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In Solidarity — Joe

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No stranger to manipulating elections, the American ultra-wealthy are openly thwarting the democratic process at both home and abroad. Drawing from its rich history of anti-leftist imperialism throughout South America, the American capitalist class is currently aiding the Latin far-right in more modern ways than previously.

The week before the Brazilian elections, the campaign of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — known as Lula — reported that Facebook and Instagram were censoring its accounts. According to the Brazilian Workers’ Party (the “Partido dos Trabalhadores” or “PT”), the President’s posts appeared without a share button, were hidden by the algorithm, and played without audio or at fast speed to discourage viewing. Meta quickly blamed “technical” issues, saying “Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false.” But new reporting from the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo shows that was a lie. The paper's reporters reviewed internal Meta messages confirming that Mark Zuckerberg’s company restricted accounts related to the PT and President Lula, while boosting the accounts of rightist candidate Flavio Bolsonaro. Meta even went so far as to change its algorithm to recommend that Instagram and Facebook users join Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp channel, directly funneling them into the fascist project.

Independent watchdogs also found that Meta allowed unauthorized foreign accounts to buy ads supporting Bolsonaro, violating Brazilian election law. The pro-Bolsanoro techno-fascist campaign received additional support from journalist-turned-Peter Thiel-lackey , who may as well be on the Palantir payroll by this point. The anti-imperialist South American outlet Orinoco Tribune reported that The Intercept founder was boosting conspiracy theories about judicial malpractice and a closed U.S. embassy to help the Bolsonaro campaign. Greenwald offered no evidence to support his claims, and the president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Kassio Nunes Marques, appointed by Falvio Bolsonaro’s father, former president and current inmate Jair Bolsonaro, said the theory had no merit. Orinoco Tribune reporters noted that all of Greenwald’s messages were in English, a clear sign he was laying the ideological groundwork for English-speaking audiences to accept a possibly stolen Brazilian election.

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The answer did not go as Tommy planned.

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Protesting is one of the most organic political actions. Since the dawn of civilization, whenever people are dissatisfied with their rulers, they air their grievances loudly and publicly. For as long as there have been capitals and castles, there have been angry crowds outside them, jeering the powerful within.

But not all protests are equal. Some build vibrant, powerful movements that achieve their goals by codifying grassroots discomfort into law. The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days, building public pressure that eventually led the Alabama district court to rule racial segregation unlawful. In 1987, the June Movement brought down South Korea’s military dictatorship, and three years later British citizens won the repeal of a poll tax through sustained protests and political action.

Comparatively, less-organized protest movements struggle to find success. Occupy Wall Street served as a training camp for activists who propelled Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and the rebirth of the socialist left. But Occupy’s vague, idealistic demands limited the movement and failed to attract mass support necessary to win concessions. “Outlaw all credit reporting agencies” and “open the borders” were too strong an ask for what was ultimately the occupation of a city park. Wall Street tycoons didn’t appreciate angry protesters in their financial district. But the movement never dissatisfied or threatened capital enough to motivate bankers to call their corporate politicians and tell them to open the Southern border. And even if they did, no single law can achieve the open borders imagined in leftist utopia. The Occupy protestors weren’t wrong to fight for a more equal society. But their calls for social revolution greatly overestimated their power and isolated them from the masses, yielding few material gains.

That is why concrete, achievable demands are crucial to any mass movement—especially protests, given the decentralized nature and unpredictable conditions of street action. Without clear objectives, unity of purpose, and strict message discipline, protests risk dissolving into chaos that drains energy, fragments coalitions, and opens the door for counter-revolutionary movements to seize power.

Recent protests in New York City, France, and India show that organization is key to a successful protest movement.

New York City

The first protest we’ll examine took place in New York City on October 7th outside City Hall. Organized by the Palestinian liberation group Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and endorsed by dozens of student and liberatory organizations, the call to action accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “capitulating to Zionist pressure” and other transgressions related to his dealings with the city’s powerful Zionist political establishment:

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement. He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality. Instead, he has repeatedly capitulated to zionist pressure: Criminalizing protests against the sale of stolen Palestinian land in New York City through the passage of the NYC Council Bill Intro 1-B; allowing the NYPD to surveil, arrest, and violently suppress protests against these illegal land sales; and most recently, pledging $26 million tax dollars to the “Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism“ which will provide funding for zionist propagandist groups such as JCRC-NY; and security infrastructure for zionist synagogues which host illegal real estate sales of stolen Palestinian land to expand settlements.

The Mayor’s claim of solidarity with the Palestinian people is meaningless when it is followed by no action and capitulation to zionist pressure.

The problem here is that the organizers listed grievances, but no demands. Without concrete steps to address these grievances, neither the protestors nor the protested know exactly what the group wants. For example, WOL accused the mayor of “criminalizing protests against the sale of stolen Palestinian land in New York City through the passage of the NYC Council Bill Intro 1-B.” This refers to the infamous law that established a protest “buffer zone” around “places of worship,” an implicit protection for synagogues that host real estate events selling stolen Palestinian land. But it’s wrong to say Mamdani “criminalized” protest, or even focus on him if a movement aims to end buffer zones. The New York City Council passed Intro 1-B with a veto-proof 44-5 majority. Mamdani returned the bill unsigned to signal his disapproval. The Council also passed a similar bill establishing a buffer zone in schools, 30-19, which Mamdani vetoed. Because the action focused on vague complaints rather than specific demands, it didn’t apply pressure to the right outlet. (The same is true of a later demand that Mamdani abolish the City University Board of Trustees, which he can’t do because New York State law established the Board.) As a result, the buffer law was no closer to being repealed than it was before the action. If anything, the protest’s disorganized chants and unsettling tactics drove away crucial allies, furthering them from their goals.

On the morning of October 7th, hours before the protest began, Politico ran a story about how The Legal Aid Society, the NYCLU, and other NYC-based criminal justice reform advocates urged the mayor to live up to his campaign promises. Specifically, they wanted the administration to abolish the NYPD’s violent Strategic Response Group and the gang database. One official pressuring the administration was DSA City Council member Tiffany Cabán, who urged City Hall to show movement on its pledged police reforms. As Politico wrote:

Council Member and fellow DSA-member Tiffany Cabán said the mayor has taken a big first step with his new public safety department and has done much to address affordability through other initiatives like an expansion of childcare — which she said are crucial to boosting safety by making New Yorkers less likely to commit crimes in the first place. But she argued falling back onto failed policing practices undercuts that progress, and that a major shakeup in NYPD operations is necessary. And she’s confident she’s not alone.

“It’s nine months in. You give a certain level of grace for coming in and having to do a whole lot in a short amount of time,” Cabán said. “But we’re getting to a point where I think you’ll see outside organizations, advocacy groups and directly impacted folks knocking at the administration’s door and saying: Hey, time is kinda up. We need to see some more movement.”

Hours later, the protest began outside of City Hall and accused Mamdani of genocide. Chants included “700,000 dead. Mamdani, your hands are red!” and “We don’t care about where you’re from. You cannot talk about being Muslim anymore. You cannot weaponize being brown anymore. Identity politics can only get you so far.” Later, the WOL protest moved and disrupted a vigil eulogizing fallen Israeli and Palestinian civilians that Mamdani was attending.

The very next day, Cabán distanced herself from the vigil protest, saying she was “heartbroken to see last night’s disruption of the vigil honoring the lives of the Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last three years.” Cabán was one of five city councilors who voted against the buffer zone bill, which the protest organizers listed as a grievance. If your protest alienates politicians already on your side, it’s unlikely to entice other councilors to work with you to vote to repeal the law. Now, two forces advocating for something as reasonable as disbandment of a violent police unit and an end to state censorship have been separated. Cabán wasn’t the only one frustrated with the disruption. In a recent interview with , Palestinian civil rights activist Mahmoud Khalil criticized calling Mamdani a “genocide enabler,” saying it cheapened the word and disrupted the higher aim of the Palestine solidarity movement. Both Khalil and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese encouraged protestors to move away from “purity politics” and “internal struggles” and focus on the immediate priority of stopping weapons shipments to Israel.

International Efforts

To see how protests can be more effective, we look to two international examples: India and France.

In India, the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has brought millions into the streets to rally for democracy, education, and economic reform. The CJP’s five demands are broadly appealing and list specific ways for the government to meet them:

1. Jobs & Accountability: “A National Employment Guarantee for graduates — modeled on MGNREGA but designed for educated youth. Minimum stipend for graduates who cannot find employment within 6 months of graduation.”

2. Education Reform: “Resignation of the Education Minister — the minister in charge when a national exam is compromised must take responsibility, not deflect it.”

3. Press Freedom: “Independent media tribunal — a body to investigate government interference in editorial independence, with the power to impose consequences.”

4. Judicial Dignity: “Judicial accountability mechanism — a transparent, citizen-accessible system to file complaints about judicial conduct, with mandatory review timelines and public outcomes.”

5. Radical Transparency: “Full public audit of PM CARES Fund — conducted by the CAG and published in full, showing every rupee collected and every rupee spent, with beneficiary details and project outcomes.”

When the CJP and its allies marched on the Indian Parliament, they did so with slogans that attracted a broader coalition and inspired others to join. As a result, the government looked outside its window and saw an organized, energized constituency united by a common cause. Feeling the heat, the Modi government relented and agreed to partial demands. As the CJP website shows, the party took particular pride in ousting the Education Minister.

