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Opinion
FIFA Must Revoke Trump's Peace Prize
If a government can pressure a global sports institution into legitimizing its leader under the banner of peace, then global civil society must be capable of compelling that same institution to correct its course.
Jan 18, 2026
In December, US President Donald Trump was awarded FIFA’s newly created “FIFA Peace Prize–Football Unites the World” by FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The decision immediately sparked disbelief and criticism worldwide, raising a fundamental question: What does FIFA mean by peace?
If football is truly meant to unite the world, then this prize—and the process that produced it—must be seriously reconsidered.
The awarding of the Peace Prize did not emerge from a transparent or democratic process. It reflects a broader pattern in which the Trump administration has exerted political and diplomatic pressure on international institutions to secure legitimacy and public endorsement. In other words, bullying. FIFA, despite its claims of neutrality and independence, appears to have yielded to that pressure.
But power imposed through coercion can be reversed through organized, collective, nonviolent action. If a government can pressure a global sports institution into legitimizing its leader under the banner of peace, then global civil society must be capable of compelling that same institution to correct its course. It is not about punishment or humiliation. It is about legitimacy.
Peace Cannot Be Performed
The United States’ current posture toward the rest of the world—marked by sanctions, coercive diplomacy, military threats, and disregard for international norms—stands in open contradiction to the values the Peace Prize claims to represent. One cannot credibly speak the language of peace while practicing domination.
Revoking this prize would send a clear message: Peace is not a public-relations exercise, nor a political trophy extracted through pressure.
When intimidation succeeds without challenge, it becomes precedent. When it is challenged collectively and nonviolently, it becomes brittle.
Revoking this prize would send a clear message: Peace is not a public-relations exercise, nor a political trophy extracted through pressure.
A World Cup Under Question
This controversy unfolds as the 2026 FIFA World Cup approaches. Scheduled from June 11 to July 19, it will be the first-ever 48-team tournament, with 104 matches across 16 cities, 11 of them in the United States, the others in Canada and Mexico.
International fans, activists, and political figures are questioning whether the current US political climate—particularly immigration enforcement practices, travel restrictions, and border policies—makes the country a safe and welcoming host for a global celebration meant to unite humanity.
Calls to boycott the 2026 World Cup are spreading across social media, as supporters report canceled travel plans; withdrawn ticket purchases; and growing fears of arbitrary detention, visa denials, and hostile treatment at borders. Human rights organizations have repeatedly warned about detention practices and the erosion of civil liberties—concerns that take on heightened urgency when millions are expected to cross borders for a global event.
A Nonviolent Proposal for a Global Reset
If there is one nonviolent action in 2026 with the potential to shift global consciousness, it is an international campaign demanding accountability from FIFA itself.
Such a campaign could call for:
- The revocation of the FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump;
- A one-year postponement of the 2026 World Cup; and
- The relocation of the tournament to a coalition of African host countries—such as South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria—regions with deep football traditions and long-standing exclusion from global sporting power.
FIFA is not a neutral body floating above politics. It is a global institution with 211 member associations, whose decisions reflect values, alliances, and power relations. What FIFA chooses to reward—and whom it chooses to honor—sends a message to billions.
Broadcasters: Withdrawing the Economic Consent
One of the most powerful nonviolent levers lies beyond stadiums and borders: broadcasting. The World Cup exists not only as a sporting event, but as a global media product. Television networks and streaming platforms pay billions in licensing fees that finance FIFA’s operations. Without those fees—and without audiences—the tournament loses its economic foundation.
A coordinated nonviolent campaign could therefore call on broadcasters to:
- Suspend World Cup coverage;
- Refuse to pay licensing fees while FIFA legitimizes coercive political power under the banner of peace; and
- Publicly explain their ethical position to viewers, advertisers, and citizens.
This action would not target players, fans, or workers. It would target the financial and symbolic infrastructure that allows FIFA to operate without accountability. This is not censorship—it is ethical refusal.
