One of the biggest issues that is keeping Americans and others alike from carrying out the policies that benefit them is the fact that the government has been run by “oligarchs” for too long. Be it the Schumer Democrats or the Trumpian Republicans, the primary concern has been to be concerned with the party and not the people. This contributed a great deal to the 85 million+ that did not vote in the 2024 US Presidential Elections. As Tim Hjersted mentioned in this article, the movement to take back America is already underway with a secret ingredient that will indeed win the Mid-Terms and the 2028 US Presidential Elections in favor of the people and not the rich.

Progressives have long understood that the biggest threat to society isn’t just the Republican Party. It’s the concentrated corporate power that has captured our government wholesale.

Trumpism is one expression of that capture—a strategy to funnel wealth and power upward through fear, division, and culture war scapegoats.

The other is the corporate liberalism of Clinton, Obama, and Biden—an agenda that deregulated Wall Street, passed right-wing crime bills, deported millions, let the healthcare industry write its own reform, and put a kinder face on empire without ever questioning it.

Decades of serving the interests of capital over the interests of the working class (merely offering a diet version of the Republican brand) destroyed people’s trust in the Democratic Party’s ability to offer a genuine alternative, and into that vacuum walked Trump, a faux populist promising to burn the whole system down while enriching the same concentrated power that built it.

The Republican Party has long been fully fused with that power. There is no anti-corporate insurgency coming from the right, leading many to conclude the only viable path to challenging this double-headed beast runs through the Democratic Party, broken as it is.

Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a generation of progressive challengers have followed this path, while the Democratic establishment has fought back at nearly every turn—and once inside, they’re still vastly outnumbered and sidelined by the establishment forces in both parties.

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So how do we actually win a government owned by the people rather than corporations?

This question has split the left into two camps: #DemEnter: double down and overwhelm the establishment via a mass takeover of the Democratic Party from within, and #DemExit: abandon the Democratic Party and build independent power outside it.

I see this as a false choice. We don’t need a one-size-fits-all strategy. We need a coalition that can pursue both without tearing itself apart.

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory and the recent slate of DSA wins in New York has proved that a bold populist insurgency can beat the Democratic machine from within. But inside strategies alone aren’t enough. Nor are outside ones. The organizations that understand this best are already building from a fusion approach.

The Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America for instance maintain their own independent organizational power: their own membership, their own platforms, their own capacity to mobilize, while using Democratic Party infrastructure to win races and build governing power.

Then we have Our Revolution, which is focused on taking over the Democratic Party through down-ballot races.

The Sunrise Movement is building the kind of power that can pressure whoever is in office.

The US Green Party, while infamous for unsuccessful presidential runs, has seen some modest success at the local level: city councils, school boards, and other positions where grassroots organizing translates directly into wins.

Then there are groups like Local Futures / Economics of Happiness, building regenerative alternatives beyond traditional politics.

These are all fronts in the broader fight against corporate rule.

But honoring everyone’s lane doesn’t mean pretending every strategy is working equally well. Above the local level, third parties almost never win, and the numbers aren’t close.

The Third-Party Ceiling

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As Alan Minsky has documented, since 1946 there have been over 17,000 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. The number won by third-party or independent candidates can be counted on one hand, and not one has been by a Green.

In the Senate, a few independents have won in the past 80 years: Bernie Sanders, Angus King, and Joe Lieberman among them. Not one has been a Green either.

Statewide and local races tell a similar story: across literally millions of elections since WWII, third-party victories amount to less than one-tenth of 1%. In 2024, Greens won 43 of 91 local races and lost all 88 of the partisan state and federal races they contested. And at a time when dissatisfaction with both parties is at record highs, roughly 85 million eligible voters stayed home in 2024 rather than cast a third-party ballot.

Longshots are worth taking when the structure allows them to break through. But there are real costs to picking fights the math won’t allow you to win. When defeat comes, and it almost always does, it breeds the very apathy and cynicism our movements are trying to overcome. And there’s the opportunity cost: every cycle spent on a blocked path is a cycle where a winnable race goes unfought.

To fight apathy, we need fights we can win. One more fearless progressive voice in Congress or City Hall, with an actual vote on actual legislation, could do far more to advance the cause than any number of campaigns that end in noble defeat. The movement already has plenty of inspiring voices. What it needs is votes in the rooms where legislation is written.

The Insurgency Is Already Working

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With third party initiatives nowhere close to contesting power in a serious way, we’re faced with the urgent need to defeat the Republicans and the corporate Democrats, and so I find myself agreeing the best path for most of us is a two-front insurgency: 1) challenge corporate Democrats through aggressive primarying and a bold, populist agenda, and 2) organize to transform the party itself from the precinct level up (more on part 2 below).

Mamdani’s campaign is the blueprint, and the wins kept coming all year. On June 23, three Mamdani-backed candidates swept their New York House primaries: Brad Lander ousted corporate Democrat Dan Goldman in NY-10, Claire Valdez took the open Brooklyn–Queens seat on a Medicare for All and social-housing platform, and Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off ten-year incumbent Adriano Espaillat. A week later in Denver, 29 year-old Melat Kiros ended Diana DeGette’s thirty-year incumbency.

The insurgency isn’t confined to deep-blue cities either.

Randy Villegas, a community-college professor backed by Sanders and AOC who took no corporate PAC money, beat the DCCC’s hand-picked moderate in California’s 22nd despite more than $2 million in outside spending against him. He now faces Republican David Valadao in one of the most flippable swing districts in the country.

And in August, the insurgency reached the U.S. Senate: Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic nomination after Governor Whitmer endorsed his opponent and outside groups spent roughly $65 million trying to stop him—the most expensive Senate primary in American history—while Donavan McKinney unseated Rep. Shri Thanedar in Detroit the same night.

Two weeks later in Florida, Angie Nixon, a state representative, former union organizer, and DSA member, took the Senate nomination with 56% against Alex Vindman, the former Trump impeachment witness who outraised her by more than sixteen to one.

Add labor organizer Taylor Rehmet’s Texas state senate flip and Analilia Mejia’s New Jersey win earlier in the year, and the pattern is unmistakable. Bold progressives can beat the Democratic establishment.

We’re not winning every fight. The same night El-Sayed took Michigan, Cori Bush lost her comeback bid in Missouri by 22 points after a pro-Israel super PAC spent more than $2.5 million against her, on top of the $9.3 million it spent beating her in 2024.

That’s the honest asterisk on this whole insurgency: organized people can beat organized money, but money still wins races, and a single well-funded PAC can still flatten a good candidate running alone. This is why isolated victories aren’t enough. What matters is how many of them there are.

Winning Primaries Is Not the Same as Taking Over the Party

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A reader of an earlier draft of this piece made a great point. Winning Democratic primaries alone won’t challenge the often-invisible party apparatus that governs from the precinct-level on up.

The exact rules and titles vary from state to state, but in many places, precinct delegates elect county and district leaders, choose representatives to state committees, and help determine who governs the party between elections.

State parties select their own officers and members of the Democratic National Committee, whose members elect the national chair. Institutional power flows through a chain of local positions and meetings that most voters and many activists hardly know exist.

These bodies may help recruit candidates, direct organizing resources, shape party rules and platforms, elect party officers, and decide which communities and races receive sustained attention. If progressives win a handful of candidate primaries while leaving this permanent structure untouched, the corporate wing can retain much of the machinery that recruits, funds, supports, and pressures those candidates once they enter office. This is the hidden half of the iceberg that keeps the status quo in tact.

A real inside strategy therefore has to operate on two fronts. We need progressives and democratic socialists running for public office, and we need them organizing within the party’s governing structure—from precinct committees and county organizations to state committees and the DNC. One front changes who casts votes in legislatures. The other changes who recruits candidates, builds the bench, sets organizational priorities, and supplies those elected officials with the backup they need to withstand corporate pressure.

This work is rarely glamorous. It means reading local bylaws, attending meetings, filling vacant precinct positions, recruiting slates of committed organizers, contesting leadership elections, and remaining involved after the campaign signs come down. It is year-round organizing, often conducted in rooms where a surprisingly small number of people exercise an outsized amount of influence simply because they are the ones who consistently show up.

But taking party positions cannot become an end in itself either. Without an organized base in unions, tenant organizations, DSA chapters, mutual-aid networks, and other independent movements, an internal party insurgency can become another exercise in procedural maneuvering. The point is not merely to control committees. It is to make the party accountable to organized working people—and to build an institution capable of turning a progressive platform into public policy.

That is the fuller meaning of taking over the Democratic Party. Primaries are part of it, but only part. The goal is to win elections, transform the permanent organization from the grassroots up, and build enough durable power that progressive officeholders no longer enter government alone.

The Best of Both Worlds: #DemEnter and #DemExit

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As Minsky and others have concluded, the Democratic Party is the only institution powerful enough to contest and defeat the Republican Party and their corporate owners in 2026 and 2028.

So does that mean yes to #DemEnter and no to #DemExit?

Actually, I’m saying yes to both, following a path that allows the two strategies to complement each other rather than conflict.

We need progressives to challenge corporate Democrats through both aggressive primarying and precinct-level work to transform the party machinery itself, but we also need to build independent power.

Les Leopold has shown how we can do this without becoming spoilers: run independent candidates in safe red districts, providing a true “second party” option where there effectively is none.

The math is compelling. There are 132 congressional districts that Republicans won by at least 25 points. In those deep-red districts, there’s no Democratic Party to spoil. A progressive independent running there isn’t a third party. They’re a second party.

Dan Osborn proved this in Nebraska, nearly defeating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024 as an independent, in a state Trump won by 20 points. He’s on the ballot again this November against Pete Ricketts. His platform to protect Social Security, ban billionaires from buying elections, and end pharmaceutical profiteering rings true to voters in bright red Nebraska precisely because he’s running against billionaire domination of politics.

So the playbook is: run independent candidates where feasible and primary corporate Democrats everywhere else.

Bernie Sanders, among others, has signaled support for this strategy, which takes the best parts from #DemEnter and #DemExit and gives us the best shot at a united front against the forces that own both corporate parties.

Les Leopold suggests we bolster this independent movement with a Workers Political Association, which has polled well across the spectrum.

The Lonely Progressive Problem

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Now, the honest objection from the #DemExit side:

“We’ve seen what happens when progressives enter the Democratic Party. The machinery subverts them. Party leadership controls committee assignments, directs donor networks, and sets the legislative agenda. Progressives who don’t play along get frozen out. Over time, even the boldest voices start casting compromising votes, accepting bad deals, and pulling their punches. They stop drawing sharp lines with party leadership, and start choosing their battles in ways that feel like retreat.”

This is real, for sure, but consider what we’re actually looking at. Sanders and AOC aren’t operating inside a progressive party. They’re operating inside a corporate party where they’re vastly outnumbered. When Sanders or AOC softens a position, that’s not evidence that #DemEnter doesn’t work; it’s evidence that #DemEnter hasn’t gone far enough. A handful of progressive voices inside a caucus of 213 corporate Democrats aren’t going to transform the party. They’re going to get ground down by it. The fact that they’ve held as much ground as they have, essentially alone, is remarkable.

Sanders’s problem has never been a lack of conviction. It’s a lack of backup. Give him 20 allies in the Senate who share his commitments and the negotiations change completely. The pressure to compromise doesn’t evaporate (politics is compromise), but the terms of compromise change.

Right now, progressives negotiate from a position of near-total isolation, which means every deal is lopsided. With real numbers—say, a bloc of 50 in the House—they become a force that has to be bargained with, not managed. That’s not a fantasy. It’s how the Freedom Caucus transformed the Republican Party in under a decade with roughly 40 members.

Will those 50 progressives still disappoint sometimes? Absolutely. But here’s the terrain-level reality: 50 imperfect progressives with actual votes on actual legislation will always accomplish more than 50 ideologically flawless voices shut out of every room where decisions are made. A dream candidate in exile is still exile.

Numbers Is Half the Problem

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Now, at this point, an obvious objection arises: the Congressional Progressive Caucus already has nearly 100 members. If numbers are the answer, why doesn’t it already wield power comparable to the Freedom Caucus?

Because head count is not the same thing as a bloc. The Progressive Caucus has done important work moving ideas like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, labor rights, and taxing the wealthy into the mainstream. But membership in a caucus does not necessarily mean agreement on firm legislative demands, or a willingness to withhold decisive votes until those demands are met. A caucus can contain 100 nominal progressives while possessing far fewer members prepared to act together when leadership applies pressure.

The 2021 infrastructure fight illustrated the difference. A majority of the caucus initially pledged to withhold support from the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the larger Build Back Better package passed the Senate. When leadership separated the bills, however, all but six House Democrats supported the infrastructure bill based on assurances that Build Back Better would follow. It never did.

That isn’t an argument against electing more progressives. It clarifies what kind of numbers we need. When I say a bloc of 50, I don’t simply mean 50 representatives willing to adopt the progressive label. I mean 50 movement-backed members with shared red lines, organizational discipline, and the willingness to vote together when their leverage matters most.

The Freedom Caucus transformed the Republican Party because its members were prepared to use their votes as a bloc, even against their own leadership. We need a more cohesive, movement-accountable caucus willing to do the same.