Emboldened, the protests grew, and the Modi government cracked down. When CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and his closest advisors were arrested, the cockroaches (their term) regrouped and demanded the leaders’ freedom. A court quickly released Dipke and company, even while the police detained over 15,000 protestors. Now, the leaders are back on the street, leading the protest toward its next goals: freeing all prisoners and securing the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Their slogans are broadly appealing (“Final Call to Save Democracy”), and an official spokesperson issues statements, giving the CJP clarity of purpose and the power to continue the fight, even in the face of brutal government repression.

We see similar strategies and results in France. Last month, teachers at Saint-Exupery High School in a suburb outside Paris went on strike demanding full staffing and an end to teacher shortages. Students joined in, protesting austerity measures that have led to run-down schools, missing teachers, and what they describe as inadequate education. Experiencing the same issues as Saint-Exupéry, students and labor unions from other school districts began their own protests, which coalesced in Paris around ten clear demands. They didn’t just say “end teacher shortages” and “support students,” but listed specific metrics for the government to meet, including student-to-professional ratios—“One nurse per five hundred students”— an increase in education accessibility—“250,000 additional places in higher education starting next academic year”—and material improvements to living conditions—“Increase student grants by €200 per month, distribute them over twelve months, and allow 300,000 additional students to access the grant system.” By articulating what they wanted and the steps ministers should take to satisfy them, the protestors set a clear threshold for the movement to know when it had won.

Feeling the pressure, the French government announced it would deploy 3,000 substitute teachers to fill vacancies at underfunded high schools nationwide. Students at Saint-Exupery High School reported that their issues were fixed locally, and French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu pledged to increase education funding in the upcoming budget. Students plan more protests on Tuesday, October 13th, to keep up the pressure and make sure the promise becomes reality.

Lessons Learned

While many demands of the CJP and French student union remain unfulfilled, there’s no denying their movements have been incredibly successful. By clearly stating what they are fighting for, attracting allies, and practicing message discipline, they have built mass movements that threaten state power and win concessions. They didn’t just disrupt; they built pressure and applied it to specific targets. Pressure is not the same thing as noise. Noise can be ignored or brushed off. Pressure cannot. By building a large coalition willing to march in the street and endure brutal oppression, mass protests show politicians and bureaucrats exactly what the crowd wants them to do — pass a law, fire a minister, etc. If the demands are ignored, then everyone in the crowd will be pissed. They might vote against you, reject your party, or even bring society to a halt by occupying major metro and commercial areas. This is pressure. But it works only when the protest is a large coalition pressing for specific requests, not a small, alienating contingent that scares off would-be allies and is easily dismissed by politicians and misrepresented by the media.

Fortunately, many in New York City are adhering to protest best practices. Following an ICE shooting last Friday and the NYPD’s harsh treatment of anti-ICE protestors, calls to abolish ICE and the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, as well as removing police commissioner Jessica Tisch, grew over the weekend. In response, New York City DSA released clear demands: The federal government must abolish ICE, Tisch must disband the SRG and end NYPD assistance to ICE or be fired; the New York City Council should pass the CURB Act to end all SRG abusive tactics, and the state assembly must pass the New York For All and Safe Access to Care acts to prevent ICE from entering hospitals.

The NYCLU was more specific, calling out City Council Public Safety Chair Oswald Feliz and Speaker Julie Menin for blocking the CURB Act. In addition to urging New Yorkers to call these councilors, the NYCLU is hosting a rally outside Feliz’s office on Tuesday morning. Hoping to draw media attention and supporters, the rally aims to show Councilor Feliz that his constituents want the CURB Act passed. By building power, uniting behind an achievable demand, and focusing on the specific points and people in the political process blocking the goal, this rally is likely to bolster the movement for necessary police reform.

That said, this doesn't mean Within Our Lifetime or any of the protestors who showed up on October 7th were wrong. They’re aghast at the slaughter of Palestine and rightfully seek to stop it. But to achieve our shared goals, we’ll need to channel that energy into effective, disciplined grassroots movements that can win. If the protest best practices of strict message discipline, clear goals, and a mass appeal remain absent, then the movements for safe policing and a free Palestine will be powerless, and the oppression will continue unchallenged.

For more on the success, failures, strategies, and tactics of progressive movements, I suggest ’s excellent book If We Burn.

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In Solidarity — Joe

“It was a mess.” That’s how May Martinez described the failed execution of her daughter’s murderer, Christa Pike. When the first lethal injection failed to kill Pike on September 29th, she was left writhing in pain before an audience of journalists and family members. The executioners administered a second dose to no effect. As Pike screamed and kicked, the death chamber curtains closed, and the spectators were rushed out without explanation. Currently, Christa Pike is alive and delirious in a Tennessee hospital. A court ordered state officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the execution, which will certainly be used in forthcoming lawsuits against the state for violating Pike’s 8th Amendment rights. Next come the impossible questions about what happens to the condemned now. Protracted legal fights deciding Pike’s life are certain.

If anything, May Martinez’s thought was an understatement. “A mess” only scratches the surface of this cataclysmic clusterfuck, which extends far beyond the mayhem of the Tennessee execution chamber.

On March 30th, 1996, Christa Pike was convicted of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder. The victim was Colleen Slemmer, a fellow college student whom Pike and co-conspirators lured into the woods, tortured, and killed during a Satanic ritual. With the ghastly details of the crime in headline news and the Satanic Panic dominating the day, Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution, making her the first woman to be condemned by Tennessee in over two hundred years.

After thirty years of failed appeals, Pike’s lawyers succeeded in getting the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a “short” stay of execution an hour before the procedure was to start. Pike’s legal team argued the sexual abuse she suffered as a child greatly altered her cognition at the time of the murder (Pike was only eighteen). As that topic had been omitted from her 1996 trial, and scientific research on the matter has improved greatly over the last three decades, the 6th Circuit paused the execution until it could “properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.” Never one to let silly things like “proper analysis” and “legal merits” get in the way of a good killing, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority granted Tennessee’s request to vacate the stay. An unexplained decision signed by who-else-but Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave Tennessee the go-ahead to proceed. As a result, the federal and Tennessee governments tortured a citizen, yet another display of American savagery for the world to witness.

This wasn’t Brett Kavanaugh’s first foray into legal fuckup. In the September 2025 case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh legalized racial and class profiling by empowering ICE agents to stop and detain suspected undocumented immigrants based on:

“[Factors such as (i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity].”

Kavanaugh didn’t introduce bias into American law enforcement. ICE and other police forces have been racially profiling long before 2025. But he did codify racial stops as constitutional. Legally empowered to conduct “Kavanaugh Stops,” ICE agents increased their terrorization of Hispanic, immigrant, and Chicano communities, as well as anyone who stood beside them. A new report from ProPublica details ICE’s brutal detainment of over five hundred American citizens who were “suspected” of being undocumented because of their ethnicity, race, or use of the Spanish language. When pressed on this unconstitutionality, the Department of Homeland Security cites Brett Kavanaugh’s Noem ruling as justification. DHS is evil, but not wrong. With Kavanaugh’s approval, the Supreme Court established that any ICE agent can ignore the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments if they suspect someone has an “illegal” vibe. While this report is new, the impact of Kavanaugh’s decision was immediate. The blowback was so fierce that Kavanaugh tried to walk back his legalization of racism just two months later in Trump v. Illinois. In a footnote, Kavanaugh wrote:

“The basic constitutional rules governing that dispute are longstanding and clear: The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”

Kavanaugh and his fellow conservatives achieved the state suppression they sought, and left a paper trail distancing themselves from the real-world horror they inflicted upon the United States. Folks, this is the essence of American conservatism’s legal intelligentsia. An accussed-rapist decides Daddy President’s private blackshirts can do racist terrorism. Then when these blackshirts do exactly what everyone knew they would, the aforementioned alleged rapist reverses his decision in a footnote so future court historians will say he had a ‘complicated’ relationship with racism rather than describing him as the outright knuckle-dragging mongrel that he is.

I’m not surprised Kavanaugh’s name is the only one on this decision. If you had told me in 2018 during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process that he would spend his career codifying white nationalism and fast-tracking the torture of a prisoner, but doing it in the most cowardly, craven way possible, I would have absolutely believed you. For those unhaunted by the memory, Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford during his confirmation hearing. Coming at the height of the #MeToo movement, some Republicans were uneasy about voting for him. Eager to show his fellow conservatives that he was also a grade-A scumbag, Kavanaugh debased himself to previously unseen depths by yelling “I like beer” at Senators, like a 19th-century anti-Irish immigration cartoon come to life. Then Senator Ben Sasse even worked up his alligator tears for an infamous floor speech in which he praised the #MeToo movement, denounced Trump for criticizing Kavanaugh’s accuser, said Kavanaugh was innocent, mentioned he has daughters, stated he didn’t want Kavanaugh to be appointed in the first place, spoke out against the epidemic of sexual assault, claimed the right was as committed to combating sexual assault as the left, and then voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Now that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sasse is using his final days not to reconcile for his mistakes, but to lecture Americans to stop playing Candy Crush and increase the birth rate. Yeah, man, the App Store isn’t why Americans are having fewer children. It’s because lack of healthcare access and high cost of living make families prohibitively expensive. Perhaps you should’ve considered that during your time in the most powerful legislative body in the world.

