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Opinion
Vote to Check Trump's Power—Then Demand Victorious Dems Follow Through
Of all the accountability tools that will be available should the Democrats prevail on November 3, impeachment and court reform stand out as the most powerful.
Nov 01, 2026
It’s not enough for the Democrats to win the midterms. Whether they take back one or both chambers of Congress, their overriding objective must be to cripple the remainder of Donald Trump’s presidency and dismantle the MAGA movement he leads. Holding Trump and his key enablers to account for their lawlessness and corruption will be the standard for success. Without accountability, there will be no justice and no end to the growing threat of fascism in America.
Of all the accountability tools that will be available should the Democrats prevail on November 3, impeachment and court reform stand out as the most powerful. Both are implicitly on the midterm ballot, and while neither is a magic bullet for checking Trumpism, they can and must be deployed far more aggressively and urgently than in the past.
The road ahead won’t be easy, but the party may never get another opportunity.
Impeachment
The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, has made it all but impossible to hold Trump accountable through ordinary criminal prosecutions. As legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has noted, Roberts’ opinion contains language that “suggests the president cannot even be investigated for his official actions,” much less indicted.
But the immunity ruling in no way undermines Congress’ impeachment powers. Even Trump’s lead lawyer in the case—D. John Sauer, now the administration’s solicitor general—acknowledged the broad scope of the impeachment power, contending that the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgment Clause (Article I, Section 3, Clause 7) requires that a president be impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate before being prosecuted criminally. Although the court rejected Sauer’s prerequisite argument, it recognized, consistent with the views of the Founders, that impeachment is a political process separate and apart from criminal prosecutions.
As Trump’s lawlessness and corruption have become more brazen and unrestrained, appeals for a third impeachment are mounting. In early October, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of editorials and op-eds calling on Congress to act in response to the president’s unconstitutional military operations in Iran and elsewhere; his attacks on judges, journalists, law firms, and political opponents; his threats to execute members of Congress; his reckless deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; his inhumane mass deportations and detentions; his assault on birthright citizenship; and his use of the presidency for base self-enrichment, among myriad other “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
As Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein put it in their contribution to the Inquirer series, “Trump has turned the Constitution into a museum piece and claimed the infinite unchecked power of a dictator.” In their view, the “doubting Thomases who dismiss” a third impeachment are turning a blind eye to Trump’s “litany” of derelictions.
Even if conviction in the Senate is unlikely, the process itself has enormous value. Writing for LawFare in 2021 at the outset of Trump’s second impeachment trial, Princeton University political science professor Keith Whittington explained:
[R]emoval and disqualification are not the sole purposes of the impeachment clause. The impeachment process is a “grand inquest” in the sense that it is congressional oversight on steroids. The impeachment power gives the first, most democratic branch of the government the ability to scrutinize the actions of individuals in the other branches of government and call them to account for their actions… What’s more, the impeachment process serves as a warning to future officeholders.
There is also no reason for the Democrats to limit impeachment proceedings to the president. The vice president and all civil officers of the United States, including the justices of the Supreme Court, will all be fair game. Aware of his exposure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly eyeing a Senate seat in Tennessee, hoping that if Marsha Blackburn becomes the state’s next governor, she will appoint him to fill her vacant seat, as senators are not considered civil officers of the US.
Many Trump aides are also reportedly seeking pardons to protect themselves from future federal criminal charges. Trump has expressed a willingness to comply, but the Constitution is very clear that the pardon power does not extend to cases of impeachment.
With the midterm elections behind them and an electoral base demanding action, we could see not one but multiple impeachment inquiries in the House—and, later, trials in the Senate—aimed at airing the facts of the Trump administration’s malfeasance for all the world to see, and serving as a catalyst for legislation to prevent another Trump-like tyrant from rising in the future.
Court Reform
John Roberts and his Republican confederates have issued a blistering succession of reactionary majority opinions, not only on presidential immunity, but also on voting rights, gerrymandering, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, gun control, abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, the use of dark money in politics, and equality for LGBTQ+ people, to cite just a few of the worst.
Reversing the tide and restoring our rights will require court reform. And while the most far-reaching reforms—such as more justices and term limits—will have to wait until the election of a Democratic president, a new Democratic Senate majority will be able to immediately block the confirmation of any pending or future Trump judicial nominees.
Clarence Thomas, 78, and Samuel Alito, 76, are the Supreme Court’s oldest members. Both are far beyond their salad days, and Alito has said that he is considering retirement before Trump leaves office. If either or both step aside while the Republicans hold the Senate, Trump will undoubtedly replace them with younger and possibly even more extreme jurists, such as James Ho of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, or the obsequious Florida US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who killed the Mar-a-Lago documents case. If the Democrats retake the upper chamber, the two senior justices will likely hang on as long as they can, but neither will outlast the term of the next Democratic president, who can replace them with liberals.
The outlook for the lower federal courts, where the vast majority of cases are decided, is even more favorable. A Democratic Senate majority should mean the end to new Trump judges anywhere in the country.
Where We Come In
Nothing is certain in politics, and it is entirely possible that the Democrats, once back in the majority, will try to mend fences with their MAGA adversaries in a futile attempt to restore the status quo ante Trump.
This is where we come in.
Voting is essential, but it cannot be the end of our political engagement. After the midterms, and throughout the run-up to 2028, we will need to keep the pressure on. We cannot allow the Democrats to chicken out, as they have so often in the past. There can be no more Biden nice guys, and no more Merrick Garlands. We have seen that movie before, and it isn’t worth a sequel.
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Rape as a Tool of Empire: Cornell, Palestine, and the Silence of Western Feminists
Just because a woman is brown and Muslim, or just because the man being abused is Palestinian, does not mean their pain should be ignored by the mainstream feminists of today.
Nov 01, 2026
I came across a tweet recently that reads: "Reminder that rape is used a weapon of war on a regular basis because it is one of the most demoralizing, terrifying, and life-changingly traumatic things that can happen to a human being."
This post was in light of the gruesome sexual assault case coming out of Cornell University, and it really stuck with me. I've spent the past few years reading and talking about the experiences of Palestinians as they face every kind of abuse from Israeli soldiers and settlers. It is not lost on me that the vehicles used by the patriarchy to suppress women, like rape, are unfortunately present in every aspect of our society—the same society that has manufactured consent for a genocide in Palestine. From college campuses to Palestine, we are seeing sexual and gendered violence being intentionally used to strip human beings down to the barest parts of themselves.