A Universal Campaign: Social Media as Nonviolent Infrastructure
For such a campaign to succeed, it must be global, visible, and coordinated. That is why social media is not secondary—it is essential. Social media platforms are today’s nonviolent infrastructure. They allow millions of people to act together across borders, languages, and cultures without centralized control. When used strategically, they transform isolated actions into universal pressure.
A global campaign could:
- Coordinate shared messages, visuals, and hashtags across continents;
- Amplify testimonies from fans, players, journalists, and human rights advocates;
- Expose contradictions between FIFA’s rhetoric and its actions in real time; and
- Apply sustained public pressure on FIFA leadership, broadcasters, sponsors, and advertisers.
This is how nonviolent movements grow: through visibility, participation, and persistence—until silence becomes impossible.
In order to succeed, however, this must be more than a media moment. It must become a grassroots nonviolent movement.
Football clubs, supporters’ associations, players, national federations, and fans everywhere should be called upon to stand—not against the sport, but for human dignity. This is about withdrawing consent from illegitimacy and restoring meaning to the game. Football has always been more than a game. It reflects who we are—and who we choose to become.
After all, people are not football fans first. They are human beings first.
The question now is simple: Will FIFA continue to serve power—or will it revoke the Peace Prize and reclaim the game for humanity?
This article was first published in English on Pressenza and is now available in: Spanish.
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Beware the Rise of JD 'Just-as-Dangerous' Vance
With Trump a distinct question mark and while the Trumpian current ebbs and flows, one wave is pushing the 2028 candidacy of Vice President JD Vance, but this shouldn't be a relief.
Jan 18, 2026
Donald Trump may, of course, be the Republican candidate for president in 2028, the US Constitution notwithstanding. Although it is clearly written in the 22nd Amendment that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” it may well be a majority vote of the Supreme Court that determines whether that applies to Trump.
In the past, that court has gotten around the Constitution without a single word of it being changed. Rather, its judges have let an innovative interpretation prevail. In 1896, for instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court ignored the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment that demanded “equal protection” and so upheld racial segregation by creating the fiction of “separate but equal.” It would take 58 years before that lie would be overturned.
Harvard law professor and Trump legal whisperer Alan Dershowitz has told the president that “it’s not clear” if it is constitutionally settled whether he can serve another term, even if elected. Reportedly, Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer is working on a book on the subject to be published in March 2026. And MAGA world—from the White House to members of Congress to far-right media figures—is stirring the pot on Donald Trump’s potential fourth bid for president.
Trump is also clearly worried about his legacy. Branding federal buildings and institutions with his name, building an outrageous ballroom, pimping out the Oval Office in gold, and constructing an unnecessary “Triumphal Arch” are all desperate attempts to be remembered as “great” at any cost. Yet, he has to know that the next Democratic president will be under tremendous pressure to remove most, if not all, Trump-brand edifices as quickly as possible. In the end, his real memorials will undoubtedly be the authoritarian policies and conduct that will label him as one of the worst, if not the worst, presidents in American history.
Keep in mind that Trump will be 83 by the time of the 2028 election and he’s already exhibiting so many of the behaviors generally attributed to the fabled “crazy old man” down the street.
That said, Trump remains a question mark when it comes to a third term. There are a number of reasons he might not try for one, not the least being his deteriorating mental and physical health. It didn’t take the New York Times to question his capabilities, not when anyone watching him could hear him slurring his words, dozing off in front of the cameras, barely moving even on a golf course, and sounding more incoherent than ever.
His manic putting up of sometimes hundreds of posts a day or in the wee hours of the night—although his staff may be responsible for some of it—should be considered a cry for help, if ever there was one. And it’s not just the volume of his postings, but their increasing extremity. The hate has become more hateful, the taunts more vicious and racist, and the fabrications more outlandish and divorced from reality. And keep in mind that Trump will be 83 by the time of the 2028 election and he’s already exhibiting so many of the behaviors generally attributed to the fabled “crazy old man” down the street.