Like the process that got him onto the court, Brett Kavanaugh is not the only one at fault for torturing Christa Pike. In all likelihood, the conservative justices agreed to allow the execution, but forced Kavanaugh to sign his name because he’s the lowest on their pecking order. Yet, as Kavanaugh the man is the manifestation of the Court’s ideological capture and disregard for established law or basic decency, he is also an opportunity to challenge it. Both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said under oath that they wouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. Then, they both voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — a clear lie under oath, and one of many impeachable offenses the pair have committed. Given the severity of the Supreme Court’s disregard for the limits on its power, such as circumventing Congress to amend the Constitution to destroy established civil liberties on behalf of ICE, other proposed reforms are well worth consideration.

Appetite for materially altering the Court is strong. Even more conservative Democrats such as Adam Schiff and Joe Biden are on record supporting term limits and expanding the Court to thirteen justices to match the thirteen circuit courts in the United States. The most obvious need for Supreme Court reform is in its self-appointed ethics code, which has no mechanism for enforcement or punishment. The highest Court in the United States is rewriting the Constitution to match the Heritage Foundation website, and the only limitation on their behavior is a pinky promise that they’ll do it “ethically.” Meanwhile, the conservatives have turned the emergency docket (a.k.a. the “Shadow Docket”) into a fast track to anonymously approve whatever the White House wants. The Brennan Center for Justice found that the Court used the process to resolve cases in Trump's favor 75% of the time. Like Kavanaugh’s Noem ruling, many of these cases involve immigration and effectively erode all Americans’ civil liberties.

Brett Kavanaugh is the most visible and repugnant manifestation of the decaying corpse that is the Supreme Court. His confirmation was an embarrassment, and his tenure has been even worse. Kavanaugh illegally ended key Constitutional protections, and his latest work is stopping a judicial review so Tennessee could torture a woman — at least the second he’s personally victimized. With each passing day, Kavanaugh and his co-conspirators strip Americans of their rights under the false guise of legal proceedings and the rule of law.

Impeaching Brett Kavanaugh won’t solve all the issues with the Supreme Court. But it’s a good start that will remind everyone, citizens and justices alike, that the elite answer to the people. The elite are forgetful, so we'll need to remind them of their subservient status to the masses through a mass political program that directly challenges their power, including but not limited to the Supreme Court of the United States.

If you appreciated this essay, please click the ❤️ to help it rise in Substack’s algorithm. Don’t forget to subscribe so future articles land in your inbox. If you’re a returning JoeWrote reader, consider supporting my work with a premium subscription. For the cost of just one cup of coffee a month, you can help me keep creating content like this. Plus, you unlock everything JoeWrote has to offer.

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In Solidarity — Joe

If you’re unaware, the Prairieland Defendants were sentenced to hundreds of years in prison based on Trump’s directive classifying Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist group’ — the first classification of its kind. The trial was a sham, and new reporting from The Intercept proves it. Key evidence was hidden from the jury, and the defendants were denied access to meetings with forensics experts from their legal defense team. I suggest you check out The Intercept’s full article. Reporting like this helps us advocate for a full pardon for the defendants, which is the only way to repair this egregious miscarriage of justice.

In Solidarity — Joe

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This is the book I’ve been waiting for. Burgis and his co-authors, Mike Beggs and Bhaskar Sunkara, examine the finer points of Marxist economics to develop a socialist economic model worth pursuing. It covers the balance between national and cooperative workplaces, public funding, macroeconomic policy, and much more. What I appreciated most was the authors’ admission that they don’t have all the answers, and some issues will be ironed out by democratic decisions down the road.

You can preorder The Blueprint here. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy, and can say it’s well worth your time.

Enjoy the conversations!

In Solidarity — Joe

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Acclaimed civil rights journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has a remarkable essay in The New York Times grappling with her well-intentioned but ultimately harmful decision to send her daughter to underfunded inner-city New York City public schools. In scathing self-criticism, the lead editor of The 1619 Project admits her long-held insistence that wealthier families forgo their privilege to help the broader community hurt the person she held dearest: her daughter, Najya.

This is difficult for any parent to admit. Especially Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has built a career encouraging parents to make this tough choice along with other social justice initiatives. Her award-winning body of work focuses on racial injustice, specifically the under-education of African American children because of their race and socio-economic status. As is surprising to no American, poorer minority communities have worse public schools, while richer, whiter communities have better ones. Hannah-Jones and other egalitarians have long argued that wealthier families can combat this ‘educational apartheid’ (her term) by enrolling their children in the public schools, even if they could get into a better one. As the theory goes, the increased tax revenue, donations, and parental attention richer families provide will improve school quality and give students more opportunity—even if that improved performance is lower than what their individual child could receive elsewhere. One might call this selflessness. But as Hannah-Jones admits, it’s not. By sending her daughter into an underfunded school system, Hannah-Jones isn’t the one who sacrificed. Najya was. And she had no say in the decision. The essay is profound in its analysis, self-criticism, and admission that it doesn't have all the answers. This is the antithesis of what usually appears in The Times opinion section, which is why this is the first JoeWrote article praising the paper that usually earns my scorn. The article is well worth your time, and you can read it for free here.

As expected, the essay centers on the Black experience in America and questions the moral responsibilities a wealthy Black family has to their larger community against their own daughter. Hannah-Jones grapples with the legacy of those who came before her, comparing her decision and that of previous Black parents who sent their children to desegregate schools, which was often a terrible experience for the child. I can’t offer any insights on that topic. Here are some people who can. What calls to me about Hannah-Jones’ admission is the underlying universal truth that no amount of individual choices can fix systemic failures. As Hannah-Jones writes:

“How could I spare myself the judgment I had meted out to others when they justified why they — despite believing in integration — sent their own children to schools that entrenched segregation? Across the country, I’d lectured about how educational inequality is systemic, but that this fact did not absolve each of us of our individual choices. And in the end, I could not even sustain the cause within my own family.”

Hannah-Jones places the blame on her shoulders. Her critics do the same. National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry stopped ranting about Colin Kaepernick long enough to accuse The Times journalists of being “motivated by a savior complex.” As expected for a publication that explicitly argued for racial apartheid, Lowry claims Black schools are funded just fine, but it’s the ‘culture’ that holds them back. Megyn Kelly said Hannah-Jones “didn’t give a shit about her daughter,” and the New York Post accused her of “virtue signaling” at her daughter’s expense. The word “performative” flew around social media, casting the Hannah-Jones family as self-righteous social justice frauds who let their daughter suffer so they could morally posture at swanky New York cocktail parties. Even when we filter out the horrific racism, this critique misses what Hannah-Jones did for Najya, leaving the commentariat unable to grasp the author’s powerful reconciliation.

The Hannah-Jones family did not throw their child into a rough school and walk away like she was a fish in a catch-and-release pond. Both Nikole and her husband, Faraji, fought for Najya and the rest of her classmates at every opportunity. They advocated for their daughter through frequent meetings with principals and teachers, volunteered as lunchtime supervisors, and went above what their peers could offer with school donations and serving on the parent-teacher committee. Najya also received private tutoring, a benefit of her family’s wealth that her classmates likely couldn’t afford. In addition to wealth, Hannah-Jones’ prestige was another advantage lent to the cause. Given her career as a famous journalist covering the underdevelopment of Black education, Najya’s teachers and administration certainly gave Nikole Hannah-Jones’ requests, concerns, and participation extra weight. While the author expresses justifiable frustration at multi-day response times from her daughter’s principal, her questions were likely answered first. And it still wasn’t enough to get her daughter the schooling experience every child needs and deserves.

Acknowledging Hannah-Jones’ notoriety and increased privilege over other parents isn’t a critique. Rather, it points out that Najya had the best chance of any student to get a good education from an underserved school system. Despite hard work, intelligence, dedicated parents, a comfortable home life, private tutoring, and an award-winning racial justice reporter advocating for her, Najya still couldn't overcome the failed results of a failing system. She struggled to pass statewide exams and other educational benchmarks, causing her great stress and hardship on top of everything else a teenage girl has to endure.

The lesson is clear: individual choices cannot overcome broken systems. Hannah-Jones recognizes this and identifies school choice as a source of the educational apartheid. Even as wealthier, typically white and Asian families move into historically Black and minority neighborhoods for lower rent, they are able to send their kids outside the corresponding school district through tests and sorting. There’s no explicitly racial component to the tests. But the result appears largely the same. White and Asian students get to attend better schools while Black children are stuck in the underperforming ones, even if they live in the same neighborhood. As a result, minority families experience the financial strains of gentrification, but none of the benefits of improved educational services. This further indicts systemic issues. Gentrification is not the result of individual choices by the gentrifiers, but multi-generational underfunding of poor neighborhoods and political deference to development and business interests. Hannah-Jones also criticizes teaching and administrative staff for absenteeism and lack of concern. I’m sure these professionals could make better choices. Yet again, I suspect America’s chronic underfunding of the teaching profession and relentless attacks on social services are to blame.