The Bill Comes Due in November

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Here’s what makes this moment different from the usual argument about left strategy: the primaries are over. The bargain progressives have been asking liberals to accept—vote for the boldest candidate in the primary, and we’ll show up in the general—just got tested. In a lot of places, liberals held up their end.

Now the other half of that deal comes due.

El-Sayed faces Mike Rogers in a race that could decide control of the Senate.

Nixon faces Ashley Moody in Florida, a state Democrats had written off.

Villegas faces Valadao in a district that could decide the House.

Osborn is running in Nebraska as an independent with the state Democratic Party’s endorsement, after it cleared the field for him.

And Republicans made no secret of preferring El-Sayed as an opponent. They ran ads boosting his progressive credentials during the primary, on the theory that a democratic socialist is the easier kill. November is the test of that theory. If bold progressives win competitive general elections, the “unelectable” argument that has governed Democratic strategy for thirty years loses its last piece of evidence.

So the ask right now is simple: show up in November, including in the races where the nominee isn’t the one you wanted. Progressives owe that in the districts where a corporate Democrat won the primary. Liberals owe it in Michigan, in Denver, in NY-10. It’s the same bargain, pointed in both directions.

Electing Progressives Is Only Half the Battle

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The real test comes after election night. This is where the left has historically failed: we mobilize to elect someone, then demobilize and watch from the sidelines as they get ground down by the machine.

The traditional playbook offers two options: pressure from outside (”hold their feet to the fire”) or insider co-governance among a handful of organizational leaders. Both leave the mass base that did the actual work of winning sitting on the couch.

NYC-DSA has been pioneering a different model. Their Socialists in Office Committee keeps endorsed legislators working in lockstep with thousands of rank-and-file members on concrete campaigns. Not just lobbying, but organizing together. Through that structure, they helped win increased taxes on the wealthy in 2021, major tenant protections in 2019, and significant climate legislation in 2023. That’s not “feet to the fire.” That’s mass governance: movements and elected officials operating as parts of the same project.

Mamdani’s mayoral campaign showed what this looks like at scale: over 100,000 volunteers didn’t just vote for him, they knocked doors, made calls, and organized their neighborhoods. The question now is whether that infrastructure transitions from campaigning to governing, whether those 100,000 people help shape the administration’s agenda through popular assemblies, neighborhood councils, and participatory budgeting, or whether they go home and watch from the sidelines. A socialist administration without an organized mass base gets isolated and weakened. An administration that governs with its base becomes harder to stop.

That’s the model. Pressure from the left is what keeps #DemEnter candidates honest, but it works best when it comes from an organized base that sees itself as part of the governing project, not outside it.

The goal isn’t to elect perfect progressives, either. It’s to build a coalition of imperfect progressives large enough to shift the Overton window and push their more cautious colleagues in power to take bolder stances, and then stay organized enough to make sure they use that room.

The early evidence favors that bet. In his first hundred days, Mamdani secured $1.2 billion in state funding for universal child care without raising taxes, opened 2,000 daycare seats in low-income neighborhoods, recovered $34 million on behalf of tenants, and required body-camera footage to be released within 30 days of critical incidents. Then in June, the Rent Guidelines Board he appointed voted 7–1 to freeze rents on roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments, including the first two-year freeze in the city’s history, delivering the signature promise almost everyone assumed would be the first thing he traded away.

He’s also hit real walls. Hochul blocked the millionaire’s tax he campaigned on, which killed the free-bus pledge for this year. And he’s governing under sustained fire from both parties’ establishments—the same forces that spent the primary season trying to beat his allies and are now invested in his failure.

That’s not evidence the strategy failed. It’s what governing looks like: a signature promise kept, a revenue fight lost to someone else’s veto, and a steady headwind from people who need him to fail.

The old cynicism—that they always compromise once in office—was earned honestly, by watching a generation of progressives get absorbed and neutralized after election night. But Mamdani hasn’t traded the program away. He’s been blocked in places, and he’s kept pushing. That’s the whole difference #DemEnter was betting on, and road-weary travelers may want to keep an eye on whether it holds.

Focus on the 85 Million

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That’s my take. With this playbook, we don’t all need to agree on where to put our energy. There’s a complementary role for everyone.

So let’s set some ground rules for disagreeing without destroying each other in the process:

First, let’s remember the 85 million people on the sidelines. There’s no need to attack Democratic voters as “complicit” or third-party voters as “spoilers” when millions of non-voters can be moved by good policy, good organizing, good messaging, and good leaders.

Apathy may well be our greatest opponent. Victory goes to the strategy that inspires the most people to shake off their understandable apathy and fight for the world they want.

Electoral politics is also just one tool. The day-to-day work is still organizing: in our workplaces, mutual-aid networks, and in movements that refuse to be co-opted by party structures.

It’s time we stop wasting energy attacking each other’s strategies and focus on building pluralistic movements and coalitions that challenge the oligarchy that rules us.

Whether the lane we choose is taking over the Democratic Party, growing independent alternatives, winning specific campaigns, pushing for Ranked Choice Voting, or fighting outside the electoral system entirely, the goal stays the same: dismantling corporate power, resisting militarism, and securing widespread economic and social prosperity on a thriving planet.

A Pocketbook Guide To Take With You

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This piece covered a lot of ground. Here’s a recap:

First. Primary corporate Democrats aggressively, everywhere. The 2026 primaries proved it works, in New York, Colorado, and Michigan alike. This is the real fight, and the fight most people skip. Who we vote for in primaries is about vision—what kind of country we’re actually building. Who we vote for in the general is about terrain—choosing the conditions under which our movements will organize and fight. Progressives and liberals don’t have to agree on everything to recognize that organizing under a flawed democracy is a fundamentally different challenge than organizing under authoritarianism. We need each other.

Which means we need a coalition deal, and it’s a simple one: progressives show up in the general to defeat the worst option, and liberals show up in the primary to support the most progressive option possible.

“I’ll vote blue no matter who in November if you vote for the boldest progressive in the primary.”

This is how we unite people who share a majority of the same goals and face a common enemy that wants to crush us both.

Second. Run independent, working-class candidates in safe red districts where they can’t spoil, and where the Democratic brand is a liability anyway.

Third. Fight for ranked-choice voting everywhere. Under RCV, voters can rank a progressive first and a Democrat second without fear of spoiling, which makes both tracks easier and eventually dissolves the spoiler debate entirely.

Fourth. Build power between elections. The campaigns that win don’t materialize out of thin air. Mamdani’s 100,000 volunteers weren’t recruited during the campaign. They were inherited from years of NYC-DSA chapter building, Working Families Party organizing, and tenant unions that had already activated thousands of New Yorkers around housing and economic survival. The campaign was the harvest. The organizing was the planting. The same story explains Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset of ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley, built on years of DSA and Sunrise organizing in Queens, and Brandon Johnson’s 2023 Chicago mayoral win, built on the Chicago Teachers Union’s decade of political infrastructure.

This is where the real work lives: in unions, tenant organizations, mutual aid networks, ballot initiative campaigns, and independent media that speaks to the 85 million people disenfranchised by the status quo.

Fifth. Organize locally inside the Democratic Party. Learn your state and county rules. Become a precinct committee member or delegate. Recruit others, organize slates, contest county and state committee seats, and elect party leaders accountable to working people.

Progressives have already made real, if uneven, inroads this way. Sanders-aligned organizers won sustained leadership of the Nebraska Democratic Party, while a DSA-backed slate swept Nevada’s state-party leadership in 2021. Nevada’s reversal two years later carries an equally important lesson: winning an internal election is not the same as building durable power.

Taking over the party requires a broad base, competent administration, independent movement organizations, and year-round organizing long after the leadership vote is over.

Find your lane in the between-election work and invest in it for the long haul.

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Sixth. Win the spirit battle. Apathy and cynicism are the inner enemies that stop us before we even try. Cynicism is especially seductive because it tells us that the system is too corrupt to touch, every institution is compromised, and seeking power will only compromise us too. It disguises withdrawal as moral purity and powerlessness as virtue.

But power isn’t inherently dirty. It is simply the capacity to shape the conditions of our lives. It can be concentrated and abused, or shared and democratized. Rejecting every institution as compromised doesn’t keep our hands clean. It merely leaves those institutions—and the decisions they make—in the hands of people who have no hesitation about using them against us.

The right understands this intuitively. They organize to dominate media, courts, school boards, state legislatures, and political parties precisely because those institutions are powerful. They will never stop seeking power, no matter how corrupt the system becomes.

The question then is not whether power will be exercised. It is who will exercise it, for whose benefit, and under whose control.

We simply can’t afford to cede that ground. When a muscle like democracy is weak, the answer must be to strengthen that muscle, not allow it to atrophy further.

If the left stands for anything, it is the fight for democracy over corporate rule. The people must have democratic control over the decisions that shape their lives. Full stop.

So whatever path you choose, just remember: our movements need you.

So whatever path you choose to support, just remember, our movements need you.

May each path win victories for us all.

About the Author

Tim Hjersted is the founder and director of Films For Action, an online library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society. You can find him on Substack, along with more details of his article including a podcast by clicking here.

I’m going to start by making a very bold statement: The US economy is going to crash next year, BIG TIME! And apart from blaming the current administration for accelerating the process, we have to look at other factors that will contribute to the coming of The Greater Depression. We have the environment- with the hottest year on record, we have started a domino effect that will impact the economy with food shortages, a dysfunctional supply chain and depleted resources. We also have an outdated infrastructure that is unable to adapt to a changing environment. And we compensate with consumption while we are desperate for change.

And it’s not a surprise that when there is a crash, there is a person or a group of people who are ready to revive the country with their New Deal. But it’s not the New Deal we saw with the last crash in 2008. In Marie Newman’s guest piece, this type of New Deal will be like the one last seen with Franklin D. Roosevelt- a top-down and thorough approach that will transform the country to a point where it will no longer be recognizable.

And this change is something that people have been yearning for since the 1990s- one that will be much better for America and beyond…..

Broadly, more progressives are winning in blue districts than corporate Democrats. And more interestingly, progressives are winning in purple districts. This is exciting. It means workers, the middle class, and working families of every income station are being prioritized.

It means voters are doing the work like never before. They are researching and understanding the negative influence corporate PACs, AIPAC, and big donors have on candidates and incumbents.

Exhaustion is settling into our country because of the income gap between the wealthy and everyone else. It is simply too wide to ignore now. Americans of every political stripe are fatigued from working 2-3 jobs and barely making ends meet. Walk into any diner in Ohio, Nevada, or Tennessee; read the comment sections of local newspapers in Georgia; or walk through the union halls of Michigan that are slowly coming back to life. Americans are bone-tired. Not the tired that comes from a bad news cycle, but the deep, structural tired that comes from watching the system work beautifully for uber wealthy people and grind everyone else into dust.

But we’ve been here before. And the last time we were here, the country did something remarkable. And it made a tremendous difference.

Let’s look at it…

The Echo of the 1930s

The parallels between now and the early Roosevelt years are genuinely striking, and not in a vague, hand-wavy way. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt ran against Herbert Hoover, Americans were living through a collapse of institutional trust that felt total and irreversible. Banks had failed. Unemployment had reached 25 percent. The Hoover administration had responded to the crisis with the kind of detached, ideological rigidity that made ordinary people feel invisible. The Bonus Army, a group of World War I veterans who marched on Washington demanding their promised benefits, was literally dispersed by military force under General Douglas MacArthur. The government’s message to struggling Americans was essentially: wait, and trust the markets.

Sound familiar?

Today, roughly 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, according to most consumer surveys. The housing market has effectively locked out an entire generation of younger buyers. The student debt crisis has become a kind of permanent tax on ambition. And the political response from establishment figures in both parties has often felt like a shrug dressed up in policy language.

What Roosevelt understood, and what made him transformative, was that the American people weren’t asking for a philosophy lesson. They were asking to be seen.

What Twelve Years of FDR Actually Built

Roosevelt won four presidential elections. Let that sink in for a moment. He won in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. The American people kept returning to him because he kept delivering, and because the things he built were tangible and real in ways that changed daily life.

The Civilian Conservation Corps put 3 million young men to work planting trees, building trails, and restoring public lands. The Works Progress Administration, later renamed the Work Projects Administration, employed more than 8 million Americans and built or improved 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 public buildings, and 75,000 bridges. These weren’t abstract policy achievements. They were roads people drove on and schools their children attended.

Social Security, signed into law in 1935, created a retirement safety net that had simply never existed in America before. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation protected ordinary bank depositors. The National Labor Relations Act gave workers the legal right to organize. The Securities and Exchange Commission brought accountability to financial markets that had previously operated like a private casino for the wealthy.

What Roosevelt built was a new social contract, one that said the federal government had a responsibility to the economic security of its citizens. That contract held, more or less, for four decades.

In short, he built back trust. And for the entirety of his administration, his approval ratings never dipped below 50% and averaged 61%, because he implemented solutions that actually work. He created jobs, improved infrastructure, and rebuilt the country, while also creating structural safety nets that improved the economy and society.

Effectiveness and proven solutions.

Being able to trust government would feel pretty good right now.

