In this issue:

• No free speech in a corporation unless you're in a union

• Jeffries took the meeting with Kushner — and got played

• Democrats spending their TV minutes on Piker instead of Max Miller

• Canada is willing to suffer to make us suffer. Nobody here is.

• Starmer didn't move to the middle on trans issues — he moved the middle

• Court expansion is the one non-negotiable

• Mamdani continues his tough-on-crime mayorship

• $16 billion is what Meta pays to make a trial go away

• A democratic socialist just won a Senate primary in Oklahoma

• Lake Ontario is defined in the U.S. Code

• Also this week

Win at Washington Post Highlights That There Is No Free Speech in a Corporation Unless You Are in a Union

Karen Attiah was fired by the Washington Post last year for posting about “white men who espouse hatred and violence” in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing. She fought it. On Monday an arbitrator ordered the paper to reinstate her immediately.

A reminder that there is no free speech in a private corporation — unless you are a member of a labor union. Labor unions don’t just raise wages. They protect your right to speak your mind even if your boss doesn’t like it, even if your boss is Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men on earth.

Union contracts generally prevent sudden termination and require a process showing a pattern of misconduct for termination, which protects workers against exactly the kind of free speech retaliation that Attiah suffered at the Post. Under the Post Guild collective bargaining agreement, bypassing progressive discipline requires proof of “gross misconduct,” and as the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and the Democracy Defenders Fund argued going into arbitration, that is a threshold management could not meet against a columnist with eleven years of service and an unblemished disciplinary record.

What’s also worth noting in this case is, as you watch this video, remember: This is what a working class labor activist looks like, for everyone who wants to reduce “working class” to white non-college men. Working class is everyone on the wage side of the capital-wage battle over economic inequality in our new Gilded Age.

Jeffries Took the Meeting with Jared Kushner -and Got Played

The Times reported that Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Trump’s son-in-law and Israel point man, in a private space in New York offered up by a mutual friend of the two men, and that neither man would comment on the session.

Meeting with political adversaries is often required, but this was the clubby corruption of elites, signaled by meeting in the space of a “mutual friend.” That Jeffries has a mutual friend with Kushner is the problem, and it is why he shouldn’t be Speaker.

The fact that Jeffries at first refused to comment on the meeting highlights the corruption. You do secret meetings with the enemy when you plan to fuck one of your own constituencies as part of the deal. And the reason this is bad is that Jeffries is clearly more comfortable meeting with Jared Kushner than supporting progressive Democrats: he refused to endorse Mamdani in the general election for mayor, and he has yet to endorse Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the November elections.

He also got played. Kushner leaked the meeting to Maggie Haberman as a means of stoking intra-party discord among Democrats, which Neera Tanden of all people was reposting by Sunday morning. Jeffries is just terrible at strategy. He is hated by most voters and hated by a large chunk of the Democratic base, which is a combination you would think disqualifies a man from leading a caucus into a midterm.

Adding to the distrust generated by the meeting, two days afterwards, Jeffries and Gregory Meeks handed Jared Moskowitz — one of the most pro-Israel Democrats in Congress — the ranking slot on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. This comes as new polling showed Democrats in all six of the first 2028 primary states overwhelmingly in support of sanctioning Israel and cutting off weapons to it. Yet Jeffries is shitting directly on the base of the party by putting a supporter of Israeli genocide in charge of Israeli policy.

Too Many Democrats Are Spending Their Television Minutes on Hasan Piker Instead of Max Miller

It is just amazing that Democrats are wasting breath on Hasan Piker when a sitting GOP House member abused his two-year-old and his wife and most of the GOP is still supporting him. Clearly, defending Israeli genocide is more important to some Democrats than winning the midterms.

On a single day in August, Elissa Slotkin, Josh Gottheimer, Jacky Rosen, Hakeem Jeffries and Ritchie Torres all spoke out against Piker.

My problem is not in the abstract that centrists criticize Piker. Lots of us take shots at the centrists too.

But we’re not on television, and my problem is Democratic leaders using the precious minutes they are given on national TV to do anything other than attack Trump and the GOP.

A fun and telling thing to track will be whether Piker or Miller receives more mainstream news media coverage between now and the election. Democrats feed that imbalance every time they choose to talk about Piker and not Miller.

Meanwhile a former Republican at the Bulwark, Tim Miller, is more focused on defeating Trump than all the Democratic leaders who are attacking Abdul El-Sayed for whatever Piker or other supporters might say. There is a complete double standard on antisemitic versus anti-Arab and anti-Islam statements in public discourse, and this week made it about as legible as it gets.

Canada Is Willing to Suffer to Make Us Suffer. Nobody Here Is.

Trade talks with Canada collapsed this week after the United States tried to restrict Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries, which according to CBC sources included making Canada impose new tariffs on non-US trade partners in compliance with Washington. Trump also sought to restrict Quebec’s requirements for French language on packaging and in its media- an absolute no-go for any Prime Minister who doesn’t want to blow up the country.

Mark Carney called it unacceptable and said the Americans asked too much and offered too little. This is basically an act of war, demanding another country become a vassal state on threat of economic sanctions. The US has been blessed with friendly nations on our two longest borders, but at this rate we will soon see a defense treaty by Canada that leads to Chinese military bases there.

Doug Ford is the Conservative Party leader of Ontario, the largest province, and he is the one echoing that economic war by Canada against the US will be bipartisan. “He underestimates Canada. We’re all in,” Ford said. “Up here, we’re at a fever pitch, everyone’s in for an economic war.”

At this point, most Canadians are willing to suffer a bit in order to inflict pain on the US. No one in the US is willing to suffer anything in order to make Canada suffer. That makes a trade war with Canada even stupider than a war with Iran, though it runs on a similar asymmetry of domestic tolerance for pain. If this trade war goes nuclear with Canada cutting off energy, minerals and lumber to the US, the demands to end it will be so strong here that Canada may end up owning the US side of Niagara Falls, with maybe Detroit thrown in to pacify Canada and let Trump extricate himself.

And then there is Ford telling Americans outright to vote against anyone who supports Trump, which is basically urging Americans to vote Democratic in the midterms. “I don’t respond to a dictator like Trump, a bully like Trump,” he said. “I’m not gonna take any advice off a guy that’s the king of bankruptcies... your own people don’t even like you. And they’re gonna speak loud and clear in the midterms. If I was allowed to, I’d be down there door-knocking.” It is just extraordinary to have one of the most prominent rightwing politicians in Canada attacking a Republican president like this.

Starmer Didn’t Move Toward the Middle on Trans Issues. He Moved the Middle to the Right.

Deltapoll had Labour at 30 percent this week, Reform at 27 and the Conservatives at 20. That the Conservatives and fascist Reform together receive 47 percent of voter support reflects how completely Keir Starmer failed, stoking support for the rightwing by aping their anti-immigrant, anti-trans and anti-poor rhetoric.

Starmer went all in on anti-trans rhetoric and policy, and the anti-trans voters stuck with the rightwing anyway. That is the lesson for Democrats: throwing trans kids under the bus won’t gain votes, but it will help the rightwing by endorsing their rhetorical view of the world. Starmer became head of Labour in 2020 and began promoting an anti-trans line, and the result was a massive shift in public views against trans people. He didn’t move towards the middle view on trans issues. He moved the public view on trans issues farther to the right.

Court Expansion Is the One Non-Negotiable

The Supreme Court handed Trump a preliminary win this week on his mail-in ballots executive order, in a case where the administration is trying to exert greater control over mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterms despite the primary role states play in overseeing elections.

Any Democrat who voices opposition to expanding the Court should be marked for primary challenge, since anything else is political suicide. That should be the single most non-negotiable position. I would take a pro-Israel pro-crypto Democrat supporting court expansion over a leftwinger opposing it.

John Roberts is also letting Trump keep building his ballroom while the justices consider the legal challenge to it. The project is now 90,000 square feet and has grown in size and scope, with the president’s lawyers arguing it is intertwined with the renovation of an underground military bunker. Knocking this down is now obligatory as a symbol of reining in a corrupt presidency and a corrupt Supreme Court, and any candidate who hedges on that should be obliterated in primaries.

Mamdani Continues His Tough-on-crime Mayorship.

Showing how it should be done, Mamdani has made going after white collar criminals a cornerstone of his mayorship. Wage theft is theft, tenant harassment is illegal, and the city is now working with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to share real-time information and crack down on crimes that target workers and consumers. That is a crime agenda aimed at the people who actually take money out of New Yorkers’ pockets.

On a separate issue, I have a small beef with Mamdani.

Having been seen biking without a helmet, Mamdani did a mea culpa and promised to wear a helmet in the future. Now, that’s a fine thing but there is a bizarre focus on bike safety in the media, while ignoring the far greater danger from driving cars.

Notably, where bike infrastructure is safe, like Amsterdam, people generally don’t wear bike helmets at all. Worry about helmets is a sign of New York’s tolerance for bad street design and speeding cars, and as Streetsblog put it, a focus on a helmet paints deadly crashes as the failure of vulnerable road users to protect themselves rather than as the failure of government to stop completely avoidable carnage.

Amsterdam at rush hour. Count the helmets.

Kids should always wear helmets, and all of that is true. But the question nobody asks is why we don’t require them in cars, since car accidents are a leading cause of brain injury-related deaths among children. Why aren’t politicians criticized for not wearing helmets while driving a car? Far more people die in car crashes each year than are murdered, and we do very little about it.

$16 Billion Is What Meta Pays to Make a Trial Go Away

Meta agreed mid-trial to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children, paying 29 states more than $16 billion to resolve allegations that it designed the products to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected the personal data of kids.

Honestly, this looks like the states folding, since they had been seeking up to $1.4 trillion. And the stock market thinks Meta won, since its shares rose after the settlement was announced. Sixteen billion dollars shared across 29 states won’t pay for much, and Meta will barely notice it.

A Democratic Socialist Just Won a Senate Primary in Oklahoma

N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, a democratic socialist, won Oklahoma’s Democratic Senate primary runoff and will face Republican Rep. Kevin Hern in November.

Following DSA-supported Angie Dixon winningthe Senate primary in Florida last week, shows where the Democratic base is heading, even in red-leaning states. It’s also worth noting that Oklahoma had one of the strongest Socialist Parties in the nation a hundred years ago.

My read is that Democratic voters systematically vote for candidates more conservative than they are, on average, out of pragmatism about winning general elections — but they vote more progressive in bluer states where the progressive can actually win, and more socialist in hard red states where they have little chance of winning in any case. Oklahoma is the second of those, and it says more about the base’s preferences than about November.

The other election result got almost no coverage: a candidate supported by the Working Families Party, which gets about 1 percent of the media the DSA gets, won the special election for a US House seat in California. Aisha Wahab, a Democratic state senator, will fill out the term of Eric Swalwell.

Whatever Trump Babbles About, Lake Ontario Is Defined in the U.S. Code

Whatever Trump babbles about, it can’t override federal law, which defines Lake Ontario as one of the Great Lakes and even gives its latitudes. Title 16, Section 931 says “Great Lakes” means “Lake Ontario (including the Saint Lawrence River from Lake Ontario to the forty-fifth parallel of latitude), Lake Erie, Lake Huron (including Lake Saint Clair), Lake Michigan, or Lake Superior.”

Eisenhower got there first on putting the name in federal statutes, signing an actual law defining the names of the Great Lakes and establishing a joint management plan with Canada. So until Congress passes a new law, it’s Lake Ontario. The press are such supplicants on this, acting like it is a matter of politics. There is a clear statutory definition here, so the coverage of this should read “Trump makes clearly illegal move to rename Lake Ontario, ignoring statute passed under Eisenhower.”

Also This Week

The only accounting fraud is on the other side. Dean Ball, the “head of strategic futures” at OpenAI, went on an unhinged rant against Social Security, telling young Americans their grandparents and great-grandparents committed a kind of accounting fraud in enacting it and much of the New Deal state. The only accounting fraud is the uber-rich pretending we as a nation can’t afford Social Security, since the wealth of the top 1 percent is far greater than any national debt. As I argued earlier this week, a wealth tax on that 1 percent would solve every budget “accounting” issue instantly.

Why people are pissed off. Headline PCE rose 3.7 percent year over year in July, topping forecasts of 3.6 percent, with the core rate holding at 3.3. The headline is the inflation number, but the details make it worse: spending increases were all in services like higher insurance, health care, housing and utility costs, while people had less money and spent less on clothing, food and household furnishings.

Restoring measles. Two people died from measles in Pennsylvania this week. Trump continues his mass murder legacy, now via a resurgence of previously suppressed diseases killing the population. Mismanaging Covid wasn’t enough; he has to restore measles, and no doubt the return of polio is next.

Bragging about the job you didn’t do. The FDA is bragging that it is recalling fewer foods. This is like a DA bragging about how many criminals they didn’t prosecute.

Between two blades of a scissors. An array of left activists from Angela Davis to Judith Butler weighed in on the twin evils — “both blades of the scissor” — of Iranian internal oppression and the illegitimate war against the Iranian people, comparing Iran’s oppression to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Some on the left condemn the letter, but I think the left always needs to be able to engage the world and the US domestic public on internal oppression by bad regimes even as we highlight why aggressive war is not a solution, especially given the evils of allies like Israel involved in that aggression.

The Bugatti was rented. Court filings revealed that Andrew Tate’s Bugatti and Aston Martin were both rentals, which has produced a hilarious thread of Tate lawyers desperately arguing that Andrew Tate is a penniless liar who scammed his followers by pretending to have money — because the lawyers are trying to prove he is not a flight risk on account of his supposed wealth.

Where AI is needed least. On a professor’s objection to a university-wide AI restructure: I am more favorable towards the use of AI for various purposes, but university classrooms are where AI is needed least. Much like calculators aren’t needed to teach most mathematics, although they are useful for more advanced math, they shouldn’t be used until you have mastered the core skills without them.

Dolly, and the bike seat. Lindsay Ellis has a documentary on Dolly Parton that doubles as a fundraiser for Dolly’s Imagination Library, which sends a book every month to children. It was an amazing thing when our kids were young, and really one of the things that makes Dolly such an amazing figure in our nation.

As the federal debt continues to explode, the Trump administration is desperately back to blaming Biden for all the insane policy decisions Trump has made, from slashing taxes on the wealthy, exploding spending on foreign wars, and pushing tariff changes that have driven up inflation while in the end producing little revenue because even his own Supreme Court deemed them illegal.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, going on national television, just throws up his hands and tries to blame Biden for any budget problems. “We did get it under control. We inherited a mess … we had to refund the tariffs.”

This is a lie.

Biden in fact inherited a mess - from Trump’s first term.

Between Trump’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy and his management of Covid, annual deficits in his final budget hit a historic record of $3.13 trillion in FY2020. Even as he provided relief spending that created more jobs per month than any President in the last fifty years, Biden actually cut annual deficits by $1 trillion compared to when he entered office.

And then Trump came into office for a second term and is spiking the deficit up again with new tax cuts and massive military spending (see my piece on Trump’s insane military budget).

Put these numbers in longer term context.

Trump wants to blame Covid for the debt he piled up his first term, but the current surge in debt in his second term shows it was built into his policy agenda. Trump is piling on budget costs and cutting revenue in ways that will drive the national debt above the level taken on to fund World War II. The old record is 106% of GDP, set in 1946. Federal debt held by the public crosses 100% this fiscal year and the CBO projection has it at 120% by 2036.

As reflected in the graph below, it was the same combination of tax cuts for the wealthy and massive military spending under Reagan that first drove up the debt as a percentage of GDP from its postwar low in the 1970s. Bill Clinton would actually shrink that debt burden and even achieve a balanced budget under his Presidency, but projections are now that Trump tax cuts and military spending put the U.S. on course for a debt level of 120% of GDP by 2036.

But that’s not the real crisis.

We have survived high debt levels in the past, but what’s creating a crisis is that high interest rates converge with higher debt to explode the interest payments US taxpayers shell out each year.

While deficits came down under Biden, inflation and interest rates spiked in the wake of corporate profiteering with Covid price hikes. And with those interest rate hikes, the cost of servicing the national debt expanded as well.

Interest rates had been coming down by the end of the Biden Presidency, but Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran spiked interests rates again - and the result is record interest payments on the national debt.

What this means is interest payments on the national debt will surpass $1 trillion annually for the first time in 2026.

And for the first time, more money will be paid out to owners of Treasury bonds than to Medicare.

At 3.3% of GDP, interest payments will pass the post-WWII high of 3.2% set in 1991 after the Reagan-Bush tax cuts and military spending surge in the 1980s- and those interest payments will constitute 18.6% of all federal tax revenues in 2026.

Add in the the $1.15 trillion approved for the FY2027 defense budget and the additional few hundred billion likely to be approved for the Iran War and other supplemental military spending and most of the roughly $2.9 trillion in personal income tax revenue collected by the government is going to either military spending or paying off the debt. Almost everything else besides Social Security & Medicare - covered by hefty payroll taxes on workers’ wages - is being paid for with new deficit spending each year.

And who receives that $1 trillion plus spending on servicing the debt? As Robert Reich lays out in this video, those interest payments are just circulating right back into the hands of the wealthy elite holding treasury bonds, who get more any more money each year as they lend the government money to cover those mounting deficits. Some goes to foreign holder of U.S. debt, but the overwhelming is owned by our homegrown plutocracy.

So here’s the bottom line. We don’t have a debt crisis. “We” collectively have lots of wealth; it’s just in the hands of the uber-wealthy. Tax the uberwealthy - meaning slide their assets over to the governments side of our collective ledger, and the government debt disappears.

Now, you will hear strawman arguments that you could tax all of Elon Musk’s wealth and it won’t make a big difference in the national debt. Which is true. It would make a difference, since a $1 trillion less for Musk would be a $1 trillion less debt owed by taxpayers. You could even tax the wealth of all billionaires- which adds up to $9 trillion - a massive amount of wealth but most of the national debt would still remain.

But most analysts who talk about wealth taxation look at those for whom money has largely become irrelevant- the wealthiest 1% of households who each own an average of roughly $30 million, an amount where additional money is largely irrelevant to their lifestyle. The total wealth of that group has soared past $50 trillion - far more than the national debt.

Even if you didn’t touch that first $30 million owned by those households - and let them keep the luxury homes, the private jets and boats - the rest of their wealth would still be roughly $35 trillion (based on these numbers in 2022 and adjusted for assets increases since then), just about enough to cover the national debt all by itself.

And if we wanted to be just a bit less radical, we could assess a 10% annual wealth tax on all wealth above $30 million in each household, yielding about $3.5 trillion annually .

That’s enough to eliminate the federal deficit and cover all interest payments, allowing legislators to expand programs to address the needs of working families, instead of just letting those interest payments absorb more and more of the federal budget.

And here’s the thing, even this 10% wealth tax would likely only slow the growth in the wealth of the uber-rich, since their wealth has been growing faster than 10% in many years.

But it would at least ensure the wealthy are actually paying a reasonable share of taxes. The income tax has failed miserably in addressing rising inequality, largely because the wealthy evade it so easily. Notoriously, many avoid ever selling their stock, just borrowing against its rising value - what’s called the "buy, borrow, die" strategy where the increase in the value of their assets are NEVER taxed.

Fearmongering over the national debt will be used by the Right to demand slashing social programs.

Progressives need to seize the issue to demand serious taxation of the wealthy.

If average working homeowners pay a wealth tax every year on their homes, the property tax, we should make the case that the uberwealthy should pay a wealth tax on their assets to address the national debt.

In this issue:

• The Circular Illusion of Economic Prosperity

• Data Centers Are the Sleeper Issue — and the GOP Knows It

• Trump’s Crush on Kim Jong Un

• The Pro-Criminal Regime

• The Left Keeps Winning While National DSA Keeps Embarrassing It

• Trashing the Alliance With Britain Over a 2% Tax

• The Unelected, Unvetted Aide Who Types the President’s Posts

• Trump Just Wrote the Democratic Mandate for Them

• Also This Week

The Circular Illusion of Economic Prosperity

As the Wall Street Journal reports this week, “S&P 500 companies reported $2.64 trillion of combined net income [but a] big chunk of earnings consisted of paper gains from marking up equity investments in other companies.” And when those companies report those inflated earnings, it drives up THEIR profits and share prices, increasing earnings for the companies invested in THEM- a circular illusion of growing profits in the new bubble economy.

The Wall Street Journal: “The $121 Billion in One-Time Gains Boosting Big Tech’s Profits” — gains on investments in companies like Anthropic are inflating earnings at some of the biggest technology companies.

This is the circular illusion of economic prosperity. Alphabet/Google “other income” totaled roughly $121 billion, almost all of it from investment gains — and Alphabet’s earnings are about 10% of all second-quarter earnings for the S&P 500. So a number that is mostly the appreciation of stakes in other companies is carrying a tenth of the reported profit of the American corporate sector.

This is the Wall Street Journal arguing a lot of financial reporting is now fiction: “Counting gains in volatile equities when they go up while subtracting everyday operating costs isn’t analysis. It’s marketing, which of course is what Wall Street is all about. Investors beware.”

Data Centers Are the Sleeper Issue of the Entire Election Cycle — and the GOP Knows It

Axios got a memo out of the National Republican Senatorial Committee saying Democrats have made data centers a “centerpiece” of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio — and that it is working. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

I hope there is a similar memo from the Democratic Senatorial Committee telling all Dems to campaign hard against AI data centers. Wish I had Dem leaders in Congress doing daily press conferences making this the defining issue of the election — highlighting Trump’s corruption, corporate oligarchy, and costs for consumers.

Trump is doing his part:, saying at a press conference “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big data center, I would absolutely want it.” Dem candidates should splice this into ads, and say they are running against the Trump-supporting tech billionaires looking to destroy your communities and enrich the Epstein class in DC.

Abdul El-Sayed campaigned hard on the issue, and I detailed how stark the public opinion polls are against AI in a post earlier this month: only 17% of voters expect AI’s ten-year impact on the US to be positive, while 42% say it will be negative — an astonishing animosity. And the hostility converts straight into policy support. Data for Progress asked voters about taxing the profits of AI companies to pay for the workers those companies displace, and every option cleared by huge margins: job training at 74–16, a public-sector jobs program at 74–16, expanded unemployment insurance at 70–18, even a universal basic income at 59–29.

The local fights are uglier than the national numbers suggest, and they scramble the usual alignments. There is an aspect of pick-your-enemy in one California fight: water-guzzling farms in the Imperial Valley complain that a water-guzzling data center will take their water, even as actual human beings living in the state get less than 20% of California’s water supply.

The largest data center in California has been denied water for cooling — and the developer is suing the public agency that said no.

The question is why the hell a water-guzzling data center picked a spot near the desert to build in. The answer is pro-corporate government in this border area — the county “has been much friendlier to the developer”, agreeing the $15 billion project did not need environmental review to move forward. Community groups there say the region is being turned into an environmental sacrifice zone.

And the bills for AI hypergrowth land in places nobody was polling. Memory prices are up 500% in the past year because of AI, which is basically destroying gaming as a hobby by making everything unaffordable. The shift of young men to Democrats is not solely because of this, but it is an obvious talking point for that group summarizing the impact of the Trump regime.

Trump’s Crush on Kim Jong Un Is Doing More Damage Than Any Sectarian Left Group Ever Managed

Much as I mock sectarian groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation for their pro-North Korea stance, they have nothing on Trump’s crush on Kim Jong Un and his hostility to democratic South Korea. Trump just loves his dictatorial buddies around the world.

He said it again a few days later: “I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un … I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea when I’m friendly with him.” Trump is friendly with actual Communist dictatorships, but wants the American people to take his rhetoric about Democrats being Communists seriously. If they were Communists, he’d apparently be friends with them.

Seoul has drawn the obvious conclusion.

President Lee Jae Myung is now pushing for wartime operational command to return to South Korea and for faster development of nuclear-powered submarines. Ironic that Trump is reducing effective US military power in South Korea just as we saw Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan establish an independent military alliance. Trump is a secret anti-imperialist member of the DSA Red Star faction undermining US power globally.

The Pro-Criminal Regime

Attorney General Todd Blanche is launching a new process that allows individuals who lost their gun rights because of felony convictions to apply to have them reinstated. The pro-criminal regime: pro-corporate crime, and for putting guns back in the hands of criminals.

Wall Street Journal: Trump Administration Moves to Restore Felons’ Gun Rights.

At the same time the Justice Department is bringing fraud cases against food-truck operators in California. As the Times put it, “the new emphasis on small-dollar fraud comes as the administration has issued pardons and commutations to white-collar convicts, pulled back from criminal cases against multinational corporations and dropped charges against wealthy executives.” This is about political attacks on blue states, while letting large-scale corporate crime go wild. Trump is the biggest enabler of crime in US history.

The most glaring issue in Trump’s deportation drive is that the only people actually violating criminal laws are employers — yet almost none of them have been targeted by ICE. All part of Trump’s general abandonment of any accountability for criminal activity by the corporate class.

The Left Keeps Winning Primaries While National DSA Keeps Embarrassing It

Another leftwing upset: state rep, DSA member and former union organizer Angie Nixon won the Senate primary in Florida despite being outspent 16 to 1.

She will face a steep hill to defeat incumbent Republican Ashley Moody, but Moody is neck-deep in her own corruption scandal, so who knows.

New York Times: Angie Nixon Scores Upset Win in Florida Senate Primary.

The Florida GOP is a den of corruption and criminality, so Nixon has plenty of material to run the mother of all anti-establishment campaigns against it. This week alone, Mike Caruso, a close ally of Ron DeSantis, was arrested and charged with five felonies.

Meanwhile Fox News is doing more free ads for DSA candidates.

