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Opinion
How to Reach the Working Class in Red-State America
What should be done in places where there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America, or any effort whatsoever to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up for the benefit of working people?
May 15, 2026
When the polls close next November, about half the country will flash red within seconds. That’s because there are more than 130 congressional districts where Democrats lose by 25 points or more.
So, what’s the strategy for changing that?
That question—and why so many of us seem unable or unwilling to answer it—is at the heart of my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.
There are only two options. The first is to dramatically reform the Democratic Party so that it once again speaks to and for working people. The second is to build a new independent party of working people, distinct from the two major parties.
Neither path is easy. But which one actually has a chance?
The road to reforming the Democratic Party is long—and incredibly steep
Take West Virginia. From 1948 to 1964, the state sat safely in the Democratic column. From 1968 through 1992, it swung back and forth. Bill Clinton still won 52 percent there in 1996. But after that, the Democratic vote collapsed—to 30 percent for Biden and 28 percent for Harris.
Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states? There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.
The decline in state politics has been even worse. In 2024, Republicans held all but 11 of the 134 seats in the state legislature. In 49 races, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate.
What happened?
The Democrats came to be seen as the enemy of coal—and therefore the enemy of jobs. Worse still, they offered no serious replacement. Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” which meant the government would no longer create jobs directly. The era of New Deal-style public job creation was over too.
Into that vacuum stepped the private sector, helping turn West Virginia into the opioid capital of America, with the highest overdose death rate in the nation.
So how exactly is anyone supposed to reform the Democratic Party in West Virginia—or in any other deeply red state? It’s not happening. In these places there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America rebuilding the party from the ground up. The reality is that red America is being written off. The progressive strategy now is to win primaries in blue and purple districts.
Build a New Working-Class Independent Movement?
Dan Osborn in Nebraska offers another path.
A former local union president who led a strike against Kellogg, Osborn is now running for Senate for the second time against what he calls the “two-party doom loop.” He lost by six points in 2024 but ran 15 points ahead of Harris. The Democrats did not run a candidate. Now, according to recent polls, he’s in a neck-and-neck race.
It will be an enormous battle. Because he’s running for Senate rather than the House, huge sums of money will pour in to defeat him. But he is still likely to perform far better than Nebraska Democrats—and that tells us something important about how to challenge power in ruby-red America.
Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states?
There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.
In a YouGov survey we conducted of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we asked whether they would support a new “Independent Workers Political Association” (a name we invented) that would back independent candidates outside the two major parties.
We paired the question with a short but strongly progressive platform:
- The right to a job at a living wage, provided by the government if the private sector can’t
- No layoffs at corporations receiving government money
- Raising the minimum wage to a living wage
- Stopping price gouging by pharmaceutical and food companies
Overall, an astonishing 57 percent supported the fictional organization—including 40 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of voters under 30.
When we isolated the most rural voters, we found:
Support for the Independent Workers Political Association
- Rural Republicans — 50%
- Rural Independents — 50%
- Rural Democrats — 77%
None of this guarantees success. Building a new political organization takes time, money, discipline, and enormous commitment. Right now, all we have are a handful of independents running here and there.
What we really need is for major labor unions to test this path seriously.
Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.
These are exactly the questions I take up in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: why the Democrats collapsed across much of working-class America, why independent working-class politics keeps reemerging, and what it would actually take to build durable political power outside the two-party system. If we are serious about progressives competing in red America, we need more than protest votes and nostalgia. We need a strategy.
Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.
But what if we fail?
Let the late Tony Mazzocchi, founder of the Labor Party in the 1990s, faced up to that question:
“I just look at building the Labor Party as something that has got to be done. I think the chances of defeat are greater than the chances of success—appreciably greater… And not to have tried would have been more tragic than to have tried and been defeated.”
The question is no longer whether working people are angry. The question is how best they can build a political home of their own.
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The United States' Long War on Cuba
A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty.
May 15, 2026
In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.
Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.
This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.
The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.
It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.
The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.
So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.
Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire
Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.
The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.
As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”
History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.
In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.
By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.
By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.
The Roots of the Cuban Revolution
Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.
It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around.
Castro’s first revolutionary assault came soon after, with the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Though the attack failed, Castro’s arrest and trial gave him the opportunity to defend not his innocence, but the legitimacy of and need for revolution, delivering a two-hour speech that condemned the island’s entrenched inequalities and the regime that sustained them.
The state imprisoned Castro and his fellow revolutionaries before commuting their sentences under popular pressure in 1955, after which they went into exile. From Mexico, joined by Che Guevara, they began plotting their return to Cuba and the overthrow of the regime. By late 1956, they had landed in Cuba and launched their insurgency from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Just two years later, Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959, carrying with him as much as $300 million in siphoned state funds and ill-gotten gains amassed at the expense of the Cuban people, while leaving behind the ruins of a regime stained with the blood of as many as 20,000 Cubans.