Why the Next FDR Is Probably Coming

Political scientists and historians talk about “political time,” the idea that certain moments in history create conditions where transformative leadership becomes not just possible but almost inevitable. Stephen Skowronek at Yale has written extensively about this framework, and by his analysis, we are deep into a period of regime fragility, where the old political order is exhausted, but the new one hasn’t fully arrived.

The energy inside the Democratic Party right now is populist, progressive, and economic. Bernie Sanders demonstrated in 2016 and 2020 that a candidacy built entirely around economic inequality could generate enormous grassroots enthusiasm. Ro Khanna, Chris Murphy, Summer Lee, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Deal-like frameworks explicitly invoke the Roosevelt legacy. The labor movement, after decades of decline, is showing genuine signs of revival, with successful union campaigns at Amazon, Starbucks, and across the auto industry.

The country is ready for someone who can stand at a podium and say, with genuine conviction, that the billionaire class has captured too much and that ordinary working people deserve a government that fights for them. Not in a performative way, but in a let’s-actually-build-something way.

Watch for candidates who put a plan in writing around FDR principles – this telegraphs that the politician is serious and is willing to have their feet held to the fire.

Similarly, watch for candidates who are plain-spoken about criticizing their own party, in hopes they can be a part of necessary and positive change. Make sure they mean it, then support them.

Roosevelt once told a crowd of supporters that he welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists. That kind of moral clarity, combined with a genuine program of economic reconstruction, is exactly what this political moment is hungry for.

The soil is ready. The question is: will voters listen and pick up a shovel to help?

My bet is a resounding “yes.”

*********

An interview with Marie Newman is in the works and will be posted in the Files later this month. In the meantime, you can find her work by visiting her page here.

Today is the first anniversary of the Big Beautiful Boycott, and we need your help. We’ve been receiving some information on more companies that have decided to obey Trump and the architects of Project 2025 and MAGA. Many of them used to be on the list of companies that were still supporting DEI. Therefore we would like to ask you to refer to the two lists enclosed below and update in the Comment Section with which ones should be added to their respective lists.

Once I have a list of companies, I will update the list in full and have a newer, more accurate list available in October. This way, people interested can find out who has been naughty and who has been nice. The initiative is still ongoing and it is important to get the word out there and encourage people to support what is right.

Thank you for your support in this matter. The list can be accessed by clicking on the respective pictures below:

Here’s the BBB List:

And the DEI List:

And now the answer to the question on the difference between the German Herb and the English Herb. Again this scenario, you enter a bar and request a Herb Beer and you have a choice of the two below:

ANS:

We’ll start with the word HERB.

The English HERB has to do with all of the spices you would put on a cooked meal, like Rosemarin, Basel, Pepper, Thymian, etc. Some are bitter, some are spicy, and some have the taste of garden in them.

And sorry, cinnamon and sugar do not fit here.

*****

The German HERB is an adjective and has to do with anything that is dry, bitter, astringent, crisp or tart. For that you can use for fragrances, but also for (mostly) alcoholic beverages.

It can also be used for something that is drammatic and bitter. For example:

Die politische Partei erlebte eine herbe Niederlage in der Landtagswahl und gewann nun 5% der Stimmen.

EN: The political party suffered a bitter defeat in the state elections, having garnered only 5% of the votes.

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And as far as HERB BEER/BIER is concerned, here’s a brief but simple explanation:

The terms “German Herb Bier” and “English Herb Beer” sound nearly identical, but they refer to completely different brewing concepts due to language, history, and beer purity laws.

The Key Differences

• Language vs. Ingredients: In German, “herb” means dry, crisp, or bitter. It describes a flavor profile—specifically hop bitterness—not physical plant herbs. In English, “herb” literally means botanical herbs (like sage, bog myrtle, or rosemary).

• Style: A German Herb Bier is typically a crisp, pale lager (most commonly a German Pilsner). An English Herb Beer is typically an ale brewed with botanical plants alongside or instead of hops.

• German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot): Under traditional German brewing laws, beer may only contain water, barley malt, hops, and yeast. Therefore, actual botanical herbs are prohibited in standard German commercial brewing, making a true plant-herb beer rare in Germany.

So basically you have a choice between an Ale or a Flensburger, like in the picture below:

Or perhaps a Jägermeister versus a Bitter Liquour?

No matter what the choice is, it always depends on one’s preferences. But regardless of consumption, remember: You have to know when to say stop!

You can find more examples of False Friends here in this pocket guide. Some interesting facts and some quizzes to rattle your brain and further your language knowledge. Click here

The German acting community and crime drama fans mourn the death of actor Andreas Hoppe, who died on August 17, 2026, at the age of 66. Known to millions for his memorable role as Inspector Mario Kopper, Hoppe left a lasting mark on television history.

Early Career & Acting Roots

Born on June 1, 1960, in West Berlin, Andreas Hoppe studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover from 1982 to 1986. Before making his mark on television, he built a solid foundation on the theater stage, performing at various venues, including Berlin’s Grips-Theater and Theater des Westens in the early 1990s.

The Tatort Years with Ulrike Folkerts

Hoppe’s defining role came in 1996 when he joined the long-running crime series Tatort Ludwigshafen as Mario Kopper, investigating alongside Lena Odenthal, played by Ulrike Folkerts. Interestingly, Hoppe and Folkerts knew each other long before their TV partnership; they had been in the exact same acting class in Hannover during the early 1980s.

Their on-screen dynamic felt completely natural—a mix of deep loyalty, playful banter, and genuine warmth. Across 21 years and 57 episodes, the two played off each other effortlessly, with Kopper often serving as the grounded, food-loving anchor to Odenthal’s intense detective work.

Best Moments in the Series

The Debut (”Der kalte Tod”, 1996): His very first appearance immediately established Kopper as a distinct character—wearing his signature flat cap (Batschkapp), showing off a unique gravelly voice, and bringing immediate charm to the Ludwigshafen team.

The “Dolce Vita” Dynamic: Fans fondly remember Kopper’s half-Italian heritage, his passion for Sicilian cuisine, and the shared flat with Lena, where he frequently cooked pasta and poured wine/grappa after hard cases.

His Farewell Episode (”Kopper”, 2018): After more than two decades, his final episode brought his character’s backstory full circle, taking him to Italy for a dramatic, deeply personal exit that honored his 21-year legacy.

Why He Left Tatort

Hoppe’s departure in 2018 was not entirely voluntary. He was vocal about his dissatisfaction with how the show’s producers were developing his character and expressed strong skepticism toward experimental episodes. Following internal creative differences regarding the direction of the Ludwigshafen team, the decision was made to retire the character of Mario Kopper, giving him a dedicated farewell movie.

Life Beyond Acting

Outside of Tatort, Hoppe took on guest roles in productions like Das Traumschiff and Rosamunde Pilcher adaptations. However, his real passion lay in culinary arts and regional food culture. An avid cookbook author and advocate for sustainable eating, he frequently appeared on television shows focused on cooking and regional produce. Shortly before his passing, he appeared on the Sat.1 culinary show Promi Taste.

Commentary

Andreas Hoppe’s portrayal of Mario Kopper was a masterclass in bringing authenticity to German television. At a time when TV detectives were often written as brooding or overly polished, Hoppe brought a relaxed, deeply human, and unpretentious energy to Tatort. His chemistry with Ulrike Folkerts was born out of a real-life, decades-long friendship, making their partnership one of the most beloved in German TV history. He was an actor who stayed true to his artistic instincts both on and off the camera.

Sources

• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) – Er war Kopper: Zum Tod des Tatort-Schauspielers Andreas Hoppe

• Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hoppe

• Focus: https://www.focus.de/kultur/stars/tatort-star-andreas-hoppe-mit-66-jahren-gestorben_b780d02c-ca09-43e3-af77-8c11ade85d62.html#:~:text=Dies%20teilte%20die%20Agentur%20Engelspost%20unter%20Berufung,Hoppe%20ist%20gestorben%20IMAGO%20%2F%20Sabine%20Gudath.

• BILD: https://www.bild.de/unterhaltung/er-wurde-nur-66-jahre-alt-ex-tatort-kommissar-andreas-hoppe-gestorben-6a8f172d198bb9fbdfb00157

Ciao, Kopper. Take care!

Modern global supply chains operate on paper-thin margins, highly calibrated logistics, and sensitive environmental baselines. Project 2025—the 900-page policy guide crafted by conservative think tanks—proposes a fundamental dismantling of federal oversight, climate initiatives, and safety net programs. When these structural rollbacks intersect with record-breaking El Niño climate cycles, the resulting vulnerabilities threaten to destabilize global agriculture and national food security.

1. Introduction: The Triad of Modern Vulnerability

The global food system does not exist in a vacuum. It relies upon a complex triad: predictable climate patterns, scientific early-warning infrastructure, and targeted regulatory guardrails that protect soil, crop yield, and public safety. In recent years, this system has come under increasing strain due to baseline planetary warming, amplified by intense El Niño climate phenomena.

Concurrently, policy proposals put forward in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” advocate for a wholesale reduction of the federal government’s role in monitoring climate data, enforcing food safety rules, and providing agricultural risk mitigation. Examining these policy recommendations alongside escalating climate shifts reveals how ideological deregulation could unintentionally compound systemic food chain disruptions.

2. Project 2025 and the Agriculture Sector: Deregulation vs. Resilience

Chapter 10 of Project 2025 focuses on reforming the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and broad federal agricultural mandates. The document frames federal intervention—ranging from farm subsidies to environmental mandates—as burdensome overreach that distorts free markets and hampers producer independence.

Key Agricultural Policy Shift Points:

• Deregulation of Food Safety & Inputs: Project 2025 advocates for streamlining chemical and pesticide approvals, reducing regulatory burdens on meat processing facilities, and rolling back oversight on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

• Phasing Out Subsidies & Crop Insurance: The blueprint calls for curtailing taxpayer-funded crop insurance subsidies, arguing that price supports act as corporate welfare that insulates large agribusinesses from real market dynamics.

• Separating the Farm Bill: Historically, federal agricultural policy unites farm commodity support with urban nutrition programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Project 2025 recommends severing this connection to shrink federal spending.

Agricultural Economist Perspective:

“Decoupling the Farm Bill split breaks a 50-year bipartisan compromise between urban and rural districts. Without crop insurance safeguards during severe weather years, small and medium family farms face immediate insolvency, driving aggressive corporate consolidation across the agricultural sector.”

3. Climate Acceleration and the Record El Niño Phase

While policy debates continue in Washington, physical planetary systems are experiencing unprecedented strain. Recent record-breaking El Niño cycles—characterized by severe ocean surface warming in the central and eastern Pacific—have pushed baseline global atmospheric temperatures to historic highs.

El Niño shifts regional weather paradigms: driving extreme droughts across South America and Southern Asia, while triggering intense atmospheric rivers and flooding across North America. In a stable regulatory environment, federal science agencies track these macro-trends to provide actionable early-warning alerts to farmers, maritime fleets, and commodities markets.

4. The Collision Course: Federal Blindspots & Supply Chain Fragility

The central vulnerability arises where proposed policy rollbacks overlap with climate-induced stress. By dismantling environmental oversight and scientific forecasting right as extreme weather events multiply, the food supply chain faces compound disruption risks.

A. Information Blindspots in Weather Infrastructure

Project 2025 explicitly targets the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), labeling it a primary driver of the “climate alarm industry” and proposing that the National Weather Service (NWS) commercialize its operations. Transitioning public meteorology into paywalled or commercial models reduces access to vital climate data. Independent farmers depend on non-partisan, free weather models to determine planting schedules, irrigation management, and harvest timelines during volatile El Niño cycles.

B. Environmental and Safety Inspection Rollbacks

Deregulating chemical application guidelines and easing processing facility oversight increases the incidence rate of chemical runoff, soil depletion, and foodborne pathogen contamination (e.g., Salmonella, E. coli). When high temperatures during heatwaves accelerate bacterial growth in unchilled logistics lines, relaxed federal inspection standards significantly heighten the risk of nationwide food recalls and sudden retail shortages.

Supply Chain Analyst Perspective:

“A supply chain under climate stress requires real-time transparency and rigorous regulatory safeguards. If you remove federal monitoring while extreme heat destabilizes crop yields, you transform minor supply shocks into systemic domestic shortages.”

5. Conservative Rationale vs. Critical Counter-Arguments

To understand the debate fully, one must evaluate the ideological motivations underpinning Project 2025 alongside the critiques raised by scientists, policy analysts, and labor groups.

The Proponents’ Rationale:

1. Market Efficiency: Removing government subsidies forces farms to respond to true market demand, eliminating inefficiencies and incentivizing genuine innovation.

2. Curbing Agency Overreach: Restricting federal agencies like the EPA and USDA restores decision-making authority to local communities and elected officials rather than unelected career bureaucrats.

3. Energy Dominance: Expanding domestic oil and gas production lowers transport and fertilizer production costs, which proponents argue will ultimately reduce grocery prices for consumers.

The Critics’ Counter-Arguments:

1. Systemic Vulnerability: Stripping climate adaptation grants leaves domestic agriculture exposed to multi-year climate shocks, endangering national food security.

2. Public Health Risks: Weakening regulatory standards transfers public safety risks onto consumers, leading to increased foodborne illness outbreaks and environmental contamination.

