Just over a year ago, Republicans passed the Big Ugly Bill into law. The bill slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid, SNAP, and the Affordable Care Act—even as it gives massive tax handouts to the wealthiest people in America. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are richer, while working families suffer and die without the health care they need.

Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) represents California’s 22nd district, where two-thirds of his constituents rely on Medicaid. That’s over half a million people! And it’s the highest number of Medicaid enrollees of any Republican-held congressional district in the country.

Before the vote, Valadao pledged that “I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid.” Then, he turned around and voted for this cruel monstrosity of a bill.

The Big Ugly Bill passed the US House by one vote. That means Valadao’s vote was decisive. He could have stopped families in his district from losing their health care. He could have stopped hospitals from cutting services and even closing their doors. He could have stopped Affordable Care Act premiums from skyrocketing. Instead, David Valadao betrayed the people he represents and showed where his true loyalties lie—with billionaires and Donald Trump.

The good news is that Randy Villegas, a working-class champion, is running to defeat Valadao this November. Villegas just won the Democratic nomination. I was proud to stand alongside him last week as we rallied outside Valadao’s office to mark the one-year anniversary of the Big Ugly Bill.

Villegas electrified the crowd, reminding us that: “Rep. Valadao voted to cut Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires. Meanwhile, Valadao has a government-sponsored health care plan that we pay for as taxpayers. He needs to use that plan to schedule a physical — to look for the spine that he's been missing.”

Rep. Valadao voted to cut Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires.

Meanwhile, Valadao has a government-sponsored health care plan that we pay for as taxpayers. He needs to use that plan to schedule a physical — to look for the spine that he's been missing. - @villegas_CA22 pic.twitter.com/RE5iEWOhIC
— Social Security Works ❌

When the current presidential administration took office on January 20, 2025, the authoritarian firestorm they ignited was, sadly, rapid but somewhat expected.

Funding cuts to childcare, housing, healthcare, and food were swift, as were escalated and targeted attacks towards immigrants nationwide. Much of these reckless cuts were led by Elon Musk. Aside from Musk’s billions in government contracts and showering Trump’s campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars, he had no actual government experience. Musk’s tech bro ethos, and firestarter mentality resemble, in retrospect, that of a young Trump. A terrifying resemblance that made him the perfect actor to wreak total havoc on our federal government.

The proximity to Trump that Musk paved for himself laid the groundwork for creating the Department of Government Efficiency, better known by its tongue-in-cheek name of DOGE. The false promise that DOGE would save US taxpayers trillions was, of course, nothing but a disastrous ploy that cost us money, destroyed vital agencies, decimated regulation, and exposed the personal data of nearly every American. And to date, neither Musk or DOGE officials have been held accountable.

Americans from across the country were quick to protest outside of Tesla showrooms to show Musk that we wouldn’t stand by as DOGE callously dismantled our government. We immediately partnered with Tesla Takedown and organized our supporters to join Tesla showroom protests. We began building a network of activists across the country, and worked alongside Communications Workers of America (CWA), who were motivated by the idea of making Musk feel the real-time impact of the consequences of his actions.

We soon organized with activists from across the country to lead Divest Public Money from Musk campaigns aimed at hurting Musk's bottom line. We pushed local governments to pass resolutions instructing government agencies to not do business with companies owned by Elon Musk and urged public pensions to divest from Tesla or pause all new investments in Tesla.

Starting with the pension board of Lehigh County, PA, whose comptroller signed on to our campaign early on, they paused Tesla investments in their actively managed funds; the city of Davis, CA passed a resolution blocking contracts with Musk and his companies. And, as Musk eyes the launch of his own interagalactic mobile network, we have targeted T-Mobile with a boycott urging them to drop their contract with Starlink which resulted in thousands ending their T-Mobile contracts.

Accountability is necessary, and our elected officials have always held the power to step in and address the Doge destruction. This daily dumpster fire catalyzed our organization, Stop The Money Pipeline, to band together with thousands of other Americans, CWA, and Tesla Takedown, to call on Members of Congress to hold DOGE accountable. We are urging them to make public commitments to hold Congressional hearings and investigations into DOGE and Elon Musk’s role in potentially illegal and unconstitutional activities.

Our DOGE Accountability Campaign has garnered the support of more than 50,000 individuals who signed the Investigate DOGE petition. The campaign has also earned the backing of 54 unions and organizations. Just last month, we hand delivered our petition to the district offices of 26 Members of Congress. The goal is to get 75 Members of Congress to subpoena Musk and DOGE officials for hearings and investigations. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) recently called for an investigation; Rep. John B. Larson (D-CT) has also vocally called Musk out; Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) released an extensive report detailing many of DOGE's failures. We are hopeful more members will commit. Others can keep calling on members to commit, join our campaign, and get involved in upcoming actions and organizing.

There is no rhyme or reason for Musk’s rampage. He targets the vulnerable, and moves fast and breaks our government simply because he can. While at the helm of DOGE, he fired federal workers who had been regulating or investigating his companies. If he gets sued he can throw money at the problem. People believe the hype because of how hard he allegedly works—but in reality it’s quite the opposite. His work ethic is power and greed, pure and simple.

Our campaign is unrelenting because Musk will not stop anytime soon. We encourage others who want to be on the right side of history to do the same.

Historically, periods of widespread economic suffering have often seen a surge of left-wing organizing, and even notable victories. In 1789, desperation among the peasantry and urban working class helped catalyze the French Revolution. The 1880s and 1890s in the United States saw the Farmers’ Alliances and the People’s Party sweep the interior of the country, in a vast movement to overcome the exploitation and poverty of farmers and workers. During World War I, the miseries of the Russian peasantry and industrial proletariat provided the context for the overthrow of Tsardom and then, months later, the overthrow of an ineffectual parliamentary government. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw, in the US, the birth of the welfare state and the triumph of industrial unionism.