Counterrevolution in the Caribbean
In 1959, the new leadership inherited a desiccated country picked over by the buzzards of foreign capital and a corrupted local elite. The Cuban revolutionaries set out to overcome these conditions and construct a more just social order, one capable of guaranteeing a basic standard of living long denied to the Cuban population through the misappropriation of the island’s wealth and resources.
The earliest measures included agrarian reform, universal education, a national literacy campaign, expanded healthcare, urban reforms that opened pathways to homeownership for working-class Cubans, and anti-discrimination laws aimed at dismantling entrenched racial hierarchies. Crucially for the trajectory of US-Cuban relations, the revolution also nationalized parasitic foreign-owned and privatized industries.
The new Cuban government was initially met with a degree of popular appeal and favorable media coverage in the United States, further amplified by Fidel Castro’s April 1959 visit to the country, during which he sought to explain the revolution to American audiences. While in Washington, Castro even met with Vice President Richard Nixon, but the Eisenhower administration quickly soured on the revolutionary government and soon resolved to see it fail.
The concern was not Cuba itself, but what the revolution might represent. As State Department official J.C. Hill warned that year, “there are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”
By October 1960, that decision had effectively been made with the imposition of a blockade on the island. The logic underpinning this economic declaration of war was made explicit in a memo by State Department official Lester Mallory. Recognizing that Castro retained widespread popular support, Mallory concluded that the most effective means of undermining him was the deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people. The memo called for the denial of “money and supplies” to the island in order to produce “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
In April 1961, Washington escalated its campaign by backing a direct military assault on the island. Yet the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did little to temper the obsession with unseating Castro. In the aftermath, consensus hardened across the Kennedy administration that “US policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” What followed was an expansive campaign of covert warfare involving sabotage, assassination plots, and support for anti-communist exiles.
Among the proposals considered were plans to manufacture consent for military escalation through false provocations. One suggestion was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area… pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States… [which] would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Other proposals called for false flag attacks on the US navy and the shooting down of a civilian airliner that would then be blamed on the Cuban government.
This single-minded fixation did little to advance US objectives. Instead, it pushed Cuba further toward the Soviet Union, which offered the island an economic and political lifeline in the face of Washington’s blockade and escalating campaign of destabilization. It was within this context that Castro declared the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. The relentless threats to the island also fostered a profound and understandable sense of siege within the Cuban government itself.
Ultimately, Washington’s Cuba policy, combined with what Kennedy privately described as the “goddamned dangerous” deployment of US missiles in Turkey, helped create the conditions for the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and revealing the extent to which the US was willing to risk a senseless, largely self-imposed global catastrophe in defense of the maintenance of its empire.
The Persistent “Threat” of Example
Despite this long war against Cuba, the Cuban government and people have not abandoned their revolutionary project. They have continued to build socialism and a new social order toward what Che Guevara described as the construction of “new [people]”: human beings whose motivations, commitments, and social relations are not governed by opportunistic self-interest at the expense of others, but by solidarity and a shared sense of collective humanity.
Cuba has consistently sought to demonstrate this commitment on the world stage. One of Fidel Castro’s earliest acts of foreign policy was the support of those seeking to liberate the Dominican Republic from the brutal US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In the decades that followed, Cuban soldiers and advisers would play major roles in liberation struggles across Africa, including in Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name.
Cuba’s foreign interventions proved especially consequential in the struggle against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Southern Africa. It was this material solidarity that led Nelson Mandela to declare during his 1991 visit to Havana that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa,” traveling to Cuba shortly after his release from prison.
But Cuba’s principal export to the Third World has not been bombs to take lives, as in the case of the United States. It has sent doctors to provide life. Since 1960, Cuba has dispatched more than 600,000 medical professionals to over 160 countries. In doing so, Cuba has advanced not only the principle and practice that healthcare is a human right, but a vision of education and foreign policy rooted in both science and conscience.
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around. It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege. It is not a sponsor of terrorism, but the victim of sustained US aggression.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name. Cuba, like all those confronting US empire, deserves not the “freedom” of the grave that Washington has so often offered the world, but a true freedom rooted in justice, self-determination, and respect for human life and dignity.
We must therefore demand an end to the blockade on Cuba. We must reject any further military escalation. We must call for Cuba’s removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. And we must support the restoration of Cuban sovereignty over the occupied territory at Guantánamo Bay.
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Rep. John Larson vs. the Billionaires: A Battle for Social Security’s Future
Why is a hedge fund billionaire who claims to align with the Democratic Party trying to take out one of the most fierce defenders of Social Security now serving in Congress?