3. Economic Inequality: Eliminating SNAP support and crop insurance disproportionately impacts low-income households and small family farms while enriching consolidated agribusiness monopolies.

6. Conclusion: Navigating Policy and Planetary Realities

As extreme climate events like El Niño become more frequent and severe, the resilience of national food supply chains depends on proactive science, targeted safety nets, and robust public oversight. Project 2025 offers a blueprint designed to shrink the federal footprint and unleash market forces. However, applying pure free-market deregulation to essential public resources like food safety, weather tracking, and climate adaptation creates dangerous structural vulnerabilities. Striking a balance between economic efficiency and systemic resilience remains the defining governance challenge of our time.

References & Cited Sources

1. The Heritage Foundation: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025) — Policy blueprint for federal administrative reform.

2. Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI): Annotated Analysis of Project 2025: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — Critical review of proposed weather agency restructuring.

3. Earthjustice: Project 2025: Dismantling Environmental Protections and Climate Policy — Legal and regulatory risk analysis.

4. Food & Water Watch: How Project 2025 Puts People and Our Planet in Peril — Detailed report on agricultural deregulation and food security risks.

5. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): Global Food Policy Report: Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World — Research on global food value chains and climate resilience.

6. Brookings Institution: Legislative & Policy Analysis of Federal Proposals — Economic feasibility assessment of agency restructuring.

As we face a crisis of unprecedented proportions, we’re looking at ways to counter it. One of the most important factors is food security for this record-breaking El-Nino is bound to cause food shortages world-wide. Here’s an example that farmers and homeowners should strongly consider. Details here:

A Look at an Alternative to Commercial Farming that is Beneficial to the Environment

Modern agriculture has reached a critical crossroad. For over half a century, the global food system has relied on high-input industrial models designed to maximize short-term yields through chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, intensive tillage, and monoculture cropping. While this system dramatically increased grain production in the short term, it came at a devastating environmental cost: topsoil erosion, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and significant greenhouse gas emissions.

In response, alternative agricultural philosophies have moved from niche movements into the mainstream. Terms like organic, sustainable, and regenerative are now frequently used by food producers, environmentalists, and policymakers. However, these concepts are far from identical. Understanding the nuanced differences between preserving what we have and actively restoring what has been damaged is essential for consumers, home gardeners, and commercial producers alike.

This comprehensive guide explores the mechanics, applications, benefits, and global significance of organic, sustainable, and regenerative farming—from backyard garden beds to multi-thousand-acre industrial farms across North America and Europe.

1. Defining the Pillars: Organic vs. Sustainable vs. Regenerative

To understand how modern eco-friendly agriculture functions, we must first distinguish between its three foundational methodologies.

The Organic Philosophy: What Not to Use

Organic agriculture focuses primarily on prohibitions and input restrictions. Established legally through government bodies like the USDA (in the United States) or the EU Organic Regulations, standard organic farming prohibits synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), sewage sludge, and irradiation.

The primary goal of certified organic farming is to prevent direct chemical toxicity to human consumers and local ecosystems. However, a farm can theoretically qualify as standard organic while still practicing intensive tillage, monoculture cropping, and bare-soil management—practices that degrade topsoil over time.

The Sustainable Approach: Maintaining the Balance

Sustainability is built around the concept of preservation and neutrality. Sustainable farming seeks to satisfy human food needs without depleting natural resources or compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

It aims for a zero-net-loss equilibrium across ecological, economic, and social systems. While sustainable practices prevent further damage, they do not inherently focus on actively rebuilding ecosystems that have already suffered decades of degradation.

The Regenerative Mandate: Active Biological Healing

Regenerative agriculture goes a step beyond sustainability. Rather than aiming for neutrality (maintaining the status quo), regenerative farming is actively restorative and outcome-driven.

It treats the farm as a living ecosystem, focusing on rebuilding degraded topsoil, increasing soil organic matter, sequestering atmospheric carbon underground, enhancing biodiversity, and restoring hydrological cycles. In a regenerative system, agricultural output becomes a byproduct of biological restoration rather than resource extraction.

2. Core Principles: How Regenerative Systems Function

Regenerative agriculture is governed by foundational biological principles designed to cultivate life beneath the ground.

Minimizing Soil Disturbance (Low/No-Till)

Mechanical plowing breaks open topsoil, exposing subterranean microbes to ultraviolet light, destroying beneficial mycorrhizal fungal networks, and releasing trapped carbon dioxide ($CO_2$) into the atmosphere. Regenerative systems minimize or eliminate tillage to allow delicate subterranean food webs to mature undisturbed.

Maintaining Living Roots Year-Round

In conventional farming, fields often sit empty for six to eight months after harvest. In contrast, regenerative farming keeps living plant roots in the ground 365 days a year using off-season cover crops (such as cereal rye, crimson clover, and field peas). Living plant roots release liquid carbon exudates (sugars) into the soil, directly feeding bacteria and fungi through winter.

Maximizing Plant & Insect Biodiversity

Monoculture cropping invites widespread disease and pest pressure, forcing reliance on chemical sprays. Planting complex crop rotations, companion plants, and native wildflower borders disrupts pest cycles naturally, provides habitat for natural predators, and feeds a broader diversity of soil organisms.

Integrating Livestock

In wild ecosystems, herds of ruminants move constantly across grasslands, grazing, trampling plant matter, and depositing manure. Regenerative farming replicates this through managed intensive rotational grazing. Ruminants manure fertilizes the land naturally, while targeted grazing stimulates root growth and accelerates organic matter formation.

Biological Pest and Fertility Management

Rather than applying synthetic chemical inputs, regenerative farms build long-term fertility using finished compost, biofertilizers, cover-crop nitrogen fixation, and worm castings (vermicomposting). Pests are managed by supporting predatory insects (such as ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps) rather than using broad-spectrum chemical sprays.

3. Standards in Practice: Certified Organic vs. ROC

As green terms proliferate in consumer marketing, third-party certification provides essential accountability. Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) was established by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (led by organizations including the Rodale Institute and Patagonia Provisions) to set a comprehensive baseline.

ROC requires standard Certified Organic certification as a mandatory baseline and layering rigorous requirements across three distinct operational pillars:

1. Soil Health & Land Management: Requires continuous cover cropping, crop rotations, and reduced tillage while explicitly banning soil-less hydroponic systems and synthetic inputs.

2. Animal Welfare: Mandates pasture-based, 100% grass-fed management for ruminants, freedom of movement, natural behaviors, and an absolute prohibition on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

3. Social Fairness & Worker Protection: Guarantees fair living wages, safe working environments, clean housing, freedom of association, and explicit bans on forced labor—an area completely unaddressed by standard USDA Organic rules.

To encourage transition without lowering standards, ROC operates on a tiered scale (Bronze, Silver, and Gold), requiring participating farms to continually improve their practices over time.

4. Applying Regenerative Principles in the Home Garden

Regenerative practices are not restricted to commercial farms—they are highly adaptable and effective for backyard plots, urban gardens, and community patches.

The Backyard Regenerative Toolkit

Step 1: Adopt the “No-Dig” / “No-Till” Method

To start a new bed without turning over the soil:

• MOW the intended plot short.

• COVER the grass with overlapping layers of plain, unprinted corrugated cardboard (overlapping seams by 6 inches) to smother weeds.

• WATER the cardboard thoroughly.

• LAYER 3 to 4 inches of rich compost directly on top of the cardboard, followed by 2 inches of organic mulch (straw or shredded leaves).

• PLANT transplants directly into the compost layer. Over time, earthworms will digest the cardboard, blending the layers naturally without disturbing soil strata.

Step 2: Practice “Chop and Drop”

When harvesting or clearing seasonal plants, do not yank crops out by their roots. Snip plant stems off at ground level. Leave the roots inside the dirt to decay—leaving root channels open for oxygen and water while feeding underground microbes. Chop healthy stems and leaves into small pieces and scatter them across the bed as a protective mulch layer.

Step 3: Utilize Backyard Cover Crops

When a summer crop finishes (e.g., in late summer), scatter cover crop seeds directly over the soil. Fast-growing options like crimson clover (fixes nitrogen), daikon radish (drills open compacted soil), or winter rye (creates a thick mulch mat) keep soil alive over winter.

Step 4: Maximize Polyculture & Beneficial Insects

Avoid planting single rows of a single crop. Intercrop tomatoes with basil and marigolds; plant flowering alyssum near brassicas. Interplanting attracts ladybugs, hoverflies, and predatory wasps, controlling aphids and caterpillars without chemical intervention.

5. Scaling Up: Broadacre Row Crops and Market Vegetables

A common misconception is that regenerative farming only works on small, intensive homesteads. In practice, regenerative practices operate successfully across thousands of acres of commercial field crops (corn, soybeans, wheat) and field vegetables (cabbage, broccoli, root crops).

Row Crop Adaptations (Corn, Soybeans, Grains)

• No-Till Seed Drills: Commercial operators use heavy seed drills equipped with specialized coulter discs that slice a narrow 1-inch slit through last year’s crop residue, drop the seed precisely, and press the soil shut—leaving 95% of the surface undisturbed.

• Roller-Crimpers: Farmers plant cash crops directly into standing, living cover crops in spring. A tractor-mounted roller-crimper crushes and breaks the stems of the cover crop, creating a thick organic mulch mat that smothers weeds and conserves moisture all summer.

• Aerial / Interseeding: High-clearance tractors, air seeders, or agricultural drones seed cover crops into standing corn or soybean canopy before harvest, ensuring green plants are growing the moment the primary crop is cut.

Commercial Vegetable Adaptations (Brassicas, Cabbage)

Large-scale vegetable production often requires delicate soil handling. Farmers use strip-tilling (tilling narrow 6-inch strips exclusively where transplants will be set while leaving the surrounding 80% covered) combined with nitrogen-fixing cover crop cocktails and native flower insectary borders to manage nitrogen needs and natural pest control.

6. Real-World Global Case Studies

Regenerative practices are proving commercially viable across varied climates in North America and Europe:

North America

• Brown’s Ranch (Bismarck, North Dakota, USA): Gabe Brown transformed 5,000 acres of degraded, bankrupt farmland into a thriving enterprise. By eliminating all synthetic fertilizers, fungicides, and pesticides in favor of multi-species cover crops, direct-seeding, and rotational grazing, the farm drastically reduced operating costs while rebuilding topsoil organic matter from 1.7% to over 6%.

• Wild Hope Farm (Chester, South Carolina, USA): A multi-hundred-acre certified organic and regenerative produce farm serving regional markets. They utilize roller-crimped cover crop mats, compost-based fertility, and native pollinator strips to grow commercial brassicas (cabbage, kale), leafy greens, and row crops sustainably.

Europe

• Ferme de la Confrérie (Normandy, France): A broadacre European operation utilizing direct-drilling techniques and continuous soil coverage across extensive field crops and brassicas. They integrate winter livestock grazing over cash crop stubble to recycle nutrients naturally, drastically curbing reliance on imported chemical fertilizers.

• Overbury Enterprises (Warwickshire, United Kingdom): A multi-thousand-acre traditional estate that systematically shifted from deep plow inversion to zero-tillage, multi-species cover crop cocktails, and sheep integration. Overbury has demonstrated equal or superior grain yields alongside significant reductions in tractor fuel consumption and synthetic inputs.

7. The Climate Imperative: Mitigation, Resilience, and Food Security

The widespread adoption of regenerative farming is vital in the context of accelerating climate change. Agriculture is deeply vulnerable to climatic shifts, but it also holds the key to meaningful climate solutions.

Soil as a Massive Carbon Sink

Through photosynthesis, plants pull $CO_2$ from the atmosphere and transform it into carbon-based plant tissue and root exudates. When soil remains undisturbed and biologically active, microbes convert these exudates into stable soil organic carbon, storing gigatons of atmospheric carbon deep underground for decades or centuries.

The “Soil Sponge”: Drought and Flood Resilience

Climate change accentuates extreme weather swings—extended dry spells followed by sudden, violent rainfall.

• Drought Cushioning: Every 1% increase in soil organic matter enables an acre of land to absorb and hold roughly 20,000 additional gallons of water.

• Erosion Prevention: Biologically active soil forms porous structural aggregates held together by fungal glues (glomalin). This structure absorbs heavy rain rapidly like a sponge, keeping valuable topsoil in place during severe flood events.

Cutting Fossil-Fuel Dependency

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production requires energy-intensive chemical synthesis powered by natural gas, while applying excessive nitrogen releases nitrous oxide ($N_2O$)—a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent at trapping heat than $CO_2$. Replacing chemical nitrogen with leguminous cover crops and animal manure removes fossil-fuel requirements directly from the farm ledger.

Conclusion: Rebuilding the Roots of Our Food System

Regenerative agriculture represents a paradigm shift: moving away from viewing nature as something to control with chemicals, and toward viewing the farm as a living ecological network to support.

Whether implemented in a backyard “no-dig” raised bed or across a 5,000-acre commercial grain farm in the Midwest or Western Europe, the core mandate remains identical: feed the soil, and the soil will feed the world. By choosing regenerative practices, supporting local regenerative producers, and understanding how food choices impact topsoil health, we actively contribute to cooling the planet, restoring ecosystems, and securing our global food supply for generations to come

Primary Sources & Further Reading

1. Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA)Official governing body for the Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) standard, outlining certification criteria across soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness.