Kristen Welker asked Hakeem Jeffries whether democratic socialists belong in the Democratic Party, and he answered with a list of things he personally does not support.

The right answer is: “This is a diverse party and the voters of individual Congressional districts decide who belongs in the party. I don’t agree with colleagues on many issues, but that’s because our members think for themselves, unlike Republicans who in lockstep do whatever Trump tells them.”

The trouble is that national DSA keeps handing him the easy answer.

As someone in favor of slashing police budgets and indicting abusive police, this interview by a national DSA leader is an embarrassment, where she says what to do about rape is “hypothetical.” Saying rapists should not be jailed and that better streetlights would solve the problem is insane and political suicide.

The problem with national DSA leaders is not that they are radical, but that they are incompetent communicators out of touch with the basic concerns of people. I strongly defend Hasan Piker because he knows how to communicate his radicalism. Folks like this don’t — and the sad thing is she is in the “moderate” DSA faction.

Then, on the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth, national DSA put out this. The blockade on Cuba is evil and denouncing that should have been enough without hagiography of Fidel. National DSA continues to celebrate dictators and embarrass everyone associated with it.

Trashing the Alliance With Britain Over a 2% Tax

Trump is threatening total economic war with our strongest traditional ally, the UK — and his own trade tsar says the 100% tariff threat is “not a bluff.”

This trade war is not on behalf of manufacturing workers or anything to do with American wages. It is only to protest British taxes on tech companies, because all he cares about is protecting corporate profits.

The Independent: Trump’s threat of 100% import tariff on UK “not a bluff,” US trade tsar warns.

Understand what is being fought over. The digital tax Trump is protesting is a modest 2% tax on the revenue companies generate from UK users. It raises a bit more than half a billion dollars, barely noticeable on the balance sheet of trillion dollar firms. But Trump is trashing our relations with the UK over it.

One reason it exists is that tech firms are chronic tax evaders. Most pay little or in some cases NO corporate tax in the UK, so this is the method used to have them pay some taxes. In fact, most advocates in the UK think the tax is criminally low and want it raised to 10% of digital sales — a position the Liberal Democrats have already adopted.

The Unelected, Unvetted Aide Who Types the President’s Posts

No one elected Natalie Harp and the Senate didn’t confirm her, but she quietly wields more power than almost anyone else in Trump’s government. As the Journal put it, “a well-timed text to Harp can unlock access to Trump, giving well-known lobbyists and fringe figures alike an audience with the most powerful man in the world.”

While some are declaring investigating Harp to be a sexist attack on a poor defenseless woman, NOT investigating her would be the most sexist thing possible, as if women are just vessels for their masters.

None of the adulation she writes about Trump is very different from the obsequious flattery Cabinet members offer him at meetings. She knows how to flatter Trump and would be a perfect recruit by a foreign enemy. She needs full vetting.

And as the person typing in many posts for Trump, Harp could be working with those insider trading ahead of dramatic market-moving posts. Media and Democrats should demand an accounting of her personal finances.

Media should be all over this as a massive red flag: she refused a security clearance for almost a year. By that point, Trump had no doubt so corrupted the process that anything that would have come up earlier was buried.

Trump Just Wrote the Democratic Mandate for Them

Trump went after Abdul El-Sayed for campaigning on killing the filibuster, and helpfully listed what would follow: four more senators, eight more members of Congress, DC and Puerto Rico statehood implied throughout, a Supreme Court expanded to 23 justices, and himself as the last Republican president. El-Sayed’s response: “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Trump is telling voters what Democrats will do with majorities in the House and Senate — and if they win those majorities, he has handed them the mandate to enact these policies. That’s the media rules of “mandates,” isn’t it?

Also This Week

The landlord’s god-given right. A guy complains, with his family’s government-created property right to collect rent from tenants, that tenants ALSO have a government-created property right to pay a certain amount of rent — calling the latter “abuse” while thinking the former is god-given. Now I might agree it’s unfair that some people pay $80 a month for rent and others have to pay much more, and as soon as we deal with the unfairness that some people inherit multi-million dollar buildings and others don’t, we can get around to inequities in rent-controlled rents.

The free-trade DSAers. The idea that the left and Trump shared similar views on trade was always ridiculous. Trump’s critique of free trade is that it doesn’t screw over poor countries enough to favor US interests, while the left critique is the exact opposite, that trade rules undermine workers’ rights and the environment globally. New polling from The Argument finds Democrats favorable to DSA are now the most pro-free-trade bloc in the country, at 54% strongly supportive.

The $1 trillion black box. Congress appropriated $1 trillion for defense this year, more than twice as much as the combined budget for the agencies overseeing health, veterans affairs, education, housing, agriculture and justice, and ProPublica is setting out to report on how it gets spent. Just a ridiculous waste of money. Cut out half the defense budget and the US would still have the largest military budget in the world.

A four-year black hole in the data. Last week it was the beneficial ownership registry being demolished. This week the Guardian counted the whole campaign: nearly 400 US datasets deleted or altered, with health data hit hardest. We are going to have a four-year black hole in longitudinal data trends. Every public health and social science study will have a giant asterisk for analysis of what happened in these four years.

A precedent worth filing away. A former top aide to Anthony Fauci pled guilty to a felony conspiracy charge for scheming to hide emails, and reporters noted that “criminal prosecutions stemming from efforts to evade Freedom of Information Act requests are exceedingly rare.” In 2029, let’s take this as precedent to indict most of the Trump administration, which we know is breaking every possible records law to conceal its criminal activity from FOIA requests.

Only cities deserve fast internet. The Trump administration is screwing over its rural base once again, saying only urban areas deserve fast internet. In order to keep rural areas trapped with slow Musk Starlink, the FCC eliminated the goal of providing 1Gbit download — meaning wired broadband — for rural areas, on the theory that the standard must be “technologically neutral.”

Working with the regime we are bombing. So many lows, but Trump working with the repressive Iranian regime to let them pick which refugees get returned is a particular low in cruelty and hypocrisy. And on the war itself, CNN reports Trump is trying a new approach: disengage. Also known as unconditional surrender.

No one with talent should do business with the Ellisons. I cut off my Paramount subscription a few years ago when the takeover was announced, and I have zero respect for anyone enabling their MAGA censorship and industry-wrecking threats. Why capitalism sucks, in a nutshell: one guy can threaten to take away jobs from tens of thousands of workers if he isn’t allowed to execute a potentially illegal merger — and IATSE and Becerra are giving in to the blackmail by calling for the antitrust lawsuit to be dropped.

Following up on Max Miller. How is he not disowned by MAGA? Abuse of child and wife aside, CNN found a parade of old classmates describing him as a violent, abusive person, on top of multiple run-ins with police including drunk driving.

If we had a functional FDA. We’d have massive fines and even indictments for consumer fraud. Researchers took “54 products that listed avocado oil as the ONLY oil used and submitted them to chemical analysis” — 89% showed signs of being adulterated with other, cheaper oils.

100 deaths is a national crisis, 2,900 isn’t. A hundred total annual deaths related to e-bikes, only some of them teenagers, is a national crisis demanding new laws. But 2,900 teens dying annually in car-related killings isn’t a crisis demanding safer cars, lower speed limits, and better street design.

Draining the reserve past the point of repair. The rapid drawdown of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve could damage the caverns that store the oil. Trump doing long-term damage to American infrastructure to serve his own short-term political interests: his presidency in a nutshell.

A footbath is not an establishment of religion. Providing a foot-washing facility to ALL visitors to an airport, that happens to be needed particularly by one religious faith, is not a violation of the Constitution. But putting the religious doctrines of one religion in public schools clearly is.

A win-win, because workers designed it. Unexpected absences cost employers tens of thousands of dollars a month, and an app helping workers with last-minute transportation, food and childcare has largely fixed the problem at one McDonald’s. Honestly, this sounds like a very smart win-win approach largely because it was developed by people starting from the workers’ perspective and needs, and then showing employers how they would benefit if they eased the everyday emergencies in their workers’ lives.

And if you missed it: I was doing genealogical research this weekend, and it’s bad news when your best source is the Yad Vashem databases. I wrote the whole thing up as a standalone piece this week, including how the anti-immigrant visa system created in the 1920s was rigged against Jews fleeing persecution. As I wrote, one reason I despise AIPAC is that they justify support for Israel on saving Jews fleeing oppression, but support Trump and GOP politicians shutting the US border to millions of others fleeing death and oppression.

There are many reasons I am essentially an open-borders immigration advocate, but one motivation is that my grandmother Hedy came to this country in 1921 when borders were still largely open — but the rest of the family was trapped when the U.S. shut our borders and left them to die in Nazi camps.

The borders were largely shut during the Klan-promoted anti-immigrant wave of the 1920s — and my grandmother, an older sister and an uncle got in just under the wire.

Part of the family that made it to the U.S. later bought a large house in the Rockaways with enough space to hold family members planning to flee the Nazis. But with the U.S. and other nations refusing entry, most Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis couldn’t leave.

So the family house on the Rockaways remained empty, filled with the ghosts of those who died in the camps.

How The U.S. Government Left the Jews to Die in Hitler’s Europe

The declining immigration numbers were stark, as you can see in this graphic: immigration to the U.S. by the 1930s was a tiny fraction of what it had been twenty years earlier. (Graphic courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The deeper problem was not only that few visas were available, but that the U.S. imposed mounting burdens on those seeking them. Germany had a relatively larger visa allocation than other countries — but most of those visas went unissued, because the Jews wanting to flee didn’t have the money to immigrate. The U.S. State Department demanded that any immigrant demonstrate they would not become a “public charge” — i.e., need welfare support — in order to enter the country. Since the Nazis began stripping Jews of financial assets if they left the country, Jews were mostly turned away on that basis.

For countries like Czechoslovakia, the situation was more dire, since few visas were even authorized — only 3,073 annually, a quota later reduced further. By the time Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, there was a ten-year waiting list for citizens of that country to immigrate to the U.S.

The Holocaust was driven by the evil of Hitler’s racist fascism — but it was also driven by his racist counterparts in the U.S. and other nations who shut their borders and let people die under Hitler’s regime.

AIPAC and Others Who Support the Trump Regime Are Betraying Every Jew Murdered Due to Anti-Immigration Policies

In 1965, the U.S. Congress finally reformed our immigration laws to allow far more newcomers — and other policies would begin to prioritize protection of refugees, particularly under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) law created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.

But in the last year and a half we have seen the complete gutting of that promise to defend refugees, trapping a whole new generation trying to flee death and oppression. Trump is doubling down on his evil and working to deport mass numbers of immigrants who had been protected under TPS — Haitians, Venezuelans, South Sudanese and people from so many other places where populations face repression, murder or just flat-out starvation.

Where Joe Biden brought in 100,000 refugees in his last year in office, the Trump administration admitted only 6,700 refugees between October 2025 and May 2026 — and, in a sick, evil joke, all but three came from South Africa, based on the non-existent oppression whites face in that country.

So many families just like my Slovakian Jewish family members will die because of Trump’s evil immigration policies.

One reason I despise AIPAC is they justify support for Israel on supposedly saving Jews fleeing oppression — but then they and the Israeli regime itself support Trump and GOP politicians shutting the U.S. border to millions of others fleeing death and oppression.

If “never again” means just recreating the Holocaust for everyone else in the world, that is a sick version of Judaism no one should want to associate with.

Thankfully, most American Jews reject the pro-Trump political views of AIPAC and 67% of Jewish voters surveyed say they intend to support Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. And 72% see ICE agents in American cities as “dangerous.”

That American version of Judaism is the one that merits respect — but it is high time for a divorce between American Judaism and the genocidal version in Israel murdering Palestinians and supporting the fascist anti-immigrant Trump regime.

• Every Stated Iran War Aim Has Led to Its Opposite

• The Media When a Centrist Loses vs. When a Leftist Loses

• The Proud Boys Walk Free and the SPLC Gets Indicted

• Fourteen Million People

• Whether Mike Johnson Keeps Protecting Abusers

• Condemning Hasan Piker While Bemoaning the Loss of Young Men

• One of the Largest and Swiftest Shifts in Public Opinion in US History

• Republican Presidents Have Created Almost No Net Jobs in Fifty Years

• Trump Wants to Kill the Pied-à-Terre Tax He Would Have to Pay

• Woke 1 Was Symbolism Without Institutional Change

• Yellow Stars and Ankle Monitors

• Relentless Delivery, Relentlessly Communicated

• Also This Week

Every Stated Iran War Aim Has Led to Its Opposite

Politico went and asked current and former U.S. officials what had to be done to win in Iran. “The most common first response was a primal scream of sorts that translated into, ‘We never should have started this war.’ That was followed by: ‘What do you mean by “win”?’” Pretty much. The piece lays out three main camps with proposals, all of which have downsides, which is another way of saying nobody in the building has a theory of victory.

The arbitrary and murderous nature of Trump’s war has delivered one message to Iran: they will never have security until they have a nuclear weapon. No deal will be honored, so the only security is mutually assured destruction with Israel. So all stated war aims have led to their opposite. The war was sold as nonproliferation and it has made an Iranian bomb the rational move.

And the proliferation is not going to stop at Tehran. Juan Cole reports Türkiye and Saudi Arabia are now seeking a Pakistani nuclear umbrella against Israel. Oh goody — a Triple Entente nuclear trigger arising from Trump’s idiotic war. With nuclear-armed Pakistan now explicitly in this alliance, a nuclear-armed Iran is almost inevitable as a defensive move to counter it and nuclear-armed Israel.

Meanwhile the running tally: war in Ukraine, war in Gaza, war in Iran, war in Yemen, war in Cuba.

And no one, including Israel, pays any attention to Trump’s incompetent attempts to end the wars he started. His own Board of Peace announced an agreement last month under which Hamas would give up its weapons alongside an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This week Israel rejected the fifteen-point plan outright- showing even Israel knows they can ignore Trump flailing around the world.

The Media When a Centrist Loses by One Point, and When a Leftist Loses by Less

Media bias here is almost funny — almost NYTPitchbot level. Politico’s headline when Abdul El-Sayed won his primary in Michigan: “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Politico’s headline when David Crowley beat Francesca Hong in Wisconsin by under a point: “The far left hits a wall.”

The Times went with “A Stunning Loss in Wisconsin Shows the Limits of the Left,” on the theory that Hong’s defeat “may have shown the democratic socialist wave cannot reach beyond urban centers.” A sub-one-point loss is now a wall and a limit. A one-point win by the centrist is a disappointment for the people who beat her.

What’s notable is that neither DSA House member — AOC or Tlaib — nor Bernie endorsed Hong. Some degree of judgement call with them that she was not quite ready for prime time, and that a loss by her in the general election would likely hurt the left, and the nation, more than a primary loss would. AOC endorsed El-Sayed and DSA did not, and he won. AOC did not endorse Hong and DSA did, and she lost. Not that it’s causal, but I do think most left voters take an AOC endorsement more seriously as a voting guide than DSA institutional endorsements, given how flaky some chapters are.

I will note that the Wisconsin DSA chapters were some of the loudest in calling for then-DSA member Rep. Jamaal Bowman to be expelled from DSA for not being pure enough in his opposition to Israel. So if I was a left voter, I would have doubts about their judgement.

This is why the weird sectarians in national DSA need to be dumped. Asked by David Remnick whether we should send weapons to Ukraine, DSA co-chair Megan Romer answered no, and when asked whether that means allowing Russia to overrun Ukraine entirely, offered that “we should be sending huge teams of diplomats”- ignoring fact Trump is on the phone with Putin every other day it seems.

Actual local DSA elected leaders — AOC, and recently nominated folks like Philly’s Chris Rabb — have strongly supported Ukraine and condemned Russia. The organization’s national leadership is a liability to its own officeholders.

One more thing about how this got covered. Prediction markets are not predictive and should not be covered as news. Kalshi had Hong at 95% on the morning of the primary she lost.

And a note on the framing to come. Trump and GOP leadership are saying the whole Democratic Party are communists. Curious whether that will blunt their ability to say Hong is REALLY a socialist. Voters may start tuning out the difference. Hong’s own answer was the right one: “What’s extreme is Rep. Tiffany has voted against interests of Wisconsinites over and over. What’s extreme is that he’s an election denier and continues to protect pedophiles.”

The Proud Boys Walk Free and the SPLC Gets Indicted

Complete Nazi government action — indicting those investigating rightwing racists.

CNN reported this week that a former Southern Poverty Law Center employee has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside white supremacist groups. An Orwellian world where the Proud Boys walk free and the SPLC is being indicted.

That followed another shocking assault on free speech, as a Trump judge denied even discovery to the SPLC in the vindictive prosecution Trump is running against them. Judge Emily Marks, a Trump appointee, denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the federal indictment on vindictive-prosecution grounds, and then denied any further discovery into the claim — which is to say, you may not gather the evidence that would prove the thing we are declining to find.

And the same week, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump halted the requirement that Trump turn over his financials in discovery for his $10 billion defamation case against the BBC. That defamation cases by a sitting President are not being immediately dismissed is a shocking assault on a free press. The dollar figure is not the point. A president who can keep a ten-figure libel suit alive against a broadcaster, while being excused from producing his own records, has a weapon that works whether or not he ever wins.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/trump-bbc-libel-lawsuit

Fourteen Million People

The Lancet predicts that Trump and Elon’s slashing of USAID funds will kill 14 million people — making them some of the largest genocidal mass murderers in history. The study finds USAID funding prevented roughly 91.8 million deaths over its 21-year study period, including 30.4 million children under five, through a 65% reduction in HIV/AIDS mortality, 51% in malaria, and 50% in neglected tropical diseases. The forecast for the cuts is more than 14,051,750 additional deaths by 2030, including 4,537,157 children under the age of five.

The media continuing to treat Musk as anything but a monster makes them apologists for this genocide. There is no version of a profile that squares “mercurial genius” with a peer-reviewed forecast of four and a half million dead toddlers.

Whether Mike Johnson Keeps Protecting Abusers Is What’s on the Ballot

Mike Johnson defended Ohio’s Max Miller despite horrible abuse allegations: “We don’t take disciplinary action against members for allegations. It’s in his own words ‘a nasty divorce proceeding’ … he thinks it’s a hit job on him.” Whether Mike Johnson continues to protect abusers — whether Ohio’s Max Miller or all the Epstein-class abusers — is what is at stake in the midterm elections.

Then the New Republic reported that Miller sued his daughter’s daycare in 2025 over her bruises, with his ex-wife not listed as a complainant. Miller is clearly a psychopath. If there was any evidence, day care staff would be in jail for this — so this clearly is a way to cover up his own abuse, and no one dared indict or take away custody from a sitting Congressman.

And it is now a downballot problem for the GOP. Mike Lawler has defended Miller and doubled down on refusing to return the $17,000 he has received from him.

New York voters needs to remove this child abuse apologist from office this November.

Dem Leaders Condemning Hasan Piker While Bemoaning the Loss of Young Men

Unless a commentator is boycotting Fox News and Joe Rogan, they are in no position to condemn Hasan Piker. AOC is rightly calling out corporate Dems bemoaning the failure to reach disaffected voters, particularly young men, while also attacking one of the few voices reaching them. As she put it: “Much hay was made about the fact that we lost young men in the last election. Many of the same consultants that are wringing their hands today were the same ones talking about how we have to go on Joe Rogan and not be so willing to engage in cancel culture.”

And when Stephen Miller is attacking him this much, it should make Dem centrists think twice about lining up with Miller in attacking Piker. It raises the “first they came for the…” issues to dogpile, since any Dem should recognize they are next.

One of the Largest and Swiftest Shifts in Public Opinion in US History

Netanyahu going all in on the Trump alliance — and genocide in Gaza — has driven one of the largest and swiftest shifts in public opinion in US history. CNN’s aggregate of Israel’s average net favorability at the same point in a Trump term: plus 51 points in July 2018, minus 16 points in July 2026. Sixty-seven points in eight years. And a chunk of US Jewish leaders hooking up with Trump’s fascist state are just adding to both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes.

Which is also why the reflex to call criticism of AIPAC money “antisemitic” keeps backfiring. Talking about millions of dollars spent by a particular lobby is not antisemitic, since many other Jews contributed to El-Sayed. Unless “Michigan Jewish Democrats” are saying that Jews who supported El-Sayed aren’t real Jews — which is damn offensive, and they should apologize.

Republican Presidents Have Created Almost No Net Jobs in Fifty Years

Need to hit this number relentlessly. GOP Presidents over nearly 50 years have created almost NO net jobs. Essentially all new jobs since 1989 have been created under Democratic administrations: 49.8 million under 20 years of Democratic presidents, 1.86 million under 17.4 years of Republican ones. Doesn’t fit the media narrative, but the GOP sucks at job creation.

And the current numbers are not looking to change the trend. Look at this graph and compare robust job growth under Biden — and then the pathetic Trump economy of nearly no net job creation in the last 18 months. The July report had the economy losing 23,000 jobs against expectations of plus 80,000, with May and June revised down by a combined 103,000. Unemployment ticked down to 4.1% for the wrong reason: over 260,000 people left the labor force. Wage growth of 3.2% is entirely wiped out by inflation.

And who left. Women accounted for all of the job losses and all of the labor force decline in July, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Trump’s economy is an economic war on women and non-white workers.

Trump Wants to Kill the Pied-à-Terre Tax He Would Have to Pay

Almost every state in the country gives preferential tax treatment to the primary home a person lives in, so it’s insane that Trump is arguing a tax on luxury second homes might be illegal. He said this week he is looking to see whether the federal government has “any legal right to avert this disaster.” But he thinks his job is telling every person and every local government what they can do.

What’s insane is that Trump’s unit is only assessed for tax purposes at $6 million, while most people assess its value at over ten times that amount. If NYC’s assessment system didn’t favor luxury homes so much, Trump would be paying 10 times his current taxes on the unit.

The Community Service Society and the Progress and Poverty Institute laid out the whole half-century of inequities in NYC property taxation in a report last year, and this is what it buys: the loudest opponent of a second-home tax is a second-home owner whose assessment is off by an order of magnitude.

Woke 1 Was Symbolism Without Institutional Change

The Atlantic ran its retrospective on “Woke 1,” and even in the attempt to list the movement’s sins the piece struggles to identify anything significant. That is the real indictment, from the other direction.

Police keep killing innocent people, so the problem of Woke 1 was lots of symbolism that irritated people but almost no institutional change in policing practices. And ICE is doubling down on the worst of police abuses.

Back in the day, “political correctness” was originally a left insult for folks who talked a good game but didn’t focus on actually winning. There’s a bit of that in the jokes about Woke 1 — and the “1” is a way of saying it should be Woke 2, but with more focus on results.

AOC has been criticized for laughing that parts of “Woke 1” were crazy, but I read her as mocking the folks who got too caught up in saying the politically correct thing- and not focusing on how to win - something AOC is obviously focused on.

Yellow Stars and Ankle Monitors

CNN reported that Haitian immigrant Monsanto Maler collapsed to the ground in tears after leaving with an ankle monitor from an ICE check-in in Blue Ash, Ohio.

But wouldn’t it be more colorful if adorned with a yellow star. Don’t want to lose track of people, so might I suggest tattooing numbers on their arms? Day by day America is looking more and more like 1930s Germany for many people.

The same administration is running “civil rights” litigation against people and groups all over the country- all led by Trump who said of Somali-Americans this week: “They’re not smart. They have no aptitude. They have nothing going.” No one should take any DOJ civil rights lawsuit seriously when it comes from a white racist President spewing statements like this.

And the permission structure for hate keeps widening. A mob viciously beat a trans couple in what LGBTQ Nation reported, and police then criminally charged Shae Sanders and Aurora Rush, the two people who were injured in the attack. We now have government-supported lynch mobs against trans people. This is what the wave of anti-trans bigotry is creating now.

Meanwhile there is endless national outrage over a candidate saying the Thanksgiving story is problematic — which it is — but little coverage of the endless parade of stone racist statements by GOP candidates. Bo French is running for statewide office in Texas, believes in the “Great Replacement,” has called Native Americans “third world savages,” and after his own party tried to cancel him in 2025 is now backed by Governor Greg Abbott. And major media is not demanding national GOP leaders disown him.

The Contrarian

He Wants to “Round Up Every Muslim” — and Oversee the Oil Industry In Texas

The Democratic Party has been dogged by problematic candidates in this election cycle, chief among them the secret–Nazi tattoo haver, racist shitposter, and accused rapist Graham Platner. (Platner denies the rape claim…

Read more

22 days ago · 94 likes · 25 comments · Tim Dickinson

Relentless Delivery, Relentlessly Communicated

Siena has Zohran Mamdani at 69% favorable and 24% unfavorable among New York City voters, up 13 and down 10 since April — his highest favorability in their polling. Relentless delivery and relentless communication about that delivery works. Lesson for Dems of any ideological faction.

Also This Week

They are deleting the evidence. The Trump administration made it official this week: it is demolishing the US beneficial ownership registry and deleting all the data it already collected, a disaster for anti-corruption enforcement. This is insane levels of criminality coverup by the Trump administration, and destroying government data should lead to indictments all by itself in 2029.

So many confessions of criminality. Trump bragging about controlling a super PAC would generally be a civil violation on its own, but in combination with charges of bribery — clearly involved with Trump fundraising — this statement would be major evidence for a criminal indictment in 2029.

Orwell would be proud. War is Peace, Hate is Love, Fauci was President in 2020. Rick Scott is out rewriting the history of covid: “So many people died because of Anthony Fauci.” Because of GOP lies, Republicans refusing vaccines died in greater numbers than Democrats. They literally murdered their own voters. Florida in particular was studied for this partisan death rate: after vaccines became widely available in 2021, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.