It is this system of imperial patriarchy that cultivates a world in which two situations are allowed to occur simultaneously: A college girl can be drugged and sexually assaulted for seven hours, and women and men in Palestine can have their bodily autonomy ripped away from them as a tool of genocide. In both cases, the victims have been dehumanized by the outside world to such an extent that they are now an other.
Israel is committing one of the world's greatest acts against feminism right now: dehumanizing Palestinians, men and women both, to such an extreme degree that they are seen as disposable cattle to Israeli soldiers and settlers.
And in both cases, their perpetrators and assailants can leave the crime scene unscathed, with their hands clean.
This summer, the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) released a report on the harrowing sexual and gendered violence Palestinians have faced during 70-plus years of occupation, and increasingly so in the past three years of accelerated genocide. Israel has always treated its military personnel and settlers with impunity, allowing them free rein to sexually torture Palestinians. With extensive evidence, the report concludes that Israel systemically uses sexual violence as a method of genocide.
The stories that are recounted in "A Predatory State," by both Palestinian men and women, are absolutely terrifying. When read all together, the pattern is plain and clear: Israeli soldiers and personnel operate within a dynamic of power where they believe they have complete authority over another human being. This results in gruesome and grotesque behaviors like sexual coercion, assault, harassment, and even enslavement. Palestinians are subjected to these abuses any time Israelis show up to steal their homes, massacre them, and round them up in mass-imprisonment campaigns.
I think of my family members who have lived in Palestine for generations. What have they experienced? What kind of trauma runs through my veins right now, as I am writing this? It is terrifying to know that as a woman in this world, the threat of sexual assault is always there. In Palestine, you can't really avoid it when the perpetrators are at every checkpoint, storming into your house at night, encroaching on your backyards with their illegal settlements, guarding the prisons, and just being everywhere all at once. It's not a matter of if but a matter of when. It also isn't a matter of man or woman, because in reality it happens to both. In a culture that holds modesty as a core value, I can only imagine the emotional and socioeconomic toll sexual violence takes on Palestinian people and their families.
Bell hooks defines feminism as "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” I would think anyone would see this situation and resonate with it as a feminist issue. The ideology is not selective, nor is it performative; it's supposed to be something whole and intersectional. Feminism in practice should advocate for every person affected by the oppressive structures of patriarchy. That being said, you would be surprised at how many feminist and women's organizations act otherwise.
The Western feminist space has become one where optics are the only thing that matters. These "feminist" organizations operate as an institution for the institution, yet they brand themselves as global caregivers fighting for gender equality. In reality, they are the fruition of neoliberal co-optation of actual revolutionary ideas. That is why they deem Palestinians as nonhuman, consistently failing to speak up about the sexual and gendered violence they face in genocide. Palestine is too revolutionary for them.
Reading through PFC's report and then researching some of the most influential women's organizations—who have either never said a word about Palestine, despite their decades of existence, or issued a few measly statements here and there—was a painful process. The first target we had identified at CODEPINK was the Center for Reproductive Rights. This global legal organization upholds reproductive and sexual rights for women, not only in courts but also through consultations with other human rights organizations. They are active worldwide, fighting for reproductive and sexual health as a basic human right from the US to Africa to Asia—but somehow Palestine is missing from their picture.
In Palestine, women are facing a maternal health crisis with hardly any functioning hospitals, dangerous sanitation levels, and an overall stressful quality of life. A report was recently published highlighting the unprecedented rise of miscarriages in Gaza under Israel's blockade. In 2022, Gaza reported 57,000 births. In 2024, just one year after Israel's genocidal campaign began, the birth rate in Gaza dropped to a staggering 38,000. Then, from December 2025 to April 2026, in the span of just six months, birth rates in Gaza declined by 67%.
This seems like something the Center for Reproductive Rights should absolutely make noise about, but every single one of our attempts to speak to them has been blocked and ignored. When you look at their board and staff, the answer is pretty clear. When you have an organization run by a culmination of ex-CIA operatives, presidential campaign officials, and venture capitalists, Palestine seems to be the antithesis of the "values" they ascribe to, and the "feminism" they follow.
Israel is committing one of the world's greatest acts against feminism right now: dehumanizing Palestinians, men and women both, to such an extreme degree that they are seen as disposable cattle to Israeli soldiers and settlers. Yet, that does not concern the self-prescribed feminists who work for the state and war economy that is aiding and abetting this tragedy.
I leave Nawal El Saadawi's quote here as a reminder that liberal, white feminism does not seek true liberation for all those the patriarchy oppresses. Just because a woman is brown and Muslim, or just because the man being abused is Palestinian, does not mean their pain should be ignored by the mainstream feminists of today. Feminism is intersectional and whole, and it is beautiful that way. These organizations' hypocrisy in the face of injustice is a horrible stain on the feminist movement. I wish nothing more than for all of us to stand together as women subjected to struggle and scorn against the colonial powers of this world.
“Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men.”―Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World
The US National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), by texting "START" to 88788, or through chat at thehotline.org. RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or by texting "HOPE" to 64673. Both offer 24/7, free, and confidential support. DomesticShelters.org has a list of global and national resources.
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Centrist Dems Dismiss the Progressive Wave at Their Peril
In the coming months, Hakeem Jeffries and others like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville may discover a growing canyon between their direction for the party and a Democratic base increasingly friendly to democratic socialism and impassioned for Medicare for All.
Nov 01, 2026
The energy and votes unleashed this year by the insurgent new left of the Democratic Party would surely be welcomed by the Dems’ leadership after a long hangover from 2024 and setbacks at the hands of President Donald Trump, right?
Not exactly. These developments are viewed as anything but good news by many members of the party elite. Hakeen Jeffries (NY), in line to become Speaker of the House if Democrats prevail November 3, refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani last year even after he won the Democratic Party nomination in New York City. In Michigan, Jeffries had endorsed Senate candidate Haley Stevens, a big recipient of American Israel Political Action Committee (Jeffries himself has been a beneficiary of AIPAC), over the staunchly progressive Abdul El-Sayed, who won the primary. These choices were consistent with Jeffries’ history of hostility to progressives in the Democratic Party.
Over the last year, primary victories by progressives have given Jeffries much more to worry about. While there has been a general growing upsurge in support for Democratic candidates, much of the drive has been fueled by the left wing of the party. The Democrats have witnessed something of a rebirth charged by youthful, notably progressive momentum . While Democrats including moderates have gained ground in both special elections and primaries, the electoral strength of left-wing candidates has become a growing trend. From the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in 2025 to primary and special-election victories won by avowedly left-of center candidates this year, there is now a significant activated progressive core within the Democratic Party.