While systemic failures are not an excuse to shirk collective responsibility, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s raw account shows that no amount of virtuous decisions can overcome failing systems. The problems she identifies will continue until America grapples with its cultural aversion to the collective good, which stems from our adoration of capitalism and our refusal to finish Reconstruction. Still, I commend Nikole Hannah-Jones’s genuineness and courage in admitting she was wrong and seeking future answers in the open. Integrity is a rare trait among the political class. And Nikole Hannah-Jones’s admission shows she has it, setting her apart from the chorus of “commentators” and elevating her to the status of a true intellectual—one who can set aside personal feelings to seek social solutions unhampered by self-interest.

While Nikole Hannah-Jones earns our praise, the systems she identifies should be the target of our wrath. As the late Michael Brooks said, “Be ruthless to systems and kind to individuals.” So ruthless we shall be.

If you appreciated this essay, please click the ❤️ to help it rise in Substack’s algorithm. Don’t forget to subscribe so future articles are delivered to your inbox. If you’re a returning JoeWrote reader, consider supporting my work with a premium subscription. For the cost of just one cup of coffee a month, you can help me keep creating content like this. Plus, you unlock everything JoeWrote has to offer.

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In Solidarity — Joe

Many questioned why the pre-kickoff show turned itself into a political prop. But this wasn’t the first time ESPN pushed the PCSA. Former Alabama head coach Nick Saban and personality Pat McAfee spoke positively about the bill the week prior. Saban has been the act’s poster boy, appearing in commercials and testifying in favor of the bill on Capitol Hill. As one might assume from the League of Extraordinary Assholes lining up behind the PCSA, the act is more sinister than its name implies.

In 2021, NCAA athletes gained the ability to profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness. While most players receive a few thousand dollars a season from school-specific NIL ‘pools,’ the superstars are making millions. (As they should.) The NIL era has given young players considerable bargaining power over coaches, who once held all the cards in recruiting discussions. Now, players are demanding lucrative NIL deals in exchange for their on-field play. It’s a simple bargain that every worker, no matter their age or education status, is entitled to make.

The NCAA dislikes the flow of money. But its real concern is that players are realizing their power and aren’t afraid to wield it. Since 2021, a string of high-profile lawsuits and legal proceedings brought by student-athletes have expanded their rights to claim wages, unionize, and pursue antitrust action against the NCAA. Pro and college leagues alike are living, breathing antitrust violations. For example, the NFL isn’t a company. It’s a non-profit that helps thirty-two different companies (the teams) collude to determine pay (salary caps), location (trades), and other employment conditions that would be illegal in any other industry. Like any other college graduate, athletes leave school with valuable skills. But unlike their peers, who go work for whatever software company they choose, athletes are assigned a specific city, company, and wage through the NFL draft. This is an illegal trust, but we let it slide because it entertains us on Sundays. The NCAA has many of the same anti-competitive regulations as the professional leagues. But its violations are even more egregious than the professionals because the NCAA doesn’t classify workers as employees, denying them pay and collective bargaining rights.

Of course, the NCAA wants to protect the unprecedented power imbalance that enriches schools, conferences, coaches, and executives at players' expense. Growing labor power, or dare I say, class consciousness, is a threat to their bottom line. So, they turned to the most craven man in politics, Ted Cruz. Hence the Protect College Sports Act.

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Yesterday, the leaders of Scotland, Wales, and the North of Ireland signed a joint statement announcing intent to dissolve the United Kingdom. Independence movements are hardly new to the islands. Its history is filled with rebellion and strife. But this is different. For the first time, independence parties hold first minister positions in all three Celtic nations. The statement was signed by Plaid Cymru leader and first minister of Wales Rhun ap Iorwerth; Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and Scottish first minister John Swinney; Vice President of Sinn Féin Michelle O’Neill, who leads the government in British-controlled Ulster; and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald, who leads the opposition in the Republic of Ireland. Clearly, the Celtic nations want out — call it a Cexit.

Though these pro-independence parties have existed for centuries, the post-Brexit British turmoil has birthed the conditions for their ascent to power. In May, Plaid Cymru ended a century of Labour rule in Wales, while Swinny and the SNP reestablished itself as the largest party in Scotland. Sinn Féin has led the mandated power-sharing government in the North of Ireland since 2024. Combined with its Southern block, what was once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army is now the largest party in the Irish nation.

Neither this statement nor increased calls for separation should surprise Westminster. Britain has been rudderless since it elected to leave the European Union in 2016. Seven prime ministers have come and gone since the June 2016 election, each failing to improve the quality of life of everyday Britons. Like the United States, the United Kingdom faces an ongoing cost-of-living crisis that defines its domestic politics. The short-term cause can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-era inflation, but its real roots lie in decades of austerity pushed by the Conservative and Labour governments alike. Britain’s insufficient welfare programs have covered the average cost of essential goods in only two of the last fourteen years. And those two were only due to the temporary benefit increase during COVID. Real average weekly wages have fallen in Britain since 2008, and remain significantly lower than in continental Europe. The U.K.’s formal exit from the European Union in 2021 has only worsened the problem. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, Brexit cost Britain 4% in productivity and a 15% decrease in both imports and exports, among other unnecessary economic pains. Independent studies have confirmed these findings:

“By the end of 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating steadily over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by 12% to 13%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.” — The Economic Impact of Brexit

After Keir Starmer’s government collapsed earlier this summer, Andy Burnham became the new Labour Prime Minister with a promise to address the crisis. Burnham has pledged a 10-year plan to lower living costs through public housing investments and welfare improvements, along with Mamdani-esque policies to cap bus fares and crack down on predatory subscription pricing. It’s a welcome start, but many doubt the post-Corbyn Labour Party has the skill, knowledge, or spirit to deliver the change Britons want. Once a strong workers’ party, Labour neoliberalized throughout the 20th century. The death knell for working-class politics rang when Tony Blair stripped the socialist pledge to “secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry” from the Party platform in 1995 and replaced it with some gobbledegook about Britain chasing its dreams or whatever. With an unapologetic excision of the British Left under Keir Starmer, the modern Labour Party’s foundation is that a capitalist economy and a bellicose foreign policy are good for all. Now that Britons are asking for systemic change, I’m doubtful Labour will be able to deliver the very thing it has spent decades decrying.

Deteriorating living conditions and a menu of dissatisfying political options have emboldened calls for Irish, Scottish, and Welsh self-governance. Of the four points of unity listed in the statement, three speak to the economic need to sever ties with London. The authors advocate for “a stronger, fairer economy,” using energy resources to “bring down bills for families and businesses,” and cite Brexit’s “damage to our economies” as a reason they want to join the European Union independently. The final point rounds out the economic concerns by framing them as one aspect of self-determination, declaring, “No Westminster government has the right to block democracy or undermine the principle that our people will decide their own future.”

While the economic grievances can be traced to near or distant history, the fourth point was intended to rebut Burnham’s recent declaration to Stormont that there would be no vote on Irish reunification during his tenure. This clearly violated the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which Burnham excused by saying he sought to “bring people together.” Perhaps the British executive is unaware, but the people of Ireland (and, evidently, Scotland and Wales) very much do not want to be “together” with England. Quite the opposite, in fact.

With Britain in a tailspin, deteriorating economic conditions, and explicitly anti-democratic statements from a prime minister just weeks into his term, it's no surprise the Celtic nations chose this moment to make their move. But another catalyst is at play here, one not unique to England or its disgruntled neighbors.

For a long time, England could quell such calls for independence by arguing the benefits of remaining in the Empire outweighed the negatives. Veteran readers know I don’t shut up about Irish rebel leader James Connolly, who upset his Fenian comrades by loudly asserting independence movements would fail until rebels provided better living standards for the common folk than Britain did. Connolly was correct. Despite the horrors of colonization, fear of losing their economic sustenance was enough to deter most subjects from nationalist projects — and the British Army was dispatched to convince those needing more convincing. But fast forward to now, and the status quo isn’t working. Currently, the only thing the Celtic nations are getting from London is declining wage growth, lost economic gains of association with the European Union, a revolving door of prime ministers, and increasing right-wing British nationalism that frequently denigrates them. Plus, the British Government went against its subjects’ wishes and supported the colonial genocide of Palestine.

Across the world, the established order is failing, driving interest in political alternatives once deemed too radical for consideration. Neoliberalism has left workers on the cusp of poverty, imperialism is producing nothing but death and destruction, and conservative jingoism is fueling stupid political decisions, such as Brexit and absurd trade wars with Canada. While the Welsh, Scots, and Irish once asked what they had to gain from leaving the United Kingdom, now they wonder why they’re sticking around. More and more, the working class is asking simple questions about how their nations are structured, and if systemic change is necessary. As the call for Celtic independence shows, such questions are being answered with a resounding “Yes.”

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In Solidarity — Joe

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Every year, the case against Saudi Arabia grows stronger, and the American government’s credibility is weakened. Almost 3,000 innocent Americans were murdered on September 11th, 2001. Both Democratic and Republican presidents used this tragedy to justify a global war on terror that killed, displaced, and ruined millions more lives than were lost in New York. Not only has our government desecrated the memory of the deceased, but it has also done everything in its power to prevent the murderers from being brought to justice. We should never forget this betrayal and never stop fighting for the victims’ right to justice.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th, the deadliest modern terrorist attack on American soil. It’s a stoic day for our country. From classrooms to Sunday Night Football, Americans will bow their heads in a moment of national silence to commemorate the 2,977 Americans who perished in the iconic catastrophe. While nationalist fervor insists we Never Forget, Americans are kept in the dark about the most groundbreaking revelations of 9/11: there is ample evidence that our ‘ally,’ Saudi Arabia, enabled, funded, and directed the al-Qaeda hijackers.