It is no surprise, then, that the suffering of a large proportion of Americans today is helping to bring forth a new left, which has lately been seeing electoral and policy victories. In just over a year, Zohran Mamdani has become a figure with national name-recognition, but it might not be long before more people have heard of Chris Rabb, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in Pennsylvania who is headed to Congress this year; Janeese Lewis George, a DSA member who is set to become mayor of Washington, DC.; Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez, New York leftists entering Congress; Nithya Raman, a socialist who might be the next mayor of Los Angeles; Melat Kiros, a socialist from Colorado who won her primary; Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist who may soon be the newest senator from Michigan; and others.

There isn’t anything like a French Revolution or a Russian Revolution on the horizon, but in the coming years, as the American economy continues to leave working people behind, it is certain that we’ll see more left-wing victories. By the 2030s, the stagnant center will be in dire condition, faced with a well-funded far-right and a left stronger than at any point since the 1960s.

What are the economic trends that forecast such an outcome? Some of them are almost universally acknowledged. Most obviously, inequality continues to skyrocket. Even before Elon Musk became a trillionaire—a fact, incidentally, that itself proves the insanity of American capitalism—the top 1% of American households owned 32% of all US wealth, about equal to the bottom 90% combined. America’s billionaires own more than $8 trillion. The income of the richest 1% averages to more than 100 times that of the bottom 20%. It is hardly surprising, then, that among peer countries, the US has the highest rate of poverty, the highest rate of infant mortality, and the second lowest life expectancy. Nor is it a surprise that a majority of Americans think a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, or that less than half of families were able to afford medical expenses in 2025.

The picture is clear. There are good reasons that Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist, is consistently one of the most popular politicians in the country. Mainstream liberal commentators fret that running leftist candidates may cost the Democratic Party votes, but such commentators are evidently far out of touch with voter sentiment. According to polls, three quarters of Americans think the country’s political and economic system needs major changes. The Democratic Party is viewed unfavorably by 59% of adults (not much different from the Republican Party’s 58%). Chuck Schumer, a veritable symbol of the centrist status quo, is disliked by 68% of voters. Left priorities like Medicare for All, a substantially higher minimum wage, strengthening unions, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increasing affordable housing, doing more to protect the environment, and cutting the military budget regularly poll well.

Far from the left’s ascendancy being a threat to the Democratic Party’s power, it is more plausibly seen as the best way to save the party. From Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders, populism, especially economic populism, is popular. It is a little odd, therefore, to see a party’s leadership consistently doing everything it can to harm its own electoral prospects, by trying to crush populist insurgents and suppress a populist message.

Longer-term trends, too, look good for the left. It isn’t often enough remarked that the US is in many respects in a situation comparable to that of the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression. The soaring inequality is one parallel, as is the soaring stock market. It has become commonplace to observe that the AI boom has features of a bubble. Another parallel is the extreme weakness of organized labor both today and in the late 1920s. Actually, the union membership rate in the private sector today, 6%, is even lower than it was in 1929, about 10%. The weakness of unions has contributed mightily to the stagnation or decline of wages among the working class, and thus to the low purchasing power of consumers. In the 1920s, a huge expansion of consumer credit, such as installment buying, was necessary to maintain the economy’s rate of growth, because millions of people simply weren’t making enough money to buy the things they wanted. Today, likewise, total household debt is at a record level, over $18 trillion.

In fact, the top 10% of earners now account for half of consumer spending—which is reminiscent of the late 1920s. The economy, therefore, faces serious problems of aggregate demand. Altogether, these are ominous tendencies. Particularly because one of the major priorities of the Trump administration has been to accelerate the transfer of money from working people to the rich, thus further shrinking aggregate demand in the long run. One method of doing so has been to reduce taxes on the wealthy while increasing them on the lowest-income households. Another has been to slash the social safety net, for example SNAP and Medicaid benefits, which causes low-income households to cut back on their spending. Attacking unions and laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers has been a third way Trump is harming the prospects of sustained economic growth. And the list goes on.

In short, it is virtually certain that in the not-too-distant future, very hard times are coming. Such times, of course, provide an ideal opportunity for left organizing and left politics. Millions of people will get “mad as hell” and they “won’t take it anymore.” A populism of class struggle will rise to the fore again, since it will resonate with people’s experiences and grievances. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats will continue to cultivate a new generation of left leaders, doubtless with ever-greater success. Far-right populism will probably see victories too, and it’s impossible to predict how the conflicts between left populism and right populism will play out.

But what we can predict is that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is doomed. The era of Clintonite centrism is passing, at long last. The future is much more interesting than that.

I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids.

To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and community colleges.

The tax-sheltered account route also favors higher-income people. Over a quarter of households owe no income tax, meaning they would get no benefit whatsoever from putting money in a tax-sheltered account. Another 20 percent are in the 10 percent bracket, meaning the account would just save them just 10 cents on every dollar invested. By contrast, the highest income households save 37 cents on every dollar invested in a tax-sheltered account.

In addition, tax-sheltered accounts put a lot of money in the hands of the financial industry. Tens of billions of dollars go to the people and companies who administer these accounts, creating a pointless layer of wasteful bureaucracy.

To be fair, the Trump accounts limit fees to 0.1 percent of assets, far lower than is charged by many accounts. This is an important point. People can get low-cost funds in other accounts also. Stock index funds generally have the lowest fees, and most people would be wise to take advantage of them. People will tell you that they will beat the market, but most won’t, and you’ll just end up wasting money in higher fees and trading costs.

But that has nothing to do with individuals’ decisions on where to put their money. For better or worse, Trump accounts exist. The question is whether people will be helping their kids by putting money into them. And, as I said above, the answer for almost everyone is no.

The main reason is that we already have 529 accounts for the purpose of saving for a kid’s education. The big difference between the accounts for this purpose is that it is possible to withdraw money from a 529 account, if it’s needed, where it is not possible to withdraw money from a Trump account for any reason, until the kid turns 18.