But Carville is correct on one point: Jeffries will encounter resistance from new House members wary that he will deeply alienate the electorate with tepid reforms that fail to produce tangible improvements in voters’ lives.
A number of the candidates are closely affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), others are independent progressives, and a much larger number are firmly committed to fighting for a Medicare for All healthcare plan. This trend reflects a broader, momentous shift to the left within the Democratic base. Democratic socialists make up only a minority, but they have earned a recognized place in the party. Recent polls from CBS News and The New York Times found that roughly 58-66% of Democrats view socialism positively, with that number rising to 70% in a ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted this month. CBS News polling revealed about 60% of Democrats favor a mix of socialism and capitalism.
But evidence of this relatively recent turn in the outlook of the Democratic base is only perceived as deeply disturbing by Jeffries and others like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, an influential Democratic strategist. Fittingly, Jeffries’ statement on democratic socialism and presumably DSA in particular projected no welcoming for an energetic, youthful element of the party: “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” In this comment, Jeffries deploys a trope that DSA-backed candidates are somehow “hard-left” extremists fixed on espousing far-out symbolic views rather than winning substantial reforms at every level of government. In fact, the DSA-affiliated candidates and officeholders are pursuing broadly-shared progressive aims like taxing billionaires, sharply raising the minimum wage, providing universal childcare, and legislating a Medicare for All healthcare system.
On Medicare for All, Jeffries’ evident lack of support places him far outside the Democratic mainstream. At a 78% level of support, the base of the Democratic Party ardently backs a Medicare for All system that would largely replace large insurance corporations with a government-administered system as in Canada. A national Data for Progress survey found 65% of all voters support a Medicare for All system, including 71% of independents, and 49% of Republicans.
For the next Congress, Jeffries will be swimming against the tide on Medicare for All, as it is all but certain to become a pressing issue in the face of rising public concern over healthcare, which is already one of voters’ top affordability concerns and will become more sharply climbing as employers are aggressively thrusting rising insurance premiums back onto workers. Further, major cuts in Medicaid are already creating enormous stress for those otherwise lacking conventional insurance, and these reductions will intensify in 2027 when they come fully into effect.
At the same time, Medicare for All is gaining credibility as an alternative to the status quo. An important Yale study calculates that Medicare for All would save the US $1 trillion per year. Further, Medicare for All would save an estimated 114, 000 lives annually as the 27 million currently uninsured finally gain timely access to care.
Former Chicago mayor and diplomat Emanuel, a potential 2028 presidential contender, is another leading force who characterizes DSA and progressives as extreme and fiercely opposes Medicare for All. He told MS NOW that he believes that DSA simply has no place in the Democratic Party.
Emanuel, like Jeffries and several other figures in the Democratic establishment, caricatures DSA based on the most fanciful elements of DSA’s official long-term “agenda.” But that agenda is almost uniformly ignored by DSA officeholders, candidates, and local chapters alike. Still, Emanuel spotlights.impossible-to-achieve points on the agenda (e.g., abolishing the police and prisons) while ignoring the actual work of DSA conducted by officeholders like Mamdani, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and many others, and DSA chapters across the nation working on the minimum wage, taxation of billionaires, and well-funded public services—an agenda far different from Emanuel’s fixation on the much-derided sweeping privatization of services and sell-off of resources while mayor of Chicago.
Emanuel, who dismissed DSA on MSNOW TV as "an Ivy League seminar,” in reality seems less troubled by DSA’s meaningless long-term “agenda” than the more concrete programs that a new band of left-wing members will bring to the next session. Emanuel, for example, is singularly focused on repudiating the idea of Medicare for All legislation, which will gain a substantial influx of support if progressive candidates prevail in the midterms.
But the most ferocious voice excoriating the Democrats’ Left has been Carville, the long-time Democratic strategist. Carville describes DSA and the progressives as “over-educated little white turds,” conveniently ignoring the high-profile people of color within the progressive coalition, including, for example, Latina primary winners for the House from New York and a new House member from New Jersey. Carville has been unwilling to acknowledge the prominence of people of color in the democratic socialist camp, like Mamdani; Ocasio-Cortez; recently-elected US Rep. Analilia Mejia of New Jersey; and House candidates Melat Kiros of Colorado, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City, and Donavan McKinney in Michigan, the last two defeating entrenched incumbents in their primaries.
Escalating his attempts to alienate Blacks from DSA and the left wing of the party, Carville lashed out at DSA, claiming, “They think that Lenin was a more glorious human being than Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass. That's what they really think.” Of course, Carville somehow manages to overlook the fact that King himself considered himself a democratic socialist, as did other key Black giants like A. Phillip Randolph.
But nothing tops Carville’s comment earlier this month in which he actually expresses more fear of DSA and the left than having far-right Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) continuing in his post. The searing hostility of Carville toward the Democrats’ left was evident in The Bulwark Takes podcast: "I would be disappointed if it [the midterms] comes in at 225 House seats. And that would almost be—I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats win by five because if that happens, they're hostage to the DSA," Carville said. "Like Hakeem cannot move. There's no place for him to go." Whether meant even partly in jest, Carville displayed the venom gathering against the left electoral successes.
But Carville is correct on one point: Jeffries will encounter resistance from new House members wary that he will deeply alienate the electorate with tepid reforms that fail to produce tangible improvements in voters’ lives. Media accounts report that Jeffries has no visible challengers to becoming speaker, but he will surely face battles both with increasingly progressive Democrats in Congress and the party base to which they are giving a new voice. “He [Jeffries] needs all of our votes to be speaker,” Chris Rabb, the DSA-backed Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s third congressional district, pointedly told The New York Times.
Jeffries has cloaked his conventional centrist politics as simply representing a majority of Democratic voters, while feeling free to lash out at progressives critical of “corporate” members of Congress whose policies align closely with their donors in corporate America: “The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls."
But in the coming months, Jeffries and others like Emanuel and Carville may discover a growing canyon between their direction for the party and a Democratic base increasingly friendly to democratic socialism and impassioned for Medicare for All. Some in the establishment set may be preparing themselves for a battle with the marginal “white turds,” but not a significantly shifting “mainstream” of the party seeking the fighting spirit and visionary reforms offered by the party’s left.
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Is The New York Times Helping Trump Steal an Alaska Senate Race?
When Trump's DOJ filed a potentially election-blocking lawsuit over the fact that there were two Dan Sullivans running as Alaska Republicans, the Times put its investigative efforts not into Trump’s threat to democracy, but into attempting to document that he might have a point.