“The circumstantial evidence (of Saudi involvement in 9/11) has mounted. Given the lapse of time, I don’t know any reason why the truth should be kept from the American people.” — Richard Lambert, lead FBI investigator into 9/111

What follows is the outlining of a conspiracy theory. There is no smoking-gun evidence that King Fahd, the then-Saudi monarch, directly ordered the attacks. But there is enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that Saudi intelligence agencies enabled the hijackers. Instead of prosecuting the perpetrators or cutting off diplomatic relations, the United States government has defended the Kingdom and silenced the victims’ families.

In August 2002, less than a year after the attacks, survivors and family members of 9/11 victims sued Saudi Arabia and its officials, alleging that they had funded and aided the hijackers.2 Their suit was blocked by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which prevented Americans from suing foreign governments in federal courts. Though they kept advocating for their cause, they were stonewalled until 2016, when Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA). President Obama vetoed the act, but Congress overrode him for the only time in his presidency.3 The JASTA made an exception to the FSIA, saying Americans could sue foreign governments that enabled terrorism.

‘This legislation ensures that those who aid and abet terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are held accountable for their conduct, even if such offenders are foreign sovereigns or their agencies or instrumentalities. The JASTA does so through modest amendments to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) and the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA).’ — testimony of Congressional witness Jimmy Gurule4

Able to pursue legal action, the victims’ families asked the American government to declassify documents from the FBI’s Operation Encore, the Bureau’s investigation into potential Saudi involvement. Though first-term President Trump promised the families he would release the name of the Saudi diplomat the FBI had linked to the attackers, he instructed his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to prevent the disclosure, claiming releasing the files would cause “significant harm to national security.”5 To his credit, President Biden declassified a sixteen-page report summarizing the FBI’s findings in 2021. Though partially redacted, the newly released documents confirmed suspicions about Saudi Arabian nationals collaborating with the hijackers. Congress’s 2004 9/11 Commission Report had thrown water on the claims that two Saudi men, diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy and state employee Omar al-Bayoumi, aided the hijackers once they were in America. While Congress claimed there was ‘no evidence that Thumairy assisted the hijackers,’ the FBI found Thumairy had assigned an underling to help two hijackers a year before September 11th, calling them ‘two very significant people.’

It was previously known that Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi had been in contact with two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. However, those interactions were falsely categorized as random encounters in a close-knit Muslim immigrant community. Dismissing these connections, Congress’s 9/11 Commission dismissed al-Bayoumi as ‘an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamic extremists.’ The FBI report refutes this claim, citing a witness who watched al-Bayoumi wait for the hijackers to arrive at a restaurant before having a lengthy conversation with them.

A new report from the BBC lends credence to the Bureau’s disagreement. In October 2003, American investigators traveled to Saudi Arabia to interview al-Bayoumi as part of the congressional 9/11 commission. The investigators talked to their suspect for only four and a half hours, interrupted by a multi-course meal in which the Americans were wined and dined by their Saudi hosts. Notes from the interview show that al-Bayoumi received extraordinary reassurances. The investigators repeatedly told him, “No one believes he knowingly helped the hijackers carry out their terrorist mission.” I won’t claim to know the fine points of law enforcement interrogation. But I can’t imagine preemptively telling a suspect they’ll walk and breaking for a lavish feast are common in a serious pursuit of truth.

Additionally, those close to al-Bayoumi told the FBI he spoke often about a need to ‘take action’ for ‘jihad.’6

While one might consider the Congressional and FBI reports to be equally trustworthy yet contradictory, other sources corroborate the Bureau’s account. As early as the 1990s, law enforcement suspected al-Bayoumi was an informant for Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP). Having moved to America in 1994, al-Bayoumi was technically a student at San Diego State. But he never took a credited class, only a few months of English language education. In reality, al-Bayoumi was living off a stipend from the Saudi government. He was employed by Saudi Arabia’s civil aviation division to work on the Air Navigation Systems Support project. That project was happening in Saudi Arabia, raising questions as to why it was paying a delinquent student in California. To make things more suspicious, the Saudi government reimbursed the private companies paying al-Bayoumi for his salary. It’s undeniable that al-Bayoumi was working for the Saudi state. He once delivered $400,000 to a California mosque on the Kingdom’s behalf. When those employers tried to end al-Bayoumi’s employment in 1999, a government employee intervened. Sending a letter marked “extremely urgent,” the Saudi government insisted al-Bayoumi be rehired as "quickly as possible.” Al-Bayoumi was put back on the Saudi payroll. But those payments stopped abruptly on September 11th, 2001.7

It was later learned that hours before a meeting with the hijackers, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazm, al-Bayoumi visited the L.A. Saudi consulate to meet with Fahad al-Thumairy. It’s unknown what they discussed, but Occam’s Razor suggests it was about how to support the terrorists he would meet later that day. Al-Thumairy later had his diplomatic passport revoked by the State Department for suspicion of “terrorist activity.” This meeting was just one instance of logistical support al-Bayoumi gave to the hijackers. Al-Bayoumi essentially floated the two men, even signing their rental agreement for a San Diego apartment.

In June of 2024, the victims’ families pressed for more transparency, asking a federal court to unseal the FBI’s underlying evidence used to create some of the documents Biden declassified. The court released a self-taken video from al-Bayoumi recorded in 1999 and found by British police in al-Bayoumi’s U.K. apartment weeks after 9/11. The video is a narrated tour of landmarks around Washington D.C., in which al-Bayoumi details entrances, exits, and security checkpoints around the capital. He also explains the configuration of the Washington Monument to the Capitol Building, which could serve as an indicator for suicide pilots trying to locate high-value targets from the air. A portion of al-Bayoumi’s scouting video can be seen below.

Though this video was discovered by British police in al-Bayoumi’s U.K. apartment weeks after the attack, it was only disclosed in 2024. In 2026, more evidence from the U.K. raid was unearthed, raising more questions than it answered. One jaw-dropping page shows a math equation calculating the line of sight for navigating a plane into a ground target, factoring in plane speed and other variables unique to the 9/11 attacks. When the 9/11 families brought this document into court, attorneys for the Saudi government claimed it was a child’s school assignment.

"[The sketch is] the mathematical calculation of the crash. When we figured out what it was, we knew that it was the smoking gun that we'd been looking for." - Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a member of the 9/11 families' legal team

Though this evidence was logged by British police ten days after 9/11, it disappeared. Records show that U.K.-based FBI agents had the document, but they never mentioned it to the officers interrogating al-Bayoumi. The plane diagram eventually resurfaced in 2021 when the 9/11 families subpoenaed the FBI for it. All the FBI had was the original document and one short note written in 2012, eleven years after it was discovered. Why such a crucial piece of evidence was allowed to slip into nothing remains unclear. Upon seeing the drawing, the judge ruled it "connects al-Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.” That connection should have been drawn a quarter of a century ago, when there was still time to punish the perpetrators.

Along with the diagram, a video showing al-Bayoumi with the infamous al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki was also found in the British apartment in 2001, but remained hidden until recently. In 2021, Al-Bayoumi denied ever knowing al-Awlaki while under oath. But the resurfaced tape, taken in 1997 or 1998 at a paintball arena, shows the two in close embrace. Another video showed the duo meeting at a meeting for Riyadh’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a Saudi government program that promotes fanatical Wahhabism throughout the world. With an established link between the Saudi government employee and al-Qaeda operatives, claims of coincidence crumble.

Given the damning nature of this evidence, one must wonder why the Americans were so quick to release al-Bayoumi. While the British police didn’t know about the plane diagram, they had these tapes and other evidence about flight paths and aviation guides taken from his apartment. On September 28th, 2001, the British police met with the FBI to decide if they should release al-Bayoumi or charge him. As the BBC reports, the British detectives believed they had enough evidence to charge the suspect and deport him to the United States for trial. But the Department of Justice declined, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence. That day, al-Bayoumi was released and fled to Saudi Arabia, where he presumably remains.

Given this, one has to wonder what other evidence is hidden from the public eye for “national security” concerns. At each step of their investigation into a possible Al-Qaeda-Saudi Arabia link, FBI agents were blocked by both Washington and Riyadh. They were seldom allowed to interview suspected contacts, and while the Bureau’s leaders publicly echoed Washington’s claim that there was no link between the Saudi government and the hijackers, those doing the investigation discovered the opposite. When retired FBI agent Kenneth Williams, who had warned his superiors about a possible hijacking in July of 2001, was asked to testify on behalf of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, he was threatened by the FBI and the first Trump administration. According to Williams, he was told:

“There is other litigation involving the U.S. government going on, and any cooperation by you may negatively impact that case. The Trump Administration is trying to have good relations with Saudi Arabia, and they do not want you to give a deposition or cooperate with counsel for the families.”

Fearing for his pension, Williams declined to testify.

There’s no mystery why the American government would want to protect Saudi Arabia from being held responsible for 9/11. First is the obvious reason: the Saudis have America, and more specifically, our politicians, over a barrel. Literally.