   • Source: Regenerative Organic Alliance Directory & Standards

2. Brown’s Ranch (Bismarck, North Dakota, USA)A leading broadacre case study (5,000+ acres) demonstrating zero-synthetic inputs, no-till seeding, multi-species cover cropping, and rotational livestock grazing.

   • Source: Brown’s Ranch Official Website

3. Wild Hope Farm (Chester, South Carolina, USA)A certified organic and regenerative produce operation utilizing cover crop mats, insectary borders, and crop rotations for vegetable production.

   • Source: Wild Hope Farm Official Website

4. Overbury Farms (Worcestershire, United Kingdom)A multi-thousand-acre UK estate demonstrating direct-drilling, multi-species cover crops, and sheep rotation to restore soil health in grain farming.

   • Source: Overbury Farms & Enterprises

5. Rodale InstitutePioneering non-profit research institution dedicated to organic and regenerative agricultural science, including long-term comparative soil trials.

   • Source: Rodale Institute Agriculture Resources

WASHINGTON — In an unprecedented move that has rocked the military journalism community, the U.S. Department of Defense has officially issued separation notices to the senior leadership of Stars and Stripes. Fired Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin, Publisher Max Lederer, and Middle East reporter Lara Korte were ousted in what critics are calling a direct assault on the First Amendment protections long afforded to the historic military publication.

The Trigger: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the “Woke” Refocus

The terminations mark the climax of a monthslong campaign led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to reshape defense media. Since taking office, Hegseth has repeatedly expressed frustration with Stars and Stripes’ independent editorial direction, arguing that the taxpayer-funded newsroom had strayed into cultural controversies and political distractions.

Under Hegseth’s direction, the Pentagon issued guidelines requiring the publication to refocus its coverage strictly on combat lethality, physical readiness, weapon systems performance, and core military operational success.

The tension boiled over when Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte appeared on CBS News to publicly defend the paper’s statutory editorial independence. In official separation paperwork, the Pentagon cited “insubordination” as the grounds for dismissal, directly linking the firings to the newsroom’s public refusal to adhere to the Defense Department’s media mandates.

In Their Own Words: Statements from Key Figures

The dismissals have produced sharp statements from those involved, highlighting the ideological divide over the publication’s role:

• Erik Slavin, Fired Editor-in-Chief: In an interview regarding his termination, Slavin defended his team’s actions, calling the dismissal a retaliatory strike against basic journalistic integrity. “Our mission has always been to report the truth to service members without fear or favor,” Slavin stated. “When military leadership attempts to turn an independent newspaper into a public relations channel, crossing that red line demands resistance. Dismissing us for defending editorial independence sets a dangerous precedent.”

• Max Lederer, Departing Publisher: Lederer, who announced his departure shortly before the formal purges following three decades with the outlet, penned an internal memo explaining his position: “My philosophy regarding a free, uninhibited military press differs in fundamental, irreconcilable ways from the current trajectory set by Defense Department leadership.”

• Department of Defense (Pentagon Statement): A spokesperson for Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office defended the administrative action, stating: “The Department expects all personnel within military-funded entities to adhere to institutional guidelines and orders. Public insubordination and the active undermining of departmental directives on public airwaves are incompatible with continued service within the Department of Defense.”

Staff Resignations and the Installation of Military Oversight

The purge follows an internal revolt and key resignations across the editing staff. Tensions spiked when the Pentagon unilaterally placed active-duty Navy Capt. William Urban into upper management as “Military Deputy to the Publisher.”

Journalists inside the newsroom viewed the appointment of an active-duty public affairs officer as an attempt to establish a censorship firewall over daily operations. In protest of Capt. Urban’s installation and the prior firing of Newsroom Ombudsman Jacqueline Smith—who was ousted after raising concerns over editorial meddling—several senior line editors and veteran reporters tendered their resignations.

What Is Next for Stars and Stripes?

The departure of its top civilian editors leaves the century-old institution—which was chartered by Congress to remain free of military censorship—at a structural crossroads:

• Military Administration: Active-duty leadership under Capt. William Urban has temporarily taken operational charge, pledging to modernize digital delivery while reshaping coverage to match the Department’s operational priorities.

• Legal and Congressional Pushback: Lawmakers and press freedom advocacy groups have called for immediate congressional hearings. Newsroom advocates note that federal law specifically protects Stars and Stripes under First Amendment principles, setting up a potential landmark legal fight over executive authority versus statutory press freedom.

• Loss of Credibility: Former staff members warn that if service members perceive Stars and Stripes as an official propaganda organ rather than an honest watchdog reporting on military healthcare, pay, and leadership accountability, the outlet will lose its readership entirely.

References

1. Associated Press. (2026, August 21). Pentagon dismisses Stars and Stripes leadhttps://apnews.com/article/stars-stripes-pentagon-censorship-media-d42affb0c17fef31c6089645c8dbbe70ership after editor, reporter oppose military interference. AP News.

2. Deutsche Welle (DW). (2026, August 22). US Department of Defense fires editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes over independence dispute. DW News.

3. TIME Magazine. (2026, August 21). Pentagon Fires Editor and Publisher of U.S. Military Newspaper. TIME.

4. The Washington Post. (2026, August 20). Stars and Stripes publisher announces departure with a parting shot at Pentagon. The Washington Post.

5. Al Jazeera. (2026, August 22). Editor of US newspaper Stars and Stripes reportedly fired under Trump administration directives. Al Jazeera English.

This False Friend Friday installment has a good lesson for those who are learning German and love to drink beer. Imagine this scenario, you enter a bar and request a Herb Beer and you have a choice of the two below:

You have HERB BIER (German) and HERB BEER (English). While Beer is Bier, the word Herb is different between the two language. What’s the difference?

And are there any other ways of using HERB in both languages?

That’s your homework for next Friday, where the answer will come out.

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And in case you want to know more about Pappenheim:

In the previous False Friend Post, we looked at the idiomatic expression “Ich kenne meinen Pappenheimer,” and wanted to know what exactly does it mean in English, let alone what the False Friend equivalent is. We’re going back to the four ladies visiting Pappenheimer, where Heidi explains about her hometown with Janet, Saskia and Claire (right to left). Look at the strip below and you will find the answers:

Hope the explanations of the two help. The origin of the expression comes from the work by Friedrich Schiller entitled Wallenstein’s Death (D: Wallensteins Tod), which you can find out more about it here. And while there is no such town as Pappenheim in Minnesota, there is one in the Franconian district of Bavaria, located 70 km NW of Nuremberg. It’s not that famous as it has only 3940 inhabitants. :-)

BTW, this strip was AI-generated with ChatGPT. ;-)

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You will find more examples of False Friends in this Pocket Guide below. Quizzes are included. Useful for all occasions! :-)

FALSE FRIEND POCKET GUIDE

TYB

55 years ago this year, a memo was introduced that would alter the American landscape. The Powell Memo was introduced as a way to undermine the free system where the country would be run by small businesses who looked after the little guy to ensure he/she got the share of living. Over the course of over a half century, much of the policies in the US have focused on rich getting richer and more powerful, but at the expense of the rest of the population who went from Middle Class with a home per family to the lower class, scraping just to pay rent for an apartment or home. And we are seeing this clearly with the policies of the Trump Regime with more damage to come once the Mid-terms have passed unless he is removed through impeachment.

Overview:

On August 23, 1971, corporate attorney Lewis F. Powell Jr.—just months before his appointment to the United States Supreme Court—authored a confidential memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Written during an era marked by anti-Vietnam War protests, environmental advocacy, and consumer protection movements led by figures like Ralph Nader, the memo articulated a profound sense of anxiety among business elites. Powell warned:

“No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack… [T]he assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued.”

To counter what he viewed as ideological subversion, Powell urged the business community to abandon passive compromise and systematically build long-term political, legal, and intellectual infrastructure. He emphasized that single companies acting alone could not stem the tide; lasting change required institutional coordination, generous funding, and sustained pressure across all public domains.

Key Institutions, Concrete Examples, and Strategic Mobilization

The memorandum functioned as a strategic blueprint, prompting major conservative donors and corporate executives to fund an interconnected network of organizations:

• Policy Research & Intellectual Infrastructure: Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation (1973) and the Cato Institute (1977) were established to shape public policy and challenge the post-New Deal economic consensus. Powell explicitly called for corporate sponsorship of conservative scholars, textbook reviews, and balanced speaker programs on college campuses to counter left-leaning faculty.

• Business Advocacy & Lobbying: Groups like the Business Roundtable were formed to unify corporate lobbying power in Washington, multiplying the presence of corporate lobbyists and political action committees throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

• Judicial Strategy & Legal Networks: Emphasizing Powell’s directive that the courts were “the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change,” conservative legal scholars later launched the Federalist Society (1982) to cultivate judges and attorneys who aligned with originalist and free-market legal doctrines.

Debating the Powell Legacy: Proponents vs. Critics

The long-term impact of the Powell Memo remains a subject of intense debate among historians, legal scholars, and political analysts:

• Perspectives from Supporters and Free-Market Advocates: Proponents contend that the memo was a necessary, defensive reaction to widespread anti-business hostility and government overregulation. From this perspective, Powell helped save the U.S. economy by restoring market efficiency, protecting corporate speech, and balancing an academic and media landscape that had become overwhelmingly hostile to private enterprise. Defenders note that organizing business advocacy is a constitutional right to petition the government, ensuring that employers and wealth-creators have a voice in policy.

• Perspectives from Critics and Progressive Analysts: Conversely, progressive scholars and civil society organizations view the document as a corporate blueprint that initiated a decades-long erosion of public democracy. Critics argue that the institutional machinery set off by the memo successfully centralized political power in the hands of major corporations and wealthy donors, directly leading to weakened labor unions, rising income inequality, and corporate dark money in elections.

Contemporary Relevance and Political Legacy

In modern political discourse—including discussions surrounding Donald Trump’s realignment of the Republican coalition—the legacy of the Powell Memo appears in complex ways. While the institutions established in its wake built the judicial pipeline that delivered conservative court majorities, the populist economic direction of the modern GOP (marked by tariffs, trade protectionism, and economic nationalism) often contrasts sharply with the pure corporate, free-market orthodoxy originally envisioned by Powell in 1971.

Primary Sources and Archival References

• Lewis F. Powell Jr. Papers (1971): Memorandum: Attack On American Free Enterprise System. Washington and Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons.

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce Archives: Historical filings and public republications of the 1971 Powell Memorandum.

• Judicial History Resources: Legal analyses detailing Powell’s Supreme Court confirmation and subsequent jurisprudence regarding corporate speech and political contributions.

If there is one way to defeat MAGA in the Mid-terms in November, the Democrats need to put aside their differences and come together, trusting each other, regardless of whether they are moderates, progressives or even socialists. If there is a lesson in history to refer to, it would be the one introduced by Miles Mogulescu in this guest piece. The Weimar Republic failed because of the difference between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD). The end result was the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, and the rest was history. Parallels are being seen between that time and the current situation with the Democrats in the States. And here’s how:

In the early 1930s moderate and leftists Germans attacked each other as badly as they attacked Hitler and the Nazis.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was a large democratic socialist party supporting parliamentary democracy, often joined Weimar Republic governments, and generally favored gradual reform.

The Communist Party (”KPD”) considered themselves revolutionary socialists and believed that the capitalist system should ultimately be overthrown.

The SPD and KPD were both mass parties in the 1920-’30s, each getting millions of votes and turning out tens of thousands of people in mass demonstrations. But they considered themselves enemies. Their supporters literally fought each other in the streets.

The KPD considered the SPD to be “social fascists,” as dangerous as the Nazis.

SPD leaders believed the KPD sought to destroy parliamentary democracy and regarded themselves as defenders of constitutional government against extremists on their left and right. SPD-controlled governments had also used police against KPD organizations and demonstrations.

In the last democratic elections in November of 1932, the SPD received 20.43% of the vote, the KPD received 16.86% of the vote and the Nazi Party received 33.09% of the vote. Thus the combined SPD and KPD received a Parliamentary plurality of 37.29% of the vote compared to the Nazi’s 33.09%. But with the SPD and KPD refusing to unite, German President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Soon after, Hitler outlawed both parties on the left, arrested many of their leaders, and subsequently started to send them to concentration camps.

Today, there are real political differences between Democratic so-called “moderates” and Democratic “progressives.” But until the mid-term elections, the great danger that must be defeated is MAGA-style fascims. If Democrats do not win at least one (or hopefully) both Houses of Congress, there will be little to block at least two more years of escalating Trumpian authoritarianism which could effectively destroy the Republic.

Between now and November, Democratic moderates and progressives need to form a United Front against MAGA. They need to avoid the mistakes of the German left in the 1930s. For the immediate term—whether there are differences of opinion about Medicare for All or US aid to Israel—the focus must be on fighting MAGA and winning congressional seats for Democrats, whether the nominees in the general election are moderate or progressive.

On paper, Democratic candidates seem to be moving in this direction. In Michigan the moderate Democratic loser, Haley Stevens, and the progressive Democratic winner, Abdul El Sayed spoke on the phone and Stevens endorsed El Sayed. On social media, Stevens posted that she if offering El Sayed “my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November.”