Trump is politically handing Central America to China. From the Wall Street Journal on Cuba’s China-financed solar buildout: China has replaced the US as the dominant trading partner for most big economies in the Caribbean, and “China gets a lot of goodwill brownie points throughout the region with what they’re doing with Cuba.”

Most people hear “abundance” and assume it means more for the already wealthy. I actually am into a lot of abundance-style YIMBYism. But most people hear the word and they just assume it means more for the already wealthy, while they get stuck paying the bills. See data centers driving up utility bills. So this poll showing Democratic voters prefer populism over abundance is unsurprising.

That such a conservative Dem represents Hawaii is insane. Rep. Ed Case was one of a handful of Democrats last year to back the SAVE Act, and faced a challenger to his left over it. Bolts has good background on why he needs to be replaced.

The media hyping how left-wing El-Sayed is are to the right of the Bush campaign. Matthew Dowd — chief strategist for Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 — points out that nearly every one of El-Sayed’s issue positions is supported by a majority, and that his stands are the center of American politics today.

Why seniors benefit from Medicare for All. Really great point from El-Sayed: young people tend to pay more into insurance than they receive back, and either that excess goes into the pockets of private insurance CEOs, or it could go into the broader Medicare system to make it more sustainable.

This is actually helpful. Former NBA players declaring for the WNBA draft on “self-declaration” grounds shows the difference between transgender women who are living as women — while playing sports as part of that life — versus men being assholes playing games to be predatory assholes.

And if you missed it: I wrote a standalone piece this week on why El-Sayed is a radical — in taking on AI corporate oligarchs, and why his opponents aren’t attacking him for it, since that would just elect him in a landslide.

But where El-Sayed is a self-acknowledged radical is in taking on the mega AI companies. He supports Bernie Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to transfer 50% equity from the largest AI companies into a public fund. But El-Sayed’s policy on AI goes a lot further…a lot further. He wants to subject the AI companies to a range of regulations and most significantly, put those companies under democratic control.

As his campaign site highlights:

Abdul is the only candidate in the Michigan Senate race to support public ownership of AI, and one of the only U.S. Senate candidates to do so nationwide. Notably, he is the first to propose public control of AI.

Why is El-Sayed willing to declare himself the most radical candidate in the country on taking on AI oligarchs?

El-Sayed knows AI companies are the most hated institutions in America

The polling on opposition to AI companies is almost unprecedented. A Public Record survey of ~52,000 Americans found only 15% trust AI companies to make decisions about how AI is developed — the lowest of any institution tested. And this result comes from one of the AI companies (Anthropic).

Other polls have found similar distrust and anger at government’s failure to stop them:

• NBC's March 2026 poll put AI's favorability at just 26%, less popular than ICE, Donald Trump or the Republican Party.

• 71% oppose allowing any AI data center to be built in their community, higher opposition than nuclear plants.

• Annenberg found 65% of voters say government has done "too little" to regulate AI. The same poll found only 17% expect AI's ten-year impact on the US to be positive; 42% said it would be negative.

And Americans want to tax the hell out of AI companies to fund anticipated job losses and other damage from AI.

A Data for Progress poll shows almost three-quarters of voters want AI companies to fund job training and a public jobs program. And these numbers hold up across Democratic and Republican voters; in fact Republican voters were marginally more in favot of taxing AI companies to fund a public jobs program than Democratic voters.

Michigan is already ground zero for the impact of AI data centers, with multi-billion dollar construction being built - and residential utility customers are already facing large increases in their utility bills.

If Mike Rogers and his super PAC supporters attack El-Sayed for his AI policies, that will likely just convert apathetic voters into ardent El-Sayed voters.

I’ve argued that the whole Democratic Party leadership and our candidates should go all-in on attacking AI companies as a key 2026 campaign theme, and this polling shows why everyone should be emulating El-Sayed.

So What is El-Sayed Proposing?

At the end of June, his campaign issued his comprehensive policy, what he calls AI Under Democracy, a comprehensive AI policy platform.

Yes, he wants AI companies to hand over 50% of their equity to the American people but he goes further than Bernie in demanding that public representatives have a voting majority of the board of all the AI companies.

The existing shareholders would still get to profit, but only as passive investors without operational control of the firms. He would also require all AI companies to have corporate charters that require them to sacrifice profit when that clashes with the public interest in safety, civil rights and democratic integrity of our institutions.

As I’ll argue below, I think El-Sayed is being too generous with AI investors, but he is still the most radical serious candidate on this issue of democratic control of AI out there.

El-Sayed also proposes a tax on all companies using AI to automate away jobs, using those funds to train and reemploy workers, as well as expanding unemployment insurance to cover gaps in providing new jobs.

I also appreciate that he wants a requirement that any public board member at these AI firms would be barred from employment at any major tech company after their service to prevent revolving door bribery. It’s a good policy that should be expanded to every regulator across the government. Public service regulating an industry should be the end of any person’s career in that industry.

How He’d Tighten AI Regulation

Beyond taxing AI companies and funding jobs programs, El-Sayed has proposed one of the tightest sets of regulatory standards out there to work to defuse some of the harms of AI in our communities, including:

• Mandatory behavioral “Red-Teaming”- i.e. set up independent testing to stop deception, manipulation, and coercion by AI models before they are deployed.

• Create an independent FDA-style agency to evaluate all models before deployment.

• Biosecurity screening coordinated with CDC, NIH and FEMA to stop models from assisting in bioweapons development

• Domestic authoritarianism prohibition: No mass political surveillance, protected-characteristic predictive policing, or AI targeting of dissent.

• Democracy protections: ban deceptive AI-generated political media with mandatory disclosure of AI-generated political ads and ban on algorithmic disinformation.

• AI can’t replace human oversight on medical care decisions, firing weapons, warrantless surveillance, or hiring and firing decisions.

El-Sayed also recognizes AI is operating in a global system so we need to build a global network to build AI safety into the global political and economic system.

All of this addresses many of the fears voters have about AI and are policies that Democrats should be promoting in every political campaign during the midterms.

El-Sayed is Still Going Too Easy on the AI Oligarchs

In the current debate, I can only applaud El-Sayed’s relative boldness, but I do have to say he ultimately is leaving the tech oligarchy in place - which is a problem.

Letting Elon Musk, Sam Altman and the whole crew of techbros hold onto half the profits of a technology that threatens to swallow the rest of the economy is both economically unjust and dangerous in leaving such concentrated wealth in such a small number of hands.

As I wrote three years ago as the tech was coming into public debate, the problem of AI is that it borrows the sum total of human knowledge using tech funded by public institutions - yet private individuals are grabbing the profits and threatening to wipe out whole sectors of the rest of the economy. They are doing the equivalent of drilling on public land - and even if they pay a bit to the public in taxes or an equity share, the private share they take is not theirs to own.

I’ll write more about this in coming months - I have a book that will come out in the fall (if I meet my deadlines - but we need to be clear-eyed that the whole AI industry is fundamentally a theft from the commons of public knowledge.

So El-Sayed is in fact taking the moderate position on the issue - and I actually think voters who implicitly recognize this theft will treat his proposals that way, as the bare minimum to impose at least some accountability on the AI industry.

But radicalism is often less the policy you start with than being willing to take a longer step than everyone else. And in that, El-Sayed is playing a radical role in moving the debate forward and creating a standard that other candidates will follow.

• Michigan Answered the Dark Money With a Progressive Wave

• Have Moderates Thought About Presenting Compelling Policies Instead?

• Where’s Your Worried Op-Ed About the $117 Million in NYPD Abuse Payouts?

• Seniors Get a Surprise Premium Increase Right Before the Midterms

• Left YIMBYism Is Finally Winning Inside DSA

• Musk Is Buying Eight States, and Somebody Else Cleans Up After Him

• Antisemitism Isn’t the Main Problem in the US. Islamophobia Is Chronic.

• The World Cup Grab Died in a Week, and UEFA Isn’t Accepting the Apology

• Also This Week

Michigan Answered the Dark Money With a Progressive Wave

El-Sayed winning the Senate primary got all the news, but DSA-backed Donovan McKinney defeating incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in the Democratic primary, at least partly over the incumbent’s support of Israel, should be getting more coverage. Thanedar had spent years insulating himself with his own money in a Detroit district. He lost anyway, to a challenger running to his left on Gaza and on economics.

MLive: Donavan McKinney defeats Shri Thanedar in Michigan 13th District primary

Stevens closed with “they might not like how I sound, but I will make sure that Michigan is heard” — but folks funded with tens of millions of AIPAC dollars shouldn’t try to sound like they are part of an oppressed class. What was also remarkable is how substance free so much of her rhetoric was, with no actual policy or political change even mentioned in so much of her pitch.

But honestly, given how tough this primary was, credit to Stevens for a quick and strong endorsement of Abdul once results came in. Aside from Israel, she has been a good liberal vote in the House, so glad to see this.

Left, liberal, centrist, non-insane GOP — removing MAGA control of the House and Senate is the only way to gain the power to stop a Trump coup, which WILL come if the GOP keeps control of Congress. Folks have the right to hate on any candidate they want in primaries, but the calculus should shift in the general election to doing everything needed to get a Dem majority in the House and Senate.

Now for the general. El-Sayed’s answer to the foreigner-baiting is already the right one: “If all Mike Rogers got is that his name is Abdul and my name is Mike, you’re gonna be surprised how many people are like, yeah, but that’s the Abdul who wants to bring down the price of my groceries and make sure I got healthcare.” So make it “Mike from Florida.” That should be social media’s label for Mike Rogers in every mention, mocking him for moving to Florida immediately after leaving Congress and only reclaiming Michigan residency to run for Senate. Nice counterpoint to foreigner-baiting El-Sayed.

Have Moderates Thought About Presenting Compelling Policies Instead?

Last week it was Rahm Emanuel in the Wall Street Journal and the Bulwark warning that democratic socialists were a gift to MAGA.

This week the repellant Third Way stepped in with an announced oppo budget. The Times reported that moderate Democrats are preparing for “war” against an ascendant left, and Third Way said the $15 million it plans to spend through 2028 not on fighting Trump, but to attack DSA as a “mortal danger” for Democrats. The money buys opposition research into DSA, polling, social media programs, and “educating” Democratic activists and leaders. It targets both open democratic socialists and people like El-Sayed, accused of performing the “D.S.A. dodge.”

New York Times: Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

Have moderates thought instead about presenting compelling policies more appealing to voters? Instead of going to war against the left, why not attract votes by going to war against insurance companies gouging patients, against employers busting unions, or against polluters?

This is not a hypothetical ask. Obama “went to war” against the left not by attacking them but by piecing together Obamacare as a compelling enough alternative to single payer to satisfy Democratic voters. Biden passed the IRA green jobs bill as an alternative to the Green New Deal. Both of them challenged the left by responding with attractive policy options, not by hiring researchers to dig up dirt on it. More of that by moderates.

Third Way should be tossed out of party meetings if they spend tens of millions THIS YEAR doing opposition research on DSA rather than research against GOP-allied groups. That this is their top priority reflects their role as corporate moles inside the Democratic Party, not as actual Dem partisans. The Times piece even concedes the obvious risk in its own last line: how the discrediting campaign will affect the midterms, “potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress — remains unclear.” They are spending $15 million on an effect they cannot rule out will help Republicans.

Where’s Your Worried Op-Ed About the $117 Million paid out to cover NYPD abuses?

USA Today ran an opinion piece this week calling Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores “a socialist trap,” on the theory that NYC taxpayers will take the hit subsidizing discounts they may never even use. Fine. New Yorkers had to subsidize the $117 million that the NYPD paid out for misconduct lawsuits in 2025 alone, even though most of them were never personally abused by a cop. Where’s your worried op-ed on that one?

The test for whether a public expenditure gets called a “trap” shouldn’t be whether every voter uses it, but whether it serves a public policy goal voters support. Most voters think families getting an affordable diet is a goal, but USA Today thinks attacking that goal is worth a headline but restraining police abuse doesn’t.

Seniors Get a Surprise Premium Increase Announced Right Before the Midterms

Young people are the most pissed at Trump of any group. But that may change with this: Trump is moving to end a subsidy program to stabilize premiums of Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, in which nearly 25 million people are enrolled.

MS NOW: Trump’s Medicare change comes at a curious time

The administration downplays this as “only” $20 per month more for prescription drug coverage, which is $240 per year. But researchers at KFF estimate that some Part D enrollees may face larger but unknown costs of coverage, with some seeing a $50 per month increase already in pilot states. If Florida’s Senate seat wasn’t in play before this, it sure as hell will be now, with seniors seeing a surprise increase in monthly premiums announced just before the midterms.

And the coverage losses due to Trump’s broader attacks on health care are already showing up in hospital finances. The number of people with ACA plans fell by about 2.6 million as of February compared with a year earlier, and CBO projects a further 4.1 million people will lose coverage in 2027. Hospitals who must treat people in emergency rooms often don’t get paid. Uninsured patients skip preventive care or early detection and end up in far more costly emergency visits. Banner Health’s CEO Amy Perry said the system has seen uninsured patients stop coming in for preventive tests and regular checkups, and the nonprofit expects a rising need for serious emergency care later this year. That is the whole policy in one sentence: cheaper coverage now, sicker patients and unpaid emergency bills in eighteen months.

Wall Street Journal: The Rising Number of Uninsured Patients Starts to Hit Hospitals

Left YIMBYism Is Finally Winning Inside DSA

As someone who has been arguing for left YIMBYism for decades — I had a piece in Jacobin on this over a decade ago — DSA-aligned candidates promoting left YIMBY housing policy makes me so very happy. Nithya Raman, running for mayor of Los Angeles, told Vanity Fair that housing is her main difference with DSA. And she emphasizes the idea that you can’t be pro-immigrant and against more housing.

That last point is the one that took the longest to land on the left. A city that welcomes immigrants and refuses to build for them is running a housing lottery where the newest arrivals lose. Supply is not a right-wing idea, and rent control plus social housing plus abundant construction is not a contradiction. It only looked like one because American housing politics got organized around defending whatever was already built.

Musk Is Buying Eight States, and Somebody Else Cleans Up After Him

Musk has authorized his super PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million on a new field program in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, a year after threatening to start a third party. America PAC is targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio to start, with conversations about North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas.

Democrats need to run against “Musk and the AI oligarchs forcing data centers and untested tech on our kids.” We need to make Musk’s spending, and other oligarch money, so toxic that it hurts the candidates they spend the money on. And Dems need to run against the whole Epstein corporate class funding Trump’s regime and subverting our democracy with their billions. Nine figures only works as an advantage if nobody makes the donor the issue.

Meanwhile, Musk declined Zelensky’s request for a meeting during the Ukrainian president’s visit to the US, a meeting Zelensky wanted in order to discuss a plan to destroy ballistic missile launchers in Russia. Another reason every decent nation should dump Starlink and SpaceX services as quickly as substitutes are available.

And a discarded SpaceX rocket finished a year of aimless drifting by smashing into the Moon at 5,400 mph. Why isn’t Musk responsible for retrieving his garbage?

Musk always depends on public subsidies of his businesses, so someone else will have to clean up all the garbage produced by his cheap, sloppy launch tech.

Antisemitism Isn’t the Main Problem in the US. Islamophobia Is Chronic.

Monty Fritts is a state representative in Tennessee running for governor on banning mosques. If any Democrat was running for governor on banning synagogues, it would be a national drumbeat of Dems denouncing the candidate. But no one will demand GOP leaders denounce this guy, because antisemitism isn’t the main problem in the US and Islamophobia is chronic.

The softer version ran in the New York Times the same week. A style piece about the next Met Gala honoring John Galliano, the designer infamous for an antisemitic rant, somehow found room for a paragraph noting that “antisemitism is on the rise, and some Jewish New Yorkers are uneasy with the leadership of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, most recently after the stabbing of two men last week in broad daylight, one of whom was leaving a Jewish community center.”

Whatever concerns there are about antisemitism, what is clear is rising anti-Muslim bigotry, since the desire to negatively tag a Muslim mayor with a completely unrelated story is clear bigotry.

New York Times: Next Met Gala Show Will Honor John Galliano

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency ran a piece arguing Mamdani has made it impossible for liberal Zionists to protest Netanyahu’s UN visit.

But since the writer says “we make clear that we stand with Israelis like former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, former prime ministers Naftali Bennett” — who oppose any Palestinian state — this is coming from a writer who may oppose murdering children, but still supports Apartheid. The issue is not Netanyahu but the Israeli people who have supported racist Occupation since 1967. Netanyahu is a war criminal, and Mamdani said that truth and upset some liberal Zionists, but the rest of Israeli leadership are just as committed to denying Palestinians any self-determination.

And Stephen Miller announced an executive order expanding the categories of people ineligible for birthright citizenship, including “people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments.”

I think stripping citizenship from the children of all AIPAC staff is a bit extreme, but what comes around goes around. But of course I joke, since racist policy means this will be applied to Muslims and other brown people but never to the largest foreign lobby trying to buy US elections.

The World Cup Grab Died in a Week, and UEFA Isn’t Accepting the Apology

The plan to hand control of FIFA to Jared Kushner’s brother appears dead. Infantino scrapped the private investment proposal after the opposition became universal. And the question now is whether Infantino’s goal of reelection as head of FIFA is also dead, given anger at not just the proposal but the failure to consult with regional federations in drafting it.

BBC Sport: Gianni Infantino scraps private investment proposal after widespread opposition

The apology didn’t buy him an exit either. European soccer continues the FIFA boycott, pretty much saying the World Cup is dead as long as Infantino is in charge. And UEFA demands some kind of permanent structural safeguard against future privatization moves — not a promise from the current president, but a rule that survives him.

Also This Week

Line-item every dollar. Don Moynihan documented that more than a trillion dollars flows through the federal government in grants, and that the Trump administration has been directing those grants on purely partisan grounds, denying them to blue states. So stop sending discretionary grants through the states, which allows two levels of partisan bias. Line-item every dollar with clear federal rules that send money directly to individuals, school districts, and local governments for specific purposes.

Project 2025 couldn’t kill Head Start, so they’re gutting it by rule. Congress refused to eliminate the program, so the Trump administration is eliminating every regulatory standard instead, including allowing unlimited class sizes, turning it into nothing more than a babysitting service.

So many diaries of Anne Frank will be written by immigrant children about the Nazi Trump era. A comprehensive survey of farmworkers found 61% have shopped less and almost a third said they have not sought medical care when they needed it, out of fear of leaving the house.

The defeat of right-wing initiatives in multiple states should be a big story. Missouri Amendment 5, which would have eliminated the state income tax that supplies more than 60% of general revenue, lost 82.4% to 17.6%. Attention to all Dem tax cut slopulists.

Bessent declared the gap between rich and poor “dead.” A report by the Bank of America Institute found the gap between the top and bottom ends of the income scale was the largest since 2015. Bessent is firmly in the “you know he is lying when his lips move” category.

Trump pressured Panama to kick China out of Panama ports. The result is hundreds of Panama-flagged ships getting detained for “safety” issues, causing significant disruptions to global trade. China demonstrating again its power over global trade.

Norway taxes oil production at nearly 80%. Oil is a majority of its foreign exports, and Norway now has a government-run sovereign wealth fund four times as large as its GDP. Trying to pretend that’s not a version of socialism becomes an exercise in semantics at some point.

The Treasury did not declare the US insolvent. Another idiot budget headline ignoring the fact that the “assets” of the federal government include the ability to tax the immense income of corporations and the wealthy. There is no budgetary crisis, just a crisis of political will.

“Free speech” now means the right of corporations to lie to consumers. A federal judge figures that using the misleading recycling symbol is probably protected speech. Years ago the Supreme Court said advertising by corporations was free speech and could not be banned, such as for alcohol. This is where that ends up.

NEW PEACE DEAL WITH IRAN, and not by Trump. Oman and Iran seem to have negotiated a deal where Iran will control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz with Oman getting a share of the tolls.

US wars tend to breed the next one. On reports that the US and Israel are considering an Iran land blockade: “Iran borders a whole bunch of countries, and Iraq is very aligned with Iran.” The US ousted Saddam to put an Iran-aligned government in power in Iraq, and while fighting Russia, supported the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

And if you missed it: I wrote a standalone piece this week on why, with Europe now massively expanding its own military spending, the US is hiking military spending instead of slashing it.

Then, on July 22, in a last flurry of business before a month-long recess, the House voted to raise it again for next year. It passed next year’s defense authorization by 216 to 212, six Democrats crossing over: $1.1 trillion for 2027, built around the $1.15 trillion in discretionary spending Trump requested. Hours later it advanced a separate $95 billion budget blueprint by 216 to 214, with more than $70 billion for the war against Iran, $12 billion for farmers hurt by the trade war, and money to implement Trump’s election overhaul bill. Both are a down payment on the administration’s full 2027 request, which would fund defense at $1.5 trillion.

That war has cost $37.5 billion so far by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own accounting, and CSIS puts the full bill at roughly $40 billion. Eighteen American service members are dead and nearly 500 wounded. Gas is back above four dollars a gallon.

Adjusted for inflation, the Pentagon’s 1985 request was the peak of the post-Korean War era and came to $717 billion in today’s money, by the Congressional Budget Office’s accounting. The 2026 request — this year — is $961 billion, and the pending supplemental would carry it to roughly $1,028 billion. The only year that ever ran higher was 2010, at $1,007 billion, when the US was moving towards 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan and 50,000 were still in Iraq. This year matches the peak of two ground wars. There is no such war. Trump’s request for next year would be more than double what the country spent facing the Soviet Union.

Why isn’t the United States cutting military spending? Every justification ever offered for spending at this level has been overtaken by events, yet Congress keeps rolling over for more and more wasteful, destructive defense spending that just empowers reckless adventurism by presidents.

The threats keep shrinking and the budget keeps growing

The justification that built the permanent war economy was Europe. The continent lay in ruins after 1945, unable to defend itself, with the Red Army sitting in the middle of it. Whatever you think of how the Cold War was fought, that was a real argument about a real situation. Thirty Soviet divisions in East Germany were not a fantasy.

But the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. There was supposed to be a peace dividend, and for a few years there was something like one. Then it stopped.

What refilled the space was terrorism. September 11 produced two wars, and the wars produced a new reason for the budget to keep growing. Neither war was fought against the people who attacked us. Iraq had no operational tie to al-Qaeda and no weapons program, and the occupation manufactured ISIS out of the wreckage. Afghanistan began as a manhunt for a few hundred men and became a twenty-year project to build a government that collapsed in eleven days. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the direct bill at roughly $8 trillion, more than $10 trillion counting veterans’ care owed through 2050, against upward of 900,000 dead. The overwhelming majority of those dead were not Americans, were not combatants, and had nothing to do with September 11. The Taliban run Kabul.

Those wars didn’t fail for want of funding. They failed because they were the wrong wars, chosen by administrations that could reach for military force without persuading anyone first. Every year they failed, the budget grew.

China is another current nominal reason. SIPRI puts American spending at 2.8 times China’s in 2025, $954 billion against an estimated $336 billion, and that is at market exchange rates before anyone counts the allies. Set this year’s $1.043 trillion against China, Russia and Iran together, which come to $533 billion, and the United States outspends every country it names as an adversary by 96 percent. Add the nine next-largest militaries outside Europe and North America, including many nominal allies like India and Japan and Israel and Brazil, and the twelve of them together still spend less than the United States alone. Nothing in that comparison explains a 40 percent increase.

Sources: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, Apr. 2026; CRS R48891; FY2026 NDAA; CSIS; Quincy Institute Policy Note 25.

Europe stopped being an excuse and nobody adjusted

The longest-running excuse is Europe. American presidents have spent seventy years explaining that we carry the load because the allies couldn’t or wouldn’t. Every one of them from Eisenhower forward complained about it, and every one of them kept paying anyway.

Europe has now called the bluff. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine accomplished in three years what decades of American hectoring couldn’t, and the continent rearmed.

In 2014, NATO’s European members plus Canada spent $278.9 billion in constant 2021 dollars, 1.40 percent of their combined GDP. By 2025 that reached $571.2 billion and 2.31 percent, with NATO projecting $633.9 billion and 2.53 percent for 2026. In real terms Europe and Canada have more than doubled their military spending in eleven years, up 104.8 percent. In 2025 alone they added roughly $90 billion in constant dollars, a 19 percent jump in a single year, and for the first time every member cleared the 2 percent floor Washington had been demanding since 2006.

Source: NATO, Defence Investment of NATO Countries (2014–2026), July 2026, Tables 2–4.

The American share of total NATO military spending dropped from 72.8 percent in 2014 to a projected 57.3 percent in 2026.

Presidents for seventy years said this was the outcome they wanted so the US could reduce its own spending. I would argue Europe is itself spending too much given Russia spends far less - but the main point is that Trump’s response to more spending by Europe was to propose the largest military budget any country has ever assembled.

Any excuse for the scale of past US defense spending is gone. Europe is not devastated, not defenseless, and not free-riding. Yet the Pentagon number in Washington keeps going up.

War Profiteers Keep Concocting New Justifications for Endless Military Spending

We spent to contain the Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union ceased to exist we spent more. We spent to fight terrorism, fought two wars against countries that weren’t the terrorists, and when those wars ended in defeat we spent more. We spent because Europe couldn’t defend itself, and when Europe doubled its military budget we spent more.

At some point the pattern is the policy- more war no matter the real threat, no matter what allies are doing.

None of this departs from American history. As I argued in this piece, this is a country that expanded across a continent by killing the people living on it, whose nineteenth-century federal government amounted to an army killing native Americans with a post office attached, and which moved without pause from continental conquest to projecting force everywhere else. The permanent war budget didn’t begin as an answer to Stalin. Stalin was the occasion for formalizing something this country had been doing since its founding. The threats get recruited to fit the budget.

