healthcare, a drawdown of our endless wars, protection for labor through rescinding harmful trade deals, relief for underwater homeowners and criminal justice reform. He promised change, delivered little of that and largely did the opposite of what he promised to do. Hillary Clinton, who made certain we did not forget that she was a historic candidate based on gender, was an established ally of Wall Street and a pathologic liar yet she was still able to win the popular vote, leaving liberals to blame Bernie Sanders progressives, Putin, James Comey and the electoral college for her loss (and sexism of course) to a candidate as impulsive and unqualified as Trump, all the while pointing out accurately that she really “won”. This time there is no electoral college to blame. There is no Putin to blame. There is no Bernie Sanders to blame, although he is in hot water with Democrats for telling the truth about their incompetent party after the fact.

Livid at the betrayal by their base, Democrats are turning to their own brand of bigotry in their stereotyping of latinos and black males who did not behave and follow the orders of the liberal elite. Pundits obsessed for days about a comedian’s tasteless quip about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, but Latinos still came out for Trump in record numbers. Nobody outside of the liberal echo chamber cared in the least about a trivial one-liner. The concern of male Latinos in exit polling was the economy, an outrage to the liberal elites who thought that a joke told by a comedian at a Trump rally should have been the nail in his campaign’s coffin. Working class voters did not care about racism or January 6th or “saving democracy” as the pundits and the party told them they should, but they were resentful that Biden did far too little and that Harris did not show even a rhetorical interest in actually helping them. Liberals talk down to constituencies without a college education and marginalized populations because they refuse to or are unable to acknowledge the lived experience of those who are struggling, perpetuating a cycle of working class and poor voters feeling they are not being heard and searching for anyone who will listen to them and channel their anger. Both Trump and Sanders speak directly to voters without a filter, the difference being that Sanders does so for the common good (before he licks his wounds and assimilates back into a broken political party) and Trump does so for his own good. Liberals have little interest in the common good, focusing on social issues like trans rights or abortion while setting perpetual war, deindustrialization and genocide on the backburner for electoral purposes, and no interest in the welfare of those they demean for failing to fulfill their “obligation” to the Democratic Party. Even if he cowtows to the Democratic Party to excess, progressives like Sanders foster unity by showing empathy for the working class that supported Trump and who are fed up with Democrats leaving them in the dust, while liberals divide through xenophobic vote shaming and finger pointing at their disobedient constituents.

And if anyone thinks the Harris campaign’s lurch to the right in its embrace of Republican neoconservatives was wise, the election results prove the opposite. Not only did Harris get a mere 10% of the Republican vote, one percentage vote higher than Biden, but progressive ballot measures met with success in the reddest of red states. From 65% of voters in Kentucky rejecting a ballot measure that would have allowed lawmakers to spend public funds to provide financial support for students in private, religious, and charter schools to voters in Missouri and Alaska approving a $15 minimum wage, across the country progressive ballot measures passed overwhelmingly. While Harris was foaming at the mouth about assuring that the US had the “most lethal” military force in the world and proclaiming Iran to be the greatest danger to our national security, the electorate was voting for fair wages, preservation of public education, comprehensive health care coverage and worker protections. The 14% of voters with incomes less than $100,000 who helped Biden defeat Trump in 2020, albeit by margins as low as 0.3%, stayed home in 2024, resigned to the fact that in reality neither party was going to do anything material to improve their situation. What Democrats got by acting like Republicans was the shedding of young voters, black and Latino males and women who were not college educated. Despite Harris’s harsh immigration rhetoric and nationalist propaganda, Fox News and other conservative outlets still labeled her as a socialist/radical leftist. While corporate news outlets like MSNBC, NPR and The New York Times fawned all over her, and faux progressive broadcast stations like WCPT in Chicago amplified her warmongering as they did Biden’s, the electorate remained unconvinced that a chameleonic spokesperson for the establishment would do anything differently than her unpopular boss. Of course, Harris’s inability to answer on repeated occasions what she would do differently than Biden did not help in an election in which one of the electorate’s top priorities was change. Democrats needed another Bernie Sanders, not another Hillary Clinton channeling George W Bush.

Liberals barely noticed what to me was the most telling moment of the Biden presidency, one which exposed Biden’s self-serving political expediency and belies claims that Biden is “pro-labor.” When railway workers were organizing to strike in the summer of 2022 it was Biden who intervened, mobilizing Congress to block the strike while negotiating a contract that was completely unsatisfactory to railway union members but more than satisfactory their billionaire bosses. Biden worked with Warren Buffet, owner of BSF Railroad which was the focal point of the strike, who insisted that profits were down and there was only so much of his billions in capital that workers were entitled to. The first contract Biden offered contained zero sick days, a contract Biden said publicly was a “good deal” for workers. This was the moment I knew that Biden would never be re-elected (ignoring the fact that I knew he wouldn’t survive cognitively to the general election). Ironically, this “pro-union” president not only didn’t want to upset his billionaire donors but was making certain economic numbers didn’t tank due to a railway strike as he would suffer the consequences politically. In the end, Bernie Sanders voted for a resolution to include a nominal number of sick leave days and was joined in his crusade by none other than Ted Cruz, who Tweeted “I just don’t agree with Biden & the Democrats voting to screw the union workers.” Cruz was joined by Republicans Mike Braun, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, John Kennedy and Marco Rubio, all evidently to the left of Biden when it came to labor.

While Biden committed the cardinal sin against organized labor and thus against the origins of progressivism itself, former progressives like Robert Reich, Thom Hartmann and Michael Moore rationalized that he had no choice but to “save the economy.” This is the main distinction to be made between progressives and liberals, which is why it is impossible to be honest and talk about “the left” as a single entity. Liberals are fine with protecting capital against the vested interests working class as long as it protects their political party. Progressives are not. Liberals are fine with the genocide of Muslims, offering the line “the ‘war’ in Gaza is terrible but…” then going on about how Trump would be worse. Progressives understand that there is nothing worse a government can be involved in than genocide. Period. Liberals thrill to the prospect of the first woman president regardless of her ideology or lack thereof. Progressives just want someone in office whose first priority is not protecting the capital of white supremacists. Liberals blamed Bernie Sanders for exposing Hillary Clinton for her poor judgment, lies and allegiance to Wall Street. Progressives lauded him for it. Liberals will cover up for their candidates at all costs, to the point of falsely blaming conservative media of doctoring videos of Biden freezing and aimlessly wandering at public events and proclaiming him to be “fit as a fiddle” in the face of an obvious years long progression of his Parkinson’s Disease. And to the point of claiming Kamala Harris ran a “great” campaign when she was unable to speak extemporaneously, woefully unprepared and doubled down on neoconservative endorsements and their talking points. Progressives acknowledged that Biden was in cognitive decline in 2020 and expressed concern regarding Harris’s poor judgment and inauthenticity in going up against Trump in 2024 (as they did with Clinton in 2016).

Liberals are grasping for something or someone to fight against. Progressives are consistent in what they are fighting for. Liberals are outraged about Republican attacks on women’s reproductive rights, but there is barely a whimper when they learn that Democrats lied about codifying Roe v Wade when they could have, found the issue insignificant when they weren’t campaigning, and did virtually nothing when they were in power and the Dobbs decision came down. And don’t mention the thousands of women in Palestine and now Lebanon who are going without health care and having miscarriages or dying themselves due to no access to healthcare, because that’s thousands of miles away and their own party is responsible for it. I am receiving multiple e-mails every day from Tim Walz and Kamala Harris and Robert Reich and Michael Moore about how we can fight the Trump administration, but it would have been much easier and more effective to intervene in your own party’s folly than stopping Trump when he has all three branches of government and the Supreme Court. It should be obvious by now that “fighting Trump” with women’s marches and pussy hats had little effect. Fundraising off the issues that you have done little or nothing about works only because the liberal base functions on the level of their amygdalas just like Trump’s base. It is impossible to “stop Trump” if your own party continues the policies and embraces the neocons that allowed him to ascend in the first place.