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke on the phone with El Sayed, and Schumer reportedly telling the Michigan nominee, “I don’t need you to like me. I just need you to win.” “We had a really good conversation,” Schumer said. “I told him I think we’d agree on things: Beat Rogers, win Michigan, take back the Senate. He said I agree on all three.” Schumer added that his takeaway from the call was that “we have more that unites us than divides us.”

But a meaningful Democratic United Front will take more than rhetoric. Control of Congress is likely to be extraordinarily close. Democratic moderates must not only say nice things about progressive nominees. They must use their money and their supporters to campaign as strongly for them as they would if their preferred moderates had won the nominations. And for their part, progressive nominees need to take a temporary break from attacking moderate Democrats as mere corporate tools. In a post primary interview, El-Sayed described Schumer as “pragmatic”—a pulled punch if ever there was one.

But it’s concerning that some so-called moderate Democrats are more intent on the progressive nominees losing the general election than on defeating MAGA.

Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, a leading corporate-friendly Democratic group told the New York Times that it is preparing a new $15 million effort “to discredit” democratic socialism.

According to the Times, the “group plans to target the Democratic Socialists of America movement, which he believes poses a ‘mortal danger’ for Democrats.

Cowan told the newspaper that the effort “would include opposition research into DSA, polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the ‘DSA dodge’— flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.”

Meanwhile, former Bill Clinton campaign advisor James Carville proclaimed that Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom a majority of New York Democratic voters chose to run for Congress, should not be seated by the Democratic caucus if she wins the seat, as is likely.

He said of Chevalier, “I ain’t in the same party as you,” and explicitly proposed that Democrats consider the word “schism.”

Comedian Bill Maher—who now describes himself as “left of center, slightly”—recently said that if progressives dominate the Democratic Party, he would consider supporting JD Vance or Marco Rubio in 2028.

These so-called “moderate” Democrats are imitating the 1930s German left. If their efforts help MAGA to retain Congress they will be repressed along with the “progressives.” Eventually, they could all end up sharing the same jail cells.

---

About the Author:

Miles Mogulescu is an entertainment attorney/business affairs executive, producer, political activist and writer.

We’re seeing this trend everywhere, even in here in Europe. Fewer people are taking to the streets in protests and retreating into the Internet World where they are “safe” from harm. Fewer people who are willing to stand up for the rights of others- the weak, the old, the minorities. Fewer people that are willing to risk their lives to lead. In this guest column, Henry A. Giroux of LA Progressive looks at this problem on the side of the Democrats, especially with three months left before what could be the last chance to unseat Donald Trump with the Mid-terms.

It sends a warning shot to everyone to get involve, speak out and take a stand, physically. That warning shot also applies to Europe and elsewhere, as we face a rise of fascism everywhere.

Including Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Pommerania in Germany, where the AfD may have their first government in September unless people find creative ways to stop the trend!

From education to politics and culture, corporate power is narrowing the spaces where people learn to question authority, imagine alternatives and act as democratic citizens.

“I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.” — Arthur Miller

Moral witnessing has largely retreated into billboards, podcasts, a commodified and hate-filled media ecosystem, and relentless gestures of liberal empathy emptied of consequence.

Too few artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers are willing to risk their careers by confronting the genocidal wars of our time and the governments and institutions that sustain them with weapons, money, and silence.

Where are the voices for the children being slaughtered in Gaza and for those subjected to the horrors of war, displacement, and hunger in Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and elsewhere?

Where is the outrage against the masked thugs patrolling America’s streets, terrorizing communities, violating the law, and turning state violence into a spectacle of fear?

Where is the international movement of artists, academics, and cultural workers willing to organize, strike, and refuse complicity with the corporate barbarians who flood the culture with hatred, purchase elections, and seize control of the commanding institutions of public life?

Where is the collective outrage over what Joel Whitebook calls “humanity’s headlong race toward an ecological cliff and the accelerating global spread of neo-fascist movements”?

Under the reign of neoliberal trillionaire fascism, the planet burns, cities are militarized, inequality deepens, war becomes a governing principle of politics, racism returns as a celebrated language of power, and young people are robbed of both a future and a place in history. Cruelty is normalized, ignorance is weaponized, and the machinery of death is dressed up in the language of security, efficiency, and national greatness. Border madness feeds white nationalism and colonial fantasies. What once provoked shame is now performed as spectacle. What once demanded outrage is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

———————–

This collapse of moral courage is nowhere more visible than among the liberal establishment of the Democratic Party, whose fear of an emerging democratic socialism among young people and an increasingly organized DSA appears at times more intense than its opposition to the militarized gangster capitalism of the Trump era.

The contempt is revealing because it exposes what liberal centrism fears most: not authoritarian power, but a politics willing to challenge the economic order on which that power feeds. Even the liberal press often reproduces this panic, framing the resurgence of democratic socialism less as a response to grotesque inequality, corporate rule, and the political exhaustion of neoliberalism than as a threat to the Democratic Party itself.

The question posed by Rolling Stone, whether the democratic socialist surge might “doom the party,” gets the crisis exactly backward: the more urgent question is whether a party wedded to corporate power, militarism, and neoliberal capitalism has already forfeited its capacity to speak to millions of young people who no longer believe the existing order has a future.

This fear is manufactured through a sterile self-serving ideological language.

In Rolling Stone, Bernie Sanders becomes a “Trojan horse” who “infiltrated” the Democratic Party, democratic socialism is associated with Animal Farm and a “bitter worldview,” while Trump’s politics, despite its acknowledged racism and cruelty, is described as “eminently salable.”

Democratic socialism is treated as a pathology to be contained, while authoritarian politics is translated into the bloodless language of electoral viability.

———————–

Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, co-founders of the centrist group Third Way, declared in a Washington Post op-ed that the DSA’s ideas are “electoral poison.” But what exactly is the poison they fear? A politics that demands economic equality, universal social protections, racial justice, democratic control over concentrated wealth, and an end to a political order in which billionaires purchase elections while the poor and working class are abandoned and public life is hollowed out. This political betrayal runs through the Clinton and Obama years, when the Democratic establishment made its peace with neoliberalism, Wall Street, corporate power, and the permanent war state, leaving it increasingly incapable of confronting the economic forces that nourish authoritarianism.

At a moment when fascism is gathering force and ecological catastrophe is accelerating, defending capitalism against those demanding a more just society is not political realism. It is moral surrender dressed in respectable suits and cowardice repackaged by the media as common sense. And nowhere is this moral bankruptcy more grotesque than in the continued flow of American weapons to Israel as tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed or wounded in Gaza.

The centrists who recoil at democratic socialism as “electoral poison” have remarkably little difficulty accommodating themselves to a political order in which children are bombed, starved, and buried beneath rubble.

Apparently, demanding economic justice is considered too radical; underwriting mass death and militarized gangster capitalism is not.

———————–

At a moment when silence has become a form of complicity, where are the voices willing to make power tremble?

Where are the heirs to W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, I. F. Stone, and Angela Davis, alongside contemporary artists such as Roger Waters and Javier Bardem, who understand that art and intellectual work surrender their moral force when they turn away from human suffering?

The question is no longer simply who will speak. It is who is willing to risk something by speaking, to refuse the safety of silence, and to transform moral witnessing into collective resistance and outrage into organized power.

The task is no longer merely to bear witness to the darkness, but to build the movements capable of confronting and defeating the forces producing it.

—

About the Author:

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. Second half should read: His latest books are The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025); Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure (Bloomsbury, 2026). He is LA Progressive’s Associate Editor

Here’s another guest post by fellow columnist Tony Pentimalli, who has a direct plea to both Democrats and Republicans: The Mid-terms are over two months away. The train is away. It’s pointless to bring up the SAVE Act, and try and mess up a perfectly made system where everyone has a chance to vote for their candidate. Trump will never succeed in stopping the elections,band his removal is well past due. So just simply leave it. It’s dead and it should be that.

Now his thoughts on this:

The Senate left Washington for its summer recess without passing the SAVE America Act, and that is a hell of a lot more important than some ordinary legislative failure.

Donald Trump spent weeks demanding that Republican senators stay in Washington, change the rules if they had to, and ram through sweeping new voting restrictions before the midterms. Republicans control the Senate, Trump leaned on them as hard as he could, and they still failed to get the bill across the finish line.

For now, that means millions of Americans are not being forced to jump through new federal proof-of-citizenship hoops because Trump decided he wanted the voting rules changed before an election. It means he did not get to rewrite the system on command, and it gives everyone fighting these restrictions something precious that Republicans were trying to take away: time.

Nobody should dismiss this as some inside-baseball procedural fight, because stopping bad legislation is one of the few things standing between ordinary people and politicians who keep trying to make voting harder whenever they think it will help them stay in power. Senate rules mattered, public pressure mattered, opposition mattered, and the fact that Republicans went home without delivering this bill proves that Trump does not get everything he demands just because he pounds the table and orders his party to fall in line.

That does not mean the fight is over, because Republicans have already made it clear they intend to come back in September and try again. They can revive the bill, try to bolt pieces of it onto something else, or hunt for some procedural trick that lets them squeeze part of this agenda through before the midterms.

What happened today still matters because Trump wanted federal election law changed on his timetable, Republicans tried to give him what he wanted, and they failed before leaving town.

That is a real victory, but it only stays a victory if people keep their eyes on them and make damn sure the SAVE Act stays dead.

About the Author:

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social

Political Crisis in Thuringia: The Scandal, The Offer, and Potential Snap Elections

Two weeks ago at this time, Germany was facing a potential that one of the states, namely Saxony Anhalt, would risk becoming the first state to be run by the far-right Alternatives AfD. With the party leading with 43% of the votes, the chances of them entering are very likely.

But looking at Erfurt, a situation is unfolding at record pace and if two parties join together, the state may be the second state to fall to the AfD with Björn Höcke as minister instead of the sitting minister Mario Voigt.

The political situation in the state parliament (Landtag) of Thuringia has escalated following an overture by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) aimed at bringing down Minister-President Mario Voigt (CDU).

1. The Scandal Surrounding Mario Voigt & Calls for Resignation

Mario Voigt, who took office as Minister-President of Thuringia leading a minority coalition of the CDU, BSW, and SPD (often called the “Blackberry” or Brombeer coalition), has come under heavy scrutiny. This has largely to do with Voigt’s academic scandal which has tarnished his reputation and hindered the progress of the state government. TU Chemnitz revoked Voigt’s doctorate after an extensive review confirmed significant plagiarism and citation issues in his dissertation. His initial administrative objection was rejected by the university, leaving him facing mounting public pressure and calls for his resignation.

Opposition parties and critics—including figures within the BSW, such as Sahra Wagenknecht herself—have argued that the scandal severely damages Voigt’s credibility and renders his leadership untenable.

2. Höcke’s Offer to Wagenknecht & The No-Confidence Plan

In a public video message, Thuringia’s far-right AfD leader Björn Höcke directly addressed Sahra Wagenknecht with the phrase “Ich reiche Ihnen die Hand” (”I extend my hand to you”). The proposal of Höcke is clear: Install Wagenknecht (or a BSW-backed candidate) as Minister-President with the backing of the AfD. The proposal has a clear motive:

The AfD holds 32 seats and the BSW holds 15 seats in Thuringia’s 88-seat parliament. Together, their 47 seats clear the 45-seat threshold required for a parliamentary majority.

To trigger the collapse of the government, the AfD plans to file a constructive vote of no confidence against Mario Voigt. Under German parliamentary rules, this requires naming a viable replacement who can command a majority.

While Sahra Wagenknecht has publicly advocated for ending Voigt’s governing coalition, she has not formally accepted Höcke’s proposal. Meanwhile, local BSW leaders in Thuringia (such as Katja Wolf) remain cautious, mindful of the severe political backlash of overtly aligning with Höcke’s AfD.

Historical Parallel:

Thuringia faced a similar political shock in February 2020, when Thomas Kemmerich (FDP) was elected Minister-President with secret backing from AfD votes. The national outcry and political chaos forced Kemmerich to announce his resignation within days, demonstrating the extreme volatility of Thuringian parliamentary arithmetic.

Strategic Implications of Potential Snap Elections

If the constructive vote of no confidence succeeds or if the state government collapses—forcing snap elections—the political fallout will ripple across local, regional, and federal levels:

1. Direct Impact on Thuringia

• AfD Dominance: Polling indicates the AfD could further solidify its position as the largest single party in Thuringia, potentially making it impossible for mainstream democratic parties to form any coalition without breaking established taboos. Like in Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony, the party has polled north of 40% in the past three months and has gained more voters as Thuringians are dissatisfied with both the state and federal policies, especially governed by the ruling CDU.

• Inability to Form a Stable Majority: A new election would likely result in another deeply fragmented parliament. With traditional parties refusing to govern with the AfD, Thuringia risks prolonged political paralysis and budget gridlock.

• Fractures within the BSW: The issue creates severe internal friction between the BSW leadership in Berlin (seeking to distance itself from conventional parties) and BSW politicians in Erfurt (who are currently serving in government). This has resulted in the BSW losing half of the supporters within the past six months, polling at or below 5% per state.