Finally (should it get to that point), a majority of the Supreme Court—I certainly don’t think all of them, no matter the situation—could follow the Constitution and rule against a third term. It should be considered ironic at this point that the 22nd Amendment was proposed and passed in response to a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, winning his fourth consecutive presidential race.
The Vance Option
With Trump a distinct question mark and while the Trumpian current ebbs and flows, another wave is pushing the 2028 candidacy of Vice President JD Vance. Trump found his avatar in 2024 when the junior senator from Ohio and former harsh Trump critic joined the crew of Republican senators fighting to be the most sycophantic to the party’s new Führer. Like his compatriots Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, there were no morals or principles that superseded Vance’s ambition and lust for power. Under the circumstances, that “JD” could easily have stood for “just as dangerous.”
As Vance confirmed at the recent Turning Point USA gathering, not only are White nationalists like Nick Fuentes and unrepentant conspiracists like Candace Owens not denounced, but they are welcomed and embraced. Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Fuentes roiled MAGA, but before that he was interviewed by Owens on her podcast. Again, there are no discernible objections from GOP leaders, including Vance.
While Vance opportunistically inserted himself into the Charlie Kirk martyr-building project—he was a pallbearer and spoke at his memorial—he has yet to call out Owens for her wild and unfounded claims that Turning Point USA staff, Israel, the French Foreign Legion, and God knows who else were somehow involved in Kirk’s assassination.
If Trump doesn’t manage to run a fourth time and Vance wants to be president, he’ll be more dependent than ever on the MAGA base and the far-right, especially since he has little to no chance of winning over many Democrats or independents.
Vance’s most eye-raising statement at the TPUSA event was when he said, “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” First, it is a pretty sure bet that no one at the event (or in MAGA) ever apologized for being white. Second, Vance reinforced the view that white supremacy will not be a barrier to any future campaign of his.
Vance’s message is clear: Every imaginable far-right extremist, from white supremacists and technofascists to offensive fabulists, is welcome in his coming 2028 campaign. And he will assumedly have Trump’s blessing (if the president doesn’t indeed decide to try to run again himself).
Poor Secretary of State Marco Rubio has as much chance of getting Trump’s support as Black GOP Congressional Representative Byron Donalds did of becoming his vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Trump 2.0 is wholly built on racial profiling, especially of Latinos, and asserting White power. Merely “looking” Latino is enough in these Trumpist times to attract armed masked men and a trip to an immigration hellhole. Rubio has vigorously defended such illegal arrests and detentions and the racist demonization of immigrants of color that’s gone with it, but he’s rolling the dice if he thinks the MAGA base will see him as the exception to their rule.
Just ask Vance. As hillbilly-centric and pro-white working class as he has tried to portray himself, despite being a millionaire many times over, the fact that he is married to Usha Vance, a woman of color and a non-Christian, has generated lots of racist blowback. Fuentes, for example, called Vance a “race traitor” for marrying Usha. Many MAGA adherents were shocked to discover Usha was not white. One report found that, between January and August 2024, there were at least 1,800 racist, gender, or religious-based attacks on Usha that reached an audience of an estimated 216 million.
While Vance has pushed back against such threats and insults, he’s ignored any possible relationship between Trump’s and his racism against Haitian and other immigrants of color and the blowback he’s experienced against Usha. His default position (rather than directly challenging MAGA bigotry): Usha is “tough enough to handle it.” In addition, instead of defending Usha’s right to practice whatever religion she chooses, he pandered to the religious extremist crowd by stating that he hoped she would convert to Catholicism and “eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church.” He then added, “I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Vance Courts the Extremists
If Trump doesn’t manage to run a fourth time and Vance wants to be president, he’ll be more dependent than ever on the MAGA base and the far-right, especially since he has little to no chance of winning over many Democrats or independents. Few will forget that he personally led the outlandish racist claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing pets and eating them in Springfield, Ohio. When busted on that fabrication, he admitted that he had known the truth, but didn’t care as long as it served his interests. He stated in an interview during the 2024 election campaign, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
Vance’s “stories” were blatant lies about immigrants (of color) and their role in US society. According to him, undocumented (and perhaps, maybe, kinda legal) immigrants are to blame for high medical prices, rising housing costs, education crises, crime, antisemitism, and illegal voting. In other words, there isn’t a problem in the United States that can’t be linked to undocumented aliens.