The Kingdom’s oil production heavily impacts global oil prices, which can sway elections. The Saudis are known to decrease or increase oil production to impact American gas prices to help their preferred candidate. In 2023, Saudi Arabia announced low oil production would continue, ensuring rising oil prices were an issue in the 2024 Presidential election — a clear sign the Kingdom preferred a Donald Trump presidency over a Democrat.8 In May of 2025, the Saudis increased production to lower American prices, which Reuters described as an ‘unspoken gift to Trump.’9 (Though the Iran War has Saudi oil exports at a thirteen-year low, so they might regret that decision.) With their political fortunes in the palm of the Crown Prince’s hand, it’s no wonder — but still not an excuse — why both parties have acted as the Kingdom’s lawyer.

Additionally, Washington sees Saudi Arabia as a key ally in the Middle East. In addition to supporting the current Iran War, there are also five American military bases on Saudi soil, which were key staging points for the Iraq War.10 The Kingdom buys $10.7 billion worth of American armaments every year, making it one of the military industrial complex’s largest customers.11 If that relationship were to be cut off, as would likely happen if the government formally accused Saudi Arabia of a crime, politicians would see their donations from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin dry up and lose a key ally in a rapidly destabilizing region.

As goes without saying, the U.S. government’s refusal to declassify all related documents to assist the lawsuit against Saudi Arabia is a slap in the face to the 9/11 victims and their families. Thanks to their strength, the lawsuit has gone forward and is set to begin on October 7th. But government stonewalling is only part of the issue. Since September 11^th, 2001, the American Empire has weaponized the lives lost as justification to launch illegal wars, disregard international law, suppress critical speech, attack civil liberties, and assassinate U.S. citizens. Given the government has spent a quarter-century stifling any real efforts to discover who ordered the attacks, it’s fair to say our leaders — both Democrat and Republican — are cynically using the 9/11 victims as propaganda for foreign military endeavors and further restrictions on our rights. (The lone exception to government betrayal is Zohran Mamdani, who released NYC’s records showing post-attack air quality was harmful to residents and responders. Another reason to vote socialist.)

It’s no coincidence that modern America’s worst acts, from invading Iraq to the CIA’s ongoing torture program, were done under the pretext of “stopping the next 9/11.” If it were revealed that the attack was carried out by Saudi Arabia, a nation we have spent the last two decades cozying up to, it would be immediately clear to the American people that every act of “national security” conducted since 2001 wasn’t a well-intentioned attempt at protecting us, but a secondary criminal conspiracy to expand the American Empire. With “smoking gun” evidence showing Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, that claim is difficult to deny.

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In Solidarity — Joe

It’s been a year since Charlie Kirk died, and Ezra Klein’s sycophantic eulogy for the reactionary provocateur still lives in my head:

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.” — Charlie Kirk Did Politics The Right Way

As soon as Klein published these words, those with a deeper understanding of Kirk’s life and purpose challenged him. The subsequent conversation between the New York Times opinionist and Ta-Nehisi Coates exposed Klein’s intellectual shallowness and, by extension, liberals’ reflexive instinct to praise illiberal conservatives in pursuit of unreciprocated bipartisan respect. The entire mainstream media followed along with overzealous tributes to Kirk and his memorial service, which CNN called a “shining path to MAGA’s future.”

The gushing praise for Kirk embodies the American intelligentsia’s sympathetic view of the conservative “free speech” push that dominated the political culture of the last decade. Embodied by conservative icons such as Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Charlie Kirk, the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party wrapped themselves in the banner of ‘Free Speech’ and whined that anybody who didn’t listen to them was canceling them. Always eager to prove They’re Above It All, the media commentators sided with the reactionaries, declaring, “We disagree with what conservatives say. But we respect their commitment to intellectual debate in the Marketplace of Ideas™️.” I cannot convey how annoying all this was. Every day the Times or Post would gush about the brave conservatives fighting with Facts & Logic on college campuses. Meanwhile, they’re doing whatever this is.

Klein’s eulogy of Kirk recalls the infamous 2017 New York Times profile of Ben Shapiro, which adored him as a “provocative Gladiator,” and “the cool kid’s philosopher.” That same year, Shapiro was hailed as a free speech warrior in the Times by who-else-but Bari Weiss. When Weiss quit the Times, claiming she was ‘canceled’ by her editor, which is a lot like saying you were ‘canceled’ by your lawyer because your lawyer told you to stop talking to the cops, the media yet again rushed to paint her as a victim. The Washington Post compared her resignation — which was entirely her decision — to McCarthyism. Milo Yiannopoulos, a leading conservative intellectual who coined genius phrases such as “Feminism is Cancer,” received endless praise for his commitment to ‘free speech.’ And by ‘free speech,’ he meant his ability to get paid to speak on college campuses that no one wanted him at.

In traditional liberal media fashion, their sanctimonious praise for the conservative ‘free speech movement’ was equal parts pompous, gullible, and wrong.

As the first and second Trump administrations have shown, conservatives hate free speech. Their commitment to free expression lasts as long as they can use it as a cudgel to force others to listen to their shitty ideas. As Frank Wilhoit said, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Yinnopolous, Weiss, Shapiro, and Kirk didn’t debate on college campuses because they saw them as bastions of intellectualism, where the sharpest and brightest forge their ideological swords in the crucible of debate. They went to colleges because hungover 20-year-olds were the only people they could outwit. Anytime someone with a fully formed frontal lobe challenged them, they crumbled. When Kirk was invited to debate graduate students at Cambridge, he was exposed. In the video below (starting at 31:33), Kirk argues abortion is immoral because ‘life starts at conception,’ and a zygote’s DNA is “created” at conception. But as the medical student — who is neither a doctor nor a professional debater — explains to him, DNA isn’t created. It’s fused. With his entire argument refuted, Kirk can’t say he was wrong, so he kept changing and arguing his position based on what the graduate student just taught him. Equally embarrassing, much of Kirk’s anti-choice argument rests on a supposed religious decree in the Declaration of Independence. But he’s in the United Kingdom, so saying abortion is wrong because George Washington said so (he didn’t) is nonsense.

This exchange highlights that Charlie Kirk was never interested in intellectual exchange. Which is why he sucked at debate. As he feels his argument crumble, he tries to trap the grad student with simple questions — “Do you believe murder is wrong?” “Should we kill dementia patients?” These deflections work well for Kirk when he’s talking to stoned college kids who will take the bait. But when anyone with actual knowledge of the topic ignores the theatrics and continues pressing him on his misunderstanding, he has no answer. So, Kirk looks to the moderator and asks for the time to expire, just like a beaten boxer begging to be saved by the bell.

Kirk’s struggles with knowledgeable opponents are common throughout the conservative movement. Whenever reactionary debate bros (a gender-neutral term) engage with informed opponents, they’re decimated. Ben Shapiro built a career on dunking on crying undergrads. But when he went to debate at Oxford, he was ripped to shreds with pretty basic questions. In the example below, Shapiro was asked why he opposes gay marriage. He predictably responded that governments should only support couples who can raise children. But he had no answer when asked if he planned to divorce his wife after their children were raised. (If you watch the rest of this video, most of the arguments go the same way.)

Shapiro is the most obvious example of the right’s fake commitment to intellectual pursuit. During this trip to Oxford, he witnessed an anti-genocide protest calling for a ceasefire in the weeks immediately after October 7th. This prompted him to write a book, Lions & Scavengers, which argues that modern society is a clash between two groups: those who seek to uphold The West and those who want to destroy The West. (All these guys are obsessed with Western Civilization, by which they mean White people.) Here’s how Shapiro described his idea for the book to, you guessed it, Ezra Klein, who invited the reactionary on for a conversation about “political de-escalation.”

Shapiro: “What really led off the book is what happens in the introduction. Right after Oct. 7, I was slated to debate at the University of Oxford, and I went into London. My security team told me it was actually too dangerous for me to be in London proper. I had to stay about an hour and a half outside of London, at a beautiful estate that is now turned into a hotel, for safety reasons.

It was that weekend that there was a gigantic protest — what I would characterize controversially as a pro-Hamas protest — in the middle of London. And the groups that were protesting were people who ranged from very far left on social issues, who would certainly not agree on social issues with people who were standing for Hamas, people who were fans of Hamas, people who were just opponents of capitalism.

And it occurred to me: Why are all these people marching together? What do they have in common?” — We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another

This lays bare Shapiro’s lack of curiosity. If I saw a group of unrelated political or cultural tendencies protesting for a single cause, my first thought would be to find out why. What is bringing these people together? What cause is so righteous, so in line with basic humanity, that groups traditionally opposing each other support it? But that is not what Ben Shapiro does. Rather, he sees people protesting his emotional support apartheid state, and immediately jumps to the insane conclusion that they all want to “destroy Western civilization.” This is anti-intellectualism. No attempt to learn, no attempt to understand where everyone else is coming from. Just a reactive response to something that you didn’t understand, which made you feel uncomfortable. There is no intellectualism on the American right. They’re not trying to solve political problems. Only dressing up their fundamentalist religion as secular debate points to trick people into believing them. To the extent it exists, the conservative intelligentsia is a bunch of guys who figured out that if they wore a jacket and didn’t say slurs, they could manipulate the media into listening to them. After all, Shapiro’s book is called Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics). But as he told Klein, the idea came to him while he was in Britain. Good job admitting you’re a fraud, dumbass.