Real problem is Congress Won’t Specify What the Military Can Spend Money on- So Presidents Invent New Wars

None of this is an argument against any intervention abroad. It’s an argument that intervention should happen only when Congress votes for it and not otherwise.

Congress hands the Pentagon money in enormous, loosely defined accounts and then lets the Secretary of Defense move it around. A transfer shifts money between accounts, a reprogramming shifts it within one, and the statute permits either for “a higher priority item, based on unforeseen military requirements,” language elastic enough to cover anything an administration wants covered. The Secretary must “promptly notify” Congress. Notify. After the money is gone.

The first Trump administration showed what that authority is worth by moving billions in appropriated defense dollars to build border wall Congress had specifically refused to fund. House appropriators eventually cut general reprogramming authority from $4 billion to $1 billion, which is the right instinct at a comic scale, given that the Pentagon filed a $4.3 billion reprogramming request this July alone.

And Congress keeps widening the hole. Last year’s reconciliation act handed the Pentagon $156 billion available for obligation all the way to September 2029, and provided it, in CBO’s words, “through broad thematic sections rather than appropriation titles and accounts,” which “gives DoD greater-than-usual latitude in using the authorized funds.” That is the line-item structure being deliberately removed. Nor is the money doing what it was sold as doing. CBO found that base-budget acquisition funding came in 9 percent below the previous year while total acquisition funding rose 18 percent, a pattern that means the reconciliation billions are substituting for appropriations Congress would otherwise have itemized rather than adding to them.

Look at what that flexibility has bought in eighteen months. Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis in the spring of 2025. At least 111 strikes in Somalia over the year, more than the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations managed combined. An airstrike in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day, with Trump promising in January that if the killing of Christians continued it would become “a many-time strike.” Thirty-five strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2, killing 115 people, most of them never identified; when a bill reached the Senate floor in October to require congressional approval for further strikes, Republicans voted it down. In January, Delta Force commandos took the president of Venezuela out of his residence in Caracas and flew him to New York, an operation involving more than 150 aircraft that congressional leaders learned about after it had begun. And now Iran.

Not one of those required a vote.

Sources: congressional authorization records; CRS reports on the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs; CFR guide to second-term strikes.

Problem is Trump spends money that wasn’t authorized - and refuses to spend money mandated by Congress. In 2019 Trump withheld $391 million in security assistance Congress had appropriated for Ukraine, using it to extort a foreign government into smearing a domestic rival. The Government Accountability Office found the withholding illegal under the Impoundment Control Act. The House impeached him for it. The constitutional system fired its heaviest available weapon at exactly this conduct.

It accomplished nothing.

Congress appropriated Ukraine aid again in the fiscal 2026 budget and Trump signed it into law. By July, $400 million of it still hadn’t moved, and the delivery schedule his own administration sent Congress runs to September 2029, past the end of his term. Across foreign aid generally the administration has clawed back some $13 billion that Congress enacted, much of it through what Russell Vought calls “pocket rescissions”: send Congress a cancellation request so late in the fiscal year that the money dies whether Congress agrees or not. GAO says the maneuver is illegal. It is being run at more than thirty times the dollar value of the conduct he was impeached for, and nobody in Washington expects a consequence.

He spends what he wasn’t given and refuses to spend what he was. Six new military campaigns in two years, none of them authorized, funded out of balances nobody voted to spend that way — while the one war Congress actually chose to help fight goes unsupplied because the president would rather it didn’t happen.

Fifty years of War Powers Act reform have gone nowhere against this. The Act asks a president to seek permission for something he has already been funded to do. Every administration since Nixon has treated it as advisory and the courts refuse to enforce it. Impeachment sits at the other end of the same failure, a sanction that arrives after the money is spent or withheld, and one this Congress has demonstrated it will not apply twice. Permission statutes and after-the-fact punishment can’t constrain a president when the money moves regardless of the answer.

Cut it, then line-item what’s left

Two changes, and neither works without the other.

Cut the budget, deeply. Quincy’s Active Denial study, written by a panel of military and policy analysts, found that even an aggressive strategy built on denying Chinese regional aggression, still forward-deployed and technologically dominant, could run about $150 billion a year below what we were spending in 2022, and more than $230 billion below with deeper ground-force cuts premised on the smaller American role in Europe that European rearmament now makes possible. Many other cuts in bases abroad and useless weapon systems could also dramatically cut the defense budget.

Then line-item what remains. Every dollar appropriated to the Pentagon should carry a stated purpose, with transfer and reprogramming authority cut to near zero and unlocked only by an affirmative vote. The obligation has to bind on both sides: money Congress appropriates for Ukraine gets delivered on Congress’s schedule, with the Impoundment Control Act given teeth that survive a hostile executive. If a president wants to shift money from Pacific readiness to a Middle East bombing campaign, he comes back and asks. Not notifies. Asks.

That sounds radical but should be the most ordinary arrangement imaginable- and is exactly the one imagined by the drafters of the Constitution and what the American people expect. It is how appropriations law already is supposed to work for every other federal agency. The Pentagon is the carve-out, and the carve-out was justified by a Cold War emergency that ended thirty-five years ago.

A smaller budget would leave fewer loose balances lying around to start a war with. Tight line items keep the remaining balances from being repurposed into one, or quietly strangled when the president dislikes what Congress bought. Together they restore the constitutional design without amending a word of it. Congress decides what the military is for, and a president who wants it doing something else has to win a vote first.

Europe spent a decade doing precisely what this country demanded, doubling its military budget. If the stated reasons for the Cold War military budget were the real reasons, that would have triggered an American drawdown and a fight over what to do with the savings. Housing, health care, the climate transition, take your pick.

Instead the House votes to spend more, and the argument that built the whole apparatus has been retired without a funeral. There is no version of this where another trillion dollars makes anyone safer.

What it guarantees is that the next president who wants a war will find the money already on the table, appropriated by a Congress that never voted for it and will never be asked to.

That needs to end if Democrats retake Congress in the fall.

In this issue:

• They Admitted They Cut Off the States That Didn’t Vote for Trump

• Global Soccer Told the Kushners to Shove Their $20 Billion

• Hope Florida Could Take Down Florida Senator Ashley Moody

• Japan’s Tariff Money Is Building a Power Plant for OpenAI

• SpaceX Is One of the All-Time Worst IPOs in History

• The Demand That the Left Liquidate Itself Is Insane

• Anonymous Oligarchs Are Renting Influencers by the Post

• AIPAC Cut Off 18 of Its Own Candidates

• Farm Aid Goes Out by Acreage

• Also This Week

They Admitted They Cut Off the States That Didn’t Vote for Trump

Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether those states backed Trump in the 2024 election. They put it in a filing. Pure violation of first amendment rights, voting rights and statutory spending rules — and everyone involved should be headed for jail, but will likely just get promoted in the Trump administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/business/trump-state-grants-canceled.html

Trump’s general partisan attacks on state funding also show why Democrats have to radically reduce presidential discretion in funding, and force more of it into line-item approval by Congress. Self-interested logrolling prevents this kind of complete state discrimination in the House and Senate. Every member wants theirs, and that greed is the friction that stops a president from redlining half the country. Discretion handed to the executive is discretion handed to whoever holds the grudge list.

The energy grants aren’t the only place the grudge list shows up. Look at what he’s already doing with disaster money. Presidential approval rates for disaster requests from Democratic-led states tracked close to the rate for Republican-led states from Reagan straight through Biden, and then in Trump’s second term the Democratic-state line falls off a cliff while Republican states stay up near 90%. This graph highlights why the Electoral College and gerrymandering are terrible and need to be abolished. If parties had to fight for every vote in every state and in every city, neither party could afford to write off any state, any city, or ignore rural regions or urban areas. Safe territory is what makes punishing the other guy’s territory cost-free.

Global Soccer Told the Kushners to Shove Their $20 Billion

Background: Jared Kushner’s brother was heading a group planning a $20 billion corporation that would take over de facto operations of the World Cup and related FIFA games. No doubt with Trump involvement behind the scenes given his closeness with Infantino.

https://apnews.com/article/world-cup-fifa-investors-kushner-infantino-uefa-8345e0864e3a217632733810c232b423

And then it blew up in their faces. The Infantino-Trump plan to privatize the World Cup was met by a promise from European teams to boycott all future World Cup tournaments if the plan is not immediately scrapped. UEFA’s own statements are absolute opposition to any private corporate investments in FIFA — not a negotiating position, a refusal.

Within about an hour, CONCACAF — the North American, Central American and Caribbean confederation — publicly rejected the FIFA proposal as well. Notably US Soccer tweeted out its support for the CONCACAF decision, which was unanimous. So Trump is going to be pissed that he couldn’t even influence US Soccer to sign up for this corporate grift.

Hope Florida Could Take Down Florida Senator Ashley Moody

Progressive social media really should be going harder on highlighting the Hope Florida scandal. It’s an issue that serves multiple Democratic messaging goals all at once:

• It helps take out a vulnerable GOP Senator up for reelection.

• It exposes the hypocrisy of the GOP’s “blue state fraud” meme.

• It hurts Ron DeSantis’s image.

• And it puts the emphasis where it belongs, on systematic GOP political attacks on Medicaid.

CBS reports that Ashley Moody did precisely what the entire GOP has accused Tim Walz of doing, and yet somehow that crack fraud task force has not arrested the GOP nominee for Senate. As Florida attorney general, it was Moody and her office that approved the diversion of $10 million of taxpayer money to the Hope Florida Foundation.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-senator-ashley-moody-faces-renewed-scrutiny-over-her-role-in-hope-florida-scandal/

Democrats have had their hearts broken by Florida so many times, starting with Bush v. Gore in 2000, that I think we’ve given up on winning there. But this is a massive scandal that could really take down Moody and give the seat to the Dems. A Medicaid settlement laundered through a charity into a political committee is not a subtle story to tell voters.

Japan’s Tariff Money Is Building a Power Plant for OpenAI

Japan is investing in a power plant on federal land in Ohio — a plant that could provide “enough to power several million homes” but that instead will deliver it to Trump’s buddies at OpenAI, using federal land to bypass any local zoning opposition.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-in-talks-with-openai-to-guarantee-250-billion-financing-for-data-center-3dd6eae3

Follow the sequence. Trump got the money by extracting investments from Japan through his illegal tariffs, is committing federal land without Congressional approval, and is deciding to give the power to OpenAI and Nvidia instead of local Ohio consumers without any local input. Just a complete evisceration of democracy. This is crony capitalism on steroids, with Trump trashing all our trade relationships to extract payoffs from Japan so he can build power plants for AI companies without any democratic input or oversight from Congress or local governments.

It’s Schoolhouse Rock on a bad acid trip.

The tariffs aren’t doing what he says either. Trump isn’t using tariffs to protect US jobs or lower prices. He’s using tariff threats to protect his tech oligarch donors from facing fines for their illegal maneuvers in Europe — after the EU fined Google €890 million, he threatened “substantial” tariffs over Brussels supposedly “robbing” American companies and taxpayers. Trump is just a mob boss collecting rent for his goodfellas.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/24/trump-european-union-tariffs

And the Commerce Department quietly announced seven new equity stakes in private companies this week, more than $870 million in federal semiconductor incentives traded for minority stakes.

If we didn’t know Trump is involved in insider trading around the companies the US is handing these awards to, I’d actually be applauding the US demanding equity for public tax dollar investments. Public money should buy public ownership. But we know this is MAGA grift and backdoor corruption, which is how a genuinely good idea gets poisoned for a generation.

SpaceX Is One of the All-Time Worst IPOs in History

Last week the underwriters were all still saying buy. This week somebody put a number on it. SpaceX is one of the all-time worst performing IPOs in history, and we should be holding hearings on what corruption of NASDAQ allowed them to load up retirement accounts with this turkey in defiance of past rules and procedures. Barron’s ranked its performance among the worst post-IPO trajectories for a mega-cap company in decades, worse than 90% of all major U.S. listings since 2009, at an 88x price-to-sales ratio.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/spacex-stock-ipo-worst-performance-years-d7144934

SpaceX is already a bloodbath for early investors, which includes everyone holding NASDAQ and similar ETFs that broke their own rules and added SpaceX without any delays. S&P retrospectively gets credit for refusing to do that.

Aside from the schadenfreude of Musk losing, the real significance is investors starting to panic. It “underscores the market’s reassessment of valuation multiples for companies with high capex requirements” — ie., ridiculous PE ratios may start to crash across the whole market.

None of this happened without US taxpayers subsidizing Musk’s whole operation. Musk’s wealth was built on government subsidies, for EVs and for rocket launches. The problem is that Musk was smart enough to see these new government-subsidized markets when few others did, but he faces lots of competitors for the robots and AI that are used to justify his skyhigh stock valuations.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/business/musk-trillionaire-government-tesla-spacex

Tesla in particular looks ripe for a crash, since China is now eating his lunch in car markets and there is little evidence he’s delivering either the robotaxis or the robots he keeps promising are right around the corner. Even his cult investors seem to be losing patience. It’s just weird that people treat Musk’s non-existent robot product as anything to take seriously. Tesla is a way-overpriced car company rapidly losing market share globally to Chinese competitors, and the Cybertruck was one of the most miserable car launches in history.

The Demand That the Left Liquidate Itself Is Insane

Rahm Emanuel got the Wall Street Journal op-ed page this week to warn that the “Bernie Bros” could spoil the Democrats’ midterms, on the theory that Republicans will make even moderate opponents answer for the radical views of DSA candidates. The argument here is not that moderates are better candidates in swing districts. The argument is that the left should liquidate itself since its very existence helps the GOP. Given that Bernie is the most popular elected official in the nation, the argument itself is stupid — but the demand is insane.

The Bulwark ran its own version a day later, headlined “The DSA Is a Gift to MAGA.” Run the causation the other way and it holds up better. The biggest gift to MAGA are moderates who offer nothing to excite voters, which leaves left candidates an almost open runway to attract attention to policies that would benefit average voters. Stop whining and offer policy and vision that excites people.

One correction to the media frame while we’re here.

Brad Lander, while a past member of DSA, built his career and won his House seat with the support of the Working Families Party, not DSA. And he’s out helping state branches of Working Families flip districts across the country, including in California. There’s disproportionate media focus on DSA versus the work of other left groups like the Working Families Party across the US.

Anonymous Oligarchs Are Renting Influencers by the Post

A dark money campaign is offering influencers $1,500 per post to attack Abdul El-Sayed and support Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. Same exact dollar figure that was reportedly paid to attack Kat Abughazaleh, and nobody ever found out who was paying for that campaign either. Just complete corruption of our democracy that anonymous oligarchs can spend unlimited money AND hide what they are doing behind the pretend front of supposed independent social influencers. Stevens is the candidate of oligarchy if she doesn’t denounce this.

https://www.ms.now/news/haley-stevens-michigan-senate-paid-influencer-campaign

Seems like a broader effort to build up a roster of influencers who create credibility posting on “affordability” and then shift in the fall to support whichever candidates the dark money funders want to promote. The whole social media infrastructure is increasingly just corporate and political astroturf. Disclosure law was written for television ads, and the money knows it.

AIPAC Cut Off 18 of Its Own — and Americans Want Netanyahu Arrested

AIPAC cut off 18 of its own endorsed candidates for voting to end U.S. military aid to Israel over the violence in Gaza. Fifteen are running for reelection.

AIPAC’s list is now 71% Republican, 29% Democrat. Honestly, kudos to the candidates who got cut off, voting their conscience despite losing the AIPAC money. And the remaining AIPAC candidates should understand they are de facto tools of a Republican superPAC now.

The polling explains why the money is losing its grip.

Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Benjamin Netanyahu by a +22 margin: 49-27 overall, 58-17 among 18-to-29-year-olds, 55-20 among independents, and 23% of Trump voters agree.

Funny how Mamdani is treated as a bizarre radical outlier for saying this, when he reflects the broad views of the American people. Netanyahu is a mass murderer and war criminal, and it’s just soft-on-crime elites who oppose his arrest.

Mark Kelly went the other way on Meet the Press, saying he’s “always going to stand by” Israel, denying the Gaza genocide, downgrading Bibi’s conduct to “some mistakes,” and criticizing Mamdani for calling Netanyahu a war criminal. Kind of glad he said this, since it basically removes him from the 2028 race — even Israel moderates won’t want to blow up the party on this hard a position on Israel.

Farm Aid Goes Out by Acreage, So the Richest Farmers Get the Most

If Congress approves Trump’s latest request, US farmers will receive $55.4 billion in subsidies this year — roughly $360 per taxpayer if spread across 153.8 million US taxpayers. This aid will disproportionately go to millionaire farmers, even as the rest of working class Americans get nothing to deal with the high costs of Trump’s tariffs and wars. Dems are cowering in fear of being called anti-rural, but they should be denouncing this welfare for rich farmers.

The mechanism isn’t a mystery. Farm aid is distributed based on acreage, so by definition the largest, richest farmers get the most. In 2025, the top 10% of farms received 59% of all commodity subsidies, while the smallest 80% of recipients only got 22% of payments. Rural poverty is the marketing; land ownership is the payout formula.

Also This Week

Musk went to court for the right to make deepfake porn. SpaceX-owned xAI sued the Minnesota AG to block a state law banning “nudify” apps that generate non-consensual intimate images of real people, including minors. Elon Musk defending the free speech right to sexually harass and humiliate women by creating AI porn images of them — and the Christian right that worries about drag queens in public life defends him. Given how courts have twisted the First Amendment into a tool for corporations to promote toxic assaults on other people and undermine elections with oligarchic spending, wiping out the MAGA court majority is needed to restore “free speech” as a right of people, not corporations.

A complete war on public service. Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money you won’t be able to get a student loan. Which declares that if you want to work serving low-income communities as a social worker or any other low-paying public job, you won’t be allowed to borrow to train for it.

Trump at 34%, and 66% disapproval. The approval number isn’t what interests me, since some other polls have gone that low. But 66% disapproval means a chunk of what used to be his base are not just undecided but actively disapproving now. GOP should be panicking.

$104 million back into delivery workers’ pockets. Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%, and tips for delivery workers fell 79%. In January the city made them change the apps. Six months later that’s $104 million directly into the pockets of workers. That’s how you deal with the affordability crisis.

The Epstein Class is running MAGA. Rep. Max Miller is accused not just of domestic abuse against his wife, the daughter of Ohio’s other GOP Senator, but of domestic abuse against their 2-year-old daughter. Sen. Jon Husted stared off into space when asked whether Miller should end his reelection bid. This is the party that throws immigrant children in cages and excuses its elected leaders of abusing infants.

“Demilitarize the police” beats “defund.” All but the fringe think there needs to be restraint on crime, but that para-military methods of current policing undermine justice. And it’s bizarre to claim Russia DIDN’T have militarized police — it’s the GOP that copies Nazi and Stalinist policing.

AOC is now a main contender. New Hampshire notoriously predicts nothing about the final nomination, but it does usually highlight who will be a real player in the nomination battle, and AOC just surged to 22% there. As an early AOC booster, obviously happy to see that.

SAG-AFTRA came out against the Paramount-Warner merger. Workers, shareholders, states and a range of other communities recognize this merger will undermine both competition and creative freedom in the merged company. And there’s not an argument available on how it benefits anyone other than the oligarchic interests of the Ellisons.

Wiped his phone, and they want him jailed for it. The government’s position is that you tricked us into destroying data on your phone after we illegally tried to search it. No one can hold us accountable for our criminal activity, but we get to throw you in jail for making us stupidly destroy your data.

GM’s CEO introduced Trump at his rally. Luckily I don’t own a car, but I’d definitely be dropping GM from my shopping list for sponsoring this hate rally.

Trump reopened the Saudi-Yemen war. The Iran War reopened the Saudi-Yemen war that raged through his first term. The Biden administration helped broker a peace in 2022 that also improved Iran-Saudi relations. Now Trump has destroyed both, and oil prices and mass death in Yemen are both likely to spike.

And the State Department mislabeled every country in Africa. At a global AIDS conference in Brazil, no less, on a chart that got shared everywhere. We have idiots running the US government, embarrassing us everywhere in the world.

That might seem counterintuitive - but look at the current reality.

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We Have a War in Iran Because Israel is Not Safe

The original promise of Israel was that, out of the horror of the Holocaust, Israel would create a safe haven for Jews in the world.

Yet Israel is not at all a safe place for Jews; in fact, it’s the least safe place on earth for Jews. Trump and Netanyahu launched a war on Iran out of deadly fear of Iran getting a nuclear weapon and relentless ongoing fear of Hamas, Hezbollah and war with neighbors like Iran seems to choke Israeli residents with insane fear.

Or at least insanity due to fear is the most justified psychological explanation for the mass murder launched by the Israeli regime that has committed some of the most horrific war crimes possible.

In the wake of those crimes, a one-state solution would restore safety to, for lack of a better word, the Jewish soul, which is being eroded daily by the culpability of Jewish leaders in Israeli and abroad in supporting the genocide in Gaza.

But forget the soul and look at the Jewish body count. Since Israel’s establishment, nowhere have Jews died in greater numbers than in Israel. Every promise that a Jewish homeland would be a place of safety has turned out to be a lie.

Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers have died in repeated Israeli wars and thousands upon thousands more of Jewish civilians have died in hostile attacks as well.

What is remarkable given the history of Jewish oppression in world history is that in the last seventy years, mass murder of Jews has largely disappeared EXCEPT in Israel. Yes, you have had terror attacks in places like Buenos Aires in 1994 (85 killed), the Australian Bondi Beach shooting in 2025, the 2018 Tree of Life murders in Pennsylvania (11 killed), and a number of other incidents- and hundreds of Jews were killed in the attack on 911.

But none match the mass death of Jews we have seen in Israel since it’s creation.

Back in 1986, Philip Roth in his novel The Counterlife would declare the US — and specifically the New York City metro — as the real promised land for Jews, a place where they could be safe and thrive - unlike Israel.

And in New York City, Jews don’t have to cringe under an Iron Dome waiting for bombs to fall or fear bombs going off in their cafes. Despite the headlines from reasonable anger over antisemitic graffiti and physical assaults, the reality is NOT A SINGLE Jew has been murdered in an antisemitic attack in New York City in the last two decades.

That is the safety that Israel has never delivered for Jews.

Israel’s Creation Destroyed the Safety of Jews in Muslim Countries

The really significant loss of safety for Jews outside Israel after its creation was in the Muslim countries near Israel- and that was the direct result of the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in the Nakba of 1947-48.

The tragedy is that roughly a million Jews lived in Muslim countries throughout the region in 1947, many in communities that had thrived for two and a half millennia.

• The Central Synagogue of Aleppo was a premier center of regional Judaism whose origins dated back to as early as the 5th century BCE

• El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia is believed to have been established in 586 BCE and considered the oldest continually active synagogue in North Africa.

• The Great Synagogue of Baghdad traced back to 597 BCE and the Jewish community comprised roughly one-quarter of the city’s population before Israel was created.

But after the mass expulsions of the Palestinians during the Israeli war with its neighbors, surrounding states responded with similar expulsions - some through direct pogroms and others through new legal restrictions that would drives the overwhelming population of Jews out of those Muslim countries. 2500 years of Jewish culture in those lands was largely liquidated in a matter of years.

The saddest part is, aside from the historic lure of Jerusalem, the perception that Muslim lands would give greater safety to a Jewish homeland was a large motivation for many Zionists focusing on Palestine. Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, writing in the early 20th century, highlighted escalating attacks on Jews among Christian nations - and wrote one story where a character spoke of how much safer Jews were among Muslims: "

[Jews] live among us like brothers; why should we not return their kindly feelings?… We Mohammedans have always been better friends with the Jews than you Christians.

There was good reason for Jewish leaders to feel that way. Even before the Holocaust, the Jews in Herzl’s time were suffering under Russian and other pogroms that would ultimately drive 2 million Eastern European Jews to the Americas (including my grandparents)- and that was just the most recent version of what had been repeated mass murder and mass expulsions over European history from the mass murders & forced conversions of the Spanish Inquisition to Black Death pogroms that wiped out 300 Jewish communities to the armed mobs that murdered Jews during the Crusades.

Whatever legal status Jews had in Europe was tentative and relatively recent, since Jews had been banned in England from 1290 to 1656, in France from 1394 until the French Revolution, in Spain until 1869, and in much of Italy until unification of the country in 1870.

While there were particular murderous incidents, particularly in North Africa & Spain the 11th & 12th centuries, overall Jews enjoyed protected if second class legal status from the time of Mohammad throughout most of Islam’s history in the middle east, with Jewish scholars like Maimonides and Benjamin of Tudela treated as an integral part of those cultures.

This was the reason Jewish communities would thrive for millennia throughout the core of the Islamic world - and why Herzl and others imagined it as a safer alternative to Europe.

Which is what makes the destruction of that safety all the more tragic. In a sense, even Herzl who wrote publicly of a future of coexistence would presage the current situation in private diaries where he talked of taking over the property of Palestinians and expelling them from land taken over by Jewish settlers. While he wrote in his diaries that “The transfer of land and the displacement…must be done gently and carefully,” the more violent Nakba expulsions launched by the new Israeli government in 1947-1948 was tragically baked in all along - and the ensuring decades of war and danger baked in as well.

The Genocide in Gaza is Endangering Jews Today- and the Solution is One State

Tragically, Israel has reenacted the Nakba in Gaza, committing mass murder and threatening a new round of Palestinian expulsions - this time in an age of social media blasting out images to the globe.

The result has been rising antisemitic attitudes around the globe, as surveys of both Jews and non-Jews highlight. Jewish Americans have mostly expressed their anger at Hamas, but they have also expressed anger at Israel itself for the resulting antisemitic backlash - and 61% of American Jews in a Washington Post poll said Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza with a full 39% saying Israel’s acts constitute genocide.