People do pay a penalty for taking money out of a 529 early, but at least they can have access to it if they need it. And unexpected events do happen. People can lose a job, have serious medical expenses, or get divorced. These and other unanticipated situations can require people to dip into whatever savings they have. With a 529 plan, they can use the money if they really need it. With a Trump account, they are out of luck.

It is important to recognize that withdrawals for non-education purposes are fairly common. A recent study by Vanguard found that 2 percent of accounts had an unqualified withdrawal in an average year. If an account is open on average for 20 years, this would mean that 40 percent of accounts have an unqualified withdrawal. People don’t expect bad things to happen, but they do.

Also, since the penalty is based only on the earnings portion of the 529 plan, not the whole sum in the plan, in most cases it is likely to be small. Suppose someone pulls $5K out of a 529 plan, where earnings are currently 40 percent of the money in the plan. That means they would pay taxes on $2,000, plus a penalty of 10 percent. If they are in the 10 percent bracket, their taxes would be $200, and their penalty would $200. If they were in the zero bracket, say because they had lost their job, they would only pay the $200 penalty. That compares to being unable to touch their money at all in a Trump account. (The money in a 529 is not taxable at all if used for educational purposes. The earnings in a Trump account are taxable.)

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not even possible to change asset allocations in a Trump account. Suppose your kid is 17, one year too young to make a withdrawal. If you’re worried there is an AI bubble likely to burst, and you would rather have your money in Treasury bonds, you’re out of luck. Trump accounts won’t let you make the switch; you have to go down with Elon Musk and the rest of the market.

The silliest argument given by proponents of Trump accounts is that they can be rolled over into an IRA to allow for lifelong wealth accumulation. So can the money in 529 accounts, up to a ceiling of $35,000.

The Trump gang makes a big issue of the $35,000 ceiling, but this is something only elite types with lots of money would care about. Very few people ever accumulate more than $35,000 in a 529 account, and the vast majority of people who do will find some education-related expense that would reduce the value of the account to less than $35,000. Remember, even food and housing can count as education-related expenses.

But let’s say someone ends up with an amount over $35,000 that they can’t use for education-related expenses. Suppose they have $40,000 that they want to roll over into an IRA. In this situation they would have to pay a 10 percent penalty on the amount over $35,000. That would be $500 on the $5,000 difference.

They would also have to pay taxes on the $5,000. The beneficiary is the one receiving the money, so they would be paying the tax. Since they are just beginning their working career, they likely have a relatively low income. This means they will almost certainly be in the 10 percent or 15 percent tax bracket, and quite possibly the zero bracket.

So, this is the bad scenario that Trump account proponents say it is important to avoid, and therefore skip a 529 and put your money in a Trump account instead? That seems pretty whacky, and why you need to fire your financial adviser if they suggest putting money in a Trump account.

To be clear, take the $1K that Trump wants to give newborn kids. It would be a much better use of tax dollars if we provided food and medical care to kids from low-income families than giving out $1K checks to millions of families that don’t need it. But you aren’t going to change the policy by turning down the money. If it bothers you, donate the money to a good cause, but do take the money and don’t ever put another penny in a Trump account.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Hamas will dissolve its government and hand over power to a new, Palestinian technocratic governing authority. The move comes as a US-backed peace process, which resulted in a ceasefire last year, has largely stalled and as Israel’s bombardment of the Strip continues regardless. Hamas is looking to pressure Israel by appealing to Trump, and show that the group is committed to handing over governance and allowing the peaceful rebuilding of a devastated Gaza.

• A month after he captured the Democratic Senate nomination in Maine with a fiery populist message, Graham Platner is facing mounting pressure to leave the race after a woman accused him of rape.

• Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, faces a legal reckoning today that could disqualify her from running for France’s presidency next year. A French court will rule on her appeal of her conviction on charges of embezzlement stemming from her party’s use of European Parliament funds to pay its own staff. She was barred from running for public office for five years.

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

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Hamas Dissolves Its Gaza Government | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250 “Celebrations" over the holiday weekend, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th.

Military flyovers come at a devastating cost—economically, psychologically, and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s American State Fair closed after people were baptizing themselves in the religious tent to prevent heat stroke. But flyovers are not new and have been used as a propaganda tool for military recruitment during NFL games and summer festivals. The militarization has been so normalized for so long.

This past weekend, thousands of people cheered on the flyovers, but many did not. The sounds of war shook windows, terrified children, animals, and those suffering from PTSD. Washington DC is made up of 700,000 people without statehood, leaving it little power to push back at the military occupation of the city, let alone the military playground.

In passing, I overheard folks sneering “Here’s where all our money goes,” and another asking “Is this what Iran sounds like right now?” These flyovers, an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a “show”. The bombs did not drop on the occupied city of Washington, D.C., as they do from some of the same jets that fly over places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.

As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran. My children know they can cover their ears, cuddle in close to me, and wait it out. The planes will pass, the ground will stop trembling, and we can return to their bedtime routines. But for children just like them in my home country of Iran, for their families, for our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Lebanon, and so many other places devastated by Western imperialism, those same sounds mean something entirely different. They mean bombs falling on schools, neighborhoods erased in seconds, families torn apart before they can say goodbye. They also cuddle in close to their loved ones, but they do so knowing it may be the last time.

As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and "freedom," also serve another grim reminder. We, in the diaspora, are forced to fund our own oppression twice over: first with the bombs dropping on our families abroad, then with that same taxpayer money reverberating back to our doorsteps here. Hovering over our neighborhoods and our children's heads, and terrorizing our communities instead of feeding, healing, and sustaining them. We must not allow ourselves to grow desensitized to the reality of what our tax dollars could be funding instead of the spread of surveillance, destruction, and devastation. And we must make it clear that we will never mistake the roar of engines overhead for the promise of peace, whether that is abroad or here.

Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.

The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?