2. Wider Impact on Eastern Germany

• Erosion of the Brandmauer (Firewall): If BSW or rogue delegates cooperate with the AfD—even indirectly to oust Voigt—it would mark a major breakdown of the political “firewall” meant to isolate the far-right in eastern state parliaments.

• Regional Polarization: Instability in Thuringia amplifies a broader narrative across East German states (like Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) that traditional establishment parties (CDU, SPD) cannot provide stable governance without relying on populist or radical political forces. Fears of that are already occurring in those two states as they face elections in September, especially in Saxony Anhalt, where the SPD and/or the Greens could miss the 5% hurdle. If one of the two fails along with the FDP, the AfD could govern with an absolute majority.

3. Impact on the Federal Government under Friedrich Merz

For Chancellor / CDU Chairman Friedrich Merz, losing a CDU-led state government—especially due to an academic scandal and an AfD maneuver—would be a major political defeat. His party is currently trailing the AfD in the national polls by an average of 8% and pressure is already heating up to force his resignation due to his widespread unpopularity. In fact only 16% of Germans approve of his performance, five percentage points less than the Traffic Light Coalition under Olaf Scholz when the government collapsed in 2024.

Merz has maintained a strict national policy against cooperating with either the AfD or entering formal alliances that rely on radical forces. A collapse in Thuringia exposes the vulnerability of his eastern state strategy and weakens the CDU’s authority nationally. It would give opposition parties at the federal level strong momentum to attack the CDU’s credibility and governance record, complicating Merz’s federal legislative agenda and internal party cohesion. Experts fear that if the AfD wins in one state, a domino effect would take place which would engulf Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and the remaining eastern states. Merz would be forced to decide between cooperating with the AfD, resigning and forcing new elections, which could see AfD getting a share of the power, or a Velvet Divorce with the eastern German states, something last seen with Czechoslovakia in 1993.

References

• Tagesspiegel: Reports on the AfD’s offer and the constructive vote of no-confidence. Link: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/ich-reiche-ihnen-die-hand-hocke-will-wagenknecht-zur-ministerprasidentin-in-thuringen-machen-15938613.html

• dpa (German Press Agency): Coverage of the political developments in the Thuringian Landtag. Link: https://thueringen.de/dpa-meldungen/nicht-nach-thueringen-wagenknecht-weist-hoeckes-idee-zurueck-412028

• Analysis of the 2020 Thuringian government crisis and political precedents.

• Der Spiegel: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/mario-voigt-cdu-scheitert-mit-einspruch-gegen-entzug-seines-doktortitels-a-812d2552-3685-4b12-9ebd-d0e9aaac3b1a

FALSE FRIEND FRIDAY

Welcome to Pappenheim, a community of 617 inhabitants that are located deep in the Ore Iron Range in Minnesota. The town was once bustling with business, thanks to ore mining and a pair of factories that made the town popular. Yet since those were shut down due to profitability issues, the town does not have much left, except some empty buildings, run down houses and homeless people living in a cardboard box.

Four women who grew up nearby are reuniting for a visit of Pappenheim. Since they graduated from high school in Virginia in 1999, they had gone separate ways in their lives, only to meet annually to talk about memories they had of the region and their high school friends and crushes. For the sake of memory, they visit Pappenheim with Heidi, the woman in the white T-shirt showing the rest of the group, consisting of Saskia, Janet and Claire what Pappenheim was like growing up.

After talking about the community, one of the three said to her:

“Heidi, you must really know your Pappenheimer!”

And this is where this Denglish expression comes in. In German, it is known as (first person form):

“Ich kenne meine Pappenheimer!”

What exactly does it mean? Use the questions from the first False Friends Expression and try to answer them:

What does the expression mean?

Where in the picture would the expression best fit and why?

What is the origin of the expression?

What’s the English meaning behind it?

And where can you find the false friend in this image?

The Answers will come next week! Good luck!

**********

In case you are wondering about the answer to last week’s Idiomatic Riddle, check it out right here:

“Was ich nicht weiß macht mich nicht heiß!”

You can also check out the Pocket Guide to False Friends, where you can find more examples and even some quizzes for you to try out. Click on the image below and you will find your way directly on the website:

WASHINGTON, DC- Yesterday was the primaries for many states in the US, where the candidates for the House, Senate and in two thirds of the US, Governor, were selected in the voting process. In a race where the highest number of voters have turned out to vote for their favorites, the stakes could not have gotten so high, with America being fed up with Trump and dying for a new start.

And this after two years of Trump: Part Deux.

With the Democratic and Republican candidates now set, it’s time to campaign for every seat in the House, two thirds in the Senate and equally as many for Governor. Mail-in ballots will be sent off on September 19th and voters will go to the polls on November 3rd.

That is unless Trump decides that he wants to call it off. And a proposal is going around that might open the door to do that, which would effectively make the US Constitution null and void if he succeeds against the will of the Americans. Occupy Democrats first announced this in a post recently and other news sources are making their round on this proposal, which should put Americans on alert and up in arms.

Bypassing Congress on Election Laws: Emergency Powers and the Constitution

During an appearance on conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root’s program, a proposal was pitched for President Donald Trump to bypass Congress and enact federal voting restrictions via presidential decree. The proposal suggested declaring a “national security emergency for elections” to unilaterally implement provisions of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.

The SAVE Act, which failed to clear the U.S. Senate, proposes sweeping changes to federal election procedure: requiring physical, in-person proof of citizenship (such as a passport or birth certificate) to register, strict photo ID requirements, and severe limitations on mail-in voting. Despite multiple attempts to pass the law, even as an attachment to other bills, the SAVE Act has failed to pass the House and Senate and there is no plans to bring it to the Floor before the November 3^rd Mid-term elections.

Under Root’s proposed scheme, declaring a national emergency would bypass the traditional legislative process entirely, leaving Congress unable to overturn the executive decree without a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers.

When asked directly about the strategy, Trump did not rule out using executive authority, stating, “Stranger things have happened. Okay, I’ll leave it at that.”

Legal and Constitutional Barriers to Unilateral Action

Legal scholars and constitutional experts note that using executive decrees to restrict voting mechanisms faces severe legal obstacles:

• The Elections Clause: Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly assigns the power to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding congressional elections to state legislatures, subject only to alterations made by Congress—not the executive branch.

• Limits of the National Emergencies Act (NEA): While the National Emergencies Act grants presidents broad discretion, those powers are bounded by statutory statutory authorization and existing constitutional rights. Presidents cannot invent powers that conflict with constitutional protections or clear federal statutes like the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

• Judicial Injunctions: Prior attempts to alter federal election administration unilaterally through executive orders (such as Executive Order 14248) have faced immediate legal challenges, with federal courts issuing injunctions citing a lack of presidential authority over state-managed voting systems.

Defending the Ballot: How to Counter Executive Overreach

The American democratic system relies on checks and balances specifically designed to prevent any single official—including the president—from dictating the rules of their own election. Preserving state and legislative authority over voting requires active engagement across legal, legislative, and civic spheres:

• Support Legal Defense Initiatives: Non-partisan voting rights organizations and state attorneys general serve as the first line of legal defense against unauthorized executive orders. Supporting organizations that challenge unconstitutional mandates ensures rapid response litigation and temporary injunctions in federal court.

• Demand Congressional Safeguards: Congress retains the constitutional power to clarify and limit executive emergency declarations. Citizens can petition their senators and representatives to pass explicit statutory protections reaffirming that the National Emergencies Act cannot be used to modify state election administration or bypass the National Voter Registration Act.

• Strengthen Local Election Infrastructure: Voting rules are administered locally by county clerks, election boards, and state secretaries of state. Contacting local officials, participating in public election board meetings, and serving as trained, non-partisan poll workers helps ensure local systems remain resilient, transparent, and compliant with established state laws.

• Verify Registration Early: Unilateral efforts to purge voter rolls or modify identification criteria often create administrative confusion close to election dates. Checking voter registration status regularly and obtaining compliant identification well in advance mitigates the risk of sudden procedural disruptions.

The framers of the Constitution placed the power over federal elections firmly with the states and Congress for a deliberate reason: to ensure that no sitting executive could rewrite the rules of power to favor themselves. Declaring a national emergency to bypass the legislative process is not a routine policy maneuver—it is a direct challenge to the separation of powers. Safeguarding the integrity of American elections requires recognizing these trial balloons for what they are and actively defending the constitutional boundaries that keep democracy accountable to the voters, not the executive branch.

Sources & References

1. U.S. House of Representatives Legislative Record (119th Congress): H.R. 22 – Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Summarizes the proposed federal requirements for documentary proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration and its legislative progress.

2. Campaign Legal Center: Analysis of Federal Voting Legislation and Mandatory Proof-of-Citizenship Laws. Explores the legal boundaries between executive emergency declarations, the National Voter Registration Act, and state jurisdiction over elections.

3. Brennan Center for Justice / Vote.org: The Impact of Documentary Proof of Citizenship Requirements on Eligible Voters. Outlines how restrictions on mail-in voting and proof-of-citizenship mandates affect registered voters, rural communities, and election administration.

4. Congressional Research Service (CRS): Declarations of National Emergency Under the National Emergencies Act. Details the legal scope, congressional veto mechanisms, and judicial precedent surrounding presidential emergency powers.

5. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_American_Voter_Eligibility_Act#:~:text=Safeguard%20American%20Voter%20Eligibility%20Act%20*%20Introduced,the%20House%20on%20April%2010%2C%202025%20(220%E2%80%93208)

6. Vote.org: https://www.vote.org/save-act/#:~:text=Under%20the%20SAVE%20Act%2C%20that%20process%20would,means%20a%20passport%20or%20certified%20birth%20certificate.

7. The Fulcrum: https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/hands-off-our-elections-states-congress-rules#:~:text=Voters%20agree.%20A%20recent%20Issue%20One%20and,any%20future%20president%20pushes%20the%20boundaries%20further.

8. Democrats Abroad: https://www.democratsabroad.org/

9. Indivisible Abroad: https://indivisibleabroad.org/

10. Resistance Roundtable: https://resistance-roundtable-fra.my.canva.site/resistance-roundtable/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAcGRvZgJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAafaja8iCb-iMORfy2Ij31vqLNqqltXaB1tOvU2L65H7UFEsCeZ0zuou7xyVbg_aem_bqHVvXa76y7Ruu1o4gnB4g

When Friedrich Merz assumed the chancellorship, his supporters promised a return to pragmatic, center-right governance that would steady Germany’s economy and pull disillusioned voters back from the political margins. Instead, the coalition government’s policy trajectory has increasingly mirrored the core agenda of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). By adopting far-right framing and watering down climate, migration, and energy commitments, the CDU under Merz is operating as an “AfD lite”. The strategic gamble was clear: co-opt far-right talking points to neutralize the AfD. The reality, however, is a swift erosion of the political center.

And this despite most recent declarations from within the party that there would be no cooperation with the far-right extremist party, especially in the eastern half where the AfD has a commanding lead in the polls in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, where more than 40% of the voters would favor a government under their regie.

Migration and Citizenship: Normalizing Far-Right Rhetoric

The shift toward far-right policy is most explicit in migration and citizenship reform. Rather than defending constitutional protections for asylum or highlighting the structural need for skilled labor, the Merz government has systematically co-opted the AfD’s security-first, exclusionary rhetoric.

Under the banner of national security and social cohesion, the government has moved to severely restrict asylum procedures, tighten physical border controls, and reverse progressive reforms to naturalization and dual citizenship. This includes the reversal of the German Citizenship law passed by the Traffic Light Coalition which would have expedited the citizenship process, especially those who have been living for Germany for years. On top of that, the coalition has increased border policies and have advocated turning away immigrants at the German border.

Merz’s political messaging routinely frames migration not as an economic or humanitarian reality to be managed, but as a crisis of public order. By adopting the AfD’s vocabulary and policy demands, the CDU has validated the far-right’s foundational premise: that open societies and immigration are inherently destabilizing.

Energy Policy: The Rollback of the Green Transition

In energy policy, the convergence between the CDU’s actions and the AfD’s demands is equally striking. Under the guise of “industrial competitiveness” and “energy pragmatism,” the Merz administration has systematically dismantled key pillars of the Energiewende, spearheaded by the Minister of Energy Katharina Reiche and by the Ministry of Transportation.

• Dismantling the Heating Law: One of the government’s earliest priorities was dismantling the Building Energy Act (the “heating law”), replacing targeted incentives for heat pumps and building efficiency with an expanded reliance on fossil gas infrastructure and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

• Defending Internal Combustion: Internationally, the government aggressively lobbied the European Union to ease and delay the planned 2035 phase-out of internal combustion engine vehicles, directly echoing the AfD’s populist defense of conventional automotive industry interests.

• Fossil Infrastructure Expansion: Rather than accelerating renewable grid integration, the policy framework prioritizes build-outs for fossil-gas power plant capacity.

While the AfD explicitly denies human-made climate change, the Merz government pays lip service to 2045 climate targets while passing policies that make achieving them mathematically impossible.

Climate Inaction Amid Record Heatwaves

This policy rollback comes at a catastrophic time. As summer after summer delivers record-breaking heatwaves across Central Europe—bringing agricultural collapse, severe water shortages, and heat-related deaths—the government’s response has been marked largely by apathy.