Which brings us to the question of how to restore safety to Jews, as well as justice for the Palestinians. While the traditional answer has been a two-state solution, many people argue Israel has made that impossible with the deployment of settlements scattered throughout the West Bank. But beyond the practical problem, most people don’t trust that a Palestinian state influenced or even dominated by Hamas or an Israeli state run by those willing to commit genocide will lead to a lasting peace.

Which is no doubt why - in a startling shift - more Jewish Americans under 35 now support a one-state solution over a two-state solution, a result headlined in the Jewish Forward.

I think young Jewish Americans reflect the future of both Jewish and global opinion because a two-state solution doesn’t solve the basic problem of either Jewish safety or Palestinian justice. Two hostile states in a tiny piece of land surrounded by resentful neighbors itching for confrontation is no answer.

Three years ago, at the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza, I went into great detail in this piece on why a one-state solution is both the most practical and more option for long-term peace and safety.

The summary is that the worst elements of each population will tend to dominate two separate states, while in a combined state, the “swing voters” will be the Jews and Palestinians willing to work together for a better nation.

If American is safer for Jews than Israel, it is not because Jews control the US states (despite antisemitic conspiracies that say otherwise). It is because a state of multiple ethnic and religious groups is less likely to be hostile to them. That is the benefits of pluralism over any ethnostate- a lesson James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”

A combined Jewish and Palestinian state, because of and despite its likely fractious angry divisions, would be a better guarantor of internal freedom and rights than the current situation of armed siege that Israeli citizens live under now. Because bottom-line, there is far less likelihood of Iran or any other country dropping a nuke on a nation with Palestinians as part of its national leadership.

While a pure combination of Jewish, Palestinian and other local populations into a single nation would be the best outcome in my mind, there are plenty of hybrid options that have been developed in other countries with similar divisions, from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to Burundi to the grandfather of ethnic conflict, Belgium. In all of these countries, democratic voting is combined with some degree of guaranteed representation for particular populations and decentralization to local or separate sub-polities within the combined national state.

In any of these nations, few could imagine stable nations after years of bloody sectarian hatred and killing, but the outcomes of such combined states has been far more peaceful than almost everyone expected. None have been perfect and political crises have beset each at times, but the road to peace each has made is far better than the years and often decades of war that preceded them.

There is no road to safety in a world where Israel continues oppressing another people. And there is no solution to a conflict where two people aspire to the same land except where they jointly share that land.

That and only that is a future where Jews will be safe and Palestinians will achieve justice.

• Trump’s Iran War Is Now a War on Water

• The Big Winner of Trump’s War Is China

• Socialism Now Beats MAGA at the Polls

• What Moderate Democrats Are Really Selling

• The $700 Million Israeli Campaign to Buy American Opinion

• A Justice Department Gone Soft on Corporate Crime

• The Insiders Are Quietly Cashing Out

• This One’s Personal: The Corporate Rot That’s Making Us Sick

• Also This Week

Trump’s Iran War Is Now a War on Water

For the cost of the Iran War in the last 120 days, the federal government could have doubled its spending on K-12 education across the country. It could have far more than doubled its spending on making housing more affordable. But instead we slaughtered children with the money. The estimate here comes from Stephen Semler, who puts the narrow, direct war cost well above $100 billion — against the $29–30 billion Hegseth and Vought claim.

And the money is buying a specific kind of destruction. Once we throw international law out the window, you don’t need nukes to obliterate modern societies. Destroy their power supply and, even more deadly, destroy their water supplies, and modern cities collapse. The CIA worked this out long ago: a single strike on a single Saudi desalination plant, one analysis found, would require evacuating Riyadh and collapse its government. Every public statement by Trump and Hegseth is normalizing this.

The impact on the rest of the Middle East was immediate. Kuwait says Iran attacked a power and water desalination plant, causing widespread damage to the station. By the sixth consecutive day of attacks, the US had struck civilian infrastructure including key bridges and a tower at a crucial port. And now water is being cut off as temperatures reach 125 degrees F in parts of Iran — a fourth strike on water infrastructure that destroyed two water tanks in Sirik, cutting off distribution to entire villages. More murderous war crimes by the Trump administration, paid for with our tax dollars.

BBC News: Iran accuses US of hitting civilian infrastructure

Meanwhile the nonproliferation logic Trump claims to be enforcing collapses on contact. So Iran can’t have enriched uranium, but Saudi Arabia — whose privileged elite sponsored the 9/11 attack on the US — gets the technology? Hard to believe Iran will accept limits on its own nuclear ambitions with more next-door neighbors on the road to the Bomb.

Associated Press: Trump approves nuclear agreement that may allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium

And the men who launched this war know exactly what they’ve exposed themselves to. When even Tom Cotton frets that the real point of an international court is “arresting Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio in the future if they ever travel abroad” — yes, absolutely. MAGA want a king immune to prosecution at home and abroad. The world will demand justice for Trump’s many war crimes. Which is why the heads of state who continue to meet with him and invite him to international summits are all becoming collaborators in normalizing those crimes.

Iran has never committed a terrorist act on US soil. Anyone who doesn’t understand that war crimes like this make one far more likely now is an idiot.

Or is Donald Trump.

But I repeat myself.

The Big Winner of Trump’s War Is China

Making China Great Again. There’s little question that China is now the dominant economic power in the world, and that the US is now a political irritant other countries are working to disentangle their economies from. As David Roberts put it at Volts, the big winner of the Iran War is China- as it revs up its clean tech exports as the world rapidly moves away from fossil fuels to escape dependence on a cauldron of tensions in the Middle East - and the whims of a mad king in Washington, D.C.

The war is already reaching into the global economy through the shipping lanes. Ships are veering away from the Red Sea after Houthi threats to marine traffic, which massively escalates the shipping shutdown — 30% of global container shipping traffic goes through the Red Sea. Trump’s Iran War is moving toward derailing the whole global economy and China looks in position to pick up the pieces.

Socialism Now Beats MAGA at the Polls

MAGA is losing its mind with the rise of socialist views among young people- and they are right to worry: voters aged 18–34 preferred socialism over capitalism by 18 points in CNBC’s new All-America poll, while older age demographics still preferred capitalism. The attitudes of 18-to-34-year-olds today are the reality of our country in 20 years. Far more Americans today favor socialism than they did under FDR.

CNBC: Democratic socialists top MAGA candidates among voters in CNBC’s All-America poll

The comparison to polls under FDR is provocative — but it raises the issue all these polls do of what the respondent actually means by “socialism.” Most polls don’t bother to ask. The ones that do show answers varying from equating it with North Korea to wanting higher Social Security payments. I highlighted this spread in a piece I wrote a year ago: about a third defined it as equivalent to Stalinist Russia, another third as a bigger welfare state, and the rest as mostly what Democratic policy is now.

I kind of enjoy that both sectarian Marxist cults and MAGA conservatives get really angry when people equate socialism with just having Scandinavian daycare centers. But the reality is that conservatives have called every advance in the welfare state “socialism” — so that’s how Americans understand the word. Which makes the right’s own panic its biggest own goal. By accusing Obama and Biden of being socialists, the GOP already convinced Millennials and Zoomers that socialism was cool. When Steve Scalise warns that “the Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing”, he’s doing the recruiting for us. At this rate, Generation Alpha will be waving Mao’s Little Red Book within a few years.

If you want the serious version of what’s happening, even a centrist outfit like the Niskanen Center has a very good, nuanced analysis of the DSA’s strengths as an organization. The biggest lesson — one every Democratic-affiliated organization should harness — is active participation by members and involvement in mass movements between elections, not just at the ballot box.

What “Moderate” Democrats Are Really Selling — and Why Mamdani Keeps Winning

Being a “Democratic moderate” does not really mean appealing to moderate voters. It usually just means being personally wealthy and benefiting from weak corporate regulation — or having your campaigns funded by those interests. Take City Council Speaker Julie Menin, whose husband’s firm just turned up owing New York more than $246,000 in back taxes.

Politico: Menin’s husband finds his firm in politically inconvenient tax trouble

And unlike Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Menin didn’t release her personal tax return, letting her hide whatever tax maneuvers she and her husband are involved in to potentially cheat NYC taxpayers. It’s just unacceptable for politicians to hide their tax returns. And notes that Tim Walz, Joe Biden, and Troy Jackson, the assumed Maine Senate nominee, all started their careers as stereotypical Democratic cultural moderates with working-class roots — but they moved left on cultural issues as the party did. Fewer of those kinds of moderates exist now. Dem “moderates” today are almost all just pro-corporate shills.

The contrast with how Mamdani actually governs highlights the vacuousness of his “moderate” critics. As Trump continues to steal from the public and Congress continues to trade stocks on insider information, Mamdani is refusing a pay raise — basic politics that Democrats should be demanding austerity for the political class until working families get paid.

His tax on second luxury homes also is going after the dirty secret of NYC, that super-luxury homes pay lower tax rates than average; his tax on second homes would mostly just raise them to the average rate, which is why a billionaire like Ken Griffin, who has “paid far below the average rate,” is complaining.

And he’s cutting burdensome permits on small businesses — ending “treatsploitation” rules on ice cream trucks and “anti-fade” rules on barbershops. Effective socialism should want tough standards, but a simple process for businesses to follow them.

The $700 Million Israeli Campaign to Buy American Opinion

Here’s how the pro-Israel information war actually runs. Israel gets US money and then spends $700 million per year to “shape consciousness” — that is, to buy off US influencers to lie to US voters. It’s also creating online slop websites designed to “trigger more positive results … on AI chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT.”

The Wall Street Journal: Israel’s $50 Million Experiment to Change U.S. Public Opinion

The operation has spent millions on “AI-enabled texts” flooding phones with outreach pretending to be human beings while manipulating views on Israel. And that Trump’s former data guru Brad Parscale is one of the key Israel agents in this effort makes the pay-to-play lobbying darker in the context of the Iran War.

You can see the results in the polling, and they’re ugly in a way the headlines miss. A disturbing new survey has nearly a third of young Americans viewing Jews as a threat to society — but the finding that “40% said antisemitism was blown out of proportion” is really the lived experience of seeing you and your friends accused of antisemitism for opposing Israeli genocide. Neonazis and pro-Israel activists are collaborating on this result.

The Times of Israel: 29 percent of young Americans view Jews as a threat to society — poll

Because the “antisemitism” label has almost nothing to do with antisemitism. The ADL and other policers of “antisemitism” have not called on Georgia Senate candidate Mike Collins to denounce his son-in-law — caught on tape using Nazi talking points — or condemned the association.

Since Collins supports Israel, he gets no condemnation. Meanwhile the same forces are running a real movement to excommunicate large swathes of the secular Jewish community; the Jewish Chronicle actually ran a piece about Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, asking “just how Jewish is Ed Miliband?” If someone is Jewish enough to be stuck in the ovens by Hitler, maybe shut up with this. Not sure it will work out the way they hope politically.

A Justice Department Gone Soft on Corporate Crime

The Wall Street Journal is now flatly declaring that the Trump administration is letting corporate criminals go free. As one source in the piece puts it, “if you’re in the world of financial services or a large public company, you can breathe a lot easier.” Democrats need to make the “soft on crime” Trump administration a major theme of the midterms.

The Wall Street Journal: The Justice Department Is Pulling Back on Prosecuting Corporate Crime

The rot connects directly to the war. The Trump administration pardoned or refused to prosecute multiple financial firms helping Iran evade sanctions — including the DOJ dropping “its long-running prosecution of Turkish state-owned lender Halkbank for allegedly evading U.S. sanctions on Iran.” So US soldiers die while corporate felons go free. The corruption is barely hidden: FCC Chair Brendan Carr took more than $63,000 in gala tickets from Paramount while its billion-dollar deals sat before his agency. If nothing else, the judge overseeing the states’ antitrust challenge to that merger should disregard all federal findings on the issue as compromised.

And some of these scandals are helpfully self-documenting. Trump Media pitched a $100,000 monthly fee for a fast feed of the president’s posts — the useful thing being that the client list becomes an indictment list in 2029 for insider trading.

Or take the roughly $13 billion in Venezuelan oil money the US has collected. Trump stole this money from Venezuela and apparently has stolen it from American taxpayers as well. It’s completely insane that the media isn’t demanding daily to know where these billions have been siphoned off to.

The Insiders Are Quietly Cashing Out

The people who know best know stocks are overpriced — and they’re cashing out their shares. US executives are selling at the second-fastest pace in more than 20 years, a classic red flag.

Watch how the sell-side handles a company like SpaceX. In THE BIG SHORT, there’s a scene where a rating-agency rep is asked why they rated all the mortgage bonds high-grade when they knew they were bad — and the rep admits they were paid by the finance firms, and if they didn’t give a good rating, the firms would just go to a competitor. So it goes with the banks that underwrote SpaceX’s blockbuster flotation: every one of them now recommends buying the stock. Flattery takes you a long way in finance.

The reckoning is already underway. SpaceX is down from its initial IPO price and moving toward the retail folks who bought at the peak losing half their investment — a company now set to wipe out more than $1 trillion in market value. Or as Barron’s argues, it is now going into the record books as one of the worst IPO in two decades.

This One’s Personal: The Corporate Rot That’s Making Us Sick

My six-to-eight-times-daily rush to the bathroom for the last three weeks makes this one very personal. This is what MAGA/MAHA has licensed — corporate corruption that is making us sicker and killing a lot of people. The immediate case is Taylor Farms, the lettuce supplier at the center of a nasty parasite outbreak, a company that gave MAGA Inc. $1 million less than a week after the story broke.

And here’s what’s genuinely new and frightening. The FDA now says Taylor Farms had a “false positive”, claiming its lab experts re-checked the lettuce samples and cleared the supplier. Like most people, I assume the FDA is lying here to help a big Trump donor.

Which is horrifying.

Whether under Reagan or the Bushes, I’d assume FDA policy was evil — but I never doubted the actual scientific tests were being conducted professionally. Trump has broken that. Once you can’t trust that the tests themselves are real, you’ve lost the thing that made the agency worth anything.

Nature Human Behaviour: The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA

None of this is happening in a vacuum. By 2020–2022, conservative Americans were less healthy and more likely to die than their liberal peers. Part of that is demographic — less educated, less healthy people becoming more conservative — but part of it, apparently, is simply not trusting their doctors’ health advice. The politics of resentment turns out to have a body count.

Also This Week

Europe keeps ditching American tech. Another major company is abandoning a US tech oligarch: Airbus is migrating 70 critical apps off Amazon’s AWS to France’s Scaleway, part of a longer list Wired ran of the ways Europe is walking away from American technology. Turns out Trump and America didn’t have the cards they thought they did to win a trade war.

Socialism is just more efficient — which is why Trump is attacking it. Brazil has free, efficient electronic payments run by the government that 90% of Brazilians use, and Trump has slapped tariffs on Brazil because he says it’s unfair to US for-profit credit card companies since it’s too easy to use. Sucks when socialism is more efficient.

The right is building the case to shoot the left. Border czar Tom Homan on people killed by ICE: “all they had to do is comply.” That was John Adams’s defense of the Redcoats for the Boston Massacre (sarcasm intented)— a fine way to celebrate our 250th anniversary, with the principle that all the founding fathers deserved to be shot for not complying. And Benny Johnson and Sen. Eric Schmitt are now openly workshopping the claim that the left is training for “a mass slaughter event.”

If Trump weaponizes the Post Office, blue states should build their own. A federal appeals court revived Trump’s anti-mail-voting rule. States should announce programs to hire people to deliver ballots and bypass the USPS — and if Trump keeps using it as a weapon, blue states should rebuild common institutions that can’t be captured to serve corruption.

Cut private schools off from federal money entirely. ProPublica documents private schools multiplying nationwide — at least 1,500 more across 13 states than there were five years ago. When Democrats regain their majorities, they should disallow federal funds for private schools, cut out the states, and allocate federal dollars directly to local public schools.

The housing lesson pro-immigrant liberals keep missing. A fascinating analysis of Spain’s mass-immigration program finds it mostly helped the economy, with relatively little anti-immigrant politics — the biggest failure being the government’s refusal to invest in new housing. Being NIMBY is objectively helping ICE: you need new housing to accommodate new immigrants, or else you feed the backlash.

A record 104 members of Congress voted to cut off weapons for Israel. A majority of Democrats voting did vote to cut $3.3 billion in weapons funding. That’s a big victory.

Andy Kim has the right health-care idea. He proposes enrolling every child in Medicaid until age 26 — and note he says Medicaid, not Medicare, since Medicare is actually a far more expensive policy for enrollees.

Cap the ultra-wealthy’s Roth IRAs. The Journal details the startup insiders who stash huge sums in tax-subsidized retirement accounts. One to-do for Democrats in 2029: cap Roth IRAs at some ceiling, say $1 million, and tax all investment returns above that at normal rates.

The “High-T” military has a paradox. A federal judge is questioning Hegseth’s plan to give troops testosterone in light of Trump’s anti-trans ban. If you give men testosterone as medical care but deny it to trans men, that’s a clear example of gender discrimination — unless they say trans men are men, but that creates a bit of a paradox, doesn’t it.

USAID’s dismantling has a projected body count. Researchers at UCLA and Barcelona’s Institute for Global Health project that the continuing absence of USAID funding will cause 4.5 million child deaths under age five by 2030 — more documentation of the global toll of Trump and Musk’s attack on the agency.

For the first time, a majority of Democrats voting — 103 Democrats — supported cutting off $3.3 billion in weapons funding to Israel, a giant victory that highlights the rising rebellion in the party against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In polls, almost 60% of Democrats want the US to reduce its support for Israel, but Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries keeps pushing a blank check- but for once lost control of the caucus. Greg Casar, who leads the House Progressive Caucus, points out that his caucus backs the Ban the Bombs Act and other measures to cut off aid to Israel’s war machine, leaving Jeffries on the wrong side of his own party’s voters and his own party’s most energetic bloc.

One more reason it’s a tragedy he wasn’t one of the NYC incumbents primaried this year. And if he is going to remain opposed to where Dem voters and House members are on such a key issue, Dems should NOT make him Speaker in January. There are plenty of other Democrats who could do the job better and wouldn’t spend their leverage protecting a government waging genocide.

The DSA’s National Leadership Is Afraid to Let Its Own Members Vote

More on NYC DSA v National. Sectarians at national are blocking national membership vote on whether to endorse AOC for President - since the sectarians know it would pass if all members voted — and they’re trying to delay any vote to the 2027 Convention, where they can dominate the process. The national leadership KNOWS it doesn’t represent the will of the membership. If it did, it would just let the members vote.

NYC DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo put it plainly: national leadership “just voted to overturn our convention & took away rank and file members’ right to vote.” He added that NYC alone sends the national organization “$2M per year in dues.” Imagine what NYC DSA could do with that money if it weren’t controlled by sectarian nuts at the top.

This is what the fight is really about. The sectarians have figured out how to manipulate the rules for power, and they depend on most members sending dues and not stopping them. Last year I argued that an AOC run for President — win or lose — would build a grassroots army fighting Trump and a lasting progressive organization for change.

The decision for DSA is whether it becomes a core part of that or gets pushed to the margins.

Mamdani Is Rebuilding State Capacity While the Press Invents Rent Numbers

Read this story- a key to understanding how progressives need to govern.

The most important thing Mamdani is doing is rebuilding state capacity, so progressives don’t just pass nice-sounding laws but actually DELIVER results. It’s also about ending mindless contracting out and having government control the tech it deploys — exactly the kind of unglamorous governing that decides whether a progressive program survives contact with reality.

And he just keeps relentlessly upgrading the quality of life in the city. This past week he turned the Link NYC kiosks — the street-level electronic screens that replaced all the old public payphones around town — into World Cup viewing parties, so you don’t have to miss the quarterfinal while you run an errand.

Meanwhile a Free Press influencer tired to slam Mamdani for failing to keep rents down, claiming the median rent is $5,295 a month. Except that’s a lie, or at least deceptive. That’s the rent on market-rate units. Existing renters average $1,750 a month, because of rent stabilization. High rents on the market-rate units are a real problem, but pretending the vast majority of renters don’t exist doesn’t help — and Mamdani is the one actually talking about how to build new units faster and more cheaply.

Trump’s Iran War Crimes Are the Best Argument for Rejoining the ICC

“Next week comes the power plants, next week comes the bridges,” Trump says of Iran, promising to knock them all out unless Tehran comes to the table. These are pure war crimes. And they’re precisely why the Trump administration wants to dismantle the International Criminal Court: because when Democrats win office, they could vote to rejoin — and immediately send Trump, Rubio, Vance, Hegseth, and the rest to trial.

Having already murdered the head of state of Iran, Trump is now effectively justifying any terror attack Iran launches against Americans. To be clear, mass murder of civilians in response to a military strike on an opposing commander in chief is itself a war crime. Meanwhile, it’s strange how the “completely destroyed” Iranian military keeps hitting US bases and supply lines across the Middle East.

Trump, the Accidental Champion of Renewable Energy

Give the man his due: Trump has been the most effective proponent of renewable energy in history, by demonstrating that depending on a non-renewable fuel controlled by raving ideologues is idiotic. As Ryan Cooper noted, after a decade of solid center-left consensus that carbon taxes are effective but politically untenable, ole Donnie Trump went and did the biggest one ever — just by blowing up the oil supply.

Europe is already responding. The EU is drafting an “electrification” plan to curb oil and gas use after the disruption from the Iran war. Trump is helping usher in a revolution toward renewable electricity — just not the one he thinks he’s fighting for.

Tripling Union Density Would Move $1.2 Trillion a Year to Workers

The Economic Policy Institute published a new report finds that calculates that tripling US union membership would shift $1.2 trillion to workers every year, narrow racial pay gaps, and end the current surge in wealth inequality.

It’s a way to transfer income to working Americans that doesn’t require a dime of tax money — one of the reasons unions were the single most effective tool for reducing inequality in the thirty years after the New Deal.

The argument is straightforward. Back when unions representing roughly a third of the workforce, they had the leverage to ensure that as productivity increased, wages would increase as well. But since unions got decimated starting in the late 1970s, wages have barely budged even as productivity - and the wealth of the elite- has surged.

EPI lays out a range of measures to strengthen unions - but the core message is simple: actually punish employers who illegally fire workers for standing up for their rights. Given workers the tools to stand up for themselves and wages will rise.

US Inflation Is Now the Worst in the G7

Trump can try to blame inflation on Iran or whatever he likes, but the reality is that inflation is worse now in the US than in comparable developed nations across the G7.

Worth remembering the contrast: back in 2023, when the whole world was still coping with the post-Covid surge in prices, the US under Biden had inflation LOWER than most other G7 nations. The gap didn’t happen by accident.

Blue States Are the Last Check on Corporate Power

With federal enforcement gutted, states are now the only real restraint on corporate power and lawbreaking, so it’s good to see them moving. State attorneys general are preparing to sue to block Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros.

The contrast with Washington is stark. Trump appointees are now overruling the DOJ lawyers who scrutinize corporate mergers, blocking enforcement of the very laws meant to protect consumers from price gouging. Trump is simply a tool of corporate oligarchs, trading favors for personal kickbacks — which is exactly why the work has fallen to the states.

Also This Week

E. Jean Carroll is paid her $5 million. As E Jean Carroll is paid $5 million after Trump raped her - and then lied about not raping her - and then had a jury find he in fact lied when he said he didn't rape her- a reminder that, yes, that is what the jury found. Trump is the only felon and the only adjudicated rapist to be President

Epstein survivors speak out against Todd Blanche. Any Senator who votes to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General is a collaborator in the coverup of that abuse — and Epstein survivors are urging the Senate to block him.

Trump quietly retreats on trans health care. In a major climbdown, Trump abandoned his most aggressive attempt to end youth gender-affirming care nationally by withholding Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals. So will hospitals in blue states now restore that care, or keep finding excuses to deny it to trans youth?

The antisemitism smear machine keeps grinding. Articles equating a Holocaust-denying Nazi like Nick Fuentes with Hassan Piker are a big reason people have stopped taking real antisemitism seriously. If everyone who criticizes Israel is “antisemitic,” then actual antisemitism stops registering when it matters — the same week a Netanyahu adviser was filmed with an antisemitic influencer in a Tel Aviv nightclub.

17 Mexican nationals dead in ICE custody or operations. Sheinbaum is suing the private companies involved and escalating to multiple human rights commissions, including the UN. Trump is burning one of our greatest strengths — allied nations on our own border.

Fascism surging in Germany, nothing to see here. The fascist AfD party is now the leading party in Germany by a significant margin. That’s the far right topping the polls in the country that should know best where this ends.

Hunter Biden keeps collecting. He just won $1.7 million in damages from former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Far too few people are ever held accountable for the lies they tell, so it’s satisfying to see someone that odious pay for them.

A Cyclospora outbreak the CDC isn’t tracking. As someone who clearly has this — I only figured out what it likely was as the stories mounted — I’m certain these numbers vastly underestimate the outbreak, because plenty of people have it and haven’t reported it yet.

UK’s Labour keeps moving right, and the Greens move in. As Labour abandons any pretense of representing working people, the UK Green Party has taken over the role, promising to tax the super-rich rather than take orders from them. Andy Burnham, meanwhile, signaled with his choice of Chancellor — the architect of Starmer’s anti-immigrant policies — that Labour will keep tilting right on the economy too.

The chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said out loud this week what most Democrats in Washington will only say off the record. “I know for a fact that there’s a lot of consultants telling their clients that you don’t want an AI super PAC to spend millions against you, so just don’t touch the issue at all,” Greg Casar told Politico. “We absolutely cannot let the AI money silence us.”