I know, I know. Recently, Donald Trump has been obsessed with water, at least the algae-green water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that he wants to be a beautiful, pristine blue. But consider that an irony indeed, since when it comes to the planet he now oversees, water is going to be a problem and a half, algae or not.

Phew, in fact, I’m already sweating and I’ve just been reading about the heat in Europe right now, a region which has been warming twice as fast as the global average for quite a while. And mind you, I’m thousands of miles away (although still in a distinctly hot New York City about to soon get hotter still)!

If it were me, the headline during Trump’s recent algal week in the news wouldn’t have been in question anywhere on this planet (of ours?). I’m thinking, of course, about the recent days when the mid-June temperature in Paris, France, hit a wild record of nearly 115 (yes, you read that right!) degrees Fahrenheit and it was in the 106-113 degree range across the European continent. From England to Switzerland and Spain, temperature records of a remarkable sort were being set and then set again (and again!).

No one had ever seen anything quite like it. In the third week of June, it was so hot, in fact, that across Europe at least 40 people drowned just trying to stay wet and cool and four toddlers died trapped in overheated cars. And yet, crisis as it might have been, think of it as just the beginning on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. With at least two and a half more years to go of Donald J. Trump, a fossil-fuel maniac of the first order who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” you can count on this planet becoming ever hotter ever sooner. And count on another thing as well: in the coming years, today’s weather and temperature headlines, however disturbing they might seem right now, are likely to prove all too mild.

In short, we humans—Trump in his wildly pro-fossil fuel views and acts being just the most obviously mad of our leaders—are all too literally hard at work heating this planet of “ours” toward the boiling point. Of course, no one should be surprised that this American president has proven to be an arsonist first class, a fossil-fuelized maniac of the first order. (Or do I mean second class and second order, since this is indeed his second time around?)

Once upon a time, in another age, Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency would have been just a sign of the descent of a great imperial power. But on this planet of ours at this very moment, he represents so much more than that with his bizarre urge to further fossilize-fuelize our world in every way imaginable. Think of him, in fact, as the eerie personification of the decline not just of the United States, but potentially of everything. Yes, the works!

And keep in mind that, on this ever-changing planet of ours, the keys to imperial power no longer lie in war, as Trump and crew made all too clear recently in Iran, and Vladimir Putin has made even more strikingly clear in his never-ending war with Ukraine, the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. And, of course, it continues to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere (just as Israel recently did in Gaza and Lebanon). It’s estimated that the first four years of that conflict have indeed already put 311 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

On Planet Earth today, it’s not complicated. No matter who (if anyone) wins any war, everyone loses. Yes, every last one of us from the almost 82-year-old me to—especially—my grandchildren who, barring a genuine surprise, will inherit what could only be thought of as the planet from—yes!—hell.

And that’s why, for the first time in human history, taking up the keys to global imperial power should no longer mean becoming the greatest military powerhouse around, something that—to give its leaders credit—China has grasped in a significant way. Now, don’t get me wrong, China is indeed arming itself in a traditional (if I can even use that word) fashion, including with the nuclear weapons that are the fastest way we humans have discovered to do ourselves in on this planet. But its leaders have also grasped that, as the heat rises ever more radically, the need for green power will only grow in an astounding fashion.

And so, in its imperial rise on this planet, and despite the way it, too, continues to burn coal, oil, and natural gas in a staggering fashion, it’s become the Earth’s great green power. It’s now selling the equipment to produce solar and wind power in a distinctly record fashion globally. As the Guardian reports, “the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth” in 2025 and “clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been trying to ensure that, in our future, the United States will indeed be a lost country on this planet. (Fortunately, he’s been unable to stop the remarkable growth and roll-out of green energy here, too.)

In the meantime, all too sadly, the casualties are rising. And make no mistake, this is indeed war (even if of a different kind than anything we’ve been used to). Under the circumstances, don’t you think it strange indeed that Americans would have elected Donald Trump a second time to be our arsonist-in-chief?

And here’s the thing all of us need to try to grasp: the worst that’s happening right now is nothing compared to what could happen in the years to come. And mind you, nothing makes me sadder than imagining the world my grandchildren may find themselves in when they grow up.

Someday, Donald J. Trump will undoubtedly be remembered as the president from—yes, it’s an all too appropriate and accurate word—hell. He will have been our arsonist-in-chief on a planet that, all too sadly, as in Europe recently and despite everything now being done, could be going to hell in a handbasket.

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.

It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.

McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.

During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).

I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.

So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you.

Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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Writing a column is like sitting atop a large hill, looking down lovingly—and angrily—at the surrounding world, embracing it in a moral perspective and sharing your analysis of what you see. Primarily, this means telling people what’s wrong.

Today, as I climbed up the hill—this is called research—something felt different, troubling. Where I used to feel enthusiasm, I felt hollow: bereft of self-confidence and certainty. I’ve been writing a weekly column for nearly half of my life, first at a local paper in Chicago for 10 years, then the current column, syndicated until recently by the Chicago Tribune, for the last 27 years. What’s going on here?

I was no longer atop that hill. Suddenly I had nothing to say. The doubt I was feeling—that I had anything relevant and valuable to add to our collective grasp of the world—overwhelmed me.

I had decided to write about what I almost always write about... war. Both current and eternal. Indeed, I had begun scrolling the internet, looking for provocative points of view. I googled the words “terrorism vs. waging war,” seeking to learn what I already knew: that the “official” world has declared a distinction between the two terms as definite as the distinction between “evil” and “good.”

Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough.

My first pop-up response was an AI Overview: “Terrorism and waging war differ fundamentally in their targets, legal frameworks, and combatants. Terrorism targets civilians to induce fear for political or ideological goals. Waging war is typically an armed conflict between states or organized groups, where lawful combatants target military objectives.”

Of course, of course. Terrorists represent evil, plain and simple. They kill real people, always for selfish reasons. But war is official. It’s state-sponsored and legal. It’s registered with God, for God’s sake. And while there’s always an evil side—the enemy—the winners, the good guys, are simply doing what they must. Civilization couldn’t have evolved without it. And that’s how we organize history: from one war to the next. This is the official understanding, which we’re spoon-fed as we grow up.

