The Democrats will probably gain control of Congress, but by a small margin rather than a landslide. Donald Trump, the worst, most unpopular outlaw, cruel, lying, corrupt, bigoted, violent, self-enriching, and devastating dictator harming the American people in our history, has greatly helped the Dems in the midterm elections.

Unfortunately, corporate consultants dominate Democratic campaigns—and have failed to capitalize on the political ammunition Trump hands them every day. This allowed Trump to get away with campaigning for toady Republican candidates and to monopolize media attention that should be focused on how the Republicans in Congress allowed the savagery of his egomaniacal and corporatist regime to undermine democracy and harm the American people.

What should progressive candidates highlight between now and election day?

You can assume that what Trump did to wreck, endanger, and weaken America will intensify his efforts to wreck, endanger, and weaken America.

First, they should alert people to the reality that the second two years of Trump’s term will be much worse for them, their children, and many millions of innocent families abroad. The poor from less developed countries were cut off from key medicines, food supplements, and other inexpensive lifesaving supplies when he and Elon Musk illegally shut down the Agency for International Development. They actually bragged about their deadly deed.

Smarting from an electoral rejection that puts him on the defensive, a vengeful, puerile Trump will likely foment upheaval at home and wage war abroad to reclaim center stage. Note, the White House is defiled daily by Trump, who has a dangerously unstable personality and is driven to do whatever he wants, regardless of laws, the Constitution, Congress, the courts, and norms of common decency. He got away with this law-breaking big time in 2025-2026, so get ready for his further unleashing of corporate polluters from the oil and gas and coal industries, smashing what’s left of laws protecting you, the consumer; you, the worker; and you, the ill patient. He will further impede millions of Americans’ access to food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, and other social safety nets, like Meals on Wheels and Head Start.

He’ll turn the White House into an even bigger source of gigantic personal enrichment for himself and his family, using the office to coerce, extort, and bribe companies into abject submission. From his own 2025 financial disclosures, his bribe-extort dealings with seedy collaborators netted him $2.1 billion, or, broken down on a 40-hour week, $1.1 million AN HOUR!

Rather than extend this list, you can assume that what Trump did to wreck, endanger, and weaken America will intensify his efforts to wreck, endanger, and weaken America. Expect more wars, more attacks on critical scientific protections and research, more suppression of renewable energy, more punishment of free speech, and more intensely shattered readiness to deal with pandemics, climate catastrophes, and out-of-control generative AI Frankenstein monsters rampaging on their own. This imposter has called these three omnicides a “hoax.”

So, candidates do portray Trump and his Trump Dump as becoming ever more lethally toxic to humanity. Unless, that is, the voters elect a pro-Impeachment Congress to Fire Trump and begin building a lawful country that works for the People. (See my book Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.)

As of last April, 90% of the Democrats and almost two-thirds of Independents want to Impeach Trump. Probably higher now!

In media appearances and at public rallies, Progressive candidates should authentically summarize what they will fight for—that resonates with left and right voters struggling to have decent livelihoods.

1. Raise the frozen federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 or $17 an hour. Twenty-five million workers will benefit.
2. Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for 45 years, paid for by raising the Social Security tax on the wealthy. About 60 million elderly people will benefit.
3. Enact an authentic child tax credit, cutting child poverty in half. Over 60 million children will be better off.
4. Catch up with Western countries and Taiwan by passing Medicare for All, lifesaving, far more efficient, and much less aggravating than the present profit-gouging, benefit-denying, corporatized system of greed first.
5. Crack down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, worker wages, and pensions. (Saving trillions of dollars yearly and having 90% approval.)
6. Adopt childcare, paid family sick leave, and other humane programs long in place in Western Europe and Canada.
7. Pass labor laws for safety, economic freedom to speak and band together, and pension protections put forth decades ago. (See: pensionrights.org).
8. Invest in crumbling public services and infrastructure in communities. Creating many good jobs.
9. Paying for the above by (A) restoring taxes on the very undertaxed or non-taxed super rich and large corporations to the level of the prosperous 1960s; (B) ending huge corporate welfare giveaways, subsidies, and bailouts; and (C) de-bloating the runaway, unaudited military budget, devouring over half of all operating spending by the federal government and getting more wasteful, fraudulent, and controlling corporate contractors by the year.

For more practical ideas, see the attached piece by former Secretary of Labor and current popular blogger Robert Reich, titled "10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable."

This weekend is the perfect time for Midnight Campaigning to reach the many midnight shift workers who keep the country going while we sleep. They are ignored by political candidates. A “thank-you” news release describing the major occupations on the midnight shift and a three-hour series of campaign stops should get candidates recognition for caring. Favorable last-minute news coverage can encourage more voters to turn out.

And finally, a word to registered voters: Political pundits predict that more than half of you will stay home. Don’t! Vote for the candidate of your choice—including write-in candidates. Otherwise, the rascals will be happy to fill the vacuum.

Then watchdog your members of Congress to turn their promises into legislative enactments.

The Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate coming from the highest levels of our government are absolutely outrageous. From President Donald Trump to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to members of Congress, including Sen.Ted Cruz and Rep. Nancy Mace, we are hearing vile, ignorant and dangerous attacks that must be denounced not just by the communities and individuals under attack, but by all of us.

When RFK Jr. was campaigning in Michigan for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, he insulted the entire Arab community worldwide—all 500 million of them—saying that Arabs “don't produce science, they don't produce literature, and they don't win Nobel Prizes or other prestigious international awards.”

His remarks were not only incredibly racist, but absolutely false. In fact, Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize. Palestinian-American chemist Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and mathematician Michael Atiyah, whose father was Lebanese, won the Fields Medal.

There is a fundamental difference between Islamophobia and antisemitism in America today: Islamophobia is being promoted by the state.

And let's not forget the extraordinary contributions of Arab scholars to mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy over the centuries.

Then there's Donald Trump, who has been on the campaign trail spewing racist diatribes against Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. Trump has been deliberately calling him Mohammad. When told that his name is Abdul, Trump responded, "I'm the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want."

He has accused El-Sayed of being a “Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist, who hates Jews and Blacks and AMERICANS.” He's even said El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate.”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz has joined in the hatefest. At a campaign event in Michigan, Cruz announced that his nickname for Abdul El-Sayed is "the jihadist leprechaun." Cruz then claimed that if El-Sayed were elected to the Senate, he could gain access to classified intelligence and pass it to terrorists. He warned that if El-Sayed is a "passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood," there is "a very real risk that Americans will die as a result." El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.

And then there's Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who declared that "Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan Horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic." Imagine if someone said this about Jewish officials!

On March 9, 2026, Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles declared that "Muslims don't belong in American society" and that "Pluralism is a lie." He has also advocated stripping naturalized Muslim Americans of their citizenship and deporting them.

The attacks on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, have been relentless. Ogles called him "little Muhammad" and demanded that he be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Senator Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of Mamdani celebrating Ramadan alongside a photo of the September 11 attacks, with the chilling caption, "The enemy is inside the gates." Mace also associated Mamdani with 9/11, while Congresswoman Elise Stefanik called him a "jihadist." How can we tolerate politicians treating an entire religious community as terrorists and enemies of our country?

Let's not forget the Trump administration's chilling raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's home, even though no criminal charges had been filed against her. Over and over again, Trump has attacked Omar, telling her to go back to Somalia, calling her homeland a "shithouse," accusing her of hating America, and even suggesting she could be deported or jailed.

Antisemitism is certainly unacceptable, but so are Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.

We constantly hear warnings about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country. But what about the tsunami of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim hatred that is not just coming from ordinary citizens, but from the highest levels of our government?

Where is the outrage? Where are the political leaders demanding accountability? Where are the congressional hearings? In the past two years, I have seen 14 hearings about antisemitism, compared with just two that discussed anti-Arab hate and Islamophobia.

CAIR's 2026 Civil Rights Report recorded 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination in 2025, the highest annual number since it began collecting these figures in 1996.

As Jewish writer and political commentator Peter Beinart has argued, there is a fundamental difference between Islamophobia and antisemitism in America today: Islamophobia is being promoted by the state. Beinart points to the attacks on Muslim elected officials, the congressional campaign against Sharia law, and Trump's Muslim immigration bans as evidence that anti-Muslim prejudice is being promoted by the very people entrusted with protecting Americans' constitutional rights.

Antisemitism is certainly unacceptable, but so are Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. And it's time we confronted all three with the same outrage, the same urgency, the same call for accountability, and the same commitment to justice.

Since President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he got to work helping billionaires get richer, while families across southern Minnesota are stretched thin. They’ve struggled to feed their families, fill their gas tank, and pay for their healthcare. Instead of taking action to lower costs, Trump and federal officials invaded our communities and used our tax dollars to fund mass deportations.

As a United States Army and Military Police Corps veteran, I know what it means to uphold an oath to serve and protect. What I can’t understand is betraying that oath, which is what our president and too many leaders have done. That’s why I was especially angered learning how much we stand to lose because of these federal deportation policies, according to a new cost calculator. Across southern Minnesota. $374 million of our taxes, or $1,520 per taxpayer, could continue funding the mass deportations. Knowing that our tax dollars are fueling this, while we are getting by with less, makes me sick.

I dedicated my career to our country, serving 32 years in the criminal justice system as a deputy sheriff, a jail administrator, consultant trainer, and policy writer for the National Institute of Corrections. As a former administrator, I know the cost of public safety, the value of every taxpayer dollar, and right from wrong.

When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota.

The actions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers during “Operation Metro Surge” and the subsequent Department of Homeland Security proceedings should sicken every law enforcement and correctional officer who takes pride in upholding the law. Not since the insurrection on January 6, 2021 have I been so angry and disillusioned with our government. Our country watched as public servants who swore an oath condemned the attacks of January 6. But after a corrupt president pressured them, too many of our leaders changed their tune, blurred the lines between right and wrong, and seemingly forgot their oath entirely. Watching “Operation Metro Surge” resurfaced feelings of disappointment, disgust, and betrayal of trust I hadn’t felt since January 6.

Officers depriving anyone of their civil rights, including due process, is wrong.

Officers brandishing firearms without articulable cause is wrong.

Officers detaining people without the ability to communicate with legal counsel within a reasonable amount of time is wrong.

And forcing working Minnesotans to pay for this chaos is wrong.

When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota. That’s 6,900 veterans who won't get their medical care paid for. That’s 1,260 teachers in our public schools and 2,053 firefighters in our communities.

These numbers, while disturbing, are consistent when it comes to how Donald Trump harms working families. The president’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” slashed the budget for lifesaving programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to provide massive tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations. While CEOs pick out their newest vacation home, more people have to forgo doctor’s visits to cover their electricity bill or car payment.

These priorities are all wrong. We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.

As taxpayers, we have a responsibility to speak up when lawmakers have betrayed our trust. I encourage everyone to speak to their friends and family about how Trump will always be in the business of helping the ultra wealthy while making us pay for it.

The war that Israel and the United States launched against Iran on February 28 is in a lull, not at an end. Major combat has paused, diplomacy has stalled, and both sides are preparing for the next round. To understand why the fighting will soon resume, we need to understand the motivations of the two governments that started it. Neither of them wants peace. Israel’s leadership seeks domination over the Middle East, and the United States seeks to preserve its domination over the world. Simply to state these aims is to underscore that both governments are operating in a world of delusion.

Israel’s political leadership is consumed by the belief that Israel’s survival depends on its military supremacy over the Arab world and on the permanent subjugation or elimination of the Palestinian people. This belief is a form of collective madness, yet it is the doctrine that governs Israeli policy. Israel’s leaders cannot accept that peace is within reach. In the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, the Arab states offered Israel full normalisation in return for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, and that offer still stands. Peace cannot be built on genocide in Gaza or on hatred of the Palestinian people and the drive to remove them from their land. Yet that is the path Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen, and he now campaigns on it openly, with his “national religious” allies, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who twist religion in the service of hatred and killing.

The United States is consumed by its declining power. Iran has been a target for more than 70 years. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized Iran’s oil. The United Sates then installed the shah and backed his police state until the Iranian people overthrew it in 1979. The US has never forgiven Iran for escaping from US domination. The US backed Saddam Hussein’s deadly war against Iran in the 1980s, and followed with four decades of economic warfare, covert operations, cyberattacks, and assassinations. US President Donald Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear agreement in 2018, bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, and then, in February of this year, joined Israel in open war, killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening strikes.

The only way to stop this madness is for the Arab world to tell the United States that enough is enough.

Washington’s fixation on Iran is in the service of American hegemony. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski named Iran 1 of 5 “geopolitical pivots,” states that matter less for their own power than for where they sit. Iran commands the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Brzezinski wrote that an “antihegemonic” coalition of China, Russia, and Iran could emerge “only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” Well, yes, Washington has been that shortsighted and reckless.

The signs that the war will restart are not hidden. This week, War Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Israel to discuss renewed joint strikes, and Israeli sources report that the plans target Iran’s petrochemical facilities and nuclear sites. The White House has promised that the United States will not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections, which is another way of announcing a timetable for war. The US naval blockade of Iran’s ports has passed its 100th day. Trump rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire in September, even though Tehran says the offer remains on the table.

Israel’s October 27 election adds fuel to the fire. On October 18, Trump endorsed Netanyahu, saying the United States would “finish the job” against Iran only with Netanyahu in charge. On October 21, at a rally in Dimona (home to the reactor where Israel secretly built its own nuclear arsenal), Netanyahu declared that the only way to end the Iranian threat is to overthrow the regime and said he had issued that directive to the army, Mossad, and the security services.

Iran has understandably drawn its own conclusions. Its commanders have announced a new offensive doctrine that includes preemptive strikes and attacks on bases in neighboring countries used for operations against Iran, and they warn that renewed attacks would bring a global energy crisis. Attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz reached a new peak this month.

This is the reality that the Arab world, especially the Gulf countries, now faces. The US bases across the Gulf did not bring security in this war. They turned their host nations into targets. The US-Israeli strategy of divide and conquer, which cast Iran as the region’s permanent enemy and invited the Arab states to shelter under American power while accepting Israeli hegemony, has brought war to the region, economic loss to the Gulf, and mass killings in Palestine and Lebanon.

The only way to stop this madness is for the Arab world to tell the United States that enough is enough. The Arab states should declare that they will never accept Israeli hegemony, that there must be a sovereign State of Palestine, and that the region’s security will come from regional cooperation rather than from Washington. The solution could be two states, as in the Arab Peace Initiative, or one binational democratic state, or a confederation. What matters is that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, each about 8 million people, live in peace, safety, and self-determination. What is not possible is the perpetuation of Israel’s brutal apartheid state.

The beginnings are visible. Qatar has called for a regional dialogue among the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Turkiye, and Pakistan, and Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman have kept the channels of mediation with Tehran open throughout the war. These efforts should grow into a standing regional security framework that includes Iran, the Gulf states, Egypt, Turkiye, Iraq, and Pakistan, built on mutual non-aggression, freedom of navigation, and a zone free of nuclear weapons that must eventually include Israel.

The Arab states have far more leverage than they recognize. If Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and their neighbors announced that their territory and airspace will not be used for another war on Iran, and that normalization with Israel is off the table until a Palestinian state exists, the calculations in Washington and Tel Aviv would have to change quickly. And the American people, who hate the war on Iran and side with Palestine, would cheer.

The era of US-led divide and conquer, with Iran cast as the permanent enemy of the Arab world, is over, even if Washington and Tel Aviv refuse to admit it. The Arab states should say so openly now before the next round of war begins, and in doing so, open the way to a region that provides for its own security and peace.

Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, are spending big to stop it.

Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40—a one-time, 5% wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200-plus billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.

In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.

When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK."

The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.

Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)

Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.

Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.

Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.

Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes—and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.

California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of September 22, 2026 and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less—just 0.07% of their wealth annually.

We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years—and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.

When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95% of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have healthcare. You will get over this one quickly.”

Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.

There’s a drama playing out across American screens in 2026. But not the sort you might expect. There are villains and heroes, yes, high finance and political intrigue, too. There may even be a surprise ending—but we’ll have to wait until the Nov. 3 season finale to find out.

The actual plot, though, is not unfolding on television screens or streaming platforms but in corridors of political power and extreme wealth, far from public view. It’s a tale about the hijacking of US elections by the world’s richest people.

According to the Federal Election Commission, as of early October a record-setting $16 billion and counting had been plowed into the 2026 midterm-election cycle. Hundreds of millions more have been added to that tally in the weeks since. Much of this money comes from the world’s richest oligarchs, many who built their unlimited wealth from ownership stakes in massive tech and media conglomerates.

So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society.

Elon Musk has contributed just shy of half-a-billion dollars to Republican-aligned political campaigns and Super PACs for the 2026 midterms. That’s more than his total political contributions during the 2024 presidential election. With no limit on how much he can spend, Musk made the biggest electoral donation in American history—$158 million—to help one candidate (senatorial hopeful Ken Paxton of Texas).

Lesser known are the contributions lower-ranking multibillionaires have made: Mike Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, and George Soros have contributed a combined $227 million to Democratic-aligned campaigns; GOP election initiatives have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($92 million); Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein ($150 million); and Jeff and Janine Yass ($110 million) .

Hundreds of millions more have found their way into the accounts of shadowy Super PACs that are not required to disclose their donors.

Musk millions for media manipulation

Most of this whopping cash infusion pays for political ads: The media-tracking firm AdImpact projects a record-breaking $11.6 billion of that $16 billion total—or approximately 73 percent of all political contributions—will buy ads on broadcast and cable-TV stations, radio outlets, streaming services and social-media platforms.

Viewers are left with little to help them separate fact from fiction before they head to the polls. That’s because the media outlets that serve up campaign spots have zero legal obligation to reject ads that peddle lies. While nearly half of this money goes to air political ads on broadcast outlets, the Communications Act of 1934 prohibits television and radio stations from censoring or editing candidate-sponsored ads, even when they know the content is false.

And while the Federal Communications Commission does require a degree of transparency regarding who paid for a given broadcast ad, it does not monitor or regulate the accuracy of an ad’s claims.

Since 2024, the owners of social-media platforms like Facebook, X and YouTube—which account for a growing piece of the ad-spending pie—have largely abandoned efforts to fact check the political ads that course across their networks.

The money-and-media-election complex

That’s a lot of data points to digest. But the information on political-ad spending leads to one disturbing conclusion: The bulk of money spent to manipulate and even misinform viewers flows back to media companies that many of the nation’s richest donors control. This cycle of money and influence is turning people away from meaningful political engagement, put off by the deluge of dishonest attack ads that will have aired hundreds of thousands of times before viewers become voters on Nov. 3.

It’s a toxic combination of ingredients that Free Press co-founders Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols called the “money and media election complex,” in which wealthy donors, giant corporations, politicians, regulators and corporate media align their interests against a public seeking to legitimately engage in democracy.

“The complex has tremendous gravitational power,” McChesney and Nichols wrote more than a decade ago, “which increases the degree of difficulty for those wishing to participate in elections in a manner not conducive to wealthy funders, corporate media or preservation of the status quo.”

So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society. Instead we have a political system that’s beholden to billionaire donors, and a hyper-commercial media that are getting rich off keeping voters in the dark.

Media outlets must take their obligations more seriously. In exchange for First Amendment freedoms, they need to cover the money that’s poisoning our politics, expose the groups and individuals funding political ads and address the falsehoods presented in many of these spots. With little time remaining before the midterms, the time to do this reporting is now.

Right-sizing Big Media

Public policy must also address the media’s systemic failings. And while communications regulation may look fuzzy when viewed from 30,000 feet, at the ground level the consequences of bad rules and regulations come into sharper focus. Nowhere is this more evident than during elections.

Instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.

The lack of adequate diversity and competition in media has encouraged industry owners to think of their outlets as profit-making machines with no obligation to disclose to viewers the political money and special interests that make them tick. And the lack of local reporters holding candidates to account—the consequence of runaway media consolidation in turn spurring newsroom cutbacks and closures—in many ways explains the rise of a class of politicians who spend more time wooing wealthy contributors than attending to the needs of voters back home.

This has created a dependency between those who control political power (and need access to the media to keep it) and those who control the media (and need access to political power to keep it). This cycle has gotten so toxic that instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.

These systemic remedies include making political ad-spending information easily available, including exposing the true funders bankrolling Super PACs. Such disclosure should happen in the body of the ads themselves. We must also get serious about strategies and policies that foster independent, local political journalism. Free Press Action has made a number of promising inroads here through state-level legislation to fund civic media.

And we need to right-size massive media conglomerates, using existing antitrust law and media-ownership limits while strengthening other rules that have been gutted at the urging of a powerful media lobby and far-too compliant lawmakers and regulators.

There’s a growing backlash against billionaire control of our political and media systems that could make these reforms possible.

The failures of corporate media have undercut the First Amendment goal of creating, in the words of the Supreme Court in 1969, an “informed public capable of conducting its own affairs.” True participatory democracy will have no chance at survival if we fail to insist on serious changes now.

By Ralph Nader October 30, 2026 The Democrats will probably gain control of Congress, but by a small margin rather than a landslide. Donald Trump, the worst, most unpopular outlaw, cruel, lying, corrupt, bigoted, violent, self-enriching, and devastating dictator harming the American people in our history, has greatly helped the Dems in the midterm elections.…

LIVE: MWF 9-11 am Eastern time & 9-10 am Tues-Thurs & Streaming Anytime

• Sir Patrick Stewart, the distinguished British actor, dies at age 86 in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.⁠ He rose from a working-class childhood to become a leading Shakespearean stage performer before achieving global fame as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Stewart brought gravitas, intelligence, and humanity to both classical theater and popular culture, influencing generations of actors and audiences worldwide. Ted and Jamarl, both Trekkies, explain his legacy.

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we also discuss:

• Binance freezes $2.54 billion in assets while investigating a possible security breach. Tether froze nearly $1.57 billion and Circle more than $800 million. The exchange will cover all losses, user funds remain safe, and withdrawals are paused pending full resolution.

• Following Israel’s October 27 election, a desperate Benjamin Netanyahu turns to racism, alleging without evidence that record gains by Arab parties were due to voter fraud. Arab leaders say Bibi’s toxic claims are a ploy to stop Gadi Eisenkot from forming a government with their support.

• The Justice Department formally accuses Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC of misleading a federal court in a stunning October Surprise case of trickery. It says she recruited a similarly named candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan, to siphon votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, then denied knowledge.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin submit sworn statements claiming President Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington is needed for national security against drones. If not approved, will DC be easily defeated by invaders?

MERCHANDISE: DeProgram.MySpreadShop.com

LIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShow

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Patrick Stewart, R.I.P. | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As we head towards the midterms, the president’s closing argument has mostly been about various people’s posteriors, but he has also taken the time to make several, um, substantive points.

One is his theory that solar panels become incredibly hot to the touch during their operation, and hence will kill “all the animals.” As he explained his theory, "The animals jump on them and they fry because those black panels are hotter than your stove.” This is not true, as anyone with a functioning brain should be able to easily figure out; there are of course tens of millions of homes and apartments with solar panels, and no reports of burns from touching them. Literally here is a video of a goat dancing on a solar panel. It turns out in fact there are dozens of these pictures online—goats on solar panels are an entire genre.

The second point he’s been making this week is that he is going to lower diesel costs by buying some of the fuel from Russia, thereby abrogating our country’s own sanctions and replenishing the Kremlin’s war budget. Indeed, the diesel is traveling on previously sanctioned tankers. As Svitlana Romanko, the intrepid leader of Ukraine’s Razom We Stand points out, this is utter betrayal: "Every barrel on board these ships exporting Russian fossil fuels is money for the missiles and drones Russia fires at Ukrainian homes every night, bringing more civilian casualties.” But since it’s President Donald Trump, it’s also utterly stupid, in that the quantities are too small to budge the high price of diesel, which, as the zealots at that radical website OilPrice.com write, is “set to persist well into 2027.” Of course, there’s another possible explanation—it’s all part of the grand corruption scheme that the Times has begun to unravel: as Anton Troianvoski and Eric Lipton document:

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it, and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the US firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Anyway, there was a third point the president made this week, this one purely monstrous. It came in a speech in oil-patch Lubbock, Texas, where, in an effort to boost flailing Senate candidate Ken Paxton, he declared an end to any real federal oversight of methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry. As Sara Sneath reports:

At a Trump rally in Corpus Christi earlier in the day, Trump shouted out Harold Hamm, saying the founder of Continental Resources was in the audience. In April, Continental Resources wrote a letter to the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] pushing back against measures in the methane rule that prohibit routine flaring of associated gas.

Hamm, careful readers will remember, was the president’s chief donation bundler from the oil and gas industry during the last presidential campaign. Anyway, it’s worth remembering that

Last year, the US emitted more methane from its oil and gas sector than any other country in the world. Methane is responsible for at least a quarter of today’s warming.

Julia Kane, a researcher for Fieldnotes, said the Trump Environmental Protection Agency was giving oil and gas corporations exactly what they want. “The oil and gas industry says it’s a ‘good-faith’ partner eager to help craft regulations, but time and time again it’s worked behind the scenes to delay and weaken them,” she said.

All of this, of course, is pretty much par for the course. You could pick any week in the last two years and come up with roughly the same kind of idiocy and perfidy and graft; the Trump presidency is an ongoing evil MadLibs.

The trouble with his current gust of malignity, however, is that right now a pair of Democrats in the Senate—Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico—have been trying to persuade their colleagues, and by extension the rest of the country, to support a “permitting reform” bill that would make it easier to build energy stuff. It’s traveling under the name BAAJA, for Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, I guess on the grounds that “affordability” is something all right-minded people support (except, of course, for Trump who thinks it, like global warming, is a “hoax.”) Anyway, the grand bargain these two senators have struck with the oil industry is hundreds of pages long, and would overturn much of the environmental review process in America.

If you have any doubts about the necessity of making changes in how we review things, read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. But the devil comes in the details—or rather, the devil is Donald Trump, and the pertinent detail is whether he can be contained in a meaningful way. Obviously Whitehouse and Heinrich knew that this would be an issue, and they did their best to build in some guarantees that it wouldn’t be able for him to use it push dirty energy at the expense of clean. But from the start there have been questions about this—I wrote two weeks ago about Harvard professor Jody Freeman, so centrist in this work that she actually served on the board of a major oil company, who said:

A close read suggests it's structurally designed to lock in and subsidize natural gas & other fossil projects over cleaner renewables for years to come, using the courts and taxpayer dollars.

Since then, what you might call normie Democrats have been sounding increasingly urgent alarms in increasingly urgent language, and urging the drafters of this massive legislation—currently scheduled for a vote five days after the election—to figure out how to amend key provisions. Exhibit No. 1 here would be John Podesta, the insider’s insider. White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, counselor to Barack Obama on climate and to Joe Biden on energy policy, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—I think it’s safe to say he understands presidential power as well as anyone alive. So it landed with a thud two days ago when he told Jael Holzman that the bill as written would hand Trump a “loaded howitzer.” He focused on the sections around “permitting certainty,” which were written to try and keep the president from interfering (as obviously he has been doing) with clean energy projects. But:

This was “one place where I think they made a huge mistake,” Podesta said, calling the restriction on revoking or rescinding decisions “one of the worst provisions of the bill.” He complimented lawmakers for trying to address Trump’s attacks on already-permitted renewable energy projects, including stop-work orders on offshore wind facilities under construction, and for seeking commitments from the administration to continue permitting projects in exchange for a deal.

However, Podesta said they are “going to have to take it out” or significantly revise it because he believes this language would allow Trump to illegally approve projects on sensitive or protected lands and courts would not be able to force the government to undo approvals that violate the law. He argued this would mean Trump could permit development in many areas land conservation groups, tribes, and anti-drilling advocates have long fought to protect from industry, including the Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, and the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

“I think they have handed Trump not just a loaded gun, but they’ve handed him a loaded Howitzer to go after public lands, to permit stuff that even if it’s illegal can’t be reversed by the courts,” Podesta said. “They’re going to have a permit gorge like you’ve never seen, not really caring about whether they’re going through the legal steps to do it, and under this bill, those can’t be reversed. That’s got to change if this bill’s going to pass.”

Abigail Dillen, president of EarthJustice, who have been leading the legal fight against Trump’s environmental extremism, followed up Podesta’s warning:

Over the next two years, BAAJA would create more legal runway for this president to make corrupt deals and green-light harmful projects of all kinds, and it would constrain any future president from repairing the damage. People can reasonably differ on long-term projections. But once you know what’s in this bill, how BAAJA plays under Trump should be clear as glass…

Most sweepingly, the bill’s certainty provisions would render Trump permitting decisions irrevocable with very limited exceptions. The next administration would likely inherit a raft of destructive and unpopular projects, and BAAJA would make it wildly risky financially and even impossible for the next president to revisit them. To be clear, the damage would not be confined to energy-related projects. Think detention centers, petrochemical complexes, data centers on public lands—whatever kinds of projects appeal to this president.

And here’s Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club and an environmentalist so centrist he once barnstormed the country with fracking executives touting the desirability of natural gas:

Title IV, “Permit Certainty,” is the draft’s most troubling section. Environmental policy has historically improved through two linked processes: identifying new risks and applying existing clean up technologies to abate them; in parallel, pushing research on clean up technology options and then adopting stronger standards as science and technology advance. Title IV works to obstruct both.

For example, a data center permitted to use fossil-fuel power could claim protection even after cleaner, cheaper alternatives become available for their needs. Likewise, if regulators later discovered dangerous contamination—such as PFAS, or “forever chemicals” in a watershed—the provision could impede stronger water-quality standards needed to protect nearby residents.

What BAAJA describes as a regulatory floor may function as a public-health ceiling. Instead of preserving agencies’ ability to respond to new evidence, it could lock in yesterday’s permits and yesterday’s pollution standards, under which millions of tons of unnecessary pollution are emitted by outmoded power plants.

For the first few weeks, this fight has been mostly confined to very elite and in-the-know circles. Earlier this week, for instance, Tom Steyer came out for the bill on the grounds that it “beats the status quo.” When I saw it, I flashed back to a gathering convened on his ranch 15 years ago: I shared a cabin there with… John Podesta and Carl Pope. We shouldn’t have this closed a political circle on questions this large.

So it’s good to see that policy is increasingly joined by politics in this debate: Given that we’re hoping for a blue wave in next Tuesday’s election, it may be hard to persuade Democrats to go along with the Whitehouse-Heinrich plan, because the conventional wisdom is starting to harden around the Ossoffian ideal that the best way to deal with Trump is to stand up to him.

A fairly important straw in the wind came earlier this week when four key Senators—Oregon’s Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, Ed Markey from Massachusetts, and Tammy Duckworth from Illinois—wrote a letter to Whitehouse, Heinrich, and their Republican co-sponors arguing that the Trump administration has clearly enforced environmental laws unfairly over the last two years and there is every indication they will keep trying to do so. As they pointed out, the Department of Energy has admitted to canceling billions of dollars in grants to states that had voted for Kamala Harris:

This vindictive, partisan discrimination based on whether a grantee is in a State represented by two Democratic Senators that President Trump lost in the 2024 election is disgraceful. It violates core constitutional protections, harms communities comprised of Americans from across the political spectrum, and, ironically, harms millions of Trump voters who live in these States. No American should be caught in the crosshairs of such a brazenly corrupt scheme. No one has explained why a Senator from a targeted State should help the Trump administration fast-track fossil fuel projects while it refuses to restore funding that Trump officials admitted was terminated on an illegal, partisan basis.

They propose a test of whether or not the Trump administration is serious going forward:

It would be compelling if, before the motion to proceed vote, the Trump administration directed DOE to 1) reinstate every award it terminated in October 2025 that it has not already restored, 2) to allow recipients to draw down those funds under the original award terms, and 3) to commit in writing that it will not terminate an award because of the political identity of the recipient’s State or the party affiliation of its elected officials.

While such action may not fully address the wide range of concerns individual Senators have about various portions of this complex legislation, it would represent an important first step and carry far more weight with us and, more importantly, our constituents whose awards were illegally terminated, than mere informal assurances that the Trump administration will stop interfering with clean energy projects.

As Rachel Frazin notes in The Hill, this constitutes a high bar, especially since Merkley is likely to succeed Whitehouse as the chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee should the Dems win the chamber—it’s considerably higher than the sign off on a few wind projects that former DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggested this week would be signal enough. (And as Heatmap reported this week, Trump hasn’t been signing off on those anyway—in fact, it appears that they’re thinking of banning the importation of wind turbine equipment on “national security grounds”). According to Frazin, the letter from the four Senators

represents a fracture in the Democratic caucus. It’s not entirely clear how widespread the sentiment is among Democrats, but if enough of them vote against the bill, it could hamper its chances.

And the odds of that happening seem to me to be increasing, because news of the bill seems to be escaping DC containment. Remember—this election is being largely fought over data centers, which Americans truly hate. Paul Krugman Thursday morning called the polling on these data factories “astonishingly negative” and provided a nifty little chart to drive the point home.

Essentially, no one (who isn’t an oligarch) strongly supports them, and most of the country hates them. So if the permitting bill might make it easier to build them—well, my guess is that many politicians in both parties are a little wary now of the data center issue, and don’t want to get crosswise on it. Too many traditional allies are up in arms—here, for instance, is the new NAACP resource for Black voters opposing data centers, complete with a great picture of Justin Pearson waging a remarkable campaign for Congress on the issue. Here’s the letter from the Climate Justice Alliance, with more than a hundred frontline groups coming together to say:

Your closed-door deal bolsters the work of the Trump administration which is hell-bent on dismantling environmental justice at every turn, and we are beyond outraged at what you are saying our lives are worth. Reject this travesty.

Equally pointedly, in Heinrich’s New Mexico this week, students walked out of classes to protest data centers and they linked their protest directly to the permitting bill:

“We will not get back the last 20 years of climate progress Project Jupiter will undo,” Isabelle Taylor-Ault, a student organizer and junior at NMSA, said to the crowd outside the Roundhouse in Santa Fe. “You, the adults, the ones supposed to be fighting for us, you may get the privilege of dying of old age, but our children will die from climate change.”

A handful of state lawmakers sitting on the interim Water and Natural Resources Committee—which was meeting on the Capitol’s third floor—headed down to watch the protest unfold.

In Albuquerque, protesters directed much of their ire toward US Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), who recently unveiled a sweeping, bipartisan permitting reform bill that protesters say reduces tribal input and empowers fossil fuel companies to quickly break ground on more harmful projects.

More than 100 protesters marched from the UNM bookstore down Central Avenue to Heinrich’s downtown Albuquerque office. In front of a large sign that read, “Heinrich is a sellout,” protesters with YUCCA, as well as Indigenous and environmentalist groups, described the bill as a betrayal by a longtime champion for tribal and environmental causes.

Indeed, it didn’t take long after that demonstration for one of Heinrich’s colleagues—New Mexico congresswoman Melanie Stansbury—to come out swinging against the bill, saying she was “adamantly opposed” in what the New Mexico Political Report called a “rare public split” between members of the delegation.

The stakes are of course enormous. If the data center buildout continues (and in New Mexico, for instance, Oracle’s Project Jupiter depends on a gas pipeline), then a Sierra Club analysis just released says the new facilities would soon produce more greenhouse gas emissions than Mexico. As Eric Roston and Olivia Raimonde write:

The US power sector would emit 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, after factoring in planned AI projects. That’s 618 million tons more than 2025 levels, by the Sierra Club’s calculations, or about a 42% increase.

A year and a half ago, researchers at the nonprofit environmental group would have estimated that the buildout and its impact would have been a quarter or half of current projections, said Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal adviser for climate and energy. “The numbers continue to sort of boggle our minds,” he said.

It’s hard to predict exactly how BAAJA would affect that, which is part of the problem: The bill is a bit of a black box, and the only thing we know for certain is that for the next two years Donald Trump occupies that black box, snarling about solar panels that kill all the animals and eager to do any favor that the fossil fuel industry demands.

So the key thing, of course, far beyond debate on this bill, is to try and defang that monster, and the chief method for that is simple: Win the elections Tuesday in as sweeping a fashion as possible. If you’re looking for a way to pitch in, there are plenty. For those of us of a certain age, Third Act’s Party Line senior-to-senior phone and text banking is operating day and night; if you’re a youngster, Seed the Vote can figure out ways to put you to work. I’m hunkered down for one last long weekend of all-out effort, and I hope you are too. We could come out of next week a different country, and wouldn’t that be sweet!

Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich decisively lost Israel’s election on October 27. The governing coalition of Likud, the far right, and the ultra-Orthodox parties fell from 64 seats in 2022 to 53, eight short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The other 67 seats went to parties that campaigned to replace the government: 48 to the Jewish-led opposition headed by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, and 19 to the two Arab parties. Turnout was 77.9 percent, the highest since 1999, and Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population, voted at an estimated rate of about 80 percent, up from 53 percent in 2022. The results make it clear: Israeli voters chose to end the Netanyahu government. The solution to Israel’s political crisis is in plain view. The only thing standing in the way of ousting the government is racism: the refusal of Israel’s Jewish opposition leaders to treat Arab citizens as part of the political community.

The racism is not hidden. On election night Netanyahu claimed a “decisive majority among the Zionist and Jewish public,” a formula that simply subtracts the votes of one citizen in five. His Likud party then viciously and absurdly declared that the election had been “stolen” by the Arab parties and demanded investigations by the police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. The purpose, of course, is to brand Arab votes as illegitimate, so that no government resting on them can be accepted.

The tragedy is that the opposition leaders have adopted the same premise. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, has said that the Arab parties “are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.” Avigdor Liberman has ruled out any government that depends on Arab votes, even a temporary one. Eisenkot has said that Ra’am’s leader “won’t be part of my next government,” and that he does not “see any Arab or Haredi parties who accept” his conditions for partnership. These leaders do not object to anything the Arab parties would do in government. With good will, they could easily negotiate a governing arrangement.

The consequences of the racism are predictable. If the opposition leaders hold to their refusal, only two outcomes remain. Israel will go to another election, with the current murderous government remaining for many more months, or the opposition will join a unity government in which Netanyahu stays in power. Netanyahu has ruled out abandoning his far-right partners. Either way, the opposition leaders would hand Netanyahu and his murderous colleagues the victory that the voters denied him.

There are no real policy obstacles to cooperation. Ra’am, the United Arab List, has already served in an Israeli government. In 2021 it joined the coalition led by Bennett and Yair Lapid, the first independent Arab party ever to do so. The other Arab party, the Joint List, has said it would vote with an Eisenkot-led government to establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7, which is the opposition’s own first priority. Israel’s voters appear to be ahead of their leaders. A Hebrew University survey on election night found that more than 61 percent of opposition voters want Eisenkot to form a government with Ra’am, while only 20 percent prefer new elections. Arab and Jewish opposition voters want the same thing, which is to oust Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.

A practical plan should follow directly from the arithmetic. First, when the new Knesset convenes, the 67 members opposed to the Netanyahu government should elect a new Speaker, giving the new majority control of the parliamentary agenda even before a government is formed. Second, Eisenkot should form a true coalition in which Ra’am sits as a full partner with ministerial posts, giving 56 seats, with the Joint List supporting the government from outside to reach 67.

The program of such a government would not be hard to negotiate, because the parties that would be in it already share most of it. The government would establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7. It would adopt an emergency plan against the crime and violence that have devastated Arab towns, and it would invest in housing and services for Arab communities, including the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev. It would restore the independence of the courts and the attorney general.

The government might last a year. Questions of borders and the Palestinian territories would not be settled by this government, but a non-racist coalition government now would move Israel toward a lasting peaceful solution, perhaps toward a binational democratic state or toward the two-state solution of the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. In the meantime, and crucially, Netanyahu and the other war criminals would be ousted.

Israel’s leaders should also understand what is at stake beyond Israel’s borders. Israel’s racism and murderous campaign in Gaza and the occupied West Bank have profoundly alienated people all over the world. A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found that a median of 67 percent of respondents view Israel unfavorably, including 60 percent of Americans. In Pew’s surveys this year, Israel was viewed more negatively than any other country it asked about. More Americans now sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The alienation extends to Jews all over the world. If the politicians double down on their racism now, they will confirm the world’s harshest judgments of Israel.

What is needed from the opposition leaders? Nothing beyond decency. The government that ousts Netanyahu is the one that accepts the votes of Arab citizens. Israel’s president has asked the party leaders to come to his consultations with an open mind. The majority to remove Netanyahu exists, provided that the leaders drop their racism

I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and I am wary of the word "unprecedented." Pundits use it for every news cycle. But as the country heads toward the November 3 midterms, I cannot find another word that fits. Never in the era of modern polling has a president taken his party into a midterm with all four of these burdens at once: a deeply unpopular presidency, an economy most Americans say is failing them, an unpopular war, and pervasive public alarm about corruption.

Any one of these can cost a party dearly. Two or three together have produced some of the worst midterm defeats in our history. All four, simultaneously, is new territory.

Consider the numbers. Donald Trump's job approval now averages in the mid-to-high 30s, with several major polls finding it at 30 or 31 percent. That is roughly where he stood when he left office in January 2021, after January 6. On the economy, the AP-NORC poll finds about three in four Americans disapproving of his performance, and nearly four in five disapproving of his handling of the cost of living. Even among Republicans, fewer than half approve of how he has handled prices.

The war with Iran began with less public support than any major American war in polling history, and it has lost ground since. Surveys now show it as unpopular as Iraq in 2006 and Vietnam in the early 1970s. One analysis of more than 150 surveys across seven major conflicts concluded that it is the most unpopular major war the United States has fought.

And corruption, long a background complaint, has moved to the foreground. In a recent Fox News poll, 88 percent of voters said they were concerned about corruption in government, ranking it above inflation and gas prices. Nearly two in three Americans tell pollsters the president uses his office to enrich himself, with the fastest increase among Republican-leaning voters over the past year.

Now look at history. In 1946, Harry Truman's approval sank to about one-third amid postwar inflation and strikes. Democrats lost 54 House seats, 11 Senate seats, and control over both chambers. But there was no unpopular war and no corruption scandal at the center of the campaign. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats lost House 47 seats, and 3 Senate seats, yet Vietnam had not yet turned a majority of Americans against it. In 1974, after Watergate and amid double-digit inflation, Republicans lost 48 House and 4 Senate seats. But American combat in Vietnam was largely over, and Gerald Ford had been president for only three months.

The closest parallel is 2006. George W. Bush stood in the high 30s, Iraq was going badly, and Republicans were mired in the Abramoff and Foley scandals. Republicans lost 30 House seats, 6 Senate seats, and like the Democrats in 1946, control over both chambers. Yet even then, the economy was middling rather than broadly seen as broken. Bush had three strikes, not four.

Harry Truman's Republican opponents did eventually assemble a four-part indictment of Korea, communism, corruption and a sputtering presidency. But that was the presidential election of 1952, not a midterm.

My Keys to the White House predict presidential elections, not midterms. But they rest on the simple principle that American elections are referendums on the governance of the party in power. Several of the keys measure exactly the forces at work today: the short-term economy, scandal, and foreign or military failure. When those turn against the party holding the White House, voters notice. This year, they have turned all at once.

Still, a historic environment does not guarantee a historic seat count. The House map is far less elastic than it was in 1946 or 1974. Two rounds of partisan line-drawing have shrunk the number of competitive districts. The Cook Political Report estimates Democrats must win 57 of 77 competitive seats to take the majority. Partisan polarization is also stronger than it was in Truman's day; a president at 35 percent keeps most of his own voters. And the Senate map leans Republican, with Democrats needing to win in Republican states to regain Senate control. When the president’s party is on defense in Texas, Ohio, and even Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic Senator since 1932, the national environment is doing the work.

So four strikes may not pull the Republican Party completely under. A large popular-vote rebuke may yield a more modest shift in seats than the national mood would suggest.

But let no one mistake the moment. Historians will look back at the conditions under which Americans voted in 2026, and they will find no midterm quite like it. Whatever the final tally, the verdict on this presidency is already written in the polls. On November 3, voters will decide how loudly to deliver it.

We shouldn’t begrudge billionaires.

As America’s super-wealthy become super-wealthier, their riches don’t come directly at our expense. It’s possible for billionaires to get even richer without the rest of us becoming poorer.

Or to put it a different way, making a fortune in America isn’t a zero-sum game.

But this doesn’t mean billionaires should be allowed to do whatever they want with their billions.

Billionaire wealth becomes a public problem when it finds its way into politics—making it harder for average voters to be heard. It throttles democracy.

Consider the estimated $300 million from more than 70 California billionaires seeking to defeat Proposition 40—the one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires that’s on Tuesday’s ballot.

It’s being led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who single-handedly put $102 million behind the campaign to defeat the measure. (Brin’s personal fortune of $251 billion makes him among the top 4 to 5 richest people in the world.)

Also leading the campaign against the billionaire tax are former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (now worth $64.3 billion, but likely far more after the upcoming IPO of Anthropic, in which he’s a major shareholder); venture capitalist John Doerr ($12 billion); Stripe CEO Patrick Collison ($17.5 billion); and crypto executive Chris Larsen ($13.3 billion).

Brin, Schmidt, Doerr, Collison, and Larsen might be perfectly nice people, for all I know. I don’t mean to impugn their integrity by noting that they’re pouring money into trying to stop California from imposing a one-time 5 percent tax on their wealth.

But in so doing, they’re unwittingly illustrating why billionaire wealth is so bad for democracy.

This is the story of American democracy in this second Gilded Age. Billionaires are building their wealth with bribes campaign donations (as well as with their ownership of media and with their armies of lawyers marching to the Supreme Court to contest judicial rulings that harm their bottom lines).

Billionaires poured money into getting Trump elected in 2016, with his promise of a big federal tax cut if he succeeded, on which he delivered, and poured their money into getting him elected again in 2024, with his promise of another big federal tax cut, on which he delivered again.

Paying for those tax cuts required, among other things, cuts in Medicaid—which in turn prompted California’s move to fill those cuts with a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaire wealth.

Total spending on advertising in the 2026 midterms is $11.3 billion so far—already higher than the total spent on ads (including the presidential race) in 2024. And much of it is from the billionaire class. The 50 largest donors to super PACs have contributed a combined $2.77 billion. Elon Musk himself has sunk $446 million into supporting Republican candidates.

Is it any wonder that billionaires aren’t paying their fair share of taxes? Many pay little or no income taxes because they have little or no income. Instead, they borrow against their vast fortunes to pay for their lavish living expenses. That borrowing isn’t taxed.

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom opposes Prop 40. He has even lent his support to a poison pill (Prop 42) that would prevent the state from ever again trying to tax billionaire wealth.

Newsom claims he’s concerned about billionaires exiting California. Maybe that’s his true motive, but Newsom may have another reason to oppose Prop 40.

As The New York Times reports, Newsom is “preparing a turnkey high-dollar operation” for an upcoming run for the Democratic nomination for the 2028 presidential election. And “as the governor of California, the state with the most billionaires,” Newsom has “certain advantages. Already, two Democratic megadonors, Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder, and Chris Larsen, a crypto billionaire, have signaled their leanings toward him. Mr. Newsom has staked out a donor-friendly position opposing California’s proposed billionaire tax and invited donors to V.I.P. receptions on his book tour.”

Interestingly, another California presidential hopeful—Representative Ro Khanna—supports the Prop 40 billionaire tax. Khanna has also sworn off super PAC funding.

Newsom is no more corrupt than the billionaires who are pouring money into opposing Proposition 40, but that’s exactly the point. America’s billionaire class is becoming far richer by the day—they could have paid the entire Prop 40 tax with the additions to their wealth since Labor Day—and although wealth isn’t a zero-sum game, power definitely is a zero-sum game.

The more political power the billionaire class has, the less political power the rest of us have. Hence, the importance of taxing their wealth if we want to preserve our democracy.

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that some 80% of Palestinian Israelis voted in the parliamentary election. I use the term “Palestinian Israeli” on the model of “Italian American,” rather than the typical “Arab Israeli,” which is racist since it implies that all speakers of Arabic are one ethnicity or nationality and that there are no Palestinians.

The community has not voted in that proportion since the 1960s, and it is a sign of widespread anger over the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted for war crimes under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.

The editors of Arab 48 say that the Palestinian-Israeli parties may get 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, nearly 16% of seats. That isn’t quite equal to their 21.7% proportion of the population, but it is closer than they’ve been before. However, this representation will not turn into political power, since the Zionist parties absolutely refuse to allow Palestinian-Israeli blocs into their coalitions. This rejection of political participation for over a fifth of the population illustrates the oxymoronic character of the phrase “Jewish and democratic.”

Because Jewish parties in Israel refuse to cooperate with Palestinian-Israeli ones, Jewish politicians like Netanyahu can spew racial hatred and pursue a cold-hearted genocide without fear of voter backlash.

The main rival to the ruling Likud, Gadi Eisenkot, has announced that not only will he refuse to admit the Palestinian-Israeli parties to his coalition but that he would not accept their passive support either. In a parliamentary government you need 51% of seats to avoid losing a vote of no confidence, which would cause the government to fall and lead to new elections. But you could have a prime minister with 48% of the seats who stays in power a long time if parties that are not in her coalition pledge not to call a vote of no confidence. They would do this if they generally liked most of her policies and disliked those of her rivals. Eisenkot, who bears some responsibility for the Gaza genocide, is saying he won’t accept even passive support from the Palestinian Israelis, since, of course, it would make him at least a little beholden to them.

During the electoral campaign, Netanyahu and his Finance Minister-tsar of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, constantly instigated against the Palestinian Israelis.

Mahmoud Mujadala, writing in the same newspaper, reports that Netanyahu and other members of the ruling Likud Party are accusing the Palestinian-Israeli parties of “stealing the election.” Netanyahu is alleging fraud and bribery at the ballot box, sort of the way US President Donald Trump and his acolytes accuse minorities in this country of voter fraud and the way they reject their loss of any election as a form of fraud. Netanyahu called for a police investigation. He also attacked the Joint List for chanting, “My country is my country.”

The Likud Party, among the more racist in the world, issued a communique saying, “The election in the State of Israel was stolen by Arab parties, which support terrorism and the erasure of the Jewish state, through serious criminal offenses that included bribery, threats, violence, fraud, and the deployment of disallowed voter mobilization programs.” It also accused Palestinian-Israelis of voting multiple times, taking a leaf from the crazy talk characteristic of Trumpism in the United States.

Because no Zionist, Jewish party will allow Palestinian Israelis into its coalition, it is possible that the two major blocs, those of Netanyahu and Eisenkot, will be unable to form a government. If they continue to reject a government of national unity, and if none of their smaller constituent parties defects to the other coalition, then yet another election will have to be held.

Because Jewish parties in Israel refuse to cooperate with Palestinian-Israeli ones, Jewish politicians like Netanyahu can spew racial hatred and pursue a cold-hearted genocide without fear of voter backlash. In the US, even segregationists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace tried to get the Black vote once African Americans were allowed to vote and became a force in politics. That sort of moderation of extremist views isn’t happening in Israel because it still practices elements of Jim Crow.

Israel’s population is roughly 10,305,000, with 2,173,000 of them being Palestinian Israelis. Jews, along with Israeli citizens not recognized as halachic Jews by the Grand Rabbinate, total 7,828,000. Typically nearly a million of the Jews are outside the country at any one time, since young people and even middle-aged people go abroad for education and careers and many only return decades later. The return rate has fallen, though, during the fighting of the past three years. There are also 304,000 foreign nationals working in Israel, including guest workers and asylum seekers. The Palestinian-Israelis are 21.7% of the total Israeli citizen population.

The Hispanic and Latine population in the United States is roughly 20.5% of the whole. So this would be like Anglo politicians here saying that Marco Rubio should never be in the US cabinet. In fact, 22 Hispanics or Latines have served in US cabinet positions, beginning in 1988 with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Lauro Cavazos as US Secretary of Education.

Or it would be like saying that the 50 Hispanics and Latines who hold seats in the US House of Representatives all got there by voter fraud or bribery.

In fact, the Zionist Israeli politicians, when they talk about “Arab Israelis,” sound an awful lot like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the bad old days of Jim Crow in the United States. Those segregationists stood against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They didn’t want African Americans to have the franchise! And neither do the Zionist Jewish politicians in Israel want non-Jews to have the franchise. Since the latter can vote, and get seats in parliament, the only thing left for the Zionists to do is to pull their wagons around and make sure no non-Jews are allowed into the ruling coalition or the cabinet.

And the UK Green Party was attacked for passing a resolution noting that Zionism is racist. Of course, not everyone who considers themselves a Zionist is necessarily a racist. But the leaders of the political parties that embody Zionism are pretty unanimous on this score.

In the past, many Palestinians and Arabs followed Israeli elections closely.

They did so not because they entertained illusions that a Zionist leader would deliver peace and justice, dismantle the occupation or remove illegal settlements. Rather, they feared that some Israeli leaders were worse than others. They hoped to avert the worst-case scenario.

Over time, however, that distinction gave way to the belief that all Israeli leaders were essentially the same. This is not pessimism. It is experience.

Consider, for example, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the Oslo peace process under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Between 1992 and 1995, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from 111,673 to 140,235 - a rise of more than 25 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, drawing on Israeli statistical records.

The same pattern continued under the Labor government of Ehud Barak.

Within his first six months, Barak’s government issued tenders for 3,196 settlement housing units, exceeding the annual average under his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government in June 2021 that included the Arab party Ra’am, settlement expansion continued unabated.

According to Peace Now, the Bennett–Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units during its first year, a 26-percent increase over the annual average recorded under previous Netanyahu governments.

The settlements are themselves a driving force behind the occupation. They require land, and therefore land confiscation; protection, and therefore an expanded military presence; water, roads and infrastructure, and therefore the appropriation of Palestinian resources. Together, these elements deepen dispossession and generate further Israeli violence.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the West Bank contained 645 Israeli settlement sites, outposts and other occupation installations by the end of 2025, including 350 settlement outposts.

The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that Israeli authorities targeted approximately 29,335 dunums of Palestinian land through declarations of so-called “state land” between October 2023 and August 2026—one of the largest waves of such land appropriation since Oslo.

By September 2026, the Commission had also documented the advancement or consideration of plans for more than 18,000 additional settlement housing units across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Alongside this expansion is the violence unfolding across the West Bank.

By the end of 2023, the West Bank had experienced its deadliest year for Palestinians since the UN began systematically recording casualties in 2005.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 23,827 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their property during 2025 alone. In the first seven months of 2026, settler attacks increased by 63 percent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year.

Typically, this violence, carried out by the Israeli occupation army and armed illegal settlers, is contextualized within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But violence in the West Bank also serves another purpose beyond collective punishment: the confiscation of Palestinian orchards, the annexation of land, the expansion of settlements and the crushing of Palestinian resistance, including nonviolent opposition to this colonial enterprise.

Any Israeli candidate in the October 27 elections who supports settlement expansion does so with full knowledge of its consequences: further dispossession, military occupation, annexation and violence.

The difference between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and politicians presented as less extreme, is often one of language, strategy and timing.

Former Israeli military chief and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, for example, openly supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite his reputation as a more ‘moderate’ alternative to Netanyahu.

What, then, about Gaza?

Who among Israel’s leading political figures is promising to end the genocide, lift the siege, ensure unrestricted humanitarian aid, restrain the army or investigate violations of international law? None.

Israeli media have spent the past three years reporting on major disagreements between the government, military establishment, intelligence agencies and political opposition over what should happen in Gaza.

Yet, Eisenkot has pledged to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza within 18 months of taking office, whether through the Trump framework or through continued war.

For his part, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid has proposed placing Gaza under Egyptian administration for 15 years, effectively shifting responsibility for Israel’s actions onto Arab states.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, supports continued Israeli military control until Palestinian groups are disarmed.

The disagreement, therefore, is often over how Israel should achieve its objectives, rather than whether those objectives should change.

Other major disagreements primarily concern Israeli society: the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, judicial reform, accountability for the failures of October 7.

But these disputes should not be confused with the questions that matter most to Palestinians.

If Netanyahu succeeds in forming another right-wing coalition, the policies of occupation, settlement expansion and military confrontation will continue, potentially with renewed momentum.

If Israel produces a broader coalition, its members may reach compromises over judicial reform, conscription and other domestic disputes. The occupation, however, is unlikely to become the central point of disagreement.

More troubling still, even a government leaning toward the center-left might succeed in presenting Israel to the international community as a country ready to move beyond the image it acquired during three years of genocide, without fundamentally changing its conduct on the ground.

The international community must therefore remain vigilant. It cannot allow a future Israeli government to present itself as a peacemaker, or sell the illusion of a newly reformed Israel, while continuing to invest in settlements, occupation, war and genocide.

One of the paradoxes of American electoral politics is the obsession with making sure that your vote is counted—i.e., tallied—rather than working to ensure that our votes actually count by being taken into account by elected representatives.

The post Vote Counted, Not Counted appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For months, President Donald Trump has watched his grip on power collapse. It’s the consequence of self-inflicted wounds.

• Trump’s intransigence over releasing the Epstein files created fissures in his MAGA base.
• The Iran War worsened that fracture.
• Lifting crippling sanctions on Russia and abandoning Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression drove the wedge between Trump and his most fervent supporters even deeper.
• The price of oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel soared, thanks to the war that Trump alone thinks America has won.
• Inflation and the national debt are moving in the wrong direction, while Trump’s illegal tariffs made everything more costly for Americans.
• The incompetence of the people he appointed to the most important cabinet positions, including Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., created havoc and killed innocent Americans.
• He destroyed alliances that have endured since World War II and compromised America’s international stature.
• His approval rating has plummeted to historic lows as independents deserted him.
• And ordinary citizens are finally fed up with the naked corruption of his pay-to-play administration. Trump, his family, and friends have made billions on the presidency while most Americans have struggled to survive.

Trump promised an “October surprise” that presumably would blind voters to his malfeasance and grift. What was it? A hollow promise of $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans maintained control of Congress after the midterms? Overtly siding with Putin in the Russia-Ukraine war? A last-minute award of $8 billion to farmers suffering under his idiotic economic policies?

I think it’s something far worse.

Avoiding Accountability

Trump is desperate to avoid accountability, and that makes the most dangerous president in American history more dangerous than at any previous point in his presidency. A Democratic majority in either chamber of Congress will begin investigations that will reveal the depth and breadth of his abuse of power to enrich himself and his cronies. Trump’s priority now is to prevent voters from electing Democrats. Period.

Trump can’t rely solely on the voter suppression techniques that Republican-controlled states have adopted over the past several years. Restrictive voter ID laws and an unprecedented gerrymandering effort aren’t likely to yield the GOP results that he needs. And his flurry of executive orders seeking to nationalize elections met hostile federal court decisions—even from his own appointees.

Attorney General Todd Blanche will continue to do Trump’s bidding. But in the end, the Constitution empowers the states to control the administration of elections.

So what will a desperate Trump do?

No one knows. But state and local election officials have been training poll workers to deal with previously unthinkable possibilities:

• Could Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show up at polling places? In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” But he added that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. That’s a pretty big qualifier.
• Will other federal officials show up at polling sites?
• Will federal officials seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia?
• Will Trump seize voting machines as some of his advisers have urged in the past?
• Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and summon the military under sycophant Pete Hegseth? (He hasn’t ruled it out.)

A Citizen’s Remedy

Trump is relying on a combination of legal challenges and voter intimidation to complete his term without accountability. Courts may continue to provide some check on his most egregious actions, but Trump moves with such dizzying speed that the courts often cannot keep up with him. Trump is relying on that too.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ lamented that Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing and replacing it with a ballroom that was already more than half finished “was likely unlawful” because Congress never appropriated the funds to do so. But without reaching the merits of the case, five other justices gave him a pass anyway.

The best chance for beating Trump is to heed his rallying call: “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Vote accordingly.

In a play by Bertolt Brecht, the persecuted astronomer Galileo says: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes."

Right now, the United States is unhappy enough to need a lot of heroes—and during this election year, many have emerged. Here are five of the notable ones.

Abdul El-Sayed

No other major candidate this year has been the target of so many shameless and racist smears as Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Muslim American who is one of the most articulate and persuasive campaigners to arise since Zohran Mamdani. The former health official in Michigan is in a toss-up race for the U.S. Senate against former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is a nonstop fountain of MAGA talking points and deceptive campaign messaging—reinforced by President Trump—that tries to cast El-Sayed as a terrorist “jihadist.”

Countering this barrage is a grassroots campaign that El-Sayed started to build during the Democratic primary, which he won by overcoming a nearly 10-1 funding deficit, including more than $30 million spent against him by AIPAC. Whether explaining Medicare for All (which he literally wrote the book on) or the genocide in Gaza or the affordability crisis at home, El-Sayed conveys a strong progressive agenda with clarity, depth and wit. While Republican donors and AIPAC are dumping vast amounts of money into propping up Rogers and attacking El-Sayed, some corporate or Israel-aligned Democrats evidently wouldn’t mind if El-Sayed loses.

Angie Nixon

A longtime community activist, labor organizer and fighter for human rights, 42-year-old Angie Nixon is now fighting for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Florida. In November 2023, as a member of the Florida legislature, Nixon sponsored a Gaza ceasefire resolution that went down to defeat, 104-2. Absurdly vilified as “antisemitic,” she stood firm, insisting that caring “about thousands of innocent lives lost makes nobody antisemitic.” Prophetically, Nixon said: “Continued attacks will only lead to more suffering and more death.”

In 2024, Nixon opened a remarkable bookstore/coffeehouse as a community hub in Jacksonville’s African-American community, offering books banned by Florida school districts thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature. Five months ago, Nixon was arrested for civil disobedience while trying to meet with DeSantis over the state’s new gerrymandered congressional maps.

Aligned with the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America, Nixon was a longshot in the Democratic Senate primary against the establishment favorite. Vastly outspent, she outorganized the opposition and stunned the power structure two months ago to become the Democratic nominee. If she were to win another upset victory on Nov. 3 in a state that Trump carried by 13 points in 2024, she’d be a force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.

Melat Kiros

In early summer, when Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent Democratic congresswoman in Denver’s deep-blue district, the win by the democratic socialist sent political shockwaves nationwide. Her victory crushed the myth that a socialist electoral insurgency could only succeed in the Northeast.

Kiros, who arrived in the U.S. from Ethiopia as an infant, is an attorney who will enter the U.S. House of Representatives in January at age 29. She lost her job at a major law firm over her advocacy for pro-Palestinian protests. She chose as a keynote for her campaign: “Establishment Democrats are beholden to the same billionaires who keep our prices high, burn our planet, and profit from a genocide. We can change that. It starts by changing who we send to Congress.” Kiros has not committed to supporting Hakeem Jeffries for speaker if Democrats take over the House, where she says she’ll push for a full progressive agenda, including federal rent control and a moratorium on data centers.

Mai Vang

For the first time in memory, a genuine progressive is on the verge of ending the Matsui dynasty that has represented the Sacramento area in Congress since the 1970s. Doris Matsui has held the congressional seat for 21 years, ever since her husband Robert Matsui died after 27 years in office. In sharp contrast, 41-year-old Mai Vang is committed to upsetting the pro-corporate, pro-war apple cart instead of riding on it.

She grew up poor, the eldest of 16 children. After stunning achievements as a community organizer, she has been a pathbreaking member of the Sacramento City Council since 2020.

Vang is running on a platform that includes abolishing ICE, enacting improved Medicare for All, establishing a federal Renters’ Bill of Rights, and taxing billionaires. If she wins her seat in Congress and Democrats win the House, Vang has said that she's not committed to supporting Jeffries as speaker.

With emphatic positions that include “stop the genocide in Palestine” and “repeal the blank check for war,” Vang explains: “My family fled the CIA’s Secret War in Laos as Hmong refugees. I carry the memory of what happens when our government chooses war over diplomacy: families torn apart and trauma that haunts generations. Today, as conflict devastates communities from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine to Sudan, our mission must be to protect life—not fund its destruction. We need a representative who refuses to profit from the industries fueling this violence. I will fight to redirect our tax dollars from endless wars abroad into healthcare and housing here at home.”

Ro Khanna

Along with his regular appearances in national media discussing the Epstein Files or his opposition to the Iran War, Rep. Ro Khanna has emerged as the most high-profile politician in California advocating for the billionaire tax measure on the state’s Nov. 3 ballot. Although his congressional district includes much of Silicon Valley, he has clashed with Big Tech billionaires and their supporters who want to defeat Proposition 40, which would generate state tax revenue to backfill the huge upcoming hole in California’s healthcare programs expected to reach $100 billion in losses of federal Medicaid funding over the next five years due to the Trump regime’s draconian cuts. Khanna has been willing to publicly denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom for siding with billionaires against the measure that would raise tens of billions from those who can easily afford it.

Khanna has not shied away from clashing with establishment Democrats for lacking conviction and moral principle. When he toured the West Bank in July, Khanna was confronted and detained by armed Israeli settlers. He later said: “If you're unwilling to speak up for Palestinian human rights, if you're unwilling to speak up against the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank, then you are morally compromised.”

It’s really cold living in a home with no heat or running water in December. That was a hard lesson I had to learn as a kid when my family was struggling.

Now, as a healthcare case manager, I’ve seen firsthand even more unnecessary human suffering caused by bad policy choices. We need change, and voting is part of how we make it.

I grew up in a large family. My dad was a convoy driver during the Iraq War and was gone from us for nearly a decade. During that time, we struggled to afford the medication to manage my sister’s Type 1 diabetes. My mother stayed home so often to care for her that she lost her job.

Even as prices rise, they’ve also chosen to take help away from those who need it the most—and give it to those who need it least.

My family filed for bankruptcy, hoping for a clean slate. Instead, with no credit, we couldn’t find a stable place to live. We lost our home and spent time bouncing around trying to find housing.

Those hard years inspired me to serve people struggling in circumstances like ours, which are all too common. And as prices rise and safety net programs get cut, they’re becoming more common every day.

When my family experienced homelessness in the early 2000s, the Urban Institute estimated that between 500,000 and 600,000 Americans experienced homelessness on any given night. Now the Department of Housing and Urban Development reports that number is over 745,000.

Today, between 50-60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck or report being financially strained. This has worsened in recent years as pandemic-era financial help has expired.

Part of the pain comes from the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs and war of choice in Iran, which have increased inflation and spiked the cost of gas and groceries. But even as prices rise, they’ve also chosen to take help away from those who need it the most—and give it to those who need it least.

The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which this Congress passed last year, slashed Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and shifted those investments to tax cuts for the ultra rich. So far, over 5 million people nationwide have lost SNAP, and at least 10 million people nationwide are expected to lose Medicaid coverage by 2034.

These changes will affect you even if you aren’t on Medicaid. Rural hospitals rely heavily on Medicaid patients. As these patients lose coverage, rural hospitals are at risk of closing, which could deprive entire communities of access to care. Nationwide, estimates suggest 400 to 700 rural hospitals are now vulnerable to closure, with nearly 300 at immediate risk.

These Medicaid cuts have also significantly compromised care coordination in rural areas. Care coordination lets case managers like me help families find wraparound care for intersecting hardships, from housing to food to healthcare. Since the Medicaid cuts, several providers have withdrawn services that help my clients with daily needs, like laundry or transportation.

My wife and I experienced firsthand how critical care coordination can be when our beautiful baby boy was born with terminal brain damage. Our care coordinator was invaluable in helping us determine his care and its costs. She was compassionate with our anguish.

Even though I’m a case manager and my wife works in human services, we struggled to navigate the system while grieving. How can a family less familiar with the system possibly cope?

Meanwhile, vulnerable people are losing help left and right. I’ve had clients like a woman with a sight disability get denied Medicaid renewal because she could “still walk and talk.” I’ve had clients with missing limbs denied disability benefits outright and then have to go through a lengthy appeals process.

We are all hurting, but together we can start to fix this. Voting lets us hold elected officials to account—and choose representatives who will fight for our housing, healthcare, and food assistance. Our lives depend on it.

The empty spaces inside Colombia’s National Museum in Bogotá offer a dramatic, if not painful introduction to its new, right-wing government. Several dozen objects related to the peace process with the M-19 rebel group; the historic 1991 Constitution; and mementos of social movements, LGBTQ rights, and other artifacts of the country’s complex history have disappeared from public view. Those objects included a Carlos Pizarro campaign poster, an armband from the political movement that emerged from the M-19’s demobilization, and the student ballot associated with the constituent process that produced the 1991 Constitution.

These histories record how Colombians previously excluded from national power fought to enter public life in a country governed for generations by a white, economically powerful, and politically exclusionary elite. Critics say removing them from the public view diminishes the evidence of that decades-long struggle. Museum anthropologist Andrés Góngora described it in El País as a “mutilated museum.”

The unexpected decommissioning of these items sparked a spontaneous citizen’s protest outside the museum in mid-October, where hundreds of angry people gathered with signs that read, “Poetry is necessary, military domination is not!” and “We’re artists, not terrorists.”

In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.

Not surprisingly, the protesters were quickly confronted by highly armed riot police using heavy-handed tactics to block off the entrance to the museum, a show of force designed to demonstrate who was now in control. Barely three months into Abelardo de la Espriella’s presidency, the fight over who belongs in the country’s history has become a fight over who has the right to openly challenge its current trajectory.

The parallel with Donald Trump’s campaign against the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions is unmistakable. Trump’s March 2025 executive order seeks “to remove improper ideology” from the institution. In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.

This is just one of a list of concrete policy decisions made by De la Espriella that indicate that Colombia’s first-ever Republican president is going full-on MAGA as he settles into his new executive office.

Seriously.

Deep Ties to Conservative Leaders in US

De la Espriella’s connections to the US Republican Party are concrete and extensive. A naturalized US citizen since 2023, he has donated to Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida and publicly endorsed her reelection. He’s met with Colombian American Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) on several occasions, including when Moreno visited Colombia during the runoff election explicitly to endorse his candidacy, what some critics saw as direct US meddling in the electoral process.

The new president’s social media posts during the campaign included images of him and his family proudly waving the “Stars and Stripes” while sporting MAGA caps. It’s no secret that Colombia’s president has become an active and vocal participant in the partisan politics of his adopted country, while moving his actual homeland ever closer to Trump.

De la Espriella’s young administration has enthusiastically embraced Washington’s interventionist security agenda while, like Trump in the US, advancing its own confrontational eradication campaign against progressive institutions and social movements. His unwavering genuflection to Donald Trump goes far beyond the familiar, decades-long accommodations that Colombian dependence on its more powerful ally has required of its elected leaders. He appears intent on making the MAGA approach to government his own, but with a distinct criollo flavor.

Like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything.

The danger is that in the Colombian context of generational political violence, the consequences could be pretty severe for those sectors at the receiving end.

De la Espriella’s over-the-top, high-volume theatrical delivery makes the bilateral relationship with the US easier to sell to his enthusiastic followers. The roaring “Tiger” persona he has adopted, the inflated rhetorical threats and melodramatic public scoldings directed at his detractors, resembles the stereotyped performance of a B-list actor playing out strongman omnipotence in a low-budget narco-telenovela. As a former defense attorney of accused drug traffickers and paramilitaries, he’s had ample time to rehearse the part, which today he is playing out on a much grander stage.

He’s done photo ops with corpses in body bags and captured prisoners in handcuffs, trophies of his self-declared war on “narco-terrorists.” On October 22, the presidency released a video showing him authorizing an aerial bombardment against the ELN, one of Colombia’s many armed groups he's declared open war against. Military command becomes an opportunity for content creation, with the president—decked out in army greens and walkie-talkie in hand—cast as its indispensable protagonist.

The circus-like spectacle carries a deliberate political message. More than 12 million Colombians supported his opponent, the left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda, in June’s runoff election. It was the closest election in Colombia’s history. This extremely narrow victory gave De la Espriella the presidency, so, like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything. Trump’s own campaign endorsement of “el Tigre” promised him the “total support and strength of the United States,” something De la Espriella is quick to remind audiences about regularly on live television and social media posts. For the new president, Washington’s stamp of approval helps project power over a country that remains profoundly divided.

Political Approval Comes With Concrete Material Commitments

In September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Colombian Foreign Minister Omar Bula signed memorandums in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla covering critical minerals and civil nuclear cooperation. News reports of the encounter situated the initiative within Trump’s competition with China and Washington’s effort to secure strategic mineral supplies, especially through its obedient neighbors to the south.

The documents signed in Barranquilla establish a nonbinding framework for technical cooperation, investment, and processing. While they do not necessarily hand ownership of Colombia’s deposits of rare earth minerals to the United States, their significance lies in the extractive development priorities they encourage: Colombia is positioning its resources within Washington’s strategic supply chains, radically reversing the previous government’s efforts at ecological sustainability and economic diversification. Opposition leaders in the Congress, excluded from any consultation in this process, argue that the public deserves to know how communities near these proposed projects will participate, what environmental protections will apply, and who will capture the benefits. Up to now, it’s anybody’s guess, and De la Espriella is in no rush to explain.

As if the extractive collaboration with Washington weren’t enough, the strategic security alignment between the US and Colombia is even more explicit, and alarming. Speaking in Panama on August 12, the bellicose US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia had requested US participation, authorizing “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terrorist networks.” Colombia also joined the US-led regional counter-cartel coalition, known as the Spear of the Americas. Critics of these announcements—left-wing lawmakers, progressive political analysts, and human rights workers—focused on national sovereignty and the constitutional role of the Senate in authorizing foreign troops.

De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s.

Hegseth’s announcement does not necessarily mean that US soldiers have already carried out attacks inside Colombia, although that is always hard to determine. It does establish the Colombian government’s willingness to invite a deeper military role for Washington in its internal strategic affairs, a trend we’ve already seen in Ecuador, Peru, and El Salvador.

The designation of the declared enemy as “narco-terrorists” makes that invitation sound straightforward and even justifiable, obscuring complex questions about who they are targeting, civilian protection, and accountability. It’s important to point out that the term “narco-terrorist” has been employed by Colombian security forces and government officials repeatedly for almost 40 years to deliberately target opposition and social movement leaders, human rights defenders, and even independent journalists. The probability of this repressive history repeating itself today is very high, considering the current belligerent leadership in both Washington and Bogotá.

Combined with De la Espriella’s public applause for the illegal bombings of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific by US forces, attacks which have resulted in over 235 deaths since last October, the current rules of engagement on the ground amount to the worst-case scenario that any of us who have fought against direct US military involvement in Colombia could have imagined.

There’s no question that the security crisis De la Espriella inherited is real, and in many ways led to his narrow election victory in the first place. The policy of “total peace” carried out by former President Gustavo Petro failed to halt the expansion of armed organizations throughout the country. Rural communities continue to endure displacement, extortion, and child recruitment despite Petro’s sincere efforts at negotiating with at least 14 different armed and criminal groups during his mandate, according to the International Crisis Group.

But if history has taught us anything, there are no guarantees that military escalation will work to bring the country security. In the past, the crackdown and capture of leaders of armed groups led to the fragmentation of those organizations, resulting in further, more widespread territorial warfare, while bombardments and sweeping arrests resulted in high levels of civilian casualties and other human rights violations. De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s. People living under armed coercion in high conflict areas need a range of protections and guarantees. And that protection must last beyond the next televised military operation or social media post.

Other MAGA-like Moves by the New Administration

There are other examples of policy decisions that demonstrate how radically De la Espriella has pivoted toward a MAGA agenda. One recent rupture relates to international human rights policy that aligns closely with MAGA’s obsessive anti-wokeism. In mid-September, Colombia withdrew from the Equal Rights Coalition, an intergovernmental alliance which promotes LGBTQ+ rights and which Colombia had been co-chairing with Spain. The Foreign Ministry explained that participation in the coalition “was not a priority.”

The positioning of Colombia as an uncompromising and committed ally of Israel is another stark shift from Petro’s open and vocal criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza. This pro-Israel stance coincides with an almost fanatical fascination with and embrace of Christian Evangelicals within Colombia, with the formerly self-described atheist president regularly performing the rituals of a true believer in front of the cameras during his first several weeks in office, openly declaring, “Long Live Christ the King!”

De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.

It’s hard to understand how any of these policy shifts will materially benefit the Colombian people, including those who voted for him. But there’s no question that these decisions put the new government even further into the good graces of the Rubio-Vance-Trump sphere of influence that the US citizen-turned Colombian president so fondly desires.

Resistance has already complicated the Colombian government’s plans. For example, a judge ordered the removed objects from the National Museum protected and barred further removals pending review.

These kind of decisions give the political opposition compelling reasons to continue to organize and mobilize. On October 14, unions, students, and Indigenous organizations took to the streets in large and small cities all over the country, speaking out against De la Espriella’s authoritarian dictates. It is already clear that popular sectors will not easily abandon their demands because the president commands the cameras. A larger call for a general strike in November is already in the works. Repression could deepen the confrontation, especially if security officials treat resistance to economic, cultural, and social policy as a security problem.

De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.

It would be naïve to think they will not stop demanding their rights and livelihoods be protected.

A president who treats those demands as obstacles to his authority is giving the country ample reason to resist.

“Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” A young white man, "Tommy," asked Dr. Abdul El-Sayed this at a campaign event in Michigan. El-Sayed’s answer was a question of his own: “Why are you asking that question? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”

Though Tommy asserts he’s asking because he hasn’t heard Dr. El-Sayed disavow this terrorist group, Dr. El-Sayed knew—as did a whole lot of folks in that room with them—that the real reason Tommy was asking is because Dr. El-Sayed is Muslim.

It has since been revealed that “Tommy” is Thomas Teepell, and not only is he a former employee of a far-right Republican senator who openly identifies as a Christian nationalist, and is himself directly connected to a white Christian nationalist group, but both he and his father are Republican strategists. And that actually matters, because this wasn’t just some misguided citizen asking his possible future senator a question; this was a political operative deploying anti-Muslim bigotry as a strategy to win an election.

Jews should be on the front lines of pushing back on Islamophobia when we encounter it, and feel both an empathy and a personal stake in the safety of our neighbors.

As a Jewish leader, that chills me to my bones, because it is the other side of the coin of the intentional strategy to appropriate and twist Jewish fear of antisemitism in order to win elections and divide communities. President Donald Trump’s administration is going on tour in battleground states talking about fighting antisemitism, while on that same tour they are using supposed concerns about antisemitism as a smokescreen to justify their dangerous immigration policies in ways that meaningfully threaten Jewish safety.

The right’s antisemitism and Islamophobia come from the same ideology: white Christian nationalism. In this ideology, both Jews and Muslims are the “other,” the threats to society and a way of life. This ideology holds Jews responsible for the “great replacement” of white people with immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color and uses antisemitism to deflect blame for the failures of those in power, to remove fundamental freedoms, and to weaken democracy. It is a certain brand of Christianity that seeks to supersede the Constitution, while wrongly accusing religious minorities of holding dual loyalty to their texts and teachings.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are intertwined in the white Christian nationalist ideology, and Jews and Muslims must be intertwined in our collective fight for our safety. That means Jews should be on the front lines of pushing back on Islamophobia when we encounter it, and feel both an empathy and a personal stake in the safety of our neighbors.

Tommy is unfortunately the avatar for far too many people. It is incumbent upon each of us to fight the dangerous conflation of the beliefs and actions of everyday American Muslims with those of terrorist organizations. As Jews, we can certainly understand that danger when far too many people regularly conflate us with the beliefs and actions of the Israeli government.

The Islamophobic rhetoric being levied against Dr. El-Sayed—or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for that matter—threatens Jewish safety, and threatens our neighbors with a precarity we know far too well. Our community must reject it.

Even more importantly, we must see Tommy for what he truly is—a cog in a political machine that weaponizes our fear and thrives on our division. We must dismantle that machine by fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia together and making bigotry a losing strategy. This November, let’s elect leaders who will work for our collective safety, rather than for our division.