In a system NOT distorted by corporate money, this would be one of top issues Dems are running on. Unfortunately, the AI money is silencing top Dem leadership who want to kick the issue down the road with “commissions” to report back later.

In the alternative, Casar wants Democrats to become “AI populists” in 2026, standing “with working people who know in their gut that AI right now is just going to make a few billionaires into trillionaires while making millions of Americans poorer, less safe and less free.” The anger is real and Casar highlights key issues Dems should focus on to reach swing voters":

• Ban companies from using AI to set your individual price based on your personal data.

• Force data centers to generate their own electricity instead of dumping the cost on your utility bill.

• Put legal guardrails on chatbots.

• Tax tokens — the underlying unit of AI compute — to slow the buildout down. Each proposal names a corporate offender and hands an angry voter a target.

Now set that against House leadership, which offers a vague pledge to protect the “American ratepayer” and a three-member commission that Jeffries convened and that doesn’t expect to introduce any legislation until the end of the year — after the House and Senate majorities have been decided. Confronted with the largest corporate power grab of the century, the Democratic leadership has arranged to have an opinion about it in December.

Voters aren’t waiting to be persuaded. They’re already voting on it.

Gallup asked Americans in March whether they wanted a data center in their area: 71 percent said no, 48 percent strongly. Gallup asked the identical question about a nuclear power plant and got 53 percent opposed. Americans would rather live next to a nuclear reactor than a server farm.

In fact, in twenty-five years of asking about nuclear plants, Gallup NEVER recorded opposition as high to nuclear reactions as data centers are drawing now. Independents are 48 percent strongly opposed — ten points above Republicans. Every age group, every income level, every region wants these things built somewhere else.

That anger is already killing careers. Last month Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, the most powerful Republican in the state, lost his primary after backing a massive data center near the Great Salt Lake. A Box Elder County commissioner who voted for the same project put it plainly: “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do.” Voters in Festus, Missouri threw out half the city council over a $6 billion data center. In Georgia, Democrat Peter Hubbard won a statewide Public Service Commission seat running against “high utility bills and data center risk-shifting.” Abigail Spanberger — no one’s idea of a socialist — won Virginia’s governorship promising that data centers, not ratepayers, would pay for the grid they’re straining.

Dan Cassino, who runs the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, has watched this crystallize: “Voters support anything to bring down their energy bills, but banning data centers is pretty much the most popular option.”

The AI backlash runs well past the zoning fight. Three in four Americans want the industry regulated, up double digits in a single year, including 77 percent of Republicans. Seventy-nine percent want higher taxes on corporations and the rich — 63 percent of Trump voters included. These are not 51-49 issues. They are the rare fights where the swing voter, the base voter and half the other party’s voters are standing in the same place, furious, waiting for somebody to tell them who did this to them.

The party wimped out on crypto and paid the price

Casar highlights Dems already failed on crypto in a similar way: “I don’t think that, on AI issues, we should be a party like where we are right now on cryptocurrency, where it’s just not really clear where the Democratic Party stands.”

Nothing about crypto was unclear. Coinbase wired $500,000 apiece to the leadership super PACs of Schumer, Jeffries and Mitch McConnell — a bipartisan tithe — on top of the $25 million it had already routed to crypto PACs. Fairshake and its allies spent roughly $200 million in 2024. The industry collected: last July the GENIUS Act cleared the House with 102 Democrats voting yes, Jeffries among them, federally blessing the crypto business at the precise moment the sitting president was using crypto to funnel billions to his own family. Schumer voted no in the Senate; eighteen of his members supplied the winning margin anyway. Democrats didn’t lose that fight. They declined to have it.

Crypto wasn’t the first time either. In 2022 two Big Tech antitrust bills came out of Senate Judiciary with bipartisan majorities and public support of 76 and 80 percent, and never reached the floor. David Dayen’s reconstruction found that Schumer — who has placed more than eighty former staffers in Big Tech’s lobbying orbit, and whose daughters worked for Amazon and Facebook — never ran a private whip count to test his own excuse that the votes weren’t there. He ran out the clock while the industry spent $277 million lobbying.

Then, three weeks into Trump’s second term, Jeffries flew to Los Altos Hills to work a room of 150 Silicon Valley donors. The goal, per an attendee: keep “Silicon Valley with Democrats.” He never raised tech policy. He told the room Democrats had to pick their fights, invoking Aaron Judge, who is “not going to swing at every pitch.” Jeffries fundraising arm for Congressional candidates has spent its efforts raising money from Peter Thiel’s Palantir network of lobbyists rather than appealing to all the voters picked off at AI tech surveillance.

Fear of Corporate Donors Won’t Save the Dems

Dem leadership justify not adopting popular anti-corporate policies based on the need to fund Democratic campaigns, which is not an insane position but corporations are almost always more excited to spend more on the GOP hardliners than the Democratic moderates sucking up to them

Some leaders might point to New York’s Alex Bores, who wrote the New York’s RAISE Act — an AI safety law so popular that 84 percent of New Yorkers backed it. Leading the Future, the super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and Perplexity, spent roughly $8 million to destroy him in his House primary last month. Bores lost, but he used the AI corporate attacks to go from being a little know two-term state assemblyman to coming within points of winning a Congressional seat in a crowded field that included a Kennedy.

In fact, we see candidates across the country defying the AI oligarchs and doing well in races. Abdul El-Sayed in June released an AI platform to the left of Bernie Sanders’s — public ownership of frontier labs, democratically elected boards, an FDA-style agency to approve models before deployment, forced divestment by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta. Asked whether he feared industry retaliation, he shrugged: “What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?” His opponent, Haley Stevens, is the establishment’s candidate, AIPAC’s candidate, and has released no AI plan at all. Michigan polling has El-Sayed ahead or at worse statistically tied.

With literally billions of dark money being released into our politics by the Supreme Court, Democrats will NEVER compete by trying to attract corporate money. But when you highlight the corporate money supporting your opponents, you can turn the oligarch spending into a liability for those they fund.

Zohran Mamdani proved this in a spectacular manner. Anti-Mamdani committees raised more than $40 million — $8.3 million from Bloomberg, plus Ackman, Loeb, the Lauders, half the Tisch family, Steve Wynn, and Alice Walton wiring cash into a New York mayor’s race from a P.O. box in Bentonville. Mamdani read the donor list back to the voters. “They’re spending more money than I would even tax them,” he said. He won. A super PAC ad buy can become a public indictment for the candidate they support, waiting for a candidate with the nerve to make a clear anti-corporate message and highlight who is pulling the strings of their puppet candidates.

If Democrats won’t aim the anger, the right will

Here is the cost of the silence, and it’s the part leadership seems least able to see.

Voters know they’re being robbed. Their power bills are climbing, their kids can’t find entry-level work, their county just got rezoned for somebody else’s servers. What they don’t have is a name for the thief. If Democrats refuse to supply one — because the thief’s PAC might spend against them — the right will supply a different one, free of charge and at no cost to its donors: the immigrant, the trans kid, whoever’s on this month’s list. That’s the whole trade. Culture war is what corporate power buys when it needs an angry electorate pointed somewhere harmless. A swing voter who is furious and isn’t pointed at the corporate interests making their lives won’t stay neutral, they will have their anger aimed at scapegoats, as we see election after election.

Some savvy Republicans are already circling the issue itself. James Fishback, running for governor of Florida, wants data centers banned in all 67 counties. If Democrats keep quiet long enough, the GOP will happily run as the party that fought the data centers while taking the checks.

The base has drawn its conclusions. Pew now finds 59 percent of Democrats disapprove of their own congressional leadership — the first negative reading since Pew began asking in 2014, and a mirror of where Republican voters sat in 2014, the year before Trump walked in and took their party away from them. Meanwhile Jeffries and Schumer keep workshopping an “affordability” message with all the edge of a grocery circular, and wonder why nothing lands.

Casar mocks any attempt to just run the midterms on a pure anti-Trump message: “When we look back at 15 or 20 years, the most important thing that happened in 2026 may be AI development, not whatever crazy thing Trump just did today. We can’t let the threat that Trump poses overwhelm our ability to organize on AI.”

The industry wants to buy off Democratic opposition so they can own the future. Individual candidates are challenging them, but we need a national Democratic leadership that will mobilize swing voters around the country in defeating their agenda.

Once You Build the Concentration Camps, They Keep Finding People to Fill Them

There’s a serious “first they came for the...” quality to this moment. Once the concentration camps are built, they keep finding new people to fill them- and keep moving on to the next step of extermination.

In Houston, ICE agents chased down and, from what local reporting and the video make clear, cold-bloodedly murdered a construction worker, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had lived here for 35 years. His last words, quoted by Congressman Joaquin Castro, were “me están matando” — they are killing me.

This does need to become a Minneapolis-level focus for progressives. Allowing ICE to murder people in unmarked vans and then deport the witnesses is a line we have to fight with every protest tool possible. And that is exactly what’s happening: three men who were in the van are potential witnesses, and they are now being pressured to self-deport, while ICE refuses to comment and, of course, lies about what happened. This should be a four-alarm fire — a government covering up a murder by trying to deport the witnesses to it.

It is now an international incident. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, says she’ll file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Trump will obviously ignore it, but it becomes more than an internal affair for the United States.

And Houston isn’t isolated. Memphis is essentially under martial law controlled by its white GOP governor, where National Guard troops just shot a man dead — Tyrin Johnson, 20, killed by soldiers Trump deployed over the city’s objections.

Meanwhile eleven more people captured by ICE have been shipped to a maximum-security prison in Eswatini, a country where they have no ties and committed no crimes. That is enslavement without trial, an obscenity and a violation of the 13th Amendment.

Trump Was Never a Businessman, Always a Grifter — and Now He’s Looting His Own Cult

It’s not that Trump made money off the presidency, bad as that is, but that he made it by looting the business he built while screwing over the very people who invested in the company and its product. Trump was never a businessman, just a wealthy grifter, and the meme coin is the purest example yet.

The New York Times put numbers on it: nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on the Trump coin, with, in the paper’s own words, “a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses.” A metaphor for his whole presidency. Norm Eisen notes Trump personally cleared $636 million on the meme coin alone. And the marks keep coming: one Trump supporter lost $32,000 on the coin and blames the Democrats, even as Trump made $1.4 billion pumping and dumping crypto on exactly these rubes.

Trump can directly steal money from his supporters and they’ll turn around and blame Democrats for it. Anyone still saying we can throw a few immigrants or trans kids under the bus and win these cult members back is delusional. Meanwhile the infinite Russian-doll levels of corruption — the single Ferris wheel, the empty fields of glyphosate, Freedom 250 as a vehicle for looting — are the kind of thing a whole lot of people should go to jail for wire fraud over.

This Is How You Actually Address Affordability

While Washington loots, New York governs. As part of the city budget agreement, everyone making up to $32,000 a year, and families making up to $68,000, now get half-price fares on the subway, extending Fair Fares to 1.3 million residents. This is how you actually address affordability. Moderate Democrats keep touting tax cuts for working families, which Republicans will simply take credit for, as they do with every tax cut. Cut medical costs, cut education costs, cut any cost government can directly impact — that’s the way to build the Democratic brand.

Mamdani is also looking to slash bureaucratic red tape to speed government approval of public safety, transit, and outdoor dining projects. The GOP is clapping for more efficient government, right? Of course not — the same people spent the week losing their minds because Mamdani asked New Yorkers to keep the air conditioning at 78 degrees, the exact figure the U.S. Department of Energy recommends. We live in the stupidest government timeline. Con Ed had to lower voltage by 9 percent in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx during the heat wave, melting the ice cream in our fridge, and Lindsey Graham thinks asking anyone to restrain energy use is dictatorship.

And Mamdani keeps messaging progressive values with every news cycle, highlighting the ways New Yorkers, particularly immigrants here, help their home countries. Worth remembering that Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. send $3 billion a year back home — a key source of economic support there.

60 Minutes and Rest of the Media Is Now as Reliable as Fox News

If you had any doubt, 60 Minutes is now as reliable as Fox News — one more media icon turned into a billionaire’s bauble for MAGA propaganda, with its MAGA-curious CBS boss reportedly meddling in a 60 Minutes report on Nigel Farage to put a more friendly reporter on the story.

The pattern is everywhere. When the White House launched a couple dozen “Freedom Fuel” gas stations, the media acted as stenographers for Trump propaganda. This is a private company running an introductory price to attract customers, with Trump handing it free advertising — but the coverage made it sound like Trump was doing something to help consumers.

The Most Obvious Racist Immigration Policy in U.S. History — and the Press Won’t Name It

It’s pure racism, and the media still won’t label it that. In June, every single one of the 1,062 refugees admitted to the United States was a white South African — the most obvious racist immigration policy in U.S. history, and the press can’t bring itself to say so. The same double standard runs through the coverage: if any Democrat pictured a Brooklyn school full of kids in yarmulkes, the press would scream antisemitism, but Islamophobia, somehow, remains perfectly acceptable.

And when JD Vance stands up and asks voters whether they’ll back “the pro-fraud party,” all the manufactured attacks on Somalis in Minnesota snap into focus — the attacks on Somali immigrant businesses were always just propaganda to feed this midterm campaign line.

The Crime-Fighting Capital — Except for the Crook the Governor Hired

New York continues to be the crime-fighting capital of the nation, cracking down on corporate crooks — from delivery companies ripping off employees, to landlords abusing tenants, to home health care companies delaying workers’ pay. This week that meant one of the state’s largest wage-theft payouts: Public Partnerships LLC agreed to pay $162 million to settle a class action brought on behalf of 200,000 CDPAP home-care aides.

But look at who had to bring the case. This had to be done by Legal Aid against Governor Hochul’s own outsourcing of the home health care system to Public Partnerships — a private company ripping off the disabled, workers, and taxpayers alike, and handing the Trump DOJ an excuse to intervene. Disabled advocates are furious at Hochul for letting PPL screw over everyone involved, even as they recognize the Trump administration is up to no good itself. Why isn’t the state simply running the program directly, instead of giving a private corporation the power to siphon off taxpayer dollars, rip off workers, and exploit disabled people? Just a tragedy that Hochul isn’t facing real opposition in her primary this year.

Cuomo’s Hatchet Woman Brings Down One More Campaign in Michigan

Lis Smith was Cuomo’s political hatchet person, the operative who helped the GOP-aligned “Independent Democratic Caucus” keep Republicans in control of the State Senate for years. So it was good to see McMorrow’s campaign go down after hiring her. As Defector put it, “if you’re thinking that someone has to be a specific kind of asshole in order to make a career out of doing political hatchet work... Lis Smith is very much that kind of asshole.”

Pete Buttigieg hired Smith for his 2020 campaign, which has always been one of the top reasons Pete sits so low on my presidential list.

The Damage to American Industry Will Be Measured in Decades

Trump’s long-term damage to U.S. industry is close to immeasurable, and it will be measured in decades, because Europe is now committing to stop buying from American industry — everything from information technology to aerospace and defense. The tell landed this week: NATO picked Sweden’s Saab over Boeing for its new $4.5 billion early-warning fleet, and the snub arrived the same day Trump touched down for the NATO summit.

There’s a cottage industry of videos by Europeans during the World Cup saying America is kind of great — mostly people enjoying huge plates of fast food, but whatever. Then Trump reminded the world of how U.S. bullying and rule-breaking screws everything up. And it should be a red alert for every democratic leader on earth that the richest man in the world openly admits he wants to end universal suffrage. Every government contract for Elon is basically democratic suicide by every nation that signs one.

This all adds to the story the Wall Street Journal highlighted of how Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been working with European leaders for well over a year to systematically plot how to separate their economies from that of the United States - and from the whims and bullying of a nation dominated by Trump and his tech oligarch allies

A Hollow 250th

Part of why the 250th anniversary was such a nonevent is that local partners were starved of cash to promote state-by-state events and programs. In nearly every state, the official humanities nonprofits created by Congress to make history and literature accessible to all Americans had to give up their 250th planning when DOGE cut their funds.

Despite this, it hilarious that almost every major city will have better July 4th entertainment than the nation’s capital: Philadelphia alone drew Christina Aguilera, Meek Mill, Jill Scott, and The Roots for a free Fourth of July concert on the Parkway, while Trump is so corrupt he lied to every entertainer he tried to recruit, hoping to put them in a partisan rally and skim money for his MAGA cronies, so they all walked.

In commemoration of the 250yh, I reupped my case that many who hate Trump are in denial — seeing his evils as an aberration rather than the embodiment of America, the America he wants to make great again. You can read The Case for Hating America for the longer argument.

A Third of American Jews Say Israel Is Committing Genocide — So Who Are the Antisemites?

The charge of antisemitism has been stretched so far it now indicts the people it claims to protect. A new AP-NORC poll finds that about three in ten U.S. adults, including 30 percent of Jewish adults, believe Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians. So if saying Israel is committing genocide makes you an antisemite, then nearly a third of American Jews are antisemites? The same poll found 44 percent of Jews view Mamdani positively, which is its own answer to the smear campaign run against him.

The generational shift underneath those numbers is even bigger. A poll highlighted in the Jewish Forward no less showing that nearly half of young American Jews now favor a single binational state — combining Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza into one country — has gotten far less attention than it deserves.

There’s nothing utopian about the position. Settlements have made a two-state solution nearly impossible, so one state is increasingly the realistic way forward. The old frame, in which any criticism of Israel reads as betrayal, is collapsing fastest among the very Jews it was built to speak for.

The Records Keep Breaking — and So Do the Old Excuses on Solar

Two to three full degrees higher levels of record heat in a single year is astounding, and scary in its implications. The models trained us to expect a slow creep; instead we’re getting a step change, hotter and hotter and hotter, landing the same summer Con Ed had to cut voltage across Northern Manhattan and the Bronx just to keep the grid standing.

The good news is that the technology to get off fossil fuels keeps outrunning the conventional wisdom about where it can work. Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps, where everyone said solar made no sense — and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any lowland farm. It sits above the fog line in thin, clear air that lets far more sunlight through, and the snow acts like a giant mirror bouncing extra light up onto the panels. That opens up entirely new options for where clean power can come from.

Also This Week

The effective altruists should want to abolish the billionaire class. In a longer piece I argued that if effective altruists were true to their philosophy, they’d be committed to eliminating the billionaire class just to end the brain drain of smart minds wasted on useless financial engineering. Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t an aberration from EA; he was its logical customer. The Effective Altruist Argument for Ending the Billionaire Class.

Musk has the blood of millions on his hands. A Nobel winner delivered a scathing takedown: by working with Trump to gut USAID, Musk committed one of the largest acts of mass murder in history, starving the global poor and denying them medicine.

Trading Iranian refugees’ asylum files. The Trump administration violated U.S. law by handing Iran’s government confidential information detailing the asylum applications of the very Iranians it planned to deport — an incomprehensibly evil approach to negotiating with Tehran.

Amendments won’t fix a captured Court. Democrats are talking about formal constitutional amendments while the GOP has enacted dozens of amendments by Supreme Court dictate. Are Dems seriously going to pass dozens of such amendments — or will they expand the Court and reverse this wholesale MAGA rewriting of the Constitution?

The physics major was Sam Bankman-Fried, who would found the FTX crypto exchange and at a certain point was considered the richest person under the age of 30 — before he was indicted and convicted for multiple counts of fraud. Michael Lewis tells the story in his book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon and most readers take it as a tale of one man’s fraud.

But the pitch MacAskill made that afternoon is now the moral operating system of many of the richest men who have ever lived and the deepest problem is not that it led Bankman-Fried to commit multiple felonies. What was saddest is he was wasting what everyone acknowledged were impressive skills on designing intricate ways to trade a useless currency, rather than concentrating on any of the infinite other tasks that could benefit humanity. But making money WAS the point for his pursuit of the effective altruist philosophy.

The pitch went like this. You’ll work about eighty thousand hours in a lifetime, MacAskill told a room of Harvard students, so the only question worth asking is how many lives those hours save. Become a doctor in a poor country and you save some people with your own hands. Become a banker and you can pay for several doctors, and so save more. He pushed it further: what counts is doing what wouldn’t have happened without you. Quit medicine and someone else fills your white coat; the patients still get seen. Quit banking and a replacement takes the desk too, except he sinks his bonus into a lake house, and nothing reaches the poor at all. So become wealthy and save the world is the logic of effective altruism

Bankman-Fried was only the first famous customer who founded his firm explicitly to spread money on such pursuits. Elon Musk read MacAskill’s longtermist sequel and pronounced it “a close match for my philosophy”. A wide range of others in Silicon Valley use this effective altruist logic to justify their manic pursuit of wealth.

The Individual Math of Effective Altruism Has a Collective Action Problem

There is a compelling logic to the argument in our world where billionaires can buy and sell whole universities and hospitals – but that very logic if taken to its limit argues for abolishing the billionaire class itself and the system that produces it.

The key problem with MacAskill’s math is you need a replacement doctor waiting in the wings, ready to take the job the oligarch skipped. But if every moral person follows the logic, every capable potential doctor or scientist or artist will drop useful work to go make money. Tell all the talented people to quit medicine and research and teaching for the trading floor, and no one is left to take the white coat.

So instead of getting a planet of funded clinics, you get a generation of the sharpest minds going into finance to shave milliseconds off a trade, nudging up the yield on a block of Google ads, dreaming up one more wrinkle in the financial plumbing.

The tragedy is we are living in Will MacAskill’s world.

The economist Pian Shu, working through the career records of MIT graduates, found that finance was the single most popular destination for degree-holders, and that across MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the sector consistently took between a fifth and a third of every graduating class that went straight into the workforce in the years before the 2008 crash. And students interviewed admitted less growth in their analytical and scientific-reasoning skills than those who stayed in science and engineering, which means much of that specialized training possible went unused.

Giovanni Marin and Francesco Vona traced the migration of scientists and engineers into finance from 1980 to 2014 and tied it to a cumulative loss of 6.6 percent in labor-productivity growth across manufacturing — six and a half points of growth that never arrived because the people who would have designed the materials and written the code were busy pricing derivatives. The financial sector swelled from 4.9 percent of GDP to 7.9, and Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein couldn’t establish any measurable social return as that sector got bigger.

This problem of the brain drain into useless activities has a long history of dragging down whole economies. Thirty years ago Kevin Murphy, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny showed that economies whose ablest people go into rent-seeking grow more slowly than those whose talent goes into substantive work. William Baumol documented that when speculation pays better than building, speculation is what a society gets.

Cap the returns and the brain drain and speculative waste disappears

So if individual logic leads to social costs, then the imperative of effective altruism should be to reroute incentives to change that result.

Some effective altruism critics have long argued that the EA’s focus on individual incentives has blinded many of its adherents to the collective solutions needed to address the concerns they continually talk about. Amia Srinivasan, in a 2015 review, argued the whole movement ignored the actual machinery of global misery, the way trade and finance and empire and exploitation of labor produce it in the first place. Or as Mathew Snow argued, EA promotes buying the poor necessities while doing little about the system that made them poor.

And if the very incentives driving people into making money to fund EA philanthropy is itself promoting a brain drain emptying the pool of people performing the work EA advocates admit is needed, then changing those collective incentives should be a focus for EA.

And the thing routing many gifted graduates toward the trading desk is the size of the reward sitting on it.

So cap it. Eliminate the billionaire class altogether.

Hold the returns to financial wealth at even just four or five times the average salary, and any incentive for the virtuous to pursue that route will disappear. A talented twenty-two-year-old won’t have the delusion that can save more lives by speeding up trades than by treating patients, since they won’t have the funds to buy and sell an army of stand-ins. The expected-value calculation that pointed her at Wall Street will now point her back toward medicine, research, and teaching. We would get more doctors and more researchers and more people doing the work of holding a society together.

Those that like wealth for its own sake will still have plenty of incentives to pursue it, but everyone else will pursue the careers that fulfill them and benefit society, not focus on the rent-seeking niches thrown up by our current insanely unequal distribution of wealth.

Eliminating the Billionaire Class Will Also Eliminate the Other Pathologies of Income Inequality

Sam Bankman-Fried was not some deviation but the exemplar of the effective altruism movement’s logic. In many ways, the moral authority of effective altruism explains the short-cuts in the law he took; since if he was doing good, or at least intended to do good, he had the license to behave worse along the way. Bankman-Fried pictured himself the first trillionaire- and the philanthropy that would follow justified anything he did. That is just as clear in Elon Musk, who officially became the first trillionaire this year, and carries the same moral arrogance of believing his self-declared service to humanity justifies all the law breaking he’s engaged in over the years.

And beyond any worry about wasted talent and moral arrogance, that much money in a narrow set of hands undermines any hope for democratic society. The figures have stopped being abstract:

• Oxfam puts global billionaire wealth at $18.3 trillion in 2026, up 81 percent since 2020, with the billionaires adding $2.5 trillion in 2025 alone, a single year’s haul larger than everything owned by the poorest half of humanity.

• Between 1995 and 2021 the top 1 percent took thirty-eight cents of every new dollar of wealth; the bottom half took two.

This is a transfer of not just wealth but power over the basic institutions of our society. The German philanthropist Peter Krämer put the political version bluntly: extreme wealth is “a bad transfer of power,” from the state to men who answer to no voter. Anand Giridharadas spent a book on how elite giving works in practice, the Sacklers endowing museum wings while their company seeded the opioid epidemic, a financier clearing one graduating class’s student debt while lobbying against the taxes that might have made college affordable for millions.

The longtermism Musk calls a close match for his philosophy creates the delusion that his wealth is needed and justified, since who but a trillionaire funds the Mars colony, the godlike AI, the rescue of trillions of unborn digital minds? And it’s the same arrogance that let Musk almost single-handedly dismantle a global USAID network of food delivery and medicine, a denial of help that is projected to make Musk one of the greatest mass murderers in global history.