May 15, 2026
Rep. John Larson is the #1 champion of Social Security in the US House of Representatives. Over the last 15 years, he has played a pivotal role in uniting the Democratic caucus against any cuts to Social Security’s modest benefits. Thanks to Larson’s leadership, the vast majority of House Democrats support legislation that protects and expands Social Security, and pays for it by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
That makes him a threat to Wall Street billionaires like Stephen Mandel. Mandel, a hedge fund manager with a net worth of nearly $4 billion, is the main backer of a new group called The Bench. This group, along with the associated Majority Democrats PAC, is pouring millions into electing corporate-friendly Democrats.
Nearly all of the candidates that Mandel’s front groups back are running for either open seats or for seats currently held by Republicans. Often, these candidates are facing off against more progressive Democrats in a primary.
Luckily, the voters who will ultimately decide are looking for a relentless champion to take on Donald Trump and deliver results for Connecticut—not a corporate-funded centrist beholden to billionaire interests.
Of all the candidates endorsed by The Bench, Luke Bronin is the only one to primary an incumbent Democrat. The Democrat that Bronin is challenging? John Larson.
Bronin is a former corporate lawyer and the product of elite institutions like Phillips Exeter Academy. He’s the polar opposite of Larson, who grew up in a public housing project and worked as a High School history teacher before running for office.
Bronin has longstanding ties to the Mandels, which are well known in Connecticut political circles.
Now, the Mandels and other billionaires are backing Bronin’s US House campaign, in hopes of taking out Larson. They know that Larson is working closely with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. If Democrats win control of the US House in November, Larson will bring a bill to protect and expand Social Security to the House floor.
If it becomes law, the Mandels and other billionaires will have to pay their fair share into Social Security, just like the rest of us—instead of only paying in on the first $184,500. That’s what they are most afraid of.
In Connecticut, political parties hold conventions months before the primary, where a small number of party insiders vote on who to endorse. At the recent Connecticut Democratic Party convention, Bronin was able to capitalize on this undemocratic process, which means he will have a higher ballot position in the August primary.
If Democrats win control of the US House in November, Larson will bring a bill to protect and expand Social Security to the House floor.
Luckily, the voters who will ultimately decide are looking for a relentless champion to take on Donald Trump and deliver results for Connecticut—not a corporate-funded centrist beholden to billionaire interests. And, a growing movement of labor, progressives, and local leaders has propelled John Larson to a decisive lead as he prepares for the upcoming August primary.
John Larson is a fighter. He is never more fierce than when he is fighting for the working class against the billionaire class. He will win the Democratic primary, and then the general election, and he will finish his fight to protect and expand Social Security for generations to come.
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Trump’s New 'Counterterrorism' Strategy Is a Sweeping Attack on Domestic Dissent
The administration is using national security as a pretext to target protesters, civil rights groups, and vulnerable communities. Here is how we fight back.
May 15, 2026
On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.
In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.
The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.
This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.
The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.
In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”
These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”
A Sweeping Attack on Dissent
Indeed, the breadth of attacks on protesters, dissenters, and civil rights organizations is overwhelming. A few examples:
- This administration slandered Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists after its own officers shot each of them dead in broad daylight, contravening overwhelming bystander and video evidence.
- Prairieland case: Eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters were convicted of material support for terrorism; raided; and had their flyers, zines, and use of encrypted chats cited in the indictment as evidence of their connection to terrorism.
- “Domestic terrorist” database: In January, an ICE officer told a legal observer, “[W]e have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist." When pressed at a congressional hearing, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons denied that a database of American “domestic terrorists” exists, but in a subsequent hearing, former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny it.
- In late April, federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented violent white supremacists for decades.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
What can we do?
Make noise: Call attention to the harms of this counterterror “strategy.” Its release during congressional recess let it fly under the radar, although Ranking Member of House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted its lack of strategy and called again for a hearing with officials. Other elected officials should likewise take action to condemn this latest attack on dissent, demand transparency about its implementation and adherence to the Constitution, and protect our rights.
Congress also has an immediate opportunity to curb vast surveillance powers enabled by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. Congressional leadership has so far blocked bipartisan efforts to pass a warrant requirement for searches of people in the US, and before accessing our intimate details through data-broker purchases. Lawmakers have until June 12 to enact basic protections for people in the US. This counterterror strategy—along with the recent whispers of its potential use against right-wing dissenters from Trumpism—shows exactly why we must urgently rein in the government's massive counterterror arsenal, starting with 702’s warrantless spy power.
Demand that local governments refuse to cooperate with the federal government, divest and remove surveillance technology, and withdraw from Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s), which deputize local law enforcement to do the feds’ bidding and share information pursuant to its permissive interpretations of federal law.
Collectively, we must continue to demand our rights: to protest, to speak, to commune, and to live free from Big Brother—especially Big Brother with a gun. Remember: The overwhelm we feel isn’t an accident; it’s tactical. Refuse to allow the administration’s intimidation tactics to succeed. Our mass, unapologetic refusal to comply, is what’s truly “delicious.”
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