I see beyond this official certainty and have devoted my life to dismantling it. But the AI Overview explanation, seemingly such an easy target for my ruthless analysis, had an unexpected effect. I felt stabbed with a sense of depression so sharp I could hardly move, let alone write. All I could do was go back to bed, cover my head with my pillow, I wanted to hide.

But the emotional pain didn’t stop. It continued piercing me. I got back up. I saw no relief. I was terrified that old age had set in. Oh my God, am I too old to write anymore (a month and a half away from age 80)? I was ready to give up, blow the column off... spend the rest of the day secretly crying.

Instead, I started writing—cluelessly. I had no idea where my words might go. I was no longer atop a hill. I didn’t know where I was. But an awareness started clutching me. What if I were under the rubble right now? What if I had I just learned that my daughter is 12 years old again and the girls’ school she attended in Iran—in Minab—had just been bombed by an American plane?

A hole had suddenly opened in my life. No, those imaginings aren’t real—not for me—but they are for some of us. Perhaps the flow of pain I felt was the realization that opposing war in relative safety is too easy. It’s not enough. And beyond the realization is simply a dark emptiness. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t even cry.

All I can do, right now, is reach deeper into my soul, to bless every human I encounter, and to publicly share the largest cry I can make for change. The cry tears loose from a poem I wrote a decade ago, which I also shared in a column I sent out last December. It’s called “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side:”

I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.

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

Today we discuss:

• As Americans take on a positive view of socialism — and more candidates who embrace that label win elections — Republicans are using a different label: communist. Right-wing influencers and Republicans used the words “communism” or “communist” in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year — a 43 percent increase.

• Two Tennessee National Guard members in Memphis kill Tyrin Johnson, 20, who allegedly turned toward the soldiers with a gun during a downtown pursuit, according to the police.

• American concerns about the targeting of two Iranian peace negotiators — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April. Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility. For many in Israel, it appears inevitable that Trump will re-evaluate Washington’s ties with Israel.

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Congress just passed $70 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond, children have been detained, families separated, and neighbors stopped based on their skin color or spoken language. ICE violence has killed a mother and an ICU nurse, separated more than 100,000 American children from their families, and left people detained in inhumane facilities.

The decision by congressional Republicans to double down on President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda through new funding is not just another attack on our immigrant friends and neighbors, including those who are legal residents, but it is also a direct attack on our public health and healthcare systems.

The tens of billions in additional funding is on top of an unprecedented $170.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $30 billion for ICE and deportation efforts, approved last year under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1)—a law which also slashed more than $1 trillion in federal healthcare funding. These cuts have and will continue to kick people off their healthcare coverage, give Americans fewer options for affordable healthcare, and drive up costs at clinics and hospitals across the country, all while billions of dollars have been funneled into ICE raids and violence that threaten the safety and well-being of immigrants and US citizens alike. All the while, American families are facing an affordability crisis, struggling to make ends meet to pay for essentials like groceries, rent, and healthcare.

Put simply: The White House and their congressional allies are funding ICE’s brutal dragnet operations in our communities by cutting health coverage, defunding clinics, and making it harder to get the healthcare families depend on—and it affects everyone’s health.

What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient.

The divergence of federal dollars away from healthcare and into ICE has led to an influx of poorly trained enforcement agents in our cities, in our airports, and on our streets. The aggressive policing and surveillance of our neighborhoods create an environment of fear, turning our streets, schools, workplaces, and hospitals into places of threat rather than safe community spaces. As a result, community members, including vital immigrant healthcare workers, are staying home, unable to contribute to the economic vitality of our neighborhoods or seek and provide necessary healthcare. In addition, as more people lose health coverage, uninsured patients seeking emergency care results in higher uncompensated care costs, putting financial pressure on health facilities, and forcing them to scale back services for all.

We cannot afford to let ICE enforcement gut the health system we all rely on. What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient. We should all be treated with dignity and be able to safely access healthcare and other neighborhood resources vital for our health and well-being.

A new poll from the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition finds that most Americans agree. Sixty-four percent of Americans disapprove of how ICE is handling their job, and 83% of Americans support access to healthcare and social services for lawfully present immigrants. The data overwhelmingly show that Americans, no matter where they stand politically, believe in and want to protect the humanity of their immigrant neighbors, despite actions from the federal government.

We urge congressional and state leaders to act. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities. Codify sensitive locations protections that prohibit ICE raids or presence at schools, places of worship, hospitals and health centers, and other places that are meant to be safe spaces for everyone. Ban local officials from inquiring about immigration status. Secure our sensitive personal and health data from inappropriate federal access. Make future DHS funding conditional on real oversight and accountability for the families being torn apart, the neighborhoods being destabilized, and the dismantling of the healthcare system we all rely on.

The following invented interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.

Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.

NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.

KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”

NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.

KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots. Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat. As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”

NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.

KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.

NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”

KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.

NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.

KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.

NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.

KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class. On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”

NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?

KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.” And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”

NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.

KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.

NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.

KM: That’s because it’s always true.

As a journalist from the Gaza Strip, I have lived through the conditions of genocide since the first day, and I am still trying to remain just as strong, not for myself, but for the message I believe I was created and born in the Gaza Strip for, a message that goes beyond individual pain to become testimony to an entire era in which the human being is being erased before the world.

We cannot reduce what we have gone through in the Gaza Strip since October 7, until today to a set of phrases or words or even a journalistic article. What we have gone through and are still going through is an entire history that needs to be documented and taught to entire future generations. Our resilience in Gaza is no longer just passing news; it has become a human condition mentioned in international forums, not as an exception, but as a harsh test of the very meaning of humanity itself.

