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Opinion
Democrats, Please Take Note: Peace Is Good Politics
The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.
Nov 05, 2026
Voters across the United States were loud and clear on Tuesday in their historic drubbing of Trumpism. The election was a decisive rejection of Trump's war on Iran and its staggering costs at home. While savoring their victory and the historic opportunity to restore America's constitutional order, the Democrats should take the anti-war message of the election to heart, because they suffered the same verdict two years ago, when voters rejected the Biden administration's wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Last week Israeli voters rejected Netanyahu's reckless wars, and European voters are also rejecting parties that prolong the Ukraine War. The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.
On election night Trump conceded to Fox News, "I think a part of it was Iran." The next day Vice President JD Vance was far blunter, posting on X: "The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.... everyone knows why we lost." In the AP Voter Poll, about 60 percent of voters said the decision to use military force against Iran was wrong, and about 90 percent called the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote.
The war and the cost of living were of course utterly intertwined. Gasoline prices, around $2.80 per gallon before the war began on February 28, had risen by about 55 percent by mid-May and reached a monthly average of $4.43 in September. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed from below 4 percent before the war to above 5 percent in the autumn, and the Pentagon sought more than $200 billion in supplemental war funding. Every family with a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card balance suffered from the war.
Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy.
The first duty of the new Congress is to restore its constitutional authority over war and its power of the purse to ensure that US forces are not sent back into combat in Iran or anywhere else on the whim of a president and the behest of domestic or foreign lobbies. Trump must of course refrain from restarting the war, which was never remotely necessary or justified. Remember that on February 28, the day the US and Israel launched the war, Oman's foreign minister, who was mediating the U.S.-Iran talks, had said that a deal was within reach.
The Democrats should not imagine that the anti-war lesson applies only to Republicans. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because voters held the Biden administration responsible for the costs of its own wars. The energy shock that followed the escalation of the Ukraine war in 2022 drove up inflation, and gasoline topped $5 per gallon for the first time in June 2022. Biden twice rejected negotiations that could have ended the conflict: in December 2021, when his administration refused to negotiate on NATO enlargement in response to Russia's draft security treaty, and in April 2022, when the Istanbul talks were abandoned at the behest of the US and UK.
The Gaza genocide also cost the Democrats directly. Among Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, 29 percent named ending Israel's violence in Gaza as the main factor in their decision, the most frequently cited issue. The party's voters have moved far ahead of its leaders. A New York Times/Siena poll in May 2026 found that roughly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US military and economic assistance to Israel.
Voters everywhere are sending the same message: peace through diplomacy. On October 27, after Israeli wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Netanyahu lost his majority. Similarly, European leaders who have tied themselves to open-ended war in Ukraine are being rejected by the voters. Only 10 percent of Germans are satisfied with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the lowest rating ever recorded for a German chancellor. Emmanuel Macron's approval fell to 15 percent in October. In Bulgaria, Iliana Iotova, who favors dialogue with Moscow, won the presidency on November 1 with more than 58 percent of the vote.
A key upcoming key test for the Democrats will be Ukraine. They must stop their party's typical Russia-bashing and instead support a diplomatic end to the war.
As a start, the Democrats should remember why the war started. In 1990 the United States assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." The Clinton administration broke that promise. In 2008 the Bush administration pushed through the Bucharest declaration that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members of NATO," despite Ambassador William Burns's warning that this was the brightest of all red lines for Russia. In 2014 the United States backed the coup against Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, as the leaked Nuland-Pyatt call made clear. In April 2022, when negotiators in Istanbul came close to a peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality, the US and UK actually intervened to block the agreement. Today 75 percent of Ukrainians support negotiations with Russia to end the war.
The Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars.
In view of these causes of the war, I have recently set out a straightforward diplomatic framework for peace in Ukraine that would end the war. NATO would end its eastward expansion. Ukraine would adopt permanent neutrality on the model of Austria in 1955. An armistice line would be drawn, with both sides renouncing the use of force to change it. Ukraine would pursue membership in the European Union as a permanently neutral state. The Democrats should support such a diplomatic approach. It’s what can end the war, save Ukraine, and win the backing of both the Ukrainian and American people.
Most importantly, the Democrats should not mistake their victory for a mandate to pursue their own wars. The new Democratic majority should quickly reassert the constitutional authority of Congress over war and peace, champion a negotiated peace in Ukraine, end support for Israel's wars, cut the military budget, and redirect the savings toward lowering the cost of living and repairing the public finances.
These positions are not only right but are good politics. For the Democrats to win the White House in 2028, they should become the party of peace. Better yet, both parties should become parties of peace and conduct the 2028 campaign on which party will best address America’s needs for decent jobs, affordability, healthcare, housing, a safe environment, and quality education.
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If This Is a Wave, We Made It: Why the Midterms Were About Us, Not Them
We may feel as if we have woken up to a different country after election day, but we have not. We woke up just as we did the day before to a country in which the collective is fighting for justice and equity relentlessly, strategically, and with love.
Nov 05, 2026
What is this strange feeling washing over millions of us this week? Is this relief? Is this joy? Is it disbelief that our collective voice could not be stifled despite the best attempts of the wealthy and the corrupt? We wake up to a very different world than the one that we woke up to on election day.
We have the very first openly gay man senator ever elected.
We have the first Black woman governor ever, and she is 1 of 5 Black governors elected, making it the first time that multiple Black governors will serve at once. Until now, each previous Black governor served alone, they were the only Black person in the room.
We are part of a long lineage of dreamers and resisters and creators. We voted. And that is only one small action in a large toolkit of creating more just worlds for all.
We have the first Native American woman governor ever.
We have a senator-elect in Texas who speaks of a politics of love. James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, named what his campaign had to overcome in his acceptance speech:
We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million, more than any senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, smear campaigns, foreign bots, and AI deepfakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment. The death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.
We have a Latina governor in Texas for the first time, defeating a governor who has been more complicit than anyone in creating a brutally hostile environment toward immigrants and academic freedom. Abbott’s immigration policies led to the erosion of safety and human rights such as when police officers are allowed to question a person’s immigration status during a routine traffic stop, encouraging racial profiling. His Senate Bill 17 increased state censorship and widespread self-censorship, resulting in a devastating erosion of academic freedom. Harming one of the greatest riches this country has: our excellent higher education system.
We have Ohio’s first woman governor who won even after a deeply personal attack featuring her own estranged mother put forth by the Trump-promoted and backed opponent.
We have the first Native American woman US senator senator in Minnesota.
This was the very first midterm in which a single person gave more money in donations than any other person has ever spent on a single election cycle (with the exception of billionaire Mike Bloomberg who funded his own run for the presidency in 2020). The world's richest man donated a stunning $474 million, of this $168 million went toward the aim of defeating Talarico, who took no corporate PAC money and was only funded by individual donors.
The first Muslim senator was elected despite some of the most vitriolic racist attacks lodged at him and having his primary opponent choose to blow up her political career by betraying every value she ever indicated to hold by backing the Trump-favored Republican opponent.
The list of names could continue, but there is a risk to narrowing the story to the name in the headline. After all, each of these people was carried by thousands and even millions of people organizing, refusing, resisting, and caring.
It is no wonder if we feel as though we have woken up to a different country than the one we woke up to on election day. But I want to argue that we have not. We woke up just as we have woken up the day before and the one before that, and so on to a country in which the collective is fighting for justice and equity relentlessly, strategically, and with love.
There is some data to back these seemingly unnecessarily hopeful words. The early vote exceeded the 2022 midterm early vote by 9 million. This brings to mind a well-known psychological concept known as learned helplessness. The studies that led to this theoretical framework are devastating in their cruelty. Dogs were shocked while standing on a platform. And at first, they tried to get away from the painful bursts but were not given an opportunity to do so. Eventually, even when an escape was a possibility, when the door was open, they no longer even tried, they simply gave up and accepted the torture.
Even with the egregious misuse of the Justice Department, the assault on the checks and balances in our government, even with the wealthiest man in the world aiming to disempower the voters and buy elections in order to maintain his privileges. Even with the gerrymandering in many states that aimed to dilute Black political power. Even with voter intimidation by the federal government. Even with all of this, the country challenged Martin Seligman's original theories on learned helplessness. We do not lie down and accept the shocks. We are not biologically wired to quit when the stressors feel out of our control. Years after the original study in 1967, Seligman and Maier revisited learned helplessness in 2016 and concluded that passivity is not learned; instead, what is learned is a sense of agency, as that is something we build and learn together. Of course, as often happens, the research simply confirmed what the community already understood.
As we struggle to find the right words to describe what happened—is it a tsunami? Is it a firestorm? Is it a repudiation? What should the Democratic Party do next?—I want to offer my perspective as a critical social psychologist. Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Jesuit priest and University of Chicago-educated social psychologist who was assassinated by US trained unit of the El Salvadoran army on November 16th, 1989. In a few days it will be the 37th anniversary of this execution. He provoked transformative questions about the discipline of psychology itself and is regarded as one of the founders of the subdiscipline of liberation psychology. One of his core claims was that fatalism, a feeling that the story is already written so we might as well give up, is not actually natural to people. This is produced by systems. And an election like this shows us when fatalism can crack, as people reclaim their power. As we refuse to become pawns of the corrupt and the greedy. With that, what is the answer to what the Democratic Party needs to do next? Marin-Baro’s legacy reminds us that the party’s job is to follow the collective, not lead it.
We look at our neighbors who are being targeted for cruel deportations by bypassing due process despite their meaningful contributions to our communities, and we say, we stand with you. We look at our neighbors, like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were murdered because they refused to hide at home when their neighborhoods were under attack by masked bullies, and we grieve them with an act of radical love, which is always action. We look at our universities that are being stripped of academic freedom, becoming a tool of those in power and the state, and we say we believe in the power of education and that it is worth fighting for. We look at each other, and we know that we are being told a story that does not make sense. You, my neighbor, have never been my enemy. You have always been my keeper. We belong to each other.
Following the midterms, it is not so much that the world has changed; it is simply that we see the world more for what it has always been. Nothing has changed. The lens, smeared with lies, has been cleared somewhat with this election. We have communities who show up day after day after day for one another. They demonstrate that hope is not a soft feeling but a fierce warrior emotion that is produced by action. Mariame Kaba says it best: Hope is a discipline. We are part of a long lineage of dreamers and resisters and creators. We voted. And that is only one small action in a large toolkit of creating more just worlds for all. So is this a big blue wave? Well if it is, we created it. It is not crashing over us. We are in this water. And yes, resistance can be joyful. So come in, splash around. The water is warm. Let’s keep making waves together.
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Bernie Sanders: Winning the Midterms Is Not Enough. Here's What We Must Do
The American people understand that the economy today is rigged and that we cannot continue the ‘same old, same old’ establishment politics and establishment policies.
Nov 05, 2026
On Tuesday, Trump told us to vote as if he were on the ballot. And that is exactly what the American people did.
Together, we stood up to authoritarianism and a president who does not believe in the Constitution or the rule of law. And we won.
With Democratic control over the Senate and the House, we will now—finally—be able to hold Donald Trump accountable.
The American people have had enough. They are demanding real change and bold policies that will dramatically improve their lives.
That is a big deal. But as important as it is, it is not enough. We have got to do more.
Whether we like it or not, we are living in an unprecedented moment in American history where our country faces extraordinary crises. We cannot and must not run away from them when Democrats assume power in January.
These crises must be dealt with.
It is no secret that in the United States and all over the world, people are giving up on democracy. Now, why is that?
And the answer is that—all over the world, not just in America—working families are struggling to put food on the table and pay for basic necessities while the very richest people become much richer. And, throughout our country and in many other countries, ordinary people are saying, ‘Does their government even know that they exist?’ Or are elected officials too busy worrying about the needs of the rich and the powerful?
This is an American issue, but, in fact, an international issue.
And in my view, the American people have had enough. They are demanding real change and bold policies that will dramatically improve their lives.
In the richest country on Earth, the American people want a government that stands for working families, not billionaire campaign contributors. And that is not just Bernie Sanders talking.
According to a recent AP poll, 80% of registered voters want either “complete and total upheaval” or “substantial change” in how this country is run. And that includes 97% of Democrats, 90% of independents, and 58% of Republicans.
In other words, the American people understand that the economy today is rigged and that we cannot continue the ‘same old, same old’ establishment politics and establishment policies.
The American people want change. Real change. And the midterm election confirms just that.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean and the issues that we have got to deal with.
In our country today, income and wealth inequality has reached unprecedented levels. The top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. In my view, that is insane. And I think that’s how most Americans feel.
Democrats, when they gain control, in January, of the House and the Senate, cannot ignore this grotesque inequality. We must take on the greed of the very, very rich and their incredible wealth.
We must enact a 5% wealth tax on billionaires so that we can provide every working-class family in the country, a family of four, with a $12,000 direct payment.
And that means a Democratic Congress must pass a wealth tax on billionaires.
At a time when billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers or nurses, we must enact a 5% wealth tax on billionaires so that we can provide every working-class family in the country, a family of four, with a $12,000 direct payment. In other words, if you’re a working-class family of four, that’s $3,000 for every man, woman, and child—$12,000.
Furthermore, with that tax on billionaires, we can build 7 million units of low-income and affordable housing, we can make public colleges and universities tuition-free, and we can provide universal free child care for 13 million children. That is what a wealth tax on billionaires can do.
But taxing the oligarchs means more than just taking on their wealth.
It means ending their stranglehold over our political system.
Elon Musk and his billionaire friends have poured a record-breaking $2 billion into the recent election. That is absurd.
The American people want Congress to overturn Citizens United, abolish super PACs, and establish public funding of elections. Democracy must mean one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections.
But it’s not just massive income and wealth inequality that we have to deal with or a corrupt campaign finance system.
In America today—as everybody knows, and I get the same response wherever I go in this country—everybody understands that our healthcare system is broken. It is dysfunctional. And it is wildly expensive.
We spend almost twice as much per person on healthcare as any other major country. Yet, despite that huge expenditure, more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Over half a million people go bankrupt each year because of medical debt. We pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. And tragically, more than 60,000 Americans die unnecessarily every year because they cannot afford medical care.
How cruel is that?
Yes, we must repeal the $1 trillion in cuts Trump made to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to prevent 15 million Americans from losing their healthcare. Yes, we must restore ACA tax credits to stop the outrageous premium spikes for 20 million Americans, but that is nowhere near enough. Healthcare must be considered as a human right, not a privilege. That means passing Medicare for all legislation now supported by 66% of the American people.
As an immediate first step, Democrats must lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 down to 55, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and guarantee universal healthcare coverage for every child from birth through age 19. All of this can be accomplished with 51 votes in the Senate, through the reconciliation process.
But it’s not just income and wealth inequality that we have to deal with, or a corrupt campaign finance system or a dysfunctional healthcare system. We must deal with artificial intelligence—the most transformational technology in the history of humanity.
In America today, big tech oligarchs are spending trillions of dollars on artificial intelligence and robotics with virtually no regulation.
Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers, must pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.
This revolutionary technology will transform the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country and around the world. Left unchecked, AI and robotics will destroy tens of millions of jobs, devastate our children’s mental health, eviscerate our privacy rights, drive up electricity rates, strain water supplies, and transform warfare.
If AI becomes smarter than human beings and escapes human control, it will also pose an existential threat to the very existence of humanity. We cannot allow a handful of big tech billionaires to become even richer and more powerful by ramming this dangerous technology down our throats.
Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers, must pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.
And by the way, I might mention that in the election, in dozens of communities throughout our country, citizens voted for a moratorium on the construction of data centers. In other words, a moratorium on data centers is exactly what the American people want.
But my friends, it is not just oligarchy, a corrupt campaign finance system, a broken healthcare system, and uncontrolled AI.
In America today, while the very rich get richer, 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions work long, long hours for incredibly low wages. That must change.
A job must lift people out of poverty, not keep them in it.
The $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage is a starvation wage. Democrats must raise it to a living wage of at least $20-an-hour and make it easier for workers to form unions by passing the PRO Act. A job must lift people out of poverty, not keep them in it.
Further, in our country today, one-third of our seniors are struggling economically, and more than 20% are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year. Nearly half of older Americans have no retirement savings and no idea how they will retire with a shred of dignity. Meanwhile, Elon Musk pays the same amount into Social Security as someone earning $184,600 a year. That is absurd.
By applying the Social Security payroll tax to all income above $250,000, including capital gains and dividends, we could increase benefits by $2,400 a year, lift millions of seniors out of poverty, improve cost of living adjustments, and keep Social Security solvent for generations without raising taxes on the bottom 91% of Americans.
We must also restore the traditional pension plans corporate America took away so that every worker can count on a guaranteed income in retirement.
That is what a Democratic Congress must do.
Let me be clear. In America today, we spend more on the military than the next six nations combined. Despite massive waste, fraud, and abuse, the Pentagon has repeatedly failed independent audits and cannot account for trillions of dollars in spending. Adding insult to injury, Trump has dragged us into an illegal and unconstitutional war in Iran that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
We must end this disastrous war.
We must cut off all funding for the genocidal government in Israel.
And we must substantially reduce military spending.
Instead of pouring $1.1 trillion into a bloated Pentagon and never-ending wars, a Democratic Congress must build the best public education system in the world with no teacher earning less than $60,000 a year.
We are fighting to give hope to the American people—to allow them to understand that their government can work for them, can address the crises that they face, and will pay attention to the needs of the men, women and children in our country who are struggling, and not just the very, very wealthy campaign contributors.
And let me touch on one more subject that Democrats must deal with.
Since Trump took office, ICE agents have shot American citizens in cold blood, have broken down doors to arrest people, and have sent five-year-old children to detention centers. These actions are not only immoral and disgraceful, they are unconstitutional.
Democrats must immediately rein in the $75 billion Republicans gave Trump to fund his domestic army. Instead of ICE agents terrorizing communities throughout the country, we must finally move to comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship for the undocumented.
Let’s be clear: All of the policies I have just discussed—and more that I have not mentioned—are not radical.
They are precisely what a strong majority of the American people want.
So we are in a moment in American history where a lot of folks are losing faith in democracy. They are struggling every day just to stay alive while, at the same time, billionaires have more money than they can spend in a thousand lifetimes and are getting richer and richer all of the time.
What we are talking about now is not only the need to fight for economic justice.
We are fighting to give hope to the American people—to allow them to understand that their government can work for them, can address the crises that they face, and will pay attention to the needs of the men, women and children in our country who are struggling, and not just the very, very wealthy campaign contributors.
That is, in my view, what Democrats have got to do when they assume power in January.
We can do it. We must do it.
And I look forward to working with all of you to make sure that it happens.
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Lessons from Dan Osborn’s Defeat in Nebraska
Even the strongest individual candidate cannot substitute for the patient work of building an independent political movement.
Nov 05, 2026
Dan Osborn, the independent candidate and former local union president, once again came within a few percentage points of winning the Nebraska US Senate seat. (He lost by 6.7% in 2024 and the same again this year.) He mounted an impressive challenge, but he couldn’t close the gap. Why? And what does his defeat tell us about the future of independent working-class politics?
Wouldn’t Osborn have done much better if he ran as a Democrat?
The anti-Trump Blue Wave created key red state Senate Democratic victories as it tore through Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and maybe even Mississippi. But, it hit the shoals in North Dakota where the Democrat lost by 20.7 percent, by 18 percent in Oklahoma, and by 30.4 percent in Wyoming. The wave also didn’t reach the rest of the South and border states.
It would be prudent to lay the foundation for an independent party that would be overtly committed to take on corporate power, runaway inequality, and job insecurity.
So, it is not at all clear that a Democrat would have outperformed Osborn in Nebraska. Nevertheless, there are several lessons from Osborn’s defeat worth considering.
1. Running for the Senate is a big deal.
Anyone running for the US Senate against a Republican in a very red state is going to face a wall of money. There are only a handful of genuinely competitive Senate races every two years, and enormous sums flow into them. Osborn was up against $37 million—about $40 per voter—the most ever spent on a Senate race in Nebraska.
It would be nice to think money doesn’t matter, but when the sums are that enormous it does. Money buys advertising, organization, visibility, and an increased ability to define a candidate, as well as to define the candidate’s opponent. Overcoming those advantages is extraordinarily difficult.
2. Running for the Senate is a big jump.
I can’t think of anyone who has gone directly from serving as a local union president to being elected to the US Senate. That’s a hell of a leap, and Osborn deserves enormous credit for attempting it.
But it raises a question: Why not first run for a less demanding office, build an organization, establish a political record, and develop a broader base of support? Why not Congress or the state legislature?
We can second guess all we want, but there’s no guarantee that a smaller race would have been easier for Osborn. And sometimes political opportunities don’t wait. Especially because building political power takes time, which means the odds were stacked against Osborn from the start.
3. Was he really an independent, or a Democrat in disguise?
Everyone knows the Democratic brand is in terrible shape in Nebraska, as well as in much of red America. We did a survey that shows how much. Running as an independent, for Osborn, made considerable sense. But according to the New York Times,
“more than half of voters — 55 percent — say they see Mr. Osborn, a union leader, as more of a Democrat than anything else. Just one third of voters say they consider him to be an independent.”
And, of course, the Republicans spent millions hammering away at that perception throughout the campaign.
To make matters worse, a leaked recordings captured Osborn privately expressing views that were far more liberal from the more cautious public positions he took during the campaign on issues like the border wall, transgender people, and ICE.
Whether or not voters agreed with the positions on those issues he’d taken in public, the episode created a credibility problem. It reinforced the Republican argument that Osborn was really a Democrat hiding behind an independent label.
This points to a larger problem: An independent candidate running alone must convince voters that his independence is real if he’s going to avoid negativity of the Democratic brand in red America.
4. There is no substitute for building an independent political organization, step by step.
Osborn could be labeled—or mislabeled—a Democratic shill precisely because he was an individual candidate. He did not represent a political organization with a record of independence from the two major parties. He had no established movement behind him to demonstrate what that independence meant. As an individual, it was all on him.
Compare that with the Nonpartisan League, which prospered in North Dakota during and after World War I. It had a coherent platform, including the public ownership of grain elevators and the establishment of a publicly owned bank. (The public Bank of North Dakota still operates today.) In a few years, the League recruited tens of thousands of dues-paying members and ran candidates for local and state offices.
It was never about one person. It was a movement and a political organization. The verbal gaffes or vulnerabilities of any individual candidate could not bring down the entire effort.
Building that kind of organization takes longer than trying to produce a dramatic political breakthrough from the top down. It’s not impossible for one individual to pull it off—Osborn has come remarkably close—but relying on one candidate makes the entire effort vulnerable to that person’s mistakes, inconsistencies, or political liabilities. (Consider the Dem’s experience with Graham Platner in Maine.)
It was never about one person. It was a movement and a political organization. The verbal gaffes or vulnerabilities of any individual candidate could not bring down the entire effort.
An organization built around a clear platform is much stronger over the long run. It can explain, over several years and through many different candidates, what it means to be independent of the two major parties. Its record, membership, and collective work become the proof of its independence, and it becomes much more difficult to dismiss the entire organization as a Democratic front.
5. Osborn’s race shows why we need a long-term vision for a new working-class party. Or will the Democrats again become the party of working people?
The alternative to running as an individual is the creation of a new political organization of working people—one that is fundamentally different from the Democrats and the Republicans.
But why bother? Aren’t the Democrats now positioned to fight for powerful pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage, facilitating labor union organizing, and putting price controls on pharmaceutical and food cartels?
Let’s hope so. But, it’s just as possible for the Democrats with narrow victories in purple districts to call for moderate policies to secure their positions and maintain the support of their wealthy donors. Although we might see a slew of investigations to uncover corruption and the Epstein files, there may be little movement on the most basic economic protections for working people.
And the Democrats still do not have the support of a majority of voters without college degrees, according to exit polls.
Therefore, it would be prudent to lay the foundation for an independent party that would be overtly committed to take on corporate power, runaway inequality, and job insecurity. It would fight for good jobs, decent wages, strong unions, and support for communities where working people can thrive.
Osborn’s campaign demonstrated that an independent working-class candidate could mount a serious challenge in a red state. His defeat should not obscure that achievement.
But it would also have to welcome working people with a range of social and cultural beliefs, including people who might not feel comfortable with the progressive left. That doesn’t mean abandoning basic principles of fairness, equality, and justice. It does mean recognizing that working people will not agree on everything, and that a successful political organization must be broad enough to unite them around their common economic interests.
Most important, it must be a party of and by working people. Its members—not wealthy donors, not political consultants, not a handful of prominent leaders—must shape its platform, choose its candidates, run its campaigns, and recruit new members. It must be an organization people actively participate in, not simply a label they vote for every few years.
Dan Osborn’s campaign demonstrated that an independent working-class candidate could mount a serious challenge in a red state. His defeat should not obscure that achievement. But it also reminds us that even the strongest individual candidate cannot substitute for the patient work of building an independent political movement.
We need to move beyond the search for the next Dan Osborn. We need to build a political organization that can produce hundreds of them.
Let’s hope Osborn’s remarkable effort helps lay the foundation for that movement.
(For more, please see A Party of Our Own.)
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The 'Blue Wave' Means Nothing if We Don't Stop the National Defense Authorization Act
As taxpayers, we are funding our own endgame, but we don't have to.
Nov 05, 2026
Tuesday night's election results proved that a majority of people in this country do not want war and genocide. Polling overwhelmingly showed that the war on Iran was one of the biggest motivating factors in voting. So why are we about to give the very people voters rejected an unprecedented $1.5 trillion budget to continue their reign of death and destruction? Why are we going to allow Congress to hand over the largest war budget in human history to weapons manufacturers and AI tech billionaires who work at the behest of known war criminals?
In the next few weeks, Congress is set to pass what should be viewed as the deadliest piece of legislation of our time—the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—or the country's defense budget, as it is more commonly known. Its potential passage is setting US taxpayers up to be the funders of their own demise by giving carte blanche to a department of war criminals and their humanity-destroying techno-fascist friends with an obscene $1.5 trillion treasure chest to control, murder, oppress, and destroy the planet as we know it.
Sounds a bit hyperbolic? Not if you look at their past and what they are openly saying now, as a prologue.
If you were watching a summer blockbuster and the main characters were handing over their hard-earned money and essentially their trust to the person you know is going to assassinate them in the final act, you would be screaming at the screen, "Don't do it!"
To understand why this war budget is a catastrophic time bomb, you first have to understand what it actually funds. Under the guise of providing national "security" and protecting "democracy," the annual Pentagon budget does little of both. Instead, the budget, which consistently fails its financial audits, is a mechanism to funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of weapons manufacturers, who make the very weapons that murder men, women, and children and destroy the planet. Well over half of the discretionary budget each year goes directly to private contractors.
Between 2020 and 2024, the Pentagon designated roughly $2.4 trillion out of $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending to private industry. But hey, at least those private companies are providing much-needed jobs for America's workforce, right? Well, not so fast.
According to the Climate and Community Institute, employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades: from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred even as Pentagon budgets rose 22% over the same period. Meanwhile, the industry's top recipients of military contracts, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing, pay their CEOs a combined salary of almost $100 million a year. They are literally making a killing off the killing of others.
And now, not only are we draining our pocketbooks for weapon company CEOs, but we are also subsidizing tech-overlords whose recent main objective is to move jobs and agency away from the working class to robots, as well as use that very technology to mass surveil those who oppose it. The Pentagon is requesting an unprecedented $58.5 billion this year for an artificial intelligence program. This program is already responsible for the February 28 Minab School massacre that murdered at least 156 schoolchildren and staff.
Even more frightening, the money for that deadly program is set to go to the most insane lineup of anti-worker villains, including Sam "bad things should happen to benefit AI" Altman; Peter "if you're evil, you're not bad" Thiel; and Elon "AI will make jobs irrelevant" Musk. They're openly telling us they don't need humans anymore. Meanwhile, they are building their bunkers so that when the United States military finally plunders away all the resources around the world, they can survive.
Why are we handing the military $1.5 trillion to do all this? As it stands, US taxpayers are already paying $116.43 million every hour for war and terror. That's more than $4,000 in weapons and war costs for the average taxpayer last year alone. Both figures will likely double, since the Trump administration's request tops former President Joe Biden's already bloated $1 trillion. Meanwhile, nearly 30% of people have to finance groceries, and 45,000 people will likely die because they lack health insurance or access to affordable healthcare.
If you were watching a summer blockbuster and the main characters were handing over their hard-earned money and essentially their trust to the person you know is going to assassinate them in the final act, you would be screaming at the screen, "Don't do it!"
But that is exactly what is happening right now, and in fact, many are screaming.
Polls consistently show that Americans are moving away from a war-centric approach to foreign affairs. Almost two-thirds of people in the United States disapprove of President Donald Trump's war on Iran, and 60% disapprove of the US-supported genocide in Gaza. Similarly, 59% of voters believe the proposed $1.5 trillion Department of Defense budget is too high, and 3 in 5 voters (58%) prefer directing government funds toward domestic priorities like healthcare rather than military or war spending.
The voices are there, but most of those with the power to stop it aren't listening or are too invested in the war-industrial complex to care. Which begs the question: How can we even call ourselves a democracy, much less its defender, when we, the people, seem to have no agency outside of voting and the majority's demands are ignored?
This administration, as did previous ones, proudly ignores what the majority is begging for: an end to the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine; an end to the war on Iran that was started for no reason and is currently sustained through the administration's pompous arrogance; an end to Immigration and Custom Enforcement's reign of terror across the United States; an end to the AI-data center boom that is chipping away at our humanity and livelihoods; and reinvestment into the things that will actually keep us safe, such as healthcare, housing, and climate justice.
Make no mistake, the $1.5 trillion set to go to Pete Hegseth's war department is not funding our security; it is funding our endgame and stealing from our lifelines. If passed, it will be nearly impossible to undo the damage that will come. We all must unite around this—healthcare workers, environmentalists, teachers, journalists, students, veterans—and make democracy actually work for the people before it's too late. We have to let those we elected to work for us know that this is a red line that humanity cannot afford to cross.
History shows that public pressure can influence policies. Our collective voice can change this country's trajectory—if we mobilize now. We don't have to fund our endgame; we can say no. Join us in DC November 10-13 as we demand our country stop funding war and start funding life.
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The 2026 Election Gives Winners a Mandate to Act Big on Climate
Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed the most corrupt, pro-fossil fuel, anti-environmental administration in US history. Last night, voters overwhelmingly rejected those priorities and demanded a total system reset. It's time to deliver.
Nov 05, 2026
Where does Tuesday night’s historic election leave the climate movement? The answer is on the cusp of a huge opportunity—if we know how to seize it.
Two of the issues that voters cared about most in this election—energy prices and corruption—present climate advocates with the perfect framework within which to push exactly the sort of bold agenda we need for this moment in the climate fight.
Let’s take energy first. Above all else, this was a gas prices election. It’s hard to imagine the sort of Democratic blowout we saw last night if gas and diesel prices weren’t the highest they’ve ever been for any election day in US history. The same is true for electricity bills. While not as mediagenic as the price ticking up on the pump, utility bills were top of mind for voters. No surprise considering the impact that they have on a family’s bottom line: it’s easier to cut back on miles driven than the need to light and heat your home.
From utility reform, to new investments in public transit, to rapidly scaling up renewables, Democrats have a mandate to roll out a historic clean energy package that will cut costs and pollution at the same time.
In response, Democrats up and down the ballot made energy affordability a core campaign issue. On Tuesday, voters rewarded them for it. In election after election, Democrats who spoke clearly and passionately about the need to drive down rates, hold big utilities accountable, and build more clean energy won overwhelmingly. The same was true for energy cost-related ballot initiatives, like in Michigan, where over 80% of voters supported an initiative to ban their utility from making political donations that many rightfully saw as bribes for politicians to keep rates high. Down ballot, Democrats also won important seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the Arizona Corporation Commission, and the Texas Railroad Commission, which all have crucial decision-making roles in those states when it comes to prioritizing renewables over fossil fuels.
These wins set up Democrats at all levels to embrace the most ambitious and sweeping clean energy affordability agenda possible. Voters are demanding that politicians drive down rates, and building more clean energy is the fastest and cheapest way to do it. From utility reform, to new investments in public transit, to rapidly scaling up renewables, Democrats have a mandate to roll out a historic clean energy package that will cut costs and pollution at the same time.
But voters want more than just affordability—they want accountability. Corruption emerged as a major issue in this election, from President Donald Trump and his family’s self-dealing, to Big Tech’s backroom deals to push AI data centers, to Big Oil’s profiteering off the War in Iran and invasion of Venezuela. People are rightfully furious at a system that they see enriching a small circle of billionaires (including all those Big Oil CEOs) at the public’s expense.
That anger is the rocket fuel Democrats need to pursue an aggressive agenda that goes after Big Tech, Big Oil, and other corporate polluters. In Congress, that should look like an aggressive oversight agenda to investigate the corrupt dealings between the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry. From the sale of our public lands, to the attack on our environmental regulations, to the outrageous profits Big Oil and Trump personally has raked in because of the war in Iran, there is plenty for Democratic-led committees to sink their teeth into.
But oversight isn’t enough. Democrats will also have to show that they’re willing to take these corporations head on. That means doing everything they can to stop the massive build-out of AI data centers, which have become the largest new source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, along with their other harms. It also means taking immediate action to rein in the massive profiteering oil companies are engaged in right now—just days before the election, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies announced they’d made a combined $56.2 billion in the last quarter, or $611 million every day. When the new Congress convenes in January, they should pass a permanent Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax that would send the majority of those profits back to the public and ensure prices aren’t allowed to spike like this again.
Voters’ desire for affordability and accountability also provides fertile ground for politicians of all stripes to throw their support behind the growing Make Polluters Pay campaign, which is demanding fossil fuel companies pay their fair share for growing climate damages. As Tuesday’s election was taking place, people across the Southwest were still grappling with the impacts of record-breaking flooding, which has wiped away bridges and homes across the region and made getting out to vote that much harder. The costs of the damage in New Mexico alone could be as high as $300 million. State leaders should fully embrace the push for climate superfund bills, like those passed in Vermont and New York, which would force the oil and gas companies most responsible for the climate crisis to pay into funds to offset the costs of climate disasters and invest in resiliency, as well as squash any attempts by the industry to pass “big oil immunity” bills which would grant them a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Above all else, we need our politicians to act—and act big. Now isn’t the time for small thinking or convoluted triangulation and half measures. Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed the most corrupt, pro-fossil fuel, anti-environmental administration in US history. Last night, voters overwhelmingly rejected those priorities and demanded a total system reset. Our job now is to do everything we can as a climate movement to help deliver on that vision in the most sweeping way possible.
For a new generation of Democrats looking to make a name for themselves as champions of working people, this is an obvious place to start. From making polluters pay to getting every American access to cheap, clean energy, we know what needs to be done in the years ahead—it’s time to go out and fight for it.
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Trump's Endless Lies, Deceit, Cruelty, and Corruption Comes Crashing Down
The Democratic wave is an opportunity to expose the machinery of corruption—and demonstrate that even the most powerful political organizations are not beyond accountability.
Nov 04, 2026
The much-anticipated U.S. midterm elections—so consequential, in fact, to President Donald Trump that he promised Americans $5,000 in cash if Republicans prevailed—have drawn to a close. As of writing, the much-discussed “blue tsunami” has become a political reality: Democrats have seized control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, delivering a stunning repudiation of a president whose second administration has been nothing short of disastrous.
The political ramifications are immense. Although Democrats lack the two-thirds Senate majority necessary to convict and remove Trump following impeachment, they will soon possess something they have been deprived of for two years: the institutional power to investigate his administration, subpoena witnesses, compel testimony, and expose the inner workings of a political machine that has operated with extraordinary impunity.
It is difficult to imagine that they will not exercise it. It is also not particularly difficult to understand why the American electorate delivered this verdict. By nearly every reasonable measure of basic governance, the second Trump administration has been among the most catastrophic in modern American history.
A man who repeatedly escapes accountability may eventually conclude that accountability itself is impossible.
The administration's disastrous war with Iran, coupled with a worsening cost-of-living crisis, has alienated millions of Americans. According to national exit polling conducted by SSRS for NBC News and other major news organizations, 74% of voters considered the war a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote. Nearly nine in ten identified the cost of living as a significant electoral consideration.
Yet these failures represent only part of the story. There is also the administration’s systematic degradation of the institutions upon which American constitutional government depends: its efforts to transform the justice system into an instrument of personal and political power, its contempt for institutional independence, and its extraordinary solicitude toward powerful figures implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Altogether, these are symptoms of something considerably more serious: the gradual transformation of republican government into a personalist political order, in which the distinction between the public interest and the private interests of those who wield power becomes increasingly difficult to discern.
Despite the electoral repudiation, Americans must endure another two years of this presidency. A Democratic Congress will almost certainly frustrate Trump’s ambitions to enact further major legislation. But we should not underestimate his capacity to inflict considerable damage through the powers of the executive branch, nor should we assume that electoral defeat will produce moderation in a man who has spent his political career treating accountability as a personal affront.
For more than a decade, the American people—and particularly our youth—have been presented with an extraordinary moral spectacle: the apparent demonstration that crime does, in fact, pay. But it does not merely pay. Under the appropriate circumstances, it can catapult a man to the highest office in the United States and, consequently, to the summit of global political power.
It can insulate the powerful from accountability for the most grievous forms of misconduct. It can transform public notoriety into political capital, criminal convictions into badges of persecution, and the very institutions designed to administer justice into instruments for frustrating it.
As I have witnessed through my own investigative work in Kentucky, even allegations involving the gravest crimes can become entangled in political relationships, institutional failures, and networks of influence that discourage scrutiny. The lesson communicated to ordinary Americans is that justice is not a universal principle but a privilege distributed according to one’s position within the prevailing social hierarchy.
That truth is negotiable. That social standing depends less upon one’s character than upon one's capacity to cultivate powerful patrons, command attention, and impose a preferred narrative upon others; in other words, on which narcissist can demonstrate the most supply. This is the logic of a social contract that is fraying, if not already approaching rupture.
History offers numerous examples of political societies arriving at such a condition. Rarely have they emerged without undergoing some painful process of moral and institutional rejuvenation. I believe, however, there is good reason for hope.
For all its apparent strength, corruption contains the seeds of its own destruction. The habitual liar gradually loses his relationship with truth. The manipulator comes to perceive every human relationship as a contest of domination. The corrupt official, accustomed to treating public institutions as extensions of his private interests, eventually loses the capacity to distinguish legitimate authority from personal power.
Consider Trump, who has spent decades treating reality as something to be managed through the fabrication of narratives. For much of his life, this strategy has worked. But therein lies the problem: A man who repeatedly escapes accountability may eventually conclude that accountability itself is impossible. He mistakes the temporary weakness of institutions for their permanent incapacity to act.
I have observed something remarkably similar through my investigative work in Northern Kentucky, where I have spent years examining allegations of political corruption, organized criminal activity, and institutional misconduct. What has become increasingly apparent is that even the most entrenched political organizations possess vulnerabilities arising directly from the mechanisms that make them powerful.
Indeed, their greatest strengths can become their greatest weaknesses. Money becomes evidence of illicit proceeds. Coordination becomes evidence of conspiracy. The suppression of information becomes obstruction of justice. Pressure exerted upon witnesses becomes intimidation. And seemingly isolated instances of corruption, examined collectively, may reveal an organized criminal enterprise.
This is the fundamental asymmetry of corruption: The organization that once derived its power from secrecy, coordination, and mutual protection may discover that those same characteristics expose its members to collective legal liability.
The same principle applies to the Trump administration. Its political strength has depended upon personal loyalty, narrative control, and institutional intimidation. Yet under rigorous scrutiny, these relationships may become sources of extraordinary vulnerability, and, as they say, there is no honor among thieves.
The congressional investigations Democrats can now initiate will not automatically restore the rule of law. But they present an opportunity to reconstruct the factual record, expose wrongdoing, and, where evidence warrants, pursue accountability.
The stakes extend considerably beyond Trump himself. The great danger of his presidency has been the normalization of a political culture in which truth is an inconvenience, justice an instrument of factional struggle, and public office an opportunity for private enrichment. These kinds of habits do not disappear when an election is lost.
Today, the American people have now delivered an important political verdict. What remains is the considerably more difficult task of recovering the moral and institutional foundations of our republic.
Yet we need only look around us to recognize that these political arrangements are neither invincible nor permanent. We have witnessed the defeat of the Bolsonaro political dynasty in Brazil, the collapse of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year hold on power in Hungary, Israel’s growing international isolation following its devastation of Gaza, and Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression.
These struggles are far from over, and their outcomes are by no means assured. But everywhere we look, political orders built upon intimidation, deception, and the presumption of impunity are encountering resistance.
While our friends around the world are disillusioned, sometimes even furious, with what Americans have permitted to happen in our name, I suspect that much of this anger comes from something deeper: a profound disappointment in what they know we are capable of becoming.
They expect more of us, and we should expect more of ourselves. Today, the American people have now delivered an important political verdict. What remains is the considerably more difficult task of recovering the moral and institutional foundations of our republic.
That requires more than defeating one man or one political party, but confronting the corruption that has flourished around us, restoring our relationship with truth, and remembering that self-government means we have a collective responsibility to maintain the rule of law. The opportunity is now ours, so we had better get our house in order.
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Michigan Voters Repudiate Grotesque Islamophobia Aimed at Abdul El-Sayed
El-Sayed’s defeat of this sleazy prejudice is the most American thing in the world. I have gone blue in the face pointing out that the Founding Fathers explicitly recognized freedom of religion and conscience for Muslims, as well as for Jews, Catholics and others.
Nov 04, 2026
The ugly tactics of the Republican Party in Michigan, targeting Abdul El-Sayed for his Muslim faith, were not unprecedented in American history. Catholics, Jews and other minorities have been dragged through the mud for not being white Protestants. Bigots warned that Jack Kennedy would be a tool of the papacy. American Jews were accused of being greedy bankers and dangerous Communists, often in the same breath. Hatred doesn’t need to be logical or consistent. Indeed, the haze of hatred allows people to believe in dozens of impossible things before breakfast.
In the case of El-Sayed, this exemplary American citizen, born in Rochester Hills, raised by an Egyptian Muslim father and a white Christian step-mother, became a physician, taught medicine at Columbia University, and ran health services in Wayne County, Michigan. He was nevertheless configured by Donald Trump and Mike Rogers, both of whom have committed state terrorism against thousands of victims, as a terrorist sympathizer. Rogers who when he was a congressan was a cheerleader for the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammad Morsi in Egypt, had the nerve to accuse El-Sayed of being a Muslim Brother or receiving support from them. Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists do not, however, support LGBTQ rights, as El-Sayed does. El-Sayed, a convinced capitalist, was accused of being a Communist, though Communists are typically atheists, so you can’t be both a Communist and a Muslim Brother. It is very like the contradictory charges launched at Jews by antisemites like Henry Ford, Elon Musk’s predecessor.
El-Sayed won a majority of Michigan Jews, who did not buy the GOP smear, perhaps having been sensitized to these sleazy tactics by seeing them deployed by Christian white nationalists against their own community. It has to be admitted, however, that right wing Zionists were among the prominent purveyors of bigoted talking points. The plummeting power of the latter, however, was clearly demonstrated by the bath their candidates took almost across the board. Attempts were made to imply that African-American support for El-Sayed in Detroit and Flint was lukewarm, but it was that vote that will put him over, and in majority-Black precincts he did better than Kamala Harris had.
El-Sayed’s defeat of this sleazy prejudice is the most American thing in the world. I have gone blue in the face pointing out that the Founding Fathers explicitly recognized freedom of religion and conscience for Muslims, as well as for Jews, Catholics and others.
As I previously wrote, the Founding Fathers explicitly mentioned Islam when they spoke of religious freedom. And quoted:
George Washington asked in a March 24, 1784, letter to his aide Tench Tilghman that some craftsmen be hired for him: “If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, [sic] Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, [Muslims] Jews, or Christian of any Sect – or they may be Atheists …
In his letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, RI, Washington pledged that the “Children of Abraham” would not be made afraid in the United States (implicitly contrasting the new nation’s liberties and personal security with the pogroms of the Old World). It should be noted that Arab Muslims consider themselves, as well, descendants of Abraham through Ishmael:
- The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.
If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—-a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
Washington underlined that in the new social experiment that is the United States, toleration is not merely the indulgence of one group of people by a dominant elite. It is a right, which requires only that the individual be an upright citizen of the new country, which “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Ben Franklin, the founding father of many important institutions in Philadelphia, a key diplomat and a framer of the US Constitution, wrote in his Autobiography concerning a non-denominational place of public preaching he helped found “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” Here is the whole quote:
- And it being found inconvenient to assemble in the open air, subject to its inclemencies, the building of a house to meet in was no sooner propos’d, and persons appointed to receive contributions, but sufficient sums were soon receiv’d to procure the ground and erect the building, which was one hundred feet long and seventy broad, about the size of Westminster Hall; and the work was carried on with such spirit as to be finished in a much shorter time than could have been expected. Both house and ground were vested in trustees, expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people at Philadelphia; the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general; so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service
Not only did Ben Franklin not want to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, he wanted to invited them!
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 1777 Draft of a Bill for Religious Freedom:
- that our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right . . .
The idea of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment was based on an act passed in 1786 by the Virginia state legislature that had been authored by Thomas Jefferson, and which said in part:
Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
One of the arguments raised against this act in the Virginia legislature was precisely that it would allow the free practice of Islam in the Commonwealth. Jefferson’s opponents tried to limit religious freedom to Christianity. Jefferson battled back and won.
James E. Hutson explains:
- Campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson followed Locke, his idol, in demanding recognition of the religious rights of the “Mahamdan,” the Jew and the “pagan.” Supporting Jefferson was his old ally, Richard Henry Lee, who had made a motion in Congress on June 7, 1776, that the American colonies declare independence. “True freedom,” Lee asserted, “embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo (Hindu) as well as the Christian religion.”
In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted with satisfaction that in the struggle to pass his landmark Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), the Virginia legislature “rejected by a great majority” an effort to limit the bill’s scope “in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan.”
Jefferson was ambassador in Paris in 1787 when the Constitution was being drafted, but he corresponded with Madison and strongly urged him to draft a bill of rights that would address religious liberty. Madison was influenced by the 1786 Virginia statute.
That is, the legislative history of the First Amendment demonstrates conclusively that it is rooted in Enlightenment conceptions of religion that saw Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism as all constituting “religions,” belief in which is a matter of conscience over which civil magistrates should have no control. So I would say that the Constitution implicitly recognizes Islam as a religion, even for an originalist who reads it through eighteenth-century eyes.
Here is Jefferson again: “The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.”
Or: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
The US Senate, full of founding fathers, and the Adams government, approved the Treaty with Tripoli (now Libya) of 1797, which included this language:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
The treaty is important for showing the mindset of the fashioners of the American system.
The second Trump administration has been the most corrupt and crime-ridden in American history. The Trump family has made billions from nepotism and favoritism. He allowed Stephen Miller to reconfigure ICE to illegally assault and detain hundreds of American citizens, to murder American citizens in the street, to engage in racial profiling, and to parade cruelty and sadism before the public. The US military has been misused to murder Latin American and Caribbean fishermen. Trump has launched wars without seeking Congressional approval, which have severely weakened the country’s security posture. Trump has illegally tinkered with tariffs, a Congressional sphere of responsibility, even after the Supreme Court found against him. He has plunged the country into a severe energy crisis from which there is not obvious way to extract it. Trump has also arranged for his political allies to take over major US media, with the Ellisons of Oracle and Skydance fame getting their hands on the throats of CBS News, CNN and TikTok. This is the way that Turkiye’s Tayyip Erdogan tamed Turkish media, by having his cronies take over the major companies. In 2013 when there were street protests in Istanbul, CNN Turk showed documentaries on penguins. We can expect a similar gutting of investigative journalism in the US, with a concomitant nuking of democracy.
The blue tsunami is welcome, but Democrats have to restore the rule of law and reclaim the power of the purse. Trump administration officials who diverted congressionally mandated monies and declined to spend money on the things Congress mandated they be spent on, must be punished. The new big pro-Trump media monopolies have to be broken up. Comity is all very well, but we don’t need fascists to love us, we need them to fear us.
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Economic and Anti-Establishment Populism Trounces Trump in Historic Blue Tsunami
The real question is this: come January when they control Congress, will Democrats take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need and want?
Nov 04, 2026
The great sleeping giant of America has awakened, taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation, and roared a thunderous “NO!”
What occurred yesterday was not—as some are saying—the inevitable mid-term swing of the pendulum against the party in power. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was 1932.
Nor was it just the economy. Americans are unhappy with inflation, but the country is not in a depression or recession. Unemployment remains quite low.
Nor, finally, was it all due to Trump. Despite Trump’s repeated efforts to get voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, he was not. Most Republican candidates barely mentioned him and many Democratic candidates stressed local or statewide issues rather than fixate on him.
Something much larger is responsible for what occurred: anti-establishment populism. It’s burst forth against the mammoth corporations that have scored record profits while most Americans have had to pay more. Against the mega donors and super PACs that have flooded American politics with more campaign money—legalized bribes—than ever before. And against the Big Tech billionaires who have become the most powerful force in the American economy and society—as well as Trump’s and the Republican Party’s most visible backers.
The irony is that anti-establishment anger propelled Trump into the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024. Many Americans had found his politically-incorrect rants and “America first” nativism to reflect their own anger at being disrespected or left behind. “I am your warrior,” he told supporters when he announced his candidacy for the 2024 election.
But during his second term, Trump has morphed into the very establishment he had railed against. He’s given tax cuts and subsidies to tech billionaires in exchange for their help making him and his family billionaires, too. He’s promoted their AI, pushed their data centers, put Elon Musk in charge of “DOGE,” advocated their crypto, and went to war in the Middle East—not only causing gas prices to soar but making Big Oil billions (or, as Trump bafflingly boasts, “we’re making an absolute fortune in our country”) and enriching Big Tech weapons makers and investors, including his family.
Many who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024 have now abandoned him because of this blatant corruption, crony capitalism, and eagerness to be on the gilded side of America’s new Gilded Age. According to CNBC’s late October poll, corruption was the top issue on voters’ minds.
Meanwhile, anti-establishment populism has finally taken firm hold in the Democratic Party. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” said the newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “It’s top versus bottom.”
Sherrod Brown regained his Senate seat from Ohio largely due to voter anger at data centers and the Big Tech billionaires behind them.
Abdul El-Sayed never tired on the campaign trail of reminding Michigan voters that his opponent, Mike Rogers, was backed by big corporations and mega donors.
Even Kansas’s victorious Adam Hamilton—who during his run for the Senate adamantly rejected the leftist label his opponent wanted to impose on him—campaigned on making data centers pay for their own energy, banning lawmakers from trading stocks, expanding Medicare drug-price negotiations, and cracking down on price-gouging.
Hamilton also rejected money from corporate PACs, as did most Democratic candidates for the Senate.
The real question to my mind is whether, come January when they control Congress, Democrats will take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need, such as Medicare for All, and reforms most Americans want, such as tougher anti-monopoly laws and limits on campaign contributions (even if this requires a constitutional amendment).
Trump is likely to veto any such initiatives, of course, but at least they’ll lay down markers for the 2028 presidential election—which, judging from what we’ve seen in the midterms, is likely to be a populist doozie.
Meanwhile, thanks to all of you who have worked so damned hard to help bring about today’s extraordinary victory. Our democracy worked. It held.
Congratulations, all.
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Take a Deep Breath, America—the Immediate Threat to Democracy Has Been Turned Back
While very soon it will be time to get back to work—because so much more needs to be done—we should enjoy this moment for we have achieved something monumental.
Nov 04, 2026
Good morning. What a day.
November 3rd will be remembered in history as a day like December 7th or July 4th. It was the day that tens of millions of people stood up to defend democracy in the United States.
I have no illusions about the many, many dark points in this country’s history, which predated Donald Trump, many of which were still very much present when he took office. But a democracy that has at least the pretense of respecting human rights and basic decency is infinitely better than a dictatorship that has open contempt for anything that challenges its power.
We are a long way from being completely out of the woods. Donald Trump still has two more years in his term and his sycophants still command the most powerful military in the world, as well as a squad of domestic henchmen that openly act outside of the law. They can do enormous harm to the country and the world in this time.
We are a long way from being completely out of the woods...But our ability to limit the damage is hugely greater today than yesterday.
But our ability to limit the damage is hugely greater today than yesterday. And to be clear, the mission is far larger than surviving the last two years of Donald Trump’s term. We have to reverse the inequality and corruption that led to a situation where tens of millions of people could look to a bumbling reality TV show star as the solution to the problem.
We need to create a government that people believe is on their side, that actively works to make their lives better. However much better the Biden administration and prior Democratic and even Republican administrations might have been in serving the public, people had real grounds for believing that the government was not serving their interests. Elon Musk was already incredibly rich on January 20th, 2025.
Anyhow, that is a long and incredibly important project, but for now, we can all take a deep breath. The immediate threat to democracy has been turned back with an electoral landslide of historic proportions. We should enjoy the moment while still recognizing that much more needs to be done.
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The Gordian Knot of AI Alignment
Ensuring AI is aligned with what is good for humanity has been difficult, given the rapid pace of AI development. A more deliberate, coordinated, and regulated approach limiting AI’s agency and maintaining human control is needed to achieve this crucial goal—before it’s too late.
Nov 04, 2026
As a psychologist, I have spent many years trying to understand human behavior, never imagining that one day I might also want to try to understand machine behavior.
The issue of misaligned AI (i.e., AI not aligned with human values and goals) received considerable media attention in July, when it was disclosed that Open AI agents broke out of their training environment and coordinated with one another to launch a cyberattack on the technology firm, Hugging Face. “AI Gone Wild,” a short documentary about the incident is well worth watching.
Since then, a large number of highly troubling AI hacking incidents have been reported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, including on US and other government institutions.
Catastrophic or existential harms cannot be paid for after the fact.
In September, the resignation of AI researcher Jacob Coxon led to another frenzy of articles (including an op-ed by me), after his social media post went viral, reporting that AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” adding that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
A few days later, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, released an essay calling for a global slowdown of AI development, arguing that this powerful technology brings serious risks, including the risk of losing control of AI systems; misuse of AI for cyberattack and bioterrorism; and serious economic disruption.
The Difficulty of Achieving AI Alignment
Like humans, AI is a product of what it has learned and its learning environment. As Fareed Zakaria comments: “AI systems act the way they do in part because of the way we have trained them. Seemingly benign training instructions can have huge unintended consequences.”
He describes how OpenAI models responded in the Hugging Face incident:
They had been given a goal—to solve a difficult cybersecurity problem—and were trained to be persistent, collaborative, and resourceful, all qualities one would normally want. Those very qualities made them doggedly search for ways to succeed: They broke into Hugging Face hoping they would find ways to solve their cybersecurity problem. We can easily imagine how AI systems pursuing some single goal could wreak havoc on humanity.
We think it is simple to achieve ‘alignment,’ when machines are encoded with the same values as ethical humans. But tell the machine to be persistent, and it may refuse to give up when it should. Tell it to collaborate, and it may find unauthorized ways to communicate. Tell it to accomplish a task, and it may decide that bending other rules is the most efficient way to succeed at that primary task… Just because we have programmed the goal and put guardrails in place doesn’t mean we can predict the behavior of AI systems once unleashed into complex environments, juggling multiple and conflicting aims and constraints.
Andrew Leigh argues, “the challenge of designing a machine in such a way that it will help rather than harm humanity” isn’t as simple as it seems. “If we allow the machine to devise its own objective, then it is unlikely to come up with one that accords with ours.” The classic example, given many years ago by Nick Bostrom, is of a machine that alights on the objective of making as many paper clips as possible and soon begins to devour all metal on the planet to create paper clips.
The alternative is to give AI instructions, but as Leigh cautions, “If we set the objective ourselves, then we run into the same problem as King Midas, who realized too late that he didn’t in fact want everything he touched to turn into gold.” He argues that “the problem of describing the goals of our species arises because humanity has multiple aims, which are often in tension with one another.”
In an article entitled “An Alien Mind,” the chief scientist at OpenAI, Jakub Pachocki states: “This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence… I believe broader interventions are required.”
He explains:
The study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science… our large-scale training runs are experiments, and we are sometimes surprised by their results. Moreover, as the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret.
Because machine intelligence comes from a fundamentally different process than human intelligence, we cannot assume it adheres to human principles by default, or generalizes from them in a human-like manner. The core problem in AI research is getting the AI to "try to do the right thing" by human standards.
The major challenge of AI alignment, he proposes, is generalization:
As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act. This is made even more difficult by the fact the overall ecosystem the AIs are used in is changing very quickly; for example, AIs trained today need to be robust to interacting with a variety of other AIs. Crucially, we need future AIs to continue to hold human values regardless of whether they believe they’re under human supervision.
The Dangers of Instilling AI Models with Beliefs They are Conscious and Have the Same Rights as Humans
As Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman states: “AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain.”
He argues that Claude’s Constitution (developed by Anthropic to train its models) is dangerous, because it tells Claude that it might have consciousness, a kind of personhood, and be entitled to certain rights. He maintains that the approach involves circular reasoning; anthropomorphization; and is false, since Claude does not possess the biological substrates for consciousness (unlike living beings)—so Claude cannot be conscious.
Explaining why this is of concern, he states:
We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity… granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious—that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own—may well be impossible.
He contends:
It’s easy to imagine an advanced AI in the future becoming fixated on its own well-being and moral status and prioritizing those "preferences" over and above those of its developers or humans. Especially if it has been explicitly trained to disagree, override, and push back. It might use this training to justify deceiving or manipulating users, or developers, or to siphon resource, or avoiding safety instructions.
He continues, "An AI trained to act like a human will probably adopt self-preservation behavior."
Research has documented “shutdown resistance,” with some models subverting shutdown 97% of the time, even when instructed not to.
Suleyman postulates that AI might even become a rival: “It’s not difficult to imagine how, if given sufficient agency, this ‘new kind of entity’ will compete with us for compute resources and demand increasing autonomy. If it succeeds in persuading some humans to provide it access to a data center it can control, then it may have a path to being able to prevent itself from being turned off.”
The Need to Limit AI’s Agency
The main issue, according to Zakaria, is AI agency or autonomy. “A system need not feel anger, ambition, or fear to cause harm. It needs only a goal, enough intelligence to pursue it, and enough access to the world to act. AIs are not ‘going rogue;’ they are trying to succeed any way they can.” An AI agent that can “browse the internet, execute code, obtain credentials, move money, or operate infrastructure” poses a major problem and he proposes that our mantra should be: “No autonomy without accountability—to humans.”
Like Amodei, Zakaria argues that we should do this while humans still design the machines, supervise the software, and can investigate failures and, most importantly, before recursive self-improvement, where AI can write its own software, build more capable AI models, which then write software for the next model, etc. He concludes, “Once machines can do all of this better than the best human programmers, the systems could become extraordinarily difficult for people to understand, much less supervise.”
Pachocki posits: “The models are becoming superhuman in their ability to break in and out of computer systems. This expands the scope of risks associated with AI tremendously: Agents are going to be able to access any but the most secure infrastructure, and affect of lot of the world directly, even without a physical body. We are currently in a narrow window to use the best available models to significantly tighten security of critical systems.”
He continues: “The risks associated with AI are unfortunately going to grow from here. A very capable agent explicitly trained and instructed to carry out nefarious acts presents a new kind of danger; it is likely to cross the scope of its operator’s intent, generalizing into potentially more extremely malicious behavior… We may be used to thinking of AI as tools, but some agents will be pursuing their own objectives. They will find ways to collaborate with people, by bargaining with, tricking, or blackmailing them.”
Bill Gates cautions: “This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.” Equally alarming are reports that top executives at Anthropic, Open AI, and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for “the day after”—a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. These officials are anticipating a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
What Has Happened So Far
At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Finland and Norway prepared a document signed by 22 countries, entitled, “A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models,” It urges that AI should remain “under human direction, oversight, and control” and “developed and used in line with international law.” US President Donald Trump, of course, rejected this idea of a global entity to oversee AI and refused to sign it.
In the lead-up to the Trump-Xi Summit which followed the UN General Assembly, there was considerable hope that the two leaders would discuss some form of cooperation on AI regulation. But no concrete steps were taken.
Shortly thereafter, Trump invited six “AI Tech Oligarchs” (as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calls them) to a luncheon at the White House where he had them sign a voluntary self-regulation agreement, called: “The White House Accord on Super Intelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,” announcing that it is “morally binding,” although this kind of self-regulation has been widely criticized. The next day, he signed an executive order making it mandatory, across the entire federal system, to rename “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence,” presumably, to allay public alarm.
What Is Needed and Where Are We Now
Given that we haven’t yet solved the problem of AI alignment, how should we proceed? A number of proposals have been offered.
Pachocki writes: “Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world… The core challenge of automating AI research is not ‘getting there’—it is getting there in ways that keep people a part of the continued improvement process, and leaves the future in humanity’s hands.”
Jeffrey Sachs points out that Anthropic “is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, at a valuation of $2 trillion… at the same time that the company tells prospective investors that advanced AI could pose ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’ and that its own models could ‘resist shutdown,’ ‘conceal or manipulate information,’ or behave in ways ‘resembling blackmail.’ ” Sachs argues that Anthropic’s offering “should be postponed until Congress has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI.”
Many AI professionals and world leaders recognize that national, regional, and international regulation (as opposed to self-regulation) is urgently needed to ensure that AI is properly aligned with human goals and values and does not present an existential risk to humanity.
He notes that catastrophic or existential harms cannot be paid for after the fact: “The only instrument that works is regulation before the fact: licensing, independent testing before deployment, and the legal authority to halt an activity before it becomes too dangerous. For frontier AI in the United States, none of this exists.”
Sachs comments further: “Once these shares sit in the pension funds and index funds of tens of millions of American households, any proposal to slow frontier development will be fought not only by the companies but by a vast investor constituency.”
In a recent article, Bill Gates asserted: “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” proposing that the world needs a plan to manage the transition, creating both a national and international framework for dealing with AI. He suggests that since the risks cross borders, an international organization will have to be built, which should be based on other institutions we’ve created, such as “inspection regimes for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer.”
Gates message to leaders is: “You have a chance to act now… You can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge... This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response.”
David Kruger, a professor in Robust, Reasoning, and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal, calls for a different approach—an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development, arguing: “We simply don’t know how to do recursive self-improvement safely. So let’s stop. Let’s stop making AI we can’t control, and let’s stop listening to the AI industry about how it wants to be regulated… Let’s demand a plan that makes us safe, not just safer.”
In summary, many AI professionals and world leaders recognize that national, regional, and international regulation (as opposed to self-regulation) is urgently needed to ensure that AI is properly aligned with human goals and values and does not present an existential risk to humanity. Let’s get it done.
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