The Debate Me Right was never interested in debate or intellectual exchange. Rather, it cynically used liberal ideas of what politics “should” be to cover its true aims. Contrary to what Ezra Klein said, Charlie Kirk didn’t believe in persuasion. He believed in belittling your opponent, increasing anti-intellectualism, and then channeling that reactionary energy into illiberal force. Such violence was what Kirk wanted. Days before January 6th, the Turning Point USA founder tweeted that he was sending eighty buses to “fight” for President Trump. Kirk was instrumental in a violent insurrection to overturn a democratic election. One man who rode a TPUSA bus was later indicted for beating a cop with a fire extinguisher. January 6th was the epitome of reactionary violence, a crucial element of American conservatism. Early in his career, Kirk created a “Professor Watchlist” that did more to chill campus speech than anything in recent memory. Anyone could list a “woke” professor (usually a Black person or woman), and immediately a gang of anti-social conservatives would launch a cyber stalking campaign to get them fired, threatened, or worse. But the intelligentsia turned a blind eye to the reality of the conservative movement in favor of a simplistic excuse that elevated their own importance while helping fascism reach the mainstream.

Broadly speaking, liberals misunderstand the resurgence of American fascism as the result of persuasion. As Klein wrote above, Kirk “broke” the Democrats’ hold on college-aged voters, which he attributes to Kirk’s sharp wit and lightning-fast retorts. Klein is right that 18- to 24-year-olds shifted to the right in 2024. But it’s more likely they refused to vote for Harris because of her Gaza policy than because some chud podcaster with a face too small for his face asked “wHaT iS A wOmAN??” over and over. College kids didn’t even like Charlie Kirk, or his ideas. A poll taken shortly after Kirk’s death found that only 30% of college students agreed with his views, while the overwhelming majority strongly disagreed with him. Believing Kirk and other rightist Debate Bros are unstoppable persuasive titans is a convenient excuse for pseudo-intellectual liberals, as it lets them off the hook for failing to stop Trumpism. There’s no shame in fighting hard against a powerful opponent and coming up short. But that’s not what happened over the last decade of politics. Rather, the liberal and conservative intelligentsia shat their pants, fell in their own filth, and let the most detestable politician in living American history beat them over and over. This was because they were intellectually unable to understand what they were dealing with. Ezra Klein thought Charlie Kirk was going to campuses to “change hearts and minds.” He wasn’t. He went to college campuses to dunk on college kids, upload it to YouTube, and get middle-aged White Republicans so angry that they’re willing to stage a coup in D.C. or call a professor they’ve never met and scream the N-word when they pick up. Liberals think they’re fighting conservatives with ideas. Conservatives don’t give a shit about ideas. They’re putting immigrants in concentration camps and calling anyone who disagrees with them a domestic terrorist. The left tried to warn them. But they didn’t listen.

If the second Trump term has shown us anything, it’s that the Republican Party is undeniably illiberal. It deports people for what they say, incarcerates teenagers for thought crimes, and punishes colleges that divest from Israel. Congress recently passed legislation stopping federal funding to any school that does an “academic boycott.” This single piece of legislation from the federal government is a greater 1st Amendment violation than anything done by so-called “woke” college kids. The entire media world lined up to cheer on Bari Weiss. Klein praised her “eye for talent,” while The Atlantic declared she “triumphed over her critics” by snagging the CBS News editor-in-chief role. Weiss perfectly encapsulates the right’s free speech charade. For years she claimed she was fighting for free ideas and multi-pluralistic democracy. Now that she is steering CBS News straight into the iceberg with openly racist attacks on Muslims, all can see that she was a liar and a fraud, whose only skill was manipulating dumb rich guys into giving her money. Unable to persuade normal college kids to support Israel, Weiss had to start her own university and self-select conservative students for her ideas to have purchase. For all the talk of a need for “intellectual diversity” at colleges, Weiss’s university is as intellectually undiverse as it gets. A recently published course syllabus is filled with neoliberal and technofascist propaganda, but not much else.

In more ways than one, the conservative pretense of free speech died with Charlie Kirk. Before his body was even cold, the right began a mass cancellation of anyone and everyone who didn’t praise Kirk as the next MLK. Unlike left-wing “cancel culture,” which was mostly Twitter hashtags, right-wing cancel culture was supported by every level of the Republican government, making it an actual First Amendment violation. Over 600 Americans were fired, censored, or professionally reprimanded by a conservative witch hunt fully supported by the Republican Party, all the way from local lawmakers up to the president. Vice President J.D. Vance specifically called for cancellations, saying “Call them out, and hell, call their employer.”

All of this came as the Republican trifecta had moved to crush dissent and launched a wave of domestic repression that recertified America’s place as one of the most authoritarian countries on earth. After Kirk died, conservatives no longer needed to wear the mask. Their ploy worked. Safely in power, pretenses were put aside, and they pivoted to the true conservative goal of conservatism: using state violence to punish speech that opposes their neo-segregationist project. Once conservatives stopped pretending, the media stopped talking about conservative free speech beliefs, despite spending the better part of a decade pushing it. Rather than admit they were duped, they simply moved on altogether.

I’m not glad Kirk is dead. I don’t think it’s okay to murder people because of what they say. But he did get exactly what he advocated for. Kirk said over and over that school shootings were the price we had to pay for the 2nd Amendment. His life ended by being shot at a school. The shooter was a White Mormon kid from a gun-loving Republican family, so the right has no one to blame but themselves. You advocated for unlimited access to firearms, and this was the cost. I’m critical of the liberals, but they tried to warn you!

While Ezra Klein and the media lionized Charlie Kirk as an intellectual titan, that’s not how he will be remembered. Over the last year, Kirk has been mocked, degraded, and memeified. Of course leftists are poking fun, but it’s the right’s fault Erika Kirk immediately tried to leverage her husband’s death into a media career, and every conservative podcaster began fighting over who could claim the mantle of Charlie Kirk’s best friend. A year after his death, leading conservative media figures who surrounded Kirk are still accusing each other of having a role in his death (untrue) or being closeted homosexuals (true). Twitter is very much looking forward to the ‘Kirkiversery,’ in which they will roast Kirk with the disrespect he deserves. Charlie Kirk’s life was not dedicated to free speech or open debate. He trolled, derided, insulted, and demeaned anyone who wasn’t a conservative White male. He was just another gutter racist, whose last words were cynically weaponizing racism to excuse gun violence; seconds later, he was killed by White-on-White gun violence. What a bitch.

Charlie Kirk dedicated his life to making American politics more violent, disrespectful, and hostile. He died violently, and will rightfully be mocked for being killed by the culture he helped create. In the end, Charlie Kirk got exactly what he asked for.

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There is a never-ending Discourse™️ about what it means to be working class in America. Pundits and pontificators squabble over what defines “working class,” who is in it, and which political groups can claim to champion working class interests. The last part is the most relevant. While socialists, progressives, and labor activists define “working class” to analyze and improve political reality, the media defines the term “working class” to argue that the socialists, progressives, and labor activists are Fake working class and should be ignored by the Real working class. The purpose of such discussions is to pull workers away from the left and back into the liberal worldview that says capitalists, managers, and workers are all one big happy American family, so there’s no need for you to sign that union card because, as you were already told, we’re all one big happy family (but the family will fire you if you sign that union card).

Writing in Vox, Eric Levitz uses the Fake Working Class angle to criticize the Democratic Socialists of America. Levitz’s article perfectly captures the mix of bad faith and lack of understanding that many media members have about DSA. He simultaneously argues that we DSAers are both dogmatic Marxists clinging to disproven theory and also deceitful opportunists misconstruing socialist theory for upper-class interests.

“The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for ‘a government by, for, and of the working class.’ Yet the organization’s membership and candidates consist largely of educated professionals. As of 2021, 80 percent of DSA members over 25 were college-educated, while 28 percent earned more than $100,000 a year (putting them in roughly the top 15 percent of America’s income distribution), according to a DSA internal survey. Among the group’s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic.”

This is a bizarre introduction, because nothing Levitz says after “yet” contradicts the mission of building working class political power. Education, income, and background aren’t what determine if someone is “working class.” That is determined by your relationship to your workplace. If you sell your labor to survive, you are working class. If your income comes from stock, investments, or a business you own, then you are not in the working class. Whether or not you’re college-educated, come from a wealthy family, or have a cool mom is irrelevant to determining your class status. A simple thought experiment proves this.

Imagine Sara and Darnell work next to each other on an assembly line. Sara grew up in poverty and was the first in her family to graduate from high school. Now, she makes auto parts in exchange for $46,520 a year, the typical salary of an average American manufacturing worker. Every day, Sara works next to her production partner, Darnell. Like Sara, Darnell does the same job for the same salary. Unlike Sara, Darnell came from privilege. His mother was a big-time stock trader, which gave the family enough money to send Darnell to the Ivey League. Darnell planned to live off his familial wealth and pursue an acting career. But then the stock market crashed, and his family lost everything. Now, Darnell must work for $46,520 a year to afford food, rent, medical care, and transportation. Sara and Darnell have vastly different backgrounds. Yet, they’re both doing the same job, for the same pay, so they can survive. Which one is working class? If Levitz’s analysis were correct, then Sara would be working class, but Darnell would not, because he comes from privilege. Obviously, Levitz is wrong. Both Darnell and Sara are working class, because “working class” is not a badge of sullen honor for the poor and downtrodden. It is a specific term to identify a person’s relationship to their workplace (the means of production) and recognize that the majority of their conscious hours will be spent in an undemocratic fiefdom that prohibits the conventional norms of democracy, liberty, and personal rights.

