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saikat chakrabarti
The Political Opportunity of a Lifetime—Don't Blow It
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Apr 06, 2026
The 2026 and 2028 elections can and should be the beginning of something transformational.
We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.
The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.
But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.
Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.
So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.
The question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick.
Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.
Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.
But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.
But you’ve got to understand how we got here.
Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.
It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.
We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.
And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.
If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.
That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.
We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.
Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.
But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.
Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.
These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.
But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.
We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.
So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.
This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Let’s back the fighters.
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'Long-Overdue': Pelosi to Retire After Four Decades in Congress
Pelosi's progressive challenger called it the start of a "generational shift" in the Democratic Party.
Nov 06, 2025
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling it quits after nearly four decades in Congress. On Thursday, the longtime Democratic leader announced that her 20th term in Congress will be her last and that she will not run for reelection in 2026.
"For decades, I've cherished the privilege of representing our magnificent city in the United States Congress," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a video tribute to her constituents in San Francisco. "That is why I want you, my fellow San Franciscans, to be the first to know I will not be seeking reelection to Congress. With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative."
The departure of the 85-year-old Pelosi, the first and only woman to ever hold the speaker's gavel, comes at a critical crossroads for the Democratic Party, when the brand of corporate-friendly centrism she came to embody faces a crisis of credibility after failing to withstand the return of President Donald Trump, and an increasingly muscular progressive flank seeks to reshape the party in its image.
"Starting out as a progressive, Pelosi has steadily drifted to the center over the decades, coinciding with her rise up the party ranks, the gradual rise of her net worth, and even San Francisco’s transformation into an unaffordable playground for the rich," wrote Branko Marcetic in Jacobin when she stepped down from the role as the Democratic leader in 2022.
Once a proponent of universal healthcare, Pelosi will likely be remembered as one of the foremost obstacles to achieving Medicare for All, which she fought tooth and nail to block, with the support of the health insurance industry, during her final four years as speaker.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent and increasingly destructive, Pelosi will be remembered as the person who derided the nascent "Green New Deal" effort to transition America's economy toward renewables as "the green dream or whatever they call it."
As the Democratic Party's base reckons with its near-total shift against Israel following more than two years of genocide in Gaza, Pelosi—who previously backed funding for the Iraq War against the grassroots of her party—will be remembered as the person who, suggested that Democrats protesting for a ceasefire were spreading “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s message” and should be investigated by the FBI.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rampages through American cities—including her beloved San Francisco—tormenting immigrants and citizens alike, Pelosi will be remembered for her role bending to Republican demands during the last government shutdown in 2019, to hand the agency more funding as part of a power play against the progressive "Squad" members who wanted to see the agency abolished or defunded.
And at a time when Americans struggle with a surging cost of living, Pelosi will be remembered as one of the people who profited most from her position at the heights of power. In 2024, she and her husband raked in more than $38 million from stock trading, more than any other member of Congress in either party, and remained a persistent defender of the humble elected representative's right to use their immense wealth of insider knowledge for personal gain.
Pelosi's retirement announcement comes at a moment when the Democratic establishment, particularly its congressional leaders—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Pelosi's successor, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—face historic unpopularity with their own voters.
A survey published by Pew Research at the beginning of October found that 59% of self-identified Democrats disapprove of the job their leaders are doing. A previous poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that Democrats believe there was a large gulf between their governing priorities, like universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich, and those of the party.
Pelosi's announcement comes just two days after the most significant triumph in decades for the progressive movement she tried to crush, with the democratic socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani being comfortably elected as New York City's next mayor despite Pelosi's refusal to endorse.
"This is an appropriate response to Mamdani’s win," New Republic writer Indigo Oliver said of Pelosi's retirement on social media. "Chuck Schumer should follow Pelosi’s lead."
Even prior to her retirement becoming official, momentum was building behind a more progressive candidate to take Pelosi's seat as well: Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who some have described as a "clone" of Mamdani, though he too has been met with criticism for his coziness with San Francisco's powerful tech sector.
"Pelosi’s retirement marks the end of an era in San Francisco politics and the beginning of a long-overdue generational shift," said an email from the Chakrabarti campaign.
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CNN Cuts Off Pelosi Primary Challenger's Discussion of NSPM-7
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said one viewer.
Oct 21, 2025
Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive organizer who is challenging US Rep. Nancy Pelosi for the House seat she has held since 1987, was met with stone-faced stares and laughter on CNN when he spoke during a panel discussion Monday about the Trump administration national security memo that one journalist said amounts to a "declaration of war" on the president's political opponents.
Chakrabarti was joined by author and historian Max Boot, journalist Bata Ungar-Sargon, commentator and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin, and former spokesperson for the George W. Bush administration Pete Seat in a panel discussion hosted by Sara Sidner.
The discussion covered the weekend's No Kings rallies, racist texts attributed to a nominee of President Donald Trump, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) raids in cities across the country before turning to the administration's recent strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea, which it says have been aimed at stopping drug trafficking and which have killed dozens of people.
Chakrabarti said the administration's policy of bombing boats in the Caribbean—vessels that, Vice President JD Vance admitted, could very well be fishing boats—to kill people the White House has claimed without evidence are "narco-terrorists," raises alarm about the president's push to unilaterally define who qualifies as a "terrorist."
Trump's policy in the Caribbean, Chakrabarti suggested, represents just one way in which the president is attempting to designate groups as terrorists. In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's killing—which he baselessly blamed on left-wing groups—he signed an executive order in September designating "antifa"—an anti-fascist ideology embraced by autonomous groups and individuals—as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that there is no such legal designation in the US.
Days later, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which focuses on left-wing and anti-fascist organizations and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
The memo has recently garnered outrage from Democratic lawmakers, more than 30 of whom signed a letter condemning Trump's threats against progressive groups and organizers, but it has received little attention in the corporate media, and Chakrabarti's fellow guests on CNN Monday displayed little recognition of what he was talking about when he raised alarm about NSPM-7.
"Here's what concerns me—Trump is saying, 'I can define who's a terrorist, and that means I can kill him.' At the same time, we're seeing executive orders defining whole parts of Democratic Party as domestic terrorists," said Chakrabarti. "Here we're seeing NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech, is extremist speech."
While claiming to protect the US from drug traffickers, he added, the administration has created "a task force of 4,000 agents who are being taken off of drug trafficking and human trafficking, and the actual crime, and being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist things."
"Do you think that's okay?" he asked the other panelists. "Can you put two and two together about what's going on here?"
Pelosi primary challenger @saikatc raises NSPM-7 on CNN just now:
"NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech is extremist speech. We have a task force of 4,000 agents...being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist… pic.twitter.com/3lj26pRIQh
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
None of the other guests responded, and Seat looked blankly at Chakrabarti before Sidner said the show was going to a commercial break.
"We will answer that question, coming up," Sidner said, laughing. "We're going to leave it there for that conversation."
When the show returned, the conversation turned to Ukraine and Russia.
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said commentator Guy Christensen.
Ken Klippenstein, who has reported on NSPM-7 and tracked mentions of the memo in the corporate press—some of which have downplayed the threat—expressed alarm that "the moment NSPM-7 comes up, [the] CNN anchor laughs nervously and ends the segment."
On Tuesday, however, Klippenstein reported that the "NSPM-7 dam" in the corporate media was continuing to break, with CNN airing a second segment that mentioned the memo.
The NSPM-7 dam continues to break, with a second CNN segment referencing the directive.
Former homeland security chief of staff @MilesTaylorUSA says: " NSPM-7 that was issued by the White House last month says that people who directly or indirectly support those domestic… pic.twitter.com/CXEVWxJpOu
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
"This would be like if George W. Bush had said CodePink was al-Qaeda," explained former national security official Miles Taylor, "or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State."
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