Instead of treating severe heat as a public health and infrastructure emergency requiring massive adaptation budgets, the Merz cabinet has implemented fiscal austerity cuts that endanger municipal climate protection and resilience funding. Even after the Great Heatwave in June which caused the deaths of more than 9800 German residents alone, pleas for a course correction have been met with indifference and gaslighting by Merz at press conferences, and Bavaria minister Markus Söder’s campaign to get people to hit the pools and lakes, which been met with backlash across the country, especially as lakes and rivers are becoming dry as a result of drought.

The official narrative brushes off severe climate impacts as manageable economic side effects, prioritizing short-term industrial subsidies and energy tax relief over structural climate adaptation. By dismissing urgent environmental realities as “ideological exaggerations,” Merz effectively adopts the AfD’s dismissive posture toward the climate crisis.

The Electoral Trap: Polls and Predictions

Political science yields a consistent rule: voters prefer the original to the copy. The CDU’s strategy of adopting “AfD lite” policy positions has backfired completely.

Current polling highlights the depth of this strategic failure:

1. AfD Leads the Field: Rather than shrinking the AfD’s base, the CDU’s rightward pivot has mainstreamed far-right views. Nationally, the AfD has surged to the top of the polls (reaching up to 29% to 35% in potential voter reach), while the CDU/CSU has bled support, dropping down to around 21%. On the state level, the CDU has lost an average of a third of the voters per state; in the eastern states the AfD are poised to enter state government at the earliest, September after the elections in Saxony-Ahnalt and Mecklenburg Pommerania.

2. Loss of the Moderate Center: By chasing populist right-wing voters, the CDU has alienated moderate, urban, and climate-conscious voters who previously anchored the party’s broad-appeal status. Instead the voters have turned to other parties that offer policies to their preference, be it the Greens or the Left but also the AfD.

What Happens Next Without a Course Correction?

If Chancellor Merz and the CDU leadership maintain this course, three outcomes are virtually inevitable:

• The Breakthrough of Far-Right Dominance: In upcoming state elections—particularly in eastern states like Saxony-Anhalt—the AfD is poised to claim pluralities or outright victories, making democratic government formation nearly impossible without breaking the “firewall” (Brandmauer).

• Policy Lock-In and Climate Failure: Years of delayed action on grid expansion, heat adaptation, and building decarbonization will guarantee that Germany misses its statutory 2030 emissions reduction goals, incurring massive legal and economic penalties from the EU.

• Normalized Populism: By proving that far-right positions can dictate the national legislative agenda from opposition, the CDU will have permanently shifted the German political center of gravity toward authoritarianism and climate denialism.

To stop this slide, the CDU must abandon the illusion that it can defeat populism by becoming populism. They need to turn to the public and listen to their concerns and act based on their interests instead of their own, which has been practiced in order to preserve their integrity, which has been questioned since the start of Merz’s term last year. Without an immediate course correction toward evidence-based climate policy, human-rights-centered immigration, and democratic renewal, Merz will not be remembered as the chancellor who contained the AfD, but as the chancellor who paved its path to power.

Sources:

Heinrich Böll Stiftung: https://eu.boell.org/en/2025/04/17/new-german-coalition-puts-climate-protection-back-burner-0#:~:text=The%20abolishment%20of%20the%20heating%20law%20is,of%20carbon%20capture%20and%20storage%20(CCS)%20technology.

AA World: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/germany-far-right-afd-s-voter-potential-hits-new-high-as-chancellor-merz-s-conservatives-slip/3961552

DW News: https://www.dw.com/en/germany/s-1432

European Commission: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/changes-citizenship-requirements-and-research-migrant-students-and-refugee-integration-germany-2025-12-11_en

Bundesregierung: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/first-government-statement-chancellor-merz-2347710

As part of the False Friend Friday series in the Files, we will also be looking at some False Friend idiomatic expressions in German and English, to find out whether they are true or false friends and the origin behind the expressions. You will find them in the Pocket Guide to False Friends in the Language Corner page.

As we are talking climate change and politics, we have this photo for you to analyse and determine what the following expression means:

WAS ICH NICHT WEISS MACHT MICH NICHT HEISS!

This photo shows a politician looking in a magazine while waiting for a haircut at a barbershop outside. There are people complaining about crop failure and outside the barbershop is something that has defined 2026- drought and forest fires.

Look at the picture below and determine the following:

1. What does the expression mean?

2. Where in the picture would the expression best fit and why?

3. What is the origin of the expression?

4. What’s the English meaning behind it?

5. And where can you find the false friend in this image?

Have a look at this image and feel free to comment in the section below. You can also use it in class if you want to encourage students to learn more about idioms and false friends to better get them acquainted with them.

The answers come next week, but you can find more examples in the Pocket Guide below. Some have quizzes with answer keys. Enjoy!

Link: POCKET GUIDE TO FALSE FRIENDS

At the time of this post, word is getting out that Republican members of the House and Senate are being sought by Trump and his corporate machine for opposing him, especially in connection with his SAVE Act, which has been declared dead by Majority Speaker of the Senate, John Thune. This is despite the fact that the number of Republicans who are opposed to the Trump regime has been growing considerably. All of this as the US (and the rest of the world) are on fire and drying out in what will be the hottest and driest summer ever on record.

Murry Evans in his post, delivers a powerful message to the Republicans. It’s a message to wake up and return to the roots of what the party originally stood for- the party of morals, equality, unity, all practiced by Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. It’s a message indicating that despite the wrongdoing going around, it is not too late to change.

Read this and feel free to spread the word:

**********

This is a message to the Republicans who still believe character matters, the Constitution matters and no president should be above the law.

Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with January 6—including hundreds charged or convicted of assaulting, resisting or obstructing police officers, some while using dangerous or deadly weapons. Yet the party that once claimed to stand for law and order largely looked away.

He demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for an enormous ballroom, fundamentally altering one of America’s most historically significant public buildings. Republican leaders barely raised an objection.

His Justice Department missed the legal deadline for releasing the complete Epstein files, withheld or heavily redacted records and faced criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike over its handling of the disclosures. Still, many of the people who had loudly demanded transparency suddenly lost their voices.

After removing board members and installing his own leadership, Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center. His handpicked board added his name to the national memorial and planned to close it for approximately two years—until a federal judge ruled that only Congress had the authority to rename it and blocked the closure. The supposed defenders of tradition offered little resistance.

His administration accepted a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar for conversion into a presidential aircraft. A new aircraft of that model was valued at approximately $400 million, and the plan called for it eventually to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library. Even some prominent Republicans raised concerns about foreign influence, national security and the appearance of corruption. Most Republican officials chose not to confront him.

He threatened allies and neighboring countries, treated tariffs as instruments of political coercion and repeatedly tried to bully Canada, Denmark and other longtime partners. He threatened escalating tariffs against eight European countries unless Denmark agreed to the sale of Greenland. The party that once championed alliances and global stability largely went along.

He alienated democratic allies while repeatedly treating Vladimir Putin’s Russia with a restraint he rarely extends to America’s friends. He launched trade conflicts that disrupted businesses, increased uncertainty and imposed higher costs on American importers and consumers. Republican concern remained remarkably muted.

He pulled the United States into a widening war with Iran that has killed thousands, endangered American troops, destabilized the region and depleted important American weapons stockpiles. Even as negotiations continued, his administration gave conflicting accounts of the diplomatic process, while Trump threatened Iran with “decapitation” if it did not accept a deal. Those who once warned against reckless foreign entanglements fell conspicuously quiet.

He transformed immigration enforcement into something resembling a domestic military operation. More than 50 people have died in immigration detention since early 2025. Federal immigration agents—including personnel from ICE and Customs and Border Protection—have fatally shot multiple people, including American citizens, and video or other evidence has contradicted official accounts in several violent encounters. Yet meaningful Republican accountability has been almost nonexistent.

He has publicly demanded investigations and prosecutions of people he considers political enemies. His Justice Department pursued cases that encountered rejected charges, unlawful appointments, dismissals and serious questions from judges about the evidence and prosecutorial process. The party that once warned about the weaponization of government now excuses it when the weapon is in Trump’s hands.

At some point, this is no longer reluctance.

It is complicity.

This is not merely about whether you like Donald Trump’s personality. It is not about tax rates, border policy or the ordinary disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. It is about whether one man may demolish institutions, reward political violence, exploit the presidency, intimidate allies, politicize law enforcement and drag the country into war while members of his own party avert their eyes.

You do not have to become a Democrat. You do not have to abandon conservatism. You do not have to agree with the left about everything—or even most things.

But you must decide whether loyalty to one man is now more important than loyalty to your country.

History will not judge only the man who abused the power entrusted to him.

It will also judge those who recognized what was happening, possessed the power to resist it—and chose obedience instead.

This summer’s heatwave should serve as a wake-up call across all aspects, from the government to the people. At the time of this post, more than 9800 people in Germany and 20,700 people in Europe have died from the temperatures that have hovered well north of 35°C across the continent. In June’s heatwave from the 22nd to the 28th alone, more than 5800 people in Germany, and with Merz’s apathy towards that trend, the calls for his removal as German chancellor are getting louder. More on that in this article.

However, this summer may be the turning point for all the climate scepticism that has plagued the country and much of Europe.

In an alarming paradox that threatens global environmental coordination, climate change scepticism (CCS) has experienced a steep, sweeping resurgence precisely as the planet breaches critical thermal thresholds. According to a landmark study recently published in Global Environmental Change by researchers Katharina Gies and Emanuel Deutschmann of Europa-Universität Flensburg, public doubt regarding climate science, clean energy transitions, and mitigation policies is no longer confined to isolated, vocal minorities.

Researchers at Europa-Universität Flensburg followed the answers of 3,074 people living in Germany from 2014 to 2023. The study’s comprehensive analysis of representative panel data reveals that the surge in scepticism constitutes a broad mass phenomenon. Across a detailed matrix of 14 indicators tracking evidence, process, and response scepticism, a staggering 59% of respondents exhibited increases between 2022 and 2023, while an overwhelming 93% registered rising doubt on at least one measure.

The Anatomy of Modern Doubt

For years, conventional sociological assumptions framed climate scepticism as a stable trait tied tightly to immutable ascriptive factors like age, gender, or geographic background. However, Gies and Deutschmann demonstrate that the sharpest increases in scepticism are driven primarily by flexible attitudinal factors. Right-wing political orientation, widespread distrust in government institutions, and hierarchical cultural worldviews centered on the preservation of traditional values emerge as the most consistent predictors of rising doubt.

The researchers utilize a sophisticated multidimensional typology, breaking scepticism down into evidence-based claims (trend, cause, and impact skepticism), process-based grievances (such as opposition to renewable energy rollouts like Germany’s disputed Building Energy Act), and response-based resistance (rejection of carbon pricing, higher taxes, and lifestyle changes). The data shows that government distrust is a powerful engine behind process and response skepticism. When citizens lose confidence in political leadership—exacerbated by compounding post-pandemic economic anxieties and energy shocks following geopolitical conflicts—they increasingly question whether decarbonization policies serve the public good.

Collision with Reality: Droughts and Wildfires

This psychological and political backlash unfolds against a terrifying backdrop of ecological collapse. In 2024, global warming exceeded 1.5°C for the first time in recorded history, and subsequent transgressions of planetary boundaries have pushed Earth’s life-support systems to their limits. Europe and the broader northern hemisphere are currently bearing the brunt of this destabilization, facing unprecedented multi-year megadroughts, agricultural failures, and catastrophic forest fires that turn vast swathes of timberland into ash.

Yet, rather than uniting populations in collective self-defense, these escalating disasters are met with deepening polarization. The psychological mechanism of “implicatory denial” and response fatigue takes hold when citizens feel overwhelmed by top-down regulatory pressures amidst economic insecurity. Populist political actors exploit these anxieties, framing green transformations as elite-driven impositions that threaten traditional livelihoods and industrial stability.

Implications for Democracy and Policy

The implications of this widening chasm between ecological reality and public trust are profound. High-emissions nations like Germany—which carries immense historical responsibility and among the highest carbon footprints in the European Union—risk complete policy paralysis if public support fractures.

The authors argue that overcoming this impasse requires a fundamental departure from top-down, technocratic mandates that trigger defensive political reactions. Instead, democratic resilience must be restored through participatory frameworks such as deliberative citizens’ assemblies and national climate “mini-publics”. By directly involving citizens in shaping equitable transition pathways, societies can dismantle the narrative of green policies as tools of de-industrialization.

Ultimately, bridging the divide between a heating planet and a doubting public demands that climate action be reframed not as an economic sacrifice, but as an indispensable pillar of collective well-being and democratic survival.

What would it take to convince the public that climate change is real and to take action for the protection of the environment and one’s quality of life? Think of the next generations that will inherit it.

Feel free to comment in the section at the end of the article.

References & Source Material:

• Gies, K., & Deutschmann, E. (2026). As the planet heats, public doubt grows: The social structure behind rising climate change scepticism in Germany. Global Environmental Change, 100, 103202.

• GESIS Panel (Standard Edition, Version 54.0.0). Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne.