“I left you for God, Daddy.”

Let those words resonate across the planet. The speaker is Yahya Al-Batran, a Palestinian man – a dad – imagining the words his newborn son would have said. The boy, Jumaa, froze to death in the family’s tent. The infant had a twin brother who was also lying still in their bed one morning recently. The parents rushed the boys to a functioning hospital, where Jumaa’s brother, at the time NBC’s story came out last week, was still fighting for his life.

Jumaa was one of half a dozen Palestinian babies (so far) who have frozen to death in their family’s tents since the onset of winter – just one more fragment of hell the Palestinians are enduring as Israel’s US-complicit genocide continues . . . one death at a time.

Every week, every day, I have less of a sense of how to write about this or, indeed, how to think about it as I absorb the news of the day. Yes, there are wars and hellish suffering across the whole planet – there always have been – but in this current moment I feel less able to shrug and move on with my own life. I feel connected to it: a participant, you might say, simply as a citizen of the genocide’s largest enabler, as strike after strike after strike kills more Palestinians.

In a recent Common Dreams column, Abby Zimet writes: “America’s newest $8 billion contribution to an increasingly normalized genocide and its bloody, barbarous, macabre delusions will ensure more of the same. As Gazans plead for mercy and reason from an uncaring world, they in truth know and say they have ‘nothing but God.’”

An increasingly normalized genocide . . .

I think that’s what’s shredding my soul about this: the lack of any sort of mainstream awareness beyond the need for endless militarism – beyond the world’s brutally divided nature. Us vs. them is apparently the limit of our understanding, with no awareness of the effect that ongoing war against “them,” and the ensuing planetary dividedness, is having on our shared human home, not to mention our future.

Yes, there are wars and hellish suffering across the whole planet – there always have been – but in this current moment I feel less able to shrug and move on with my own life.

A recent New York Times mini-analysis of America’s current mass murder situation – particularly the horrific motor-vehicle murders in New Orleans on New Years Day – definitely seemed, as I read it, like the normalization of genocide, in its implication that only our enemies are bad. Watch out, the story warned us: Terrorism is back!

“The killing of 14 people on New Year’s Day in New Orleans was the latest sign of a resurgence in radical Islamist terrorism,” the Times story informs us. “Some of the attacks — like the one last week — seem to have been merely inspired by ISIS, the network of groups that are offshoots of Al Qaeda. In other cases, ISIS groups played an active role in the planning.”

The alleged killer, who drove his rented truck into a crowd of people in the French Quarter, had an ISIS flag in the truck. The Times then proceeds to catalog sixteen instances of violence over the last five years, in countries all over the world, that were either “inspired by” or directly plotted and carried out by ISIS.

And who the hell is ISIS, anyway? The story notes that the organization came into being during the US war in Iraq, but fails to mention . . . uh, the half a million or so Iraqis who died as a result of our bloody invasion. All that matters, apparently, is the emergence of the terrorist organization, not the US shock-and-awe bombings and brutal dismantling of Iraq’s national infrastructure. You know, the terrorists just popped up and started doing bad things. If this isn’t the normalization of genocide, it’s something worse: the utter denial of genocide.

A few paragraphs later, the Times story moves to Afghanistan, noting that President Biden’s withdrawal from the country in 2021 “reduced the pressure on an ISIS chapter there known as ISIS-K, and it has since expanded beyond Afghanistan. ISIS-K was behind the Iran bombing, the Moscow concert attack and the Taylor Swift plot.”

So, shame on Genocide Joe! His pullout allowed ISIS to expand. For some reason the story fails to note that, prior to its withdrawal, that US military presence in Afghanistan resulted in over 175,000 Afghani deaths.

We live in a disconnected planet at war with itself – and in possession of the means to kill itself.

As Brown University’s Costs of War project notes: “In Afghanistan, even after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, people continue to die due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. The majority of the population faces impoverishment and food insecurity. The CIA armed Afghan militia groups to fight Islamist militants and these militias are responsible for serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians. Unexploded ordnance from this war and landmines from previous wars continue to kill, injure, and maim civilians. Fields, roads, and school buildings are contaminated by ordnance, which often harms children as they go about chores like gathering wood.”

Attention, New York Times: Terrorism doesn’t exist all by itself. While actions thought to be terrorist in nature can indeed be horrific, they cannot begin to compare to the horrors that result from heavily armed state terrorism – in particular, the terrorism committed by the “good states,” i.e., the United States and its allies. We live in a disconnected planet at war with itself – and in possession of the means to kill itself.

A year ago, on, good God, the 25th twenty-fifth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, I wrote: “What is power? Is it simply and sheerly us vs. them, good vs. evil? Every war on Planet Earth is sold with this advertising slogan. Perhaps this is why I find myself thinking about the Columbine shootings — and all the mass shootings since then. Define an enemy, then kill it. This is what we learn in history class — but would-be mass shooters, caged in their own isolation, cross a line. They take this lesson personally.”

All of which is to say that war begets violence of all sorts and at every level of devastation. “I left you for God, Daddy.” Perhaps these will be our last words as we exit the planet we have chosen to destroy.

Snce 2020, plans to build militarized police training facilities, also known as cop cities, have erupted across the country in an effort to maintain the status quo and quell political dissent from abolitionist and progressive organizers. As of July 2024, there are 80 projects either already being built or in the process of negotiating contracts to begin construction. Ten states have plans for multiple police compounds. The creation of these training facilities marks a new chapter of policing in the U.S.

Disability justice and disabled community organizers must be at the forefront of the nationwide movement to stop cop cities because this movement is a disability justice issue.

The movement to #StopCopCity emerged in the wake of nationwide uprisings in response to police killings of Black people, sparking critical conversations around the role of policing, the limits of police reform, community safety, and alternatives to the criminal legal system. Along with other organizations, I organized on the ground in Atlanta, where multiple police agencies used militarized tactics against community members. This occurred even as we mourned the loss of Rayshard Brooks, a member of our community who was killed by the Atlanta Police Department. All of this unfolded as we grappled with the profound impacts of a global pandemic—a mass-disabling event affecting countless lives.

We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated.

Our collective grief transformed into action, fueling demands to end state-sanctioned violence and redirect investment into our communities. Our displays of solidarity angered and alarmed corporations, as well as local and national political establishments. In collaboration with major media outlets, those in power obscured the focus, reframing the narrative around rising crime rates and once again positioning police as the solution to our social, political, and economic challenges.

As a response to our organizing efforts, the city of Atlanta decided to build a $90 million complex equipped with military-grade facilities and a mock city for urban police training. If completed, this would be the country’s largest police training facility. Other municipalities have followed Atlanta’s misleadership. Cop city proposals have surfaced in Baltimore, Maryland; San Pablo, California; Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and Nashville, Tennessee all in response to demonstrations that took place in 2020. Meanwhile, other facilities have completed construction and are currently in operation like the cop cities in Semmes, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Decatur and Chicago, Illinois; and Madisonville, Kentucky.

In a society that prioritizes profits over people, disabled people are frequently marginalized and disposed of. Incarceration and police violence underscore the ways capitalism fails its most vulnerable. Disabled people are often excluded from discussions about the criminal legal system, resulting in limited and ineffective strategies for addressing the root causes of incarceration (e.g., poverty, racism, and capitalism).

The overrepresentation of people with disabilities in prisons and jails illustrates how victims of capitalism are locked up and harmed. Approximately 66% of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. report having a disability, while half of all people killed by police are disabled, with disabled Black Americans disproportionately affected. Even people without a disability who are locked up develop some sort of disability over the course of their imprisonment because the prison system is disabling.

Each year, an estimated 350 people with mental health diagnoses are killed by law enforcement, and individuals with psychiatric disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed during police encounters. People like Anthony Hill, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Deborah Danner, Alfred Olango, Daniel Prude, Magdiel Sanchez, Freddie Gray, and countless others were all disabled people who were murdered by police.

These risks are even greater for people of color, women, trans folks, and LGBTQIA+ people. An alarming statistic reveals that by age 28, half of all disabled Black Americans have experienced arrest, underscoring the urgent need to address police violence and brutality as an intersectional issue that includes disability justice. These statistics will continue to rise as more Cop Cities are built, which will place BIPOC disabled individuals in closer proximity to police and increase their risk of harm.

The estimated budgets for these police training facilities are staggering; meanwhile police funding already consumes the majority of municipal budgets at the expense of essential social services. As police budgets grow, funding for education, direct services, infrastructure, and healthcare falls, leaving many—especially disabled individuals—without access to the resources they need. For example, Baltimore’s training facility is projected to cost $330 million; San Pablo, California estimates a $44 million facility, and Richmond, Kentucky, has a $28 million project budget.

Investing more in police departments does not create safer communities. Increased training does not address the root causes of violence. The safest communities are those that are well-resourced and have minimal police presence. Our communities deserve better.

The changing landscape of policing in the U.S. is increasingly characterized by international police exchange programs (also known as Deadly Exchange programs), which expose officers to new surveillance methods, military tactics, and forms of political repression from countries with notorious human rights abuses.

The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program in Atlanta sends U.S. officers to train with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), who are responsible for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The IOF conducts urban warfare training in a mock city called "Little Gaza," a replica of the Gaza Strip designed to simulate combat scenarios. These practices serve as the blueprint for cop cities across the U.S.

In Baltimore, an Amnesty International report found that the Baltimore Police Department’s participation in deadly exchange programs with Israel contributed to “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and a culture of retaliation.” However, more police departments are participating in deadly exchange programs. Police officials from states including Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington, and D.C. have also trained with Israeli paramilitary forces.

Israel, a nation responsible for the killing and disabling of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, serves as the model for these military complexes. These tactics will disproportionately impact marginalized communities domestically and amplify surveillance and repression in already vulnerable areas. Disability Justice involves liberating Palestinians from the disabling effects of genocide.

Climate change is deeply connected to the issues of cop cities and disability justice. Projects like those in Atlanta and Nashville involve clearing large areas of urban forest, causing severe environmental harm. For example, Atlanta’s urban forest, which protects communities from flash flooding, has already been compromised, leading to increased flooding across the city. Such environmental degradation worsens health conditions for disabled people, leaving them to face the consequences with little support, as we saw during disasters like Hurricane Helene. This situation will only deteriorate further.

What is to be done?

The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” reminds us that there is no single solution to combat social injustice in this country. Addressing these challenges requires a diversity of tactics and a shared commitment to building a better world. Everyone has a role to play in movement work—whether it’s cooking for comrades, taking meeting notes, providing childcare so others can participate, or conducting research on targets. Every action, big or small, adds up, creating momentum when combined with the efforts of others. There is a place for you; come find it.

We must listen to and follow the leadership of disabled people, especially those who are formerly or currently incarcerated. Those directly impacted by oppressive systems possess invaluable knowledge of how these systems function and must be at the forefront of our movements. Yes, that means building relationships with people currently incarcerated.

It’s equally critical to learn from past campaigns, both their victories and setbacks. For example, the 2017 #NoCopAcademy campaign in Chicago, which sought to stop the construction of a police training facility, illustrates how grassroots organizing can achieve tangible wins. While the facility was ultimately built, organizers succeeded in cutting $21 million from school policing budgets, a significant step toward redistributing resources.

A new world is emerging, whether we are ready for it or not. It’s up to all of us to prepare and take action to shape what comes next. Liberation is possible, but we need you to make it a reality.

TikTok and knockoff reels on platforms like Facebook inexplicably highlight these giant subtitles of people talking. Remember when subtitles were for translations of foreign languages?

The post Peak Stupidity first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Peak Stupidity appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is almost too painful to write about. I’ve spent much of the day writing and calling back and forth with friends and colleagues. All report: horror. And since it’s playing out against the most familiar backdrop on earth, the scene of more movies and tv shows than any place on our planet, I think it will be as iconic as Pompeii in our collective imagination. If, you know, people in Pompeii had had smartphones.

So let me pull back a minute and tell a broader story. Though I’ve spent most of my life in the mountains of the East, my early boyhood was in California—my earliest recollections are of our house in Altadena, the neighborhood currently being consumed by the Eaton fire. And the sharpest memories of those are of climbing the fire road to the observatory at Mt. Wilson, which you could see from our backyard. I guess those must have been the first hikes in a lifetime of hikes, the first time to see the world spread out below.

I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above. Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world, made a series of pivotal discoveries in the 1920s. First he showed that the Andromeda nebula was outside our galaxy, taking the universe past the Milky Way. And then, a few years later with Milton Humason, he demonstrated that those distant galaxies were receding from ours—that the universe was expanding. This was the crucial groundwork for the Big Bang theory.

The last time I was up there, you could press a button on a display and the reassuring voice of Hugh Downs would explain that “Hubble’s discoveries were the last great step in the Copernican revolution of thought concerning man’s place in the cosmos. Hubble showed that our galaxy is not the center of the universe. There is no center.”

These discoveries were of a piece with the other great revelations of the 20th century—things like the invention of the solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, or Jim Hansen’s pathbreaking climate science at NASA’s labs in the 1980s. They were the product of the human instinct for observation, nurtured in America’s unprecedented complex of university, government, and commercial labs. Scripps Oceanographic, MIT, Caltech, JPL, on and on. These were the kind of institutions that took us to the moon, and that indeed just last month shot a spacecraft closer to the sun than ever before.

And it’s this kind of science that lets us understand what’s happening in LA today; the descendants of Hubble and Hansen have continued the kind of painstaking research that make clear the result when a climate-induced drought (it’s only rained 0.16 inches in LA since May) and climate-induced heatwaves (the LA basin had some of its hottest stretches ever this past summer) and perhaps the climate-induced increase in the intensity of Santa Ana winds combine to created a firestorm unlike any other. It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.

In some ways, all this human intelligence is still being put to good use. Sammy Roth has written powerful recent accounts of Los Angeles’s push to build solar farms on all its margins, en route to becoming one of the world’s most renewably powered cities.

But in other ways that legacy of highly developed human intelligence is starting to disappear. It’s not just the polio vaccine (RFK Jr. told reporters yesterday, by the way, that he was “very worried” about his LA mansion). It’s the web of climate science targeted by Project 2025, which envisions an end to federal support even for the web of thermometers that measures our descent into something like hell. That’s because they understand (correctly) that this science is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” As Marc Morano, perhaps the country’s most inedfatigable climate denier, put it on Fox yesterday when asked about climate researchers

You have to cut the funding. You have to cut the program. You have to fire the employees, or at the very least, since it is hard to fire people, reassign them.

And yesterday the incoming president published a particularly memorable rant on his Truth Social platform

Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!

That this is all nonsense should by now be taken for granted. His reference is to some effort half a decade ago to allot yet more water to California’s big corporate farms; there is no river of water that the governor could somehow have diverted to Los Angeles to fight the fires. (And if you look at the videos it’s painfully absurd to imagine that a phalanx of firemen with hoses were going to beat down this maelstrom). Elsewhere on social media MAGA aficonados (and U.S. Senators) have taken turns blaming DEI initiatives, the war in Ukraine, and so on.

The great casualties in California today are people and animals and buildings—homes, synagogues, schools, libraries. The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses. But the steady loss of intelligence in our nation and our world worries me the most. Even as the stakes grow higher, we’re losing our hard-won ability to understand the world around us.

One of the mysteries of Hubble’s universe is why we haven’t found other intelligent species. One explanation is that most civilizations do themselves in before they can reach out into space.

Conflicts across the world’s regions experienced a further surge in 2024, according to data provided by Armed Conflict Locations & Event Data (ACLED)—an independent, international non-profit organization that collects data on real time on locations, actors, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world. While Ukraine and Gaza are considered the two major global hotspots of conflict, violence increased by 25 percent in 2024 compared to 2023 and conflict levels have experienced a two-fold increase over the past five years, according to ACLED. The intensity and human toll of armed conflicts are also on the rise as more civilians are exposed to violence and the number of actors involved in violence is proliferating.

What is also noteworthy about the data on violence collected by ACLED is that neither democracy nor more development appears to constrain violence. In fact, the data collected by ACLED shows that countries with elections in 2024 experienced much higher rates of violence than countries without elections.

As militarism and warmongering are pushed to new heights, the rhetoric of peace also goes into full swing.

Speaking of electoral democracies, warmongering talk is also sharply on the increase in developed nations, courtesy of major leaders of the western world, and comes with a rising militarism. Mark Rutte, NATO’s recently appointed secretary-general, warned last month that “danger is moving toward us at full speech” and that the west must face the fact that “what is happening in Ukraine could happen here too.” He urged NATO to “shift to a wartime mindset” and implored the citizens of NATO countries to tell their banks and funds that “it is simply unacceptable that they refuse to invest in the defense industry.” UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer has zealously endorsed the widening of NATO’s war against Russia and recently gave Ukraine permission to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles inside Russia. And Joe Biden delivered a warmongering rant at his final address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on September 24, 2024, urging an expansion of alliances against Russia and China and threatening Iran.

Warmongering is a constant element in the never ending obsession of U.S. presidents since the end of the Second World War to pursue a policy of what Andrew Bacevich described a few years ago as “militarized hegemony until the end of time.” Indeed, since the breakout of the Ukraine conflict, Washington has been more than eager to wage a proxy war against Russia while the U.S.-led western military bloc (NATO) has increased its military presence in the eastern part of the Alliance, seeks to expand its southern flank to Africa and looks toward the Indo-Pacific as part of its global approach to security. Meanwhile, all major western states have been behind Israel in its destruction of Gaza, offering the Jewish state an extraordinary level of support (weapons, cash and political support) as it carries out war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Of course, as militarism and warmongering are pushed to new heights, the rhetoric of peace also goes into full swing. Western hypocrisy knows no bounds. Biden spoke of the need for a peaceful world in his final address to the UN although he has done everything in his power to prolong the war in Ukraine and ensure Gaza’s destruction. His administration has vowed to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian and has fueled Israel’s war in Gaza, making the U.S. complicit in war crimes in Gaza.

Geopolitical forecasts for 2025 are grim.

The Biden administration did very little to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine as it totally ignored the question of Ukraine’s membership into NATO and has denied massacres, genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza by the Israel Defense Fores (IDF). In fact, Biden himself called the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “outrageous.” The icing on the cake was when Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, who will go down as the worse Secretary of State since World War II, had the audacity to write in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs that the United States is a country that, unlike Russia and China, seeks a “world where international law, including the core principles of the UN Charter, is upheld, and universal human rights are respected.”

Unsurprisingly, geopolitical forecasts for 2025 are grim. ACLED projects an annual increase of 20 percent in levels of violence in 2025. And then there is Trump’s return to the White House which surely adds another layer of unpredictability to an already volatile and highly dangerous world.

Imperialism is still about world hegemony and a struggle for the control of strategic resources.

Trump’s second administration seems set on advancing a new version of Manifest Destiny with threats of retaking the Panama Canal, which the U.S. ceded to Panama in 1999, forcibly buying Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark, and calling Canada “the 51st State,” a remark he repeated shortly after Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

Imperialism seems to be Trump’s new theme, but his overall vision of power is reminiscent of U.S. imperialist attitudes of the 19th century. He seems to believe that territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States would make the country safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Of course, this could all just be a symptom of Trump’s arrogance and ignorance, but there can be no denying that imperialism is embedded in U.S. political culture. The U.S. has been preparing for a future global conflict for quite some time now, first with Russia and then with China.

Imperialism seems to be Trump’s new theme, but his overall vision of power is reminiscent of U.S. imperialist attitudes of the 19th century.

The U.S. set the theater for a conflict with Russia by orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine, treating the country in turn as a NATO ally in all but name and subsequently engaging in military provocations with the hope of inducing Russia to embark on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which finally occurred on February 24, 2022. And it has been following the same scenario in the Asia-Pacific region by making Taiwan and the South China Sea the fuse for conflict.

The truth is that U.S. imperialism never died. And how could it when the U.S. still maintains around 750 military bases in at least 80 countries and territories (U.S. bases represent over 90 percent of the world’s foreign bases) and spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, which include major powers such as China, Russia, India, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom? There are more active-duty U.S. Air Force personnel in Britain than in 40 U.S. states.

Of course, imperialism has taken new forms in the 21st century and the dynamics of exploitation have changed. But imperialism is still about world hegemony and a struggle for the control of strategic resources. Military and economic/natural resource interests are interrelated, and the major capitalist states are all caught in an inescapable struggle for survival, power, and prestige. In its turn, the U.S. continues to exercise imperial power by using all its available tools and weapons to make the world conform to its own whims and wants as it tries to shore up its declining economic dominance. But with Trump’s return to the White House, and armed as he appears to be with a new version of Manifest Destiny, U.S. imperialism may become more aggressive and even more dangerous to world peace. If that turns out to be the case, the world is headed for an even more violent future.

It has been over 450 days since Israel began its genocide and military invasion of Gaza and then Lebanon, Iran, and Syria. With the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president, the American government will continue and increase support for Israel’s all out war against Palestinian people.

For the past year, students have rallied and protested to demand divestment from Israel and its apartheid regime. Heated protests have erupted across the country, including in San Francisco where students planned walk outs and took over quads with encampments and teach-ins.

Alongside these students, parents from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) communities went up against San Francisco’s school board to insist that their children cannot be censored for supporting Palestinian people. Many of these parents are Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) members, so I joined a meeting between these parents and the superintendent. When the superintendent would not bring up pressing issues around how students were being impacted by the ongoing genocide, parents disrupted the meeting and demanded their kids’ rights to speak up.

Through organizing, we build trust and are able to inoculate the harmful disinformation coming from white Christian nationalists and other right-wing forces.

However, not too long ago, I saw these same parents swayed by white Christian nationalists who were mobilizing Arab and Muslim parents around transphobia and homophobia. By circulating hateful rhetoric and drumming up fears about the “influence” of LGBTQ+ acceptance, white Christian nationalists convinced Arab and Muslim parents to pull their children out of public schools in the Bay Area. This is a trend we have seen across the country as Christian nationalist groups like Moms for Liberty recruit conservative Asian faith-based groups to rally against curricula portraying LGBTQ+ families and themes.

What happened? How did these parents go from being swayed by one fascist force to vehemently countering another fascist force? What can we learn as organizers from this moment?

The fight for a free Palestine is deeply ingrained into the many other fights against rising facism in the United States and abroad. We must understand that to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, we must also develop a longer-term strategy that contends with the growing power of far-right forces here in the U.S. We cannot do one without the other.

What does this take? First, we must be clear about who we’re up against and what strategies they are using. After 75 years of occupation and a year of military invasion, Zionism has made clear their strategy: complete annihilation of Palestine and its people. To do this, the Zionist system requires the support of other right-wing forces for monetary, political, and narrative power.

One formidable partnership is between white Christian nationalists and Zionists. Nationally, the largest Zionist organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel, which funnels millions of dollars into the Israel lobby every year. Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy document spearheaded by the far-right Heritage Foundation, lays out far-right forces’ plan to transform the United States into a Christian nationalist theocracy that would sustain Israel’s military expansion. Locally, in San Francisco, when AROC campaigned with parents and students for the addition of Eid as holidays on the school calendar, Christian nationalists and Zionists allied to threaten the school board and halt the decision.

This issue of transphobia is a longer-term struggle that we will continue to face. We have not resolved it with our members, and there is no success story. However, we are helping our members to understand the contradictions of right-wing forces in order to move our communities on various contentious issues.

For years, Christian nationalists have made inroads into organizing Muslim and Arab parents in the Bay Area by manufacturing fear and outrage around queer and trans “influences” in schools. In the past year, as AROC has mobilized thousands of people to call for a permanent cease-fire and an arms embargo on Israel, we have also been engaging in deep political education and long conversations with our communities to point out the connections between various right-wing, fascist forces.

This past year has politicized many to call for Palestinian liberation. It has especially mobilized the SWANA families in AROC’s membership, many of whom have direct connections to the region that Israel is devastating. This past year has reemphasized that we need to deeply invest in grassroots organizing and basebuilding. This allows organizers and working-class people to work together to protect our communities from right-wing disinformation and come up with real solutions that can transform lives.

When the attacks on Gaza began last October, AROC was able to provide the space and container for our parents, youth, and activists to identify key issues and leverage our power locally. We got the cities of San Francisco and Oakland to adopt resolutions for an immediate and sustained cease-fire. Through those processes, we saw our community really engage with democratic processes and understand the power of civic engagement. Through organizing, we build trust and are able to inoculate the harmful disinformation coming from white Christian nationalists and other right-wing forces. This is key to winning our communities away from right-wing influences and building a stronger anti-fascist movement.

Grassroots organizing is how we build the power of our movement! Power means we can shift conditions in society and in our own lives. Power means we can end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and block the rise of far-right fascism.

LIVE at 10 am Eastern time today and STREAMING whenever:

Never embarrassed to be seen blowing with the political winds, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent the last four years leading Silicon Valley’s censorship-industrial complex. Facebook openly admitted throttling all political content on the grounds that users didn’t like it. It hired an advisory panel with clear ideological blind spots. Most notoriously, Facebook turned to outsourced fact checkers who decide whether or not posts get blocked and users get banned even though they rarely had any expertise in the controversies they were asked to weigh in on, and made frequent mistakes. Now, at least, Zuckerberg says the fact checkers are no more.

Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by guest Peter Coffin to ask: is Facebook really entering the Free Speech Zone? If so, how long will it last in the second age of Trump?

The post TMI Show Ep 53: “Facebook: Now with 40% Less Censorship” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 53: “Facebook: Now with 40% Less Censorship” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In June 2021, just months into the Biden era, Zephyr Teachout argued that Lina Khan’s appointment to the Federal Trade Commission “may be the best thing Joe Biden has done” in office. With a firm reputation as a leader in the anti-monopoly movement, her nomination to the FTC was a clear victory for progressives in an administration otherwise primarily staffed by moderates.

Three years on, it’s clear that this optimistic outlook about a Khan-run FTC has been vindicated. In her position, Khan’s FTC has scored historic victories for consumers and workers—even as she’s faced powerful industry opposition and obstruction from right-wing judges.

Understanding the significance of Khan’s tenure means understanding how antitrust enforcement has been sabotaged in recent decades by right-wing ideologues. The federal government adopted antitrust laws beginning in 1890, which would become a crucial tool for reining in corporate abuses for decades to come. But beginning in the 1970s, federal courts would embrace a right-wing reimagining of antitrust law under the guise of promoting “consumer welfare.” Unsurprisingly, this hands-off approach helped create an economy defined by extreme corporate concentration, leading to fewer and worse choices for American consumers.

While the leadership of both agencies are set to change under President-elect Donald Trump, the new merger guidelines mean that Khan’s pro-competition vision will help shape FTC decision-making well past her tenure.

While still in law school, Khan rose to prominence in 2017 for her critique of laissez-faire antitrust enforcement. Given her reputation, observers were quick to speculate on how she’d be able to put her principles to action at the FTC. For one, the commission in recent decades has built a track record of being deferential to the very monopolies it’s tasked to regulate. Additionally, the commission has long suffered from inadequate funding, which has hindered its capacity to police monopolies. But despite these institutional constraints, Khan’s FTC has secured major wins for American consumers, all while facing down hostile corporate actors and their allies in the judiciary.

Monopolistic behavior in the food industry over the past few decades has robbed consumers of choice while increasing grocery costs. Two years ago, grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons announced a massive merger deal that quickly raised alarms among consumer advocates. While such a merger may have gone through unscathed a decade or so prior, the Khan-led FTC filed suit to block the deal. Last month, the FTC won one of its biggest victories in recent years by blocking the merger in court. This victory, along with the FTC’s successful effort to block Tapestry’s acquisition of Capri, shows that Khan’s view of antitrust is increasingly finding support in court.

Sharing jurisdiction on antitrust matters with the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division, the two agencies successfully modernized merger guidelines to help identify illegal mergers in their tracks. Observers have credited both the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division’s aggressive enforcement efforts with a recent decline in merger efforts. And while the leadership of both agencies are set to change under President-elect Donald Trump, the new merger guidelines mean that Khan’s pro-competition vision will help shape FTC decision-making well past her tenure.

These developments, of course, only scrape the surface of the FTC’s accomplishments under Khan. The commission notably blocked an effort by Nvidia to acquire Arm, which was set to be the biggest merger deal in semiconductor industry history. The ultimate failure of Amazon to acquire iRobot, which caused concern among various international antitrust regulators, has been at least partially credited to the FTC’s scrutiny. Among the most meaningful impact of renewed FTC antitrust scrutiny may be felt on private equity firms, a welcome development given said firms’ harms to competition and American society at large.

The Khan-led FTC’s ability to build bipartisan support for efforts such as recent rulemaking on junk fees, as well as on merger guidelines, should be seen as a model for Democratic governance. Moreover, the Khan-led FTC should be applauded for using long-neglected tools at the commission’s disposal, such as its ability to police price discrimination as interlocking directorates.

With Khan set to be succeeded by Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to lead the FTC, it's likely that the FTC will soon shift its approach on antitrust and consumer protection. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Khan will leave behind a legacy that will influence antitrust enforcement for decades to come. And in doing so, Khan will also leave behind a track record that shows what successful progressive governance looks like.

Ever since my first foray into climate activism in 2019, I have dreaded the year 2025. In my mind, it’s always been the Big Deadline.

The 2015 Paris agreement concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 if we have any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

And yet, now that we’re standing at the precipice of this once-far off deadline, we are still so far from the meaningful climate action necessary to fend off unstoppable climate catastrophe. Indeed, we’ve just worsened our chances at a survivable future.

We need to build a strong left to fight fascism during Trump’s presidency and to build a just green future in its aftermath.

The U.S. became the largest oil producer in 2018 and continues to expand domestic fossil fuel production. American citizens just elected a fascist president who has promised to gut the EPA and establish U.S. “energy dominance,” but the Democrat who supposedly could have saved us from Donald Trump refused to ban fracking and praised U.S. oil production.

Technically, I should be panicking. I certainly was when my college graduation last May was preceded by some headlines announcing the 1.5°C limit had already been reached. But now, as a climate activist in New York City, I find myself surprisingly calm.

This calm isn’t simply due to local climate wins, though I have celebrated those. Gov. Kathy Hochul just signed the Climate Change Superfund Act into law, which will require fossil fuel companies to pay billions into a fund to help New Yorkers recover from climate disasters. In other words, New York will force polluters to pay to clean up their own messes. This is a huge step in holding fossil fuel companies accountable.

Yet my optimism arises out of a different trend in the climate movement: Climate activists are (finally) showing up for other movements.

Historically, the climate movement has attempted to isolate itself from other political and social issues, arguing that climate policy is “just science.” This majority-white movement has failed to see that fossil fuel emissions are part of a larger history of the Global North colonizing and exploiting both people and the planet for decades. The climate crisis is a symptom of a broader exploitative system. To change that system, we need a united left that will fight for all people—not just those who identify as environmentalists.

In 2020, climate activists were rightfully berated for not showing up enough for the Black Lives Matter movement. Thankfully, I think many climate activists heard that message because today, they have come out in droves for Palestine.

Many of the college students who organized campus encampments last spring to urge their school administrators to divest from Israel and the U.S. imperial war machine were students who had previously organized for climate justice. I witnessed this firsthand at the Claremont Colleges when I was a senior: The student organizations demanding fossil fuel divestment fell to the wayside as the crisis in Gaza intensified. Globally, many climate organizations chose to speak out and take direct action to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.

But none of these climate activists had stopped caring about the climate. In fact, they often pointed out that Israel’s actions were not just genocide, but ecocide as well. The onslaught of bombs dropped on Gaza will contaminate the soil and groundwater in the region for decades. And the destruction has produced at least 54.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, equal to the annual emissions of 16 coal-fired power plants.

Climate activists cannot claim to fight for a just future and stay silent about genocide. “If we, as climate activists, aren’t able to see and speak up against the current marginalization and oppression and killing of people today, then I don’t think we should be able to call ourselves climate justice [activists],” climate champion Greta Thunberg told Al Jazeera in early December 2024.

As Trump prepares to enter the White House, we will undoubtedly see more people oppressed and killed. Among the many groups who are vulnerable under his administration are undocumented immigrants, whom Trump has vowed to round up and deport.

Migrant justice has long been intertwined with climate justice. As climate change makes many areas around the world uninhabitable, climate refugees have no choice but to leave their home.

In response to Trump’s election, climate organizers Jeff Ordower and Ahmed Gaya called on their fellow activists to bring their experiences of shutting down pipelines and coal plants to fight the incarceration and deportation we can expect under Trump. Climate activists should answer this call: The struggles for migrant justice and climate justice are intertwined, and we must meet the needs of the current moment.

“[Climate is] not more urgent than kids being ripped away from their families and dying in the desert—anyone who tries to win that argument is monstrous themselves. We either merge, join forces, or we lose,” writer and activist Naomi Klein said in 2019.

With Trump as president, things will undoubtedly get worse before they get better. We need to build a strong left to fight fascism during Trump’s presidency and to build a just green future in its aftermath. To do so, climate activists must put their words into action when they say they fight for every living being.

Shahd Rajab, a Palestinian artist from Gaza, is like any 21-year-old university student. She enjoys lattes, reads in the library, and loves to draw in her free time. Unlike students in the United States, however, Shahd has lived under the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

Now during Israel’s most brutal war against Gaza, Shahd has produced more than 80 drawings, using her art as a means of expression and resistance as she and her family endure Israel’s impacts, not only a long war but also a genocidal war.

For Shahd, war, injustice, and loss are things the young Palestinian has experienced all her life before Israel’s war on Gaza began in October of 2023.

“Tragic Childhood” by Shahd Rajab, 2024

I met Shahd through a mutual friend, Albert Campos, a Cuban-American local artist who also finds the means of resistance through art. Albert was looking for art of a young Palestinian in Gaza, then found Shahid’s work in early June of this year and began messaging Shahd on Instagram in hopes of collaborating with the artist. Dr. Manal Hamzeh, a professor at the Borderlands and Ethnic Studies Department at New Mexico State University (NMSU), encouraged Albert to collaborate with Shahd. Later she acted as a translator and facilitator to Albert’s conversation with Shahd over WhatsApp and Zoom. We began looking at Shahd’s social media to get to know the artist before communicating directly with her over WhatsApp text. The outcome of this first round of communication resulted in the selection of one of Shahd’s drawings, “Our Right to Education was Stolen, Destroyed Too (Scholasticide),” to be the cover of the December 28, 2024 issue of the Journal of Ethnic Studies Pedagogies.

On the International Day of Solidarity to Palestinians, gathered at the table of NMSU Students for Justice for Palestine in Corbett, the three of us—Dr. Hamzeh, Albert, and I—expanded the collaboration with Shahd and decided to tell her story in a feature article.

Though Shahd is learning English, we decided to present a set of questions translated into Arabic. We also preferred to have Shahd fully and freely respond to the questions in her mother language, Arabic. Dr. Hamzeh was the conduit to this process. The following are pieces of her engagement with our questions that introduce who she is, what her art is about, and what she has been experiencing the past year, since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, its 458 days and still counting.

When asked what she wanted Americans to know about the Palestinian people and their struggle, Shahd emphasized the importance of speaking out against the Israeli occupation and the U.S. funding of this genocidal war against Palestinians, even if you are not Palestinian.

“I was five years old in the 2008 war, nine years old in the 2012 war, and 11 in the 2014 war. I remember the first time my family ran from death, and in the 2014 war when we were temporarily displaced from our home. At times when the bombardment was bad, realizing the gravity of the situation and the risk of getting killed, my family would sleep in one room, so we would die together.”

These harsh conditions Palestinians in Gaza have endured have not deterred young people like Shahd, who was in her second year of college when the most recent war began in 2023, hoping to earn a bachelor's degree by the end of her studies. When this current war started, Shahd was studying at the University College for Applied Sciences in Gaza, specializing in IT. The last time a war affected her studies she was a senior in high school.

“The last and most important year of my studies, I was studying for my high school metrication exam while hearing Israeli fighter planes flying overhead and missiles exploding nearby. Despite the war, I ended the year with a 3.9 GPA,” said Shahd about her senior year of high school.

Shahd had the typical routine of a university student: She would wake up early, get coffee with her friends before morning classes, and spend her free time in the library drawing in her sketchbook. She was active on campus, attending conferences, seminars, student group meetings, and socializing with her friends. When the university student was not busy with the hustle of her college routine, she would find time to go to a cafe to have a drink and draw, or she would find time at home to work on her art. Before the current war on Gaza, Shahd drew on paper and learned digital art on her laptop or tablet.

That changed on October 9, 2023, when Shahd and her family were displaced again, this time permanently from their home in Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, under threat of death due to Israeli bombardment of residential areas. This war was not just different because of the unbridled brutality from Israeli forces. This time Shahd was separated from her father.

“As a child, I remember moments of hiding behind my father when I heard the bombs and the missiles,” said Shahd.

Shahd’s father traveled to the occupied West Bank for medical treatment three days before the war. According to the article “Cruelty against Gaza Patients Enabled by U.S. and E.U.” published by Electronic Intifada in 2022 by Maureen Clare Murphy, Palestinians have struggled to receive adequate treatment in Gaza with a total land, air, and sea blockade that has been implemented since 2007. The healthcare system in Gaza is deprived of proper advancements to deal with certain procedures. Israel has typically denied Palestinians medical transfers into advanced hospitals in Israel or nearby countries, like Jordan or Egypt. Instead, and if they get permits from Israel, most Palestinians in need of specialized medical care may be allowed to travel to the West Bank for treatment. Shahd and the rest of her family had to evacuate Gaza City, where their house is, in the center of the strip, where they were under direct risk of bombing and ethnic cleansing, at the beginning of the current war, to an area in the southern part of the strip. The Israeli military did not allow them to return to their home in Gaza City, like all displaced Palestinians from the North of Gaza, or leave Gaza to join her father in the West Bank.

“I Want My Bed” by Shahd Rajab, 2024

“This war has displaced us over 20 times; we have ended up living in a small tent; we have run from one place to another, escaping death. I only carry on me important items such as my ID card, my phone, and a single pair of pajamas. We are enduring a difficult life.”

Amid the current Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, Shahd finds strength in her art, using it not just as a form of self-expression but as a form of resistance for herself and her people.

“Art allows me to express myself and assert our just cause as Palestinians; art allows me to expose the violence of the Israeli occupation and the killing that I witness every day. I do not write my feelings, but I can draw them. When I complete a drawing, I sleep better. Through my art, I feel some joy amid the atrocities, loss, and the killing we live with.”

“Israel is actively erasing our existence as people, our memories, our schools, universities, our knowledge of the land, and our art.”

Shahd began drawing when she was seven years old. She remembers drawing cartoon characters she liked to watch as a child and how creative her father was when she was younger. Sitting together, Shahd would watch her father draw different animals with only a pen.

“I used to take my drawings to school to show my friends and teachers. The principal of the school used to love to see my drawings. Everyone, including my family, encouraged me to draw.”

Before the current war, Shahd’s favorite thing to draw was eyes. Now she draws powerful images showing the brutality of the Israeli occupation. The Israeli war on Gaza and blockade have driven up prices and dwindled supplies. After heavy bombardment, Shahd has been left with nothing but colored pencils to capture the injustice she has endured not just in the past year, but throughout her entire life. It took her months to find those colored pencils, which were very expensive. Shahd also creates images that make political commentary and reflect Palestinians’ many ways of resistance.

Despite more than 400 days of the current genocidal war on Gaza, Shahd and her people, the Palestinians, endure as they have since 1948, and insist on their right to return to their homes and land. Shahd now lives in a tent on the beach during the winter season in Gaza. She hopes, after the war, to return to her home, though she knows it is not intact, and find the drawings her mother has kept over the years still in the box among the rubble. When asked what she wanted Americans to know about the Palestinian people and their struggle, Shahd emphasized the importance of speaking out against the Israeli occupation and the U.S. funding of this genocidal war against Palestinians, even if you are not Palestinian.

Photo courtesy of Shahd Rajab

“Israel is actively erasing our existence as people, our memories, our schools, universities, our knowledge of the land, and our art. They try to steal our Palestinian heritage, they appropriated it and claim it is theirs. There will be a day when Palestine is liberated, and when we achieve our liberation, I will draw myself in the courtyard of the holy site, Al Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem.”

Shahd has a GoFundMe. Readers can donate to help Shahd and her family preserve the harsh life until the war is over and reunite with her father. Readers can also donate to the Palestine Red Crescent Society and UNRWA.

Acknowledgment: Dr. Manal Hamzeh translated all of Shahd’s responses to our questions, facilitated communication with her, and guided us throughout.

Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with food. We eat too much of it, and not the best kind; as high as 75% of Americans are considered obese. Yet our popular culture lionizes models and actors so painfully thin many of them suffer from anorexia. The latest attempt by the body-positivity movement to fight fat-shaming comes in the form of online “fat-fluencers,” one of whom has been hired by San Francisco as its weight stigma czar. Meanwhile, HHS nominee RFK Jr. is going after Big Food on the grounds that they’re inhibiting his drive to Make America Healthy Again.

Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan investigate these latest developments in our national Food Fight.

The post TMI Show Ep 52: “Food Fight! RFK’s MAHA vs. Fat-Fluencers” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 52: “Food Fight! RFK’s MAHA vs. Fat-Fluencers” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,

“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”

Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:

“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”

Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”

But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.

It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.

It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class.

Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:

Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.

Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?

Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.

I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.

Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.

It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.

I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.

At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.

Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.

For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all...

It's not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.

But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?

Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.

As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”

Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.

Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.

Justin Trudeau's resignation and Trump's looming return on the anniversary of January 6 mark not just the resurgence of the far-right, but perhaps final collapse of centrist delusions.

There's a bitter poetry to the timing. On January 6, 2025—exactly four years after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn democracy—two events crystallized the profound failure of liberal centrism. In Ottawa, Justin Trudeau, once the global poster child for progressive liberalism, announced his resignation as Canada's Prime Minister. Meanwhile in Washington, Donald Trump prepared to return to power, having decisively defeated another supposed liberal savior in Kamala Harris.

The convergence of these events represents more than just the latest episode in the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy. It marks the definitive end of an era defined by a particular political fantasy: that charismatic centrist leaders could somehow save liberal democracy from its own contradictions while preserving the very system that produced its decay.

The Liberal Savior Myth

At the heart of contemporary liberalism lies a seductive myth: that the right combination of charismatic leadership, technocratic competence, and moderate politics can save democracy from its enemies while avoiding fundamental social transformation. This "liberal savior" narrative has dominated centrist political imagination for the past decade, manifesting in figures from Emmanuel Macron to Pete Buttigieg.

The limits of liberal centrism proved fatal. Unable to deliver material improvements in people's lives while preserving the interests of their donor class, these supposed saviors watched their support collapse.

The myth operates on two levels. First, it suggests that individual leaders—through force of personality, rhetorical skill, or managerial expertise—can resolve deep structural crises without challenging the underlying power relations that produced them. Second, and more insidiously, it promotes the idea that liberal democracy itself can be saved simply by defending existing institutions rather than radically democratizing them.

This mythology reached its apotheosis in Justin Trudeau. Young, photogenic, and armed with progressive rhetoric, he seemed to embody everything liberals believed could defeat the populist right. Here was a leader who could speak the language of social justice while reassuring financial markets, who could kneel at Black Lives Matter protests while expanding oil pipelines, who could champion feminism while maintaining corporate power structures.

The same template was later applied to figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both presented as the noble defenders of democratic norms against Trumpian barbarism. Yet in each case, the fundamental contradiction remained: you cannot save democracy while preserving the very economic and political arrangements that have hollowed it out.

The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau

Trudeau's trajectory is especially revealing. In 2015, he rode to power on a wave of optimism, presenting himself as the progressive antidote to conservative rule. With his carefully cultivated image of youthful dynamism and performative embrace of diversity, he became the archetype of what liberals imagined could defeat the rising tide of right-wing populism. International media swooned over his "sunny ways" and apparent commitment to progressive causes.

The reality never matched the image. Behind the woke platitudes and photo ops, Trudeau's government consistently served the interests of Canadian capital. His administration expanded oil pipelines despite climate crisis rhetoric, continued selling arms to Saudi Arabia while claiming to champion human rights, and used federal power to crush labor resistance, as seen in his government's draconian response to postal worker strikes.

The contradictions only deepened over time. While Trudeau spoke eloquently about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, his government aggressively pursued resource extraction projects on unceded territories. He campaigned on electoral reform but abandoned it when he couldn't secure a system favorable to his party. His supposed feminist credentials were exposed as hollow when he forced out strong women in his cabinet who challenged his authority during the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

The Myth of the Liberal Savior

This gap between progressive aesthetics and neoliberal governance isn't a bug but a feature of the liberal savior model. Figures like Trudeau fundamentally misunderstand democracy as a system to be preserved rather than radically expanded. Their project was always about maintaining the status quo through a kind of repressive tolerance – allowing just enough progressive window dressing to deflect demands for structural change while keeping the fundamental power relations of capitalism intact.

This gap between progressive aesthetics and neoliberal governance isn't a bug but a feature of the liberal savior model.

The same dynamic played out in the United States. After Trump's 2020 defeat, Democrats assured voters that "normalcy" would be restored under Joe Biden. When his presidency floundered, they turned to Kamala Harris as the next great hope for defending democracy against Trump's return. Yet as with Trudeau, the limits of liberal centrism proved fatal. Unable to deliver material improvements in people's lives while preserving the interests of their donor class, these supposed saviors watched their support collapse.

The liberal savior myth rests on two fundamental delusions. First, that individual leadership qualities—whether Trudeau's charisma or Biden's experience—can overcome the structural crisis of legitimacy facing liberal democratic institutions. Second, that these institutions can be preserved in their current form while addressing the deep inequalities and democratic deficits that fuel right-wing populism.

The Structural Crisis of Liberal Democracy

This approach was always doomed to fail because it refused to acknowledge that liberal democracy's crisis stems from its own internal contradictions. The same free market capitalism that centrist leaders champion has hollowed out democratic institutions, atomized communities, and created the precarious conditions that drive authoritarian appeals. No amount of symbolic progressivism or calls to preserve norms can resolve this fundamental tension.

The same free market capitalism that centrist leaders champion has hollowed out democratic institutions, atomized communities, and created the precarious conditions that drive authoritarian appeals.

The failures of figures like Trudeau reveal the bankruptcy of what have called "repressive democracy"—a system that maintains the formal structures of democratic governance while emptying them of substantive content. Under this model, democracy becomes primarily about managing dissent rather than enabling genuine popular power. Elections serve more to legitimate existing power structures than to facilitate real political transformation.

This crisis has only deepened in recent years. As economic inequality has soared and climate chaos intensifies, liberal democratic institutions have proven increasingly incapable of addressing fundamental social problems. The response from centrist leaders has been to double down on technocratic management while wrapping themselves in progressive rhetoric—a strategy that has now definitively failed.

Beyond Liberal Democracy: Building Socialist Alternatives

The real question is not how to save liberal democracy, but how to transcend it through the creation of genuine democratic alternatives. This requires moving beyond both right-wing populism's false promises and liberal centrism's managed decline. Instead, we need a democratic socialist vision that expands democracy into all spheres of life—economic, social, and political.

This means building power from below through militant labor movements, tenant organizations, and community groups that practice genuine democratic decision-making. It means fighting for universal public goods and democratic control over the economy. Most importantly, it means rejecting the liberal belief that democracy is primarily about preserving institutions, and embracing it as an ongoing project of collective liberation.

The real question is not how to save liberal democracy, but how to transcend it through the creation of genuine democratic alternatives.

Practical examples of this alternative vision are already emerging. The recent wave of labor militancy across North America shows how workers can exercise democratic power outside traditional political channels. Municipal socialist movements are experimenting with participatory budgeting and community control. Indigenous land defenders are modeling forms of democratic governance that challenge both liberal capitalism and right-wing reaction.

Trudeau's fall and Trump's return should serve as the final nail in the coffin of the liberal savior myth. The choice we face is not between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, but between the expansion of genuine democratic power or its continued erosion under the twin forces of right-wing reaction and centrist accommodation. The only way to defeat the far right is to build democratic socialist alternatives that actually address the crisis of democracy at its roots.

The future depends not on enlightened leaders preserving the status quo, but on ordinary people organizing to fundamentally transform it. The fall of figures like Trudeau should not be mourned but celebrated as an opportunity to finally move beyond the dead end of liberal centrism and begin the real work of democratic reconstruction.

As President Biden greenlights another $8 billion in weapons to Israel in his last days in office and Secretary Blinken gives a parting New York Times interview in which he denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists are anxiously counting down the days until “Genocide Joe” and his crew exit the White House. But what will activists have to contend with under the Trump presidency?

Donald Trump proved his pro-Israel agenda in his first term, by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, supporting West Bank settlements, recognizing the Golan Heights as part of Israel, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and enacting the Abraham Accords to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states, while disregarding the plight of Palestinians. Recently, Trump has said that the U.S. should let Israel “finish the job,” warned that there will be “all hell to pay” if the hostages aren’t released by the time he takes office, and threatened to blow Iran to smithereens.

In the coming year, the Palestine solidarity movement must find and expand the cracks in the pro-Israel war machine.

Trump has signalled his intentions this time around by the people he has selected for key positions. Mike Huckabee, his pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, is a religious fanatic who doesn’t think Israeli settlements are illegal and says: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria [the territory’s biblical name, revived in Israeli propaganda].” He even insists there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the UN, used her position in Congress to stifle free speech on college campuses and advocates deporting pro-Palestinian protesters who have student visas.

What about Congress? While the 118th Congress was overwhelmingly pro-Israel, the new one, with both the Senate and the House under Republican control, will be even more aggressively biased. Members want to pass a host of horrific bills that will further cement U.S. ties to the Israeli government, punish international actors that dare try to hold Israel accountable, and repress the domestic movement for Palestinian rights. This legislation includes a bill that equates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, a bill that gives the Treasury Department the power to investigate non-profit groups for links to “terrorism” and then shut them down, a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court for issuing an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, a bill to make permanent the U.S. ban on funding the relief agency UNRWA, and a bill to cancel trade agreements with South Africa because of its genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

Worldwide, more countries are not only voting for a ceasefire at the UN, but taking concrete measures to hold Israel accountable.

And of course, we can’t leave out the challenges posed by three powerful forces: AIPAC, Christian Zionists, and military contractors. Best known is the lobby group AIPAC, which used its financial muscle in the recent elections to knock out two of the most pro-Palestinian members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, leaving others terrified of becoming AIPAC targets. Lesser known but enormously powerful are the tens of millions of Christian Zionists, who are driven by the radical belief that Israel is key to Jesus’ return to Earth after a bloody final battle of Armageddon in which only those who accept Jesus as their savior will survive. Christian Zionists—already numerous in Congress, the White House and even the military—will be emboldened by Trump.

The third powerful lobby group are the military contractors, which has more lobbyists than members of Congress. Thanks to the $18 billion that Congress allocated for Israel in 2024, weapons stocks have soared over the past year, dramatically outperforming the major stock indexes.

But there are countervailing forces as well. The American public has become more and more sympathetic to Palestinians. A November opinion poll showed that, despite the pro-Israel bias of our government and corporate media, most Americans (63 percent) want a ceasefire and 55 percent think the U.S. should not provide unrestricted financial and military assistance to the Israeli government.

The American public has become more and more sympathetic to Palestinians.

This is especially true among young people and among Democrats. And with a Republican in the White House, more Democrats in positions of power should be willing to oppose Israel’s actions since they will no longer be defying their own party’s president. And it’s not just Democrats. Many Trump supporters oppose U.S. involvement in overseas wars, and Trump himself, on the campaign trail, repeatedly claimed that he wants to bring peace to the Middle East.

Worldwide, more countries are not only voting for a ceasefire at the UN, but taking concrete measures to hold Israel accountable. The long list of countries and parties that have either submitted or announced their intention to join South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice include Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Jordan, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain, Türkiye and the Arab League. Countries that have either banned, limited or announced their intention to embargo arms to Israel include Italy, Spain, the UK, Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, Türkiye, Russia and China.

In the coming year, the Palestine solidarity movement must find and expand the cracks in the pro-Israel war machine. It must strengthen the spine of Democrats who live in fear of AIPAC and reach out to Republicans who oppose funding foreign conflicts. The same arguments many Republicans make about defunding Ukraine must be applied to Israel. Activists must expand campaigns against companies supporting Israel’s genocide, as well as efforts at the state, city, labor, university, faith-based and sectoral level to condemn Israel’s actions and promote divestment. The recent resolution by the American Historical Association condemning “scholasticide” is a good example.

While activists are bracing for a torrent of Trump policies that will create even more global and domestic chaos, including increased attacks on pro-Palestine organizations and individuals, the U.S. movement must be as resolute as the Palestinians themselves, who have demonstrated that, no matter what Israel does to destroy them, they remain determined to resist. The year 2025, with Donald Trump in the White House, will not be a time for despair or retreating in fear, but a time for action.

The expression “punch-drunk,” Google informs me, means “stupefied by or as if by a series of heavy blows to the head.” Google’s Oxford Language entry then offers a not-terribly-illuminating example of the term’s use: “I feel a little punch-drunk today.” Right now, a better one might be something like: “After November 5, 2024, a lot of people have been feeling more than a little punch-drunk.”

Learning on the night of November 5th that Donald Trump had probably been reelected president certainly left me feeling stupefied, with a sense that I’d somehow sustained a number of heavy blows to the head. The experience was undoubtedly amplified by the fact that I’d spent the previous three months in Reno, Nevada, as part of a seven-day-a-week political effort to prevent just such an outcome, along with a crew of valiant UNITE-HERE union members and more than 1,000 volunteer canvassers organized by Seed the Vote.

Still, I hoped that battered feeling would wear off after our campaign office was dismantled, the rental car returned, and the extended-stay hotel room vacated. Surely, once reunited with my beloved partner (and a pair of disgruntled cats), I’d find the disorienting pain of repeated shocks beginning to dissipate.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

In fact, it’s only gotten worse, as Trump has rolled out his picks and plans for the new administration. As old radio DJs used to shout: the hits just keep on coming! Unfortunately, these hits aren’t rock-n-roll records; they’re blows to the collective consciousness of those of us who worked to prevent Trump’s reelection, and perhaps even to a few of those who voted for him.

Ethics-deficient Matt Gaetz for attorney general? Bam! Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer, to run the Department of Homeland Security? Pow! Wait, Matt Gaetz is out! Now, it’s Pam Bondi, the woman who accepted an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution from the now-defunct Trump Foundation for attorney general. Bam! Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to run health and human services? Bang! Convicted (and Trump-pardoned) felon Charles Kushner (Jared’s dad) for ambassador to France? Take that, Emmanuel Macron! Wham! And then there’s a double-whammy for those of us who spent a couple of decades opposing this country’s Global War on Terror, as we watch the liberal media (even the British Guardian) lionize old neocon war criminals like John Bolton and Dick Cheney for their opposition to Trump this time around. Whack! No wonder our ears are ringing!

As one uppercut after another left us reeling, a whole flurry of stiff jabs followed in the form of Trump’s announcements of new territorial ambitions for this country. He wants the Panama Canal back. And Greenland, which was never ours to begin with. As he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” L’état, c’est Donald Trump, apparently.

O Canada! Yes, he wants that, too! “It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” he wrote on Truth Social. Governor Trudeau, really? Bernie Sanders jokingly probed the possible benefits of a U.S.-Canada assimilation, asking on X, “Does that mean that we can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50% less per capita on healthcare?”

The Referee Goes AWOL

One problem with being punch-drunk is that not only do you feel funny, but you begin to think everything else is a little funny, too. Demanding the Panama Canal and Greenland, not to mention Canada, is the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Saturday Night Live skit. As it turns out, though, it’s neither a caricature nor a joke. In fact, Donald Trump has transformed this presidential transition period into a Theater of the Absurd performance. And while some of his most outrageous statements may indeed turn out to be mere political theater, in the post-November 5th world, we won’t be waiting for Godot, but for the other shoe to drop.

And that’s undoubtedly been part of Trump’s point with his recent flurry of absurdities. He’s already testing how far he can go without meeting any meaningful resistance. How hard can he hit (and how far below the belt) before the referee blows the whistle and stops the fight? Or is there even a referee anymore?

Our problem (and the rest of the world’s, too) is that the fight is rigged and anyone who might have refereed it is either too corrupt, too terrified, or too absent to do the job. Don’t count on the courts, not after the Supreme Court granted the soon-to-be sitting president more or less blanket immunity for anything he does on the job. Too many Republican members of Congress, never known for possessing spines of steel, now seem perfectly happy to relinquish their lawmaking powers to unelected First Buddy Elon Musk, ducking and covering when he threatens their reelection prospects with primary fights.

With Congress and the judiciary unwilling or unable to do the job, the executive branch will undoubtedly be largely left to referee itself. Foxes and hen houses, anyone? In fact, at least since Ronald Reagan, no president has sought to reduce the power of the executive, while the once-fringe theory of a “unitary executive” has increasingly come to underpin the moves of successive administrations, locating ever more power in the person of the president. That principle was fundamental to Project 2025, the transition program the Heritage Foundation prepared for the next Trump presidency. The central premise of its key document, Mandate for Leadership, is that all executive government functions belong under direct presidential control. That control would extend even to those offices Congress made independent, such as the Federal Reserve, various special prosecutors and inspectors general, and agencies like the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the reasoning behind Project 2025’s plan to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with Trumpist political appointees, who will serve only at the pleasure of the president.

During his recent campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or its architects. But today, the project and the key individuals connected to it are once again openly in his good graces. In fact, he plans to restore one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to his old job directing the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, a low-profile agency with tremendous power. The National Archives describes it this way:

“The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President.”

In other words, the head of the most powerful office in the executive branch will, under President Donald Trump, be someone whose understanding of the role of president is frankly monarchical — that is, the government of a single, all-powerful ruler.

Still Standing — and Not Standing Still

So, if we can’t count on this country’s vaunted checks and balances to either check or balance the power of an absurdist president, where else can we look?

Well, there’s the media. Its freedom is enshrined in the first article of the Bill of Rights and the rest of us must do what we can to protect journalists (whether from U.S. missiles flying in Gaza, or Trumpian threats at home). Of course, it’s also worth remembering journalist A.J. Liebling’s classic observation that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Such prescient words first appeared in his 1960 New Yorker article about the disappearance of competing newspapers in various markets. I doubt he would be at all surprised, more than 60 years later, by the spectacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial staffs from publishing pre-election endorsements of Kamala Harris. I wonder what he would have made of ABC’s abject $15-million surrender to Donald Trump’s patently frivolous defamation lawsuit.

A free media will remain crucial in the coming period, but though it pains my writer’s soul to admit it, there are limits to the power of the written (or even the spoken) word. To check a power-mad president and his fascist handlers, those of us who are already punch-drunk but still standing in the ring will have to find new ways to amplify our commitment to freedom and human dignity through collective action.

We can undoubtedly look to existing organizations like the fighting unions of today’s reinvigorated labor movement for guidance and inspiration. We can value our own narratives in the fashion of Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who creates the space for women to tell our stories in Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We can work with any number of national progressive electoral organizations like Seed the Vote, Swing Left, or Indivisible. We can support organizations dedicated to defending the groups that even many mainstream Democrats are ready to blame for their loss of the White House — among them undocumented immigrants and transgender folks.

Seeing Negative Spaces

I really do believe what I just wrote. We must continue learning and practicing the skills, discipline, and joys of collective action. However, I wonder whether there’s something else we — each of us individually — need to do as well in the new age of Trump.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn to draw. As I struggle with line and value, and my never-very-impressive hand-eye coordination, I remember how my father, a painter and illustrator, used to say that he could teach anyone the basic skills. He’s been gone for more than a decade now and, though I’m glad he didn’t live to see Donald Trump in the White House, I’m sad that I never asked him to teach me to draw. So, I’ve turned elsewhere.

For all its horrors, the Internet contains wonderful resources when it comes to learning anything — from how to knit to how to interpret that annoying little illuminated wrench on your car’s dashboard. Hundreds of thousands of generous people freely share their hard-won knowledge there with strangers around the world. One of them is Julia Bausenhardt, a German artist and illustrator. I’ve learned so much from her many video lessons on sketching the natural world. Above all, I’ve learned that drawing is as much about what you do with your eyes as with your hands. It’s about learning to look.

Like most drawing teachers, Julia emphasizes the value of observing “negative space.” If you want to understand, for example, how a tangle of overlapping leaves and blossoms relate to each other, take a look at what isn’t there. Consider the negative spaces around the shapes you’re drawing.

I wonder whether those of us seeking to forestall an autocratic takeover of this country would benefit from focusing on the negative spaces around the Trump phenomenon, looking for what isn’t there as much as what is. I suspect that’s what the historian Timothy Snyder is doing when he counsels those resisting Trump not to “obey in advance.” There’s no reason to fill in the space around the future autocrat with our own obedience before it’s even demanded. Let’s decorate it with resistance instead.

Similarly, in the spaces around the program Trump’s handlers have devised (most explicitly, Project 2025), we can discern what’s missing from it. Surrounding its blueprints for destroying public education (the foundation of democratic life), decimating labor unions, and resurrecting long-buried regimes of child labor, forced marriage, and childbearing we can discern negative space.

What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

We must do this work collectively in organized ways, but we can also do it individually in small ways. As I contemplate another four horrific years of Donald Trump, I’m also thinking about the negative spaces of daily life. I’m thinking about small daily interactions with strangers and acquaintances. I’m thinking about the in-between times that surround the events of our lives — “negative time,” if you will. In the era of Trump 2.0, I hope to fill my negative time waiting in lines or sitting in yet another endless meeting with small acts of attention and respect. Those, too, can be acts of resistance.

After every big election, there’s a spotlight on the candidates that came out on top: Who’s in and who’s out, talk about mandates, seat margins, and the First 100 days.

There’s plenty of policy previews about next year.

But one issue will have a starring role both in Washington, D.C. and in states across the country—taxes.

We know Republicans in Washington are writing a play to extend and even expand President-elect Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. And nearly every state will have to adapt to additional fiscal pressures while also finding ways to pay for the things our families and communities need.

We know the vast majority of Americans want the rich to pay more, not less, in taxes—at both the state and federal level. It’s time for elected officials to give the people what they want after years of disappointing performances.

Past sessions foreshadow how anti-tax elected officials around the country will act on behalf of their donors: Each time Republicans have held a trifecta in Washington this century, they’ve demanded tax cuts for the rich. During Covid-19, 26 states cut taxes, often targeting top earners, which will cost $124 billion by 2028.

We’ve seen this show before and it stinks.

The plot is tired, unbelievable, and relegates voters to a bit part, when it’s our communities that should be the lead. How many times do we have to listen to the same trickle-down economic nonsense? It’s getting old.

Polling shows that voters would rather politicians play it straight and raise revenue from big business and the wealthy rather than feel the squeeze as tax cuts lead to budget cuts to the programs and services our kids and communities need most.

Flipping the script on tax cuts for the wealthy is a core reason the State Revenue Alliance was created. Voters feel the economy isn’t working for them and want corporations and billionaire CEOs to pay their fair share. Ultimately in 2025, it’s the people who’ve too often been shut out of policy debates who will fight for tax justice and change the trajectory of tax policy in this country.

Knowing that 2025 would see a confluence of tax fights at the state and federal level, state-based advocates have spent years building coalitions of pro-revenue champions committed to working together and will have the resources to fight for good schools, housing affordability, and accessible healthcare in legislatures around the country.

Together, we’ve made real, tangible, and, yes, sustainable progress in our collective efforts to win pro-revenue policies. In 2024 alone, state-based grassroots organizations, labor groups, policy shops, and legislators supported 35 tax justice bills in state capitols. Six of those bills passed and were signed into law. Those bills included wealth taxes; corporate tax reform; reinstatement or creation of capital gains taxes; repealing certain tax breaks, which too often allowed the wealthiest to shield their assets; and more.

In anticipation of this year, we are already tracking nearly 50 tax justice bills filed in state capitols. When legislative sessions open early next year, our allies will be ready, putting forth a compelling case for ensuring the wealthiest and big corporations pay their fair share at the state level so everyone has a fair shot to survive and thrive.

Rather than divide us, taxes will be an issue that unites community voices across the country in 2025. In addition to our focus on tax justice in states, we will join hundreds of national organizations to demand Congress forgo any additional tax cuts for the wealthy and advocate for new revenue.

An extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) will further reward the wealthiest individuals and big corporations with myriad tax breaks and benefits. We know it will come at the expense of working and middle-class families, costing us an estimated $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years. Extending the TCJA also puts additional strains on states and localities to make up potential funding gaps, as they rely on federal dollars for everything from schools to healthcare, critical infrastructure, and more.

We know the vast majority of Americans want the rich to pay more, not less, in taxes—at both the state and federal level. It’s time for elected officials to give the people what they want after years of disappointing performances.

As storylines develop following the 2024 election, progressives should consider the action in the states around taxes—who pays what they owe, who benefits from them, and whether or not they raise the revenue to fully fund our futures—as the biggest and most unifying fight on the horizon.

If we are successful, 2025 will reveal a more just, equitable, and sustainable tax code that helps build the future our communities deserve.

Virtually everybody with an opinion judges Jimmy Carter to have been a decent man. He was certainly as good an ex-president as we’ve ever had. But what about his legacy as a then-president? That assessment is murkier.

A common refrain holds that Carter was a good man but a weak president, that he was not wise to the ways of Washington, that he was naïve in his belief that pure motives could win over champions of impure schemes.

It is impossible to fairly weigh Carter’s success or failure without understanding the context in which he served. That context was some of the greatest institutional tumult the U.S. has ever seen.

First, was Vietnam. The U.S. had just limped, still bleeding, out of the Vietnam War. It was the first war America had ever lost. The trauma of that loss (to say nothing of the trauma of having tried to prevent it) cannot be overstated.

Carter was the first elected president to have to deal with the shock, the disbelief, the grief, the shame, and the anger from the loss. There wasn’t a person in America who knew how to deal with that rat’s nest of conflicting, disorienting emotions and make the country whole again.

After Vietnam (and, especially, immediately after) the U.S. was not the swaggering hegemon it had been for the 30 years since 1945. But what could it be? That Delphic divination was only the first of Carter’s monumental challenges. There was equal upheaval, economically.

In 1971, Richard Nixon had removed the dollar’s coupling to gold. That left Arab oil sheikdoms receiving paper for their once-ever patrimony. They responded by tripling the price of oil, sending both inflationary and recessionary shocks through the world’s economy.

Theory held that stagnation and inflation couldn’t exist at the same time. But there it was: stagflation. The remedy for stagnation was to lower interest rates and increase the money supply. The remedy for inflation was to raise interest rates and reduce the money supply.

Clearly, you couldn’t do both at the same time. The Keynesian framework for managing the economy, operative since the Great Depression, no longer worked. So, in 1979, Carter hired Paul Volcker to try to fix it.

Volcker jacked up interest rates to record levels, inducing an immediate recession. It was the right thing to do, but it killed Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, as he knew it would. It gave Ronald Reagan his now-famous question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Finally, on top of the ferocious ferment roiling international and economic affairs, there was Watergate. Richard Nixon was caught trying to break into the offices of whistleblower Daniel Elsberg’s psychiatrist and also the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The crime seems petty today, especially compared to launching a mob on the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, but it was monumental, then.

Probably no event in modern history had so shattered the public’s faith in the integrity of its national institutions and actors. Nixon resigned in disgrace. All political acts—and all political actors—were suddenly suspected of being nefarious and self-dealing.

Carter was both, but he was also neither. That is, yes, he was a politician, carrying out political acts. But he was neither nefarious nor self-dealing. He was as honest and selfless a politician as we’ve ever known. But, that was the tar with which all politics, and politicians, were smeared by Nixon’s sordid bequest.

Simply put, the intellectual and institutional moorings that had anchored the country for the prior 40 years—from the New Deal consensus to the post-World War II international order—were coming unglued. That was the tectonically-shifting world that Carter inherited. Nobody had ever dealt with anything like it.

So, how did he do? In truth, he did pretty well. First, the negatives.

In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew their government and took 66 Americans hostage. They held them for 444 days, dealing a severe humiliation to the U.S. That was probably Carter’s greatest public defeat.

But the underlying grievance had started in 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed the brutal Shah Reza Pahlavi, a reliable U.S. sycophant but a ruthless enemy of his own people. The boil of that festering resentment popped in 1979, on Carter’s watch.

Also, the Reagan campaign had cut a back-door deal with the revolutionaries to not release the hostages until after the election, thereby depriving Carter of a win in the matter. It was one of the most perfidious deeds ever to degrade American politics. Most people didn’t know that then, and don’t know it, still, today, so mistakenly blame Carter for the entire ordeal.

Later in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter had provoked the invasion. Six months before, he had begun supplying arms to the opponents of the Soviet-leaning Afghan government. The Soviets invaded to prop up their ally which was under attack by U.S.-supported terrorists, including the later-to-become-infamous Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, Afghanistan proved to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, draining it of treasure, manpower, and willpower. It is widely regarded to have been the single greatest cause of the Soviet collapse, in 1991. Carter’s critics who condemn his actions at the time always seem to forget that they eventuated in the defeat of the U.S.’ greatest adversary of the twentieth century.

Carter’s solutions to economic woes leaned conservative, or even further. It was he who began the Neoliberal regime we often associate with Ronald Reagan.

He deregulated the airline, trucking, and railroad industries. He reduced spending on welfare much more than either Nixon or Reagan ever did. Fearing inflation, he fought the United Mine Workers in their 1978 national coal strike, alienating one of his—and the Democratic party’s—most important bases.

But what of the good things that Carter delivered?

For all of the upheaval, he actually delivered better economic performance than did Ronald Reagan. That meant faster GDP growth and higher levels of business investment. He delivered the last balance of payments surplus the country has ever known. And he did this without the budget busting deficits that followed him.

When Carter left office, in January, 1981, the national debt—the cumulation of all federal borrowing over 204 years—stood at just under $1 trillion. Reagan tripled that debt in only eight years, an ominous portent of things to come. It is $36 trillion, today.

Carter placed more women and minorities in the federal judiciary—40 and 87, respectively—than all of his predecessors, combined. Ruth Bader Ginsburg attributed her decision to become a judge to Carter’s initiative. He literally actualized the centuries-long-delayed intent embodied in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.

Carter established the Department of Energy, an essential move, given the way the country and the world were being whipsawed by Arab oil producers. It has been a huge contributor to the U.S.’ being one of the world’s top energy producers still, today.

He started the Department of Education. An educated work force is probably the most valuable social asset a society can produce. But before Carter, it was left to the scattered machinations of 50 different state bureaucracies, a guarantee for national failure.

Carter engineered the Camp David Accords, bringing Israel and Egypt together to bury at least part of the hostility that has afflicted the Middle East since Israel’s founding in 1948. He proved prescient on the Israelis, predicting that they would not honor their promises to cede greater autonomy to the Palestinians.

Finally, Carter introduced Human Rights into U.S. foreign policy considerations. Even if done badly, it signaled an aspiration for what the U.S. stood for in its desire to be “the leader of the free world.”

The sum of this amounts to as adroit (though not flawless) an adaptation to the challenges of the time as could be conceived.

Besides considering the context and weighing the balance on Carter, there is one more lens through which we can, and should, judge him. That is, “Who would you rather have at the helm, today, steering the country through waters that are at least as perilous as those Carter faced?”

The U.S. is going through similar—or even greater—dislocations, today, as it was in Carter’s time. Its status in the world is plummeting as it has done everything it possibly could to bolster Israel’s heinous genocide of the Palestinians, and as China has blown by it in manufacturing, commerce, and in many areas of technology.

It has suffered withering military defeats, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, now, Ukraine. The majority of the world’s nations—led by Russia and China—are aligning against it as a Global South. Its economy, too, is much worse today than it was in Carter’s time.

In 1980, the U.S. had not begun hollowing out its economy with 40 years of de-industrialization. It had not begun the psychotic debt binge it has taken, borrowing $35 trillion dollars to try to mask the rot and keep the lights on. It was not hazarding the onset of actuarial bankruptcy, as it is, today.

These are not the signifiers of a healthy global leader. They are the signs of a wounded, faltering behemoth struggling to find a way to regain its once-heralded, even respected, primacy.

So, where does all of this leave us with Jimmy Carter?

Everybody agrees that Carter was an honest, decent, dignified, intelligent, hard-working, selfless public servant who never used his office for personal gain. It’s the things he wasn’t, though, that makes the things he was stand out in such dazzling, admirable, relief.

He wasn’t a pathological liar. He wasn’t a serial sexual abuser. He didn’t consort with porn stars and Playboy bunnies. In fact, he was married to the same woman for 77 years. His daddy didn’t leave him $413 million, so he wasn’t a phony put-up as a self-made man. He wasn’t a five-time draft dodger. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and served seven honorable years in active duty.

He wasn’t a tax cheat or a convicted felon—probably didn’t even have traffic tickets, he was such a Boy Scout. He didn’t use his office to boost his own personal wealth. He didn’t sell access to billionaires. He didn’t foment racial hatred for electoral gain. He wasn’t a bully. He didn’t threaten to send journalists and political foes to jail, in order to silence them. He didn’t steal state secrets on his way out of the presidency. And he certainly never tried to overthrow the government to keep himself in power.

It’s amazing how far our putative standards have fallen, and how we can so readily, fatuously, condemn a good man who, facing the greatest task of many decades, gave our country his very best, and, in fact, healed so many of the wounds of distrust and division that he and we had inherited.

Smug, supercilious condescension about Jimmy Carter is precisely the sign of our own inadequacy to judge him. We insist of him, even in his death, that he be some kind of incongruous super-human avatar: both chaste and worldly-wise; honest and wily; simple, but savvy; idealistic, yet pragmatic; compassionate, yet ruthless.

Would that we could apply such standards in our own time, to wildly, egregiously inferior human beings, repulsive, amoral self-dealers, setting out to loot the country for their own vanity and personal gain, again.

The most meaningful measure we can make of Jimmy Carter is whether we would prefer an imperfect, yet noble man like him at the helm of the country, today. I would. You? There you go.

Democrats and Republicans may be polarized along tribal lines. But they share common ground on their feelings about the media, big business and the government. We hate them.

The post All We Need Is Hate first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post All We Need Is Hate appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump, who takes office in a matter of days, defeated Kamala Harris in large part because of voter dissatisfaction over the economy. But what will his economy look like?

In many ways, this is a tale of two economies. The stock market, tech and the wealthy are doing better than ever. The working class and manufacturing are struggling. Can Trump reconcile his populist and billionaire bases? Can he keep inflation under control? Might he consider expanding the social safety net, especially for healthcare, or increase the minimum wage? What will he do as A.I. continues to kill jobs?

“The TMI Show” tries to predict the state of the US economy in the coming year. Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan is joined by Aquiles Larrea, CEO and Founder of Larrea Wealth Management.

The post TMI Show Ep 51: “What Next for the Economy?” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 51: “What Next for the Economy?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Elon Musk repeatedly asserts, without evidence, that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer covered up the abuses of young girls by gangs comprised largely of British Pakistani men, in cases that date back to before 2010 when Starmer was head of Britain’s public prosecutions.

“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years,” Musk posted to the top of his account on Friday. “Starmer must go, and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

In fact, Starmer, who heads the Labour government, did not cover up abuses. Instead, he brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children, including the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.

But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.

Musk also calls Jess Phillips, the Labour government’s under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, a “rape genocide apologist” because she pushed back on calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.

In fact, Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, has called for a local investigation by Oldham authorities rather than the central government. Women’s rights supporters say Musk’s labeling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” is threatening her safety.

Yesterday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line,” adding that “once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”

Musk’s Global Reach

Musk’s lies about the left-wing British government and his support for far-right groups are parts of an emerging pattern. Musk is also:

• Boosting the far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi ties, known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), before elections early next month. Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an op-ed in a German newspaper recently, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk is planning an online “discussion” on X with the AfD’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, amplifying the party’s neo-Nazi ideology.
• Attacking the Italian judiciary for curbing Italian Prime Giorgia Meloni’s hardline anti-asylum immigration policies. Musk has met regularly with Meloni, who has called him a friend, and appeared at a youth event for Meloni’s party.
• Urging support for Britain’s far-right MP Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party. Musk says he might donate upward of 100 million pounds ($127 million) to Farage’s group.
• Demanding Britain “free Tommy Robinson,” the far-right founder of the English Defence League—an Islamophobic nationalist group—and anti-immigrant agitator who, Musk charges, is in jail for “telling the truth.” In fact, Robinson is in jail because he was found to have defamed a teenage Syrian refugee and then defied a British court order by repeating the false claims. (Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud, and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.)
• Allowing on X inflammatory lies of a kind that incited anti-immigrant riots in Britain last July, following the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport. After Britain arrested more than 30 people, Musk condemned the government for what he called an attack on free speech.
• Calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an “insufferable tool” over comments Trudeau made in support of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and predicted he “won’t be in power for much longer.” (Yesterday, Trudeau announced he will resign.)

Where Musk Is Getting This Power

As the richest person in the world, politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.

He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.

But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.

Musk has hardly left Trump’s side since the election, meaning that Musks’s opinions (amplified by his social media platform) cannot be ignored by politicians around the world who are trying to decipher Trump’s opinions.

One prominent member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party is asking that Germany determine “whether [Musk’s] repeated disrespect, defamation, and interference in the election campaign were also expressed in the name of the new U.S. government.”

This combination—the richest person in the world, owner and manipulator of the biggest political messaging platform in the world, with direct influence over Trump—puts Musk in the position of being able to move other nations toward the neo-fascist right.

Why Musk Is Doing This

Not for money. As it is, he has far more than any human can utilize.

Partly, it’s ideological. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” which puts him at odds with Europe’s and Canada’s aggressive responses to hate speech online. (Britain, Musk says, “is turning into a police state.”)

But the roots of Musk’s neo-fascism probably go deeper.

I am no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that as an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is especially triggered by poor people of color moving into white nations. His father smuggled raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.

Part of his shift to the radical right also comes from Musk’s transgender child. As Musk told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, “I lost my son, essentially,” claiming she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” (Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 20, told NBC News that Musk was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.)

On X, Musk continuously criticizes transgender rights, including medical treatments for trans-identifying minors, and the use of pronouns if they are different from what would be used at birth. He has promoted anti-trans content and called for arresting people who provide trans care to minors. Last July, Musk said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents. After Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he rolled back the app’s protections for trans people, including a ban on using birth names (known as “deadnames” for transgender people).

Perhaps the major reason for Musk’s recent effort to push other nations to the neo-fascist right is his newfound thirst for right-wing global politics. After effectively (at least in Musk’s mind) winning the presidency for Trump by spending more than $250 million and unleashing a maelstrom of pro-Trump and anti-Harris lies over X, he now seeks even more of an authoritarian rush.

It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.

What Should Be Done About Musk?

For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in America can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.

Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:

• Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
• Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
• Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
• Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.