Nov 01, 2026
We don’t know if there was a second gunman involved in the JFK assassination in Dallas. We do know that there is a second Dan Sullivan running for US Senate in Alaska.
Can you believe it? Two Dan Sullivans? In Alaska? The New York Times is on it.
Dan S. Sullivan is a Republican representing Alaska in the US Senate, facing a strong challenge from former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. Her viability in the race is worrying the GOP about the midterms generally—while also, as a pro-oil Democrat, encouraging those in her party who fear it’s moving too far to the left (Politico, 10/28/26).
People outside the snowy state learned about the existence of another Republican on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.—the state has a multi-candidate ranked-choice system—when President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice, as ABC News (10/23/26) reported:
to preemptively file a lawsuit to try to block the certification of the crucial Alaska Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, citing name confusion among the candidates.
This struck many as a sign, as Time (10/28/26) put it, “that the midterm elections could face unprecedented interference by federal authorities.” The last time Trump won a major election, he instigated an insurrection to try to block certification of his opponent’s victory. His threat to annul the voting result in Alaska suggested that he was going to similarly reject the results of the 2026 midterms.
But The New York Times put its investigative efforts, not into Trump’s threat to democracy, but into attempting to document that he might have a point.
‘To Coax Other Would-Be Spoilers’
The New York Times produced an in-depth report (10/28/26) headlined “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot.” The subhead: “Operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.”
The meat of the piece, by Times political reporter Kellen Browning, was this:
The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in [Daniel J. Sullivan’s] candidacy. But the Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.
Anyone who follows US elections closely knows that spoilers are a part of politics. Sometimes campaigns will quietly help third-party candidates from the opposite end of the political spectrum in hopes that they’ll siphon votes from their major rival (Fortune, 9/2/24). And other times they recruit candidates with a look-alike name in hopes that some voters will check the box next to the wrong candidate.
According to Ballotpedia, “28 states had at least one 2026 race between candidates that share the same last name.” In 1998, who did Georgia Republicans find to challenge civil rights hero and then-Democratic Rep. John Lewis? Another guy named John Lewis.
The Brookings Institution (10/28/26) recalled when John F. Kennedy first ran for Congress:
One of Kennedy’s opponents was an Italian-American Boston city councilor named Joe Russo. Kennedy’s father, Joe, set about to confuse voters by allegedly paying another Joe Russo, a janitor with no political experience, to run on the primary ballot as well—in hopes of splitting the Italian vote. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to get the other Joe Russo into the race—Kennedy won the primary by a large margin.
‘Common in Politics’
While not a particularly honorable campaign tactic, recruiting a candidate with a confusing name is not a crime. In fact, The New York Times admits:
Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal—and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.
So these tactics are “common,” and “legal,” but also reveal “the lengths” Democrats are willing to go to win a historic midterm election? Common, legal lengths?
The paper also said that “Alaska’s voting system makes it especially easy to add spoilers to the ballot,” which “allowed Mr. Sullivan of Petersburg, a longtime supporter of Ms. Peltola and other Democrats, to land a spot on” the ballot. It continued, “Republicans have also taken advantage of this system,” noting that when Peltola “ran for re-election to the House two years ago, the state Republican Party backed an effort to help a Democrat—an inmate who ran his campaign from a New York prison—stay on the ballot.”
While the article does lay out the drama of how Democrats seized an opportunity to make the election messier for the incumbent, the Times doesn’t ever make a case that Democrats broke the law.
‘Liberal Shrieks Fading Now’
You know what is a crime? Annulling an election so that the candidate who wins the most votes can’t take office. Though Trump administration officials had already announced an intent to commit that crime, The New York Times report seemed tailor-made to abet their efforts.
Predictably, Republicans seized on the Times investigation to lend legitimacy to Trump’s election-threatening efforts. Trump himself called for Peltola “to drop out of the race and be criminally prosecuted,” the New York Post (10/28/26) reported; it quoted the president, “They said they didn’t do it, and they did do it, and they got caught.” The tabloid explained:
Top aides of Peltola were behind the recruitment effort, The New York Times reported. She had originally denied any involvement, but Wednesday’s shock report revealed she was “definitely aware” of the scheme.
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel (10/28/26) explicitly cited the Times report as an after-the-fact justification for Trump’s election-nullification plan:
When the Justice Department sued Alaska over its manipulated Senate ballot, liberal shrieks could initially be heard up to the Arctic. They’re fading now, after The New York Times on Wednesday published evidence that Democrats rigged Alaska’s ranked-choice ballot with a decoy candidate who threatens to deny Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan re-election.
The National Review‘s Michael A. Fragoso (10/28/26) also relied on the “bombshell New York Times report” to bolster his argument that the recruiting a same-named candidate was “different from lawful trickery.” The second Sullivan, Fragoso argued, is “designed to take voters who intend to vote for the incumbent and trick them into not doing so even though they want to.”
Tell that to Florida Democratic voters who were deceived into voting for Pat Buchanan for president with maldesigned ballots in 2000, an incident that helped usher George W. Bush into the White House without a popular mandate (American Political Science Review, 12/01).
‘Disturbing New Evidence’
The New York Times investigation prompted state officials as well as the feds to target Peltola (AP, 10/29/26). Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, announced that he had ordered an investigation into whether Peltola should face civil or criminal penalties, saying that the Times report
reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates—including one with the same name as an incumbent US senator—to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes.
Times editors had to have known that this article would be a gift to an administration that claims Democratic wins are not legitimate, and that the very notion of Republican losses can only be explained by complicated election rigging rather than not getting enough votes (New York Times, 8/20/26, 10/17/26, 10/25/26, 10/27/26, 10/27/26).
If the Times had found potential wrongdoing by Alaska Democrats, that would have been a necessary story for readers. This, however, is a long-read about the usual shenanigans of US electoral politics. It doesn’t add to our understanding of politics, nor is it especially damning in the bigger context.
It is mildly entertaining, for sure, but the biggest impact this investigation will have is providing more justification for an authoritarian administration that already has plans in place to shut down democratic outcomes.
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Will the AI Bubble Burst in the Face of the Working Class?
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
Nov 01, 2026
The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.
Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: Their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40% in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.
Their robotics company Unitree's IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:
And now we see the bubble bursting.
The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27% of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public, they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.
Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly 1% of American GDP, all in just one single day.
While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.
Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time—and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most—the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.
Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news with an article titled and subtitled:
The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.
Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:
Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors—14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip—with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.
A data center—a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigawatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling—replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.