Eliminating the billionaire class would end a pathological social focus on the decisions of a handful of oligarchs and instead refocus each individual on what they can accomplish themselves, since their own hands and own minds will be the only ones they have to contribute.

But unfortunately, Starmer’s likely successor, Andy Burnham, looks like little improvement, and most progressive critics of Labour are still telling voters the Greens are the best option, even knowing the risk of splitting the anti-Reform vote. And honestly, I’d join them. Yet the very reasons I’d back the Greens in Britain are exactly why I’d never vote for the Green Party or any third party in the United States.

A lot of American leftists talk about the need to “build an independent workers party,” and most of them are cribbing from Marx and later European writers. The phrase makes sense in the European context, where parties have closed memberships and the leadership, not the voters, picks most candidates. But as the rise of the “Squad” and DSA-backed challengers beating Democratic incumbents in primaries shows, the United States doesn’t actually have “parties” in anything like the sense that word carries in Europe. Combine that with the tactical need to not split the vote in November, and running in Democratic primaries is the only sane option here.

To see why, look at the United Kingdom. There, the mass of left voters drifting to the Greens to punish Labour’s rightward turn are doing the smart thing, whereas voting Green — or for any third party — in a general election here in the US is generally an idiotic decision. Most Americans, and especially the leftists reaching for European “workers party” language, just don’t grasp how differently our system works.

The general elections look similar on the surface. Britain elects its parliament the same way we elect Congress: whoever gets the most votes in a district wins, no runoff, no majority required. The difference is that Britain has five viable national parties holding seats — Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform, and the Greens — plus seven regional parties from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The gap between that and our two-party system isn’t the ballot. It’s how the parties themselves are built.

Keir Starmer has resigned, so how will his successor be picked? Since Labour now has the majority of MPs in Parliament, whoever the Labour Party chooses as leader will become prime minister. And here’s the thing: that choice is walled off at every step. You can’t even enter the internal contest unless 20% of Labour MPs nominate you — a threshold Starmer’s people raised from 10% in 2021. Given how moderate the overwhelming bulk of MPs are — more in a minute on why that is — there’s essentially no chance a left candidate even clears the starting line. Then, among that pre-screened pool, only members who joined at least six months earlier get to vote. And to be a member you have to pay £73.68 a year, roughly $100 — a hefty poll tax just for the right to weigh in. The upshot is that only about 300,000 dues-paying members, the ones motivated enough to pay, will choose the next prime minister of a country of 68 million people.

How the Machine Picks a Winner: The Burnham Case

Nothing shows the controlled nature of this process better than the path Burnham himself has taken. He was mayor of Greater Manchester, one of the largest areas outside London with a single executive, and wanted to challenge Starmer a year ago, but you have to be an MP to run for leader. When a parliamentary seat opened up in the Manchester area, he wanted it — and here we hit the next big difference from the US. Local voters don’t choose who a party’s candidate is. Party officials at the local and national level largely decide, and under Labour’s rules an elected mayor needs the national executive’s express permission even to seek a seat. In January, the national party vetoed Burnham outright. One result: voters were angry enough that the Green Party won that by-election, sending the first-ever Green MP from the north of England to Westminster.

Only once Starmer’s numbers hit disaster territory did the party decide it needed a successor after all, and suddenly Burnham was waved through to run in a completely different district, winning that seat on June 18. Notably, the same Burnham who last year attacked Labour for sounding too much like Reform is now promising to keep every policy Starmer ran on, which has led plenty of observers to suspect he cut a quiet deal to moderate himself as the price of admission.

Other sitting MPs may yet stand, but most expect Burnham to prevail. If this sounds like a process engineered to exclude troublemakers and anyone who’d stray from what the establishment wants, that’s because it is.

So How Did Jeremy Corbyn Ever Become Leader?

Which raises an obvious question for anyone who remembers Jeremy Corbyn, how did the hard-left MP from north London somehow win the leadership in 2015? The answer is that the establishment screwed up. Sensing real alienation among left-leaning voters, a number of MPs who didn’t support Corbyn lent him their nominations to get him over the threshold, assuming he’d be trounced but that the left would at least get a hearing.

That miscalculation collided with a recent rule change that let members of the public sign up as registered supporters and vote for just £3. A surge of new people paid up, voted overwhelmingly for Corbyn, and made him leader.

The next year the establishment tried to reverse it, first arguing he lacked enough MPs to even appear on the ballot, and when that failed, hiking the sign-up fee to £25 in the belief it would scare off his base. Instead, hundreds of thousands more paid the higher price to re-elect him. Corbyn went on to swell the membership so dramatically that by 2020 the eligible electorate reached 784,000.

That was the year Corbyn stepped aside and Keir Starmer won the leadership, pledging to carry Corbyn’s program forward, only with a more buttoned-down, lawyerly delivery.

The Starmer Betrayal

Having promised continuity, Starmer instead set about reversing not just Corbyn’s policies but the rules that had opened the party up in the first place. The nomination bar went back up to 20% of MPs. The membership fee climbed to the current $100-a-year equivalent. And the six-month waiting period returned, so no recent joiner could vote in a leadership contest.

But pricing people out was only the start. Starmer’s team began actively purging them. Corbyn had been hammered for years for not stripping enough members of their standing over alleged antisemitism, much of it really anti-Israel sentiment recast as bigotry. What ought to stop an American reader cold is the premise underneath the whole fight: that party leaders get any say at all over who’s allowed to show up and vote in a nominee selection. That the antisemitism charge was often a pretext for going after the left became hard to deny in July 2021, when the leadership proscribed four left-wing groups and moved to auto-expel anyone tied to them, stripping their votes in any future contest.

The purge extended to many MPs who supported Corbyn being expelled from sitting with the party caucus – having the party whip removed in British parlance – and then being denied the right to stand for parliament as Labour MPs. Corbyn himself had the party whip suspended in 2020 and was ultimately barred from standing as a Labour candidate in 2024; he ran as an independent and his constituents returned him anyway. Starmer and the Labour establishment then made sure all the MPs who would run in the 2024 general election were in the moderate Starmer mold.

The net effect of all of it is that the roughly 300,000 members who’ll pick Starmer’s replacement are well under half the 784,000 who were eligible when Starmer himself was elected in 2020. And the alternatives for Labour voters to choose from are guaranteed to only be different shades of Starmer beige.

The Rise of the Green Alternative

This is the context for the Greens’ surge. A party that had elected only a handful of MPs in its entire history suddenly blew past 200,000 members in early 2026 — up from just 68,000 the previous autumn — and has since climbed past 230,000. That total includes a youth wing, the Young Greens, that alone surged past 50,000 members to become the largest youth movement of any British party — bigger, by itself, than Labour’s entire collapsed youth membership. That brings the Greens within striking distance of Labour’s own shrunken rolls, and by spring the polls had the Greens ahead of Labour, which is a big part of why Labour insiders finally organized to dump Starmer.

Everything above explains the surge. Many left activists were barred from Labour outright. Those with less money found the Green Party’s £6-a-year low-income rate far less daunting than Labour’s $100. They knew that if they tried to rejoin Labour en masse, they’d likely be banned en masse. And even if they got in, they’d have no say over who Labour actually ran for office, whereas the Greens let local members choose their own candidates in each constituency. Faced with a party you pay to enter but can’t influence, and a party that’s cheap and lets you pick the ticket, the choice makes itself.

The danger of dividing the progressive vote against Reform’s fascist threat is real. But Labour could erase that danger tomorrow by enacting some form of proportional representation or ranked-choice voting, and the stronger the Greens grow, the more pressure Labour will feel to do exactly that. That’s the strategic logic. Building the Green threat is how you force the reform that makes the Green threat safe. For a British leftist, backing the Greens isn’t a protest. It’s a lever.

Why the Same Vote Is Idiotic in America

What should be obvious is that none of the conditions that make a Green vote rational in Britain exist in the United States. Voting in a Democratic primary is free. Anyone can run — for local office or for the presidential nomination. And no party official can bar you from voting in your own jurisdiction’s election. Until Trump is gone, Democrats hold both chambers, and the filibuster is dead, there’s no path to ranked-choice or proportional representation here, which means a third-party vote that splits the anti-Republican majority carries enormous downside and essentially no upside.

On the other side of the ledger, the left has made real gains running inside the Democratic Party, and not only lately. Socialists have been winning Democratic primaries in friendly districts since the 1930s. Jesse Jackson took 6.9 million votes and roughly 29% of the primary electorate in 1988, briefly leading the delegate count.

Bernie Sanders came close enough across two runs that his nomination was a live possibility. And DSA-backed challengers keep knocking off entrenched incumbents, the way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did to a ten-term congressman in 2018. Some Bernie supporters darkly insist the establishment rigs these primaries, but the evidence is thin. Set aside the pervasive tilt of big money toward corporate interests, and what you actually see is millions of voters mobilizing, in dozens of states, and sometimes winning.

It’s worth remembering that this openness was won, not given. The civil rights movement forced the racially exclusionary Southern parties to open their membership, and the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in Smith v. Allwright — striking down the all-white primary — had the lasting side effect of gutting any party’s power to control who votes in its own internal contests. The fight against the poll tax is why there’s no fee to vote in a primary. And the grassroots battles over party rules that began in the 1960s, above all the McGovern-Fraser reforms, ended the era of smoke-filled rooms and handed the choice of nominees, presidential and local, to ordinary voters.

So when American left writers reach for rhetoric imported from countries where closed parties like British Labour are the reality, they’re describing a machine we don’t have.

Almost all parties in Europe resemble the UK’s closed party system far more than that of the U.S. I generally loathe exaggerated appeals to American Exceptionalism, but in the case of voting rules, it actually applies and explains the dominance of the U.S. “two party system” - where neither party is a “party” in the European sense - better than the borrowed left rhetoric many third party advocates try to use.

Ignoring the actual, material facts of how our parties work is, to my mind, about the least socialist thing a person can do — if rooting your strategy in material reality is supposed to be what the tradition is about. We need to organize under the reality of conditions - economic but also political - and different political conditions call for very different political strategies.

The Most Important Decision This Court Has Made

On Monday the Court handed down Trump v Slaughter, the case ending the independence of the FTC and, with it, of every independent agency Congress has built since the New Deal. This is the most important decision this Court has made.

We can largely reverse Callais with a national ban on gerrymandering, but this case kills the functioning of every agency created since the New Deal, since now no agency can operate except at the personal whims of the President. And as we have seen, Trump regularly uses threats of executive action as a tool for political and personal blackmail against corporate donors and against political enemies.

And this is why precedent matters.

The whole structure of countless laws is based on the decision upholding independent agencies ninety years ago. EVERYTHING Congress would have legislated in 90 years would have been different otherwise — so the Supreme Court has invalidated the intent of pretty much every law underpinning the modern regulatory state.

Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench: the Court “undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”

So what’s the answer? Some suggest that the way to deal with the Court is to pass new constitutional amendments.

Rep. Neguse for example is pushing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and good for him — but talking about formal constitutional amendments when the GOP has enacted dozens of amendments to the Constitution via Supreme Court dictates misses the scale of the problem. Are Dems seriously going to pass dozens of such amendments — which is clearly impossible given the obstacles to doing under the Constitution.

Or will they expand the Court and reverse this wholesale MAGA rewriting of the Constitution? Given how this Court has constantly ignored long-established precedents in overturning every congressional law it could, a new expanded Court in 2029 should have no compunction about overturning every one of the Roberts Court’s decisions to RESTORE the rule of law and affirm congressional laws.

When This Court Rules Well, It’s Roberts Saving the GOP From Itself

The same week brought two “good” results, and both illustrate that such events are almost exclusively when the savvy John Roberts is trying to save Trump and the GOP from themselves. The Court upheld birthright citizenship — but if the Court had overturned it, I think it would have been toxic for Republicans in coming elections as existing voters would suddenly be directly in the crosshairs of Trump’s attack on immigrants.

The Court also rejected the GOP attack on mail-in ballots in Watson v. RNC — the first merits opinion where Barrett and Roberts sided with the three liberals in a 5–4 decision. I worked on mail-in voting legislation decades ago, and the odd thing is it was considered pro-GOP policy because Republicans used it more, since older, whiter and wealthier voters were more prone to like mail-in voting.

It was only when Dem activists began using it effectively did some GOP courts begin “discovering” it was unconstitutional. But this decision by Roberts just reflects the older GOP viewpoint that Trump’s obsessions on an issue don’t always match reality.

Van Jones’ Sad Journey from STORM Radical to Corporate Red-Baiter

Van Jones spent this week advising corporate Dems on how to beat back the DSA upsurge after New York’s primaries, demanding moderates defend “rich people, cops, free enterprise” from attack by the new socialist vanguard.

This is so ironic, since I knew Van personally when he was a leader in Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) — a left cadre organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. That he is now playing the role of ex-CP neocon advising corporate Dems on beating back the DSA upsurge is a sad/hilarious personal trajectory.

STORM was a fascinating group, multi-racial with some of the best left organizers in the Bay Area in the early 1990s. This retrospective document discusses the group’s history after its dissolution a decade later — and if you read it, it’s relevant that Van is the leader mentioned at the center of the controversy that tore the group apart internally. That experience no doubt contributed to his own journey into mainstream media hackdom.

It’s reasonable to have different preferences in a primary race — but the tell here is that Van is talking to those “donating” money. This is about how corporate donors need to redirect their money, no doubt by hiring people like Van to organize boots on the ground to support pro-corporate candidates.

What’s fascinating is that Van suffered a full round of McCarthyite baiting himself when Obama wanted to appoint him to a “green jobs” position — Van had been doing serious work in environmental justice organizing — and got attacked. Here is a 2009 piece I wrote defending him.

That Van is now engaged in McCarthyite baiting of the left makes this history all the more tragic. He’s free to change his own political beliefs, but the bitter nastiness of this attack on the candidates elected last Tuesday is repulsive. I joke that my personal politics are so boringly consistent — I was a democratic socialist critical of the excesses of sectarian groups like STORM back then, and I am still a democratic socialist critical of the excesses of sectarian groups, including of some factions within DSA. But Van has just gone off the deep end in this particular rant.

A Repression Machine to Rank with the Gestapo and the Stasi

The Brennan Center totaled up what Congress has handed Trump: ICE and CBP budgets exceeding $200 billion. That is one of the largest militaries in the world, deployed to invade US cities, kidnap their residents, and intern them in concentration camps. This will go down with the Gestapo, Stasi & Stalinist gulags as one of the worst state repressive structures in world history.

That so many in America still accept this tells you how every act of mass repression and genocide starts — substitute “Jew” or “Communist” or another outgroup for “illegal immigrant” and we see it happening in real time.

Say It Until It Can’t Be Ignored: Musk Committed Mass Murder

Paul Krugman said what the media keeps dancing around: Musk has the blood of millions of children on his hands. It needs to be repeated so it can’t be ignored — Musk, working with Trump, committed one of the largest acts of mass murder in history, starving the global poor and denying them medicine.

Meanwhile the markets are rendering their own verdict on the man’s genius. SpaceX stock has fallen below its first-day close and now its bonds are being treated like junk by investors. Awesome that this shit sandwich is going to be automatically shoved into many retirement accounts.

AI for Trump-Approved Customers Is Pure Corporatist Fascism

Buried in the AI news this week: “OpenAI said new AI product, called GPT-5.6 Sol, would be accessible only to customers approved by the Trump administration.”

Why would anyone build a business around US AI models at this point, when use and shutdowns are subject to the whims of a corrupt mad kind?

It’s a pure gift to China — and no doubt contributed to OpenAI dropping immediate plans for its IPO.

I’d love to see some business NOT given access once it goes live sue the Trump administration for acting without legal authorization to pick and choose which businesses may use a legal product. Banning it altogether is one thing — but a White House deciding which companies get access to a commercial technology is pure corporatist fascism.

Trump Couldn’t Even Throw America a 250th Birthday Party

Everything Trump runs directly — the Kennedy Center, the reflecting pool, and now the “Great American State Fair” — are clusterfucks of incompetence & failure. Just like all the firms Trump bankrupted, because Trump is a terrible businessman but a savvy con man.

I’m old enough to remember 1976 and the wondrous excitement of the 200th anniversary — tall ships, 50-state quarters, the speeches and all the events that were crowded as hell. Trump can’t even excite his own MAGA base to attend his pissant fair, even as troops patrol a stagnant reflecting pool. And in case you think the pathetic crowd scenes are manufactured by selective online haters, here is Fox broadcasting it:

And to pay for it all? Trump is looting the National Parks to fund his vanity projects, including most of his fancy upgrades to the White House, in an absolute Versailles “let them eat cake” symbolism — symbolic of the broader looting of our nation by Trump’s corruption.

Harris Is Courting Mamdani’s Voters — Because That’s Where the Party Is

Axios reports Harris is reaching out to Mamdani and pro-Palestinian activists in the run-up to 2028. This is great in showing the success of pushing pro-Palestinian politics to the center of Dem politics. AOC remains my first choice with Pritzker probably second, but Harris beats out Pete in my mind and obliterates Newsom in any primary matchup.

And for anyone who thinks the GOP can weaponize this: they will try to tie the Democratic Party to Mamdani — who is now the 2nd most popular elected leader in the country and more popular than the Democratic Party. Or tie it to Bernie Sanders, who is the most popular elected leader in office today according to polling.

Also This Week

“I run the protection program.” Mike Johnson told House Republicans that if Dems win the midterms they’ll investigate Trump’s family, cabinet and donors — and that he runs the protection program. I.e., the GOP Congress exists to protect Trump’s corruption from oversight. Watch his own words.

Trump is a rapist. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s latest attempt to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll — the judge said the jury found Trump raped her (Mother Jones). And that most of the public doesn’t know the Epstein files contain affidavits about Trump and a 13-year-old accuser is testament to how craven the media has been — the lawsuit prying those files open had to come from an independent journalist, not any major media company (Daily Beast).

Tariffs for the tech oligarchs. Trump threatened 100% tariffs on European countries that impose a digital services tax. He doesn’t care at all about higher prices on consumers — but he will destroy our alliances to protect the profits of his tech oligarch donors. AFP.

Union muscle defeats the “buffer zone” law. Unions did the right thing in NYC and mobilized to help stop a bill criminalizing free-speech protests near university and school campuses around the city. Frankly embarrassing that a majority of the NYC City Council voted for this anti-speech measure in the first place. PSC-CUNY’s Clarion has the story.

Where progressive government is thriving. The US left should pay attention: Spain remains pretty much the only progressive government anywhere that had power before Covid and still has it — without throwing immigrants under the bus and while pursuing a serious green transition, including a mass amnesty of undocumented immigrants underpinning a thriving economy.

$55 billion for millionaire farmers. The ballooning federal tab to prop up American farms (WSJ) would not bother me so much if I didn’t know so much of it was going to millionaire farmers. We really need to limit this kind of aid to farmers with net income under some threshold like $200K per year.

Trump kills auto jobs in South Carolina. “Production of the Polestar 3 was moved from Chengdu, China, to Ridgeville, South Carolina... The future of Polestar 3 production is now in limbo” — a completely arbitrary, sudden decision like all Trump decisions. The Drive.

A master list of CIA assets. The Trump administration is demanding intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets and recruits (NYT via Leah McElrath). I suppose as a lefty this is encouraging, since it will destroy the CIA’s ability to recruit spies and assets in the future. All existing assets are probably cutting deals to burn their handlers in hopes of saving their skins.

Project 2029’s weak-ass opening bid. The first major policy proposal out of the establishment’s post-Trump planning group is... an online child safety plan. That this is the first major policy out of this group — rather than a higher minimum wage, packing the Court, legislating Roe v. Wade, passing climate change legislation — tells you how weak-ass the establishment Dem response will be post-Trump. Why we need primaries like last Tuesday all over the country. The announcement.

Good riddance to this putz. Jake Tapper spent primetime asking Dan Goldman — who lost his seat to Mamdani-endorsed Brad Lander by 31 points — whether Mamdani is a secret antisemite. Goldman condescendingly asks whether Mamdani understands that countries like Uganda violate human rights — you know, like Mamdani is clueless about the country that forced his dad to flee during an episode of ethnic cleansing. The clip.

Mel Brooks at 100. In commemoration of Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday, this video essay by Lindsay Ellis shows the brilliance of the anti-racism of The Producers, Blazing Saddles and other Brooks movies — the point being he always denied racists the menace they craved and instead made them ridiculous.

In one telling, DSA is the most effective left electoral operation in the country. It helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York last year, the first candidate for the office to clear a million votes since 1969. And this past month its New York candidates ran the table: three Mamdani-backed congressional insurgents won their primaries, two of them by knocking off sitting Democratic incumbents. Brad Lander buried two-term Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn with two-thirds of the vote, Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat uptown, and Claire Valdez, a former union organizer, took an open Brooklyn-Queens seat. Down the ballot, DSA-backed candidates picked up seats in the state legislature too. (Lander was endorsed by Mamdani but was not officially endorsed by DSA, although many DSAers no doubt supported his campaign.)

In the other telling, the one that fills profiles in the national press, DSA is a sect so consumed by purity tests that it seeks to destroy the Democratic party while issuing foreign-policy manifestos that read like dispatches from a 1970s Marxist splinter group. Jonathan Chait wrote a screed for The Atlantic yesterday that described DSA as an “illiberal” and immoral force that is a cancer in the Democratic Party.

It’s almost hard to believe they’re the same organization.

They aren’t, really. The pragmatic politics of the New York City chapter, with its broad neighborhood alliances and its block-by-block canvassing and its willingness to back candidates who can actually win and then govern, is radically at odds with the national leadership of DSA, which is dominated by sectarian ideologues and has at points actively worked to undermine the very approach that makes New York succeed.

How AOC Illustrates the National-Local Split in DSA

Nothing shows the gap better than New York’s other star socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).

AOC largely wrote the script that Lander, Valdez, and Avila Chevalier ran last month. In 2018 she walked into a primary nobody was contesting and knocked off Joseph Crowley, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus and a man widely tipped as a future Speaker. It was the biggest upset of that cycle, and it taught a whole movement that the machine could be beaten.

You’d think AOC is DSA’s flagship endorsement. Nationally, she isn’t. While New York City chapter continues to endorse her, in 2024, the national leadership stripped its endorsement from her. The reason given was that she was too soft on Israel, and even, horrors, took part in a forum on antisemitism.

So the national DSA decided that AOC, one of the strongest voices in the House for Palestinian rights and a member who has spent more political capital on that cause than almost anyone in Congress, was too much of a Zionist ally to back. That judgment basically summarizes how insanely sectarian the majority of DSA national leadership is at this point compared to the pragmatic, sane politics of NYC’s chapter.

As Does the Bowman Purge

The same logic, in a more destructive form, played out with Jamaal Bowman.

In 2020 Bowman ran on an unapologetic defense of Palestinian rights and knocked off Eliot Engel, the sixteen-term chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of Israel’s most reliable allies in Congress. He was exactly the kind of win DSA exists to produce.

Then Bowman cast a few votes the sectarian wing of DSA couldn’t abide, most prominently for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile system, and he took a trip to Israel with the liberal Jewish group J Street. That set off a campaign to throw him out. Beginning with the Madison, Wisconsin chapter in October 2021, a reported 28 city and regional chapters, plus 11 campus YDSA chapters, demanded Bowman be censured or expelled from DSA. For most of 2021 and 2022 it’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the national organization was consumed by the question of whether to throw one of its only members of Congress out the door.

The leadership declined to expel him in the end, but it refused to re-endorse him. Two years later Bowman lost his primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who rode roughly $15 million in AIPAC-aligned super PAC money through the most expensive House primary in American history. So the net result of the left’s two-year inquisition was to help replace one of the House’s strongest voices for Palestinian rights with a dependable vote for Israel. New York DSA did endorse Bowman in 2024, but late, and without the machine it would throw behind the Mamdani slate two years later. The contrast was the whole story: base-building in New York, self-immolation at the national level.

The point is that the organization’s two halves run on entirely different logics. Notably, Chait in his Atlantic piece did not once discuss these tensions, did not mention the existence of Jamaal Bowman, and barely mentioned AOC’s role.

But these differences aren’t exclusive to New York City. Another clear parallel is DSA House member Rashida Tlaib, elected the same year as AOC, who works with a Metro Detroit chapter built on the same patient, coalition-minded organizing, and which was, tellingly, not among the chapters demanding Bowman’s head. A few chapters like New York and Metro Detroit have real roots in their communities and can carry candidates into local office and, now and then, into Congress. Outside New York City, we just saw this spring additional DSA members, Chris Rabb of Philadelphia and Melat Kiros in Colorado, winning primaries on the same model.

The Sectarian Principles in National DSA Leadership

This is in contrast to the multiple DSA chapters that practice a narrow sectarian politics and supported delegates to national leadership that have promoted the embarrassing political pronouncements that reporters now regularly repeat. The sectarianism shows most plainly in foreign policy. The national DSA office opposed military aid to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and called for the United States to pull out of NATO. Its platform has in the past called for abolishing USAID, which lands it, awkwardly, on the same side as Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s wrecking ball. And back when Maduro still ran Venezuela, the national organization sent a delegation to Caracas that handed the regime exactly the legitimacy it was looking for- and then in 2024 condemned the Venezuelan opposition and the media for criticizing the validity of the elections.

When Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine in January 2022, the national DSA International Committee blamed NATO and the US in a statement titled “DSA IC opposes US militarization and interventionism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and calls for an end to NATO expansionism.” After the Russian invasion, I detailed in this piece why defending Ukraine should be a core commitment of the global left and in a followup piece on why Ukraine was a class war against Putin’s white oligarchic petrocapitalism- issues that national DSA largely ignored. What is striking about the DSA national analysis is how locked into Cold War nostrums on Russia as an opponent of US imperialism, almost as if Putin still embodied some kind of socialist alternative to US hegemony.