No family in Gaza has gone through this without experiencing displacement, hunger, fear, pain, and loss. All homes in Gaza have been touched by grief, terror, and fear without exception, even those homes that once believed they would be safe. There is no family that has not lived in tents, and has not been burned by the fire of separation, the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the weight of a long waiting that seems endless.

In Gaza, displacement is no longer an emergency event; it has become an entire life lived on the edge. Moving from one place to another is no longer about seeking safety alone, but about a fragile chance to survive. And every time we thought we had reached a "safer place," fear followed us like an ever-present shadow.

Israel in this war has crossed all red lines, not only in the scale of destruction, but in the very nature of targeting itself, and in the insistence on continuing this scene despite its full exposure before the world.

What Israel has done to us, before the eyes and ears of the world and the international community, has made us in Gaza reorder global concepts from the beginning, word by word and meaning by meaning. Silence and complicity have made the question even more painful and profound: What does justice mean? What do international laws mean? And for whom are they written if they do not protect those being crushed before their eyes?

In Gaza, these are no longer philosophical questions; they have become daily questions asked under bombardment, among the rubble, in bread and water lines, and inside tents that protect nothing. We have begun searching for the meaning of the world itself, not merely an explanation of what is happening in it.

Journalists, doctors, ambulance workers, children, civil defense personnel, the elderly, women, and people with Down syndrome… no one has been spared from this occupation. Everyone has been inside the circle of danger, as if life in Gaza has turned into an open target without exception.

In any place in the world, is it permitted to enter hospitals, vandalize them, destroy them, and burn them in front of cameras, and then ask the world to remain silent? In any place are doctors and hospital directors arrested and tried simply for trying to fulfill their humanitarian duty? And in what world are journalists killed, and even targeted in their homes with their families, because they carried a camera instead of a weapon?

Israel in this war has crossed all red lines, not only in the scale of destruction, but in the very nature of targeting itself, and in the insistence on continuing this scene despite its full exposure before the world. And it is still continuing, as if time means nothing, as if pain can be consumed without end.

In the whole world, we had never heard of a child dying of hunger. But Israel did it in Gaza. Hunger here was not a passing feeling, but a collective state seen in faces before words, in eyes before bodies. We walked through the streets barely able to hold ourselves together from the severity of hunger, and children cried day and night from a famine imposed on us, with no choice but patience or collapse.

We complied with their orders and went to the areas they called "humanitarian," and yet we were killed there, and the tents were burned with those inside them. As if the idea of a "refuge" itself was part of the illusion, as if safety was merely a word said in statements, not in reality.

Do you remember the little girl Warda Jalal Al-Sheikh, who appeared amid flames, fire, and bodies after her tent was burned by Israeli shelling, and all her family members were killed, while she tried to survive in an unbearable scene? An image that summarizes what it means for a human being to be born in the heart of fire without choosing it.

Do you remember our colleague journalist Ayman Al-Jadi, who was waiting for his wife in the delivery room to give birth to their child, when Israel killed him while he was waiting, in a moment that was supposed to be the beginning of life, not its end? How can the world comprehend that death has reached even these smallest details?

All of this is not exceptions, but repeated scenes in a time in which exception itself has become survival.

This legendary resilience after 1,000 days of genocide cannot be read as a news item, nor summarized in a report. It must be taught in history books, not only as a sad story, but as an open indictment of the entire world, and as testimony to a people who have not stopped living despite all attempts to erase them.

And in the end, we are still here… trying to write, to bear witness, and to say that what has not yet been told is far more than what has been said.

After Democratic socialists swept the June Democratic primary races, the centrist-controlled Democratic National Committee resorted to its usual tactics. Rather than unifying the party’s progressives and corporate liberals, liberal right-wingers declared the DSA insurgency an emergency that had to be stopped. They claimed—against all the evidence—that voters are in the mood for militant milquetoast moderation.

The post A Deep Thirst for Nothingness appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

After progressives, including self-described Democratic Socialists, won numerous primary victories in New York and elsewhere, President Donald Trump launched a whopper of a lie, even by his crazed standards. He declared that the “communist” Democratic Socialists are “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding…. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.” This comes after his November 2025 White House meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, where Trump praised Mamdani strongly, saying they would work together to make a better New York City.

Trump is singing a different tune now. He is like Senator Joe McCarthy on steroids, who in the 1950s smeared political opponents, activists, and others, falsely accusing them of being communists. Snarling Joe then maliciously exploited the post-war fear of the Soviet Union. Today, Trump is just following in McCarthy’s footsteps by launching his latest BIG LIE yet to firm up his shrinking base of Trumpy MAGA voters.

Look for Trump, an authentic fascist, to dittohead himself on his “communist” tirade. He knows that the pro-Israel, corporate Democrats are distancing themselves from the rising new progressive candidates who, if they’re smart, will make populist domestic demands that are heavily favored in the polls.

These Democratic candidates should push for a much higher minimum wage than the present frozen federal minimum of $7.25 per hour; full Medicare for All; restore corporate and super-wealthy taxation to the levels of the prosperous 60s; crack down on corporate crimes against consumers, workers, and the environment; and adopt the long-time Western European social safety net of childcare, paid worker and family sick leave, and paid vacations. A real child tax credit would cut child poverty nearly in half and would benefit over 60 million children. They should raise the Social Security taxes on upper-income people to pay for raising Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years.

Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.

Candidates should push to cut the bloated military budget, end hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, and direct the savings to public works and safety net services in the community, USA.

These changes have substantial left-right voter support because they are concrete improvements for all families who need and deserve such social benefit returns from the tax dollars they send to Washington.

There are other left-right supported reforms, such as public funding of campaigns; ending the gross, corrupt selling of our elections to the highest toxic profiteering bidders; ending military arms shipments to countries that violate human rights (already federal law but unenforced); and stopping Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, committed with US weapons and unconditional political backing, which violates five federal laws.