Bernie Sanders has certainly made some tactical errors by assimilating into the neoliberal lion’s den by propping up incompetents like Biden and Harris in the hopes of implementing a more progressive agenda and saving his own hide. But when it comes to policy and the pulse of the people he is always right. Liberals were glued to their television in 2016 and 2020 when Joy Reid was on MSNBC denegrating the “Bernie Bros” and young Sanders supporters as good-for-nothings staying in their mother’s basement. In 2024, she singled out that Harris “won” among young voters against Trump and fantasized about the outcome she wanted coming to fruition if all Americans would have just been as smart as those young people who voted for Harris. Bernie’s young people—sexist and lazy. Kamala’s young people—smart and could have saved the country. Reid also had a body language expert on in 2020 analyzing Sanders’ sexist postures after he supposedly told Elizabeth Warren why a woman couldn’t be president (he didn’t). All of corporate media, from Rachel Maddow’s obsessive references to the “Bernie Bros” to Chuck Todd’s comparison of Sanders supporters to Nazi brownshirts, worked intensively to prop of the judgment-addled liar Hillary Clinton in favor of the candidate who was uniting Americans across party, age and gender lines. What the Democratic Party and their multi-millionaire celebrity media spokespersons were and are petrified of is the uniting of the poor and working class against them. They would do and have done anything, even if it results in the election of Trump which it has two out of three election cycles, to keep someone like Sanders or any authentic progressive out of contention.

It is already evident that in the face of the second election of Donald Trump liberals are continuing their role as the useful idiots of the Democratic Party donor class. By aiming their ire at Trump and the Republicans, they fulfill the desires of a ruling class that thrives on the cultural devolution and discord of their subjects. The liberal base unwittingly apes the right-wing Republicans they mock, currently exchanging memes about being put in concentration camps by Trump, evidently failing to remember that this was the same rallying cry right-wing pundits made against Obama. Democrats have been the party in power for 12 of the last 16 years and yet abortion rights have been lost, the courts have become overwhelmingly conservative, the crisis of accessibility and affordability of health care has spiraled out of control, wars continue to escalate in the Middle East, states turn from blue to red and we have been brought to the precipice of nuclear war. Liberal news outlets that have been propagandizing for Biden and Harris suddenly lament that they and the Democrats have lost the working class, all the while shaming that same constituency for their dissatisfaction with an economy that they insist has been “humming” under Bidenomics. Liberals are conditioned to divide through harsh judgment and personal attacks just as Trump supporters are, while their moral fiber is unraveled by the mandate of excusing their party’s genocide as a mere electoral obstacle.

Minimizing the harm Trump and his oligarchs will do is important work but it’s the same work that progressives have been doing against Biden and Harris and their transnational corporations. We should be placing our collective energy into building a government that will support us, not using it up defending against one that will harm us. Harm reduction only slows the inevitable decay of our institutions and our planet but is insufficient to reverse the dehumanization that allows cancer capitalists to divide us by political ideology, religion and gender. While corporate America prefers the stability and reliable inservitude of the Democratic Party versus the oligarchs who prefer the absolute power promised by Trump, both prioritize the maintenance of a powerless underclass to do their bidding. That underclass has staged a revolt against the power elite of the Democratic Party, joined by a coalition of progressives who understand that reforming a party who’s latest plan of attack is calling Tulsi Gabbard (a veteran of two wars no less) a Russian asset is a fool’s errand. Neither party is reformable. The only possible way to stop the chain reaction of deindustrialization, perpetual war, wealth inequality and the whittling away of social safety nets is mass resistance in the form of organized labor work stoppages which is why both parties have made certain that unions make up less than 12% of the total workforce, half of those being public sector unions which can be prohibited from striking as Biden did with the railway workers. Liberals have worked directly against the prospect of radical change by supporting those who have expanded the surveillance state, thus reducing the prospect of organized resistance.

Massive “Cop Cities” are being erected in Democratic-led states around the country, most famously in Atlanta and California, in order to silence dissent and further militarize police response. It was Joe Biden who helped write George W Bush’s Patriot Act, while Barack Obama expanded the National Security Agency’s powers to share unfiltered information about innocent Americans with law enforcement and prosecuted a record number of whistleblowers (eg journalists). It was Obama in 2010 who asserted that he should have unreviewable authority to kill Americans the executive branch has unilaterally determined to pose a threat. Currently there is a bipartisan attempt to push The Antisemitism Awareness Act through the House, legislation that would criminalize political speech against Israel’s genocidal militarism on college campuses. It is liberals who have set the stage for a Trump dictatorship, allowing their beloved Democratic Party leaders including Biden, Obama, Pelosi and Schumer to expand unchecked executive power. Liberals have overseen the merging of corporate and state power with Democrats and their consolidated media, a “soft” fascism ushering in the “hard” fascism of the Trump administration, making it far more difficult to resist the potential advent of dictatorship. If organized labor is unable to implement a general strike—if the capital of the oligarchs and CEOs is not tangibly threatened—then there is little hope to invoke the radical change necessary to prevent the demise of a dying empire. Progressives have no representation on the federal level because even Bernie Sanders will stroke the ego of a cretin like Biden and sing the electoral siren song until after the election when he will lambast Democrats for ignoring the interests of the working class.

They are all cowards when it really counts, which belies the tradition of the great progressive voices of our time like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, Eugene Debs or Paul Robeson who were willing to suffer persecution or death to change the trajectory of the country. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed. When the progressive caucus was castigated by their party and its media for writing a milquetoast letter to the Biden administration suggesting diplomacy in Ukraine instead of perpetual war, the caucus timidly withdrew the letter instead of writing another letter publicly exposing the Biden administration’s interference in peace negotiations between Zelensky and Putin. In 2019 when Ilhan Omar Tweeted “It’s all about the Benjamins” in response to Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy’s threat to stifle criticism of Israel, she was publicly humiliated by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and liberal media for her “anti-semitic” remarks, a damning confirmation of the undue AIPAC influence both parties had been trying to hide. When AOC stood before the DNC Convention she did not use that bully pulpit to call out the Democratic Party for their complicity in genocide. Instead she fronted for genocide by claiming that Harris was working “tirelessly” towards a ceasefire, a dishonest throw away line at once reinforcing the dehumanization of the Palestinian people and giving liberals an illusory justification for voting in favor of an incompetent warmonger. There has been no outcry from elected progressives over Biden’s greenlighting Ukraine to employ US long-range missiles in Russia, leaving grassroots organizations like Veterans for Peace and CODEPINK to mobilize the progressive base to intervene in Biden’s bid to provoke nuclear confrontation over swaths of land steadfastly occupied by Russia that will never be returned.

Progressives face a reality that liberals will not. Democrats have contributed to the deindustrialization, wealth inequality, and perpetual war that has led to this moment just as much as Republicans have. And they have reinforced the surveillance state to the point that oversight of our intelligence agencies and executive branch is so lax that a president or the CIA can do anything to anyone without pushback. The stage for oligarchal dictatorship could only be set by allegiance to corporate rule of our government, which liberals have enabled by promoting the most toxic of corporatists like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden and Pelosi. This cabal of fascists who did indeed merge corporate and lobbyist interests with government has left us in an amoral universe where only eighteen Senate Democrats vote in favor of Bernie Sanders bill to stop sending offensive weapons to Israel. Which means that 80% of Senate Democrats are choosing AIPAC and the interests of a foreign state over the interests of their constituents, not to mention the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of their Islamaphobic brand of fascism. The only remedy to such malignant American Exceptionalism is radical change, the “political revolution” modeled by Bernie Sanders in 2016 that was extinguished by the Democratic Party. There must be a new vision of unity that transcends the self-serving of an increasingly dictatorial establishment by the likes of Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and the gaggle of uber-wealthy “liberal” celebrities who foment discord along party lines.

Those who prioritize anti-war and pro-worker agendas must transcend the malignant divisiveness promoted by liberal media in order to send a message to the ruling class that their emotionally driven appeals will not work with those of us not entrenched in the naive finger-pointing of partisan politics. Our job now is to expose the anti-labor warmongers who are making it impossible for our government to provide the things we really need—health care, education, housing, a living wage, expansion of organized labor and child care—and to start a political party that prioritizes these needs while offering an honest public assessment of the damage done by America’s provocative militarism and regime change around the globe, an assessment that will never come from a Democrat or a Republican. But we cannot follow Bernie Sanders or even worse AOC back into the cancer capitalist clutches of the Democratic Party, because Democrats have proven incapable of protecting Americans from anything. When the Dobbs decision came down it was the socialists in Seattle who created the first sanctuary for women who needed reproductive services. The Biden administration just made excuses and took virtually no action to protect women’s access to care. When Trump implemented his Muslim ban it was again the socialists in Seattle who shut down an international airport, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party, and forced the Trump administration to reconsider its actions. The resistance to Trump must come from outside the Democratic Party, as their resistance is centered around fundraising and jockeying for political position, which is one reason we will suffer another Trump presidency.

Facing the reality that Democrats and liberals care less about beating Trump than they do about beating progressives and the working class is the first step on the road to recovery from the traumas of the past sixty years. Democrats have done nothing to address the wealth inequality that began to escalate during the Reagan era and shot up exponentially under the deregulatory, anti-labor regime of Bill Clinton. Democrats privatized the health care system, creating an infuriating maze of variable coverage and billing that virtually nobody is able to navigate or afford. Democrats bailed out Wall Street while abandoning the homeowners they promised to protect. Democrats preferentially expand useless wars against poor and marginalized predominantly Muslim countries, or against countries which we have provoked with our interventionist policies, then try to take the moral high ground against Republicans which is impossible when you are wantonly slaughtering innocents. We can no longer follow high-profile progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC back into the fold of a Democratic Party that thinks having Oprah or Taylor Swift on their side is going to compensate for their betrayal of the working class and marginalized communities. It is time to support grassroots organizations that will fight back against the ruling class without fear of being labeled a Republican or a spoiler. Those of us not brainwashed by Rachel Maddow or Thom Hartmann can no longer take offense to being called a “spoiler” for failing to support those who repeatedly fail to support us. We must recognize that the spoilers are the liberals who make the excuses for the genocidal, anti-worker maniacs who continue to lurch to the right with Republicans and directly enable Trump to expand his executive power. We must acknowledge our engagement in class warfare, joining with those who share our economic and humanitarian concerns regardless of who they vote for or their personal views on social issues. It is high time to face the reality that the Democratic Party and its liberal loyalists are not going to voluntarily pop their convenient bubble of Trumpaphobia in favor of the inconvenient radical change necessary to prevent a full descent into the brand of theocratic fascism practiced in Israel. The Democratic Party has consummated its merger with corporations and foreign special interest groups to impart their toxic ideologies upon us, creating a warmongering, corporatist fascism that pushes us towards the brink of total annihilation and/or absolute cultural devolution.

Please consider in supporting and/or joining in action the organizations below to begin the restructuring of our political system through organizing that bridges cultural divides and holds those in power accountable for their crimes:

Workers Strike Back

Jewish Voice For Peace

Win Without War

The Union for Everyone

Home | COMMUNCH.

Industrial Workers of the World

Physicians for a National Health Care Program

Those noble Democrats who are hell bent on “saving democracy” from the clutches of that root of all evil Trump have a funny way of going about it. Those who refuse to vote for Kamala Harris invariably find themselves on the other end of neoliberal vote shaming from the top down, from Barack Obama wagging his finger at black males for their sexism in not casting a vote for Harris to the intimidation on all platforms leveled at Third Party candidates and their supporters to editorials and pundits telling Muslims whose families are being obliterated by Democrats in power why they should be voting for Harris. The reality is that Harris has nothing to offer people like me, and has evidenced her morality and sense of humanity to be diametrically opposed to mine, so why should I cast a vote for her? Am I somehow going to save the country from the boogeyman that Democrats themselves created with their deceptive milquetoast neoliberal policies which have benefited the donor class far more than they have benefited the working class and the poor? A party that consistently works against the public interest is ultimately doomed, Democrats reaping the political good fortune of the opposing party being more openly racist and inhumane. But relativism is not good enough for some. The lesser of two evils is still too evil for me and millions of Americans who see through the smiles and feigned indignance of war criminals, liars and the arrogant incompetents who are fatally wrong in their Islamaphobic, McCarthyist, Zionist and xenophobic cancer capitalist nationalism.

How many reasons do I have not to vote for Kamala Harris? Let me count the ways….

1. Health care— Harris has never really been a proponent of Medicare for All. She just sheepishly raised her hand when Bernie Sanders asked who was in favor of eliminating for-profit health insurers during the 2020 presidential debates, going along for the ride. Of course, as the Democratic Party anointee she is no longer in favor of Medicare for All, siding with the health insurers she raised her hand to eliminate in 2020. Democrats were campaigning for a while on their breakthrough in allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices like the VA does to reduce prescription costs. that this “breakthrough” only covers 10 of the 20000 medications currently prescribed in the US and does not go into effect until 2026. While the medications covered are expensive and widely used, pharmaceutical companies are responding by raising prices exponentially on other medications. This bare-bones legislation is a compromise with the pharmaceutical industry and will barely be felt by seniors struggling with the increased costs incurred by the ongoing privatization of Medicare into Medicare “Advantage.” Harris’s campaign has been weak to non-existent on healthcare because the only viable answer is a national health care system that reduces or eliminates the role of for-profit insurers who are major donors to Democrats. Grade for Harris on health care: D-

2. Immigration— Democrats have lurched to the right on immigration, joining the right-wing Republicans in their transformation of immigration from a justice issue to that of “homeland” security. The Democrat’s immigration bill that Harris is touting on the campaign trail is more draconian than anything Trump had proposed and includes a continuation of his border wall, limits on migrant flow that will result in a complete shutdown of the southern border, and mass denial of asylum rights. Her entire campaign she has linked immigration to her time as a prosecutor busting cartels and M13, amplifying the xenophobic characterization of migrants as “invaders.” Grade for Harris on immigration: F

3. Inflation and Wealth Inequality— While it is not reasonable not blame all of inflation on the Biden/Harris administration, I do blame their lack of criticism of the Fed’s crippling interest rate hikes and their unwillingness to publicly address the problem in a sincere and empathic manner. And Harris’s boneheaded “plan” to bring down grocery prices has the FTC suing manufacturers over the pricing of specific products is yet another painstaking and ineffectual Democratic Party remedy for corporate greed. Harris’s wealth tax plan is weaker than Biden’s. Her “billionaire minimum tax” would affect only those whose net worth exceeds 100 million dollars, and her increase of realized capital gains from 20% to 28% will affect only millionaires. Grade for Harris on inflation and wealth inequality: D

4. Poverty— Haven’t heard this mentioned since Bernie Sanders is not on the campaign trail. Democrats rarely talk about the 38 million Americans living in poverty, or the 49 million who sought food assistance in 2023. Poverty is not a concern of the multimillionaire pundit class and certainly not of the donor class. Harris and Trump are using child poverty as a political football, jockeying on the generosity of their child tax credits. While the Biden/Harris administration implemented a child tax credit program successfully in 2021, after touting their achievement of reducing child poverty with the program for the 2020 midterms the program ended with little public fanfare from Democrats when only a handful of Republicans vowed to vote against it. Apart from the sparring over this program, poverty is not mentioned by Democrats or Harris (remember Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat) at all. Grade for Harris on poverty: D-

5. Foreign policy—This is where Harris is exposed as dangerous in her chameleonic (Kameleonic?) shift to neoconservatism, her most most recent nationalist rant putting Iran in the crosshairs of American hegemony. She is maddeningly avoidant on the subject of Gaza to the point of making certain Muslims do not have a part in the DNC and her staged town halls. She stokes the flames of Islamaphobia at least as well as Trump and dehumanizes Muslims to the point of playing politics with Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. There is no excuse for her negligence in not at least saying she would contemplate a weapons embargo on Israel. It is too late for that now, but her stoicism in towing the company line makes her at least as dangerous as Trump in escalating conflicts around the globe (and with nuclear superpowers no less). Grade for Harris on foreign policy: F

6. Authenticity—Leave it to the Democratic Party to anoint the most inauthentic candidate in modern history. Kamala Harris is devoid of vision, imagination or ideology. She is unable or unwilling to answer virtually any question in a direct fashion and repeats the most banal political rhetoric as if she were already an animatronic in Disney’s Hall of Presidents. The only reason someone so incompetent and generic would spark “joy” and enthusiasm is to cover up for the fear generated in the liberal base by the drumbeat of Project 2025 and January 6th. We have come to a point where someone who stands for nothing and who whitewashes and sidesteps their complicity in genocide is now “better” than the only alternative in a shitshow of a two-party system. Could there be a more inauthentic and inarticulate presidential candidate than Harris? It’s not Trump, so we will have to keep searching. Grade for Harris on authenticity—F

7. $15 minimum wage—The Biden administration pretended it wanted to pass a federal $15 minimum wage because that was one of the campaign promises Bernie squeezed out of Biden in 2020. So when it came time for a bill to be drafted Democrats balked because the Senate parliamentarian claimed the $15 minimum wage could not be included in the COVID relief bill due to the arcane Byrd Rule which the president can overrule. Biden never even tried, Democrats never included it in any other bill, and Harris only started talking about it, again at Bernie Sanders request, on October 23rd just two weeks before election day. She has talked precious little about labor, and not at all about the working poor. Grade for Harris on $15 minimum wage—F

8. Criminal justice/policing—Kamala Harris is a cop who boasts about prosecuting drug cartels and gangs every single time she mentions immigration. As a prosecutor less than 15 years ago, she opposed the death penalty but she cracked down on drug courts she saw as letting drug dealers off the hook, wrote of the need to punish thieves no matter their motivations, and fought for higher bail amounts to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and reduce gun violence.

   2009 Harris possessed, in her words, “the desire to prosecute criminals to the fullest extent of the law.” While she said during the 2020 campaign that we need to redirect resources from the police to other services. that was also the campaign during which she raised her hand against for-profit insurers and was all in on banning fracking. While she straddles the line with her rhetoric, she will ultimately always follow the will of an establishment whose wealth has been built upon the backs of labor and incarceration. Her origins in policing are so harsh and cynical, her rhetoric so simplistic and nationalist, it is hard to believe she would ever consider addressing the issues at the root of police violence and their occupation of black communities. Grade for Harris on criminal justice/policing—D

So there is no motivation for me to vote for Harris other than the threat of another narcissist who is more impulsive than she is doing things that he didn’t do in his first term as president. It is a double-edged sword to consider that one candidate will do anything that Wall Street and the military intelligence complex tell her to do in the interest of attaining power, and the other will do whatever he thinks will increase his popularity in the interest of attaining power. This is why we are backed into an electoral corner, expected to continue to support the candidate put forward by a party that is largely responsible for the rise of the even more dubious candidate. We have come to a point in which the political parties offer such little tangible advantage to the vast majority of Americans that it is now our duty to serve the interests of our representatives and not vice versa. I am expected to vote for Kamala Harris because of the threat of Trump, regardless of the fact that she has proven that she is not to be trusted any more than her nemesis. Harris has to give me a reason to vote for her—it is not my obligation to do so just because I’m a registered Democrat. But on every issue she is a phony, recycling half-baked and/or unrealized Biden/Obama/Clinton policies, many that rely on private sector contractors, that nip at the edges of systemic crises and reward the donors without initiating the systemic change necessary to actually repair the damage done by five decades of the bipartisan neoliberalism that brought Trump to power in the first place!

This maddening cycle has to end. Those who choose not to vote for Kamala Harris have just as much right to do so as voters who choose to support Trump. I am unconcerned with who is voting for who on a microscopic basis, although I would hope that those who are not voting for Harris would vote for Jill Stein in order to send a unified anti-genocide, ant-war, pro-worker, pro-Medicare for All message to the Democratic Party. But if the objective is supposedly to “vote your conscience,” I cannot vote with any good conscience vote for candidates who do not have one.

From MSNBC to The New York Times to The Hill, pundits are scratching their heads as to why the 2024 presidential election is so close. How could Americans support a white supremacist so openly narcissistic and profane as Trump instead of a black woman with the composure of Kamala Harris? Of course, these multimillionaire pundits would never reflect upon the bias of their elitist worldview, one that naturally selects a presidential candidate who colors within establishment lines, keeps them insulated in their gated communities, and who behaves in a fashion deemed acceptable to Zionists, McCarthyists and “well-meaning” white supremacists. It would never occur to Rachel Maddow as she sputters about the wonders of the stock market and the GDP that the problem is not negative coverage of the economy under Biden and Harris, but the reality that the majority of Americans are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck and that those two economic indices have little to do with their day to day existence. Dana Bash would not consider that the $100 billion plus we’ve spent on a war in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza works directly against the interest of 99.9% of Americans. Micheal Moore wonders why Harris won’t distinguish her ideology from that of Biden’s, failing to acknowledge that she is working under the same corporate sponsorship as Biden. And the vast majority of those sponsors also employ the Republican Party, which is why Harris can jaunt around the country proclaiming how she and Liz Cheney agree on just about everything.

Simply put, it is so close because the two parties are so close in the degree to which they exhibit consistently poor judgment and work against the public interest. As we continue to be told we must choose the lesser of two evils, the lesser evil becomes so evil that they become proud to have the endorsement of torturers, racists and sadists such as Dick Cheney, John Bolton and Bill Kristol. It comes as no surprise that the the Democratic Party has become the standard-bearer for genocide, mass incarceration, and “tough on crime” policies that have devastated black families. The Maddowization of their base has allowed Democrats to return to their racist roots, putting up a supercop as a candidate who has proven she is willing to serve in the interest of the white supremacist capitalist tradition. Her eagerness to embrace and prop up the most ardent of those white supremacists in the interest of winning an election serves as evidence of both how rudderless she is as a politician and how her rhetoric about law and order, immigration and warmongering is aligned with the worst Republicans have to offer. The fact that Harris is eager to hear to let the world hear what Liz Cheney has to say but cannot allow a Palestinian to speak for a few minutes at the DNC speaks volumes about her character and her willingness to shut down black and brown voices.

Democrats somehow consider the optimal strategy for the last two weeks of the campaign is for Harris to tour the country with Liz Cheney touting policy somewhere between George W Bush and Trump. Her rhetoric about Afghanistan is directly from the Bush/Cheney Doctrine as she condemns Trump for “making a deal with terrorists” in his negotiations for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan. It’s not a coincidence that Afghanistan is one of few issues on which Liz Cheney broke from Trump as she wanted 4,000 American troops to remain there indefinitely. While Harris has been stupefyingly unable to answer the question as to how she differs from Biden on repeated occasions (apart from having Republicans in her cabinet) alongside Cheney she is lamenting the withdrawal from Afghanistan. So it seems when it comes to militarism and occupation of Muslim countries, she disagrees to the right of Biden. And while Liz Cheney pretends to an anti-Trump Republican, she voted in favor of his legislative agenda over 95% of the time. She disagreed with Trump on foreign policy because he was not enough of a warmonger, an area where she finds agreement with Harris. Unfortunately, her close association with Cheney is only serving to further alienate the Muslim and anti-war communities, the Democratic Party hoping that enough Republicans will support Harris to compensate for the increasing percentage of the Democratic base who will be voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

<While the DNC does everything it can to keep Jill Stein off the ballot, they are petrified of her anti-war, anti-genocide message resonating with the base that refuses to vote for Islamaphobes, Republicans and war criminals.>

Further proof that the Democratic Party just doesn’t get it is a Kamala Harris campaign ad that features Jill Stein’s face morphing into Trump’s, claiming that Jill Stein got Trump elected in 2016 and she will do it again in 2024. The scapegoating of Stein for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss is a new approach after Democrats have previously blamed James Comey, Bernie Sanders and Putin, proving Democrats remain ignorant to the fact that it is the candidate’s responsibility to persuade the voter not the voter’s responsibility to support a candidate who they find morally repugnant. Harris is pandering to Republicans for votes because she knows with her warmongering and dearth of policy cannot appeal to progressives, continuing the Democratic Party’s lurch to the right as the optics of the two-party system become a blur under the metastasis of cancer capitalism and the two parties merge into one.

While Harris and Democrats bask in the glow of Republican political expediency, Harris reveals her true colors which are the green of the donor class and the red of the rivers of blood flowing like vintage wine at the behest of cancer capitalist militarism. There is nothing she won’t say or do to win the popularity contest between right-wing liberal and right-wing conservative bases as to which candidate is most willing to kill in the name of American Exceptionalism. While she presented herself in 2020 as some sort of moderate progressive due to the presence of Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary, the yardstick is now Biden and Trump so she is free to move to the right of Nixonian Republican Biden and do what the Democratic Party really wants to do. When questioned by CNN’s 200 million dollar man Anderson Cooper about her support for spending $650 million to continue a border wall that she had previously called “stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project” Harris answered "We need a president who is grounded in common sense and practical outcomes, like, let's just fix this thing. Let's just fix it. Why is there any ideological perspective on this? Let's just fix the problem." While her immigration policy does not include the mass deportations that Trump has threatened, it is even more draconian than Biden’s in its mass denial of asylum rights and conditional shutting down of hte southern border. On climate while of course Harris is “better than Trump,” she would not ban fracking and she would continue the oil industry subsidies and massive opening of public land leases for gas and oil drilling written into the fossil fuel lobbyist authored Inflation Reduction Act. Most climate scientists agree an increase in fracking could tip the planet to the edge of climate catastrophe. She is no famous for shutting down protest, in line with her party which has turned against its children who do not want to be shipped out to fight World War III. Her genocidal militarism is chilling, parroting the world’s most notorious dictators in her ominous proclamation “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” On nearly every issue Harris is aligned with or to the right of George W Bush and Dick Cheney, which is why she is finding her comfort zone with Republicans.

Trump could only rise to power in the face of Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, Clinton/Biden’s Crime Bill of 1994, Obama’s lies about the ACA (and its privatization of the health care system) and his bank bailout that left working class homeowners in the dust (to name a few). Add to that Democrat’s lies about protecting women’s rights (see Obama’s promise to Planned Parenthood in 2007) and their merciless warmongering and genocidal insanity and the only base left are those whose judgment and humanity are addled by multimillionaire celebrity anchors and faux progressives like Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich and Michael Moore who care more about selling dog food and feeding Trumpaphobia than protecting humanity. Hartmann and Reich warn against “circling the wagons” by criticizing Democrats, when all they are really doing is covering up for the mass murder and anti-worker ideology of the Democratic Party. They would rather watch Kamala Harris blow up the world, which she seems determined to do, than admit she is a phony supercop with no vision, ideology or imagination who has repeatedly proven to be the least popular vice-president in NBC polling history, her approval numbers being lower than those of Dick Cheney during his time in office.

The polling in the 2024 campaign is close because the parties are now petulant siblings, their performative and petty culture wars being the illusory difference between them while their legislative action is distinguished only by the Democrats’ means-tested, ineffectual, lobbyist-approved legislation which is either designed to be challenged legally or somehow benefit the ruling class over the working class. As our representatives in Washington are now almost all multimillionaire careerists with little concern for our collective welfare, the only way to get them to change is to threaten to derail their gravy train into the lobbyist/consultant class. We have to make it known that some of us are not so scared of Trump that we will walk over dead bodies and then follow a trail of sociopathic lies to serve a candidate and a party that only pretend to serve us. Those of us who are immune to the suffering the trickle-down panic of the Democratic Party pearl clutchers to whom Trump is the stick used to beat propaganda-addled liberals into submission would never cast a vote for an anointed supercop who has publicly announced her unwillingness to do anything exclusively for the black community while hawking Zionist and McCarthyist talking points. Repeating the history of propping up those who will do the barbarous bidding of white supremacist capitalism in the interest of identity politics is a fools errand proven by Obama’s presidency which resulted in the loss off over 1,000 Democratic legislative seats nationwide and ushered in the rise of Trumpism.

In this distracted democracy anyone is welcome to engage in the political theatrics of sparring over this lie or that, or to amplify the incredibly ignorant thing one candidate said on one day or the other on social media, or to tear their hair out about the apocalyptic potential of the other to negatively impact the lives of those who are defeated electorally. But if theatrics and histrionics are put aside, if one side’s Trumpaphobia and the other’s caricaturization of wokeness and socialism are neutered momentarily, the shock of how we are bamboozled election cycle after election cycle into believing that electing Democrats will somehow save us from the ravages of neoconservatism becomes stifling to the point of disempowerment. And now that both the Democrats’ rhetoric and their actions have become more and more inhumane—more and more hardened to the daily struggles of the majority of Americans to make ends meet and access health care, indifferent to our bombs and our tax dollars burning children alive in Gaza—they turn to the Republicans they have hated for decades for solace from their electoral plight, unconcerned about their conspicuous moral bankruptcy and impenetrable hypocrisy. The Democratic Party is shedding progressives, humanists, Muslims and black and Hispanic males. In a world free of moral relativism and nationalist propaganda, the Democratic Party would be shedding Democrats because it is now officially the party of the Cheneys and George W Bush. Those who Democrats found to be fascists and cowards a mere 15 years ago are now the standard bearers for their party, all in the interest of stopping Trump. So as most liberals are engaged in the amplifying Trump’s lies and speculating about the fascism he will inflict, the rest of us will work to stop Harris and her Bush Republicans from expanding upon the Biden administration’s nightmarish neoconservative agenda. It is time for Democrats to stop feigning outrage at the notion that there is little difference between the two political parties and accept that supporting Harris is supporting right-wing Republicanism. Just don’t blame those Democrats and Independents who refuse to vote Republican if Harris loses the election. It is the Democratic Party that needs to be held accountable for betraying democracy by anointing a candidate as incompetent as Trump himself. And the polls suggest they will be.

Activist resources in the struggle for justice and peace:

Roots Action

Jewish Voices for Peace

If Not Now

Workers Strike Back

It’s already painfully obvious that Kamala Harris will do anything and be anyone she needs to be in order to get elected. On the subject of Israel and Gaza, she has repeated dozens of times that her commitment to Israel is “unwavering,” meaning she will continue the flow of unconditional weapons and aid to the diabolical government of Israel which stands far to the right of Trump. When it comes to immigration, she is in favor of policy to the right of George W Bush and aligned with Trump, including the mass denial of asylum rights, effectively shutting down the southern border and continuing construction on Trump’s border wall. She was a “tough on crime” prosecutor and from every indication will continue pushing for increased surveillance, militaristic policing and the silencing of free speech. So it comes as no surprise that Harris has nothing to say regarding Israel’s terror attacks on Lebanon, yet uses that attack to stoke the fires of John McCain’s fantasy of war with Iran . She calls for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza but instead gets an expansion of Israel’s reign of terror into Lebanon, with thousands killed and injured in their latest bombing campaign. Harris offers only justification for Israel’s apparent deathwish in their attempts to expand the US mission of destabilization and dehumanization in the Middle East, as if any more evidence of her blank-slate deference to toxic neoconservatism. In his debate with JD Vance, a withering Tim Walz declared at the outset that “Let’s keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1,400 Israelis and took prisoners,” confirming that this “cuddly dad” is just another neoconservative propagandist for Zionism and American imperialism, as the reality is “this started” 75 years ago when Israel displaced some 800,000 Palestinians out of their own territory and the Israeli occupation of Palestine began. And for the record, the actual civilian death toll in Israel on October 7th was 695, not 1,400. It needs to be emphasized that Walz also let the cat out of the bag by calling for the “expansion of Israel and its proxies” as being “an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.” Walz cannot say he “misspoke” (as he has for the fourth time during this campaign) as US policy is offering diplomatic cover for Israel, 50,000 tons of bombs and “unwavering” support for Israeli settlements and occupation.

<Graphic documentation of the terrorist nature of Israeli attacks on Lebanon. The pager attacks were not precise as claimed by Demcocrats but indiscriminate, killing and injuring children, health care workers and municipal employees. US media thought the attacks were “creative,” with Kamala Harris pitching in with the establishment “Israel has the right to defend itself” gaslighting routine.>

It comes as even less of a surprise that Harris is stuttering and stammering about the urgency of ending Israel’s genocide, in her words “We need to get this deal done ... and that is my position, that is my policy." One problem with this “policy” is that Netanyahu has openly declared he will not accept any “deal” until Hamas is eliminated, an endpoint which intelligence and military experts alike acknowledge is virtually impossible. US media portrays Hamas as the obstacle to peace in the region, but it was only 6 months ago that Palestinians were dancing in the street in response to Hamas’s acceptance of a peace agreement only to have Netanyahu reject a ceasefire once again. But the most obvious fault with Harris’s rhetoric on Gaza is that she or Biden could stop Israel’s terror rampage in its tracks with a phone call informing Netanyahu that all US military aid and political protection is ending. At this point, it is painfully obvious that Harris’s deflection to “getting a deal done” is to divert from the obvious deduction that Harris herself could end the carnage if she actually wanted to as UN experts warn that US weapons transfers to Israel may qualify as complicity in international crimes including genocide.

The reason for Harris’s switch to stronger rhetoric about ending the war and the urgency of a two-state solution is internal polling that shows her falling behind Green Party candidate Jill Stein with Muslim voters in several swing states. While this should come as no surprise considering that Democrats have been slaughtering Muslims with impunity for at least 20 years, the party’s Islamaphobia is now out in the open as the liberal base brushes aside their own xenophobia to focus on that of Trump’s, somehow rationalizing that a Muslim travel ban and the potential for Trump to be “worse” for the Palestinian people justifies their enduring support for genocide. The reality is that speculative Trumpaphobic relativism and labeling anti-war activists as “antisemites” and “agents of Putin” will not bring the Muslim vote back to Harris and the Democrats. The Democratic Party, their base, and their media from Robert Reich to Rachel Maddow to Dana Bash have shown their true colors.

<A Palestenian woman tells the truth to Zionist propagandist and ten million dollar woman Dana Bash, one of many celebrity news anchors serving as a stenographer for the Democratic Party warmongers. CNN regularly amplifies Islamaphobia in its bid to transform Americans to right-wing xenophobes. It’s been successful to that end with Biden/Harris liberals.>

The sadism of Democrats is embodied in Senator John Fetterman’s enthusiasm for Israel’s terrorist pager attack on Lebanon, smiling when he proclaimed “In fact if anything I love it.” Many prominent Democrats praised the precision of Israel’s terror attack, so precise it left several children dead and hundreds of civilians injured. Newsweek asserted that the pager attacks were “the most audacious and unprecedented counter-terrorism precision attack in military history, and one that was entirely justified and in full accordance with international law.” Senator Ben Schautz asserted “but for those of us who have been critical of the conduct of the war in terms of [there being] too high of a tolerance for civilian casualties, we should be a little cautious to criticize an operation this precise.” Senator Richard Blumenthal celebrated “This attack was definitely aimed precisely at Hezbollah and seems to have been highly successful. It seems to have been extremely strategic.” Senator Mark Kelly was impressed, admiring that it was it was a “creative way to go after a terrorist organization.” There are dozens of other similar statements from prominent Democrats and their media stenographers. It is highly doubtful if the pager attack was implemented by Hamas or Hezbollah that Democrats and their media would be describing it in such glowing terms. To Biden/Harris liberals, protecting a woman’s right not to have a baby is the number one priority, but protecting Muslim children already born and pregnant women is of no consequence. The massacre of these innocents is something to justify, to cover up, to excuse in the interest of Jewish Supremacy and “beating Trump.” While liberals grandstand on the issue of right-wing White Supremacy, they exercise it in a more consequential fashion than the Republicans they love to hate, mixing it into a malignant stew of Zionism and American Exceptionalism.

The fact that there is any competitive nature to this presidential race is a testament to the inauthenticity of the Democratic Party and their undemocratic process. At this point Trump is no more than a rambling stooge, unable to come up with any vestige of the stand-up comedy routine and faux populism that got him into the White House in the first place. There must be something terribly wrong with the Democratic Party and its candidate, or with the vestiges of our “democracy” itself, to have any semblance of a competitive presidential election. Democrats still blame Bernie Sanders supporters, James Comey and Putin for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, failing to acknowledge that she was and is as much of a sociopathic liar as Trump and as such ran a terrible campaign. If voters were confident that a particular candidate of the duopoly genuinely represented their interests a know-nothing narcissistic sociopath like Trump would not even be able to mount a run for higher office. It is a testament to the Democratic Party’s allegiance to American militarism and oligarchy over the public interest at large that Harris cannot exert a statistically significant lead over Trump. Perhaps the party is being forced to face the reality that they can only rely on a certain percentage of liberals to follow them into the spiritual void where genocide, abuse of immigrants, mass surveillance, escalation to World War III and the silencing of free speech are all defensible in light of the looming threat of Trump. Perhaps the Muslim community that has been so vilified by Democrats will find redemption in showing the party of genocide and AIPAC fascism that there are consequences for such amoral and sanguinary behavior.

But at this point it seems clear that Democrats will receive no such redemption. The non-partisan component of the US populus that has not yet been indoctrinated with political party talking points amplified by hundred millionaire celebrity news anchors has rejected the duopoly with independents at an all-time high as the percentage of the total electorate. At the end of 2023 only 27% of voters identified themselves as Democrats, matching the 27% who identified as Republicans. In several swing states it appears that Muslim voters are waking up to the reality that Democrats are as or more politically expedient and Islamaphobic as Republicans, and the difference for them is a travel ban from Republicans or mass annihilation and starvation from Democrats. In Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona Green Party candidate Jill Stein leads Harris, with Michigan seeing both Stein AND Trump ahead of Harris with the Muslim electorate. The fact is that the Democratic Party and their media’s rhetoric is grotesquely Islamaphobic, minimizing the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people now and for decades by the terrorist state of Israel while preaching sympathetic for a single Israeli hostage (never citing that Israel has killed many of its own hostages). Debunked lies about photos of beheaded babies and mass rape campaigns by Hamas are repeated with regularity by Harris, Biden and the vast majority of the newsmedia, while Israel’s actual systemic rape and torture of Palestinian prisoners, most of them civilians including journalists and health care workers, goes completely ignored. Harris’s standard-issue rhetoric of sympathy for Palestinians is belied by her repeated assurances of her “unwavering support for Israel” in the face of their terrorist attacks on Palestine, Lebanon and most recently Yemen.

As Harris adopts the rhetoric of American imperialism and Zionism, it is now Iran that the ruling class has directed her to scapegoat as America’s “greatest enemy.” Of course, while America’s greatest enemy is itself and its allegiance to the fundamentalist theocracy of Israel, it becomes a certainty that Kamala Harris is worse than Biden in that she has no ideology other than harsh prosecutorial judgment, catering to right-wing xenophobia regarding immigrants and Muslims and serving American empire. It is encouraging that the Muslim community is not acting out of fear like most of the liberal base in their rejection of Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Of course, what more is there to fear when Democrats are aiding and abetting a terrorist theocracy in the genocide of your loved ones and the obliteration of your countries. Kamala Harris is not a leader but a follower, the very definition of an establishment politician who will spout prefabbed rhetoric and parrot establishment propaganda in service of the ruling class of which she is auditioning to become a part of. In response to Iran’s bombing of Israel in response to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, this is Harris’s chilling propaganda:

“I condemn this attack unequivocally. I'm clear eyed, Iran is a destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East, and today's attack on Israel only further demonstrates that fact,” she said, confirming she was in the Situation Room with Biden and supported Biden’s decision to shoot down Iranian rockets. “As I have said, I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself against Iran and Iran backed terrorist militias. My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.”

In her “clear eyed” service to her transnational corporate masters, Harris shows she is part of the problem and not the solution. Israel is the destabilizing force that provoked the Iranian attacks. Hezbollah was formed in 1983 in response to Israel’s bombing and subsequent occupation of Lebanon in 1982 as it attempted to turn Lebanon into Gaza. Ronald Reagan stopped Israel’s massacre of 40,000 Lebanese with a phone call, calling it a “holocaust.” It is Israel who is currently bombing four countries in the region, and like its daddy America it occupies, terrorizes and provokes other countries and then blames that country for their response. It is Israel who has illegally occupied Palestinian territories for decades and perpetrated the most heinous of torture and human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. It is Israel that is a rogue theocratic terror state, the majority of its citizens taking delight in the elimination of Palestinians and Muslims in general while they claim to be the victims of Muslim violence. Those staffing the Biden/Harris foreign policy cabinet are not to be trusted. The smirking cabal of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Matthew Miller have been making the rounds for months unchallenged by celebrity newsmedia claiming that their mobilization of warships to the Middle East and bottomless shipments of munitions to the region is in the interest of de-escalation. That strategy of “de-escalation” has had the opposite effect, as have all of their other foreign policy strategies. They are always wrong and dishonest yet never held accountable. All they have to protect them is the ultra-nationalism stoked by the likes of Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and virtually every major news outlet which is gaslighting Americans to the point of fanaticism.

And so out of fear of Trump Democrats will comply with Israel’s provocation of a devastating regional war that has already killed hundreds of thousands in Gaza, and several thousand in Lebanon. Democrats are losing their proxy war in Ukraine and must shift the ire of their McCarthyized base towards another imagined threat, this time the Muslim “terrorism” that threatens Israel, which of course means Harris liberals must somehow justify her cheerleading for yet another escalation of a regional war only one step removed from World War III. Harris liberals believe that war is a substitute for foreign policy, as if giving Israel tens of billions in military aid and then sending $157 million in humanitarian aid to Lebanon to mitigate the carnage inflicted upon the Lebanese people by our military aid to Israel is anything but moronic. Harris liberals believe that both Biden and Harris are helpless to rein in Israel, yet all that has to be done is for one of them to pull the plug on the flow of weapons and money. Of course they believe these things to a toxic stream of CNN, MSNBC and Sunday network “news” programs. On ABC’s State of the Union, Democratic Senator Mark Kelley had the nerve to say that Muslims should vote for Kamala Harris because she is committed to their values and because peace in the Middle East is a the top of her list of priorities. Apparently her commitment to peace in the Middle East is comprised of ginning up support for a war with Iran while demonizing Islamic organizations formed in response to Israeli occupation:

“The aid that we have given Israel allowed Israel to defend itself against 200 ballistic missiles that were just meant to attack the Israelis and the people of Israel,” she said. “When we think about the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah presents, Iran, I think that it is without any question our imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself against those kinds of attacks.”

Apart from Harris’s scrambled response, now something of a trademark for such an unvetted and unqualified presidential appointee, the substance is typically misleading as it lacks context regarding who is actually defending themselves and who is the aggressor. This confusion is part and parcel of US foreign policy particularly as it pertains to Israel, with the US joined by European countries and Israel itself in portraying Israel, the aggressor and occupier with the 17th most powerful military in the world backed by the most powerful military in the world, as the victim and the victims of Israel’s aggression and occupation as the aggressors. Of course, this mischaracterization is accepted by Americans whose country was founded on White Supremacy and whose population be it liberal or conservative are open to dehumanizing Muslims. As long as the Muslim population is seen as less than human the liberal refusal to call out Biden and Harris for their complicity in Israel’s genocide can be excused in light of the petrifying prospect of a Trump presidency.

As American troops are being sent to Israel in the buildup to war with Iran, it becomes obvious we are burdened with the dubious responsibility of having to stop two sociopaths. Regardless of the threat Trump poses, Harris must be stopped as well. Not only when it comes to her embrace of the genocide in Gaza, but as it pertains to a reframing of prioritizing threats. The biggest threat to US stability and security right now is not Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or North Korea. It’s a health care system collapsing under the burden of its own weight. It’s a public education system in rapid decline. It’s stagnant wages and labor abuses. It’s poverty and homelessness. It’s record wealth inequality that is only getting worse. It’s climate change that Demcrats boast about investing less than 15% per year of what we invest in blowing things up around the world as some crowning achievement. Republicans might be crazy, but so are Democrats to throw scraps to us peasants at the behest of the lobbyists and then campaign on legislation that barely scratches the surface. If Harris were any type of leader with any vestige of a moral compass she would stand up against sending troops to Israel and speak out against war with Iran. But the DNC platform had war with Iran practically written into it. That is what the donors in the million dollar boxes at the United Center in Chicago wanted, and that’s what Harris will give them. To me someone as vacuous and power hungry as Harris, someone who will blindly do the bidding of the felonious warmongers, is just as dangerous as Trump, and thus far her actions have caused far more morbidity and mortality than Trump ever did.

<How low can you go? Kamala Harris’s latest campaign ad boasts endorsements from a ghoul’s gallery of the some of the biggest liars, torturers and degenerates in US history. Of course Trump’s bloodthirsty National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was an architect of the Iraq War and advocated for war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela would endorse Harris over Trump. All Trump would do for him is assassinate Iran’s Major General Soleimani. Bolton is bitter than he wouldn’t go further and is confident Harris will.?

But somehow the black woman who blithely supports the massacre of black women around the globe for her own political gain and who has openly said she would never do anything legislatively “that’s only gonna benefit black people” is laudable for making history. Perhaps in that she is very close to making us all history, but not in that she will seek justice for those who historically have been marginalized and oppressed. Having a woman as president is an idealized notion as if the options were Nikki Haley or Sarah Palin or Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republicans who are just as mercenary as any male alternative, liberals would hardly be celebrating the “historic” potential of their candidacy. While there is something to be said for symbolism, that alone will do nothing for the darkness imbued by livestreamed genocide and dueling sociopathic political parties. Harris is on the dark side of the spiritual and moral sphere inhabited by the arbiters of poor judgment and American Exceptionalism who have been promoting a worldview that demonizes any country that does not comply with our economic and geopolitical agenda. So when asked if Harris is worse than Trump, it is possible to recognize Trump as a madman but also to acknowledge that in her rudderless allegiance to the cabal that has brought us to this precarious point in history, one with unchecked hubris that persists in escalating and promoting military conflicts around the world with the help of the political parties and media they employ, Harris is just as dangerous.

Following is a list of suggested actions and groups who are working to stop Kamala Harris and the Democrats and their inevitable escalation towards World War III:

1. CALL your representatives and tell them you will not vote for them or Harris unless they stop sending weapons to Israel AND they start using diplomacy in the Middle East and Ukraine in lieu of sending endless streams of weapons at our collective expense. You can call the central switchboard number below or contact your representative directly through their website.

SENATE and HOUSE: (202) 224-3121

2. “The Abandon Harris Campaign (formerly the Abandon Biden Campaign) seeks to empower people of conscience to leverage their vote for the US presidency and, consequently, effect moral change in the United States and around the world. The campaign seeks to unite and mobilize all people of conscience to forge a national movement built around grassroots organizing, political lobbying, public advocacy, and voter mobilization to effectively transform people of conscience resisting genocide as a powerful voting block that cannot be ignored.”

https://abandonharris.com/about/

3. “With the world’s eyes on Gaza the president must listen to us - the more than half a million anti-war voters who are demanding he change course on Gaza to end the suffering and death. It’s appalling that biden has the power to save so many human lives yet chooses not to intervene. The Democratic Party must heed our call and come together ahead of the election to fight racism in November.

https://www.uncommittedmovement.com/

4. Green Party candidate Jill Stein is running on an anti-genocide, anti-war platform and is on the ballot in at least 46 states. Writing her in is a direct and meaningful statement to the Democratic Party.

https://www.gp.org/

5. Kshama Sawant’s independent organization Workers Strike Back is committed to organizing labor in the fight against perpetual war and genocide. They are working on forming an alternative political party that prioritizes the needs of working Americans over those of the ruling class.

https://www.workersstrikeback.org/

In the first “presidential” debate of 2024 Kamala Harris boasted that she had the support of over 200 Republicans. The reason for that became painfully apparent as the debate went on and Harris championed her prosecutorial prowess against transnational cartels and gangs when Trump accused her and Biden of being soft on immigration, joining Republicans in conflating immigrants with crime and touting her draconian border bill which sports policy to the right of Bush and Reagan. When Trump went on about Democrats shutting down domestic energy production, Harris assured Republicans that the Inflation Reduction Act expands fracking. On foreign policy Harris rattled the sabres of US militarism, threatening China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, validating her commitment to the Biden Doctrine of pre-empting peace and diplomacy with war and intimidation. Harris perpetuated Biden’s lie in stating that that “As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is an active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,” minimizing the impacts of her warmongering while abiding by the neoconservative fantasy of US world domination through proxy wars. On nearly every subject Harris offered rhetoric that could have been spouted by George W Bush or Ronald Reagan.

And even though Harris was often to the right of these Republican icons, one must still wonder as to how is it possible that Harris and Democrats are embracing the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Even if Harris is a Republican at heart, how is it possible that Dick Cheney is the subject of misty-eyed tributes by the same liberal media and elites that called him the “torturer-in-chief” and “Satan” less than 15 years ago? Why would a Democratic presidential candidate, or any presidential candidate really, be “honored” to have the public endorsement of a former vice-president who publicly endorsed torture techniques employed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan? It would have seemed a sick joke just 10 years ago to fathom that the Democratic Party and their media would be courting the most notorious war criminal of the modern era as someone who is “honorable” and “courageous.” After all Cheney is the architect of the Bush Doctrine which explicitly states that America has the right to invade, bomb, occupy and/or change any country’s regime if there is even a 1% chance that they would plan to attack America. Or even if that 1% chance is fabricated with the use of flimsy evidence cherry-picked from politicized intelligence agencies. Cheney is the Henry Kissinger of the new millenium, amplifying the “Kissinger Doctrine” which prioritized absolute power and a US imposed “world order” over any consideration of humanity or justice.

Perhaps the most egregious failure to stand up for justice and accountability by any contemporary president would be Barack Obama’s tacit dismissal of Bush and Cheney’s war crimes. Obama’s lofty speech claiming that “In all that we do, we must remember that what sets America apart is not solely our power — it is the principles upon which our union was founded” proved to be his usual empty pontificating, for when given the chance to prosecute Cheney and his minions for torture he deflected with the non-sequitur that we must “look forward instead of looking backward.” Obama had a habit of deflecting from history when convenient, in this case ignoring the war crime of the century (perhaps now second to the Biden/Harris Gaza/West Bank genocide) because he knew he would be committing a few of his own. But Obama’s failure to hold Bush and Cheney accountable not only set a new precedent for executive accountability that would help to make Trump’s immunity case feasible, it forced liberals to deprioritize the devastating impact of the Bush Doctrine and encouraged the the further dehumanization of Muslims by the liberal base. Obama’s flippant dismissal of the slaughter of up to half a million civilians and the systematic torture of hundreds of innocents made it clear that liberals would have to start hardening their psyches and face the fact that they would have to ultimately accept the Bush Doctrine and move on to the culture wars as their primary distinction from right-wing Republicans.

Since Bush/Cheney’s Iraq War which was championed by every major US media outlet as well as the vast majority of Democrats, this “world order” has been executed with enthusiasm by both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and is now being parroted by the arbiter of “lethal” military might herself Kamala Harris. It is now acceptable or even desirable in the eyes of the liberal base for a US president to bomb or occupy a sovereign nation, or assassinate its leader, at the mere insinuation that a particular body politic would not cooperate with America’s hegemonic vision. Or in the case of Israel if the financial and geopolitical influence of that country infiltrates our body politic to the point that genocide becomes no more than a nuisance, a triviality not to be mentioned should it negatively impact the electoral prospects of a presidential candidate. Such a blithe dismissal of US complicity in war crimes would not have been possible had Obama prosecuted Cheney and his torture mafia. Because he didn’t, and compliant liberals had to erase the horrors of Cheney’s Iraq War to excuse Obama’s cowardice (or “pragmatism” as the neocons euphemize it), the recent revelation regarding the systematic rape and torture of Palestinian civilians in Israeli prisons moves no one in the Democratic media or their base. The outrage expressed at the death of several Israeli hostages is amplified by politicians and state-run media, while the mass torture and mutilation of Palestinians is ignored.

The Cheney/Kissinger doctrine of dehumanization of black and brown people around the world has come full circle in becoming a fundamental tenet of Obama/Biden/Harris liberalism. Harris supports draconian immigration policies that would outrage liberals had they been implemented by Trump. But because Democrats “need” Republicans in their corner to beat Trump such policies, including the building of Trump’s border wall, are now perfectly acceptable and are being touted by Harris on the campaign trail. The stifling of dissent on college campuses and the marginalization of protest is now central to the fascistic aspirations of both political parties. Climate change is now just a Democratic Party talking point, with “historic” climate change legislation promoting the expansion of fracking and containing requirements that millions acres of acres be auctioned off for gas and oil exploration before any lands can be offered for wind and solar farms. Foreign policy is not a competition between parties as to which can be more hawkish, Democrats currently winning in that march towards World War III with the Democratic Party Platform offering praise for the Biden/Harris administration’s bombing of four Middle Eastern countries and criticizing Trump for not taking military action against Iran (Trump’s assassination of their top military general was evidently not enough). The DNC platform is grotesque in its lies and distortion regarding the genocide in Gaza, but it even contains a clause condemning protest and the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement and proclaiming that military aid to Israel is absolutely unconditional.

Making deals with the devil to beat the devil is the precise opposite of what Democrats should be doing. Instead of obsessing about the speculative implementation of Project 2025, Democrats should be obsessing about why Kamala Harris and the Democratic establishment choose to welcome Republicans into the fold while they work to make certain black progressives do not get elected. Actions do indeed speak louder than words when the Democratic Party shuts down the voices of Muslim women in their own party yet has no qualms about lionizing Dick Cheney and George W Bush. The ideology Harris is following is far closer to that of the right-wing Republicans with whom she shares donors with than the progressives who reject funding from AIPAC, war profiteers, private prison conglomerates, health care conglomerates UnitedHealth Group and so many other powerful influences that control both parties while working against the public interest. Harris’s means-tested policies like a $25,000 first-time home buyer credit are designed by the lobbyists and consultants from the corporate entities that pay her way. These neoliberal policies will do nothing to alter the trajectory of wealth inequality, economic discomfort and distrust in government that created a monster like Trump. Turning to the inhumane and racist right-wing Republicans to prove your presidential mettle and becoming the monster you once fought against shows the battle has already been lost. If Democrats think Trump should be in jail, where precisely do they think Cheney should be? Why would a prosecutor be “honored” to accept the endorsement of the war criminal of our century? Because she and Biden are next in line for that “honor.” Because like Cheney she has no moral compass and will do whatever she is told to do in order to maintain the power of those she serves.

During a debate performance that was somewhere between a kid dutifully reciting their lines for a high school play and a paid spokesman for a cellular service, Harris repeatedly noted that Trump was working for himself and not for “you.” But in her proud declaration of endorsement by hundreds of neoconservative Republicans, Harris is sending the message that she is not working for you either. She is working for the same interests that Dick Cheney and those 200 Republicans have been working for. She is working for an American empire run by rogue military and intelligence services whose mission is to crush dissent in the interest of maintaining the power of the ruling class. For a mercenary profit-driven health care industry whose primary goal is to deny care and make patients scamper like a rat in a maze desperately trying to find a way to access and afford their care. For a consolidated media that is compliant with their respective political parties in the interest of access to those in power and thus serves to amplify their lies and provide cover for their crimes against humanity. For a financial industry that bilks the average American with fees, penalties, high interest rates, insider trading and deceptive practices. Like Biden, she will impose austerity upon the working class, the elderly and marginalized communities, passing lobbyist authored legislation while the media lauds her throwing of scraps to the peasants, intensifying the public appetite for someone outside of the corrupted duopoly who understands the suffering caused by America’s failing institutions. That faux populist could be worse than Trump, so as they did when they ousted Biden and anointed Harris, the ruling class will mobilize to find a Democratic candidate who they consider to be a sure thing. Perhaps the next Democratic presidential candidate will be running against someone so threatening that they will be “honored” to receive the endorsement of Trump.