Gaza was of course the issue where sectarian politics burst out in national headlines, as a faction of the far left, primarily led by what is known as the ANSWER coalition - itself a front group for the Party of Socialism & Liberation (PSL), would regularly praise Hamas and embarrass the rest of the pro-Palestinian movement. Yet national DSA would continue to cosponsor national marches and national actions with ANSWER (see here and here).

While NYC DSA notoriously promoted on twitter (although did not formally endorse) an ANSWER rally on October 8th, where Hamas’ actions were praised, the local leadership quickly apologized for its promotion of the rally— and AOC, Jamaal Bowman and other prominent DSA members condemned it as well. Going forward NYC DSA did not cosponsor any rallies with ANSWER! and instead allied with other groups in events with Jewish Voice for Peace NYC and with local labor unions opposed to Israel’s war.

This strategic pluralistic approach by NYC DSA in opposition to Israeli brutality is in sharp contrast to national DSA’s ongoing embrace of ANSWER which extends to cosponsoring rallies with them this year against the Iran war.

So who is ANSWER/PSL and Why is National DSA Allied with Them?

I did a deep dive on the history and politics of PSL/ANSWER soon after the Oct 8th rally in this piece, but the summary is that they are a tendency whose roots go back to 1956 by leftists who felt other leftists were insufficiently supportive of Soviet tanks killing protesters in Hungary. They would go on to become the primary defenders of Stalinist regimes around the world— and to this day tend to praise North Korea as the embodiment of the socialist ideal.

They view the United States as a violent oppressive regime that causes mass murder around the world — a view I like many leftists share (see my Case for Hating America) — but what distinguishes PSL/ANSWER is they translate this into defending any regime that opposes the U.S., no matter how heinous that regime’s own crimes. Thus, their defense of every nasty regime ranging from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Putin’s Russia. (If interested, you can read more about the organization by a top leader of PSL in this public resignation letter, where he denounces its corruption and sectarian approach.)

As to PSL’s influence in DSA, that stems from the upsurge in DSA membership following Bernie’s run for President in 2016. While many Bernie activists just were looking for a new activist home after the campaign, a number of sectarian groups saw that surge as an opportunity to join DSA and try to take it over. In established chapters like NYC, the new membership pushed the chapter’s politics leftward but were offset by existing members and many sane political newcomers.

But on top of 30-40 existing DSA chapters, there was an explosion of roughly 160-170 completely new chapters chartered in those years. Many of those chapters were especially easy for sectarian individuals and groups to commandeer and in national conventions, there was suddenly a deluge of delegates that promoted PSL-like viewpoints. Whether they were secret PSL members or just sympathetic to their viewpoint, official factions with names like the Marxist Unity Group and Red Star began electing leaders to DSA’s national body.

None have majority control unto themselves, but they have built a working alliance of sectarians willing to ally with ANSWER! among their other projects.

Red Star in particular is well organized — and one of the two DSA national co-chairs, Megan Romer, is from Red Star and the faction’s view of foreign policy lines up perfectly with PSL, summed up in this part of their Points of Unity:

Red Star strives to weaken and ultimately dismantle US empire. We acknowledge that while no political project is perfect, to publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the US State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine. There is no such thing as a third camp; one is either working to support American imperialism or to oppose it.

So if the US is supporting Ukraine, Red Star supports Russia. If the US criticizes China for cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, Red Star sides with China. And so on.

That a Red Star member is co-chair of national DSA explains many of the insane and politically toxic statements that the press finds to quote.

The other part of this sectarianism is that Red Star and its allies in national DSA leadership would prefer a third party completely separate from the Democrats and, at best, see running candidates on the Democratic Party line as purely tactical. They hate that AOC supported Biden and Harris, describing this as “capitulation to the Democratic Party establishment” and they see candidates like AOC as preventing DSA from being able to “detach ourselves from the Democratic Party apparatus.”

So this is the source of the ideological insanity we see coming from national DSA.

Why Tension Between National DSA and Locals like NYC will Blow Up the Organization

At some point, this divergence is going to cause a split in the organization.

While DSA has 100,000 paid members, most don’t vote in delegate elections to DSA’s national convention— and those that do vote tend to have the most extreme viewpoints, particularly in the smaller chapters that were often created by sectarian activists who discourage “paper members” from even voting. So a well-organized set of super-active ideologues is able to commandeer the national leadership.

But in successful local chapters, especially those which are winning elected offices, the dynamic is the exact opposite. To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.

And it’s not just Mamdani winning in New York, but notably the two recent victories by DSA chapters in Philadelphia and Colorado that illustrate this dynamic. Both Chris Rabb in Philadelphia and Melat Kiros in Colorado, while militant defenders of Palestinian rights, have publicly rejected the foreign policy line of the Red Star-style DSA leadership in explicitly supporting Ukraine. Rabb in a local opinion piece directly compared “Russia’s bloodthirsty conquest of the Ukraine” to the “slaughter of more than 70,000 Palestinians in an ongoing genocide”, while Colorado’s Kiros explicitly repudiated key national DSA positions on pulling out of NATO and a number of other national DSA positions.

As the DSA contingent in Congress grows, DSA elected leaders along with the chapters that support them are going to be in inevitable conflict with a national leadership issuing embarrassing pronouncements that will fail to build effective electoral campaigns.

At some point the elected leaders will either leave DSA or help lead a split in the organization. There is plenty of precedent for this.

Back in 1936, much of the New York City chapter of the Socialist Party seceded to form the American Labor Party, a ballot line designed so socialists could vote for FDR against the wishes of the then-leadership of the Socialist Party. Today’s Working Families Party in NYC and in other states — notably Pennsylvania where they were another key organization supporting Rabb — sees the American Labor Party as its own model.

DSA itself is the product of a later split in the Socialist Party over Vietnam, DSA emerged then under the leadership of writer-activist Michael Harrington and a number of US labor leaders after a merger with another group, the New American Movement (NAM) which itself had split off from other sectarian groups in the New Left.

If I had to guess, the sequence of events most likely to lead to a new split is that AOC decides to run for President, the national leadership refuses to endorse her, and a number of larger locals around the country do endorse her— and as volunteers swell the ranks of the endorsing chapters, that leads to those chapters seceding because they don’t feel a need to chain themselves to a national office out-of-touch with their goals.

My Personal Take on DSA at This Point

One of the most irritating things about Chait’s dishonest Atlantic screed is that he describes a North Star caucus of DSA’s traditional members who formed to oppose the national leadership’s drift into sectarianism— and then describes a resignation letter as if that group was repudiating all of DSA’s politics, not just the sectarian leadership’s irresponsible alliance with groups like PSL.

As both a founding member and early leader of North Star and one of the signers of that resignation letter, I can say with full confidence that essentially all of the people Chait is talking about remain fans of AOC and the kind of politics Mamdani is promoting in NYC. All are militantly critical of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. They just differ with the ideological rhetoric and alliances with dictatorial regimes that the Red Star type factions like. But that’s completely separate from a shared view that the corporate dominance of many parts of the Democratic Party does need to be militantly challenged.

But Chait’s characterization of what NYC DSA is doing as trying to break the Democratic Party is ridiculous. Mamdani has bent over backward to work cooperatively with moderate Dem Governor Kathy Hochul and with moderate Dem City Council Speaker Julie Menin, just this week getting broad consensus agreement on a balanced budget for New York City. While DSA and Mamdani fought in a number of House seats, they specifically decided not to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, because they wanted to help Mamdani build support with the party establishment for concrete improvements in New Yorkers’ lives. That is not the “rule or ruin” organization Chait is trying to describe. Chait’s failure to distinguish between the national DSA leadership and NYC’s local chapter is the only way he was able to play the rhetorical game he did.

All of these tensions are complicated, since there are plenty of anti-sectarian folks fighting in locals across the country to move DSA in a better direction; in fact, most North Star members are still members of DSA doing just that, while there are great folks elected at the national level pushing for more sane national DSA policies.

The reverse is also true that there are plenty of sectarian tendencies in sane chapters like NYC. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani and DSA-endorsed candidate, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s primary, is a case in point. Deleted tweets about Ukraine, Stalin and other topics clearly align her ideologically in the past more with Red Star/PSL style sectarianism than AOC-Mamdani style rhetoric. But she claims to have evolved since then and I assume Mamdani did some vetting on that change before endorsing her.

But here’s the thing. Darializa is now going to be my Congresswoman and I voted for her without hesitation because I know she won’t vote to keep sending bombs to kill Palestinians and won’t vote for corporate corruption, like Espaillat did when he supported pro-crypto legislation. And if she continues to say stupid sectarian things, someone else can challenge her in a primary in two years - because that’s how democracy works. Voters can always vote for someone better, no matter how much the Democratic establishment has heart palpitations when DSA and other progressives challenge incumbents. Notably, Espaillat challenged incumbent Charlie Rangel back in 2014, so there is a lot of hypocrisy by those mad at Mamdani for supporting a primary challenge against Espaillat.

Personally, I want a national left organization to do what NYC DSA and other sane locals are doing all over the country without the idiotic national DSA ideological baggage. I’ve written that I want AOC to run for President less because I think she will win — although I think it’s possible — but because the campaign itself can help build the political infrastructure for that better than any other likely scenario.

If she doesn’t, I still think the tension between New York City along with other sane DSA locals versus the national leadership will come to a head, although the split is likely to be nastier and messier in that case. But that blow up is coming.

Hakeem Jeffries went on TV after the Mamdani sweep by his endorsed House members to downplay the New York results as “higher income” districts with an “outsized focus on issues connected to the Middle East.” So here are the numbers. The median income in Jeffries’ district is $63K, while the median income in my district, where Darializa defeated Espaillat, is $52K.

Which is a reminder that Hakeem Jeffries is a liar — or grossly stupid — whichever you prefer in a potential Speaker.

The whole centrist narrative about democratic socialists representing elite or white lefty districts just fails with Darializa’s district, which is just 15–17% white, 52% Hispanic, 23% Black, 55% speaking a non-English language at home, with a $52–54K median income (compared to $75K nationally) and a 25.7% poverty rate.

Jeffries’ rhetoric just repeats MAGA GOP rhetoric that Democrats don’t represent “real Americans” — their voters are too rich, too black, too urban, too educated, too WHATEVER. My kids went to public school in this district, where most families were poor and working class.

It is because of constant lies and attacks on other Dems like this by Jeffries that there are close to 211 other House Democrats I would rather have as Speaker compared to him.

Then you have Tish James saying "Don’t “Blow Up” the Party”

James complained that Mamdani upset other elected Democrats with his endorsements and that he should have worked with the party leadership.

The irony here is that Tish James got her start blowing up the Democratic Party — as the first candidate to run on a third-party Working Families Party line and defeat a Democratic Party nominee, back in 2003. Mamdani didn’t blow up the party. The voters did. Listen to the voters or get out of the way.

The most honest response from the centrist crowd was Long Island House member Tom Suozzi saying: “Economic insecurity, climate change and immigrant injustice are all real problems, and alternative solutions must be offered.”

Meaning the moderates have not been offering solutions — just running interference for corporate donors, which is why they lost.

As long as Suozzi keeps winning his primaries, I’d rather he vote with Dems than the GOP. But he should recognize, as a recent Fox poll showed, that us democratic socialists are the majority of the party, and he is a guest in OUR party.

This frenzy by the centrists is driven by the idea of a sudden shift left - but that is ridiculous.

The party has been shifting steadily left for years. Biden adopted policies far to the left of the ones he once promoted as a senator — notably compared to when he voted for Reagan’s tax cuts — because he recognized this shift. The difference between Biden versus Jeffries & Schumer & other Dem establishment types is that Biden built great relationships with Bernie and AOC and other progressives by treating them as part of the spectrum of Dem politics, not as some internal enemy

Mamdani, AOC and Bernie use the label socialist, but they aren’t radically different in policy from a whole range of left-leaning Dems out there. If Tuesday helps Schumer and Jeffries and others recognize the shift THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED — the one Biden recognized as President — that’s a good thing.

And for all the centrist Dems ranting that they’ll be called socialists because of Mamdani and his slate, a reminder: you will be called a Communist no matter what you do. Even Obama was called a Communist, just as every Democrat since FDR has been.

Court Continues its War on Progressive Policies This Week

A Court that regularly rails against the federal government overriding the states just overturned consumer-protection laws in all fifty states around cancer-causing chemicals. In its win for the maker of Roundup, it blocked thousands of lawsuits from people who say they were never warned the weedkiller could cause cancer. This court is literally licensing corporations to murder without consequences.

This week it pulled a similar move to weaken state regulation of guns. Hawaii had set up what’s known as a default contract rule — the assumption is that the owner has barred guns on the property unless a gun owner requests an alternative contract of permission. But the MAGA Court strips states of their most basic property-rights power, in the name of MORE GUNS.

Hawaii in response should mandate that every hotel and store post a sign with one of two allowed messages: “We refuse entrance to guns on our property,” or “Please bring your guns and feel free to conceal them from other guests.” Be interesting to see which signs the stores put up.

Possibly the most disturbing case decided this week had the Court promoting Christian theocracy that spits on the religious rights of any non-Christians. In Louisiana, guards maliciously shaved off a prisoner’s dreadlocks, a clear violation of their religion as a Rastafarian- but the Court made them immune to accountability — essentially destroying the prisoner’s now-unenforceable rights.

What makes this a particularly insane rightwing assumption of Court power, Congress had passed a specific law, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, to give plaintiffs the right to sue officials in states accepting federal funds. But the Supreme Court barred application of the law in the name of rightwing ideology.

Under the decision, state employees using federal funds can abuse those under their power with no accountability.

If the Court keeps going in this direction, the only solution will be for the federal government to run all government programs directly, so it can directly hold its own federal employees accountable.

The point is that case-after-case, the accumulated decisions of this Court are gutting democratic decision-making in favor of judicial supremacy — and corporate oligarch supremacy, via that gutting of government regulation. As legal analyst Steve Vladeck observed, all of these cases pile up and step-by-step obliterate any ability to enact progressive policy.

It Took Mass Death for Americans to Learn What USAID Was Doing

The numbers are staggering. In Côte d’Ivoire, 70% of HIV medication was provided by USAID through PEPFAR. Over 2,000 health clinics have closed globally because of the cuts. In Somalia, child malnutrition has risen 73%.

A sad fact is that it took Trump and Elon committing mass murder for the public to learn some of the great things the Biden administration had been funding. The media’s indifference to these stories then makes it partially complicit with this mass murder.

From a Reflecting Pool He Can’t Fill to a War He Can’t Win

The GOP collectively have endorsed and now own Trump’s debacle in Iran — and own the soaring prices at the pump and the global mockery of US failure. After the Iran War Powers Resolution passed 50-48, Trump personally lobbied Republicans and they reversed themselves to block it, 50-47-1. The spinelessness of GOP Senators bowing to Trump never ends.

At a smaller scale, the debacle of the reflecting pool is perfect for cutting through all the BS, because the operation is simple enough and the problems obvious enough that it’s clear Trump can’t manage the simplest tasks — which makes it clearer to people that there’s no secret plan, just incompetence, in his larger-scale failures like Iran.

And Pirro really needs to go to jail on false-imprisonment charges for all the illegal arrests she has done. Having totally fucked up the sandwich-thrower case, they’re now “really confident about pool vandals.”

If Grok Can’t Argue for Birthright Citizenship, It’s Useless for Everything Else

Read this exchange below. It’s not that Grok is detailing rightwing legal theory, it’s that it says it can’t conceivably argue the counter-case for birthright citizenship.

Since there are clearly sources out there arguing for birthright citizenship, any functioning LLM should have those arguments available. That Grok doesn’t should crash SpaceX’s stock all by itself — because if its AI is being personally manipulated by its owner like this, it’s clearly unusable for any serious purpose by anyone.

Texas Votes to Cut Slavery Out of the Story of Slavery

With no explanation, Republicans on the State Board of Education cut lessons that taught about racial segregation and slave revolts; that acknowledged slavery was because of skin color; and that said southern states seceded from the Union in part to preserve the practice of slavery.

As I’ve argued for in the past, the solution is for the federal government, under the next Democratic Congress, should send money directly to local school districts, bypassing the state governments — but on the condition that they cover actual US history, not this whitewashed crap.

JD Vance Says the Quiet Part: Nixon Got a Raw Deal

Translate JD Vance — who thinks Nixon’s reputation is enjoying “a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so,” and joked that Watergate today would be a 12-hour news story — and you get: “Look at all the corruption we get away with without consequences. Poor Dick Nixon got a raw deal.”

The DOJ Goes Easy on Corporate Crime — and Dismantles the Tools to Catch It

In a functioning DOJ, the whole Polymarket leadership would be indicted for fraud. A Wall Street Journal investigation found the prediction market had flooded social media with deceptive videos — paid creators who looked like they were getting rich on bets that were never real. Instead of indictments, I’m sure they’ll just be cutting Trump in for a cut of the profits.

And it runs the other way too: more pro-crime activity by the GOP, this time working to destroy a database that tracks the fraudulent use of shell companies to commit crimes — the single biggest anti-kleptocracy reform the country had built in decades. Pardon the corporate offenders, defang the cops who would catch them, and shred the records that would convict them.

One Crackdown, Many Fronts: Criminalizing the Opposition

J6 assaults on the Capitol get pardoned, while these folks get terms of 50+ years because the judge stated he didn’t like their beliefs. Some of those involved were violent — but this collective punishment is just an insane crackdown on opposition dissent.

Absolute police state fascism: the FBI’s June 12 raid of the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a progressive group known for voter-registration efforts, is just another move to intimidate left-leaning organizations under the guise of fighting voter fraud, days after a Fox poll showed Trump’s candidates trailing in the state.

Then there is the ongoing saga of the DOJ withchunt against the Southern Poverty Law Center, where it’s most recent legal filings turned out to just be laundering the rhetoric of racist hate groups into the language for federal indictments. Admittedly the hate groups probably have smarter lawyers than the ones at Trump’s DOJ, so it’s unsurprising the DOJ idiots just outsource their unconstitutional, abusive legal filings to them. New filings show the SPLC investigation grew directly out of a letter extremist groups sent to Stephen Miller about the Hate Map.

Antifa-hunting indictments, terrorism sentences for protesters, raids on voter-registration drives — these aren’t separate stories but the ongoing story of Trump’s complete abuse of federal law enforcement powers to criminalize his political opposition.

Social Security Isn’t Starving the Poor — the Pentagon Is

The US in fact now spends MORE per taxpayer on food stamps than in the past, so spending on Social Security is not somehow crowding out spending on low-income families. And why are we even having a discussion about Social Security crowding out other investments when the Trump administration is proposing insane levels of defense spending to return us to Vietnam-era expenditures on the military?

There’s an important perspective buried in the original worry — societies, like individuals, NEED to spend more on investment where their populations are younger, to sustain jobs for the larger working population, while it seems pretty normal to spend more on elder leisure proportionately as they age. But the place to hunt for crowd-out isn’t Social Security. It’s the war machine.

Also This Week

The crime-panic coverage is wildly out of proportion. The ink spilled on crime stories is ridiculous given that the death toll from environmental causes — heat deaths from climate change, pollution-induced diseases and so on — completely dwarfs deaths from murder, even as Europe buries the dead from another record heat wave.

The revolt against ICE collusion reached past New York. In Maryland, Delegate Frank Conaway — the lone Democrat in the state House to oppose this year’s restrictions on ICE — was ousted by a wide margin in his primary. The revolt against Dems colluding with fascism extended well beyond NYC.

Tuesday night in New York, they did it deliberately, ousted two incumbent Democratic House members and sent a third Mamdani-backed candidate to D.C.

The pundit class will spend the week sorting these results into its familiar boxes — too far left, too woke, demographic backlash, the squad rising again. Almost all of it misses the signal. Yes, New York Democrats wanted an end to the US supporting the slaughter of children in Gaza, the end of pro-corporate deals by Dem leadership, and the shutdown of ICE. But most of all, Dem voters were exhausted by representatives who seem to surrender rather than fight, and they went to the polls to do something about it.

The polling has been telling anyone willing to listen. As G. Elliott Morris laid out before the votes were counted, the Democratic Party’s problem with voters is not that it is seen as too liberal. Swing voters rate the Republican Party as roughly twenty points more extreme than the Democrats. What sinks Democrats is the perception that they are weak and ineffective — that they will not fight, and could not win the fight if they tried. Tuesday’s primary electorate looked at that diagnosis and acted on it to send fighters to D.C.

Voters Can Tell the Difference Between a Fighter and a Folder

Start with the headline result. Adriano Espaillat, a sitting member of Congress, lost his primary in NY-13 to Darializa Avila Chevalier, an organizer the establishment treated as an afterthought until the returns came in. Espaillat was not the only incumbent dumped. New York sent a whole new slate of House members toward Washington — Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez — candidates who ran not on a list of position papers but on a single promise: we will fight, and we will not throw your people overboard the moment it gets uncomfortable.

The down-ballot races told the same story. In Queens, Jessica Ramos, a Cuomo ally in the State Senate, went down to defeat, as did another Cuomo supporter, Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar. Up in the Buffalo area, State Senator Jeremy Zellner lost to Jon Rivera, an assemblymember backed by the Working Families Party. Across NYC, Mamdani-backed candidates largely aligned with DSA won almost all the races they ran in. The same instinct by voters was firing in district after district — a base of voters deciding its own incumbents are part of the problem.

Watch the video interview with the winners (conducted by my kid :) and you hear the whole campaign in one line. Asked whether they would back away from defending trans youth the way some Washington Democrats have started to, Brad Lander didn’t reach for a poll-tested triangulation. He said there was “no fucking way” any of them would throw trans kids under the bus. That is the energy that won. Not a more elaborate policy white paper — a refusal to flinch.

This is the lesson Democratic leadership keeps failing to absorb, and it is not complicated. Deliver something real in people’s lives and you win elections. The fight is the message. Voters do not reward the cleverest framing; they reward the politician who shows up willing to take a hit on their behalf. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Washington leadership have spent years offering the opposite — caution dressed up as strategy, retreat described as the responsible path.

In what seemed like a clear response to the Mamdani-slate of candidates winning, former DNC chairman Jamie Harrison posted this seeming attack on the left:

Hard to read this statement as anything other than this former DNC chair saying f--- you to Democratic voters in multiple districts. Further explaining the anger of many people in those districts at Dem leadership.

New York just told Harrison and other DC leaders and pundits what their own voters think of this kind of contempt.

The Jewish Voters Washington Keeps Speaking For

There is a second story buried in these returns. By Wednesday morning the usual voices were already explaining the night as some surge of antisemitism — as if New York Democrats had marched to the polls to punish Jewish candidates.

The voters elected Brad Lander, the Jewish former city comptroller, as part of the very slate these commentators are calling antisemitic. The Democratic Party remains the party of Jews, Muslims, Christians, Black, white, Latino, and Asian voters together — set against a Republican Party organized around white racist Christian grievance. Tuesday did not change that coalition. It reaffirmed it.

What actually happened is a large number of Jewish New Yorkers used their votes to repudiate the assault on civil liberties that hides behind the language of fighting antisemitism. They have watched that word get stripped of its meaning and turned into a cudgel — a rhetorical tool for arresting protesters, gutting due process, and advancing an authoritarian project that has nothing to do with the safety of Jews and everything to do with crushing dissent. To read all of that as a rout of Jewish New Yorkers requires either a broken brain or bad faith, and at this point it is usually both.

Brad Lander put the principle better than any consultant could. He intends to be, in his words, one of the members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights, and he will stand just as firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews — and those are not two jobs but one.

That is the position a real majority of American Jews actually hold. It is the opposite of the line peddled by people like Josh Gottheimer, who works to collapse the distinction entirely: AIPAC speaks for the Jews, so to oppose AIPAC is to hate Jews. That equation is not a defense of Jewish people. It is one of the most effective engines of antisemitism in American politics, because it ties an entire faith to the policies of a foreign government and a lobbying operation most Jews never appointed to speak for them.

A large number of New York’s Jewish voters declined to accept that AIPAC represents them. They refused to let their identity be conscripted as cover for a crackdown on the Constitution, and they said so with their ballots.

And Brad Lander representing one of the most Jewish Congressional districts in the nation will be the symbol of that shift in Jewish politics in regard to Israel.

What Washington Should Be Afraid Of

This was not a left-wing faction capturing a few safe seats. It was a grassroots party telling the people who run it, in the bluntest language the system allows, that it wants leaders who fight — for trans kids, for immigrants facing a lawless ICE, for tenants and workers, and for a politics where “antisemitism” means actual hatred of Jews rather than a password for shutting down protest. AIPAC spent large amounts, much of it laundered through front groups, trying to stop Avila Chevalier, a protester at Columbia against israeli’s mass murder, and AIPAC lost.

The comfortable read in Washington will be that New York is just New York, an outlier too progressive to mean anything for the rest of the map. That is exactly the misreading that produced these results. Graham Platner winning his primary in Maine is part of the same message to D.C., that voters will look past serious flaws in a candidate if they believe that candidate will fight for them.

The same frustration that took out two incumbents in one city last night is sitting in primary electorates across the country, waiting for somewhere to go. Dem leaders can keep choosing caution over vision, race after race, but there is nothing safe about being seen as weak.

Or Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and other D.C. Dem leaders can listen to the voters from last night, stop listening to their corporate donors and consultants and actually lead the fight against Trump and the corporate oligarchy.

The base has stopped asking nicely for them to step up. It is now firing people who won’t fight.