Meanwhile, multiple companies have rolled out AI products that can run on a desktop PC, eliminating the need for data centers altogether. Perplexity introduced one just last month with the headline:
Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac.
Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?
Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built—if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites—will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Ronald Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.
It sure looks like we’re seeing a repeat of previous bubbles and bursts ranging from Dutch tulips to the 19th century railroads to this century’s dot-com and home mortgage collapses. And the people running the show seem just fine with creating a world where the rich get mindbogglingly richer while working people and 401k investors are out on the street.
JD Vance’s sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Marc Andreesen, the billionaire who helped Elon recruit young men for DOGE to take apart our government, complained on a podcast this year that government workers have both civil service protections and public-sector unions, giving them “two layers of insulation against ever getting fired.”
Unions, of course, are actual democracy in the workplace that generations of workers have literally fought and died for, but these guys don’t seem to appreciate or even understand that.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a 2021 essay that as AI advances, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” His warning points out how easily AI could dramatically increase the power of people who own businesses and tech while gutting the bargaining power of people who work for a living.
And, indeed, that’s already happening. Like Microsoft this week, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October, all after CEO Andy Jassy warned his employees that AI would “reduce our total corporate workforce.” One AI-related layoff tracker counts nearly 119,000 layoffs so far this year tied explicitly to AI automation, roughly four and a half times last year’s total.
And now the robotics business is exploding, with AI built into local machines that can assemble cars, sew clothing, clean streets, and drive you around town. It’s opened an entirely new industry: outfitting humans with sensors to track their movements to train robots to replace them.
So, if machines replace our workers, who’s going to have enough money to buy the goods and services the machines are putting out?
I grew up in a union family; my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, Michigan and was able to raise four boys with a three-bedroom home, a new car every few years, and had a decent retirement. Henry Ford increased his workers’ pay so they’d be able to buy the cars they were making.
This isn’t rocket science. Workers are also customers, taxpayers, homeowners, and parents; they’re the ultimate economic base of their communities. If AI destroys their purchasing power, we’re gnawing away at the foundation of America’s historic economic greatness.
We’ve seen versions of this before.
Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry leading to predatory behavior that produced a massive crash; it cost taxpayers over $100 billion to clean up the mess (a trillion in today’s money). But Reagan also sent those banksters to prison: His regulators made more than 30,000 criminal referrals to the Justice Department, which won more than 1,000 felony convictions.
Since then, times have changed; it appears that the morbidly rich have acquired near-total immunity, no matter how badly they screw up things, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires and corporations owning judges and politicians.
Congress and Bill Clinton deregulated our banks in the late 1990s and the bill came due in 2008 when it all fell apart and millions of Americans lost their homes, families watched retirement accounts evaporate, and workers who’d done absolutely nothing wrong lost their livelihoods.
Nepo-baby George W. Bush chose to hold nobody accountable, and even let the banksters keep their billion-dollar bonuses pulled out just before all the dominoes collapsed. He made zero criminal referrals against the big banks, in a crisis that was 70 times larger than Reagan’s S&L mess.
It appears that the AI gods tech bros think that’s the new normal and are betting on getting the same or better from the Trump regime. After all, in his first term he put “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, who’d thrown an estimated 36,000 Californians out of their homes during the 2008 crash, in charge of the entire economy as Treasury Secretary.
And this time the stakes are even larger than the banking system’s freeze-up; AI is now deeply entangled with America’s military, intelligence agencies, national security infrastructure, and the rivalry with China.
And in their arrogance, they’re saying the quiet part out loud: Last November, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told a Wall Street Journal conference that her company wanted a federal “backstop” for the financing behind its data centers. When a reporter asked whether she meant a government guarantee, she answered, “Exactly.”
And pouring gasoline on this particular bonfire, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill lets these companies write off the full cost of their data center hardware the year they buy it rather than the normal depreciation schedules every other industry in America has to stick to.
Perhaps that’s because the Trump family is so well-invested now in this, and he’s depending on tech bro billions to keep Republicans in office; Elon alone is spending almost a half-billion so far this year to that end.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are already paying. Residential electricity prices rose 6.9% last year, more than double the inflation rate, and Goldman Sachs’ analysts say they expect data centers to drive a massive 40% of electricity demand growth through the end of the decade.
The 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwest states have been hit with $23 billion in consumer electricity price increases through at least 2028, driven by AI data centers. A homeowner in Manassas, Virginia opened a $281 electric bill in January, up from about $100 the month before.
If today’s boom goes bust, who’s going to be left stuck with the bills for the half-built transmission lines, data centers, and power plants? Apparently it won’t be the morbidly rich tech bro masters of the universe, any more than it was Bush’s billionaire bankers.
None of this is to diminish the power and importance of AI. But the internet was real, too, and look what happened in the 1999-2002 period when that industry took down people’s retirement accounts while creating billionaires out of Zuck, Bezos, and Gates.
In 1983, Reagan instructed his Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commision to stop enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust and other anti-monopoly laws, leading to a decade of “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” as was documented in Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” movie, Wall Street.
Add that to Reagan decriminalizing share buybacks and you have the perfect storm of perverse incentives that end up with doors falling off airplanes, workers and communities being screwed, and a new low standard of crappy customer service—all fed by a lack of competition. And we see that consolidation now happening in AI.
This is what happens when the people who own the machines accumulate more economic—and, thus, political—power than the people who depend on wages. It’s the old question: “Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the small number of mostly white men who control the economy?”
The AI revolution is going to force that debate back into the open.
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
If that happens, we need to be ready to force the issue of the concentration of wealth and power that grew up around it. We failed with the internet giants in 2000 and the banksters in 2008. We need to prepare—politically and economically—for the next cycle of boom and bust that’s increasingly seeming inevitable.
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Protest and Social Change in Europe: Can Students Shift Budget Priorities?
The banging of war drums in France and the student protests there for better schools bring to the fore the class interests of the rulers and the ruled.
Nov 01, 2026
A recent Al Jazeera piece entitled, “Can Protests in Europe Bring About Change?” is instructive. A guest from academia shared a key assumption behind the budget priorities of the Macron government in France, as high school students protested for improved learning and teaching conditions, amid a drop in living standards; the affordability crisis of rising fuel, food, and rent prices; and stagnating wages.
The economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism for the poor and working classes, with youth protesters pushing back against this order, is playing out in the streets of Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, along with Albania and Serbia (non-European Union nations). Back to “Can protests in Europe bring about change?” Rainbow Murray, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, stated in the Al Jazeera piece that there are obstacles to the French government increasing its investments in public services such as education.
Why? The professor cited Russia's threat to France. The corporate and upper class control of the national government is not a threat to the working class majority, apparently.
The political donor class in France’s private sector benefits from Macron's budget priorities. High school students and their teachers don’t benefit. This contradiction seeks a resolution, one that is impossible to predict.
That ideology serves the economic interests of a tiny minority against a laboring many across neoliberal capitalist governments in the Global North. EU student protests for more government spending on public services such as education have no parallel in the US. American student protests that have come the closest to the French uprising have been walkouts against school shootings, such as the recent one in Bend, Oregon.
In the meantime, France is stepping up military spending to defend against apparent threats from Russia, despite or because of its war with Ukraine. President Emmanuel Macron has called for French rearmament to accelerate, doubling military spending in the 2027 budget from its level in 2017, when the first of his two terms began.
French high school students see their government’s funneling money into the military instead of their education as unacceptable. Students' rejection of that budget priority brings its importance to the national but also global radar screen. That's an important development, broadening the boundaries of the possible outcomes for the poor and working class across the Global North.
In the meantime, the political donor class in France’s private sector benefits from Macron's budget priorities. High school students and their teachers don’t benefit. This contradiction seeks a resolution, one that is impossible to predict.
It's easier to look back at government budget decisions. Here's one. “French carmaker Renault has agreed to cooperate with French defence company Turgis Gaillard to produce drones for Ukraine in a move supported by the French Ministry of Defence,” according to the Financial Times. For Renault, profits in drone making versus car making are fine.
Meanwhile, the Russian bear is threatening France. The same bear that lost 27 million people defeating the German Nazis in World War II also threatened the US during the Cold War. In both cases, a threat from Russia has fueled increased military spending.
The geopolitical context of France’s student protests is the unprovoked and unpopular US-Israel attack on Iran and Ukraine’s US- and NATO-backed war with Russia. Geopolitics flows from the profit interests of the domestic donor class. Look no farther than the tech billionaires profiting from fat government contracts after donating millions of dollars to the president, GOP politicians, and so-called opposition Democrats who support forever wars now and in the post-World War II past.
The banging of war drums in France and the student protests there for better schools bring to the fore the class interests of the rulers and the ruled. Will protests in Europe yield social change that improves the lives of protesters? To say that's a heavy lift is an understatement, given the resources that the prosperous few have—beginning with government violence, a fascist option—to maintain a status quo.
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A Closing Midterm Message for Progressives Looking to Wrest Power From Tyrant Trump
In media appearances and at public rallies, progressive candidates should pledge to Impeach Trump and authentically summarize what they will fight for—that resonates with left and right voters struggling to have decent livelihoods.
Oct 31, 2026
The Democrats will probably gain control of Congress, but by a small margin rather than a landslide. Donald Trump, the worst, most unpopular outlaw, cruel, lying, corrupt, bigoted, violent, self-enriching, and devastating dictator harming the American people in our history, has greatly helped the Dems in the midterm elections.
Unfortunately, corporate consultants dominate Democratic campaigns—and have failed to capitalize on the political ammunition Trump hands them every day. This allowed Trump to get away with campaigning for toady Republican candidates and to monopolize media attention that should be focused on how the Republicans in Congress allowed the savagery of his egomaniacal and corporatist regime to undermine democracy and harm the American people.
What should progressive candidates highlight between now and election day?
You can assume that what Trump did to wreck, endanger, and weaken America will intensify his efforts to wreck, endanger, and weaken America.
First, they should alert people to the reality that the second two years of Trump’s term will be much worse for them, their children, and many millions of innocent families abroad. The poor from less developed countries were cut off from key medicines, food supplements, and other inexpensive lifesaving supplies when he and Elon Musk illegally shut down the Agency for International Development. They actually bragged about their deadly deed.
Smarting from an electoral rejection that puts him on the defensive, a vengeful, puerile Trump will likely foment upheaval at home and wage war abroad to reclaim center stage. Note, the White House is defiled daily by Trump, who has a dangerously unstable personality and is driven to do whatever he wants, regardless of laws, the Constitution, Congress, the courts, and norms of common decency. He got away with this law-breaking big time in 2025-2026, so get ready for his further unleashing of corporate polluters from the oil and gas and coal industries, smashing what’s left of laws protecting you, the consumer; you, the worker; and you, the ill patient. He will further impede millions of Americans’ access to food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, and other social safety nets, like Meals on Wheels and Head Start.
He’ll turn the White House into an even bigger source of gigantic personal enrichment for himself and his family, using the office to coerce, extort, and bribe companies into abject submission. From his own 2025 financial disclosures, his bribe-extort dealings with seedy collaborators netted him $2.1 billion, or, broken down on a 40-hour week, $1.1 million AN HOUR!
Rather than extend this list, you can assume that what Trump did to wreck, endanger, and weaken America will intensify his efforts to wreck, endanger, and weaken America. Expect more wars, more attacks on critical scientific protections and research, more suppression of renewable energy, more punishment of free speech, and more intensely shattered readiness to deal with pandemics, climate catastrophes, and out-of-control generative AI Frankenstein monsters rampaging on their own. This imposter has called these three omnicides a “hoax.”
So, candidates do portray Trump and his Trump Dump as becoming ever more lethally toxic to humanity. Unless, that is, the voters elect a pro-Impeachment Congress to Fire Trump and begin building a lawful country that works for the People. (See my book Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.)
As of last April, 90% of the Democrats and almost two-thirds of Independents want to Impeach Trump. Probably higher now!
In media appearances and at public rallies, Progressive candidates should authentically summarize what they will fight for—that resonates with left and right voters struggling to have decent livelihoods.
- Raise the frozen federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 or $17 an hour. Twenty-five million workers will benefit.
- Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for 45 years, paid for by raising the Social Security tax on the wealthy. About 60 million elderly people will benefit.
- Enact an authentic child tax credit, cutting child poverty in half. Over 60 million children will be better off.
- Catch up with Western countries and Taiwan by passing Medicare for All, lifesaving, far more efficient, and much less aggravating than the present profit-gouging, benefit-denying, corporatized system of greed first.
- Crack down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, worker wages, and pensions. (Saving trillions of dollars yearly and having 90% approval.)
- Adopt childcare, paid family sick leave, and other humane programs long in place in Western Europe and Canada.
- Pass labor laws for safety, economic freedom to speak and band together, and pension protections put forth decades ago. (See: pensionrights.org).
- Invest in crumbling public services and infrastructure in communities. Creating many good jobs.
- Paying for the above by (A) restoring taxes on the very undertaxed or non-taxed super rich and large corporations to the level of the prosperous 1960s; (B) ending huge corporate welfare giveaways, subsidies, and bailouts; and (C) de-bloating the runaway, unaudited military budget, devouring over half of all operating spending by the federal government and getting more wasteful, fraudulent, and controlling corporate contractors by the year.
For more practical ideas, see the attached piece by former Secretary of Labor and current popular blogger Robert Reich, titled "10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable."
This weekend is the perfect time for Midnight Campaigning to reach the many midnight shift workers who keep the country going while we sleep. They are ignored by political candidates. A “thank-you” news release describing the major occupations on the midnight shift and a three-hour series of campaign stops should get candidates recognition for caring. Favorable last-minute news coverage can encourage more voters to turn out.
And finally, a word to registered voters: Political pundits predict that more than half of you will stay home. Don’t! Vote for the candidate of your choice—including write-in candidates. Otherwise, the rascals will be happy to fill the vacuum.
Then watchdog your members of Congress to turn their promises into legislative enactments.
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Where Is the Outrage When Islamophobia Comes Straight From the Top?
We constantly hear warnings about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country. But what about the tsunami of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim hatred that is not just coming from ordinary citizens, but from the highest levels of our government?
Oct 31, 2026
The Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate coming from the highest levels of our government are absolutely outrageous. From President Donald Trump to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to members of Congress, including Sen.Ted Cruz and Rep. Nancy Mace, we are hearing vile, ignorant and dangerous attacks that must be denounced not just by the communities and individuals under attack, but by all of us.
When RFK Jr. was campaigning in Michigan for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, he insulted the entire Arab community worldwide—all 500 million of them—saying that Arabs “don't produce science, they don't produce literature, and they don't win Nobel Prizes or other prestigious international awards.”
His remarks were not only incredibly racist, but absolutely false. In fact, Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize. Palestinian-American chemist Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and mathematician Michael Atiyah, whose father was Lebanese, won the Fields Medal.
There is a fundamental difference between Islamophobia and antisemitism in America today: Islamophobia is being promoted by the state.
And let's not forget the extraordinary contributions of Arab scholars to mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy over the centuries.
Then there's Donald Trump, who has been on the campaign trail spewing racist diatribes against Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. Trump has been deliberately calling him Mohammad. When told that his name is Abdul, Trump responded, "I'm the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want."
He has accused El-Sayed of being a “Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist, who hates Jews and Blacks and AMERICANS.” He's even said El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate.”
Republican Senator Ted Cruz has joined in the hatefest. At a campaign event in Michigan, Cruz announced that his nickname for Abdul El-Sayed is "the jihadist leprechaun." Cruz then claimed that if El-Sayed were elected to the Senate, he could gain access to classified intelligence and pass it to terrorists. He warned that if El-Sayed is a "passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood," there is "a very real risk that Americans will die as a result." El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And then there's Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who declared that "Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan Horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic." Imagine if someone said this about Jewish officials!
On March 9, 2026, Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles declared that "Muslims don't belong in American society" and that "Pluralism is a lie." He has also advocated stripping naturalized Muslim Americans of their citizenship and deporting them.
The attacks on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, have been relentless. Ogles called him "little Muhammad" and demanded that he be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Senator Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of Mamdani celebrating Ramadan alongside a photo of the September 11 attacks, with the chilling caption, "The enemy is inside the gates." Mace also associated Mamdani with 9/11, while Congresswoman Elise Stefanik called him a "jihadist." How can we tolerate politicians treating an entire religious community as terrorists and enemies of our country?
Let's not forget the Trump administration's chilling raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's home, even though no criminal charges had been filed against her. Over and over again, Trump has attacked Omar, telling her to go back to Somalia, calling her homeland a "shithouse," accusing her of hating America, and even suggesting she could be deported or jailed.
Antisemitism is certainly unacceptable, but so are Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
We constantly hear warnings about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country. But what about the tsunami of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim hatred that is not just coming from ordinary citizens, but from the highest levels of our government?
Where is the outrage? Where are the political leaders demanding accountability? Where are the congressional hearings? In the past two years, I have seen 14 hearings about antisemitism, compared with just two that discussed anti-Arab hate and Islamophobia.
CAIR's 2026 Civil Rights Report recorded 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination in 2025, the highest annual number since it began collecting these figures in 1996.
As Jewish writer and political commentator Peter Beinart has argued, there is a fundamental difference between Islamophobia and antisemitism in America today: Islamophobia is being promoted by the state. Beinart points to the attacks on Muslim elected officials, the congressional campaign against Sharia law, and Trump's Muslim immigration bans as evidence that anti-Muslim prejudice is being promoted by the very people entrusted with protecting Americans' constitutional rights.
Antisemitism is certainly unacceptable, but so are Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. And it's time we confronted all three with the same outrage, the same urgency, the same call for accountability, and the same commitment to justice.
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I Swore an Oath to Serve and Protect—the President and ICE Betrayed Theirs
The Trump administration's priorities are all wrong: We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
Oct 31, 2026
Since President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he got to work helping billionaires get richer, while families across southern Minnesota are stretched thin. They’ve struggled to feed their families, fill their gas tank, and pay for their healthcare. Instead of taking action to lower costs, Trump and federal officials invaded our communities and used our tax dollars to fund mass deportations.
As a United States Army and Military Police Corps veteran, I know what it means to uphold an oath to serve and protect. What I can’t understand is betraying that oath, which is what our president and too many leaders have done. That’s why I was especially angered learning how much we stand to lose because of these federal deportation policies, according to a new cost calculator. Across southern Minnesota. $374 million of our taxes, or $1,520 per taxpayer, could continue funding the mass deportations. Knowing that our tax dollars are fueling this, while we are getting by with less, makes me sick.
I dedicated my career to our country, serving 32 years in the criminal justice system as a deputy sheriff, a jail administrator, consultant trainer, and policy writer for the National Institute of Corrections. As a former administrator, I know the cost of public safety, the value of every taxpayer dollar, and right from wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota.
The actions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers during “Operation Metro Surge” and the subsequent Department of Homeland Security proceedings should sicken every law enforcement and correctional officer who takes pride in upholding the law. Not since the insurrection on January 6, 2021 have I been so angry and disillusioned with our government. Our country watched as public servants who swore an oath condemned the attacks of January 6. But after a corrupt president pressured them, too many of our leaders changed their tune, blurred the lines between right and wrong, and seemingly forgot their oath entirely. Watching “Operation Metro Surge” resurfaced feelings of disappointment, disgust, and betrayal of trust I hadn’t felt since January 6.
Officers depriving anyone of their civil rights, including due process, is wrong.
Officers brandishing firearms without articulable cause is wrong.
Officers detaining people without the ability to communicate with legal counsel within a reasonable amount of time is wrong.
And forcing working Minnesotans to pay for this chaos is wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota. That’s 6,900 veterans who won't get their medical care paid for. That’s 1,260 teachers in our public schools and 2,053 firefighters in our communities.
These numbers, while disturbing, are consistent when it comes to how Donald Trump harms working families. The president’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” slashed the budget for lifesaving programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to provide massive tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations. While CEOs pick out their newest vacation home, more people have to forgo doctor’s visits to cover their electricity bill or car payment.
These priorities are all wrong. We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
As taxpayers, we have a responsibility to speak up when lawmakers have betrayed our trust. I encourage everyone to speak to their friends and family about how Trump will always be in the business of helping the ultra wealthy while making us pay for it.
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The US-Israeli War on Iran Must Be Ended. Here's How
If the Gulf states announced that their territory and airspace will not be used for another war on Iran, and that normalization with Israel is off the table until a Palestinian state exists, the calculations in Washington and Tel Aviv would have to change quickly.
Oct 31, 2026
The war that Israel and the United States launched against Iran on February 28 is in a lull, not at an end. Major combat has paused, diplomacy has stalled, and both sides are preparing for the next round. To understand why the fighting will soon resume, we need to understand the motivations of the two governments that started it. Neither of them wants peace. Israel’s leadership seeks domination over the Middle East, and the United States seeks to preserve its domination over the world. Simply to state these aims is to underscore that both governments are operating in a world of delusion.
Israel’s political leadership is consumed by the belief that Israel’s survival depends on its military supremacy over the Arab world and on the permanent subjugation or elimination of the Palestinian people. This belief is a form of collective madness, yet it is the doctrine that governs Israeli policy. Israel’s leaders cannot accept that peace is within reach. In the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, the Arab states offered Israel full normalisation in return for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, and that offer still stands. Peace cannot be built on genocide in Gaza or on hatred of the Palestinian people and the drive to remove them from their land. Yet that is the path Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen, and he now campaigns on it openly, with his “national religious” allies, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who twist religion in the service of hatred and killing.
The United States is consumed by its declining power. Iran has been a target for more than 70 years. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized Iran’s oil. The United Sates then installed the shah and backed his police state until the Iranian people overthrew it in 1979. The US has never forgiven Iran for escaping from US domination. The US backed Saddam Hussein’s deadly war against Iran in the 1980s, and followed with four decades of economic warfare, covert operations, cyberattacks, and assassinations. US President Donald Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear agreement in 2018, bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, and then, in February of this year, joined Israel in open war, killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening strikes.
The only way to stop this madness is for the Arab world to tell the United States that enough is enough.
Washington’s fixation on Iran is in the service of American hegemony. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski named Iran 1 of 5 “geopolitical pivots,” states that matter less for their own power than for where they sit. Iran commands the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Brzezinski wrote that an “antihegemonic” coalition of China, Russia, and Iran could emerge “only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” Well, yes, Washington has been that shortsighted and reckless.
The signs that the war will restart are not hidden. This week, War Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Israel to discuss renewed joint strikes, and Israeli sources report that the plans target Iran’s petrochemical facilities and nuclear sites. The White House has promised that the United States will not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections, which is another way of announcing a timetable for war. The US naval blockade of Iran’s ports has passed its 100th day. Trump rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire in September, even though Tehran says the offer remains on the table.
Israel’s October 27 election adds fuel to the fire. On October 18, Trump endorsed Netanyahu, saying the United States would “finish the job” against Iran only with Netanyahu in charge. On October 21, at a rally in Dimona (home to the reactor where Israel secretly built its own nuclear arsenal), Netanyahu declared that the only way to end the Iranian threat is to overthrow the regime and said he had issued that directive to the army, Mossad, and the security services.
Iran has understandably drawn its own conclusions. Its commanders have announced a new offensive doctrine that includes preemptive strikes and attacks on bases in neighboring countries used for operations against Iran, and they warn that renewed attacks would bring a global energy crisis. Attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz reached a new peak this month.
This is the reality that the Arab world, especially the Gulf countries, now faces. The US bases across the Gulf did not bring security in this war. They turned their host nations into targets. The US-Israeli strategy of divide and conquer, which cast Iran as the region’s permanent enemy and invited the Arab states to shelter under American power while accepting Israeli hegemony, has brought war to the region, economic loss to the Gulf, and mass killings in Palestine and Lebanon.
The only way to stop this madness is for the Arab world to tell the United States that enough is enough. The Arab states should declare that they will never accept Israeli hegemony, that there must be a sovereign State of Palestine, and that the region’s security will come from regional cooperation rather than from Washington. The solution could be two states, as in the Arab Peace Initiative, or one binational democratic state, or a confederation. What matters is that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, each about 8 million people, live in peace, safety, and self-determination. What is not possible is the perpetuation of Israel’s brutal apartheid state.
The beginnings are visible. Qatar has called for a regional dialogue among the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Turkiye, and Pakistan, and Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman have kept the channels of mediation with Tehran open throughout the war. These efforts should grow into a standing regional security framework that includes Iran, the Gulf states, Egypt, Turkiye, Iraq, and Pakistan, built on mutual non-aggression, freedom of navigation, and a zone free of nuclear weapons that must eventually include Israel.
The Arab states have far more leverage than they recognize. If Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and their neighbors announced that their territory and airspace will not be used for another war on Iran, and that normalization with Israel is off the table until a Palestinian state exists, the calculations in Washington and Tel Aviv would have to change quickly. And the American people, who hate the war on Iran and side with Palestine, would cheer.
The era of US-led divide and conquer, with Iran cast as the permanent enemy of the Arab world, is over, even if Washington and Tel Aviv refuse to admit it. The Arab states should say so openly now before the next round of war begins, and in doing so, open the way to a region that provides for its own security and peace.
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Boo-Hoo! California's Billionaire Snowflakes Are Scared of a One-Time, 5% Tax!
The 22 billionaires who have spent or spoken against California's Prop 40 have seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months, yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
Oct 31, 2026
Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, are spending big to stop it.
Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40—a one-time, 5% wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200-plus billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.
In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK."
The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.
Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)
Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.
Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes—and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.
California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of September 22, 2026 and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less—just 0.07% of their wealth annually.
We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years—and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95% of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have healthcare. You will get over this one quickly.”
Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.
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