A Time When Vance Was Truthful
The next time around, Democrats would be wise to highlight Vance’s past criticism of Donald Trump. After all, he referred to Trump as “Hitler” and as a “morally reprehensible human being” in emails that plausibly were not supposed to be publicly seen. However, he did publish an article in The Atlantic only weeks before the 2016 election that he clearly wanted to be on the record. In a piece entitled “Opioid of the Masses,” he called Trump “cultural heroin.” He argued that, while Trump’s blather might make people feel good, he was anything but the answer to the deeply rooted causes of the multiple crises facing poor whites, particularly and ironically, opioid drug addiction. Like heroin, he wrote, its poison “enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.” Vance’s own mother, as he noted in the article, abused heroin and prescription opioids, giving him a highly personal stake in the issue.
What he wrote then is no less true today: “Trump offers an easy escape from the pain… Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” Continuing with that addiction metaphor, he added, “Perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.” That Vance is long gone.
It’s a maxim of today’s politics that all relationships with Trump end badly.
Of course, his most important pre-Trumpian links weren’t to his largely made-up hillbilly upbringing—he was born and raised in Ohio—but his ties to far-right billionaires in Silicon Valley. They have been dubbed “techno fascists” for their reactionary, racist, misogynist, and anti-democratic views. His bids for the Senate and then the vice presidency weren’t just supported by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other big names in the billionaire tech world, but opened the door to their increasing role in shaping policy, especially but not exclusively in relation to the artificial intelligence and technology industries.
Vance has, of course, also been in lockstep with Trump’s imperialist and self-serving foreign policy. He crudely sided with the president when he attempted to browbeat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in their infamous Oval Office meeting on February 28, 2025. He also defended, and even cruelly joked about, the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean by the US military. He justified Trump’s illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, echoing all the false claims of Trump, Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about drug trafficking and stolen oil.
It’s a maxim of today’s politics that all relationships with Trump end badly. Will Vance abandon Trump as he deteriorates yet more? The main lesson Trump learned from his late lawyer, the notorious Roy Cohn (of McCarthy-era fame), was to use people until they are no longer useful. Cohn counseled Trump in his early years and introduced him to influential and important people who facilitated his rise in New York City. They became “friends” until Trump (of course!) abandoned Cohn in his time of need once he contracted AIDS and was dying. Trump simply brushed him aside when he was no longer useful and reportedly did not even attend his funeral. Can Trump expect the same treatment from Vance?
Or will the vice president be like Kamala Harris and, as she did with President Joe Biden, pretend Trump is well when he clearly is not? As Trump struggles to make it for three more years, Vance will be questioned about his cognitive state and physical health. Will he gaslight the public and hope for the best?
Given what we have seen and that Vance has demonstrated no loyalty to principles or ethics, no one should be surprised if he turns on Trump at some point, should he determine that it is in his interest to do so.
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Don't Be Fooled: The Trump 'Peace Plan' Is Just Genocide Under a Different Name
The genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form.
Jan 18, 2026
The Trump peace scheme is not an imperfect plan that at least ends the genocide in Gaza. It is in fact a new plan to continue the genocide using a different strategy. It poses a mortal threat to the survival of Palestinians in Gaza. However this plan is not being implemented in isolation from the massive Israeli attack on Palestinians in the West Bank, but in conjunction with it. We are now witnessing, not merely a messy and complicated ceasefire in Gaza and stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Rather, we are witnessing a coordinated 2-pronged attack to destroy the very idea of Palestine. As a result we need to move from targeting the Gaza genocide as separate from what’s being done in the rest of Palestine to a focus on both Palestinian self-determination and opposing ongoing efforts to erase the reality of Palestinians as a people. To repeat: we must now insist on the national rights of Palestinians to live in a Palestine shaped by their own hands – and to counterpose that insistence to the Trump-Netanyahu plans being implemented throughout Palestine to savage Palestinians and destroy their existence as a people.
Gaza
Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is of course absurd. The Palestinians played no role in creating it. The country that has been committing an internationally recognized genocide is now going to “temporarily” occupy more than 50% of the territory on which it has carried out that genocide. And the President of the country who teamed up with Israel to commit that genocide is the Chairman of something bizarrely named the “Board of Peace”. As such he is given the power to oversee all aspects of Gaza’s future including an international “peacekeeping” military force and the appointment of Palestinians he judges should temporarily administer Gaza while Israeli troops directly occupy most of the area. The only party to be disarmed is the Palestinian resistance to the genocide.
On paper there was at least to be a ceasefire. But instead we see the Israeli military killing Palestinians on a daily basis. At the same time they violate their obligation to allow sufficient food, medicine and other basics of life to be brought in to Gaza by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as Israel creates all kinds of barriers to sufficient aid reaching the people. In addition the Israelis have blown up 1500 more buildings in the area of Gaza allotted to them and are taking over parts of Gaza beyond the area given to them in the plan. Nothing gets in the way of Israel doing whatever it wants.
In the ultimate act of betrayal, the United Nations security council has turned over the future of Gaza, not to Palestinians, but to Israel, Trump and his investors. Yet this brute reality is not seen clearly by most of the world. It is now our movement’s job to take on this plan directly and create a counter narrative that explains the continuing genocide and the need to immediately rise up in opposition to it. If the millions of people who rose up against the genocide in the past saw this plan for what it is, instead of seeing it as something that might benefit the Palestinians, they would increasingly roar their opposition.
The West Bank
In the West Bank the escalating violence includes land theft, murders, the expulsion of farmers from their fields, uprooting trees, burning home and cars, and systematic attacks during the olive harvests – a central source of their livelihoods. All this to lay the ground for almost complete ethnic cleansing and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements. The ultimate goal is to turn the West Bank into a part of greater Israel.
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians from both areas are “interred” in the Israeli Gulag of torture centers where unspeakable conditions are just as bad—or even worse–than those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
In short, we are seeing a wave of expulsions, arrests and murders by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank in combination with post-ceasefire killings, demolitions and restrictions on food, medicine and shelter in Gaza. The goal of these tactics is the same as that of the genocidal military operations and food blockade during the first 2 years of Israeli rampage that has left Gaza in ruins:The end of Palestine.
We must now shift our focus from Gaza alone to the preservation of Palestine, as Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom are under deadly attack throughout their country. We must educate the public on how the genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form, while Israel’s goal of eliminating the possibility of Palestinian life has broadened to include the West Bank.
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US Corporate Media Seems Very Afraid of Democracy
Maybe mild forms of socialism is not what they fear most.
Jan 18, 2026
Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.
In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).
After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.
NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.
‘Building civic architecture’
This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.
Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.
These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”
As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”
Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.
Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.
‘Too much emphasis’ on ‘far-left positions’
One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.
The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”
Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper’s Reid J. Epstein noted that
organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.
The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?
To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.
‘A lot of compromise’
In a New York Times column (4/17/25) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.”
Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”
Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”
Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25), not standing up to plutocrats.
‘A better story’
Despite evidence that mass issue-based organizing campaigns can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists rather than build mass movements.
As CBS News (12/16/25) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.
The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.
To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?
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