All these measures should be integrated into a heavily publicized “Contract for the American People” and turned into a daily vocal call for a commitment to this agenda by these candidates. The class message is that corporations, all created by government charters, should be our servants, not our masters, as the Kleptocratic Trump regime continues to balloon the Trump Dump.

Bolstered by support of such concrete commitments, Trump’s “communist bellowing” will look ridiculous and will be ripe for the sharpest of counterattacks, dragging the GOP’s wreckage out into the open by comparison. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Republicans will be hoisted by their own petard.

The real hurdle to this “Contract for the American People” are the corporate Democrats—indentured to the same Wall Street crowd and military-industrial Empire of war and vast profits. The chief corporate Democrats are the party’s leaders—Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. When asked by a reporter about impeaching Trump (the cruel, corrupt, violent, America-wrecking outlaw, using the White House as corporate-occupied territory to enrich himself), Jeffries replied, “I don’t want to get out ahead of that discussion.” What about getting ahead of Trump’s daily despicable efforts to destroy our democracy and wrecking America?

How about just representing the vast majority of the Democratic voters and about 60% of all polled Americans who think Trump is “a dangerous dictator” and want him impeached and removed from office?

Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.

If Trump does not steal the election with his many voter suppressions, redistricting, and other attempted usurpations of state election controls, he’ll work to paralyze a Democratic-run Congress. Jeffries and Schumer, to preserve their leadership, are susceptible to not rocking the boat and not fiercely rolling back all the Republican Party’s devastating enactments since January 20, 2025.

Let’s see if the incumbent and newly elected progressives know how NOT to marginalize themselves by pushing distractingly marginal ideas instead of showing just how popular the above components of this proposed Contract for the American People are with the voters.

These challenges should also focus on the growing drive for Impeachment around the country, which both Trump, Jeffries, and Schumer oppose (The Hill reports neither Jeffries nor Schumer have endorsed any of the removal efforts)—the latter two enforcing a “Now is not the time” policy. What smug insensitivity to the fears of millions of Americans hurting from Trump’s cruel decrees every day and night NOW!

Jeffries and Schumer are creating their own Achilles heels for emboldening their progressive Democrats to move to replace them in January 2027.

While driving home on June 30, my head nearly exploded as I listened to the evening news. Reporting on a raft of last-minute decisions passed by the Supreme Court in advance of the summer holidays, the SCOTUS correspondent explained that certain contra-Trump statutes barely managed to hold on for dear life while a more substantial pile of pro-Trump agenda items flew through with room to spare. It was the “you win some, you lose some” tone of the report that set my blood boiling. It felt like I was being told that, on the one hand, SCOTUS had cleared the way for the private purchase of thermonuclear weapons over the internet, exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended, but on the other, that such weapons could not (at least for the moment) be purchased by children under 12 without parental consent. So it’s a win for both sides.

It wasn’t as blatantly bad as that, I admit. But the strained attempt to keep things balanced, if only for old time’s sake, was certainly there. Times being what they are now, it did not sit well with me.

But the single most infuriating moment of the report was when the SCOTUS correspondent quoted Chief Justice Roberts defending the 6-3 decision to strike down a 91-year-old precedent that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) other than for reasons of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” In writing for the majority, Roberts argued that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”

It was upon hearing those exact words that my head exploded. Did Chief Justice Roberts actually write what the reporter just claimed he wrote? Could he really have allowed himself to frame the decision in terms of trust?!! The absurdity of the rationale blew my mind. The whole idea of creating multi-member commissions, such as the FTC, as independent agencies in the first place was to ensure that they could be trusted. It is their independence that actually allows the members of the commission to do their work without fear of reprisal. It’s what keeps them from becoming a board of lackeys subservient to the whims of whoever happens to be in power. In a word, the thing that the Supreme Court ruled out by this decision is the one thing that has always allowed us to trust these agencies. Without it, trust disappears.

According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.”

One of the biggest problems in states ruled by autocrats is precisely that: Trust goes missing, becoming a rare commodity desperately sought after, but rarely found. During the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, regional monarchs would invite Cynic philosophers into their courts so that they might have just one person to talk to who could be counted on to tell them the truth. As impoverished beggars, happy in that condition, the Cynics had nothing to gain by lying, nothing to lose by telling the truth. They were independent.

But Chief Justice Roberts would have us believe that he knows better about such things. He and the wiser minds of his Supreme Court treat their legal interpretations as a kind of parlor game played by experts for the sake of theoretical purity and one-upmanship. Like Medieval scholars arguing over how many thorns were in Christ’s crown, they don their robes, play their game, issue their rulings, and retire to their summer homes. Meanwhile, their decisions have consequences in the world outside the parlor that, somehow, aren’t really their concern. No. Their focus is on the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. They are the ones they want to make sure are happy and well cared for by their decisions. They, the long dead, ghosts of their own invention, are the ones that really matter.

In fact, the one non-dead person whom Chief Justice Roberts expressed a keen interest in helping with his decision was just that: one person. The president. Not the demos of our democracy, the voting citizens of this country, to the tune of several hundred million people who are still very much alive. He worried that that one man’s power might be unduly hampered if he were not allowed to fire whomever he wanted for whatever reason. His rationale amounts to a set of quotes from the rule book of a new game that he and his like-minded friends on the court have invented. They play it within his parlor while sipping brandy. It’s called “The Unitary Executive.”

This is a fantasy game, rather like Dungeons and Dragons. In it, the rules of reality outside the parlor, out in the real world, are called off in favor of the rules of the parlor and of the game itself. According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.” It’s all quite wonderful.

To make this game work, Justice Roberts and his parlor friends had to invent an equally fantastical person to do the trusting: a president who has our best interests in mind, one who can always be counted on to act in good faith. This, their game-piece president, is not a vindictive liar, greedy for power. He is a wonderful fiction, good to play with. And so it is that, by relying on the parlor fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power. But not to worry. They assure us that, according to the rules of the game, nothing bad can come of this.

My daddy used to tell me that when you get in a fist fight, you hit them first, and you keep hitting them until they can’t hit you back. It doesn’t go over well these days, in a world that likes its ideologies non-violent, and I’m not telling you to go hit anybody. But it was a good lesson, and it turns out to be good for a lot more than fist fights. It’s how you win in politics, and the Republican Party has understood that for most of my life.

Donald Trump embodies it, violence and all, and it bought him plenty. A trifecta that moves in lockstep behind him. A Supreme Court handing down rulings that anybody who’s read the Constitution can see run against the words and ideas in it. A House and a Senate run by cowards and opportunists unwilling to challenge Trump even on something as clear as who gets to take this country to war. Trump built real power, and he built it by hitting first and never stopping.

I’m not writing this with admiration for what he’s done with the power he accumulated. I’m writing these words because too many of us in this movement balk at building and using power. The fact is that to build a country that works for everyone in it, a country that’s more just and more moral, one that’s actually worth being proud of, we need power. We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world. To the contrary, that’s a reason to describe them better, to plan them better, to build a bigger coalition of people who can carry them. There’s never a reason to fold in a righteous fight.

When you start winning, you push harder. You don’t sit down and you don’t say thank you.

But folding is exactly what we keep doing. Last Tuesday, three candidates Zohran Mamdani backed won their House primaries in New York, an earthquake by any measure. And the same week Lander won big, he pledged his support for Hakeem Jeffries. Friday, AOC followed suit. She’s pledged her loyalty to Hakeem. Why? Jeffries is the establishment. He’s the status quo. He’s the leader that has presided over a party that’s failed to beat Trump. He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump. When you are trying to transform a party you can’t back down.

We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world.

Lander didn’t ask for a single thing. He could at least have borrowed Jeffries’ own lines, the ones Jeffries used when reporters asked whether he’d back Mamdani. “We’re going to have to have a conversation.” “We’ve had productive conversations.” Jeffries promised him nothing and meant to promise nothing, and Lander handed over his support for free anyway. That’s the saddest habit in our movement. Our people give up before the fight even starts.

Whoever wins the House and Senate will decide on the chamber’s leadership. If the Democrats win them both in November, there needs to be a fight over who leads us. If new progressives from around the country are elected they’ve gotta demand leadership that can meet the moment. This is a transformational moment. They can’t just roll over. We need more than strongly worded letters. We need a vision. A leadership that wants a Democratic supermajority not a “strong Republican Party”. When Platner, Kiros, Larkin, Vang, El-Sayed, and the rest win in November, neither they nor we can celebrate and sit back down. That is the precise time we stand up demanding new and competent leadership for this party of ours.

And we ought to be clear about what we’re demanding, not just that we’re done folding. A floor under our votes, in writing. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and shut the door between Congress and the lobbying shops that hire them the day they leave. Say out loud that justices who threw out the plain words of the Constitution should be impeached. Stop arming the IDF and stop paying for a genocide. Build the housing and the energy and the health care at a scale that brings the prices down to where people can actually afford to live. That’s the price of our support for the next leader. Not a letter. Not a hashtag. A list, and the spine to hold to it.

He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump.

People are calling this the Democrats’ Tea Party, and they mean it as an insult. They say the DSA is going to be the Tea Party of the left. Fine. Look at what the Tea Party ultimately created. It led straight to Donald Trump and MAGA, and built the power to take institutions apart, and put questions back on the table that the establishment thought were closed. It did all of that on sheer force of will, carried by a movement that started as the Tea Party and grew into MAGA. We can build that kind of power. The difference is what we use it for.

The Tea Party/MAGA folks are obsessed with tearing things down. Ours is focused on building and investing in the infrastructure that will raise us all up. The new breed of Democrats winning today are talking about creating enough energy and housing and electricity that we can actually afford them. We’re talking about opportunity, and fairness and accountability in the courts, here at home and out in the world. The socialists are talking about a country that stops taking part in genocides, stops arming the IDF, stops being a nation that ships bombs around the world. It’s a movement hell bent on building the future, not destroying the present.

But don’t mistake restorative for gentle. Some institutions are going to have to be rebuilt, and some are going to have to be torn down. The reason DOGE sounded reasonable to so many people is that the MAGA/Tea Party folks were willing to state the truth, that the SEC and the FDA and the FBI had all been captured and need to be transformed. They watched OxyContin pour into their towns. They watched Jeffrey Epstein glide through this country for years like the law didn’t apply to him, because it didn’t. They watched greedy Wall Streeters cheat and loot and destroy the wealth of millions and millions of Americans, and saw that the SEC and Department of Justice didn’t prosecute a single one of these criminals. They knew elections get bought and the FEC did nothing. So when the Democratic leadership tells us that these institutions are sacred and mustn’t be touched it doesn’t resonate. Voters assume you’re either a corrupted liar or a moron. Neither option inspires confidence.

When you start winning, you push harder. You don’t sit down and you don’t say thank you. You hit first, and you keep hitting, and you don’t stop until the people who broke this country can’t break it anymore.

More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.

Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?

The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.

Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.

The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.

In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.

After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.

In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."

By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.

In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.

In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:

In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own country­men, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).

The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected commu­nists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”

The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.

With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.

America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.

The Democratic National Committee's 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled "Build to Win. Build to Last," failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party's old guard. It calls for renewed focus on "Middle America," criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points, but these points alone is not what cost the party so dearly.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable if the interviews were of local party leaders, or general democratic voters? Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Did it account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020 but refused to support Harris in 2024? Where did they go and why?

There was no breakdown of Harris's collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This was not a methodological oversight. This is how the autopsy was engineered. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘Genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza, did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged that this question even existed.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris "was not well prepared"; Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab-American vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy's authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party's youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation—and the base at large—when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer exposing the failure of the DNC autopsy. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters’ regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned, it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When the contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that the finding is edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy's Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it. Fifty-thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voters they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.

Without an honest accounting of the party's failures in 2024, and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-genocide democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.