Levitz and many other liberal and conservative thinkers reject this definition because “working class” doesn’t completely convey a person’s well-being and opportunities in America. As he puts it, “You can’t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map.” This is true. Marxism is a science, not a religion. It must always be adapted to modern conditions. But Marx’s basic theory of working-class exploitation still holds. Eric Levitz believes it doesn’t, but that’s because he clearly didn’t understand it. He writes:

“Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left’s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism — capitalists and workers — rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed.”

FYI, Marks and Engels were commissioned to write the Manifesto by the Communist League, a German workers’ organization. It is a party pamphlet, something you’d be handed walking off the factory floor in 1847, not a “foundation” for the modern left. It’s common for non-socialists to claim the Manifesto is the basis of Marxism, as it lets them off the hook from reading the extensive scholarly texts such as Capital. (Levitz isn’t alone here. Weirdo Jordan Peterson built a career off preaching anti-Marxism, then admitted during a debate he’d never read any Marx besides the Manifesto.) I’m not sure if Levitz is building a strawman or doesn’t understand what he read, because Marx never said anything close to his summation that “all workers would be melted into a uniform proletariat.” The proletariat is the industrial working class, not the entire working class. This point is lost on Levitz, which explains his confusion about why socialists use the term “working class.” He writes:

“Anyone trying to impose Marx’s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems. For one, in a world where some workers earn as much in a year as others do in a lifetime, the idea that there is only one fundamental class division — that between laborers and capitalists — becomes unconvincing. In the United States, some convenience store owners make $70,000 a year, while many surgeons earn upward of $600,000. It would be odd to say that the former are members of society’s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries).”

It would have helped Levitz to actually read the Manifesto because Marx and Engels make this exact point about small-business owners, whom they refer to as the petty bourgeoisie.

Like Levitz, the pair identified the unique class position of small business owners. The petty bourgeoisie are capitalists in the literal sense, but they don’t control society in the way industrialists do. Instead, they walk a dangerous edge, always at risk of being forced back into the working class — one bad year, and a convenience store owner making $70,000 would likely have to close his store and get a job to feed his family. As Marx theorized, the petty bourgeoisie frequently align with the big capitalists, but are actually much closer to the working class when it comes to power and quality of life. Levitz says it is “odd” for Marxists to say low-income convenience store owners are the “society’s dominant class.” He’s correct. That would be odd. Which is why no serious Marxist has ever said this.

Levitz’s confusion appears to come from the false belief that socialists think “working class” is the be-all, end-all of American politics. It’s not. Relationship to your workplace doesn’t perfectly map to how Americans vote, their income, views on religion, or cultural values. To get answers to these questions, which more often than not are used to signify whether the Democrat or Republican is winning the working class vote, you need to ask those questions. Many political behaviors are more accurately determined by race, income, religion, or other characteristics. Which is why Levitz’s assertion that the left believes there is “only one fundamental class division” is not true.

Most importantly, the label “working class” is not used to differentiate between those who live in clean comfort and those who live in impoverished hardship. A warehouse worker making minimum wage has a lower quality of life than a software engineer making six figures. This is undeniable. Still, both the warehouse worker and the software engineer are in the working class because the reason there’s no air conditioning in the warehouse is the same reason the engineer has to move across the country to return to the office — the boss said so, and the workers have no democratic say otherwise.

This is lost on liberals like Levitz because they see society and politics as one of income, background, and perceived privilege. This varies from the socialist view, which sees society as the product of competing class forces: the serfs vs. the Tsar, peasants vs. the king, workers vs. capitalists. Levitz is correct in one regard, but not in how he thinks. There is no coherent working class in America. It is divided by many other factors, such as nationalism, religion, personal background, and income. When socialists speak of the working class, we’re not saying every worker has the same politics or interests — we’re trying to get them to realize their interests are linked. Levitz’s critique of the left is that our analysis of who is working class and who is a capitalist isn’t the defining feature of American politics. Yeah, we know! The American working class is not class-conscious. They don’t know they’re in the working class, because the liberal worldview that dictates American politics ignores class distinctions in favor of everything Levitz talks about: income, background, education, etc. That is why socialists aim to instill the working class with class consciousness. We want the high-paid engineer and low-paid warehouse worker to see themselves as part of a coherent group with connected interests.

Levitz and other liberals are hostile to this view, which is why he cannot offer a coherent definition of “working class” throughout his entire article. Unable to understand why DSA figures champion the working class, Levitz can only project his misunderstandings on socialists and conclude they are trying to “trick” who he believes is the Real Working Class (steam shovel drivers, white men with beards and lunchpails, and guys with trucks) into supporting the efforts of the Fake Working Class (DSA, anyone who works on a computer, people with a college degree). Levitz’s naivety leads to a hilariously incorrect assumption that DSA’s push for Biden to cancel student debt is evidence that we are using “working class” language to help out rich people:

“Socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs.

On its face, the idea that the US government should transfer tens of thousands of dollars to young doctors and Harvard MBAs would seem wildly regressive. The median US physician can expect to earn more than $6.5 million over the course of their lifetime, while the median graduate of a top-five business school can expect to earn more than $8 million. Virtually all Americans have worse prospects than this. And in the inflationary conditions of the Biden era, increasing young professionals’ disposable income was liable to push up prices for everyone else. In other words, blanket student debt forgiveness would have likely transferred purchasing power from low-income workers to early-career physicians and management consultants.

Many socialists would struggle to defend such a policy, were it presented in these terms. But by eliding the class distinctions between low- and high-income borrowers, the DSA was able to convince itself (if not the public) that across-the-board forgiveness was in the interest of “the working class.”

Levitz could not be more wrong. Student loan debt foregiveness was, and still is, in the interests of the working class. While Levitz claims student debt forgiveness would have “increased young professionals’ disposable income,” it actually would have helped older Americans the most. The age group with the most federal student loan debt is 50 to 61-year-olds, who average $48,203 in outstanding individual payments. This is three times the amount held by “young professionals” ($14,242), one reason why the 50 to 61 age group is more likely to be delinquent. While student loan debt is relatively constant across income levels, lower-income borrowers have a significantly harder time repaying. According to the Federal Reserve:

“Falling behind on payments was closely tied to one's income. Less than half of low-income borrowers with an income under $50,000 per year paid the required amount, compared with 92 percent of borrowers with an income of $100,000 or more who did so.”

The Reserve also notes “Black and female borrowers were also less likely to have made the full payment.” While borrowing levels are consistent across income, Black Americans, Hispanics, and women are the most-likely borrowers. So student loan forgiveness brings a gender and racial component as well.

Specific relief aside, DSA fights for student loan relief not because we prioritize students, but because we believe education, among other social goods, should not be limited to those who can afford it. From DSA’s statement that Levitz criticized:

“As socialists, we demand better: We demand that all student debt — and medical debt, and carceral debt — be canceled and forgiven immediately. We demand public education from pre-K to college that is truly free for all to attend.”

This is why liberal and conservative commentators drive themselves crazy trying to define "working class.” They do not understand what the term is used to convey, or what it is used to identify. They cannot fathom a political vision that sees working people as united, because they don’t see the world that way. Not intellectually curious enough to learn why socialists prioritize the distinction between capital and labor, the oh-so-smart commentariat makes fools of themselves by attributing dubious motives to socialists for engaging in a political realm they’re too blind to see.

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For the 8235th time, the Democratic establishment is Very Mad at Hasan Piker. While Laura Loomer and Randy Fine spew vile hatred at any and every Black and Muslim Democrat, conservative Democrats and the media are focused on attacking their own. In an obviously coordinated campaign, over a dozen prominent Democrats spent the entirety of last week condemning the Twitch streamer for something he never said. Hakeem Jeffries, Ken Martin, Elissa Slotkin, Brad Schneider, Cory Booker, Josh Gottheimer, Jake Auchincloss, Hillary Scholten, Ritchie Torres, and many others representing the pro-Israel establishment decried Piker as “dangerous,” “antisemitic,” and “malicious,” along with other harsh words they would never call a Republican. The manufactured outrage centered on misrepresenting Piker’s below statement as a call to violence.

“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

This is no different from what Ezra Klein has expressed: “If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.” It’s also what Dana Bash asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just months ago. Quoting El-Sayed’s then-opponent Haley Stevens, Bash asked Bibi if Israel’s cataclysmic violence was making Jews “less safe.” In this clip I found on Twitter comparing Bash’s presentation of the same statements differently, the naked cynicism of this ‘scandal’ is on full display.

Of course, the Twitch streamer isn’t the target of this bad-faith attack. He’s a stand-in for the insurgent left, which the establishment failed to defeat in high-importance Democratic primaries. Because the progressives and socialists challenging the Democratic establishment are within the party tent, the reactionaries struggle to criticize them. Doing so would further reveal that conservative Democrats prioritize themselves, their donors, and zionism over defeating Republicans, which would enrage voters and drive them into the left’s open arms. So, the establishment lies about what Piker says, slanders him as an anti-semite, elevates his importance (most Democrats have never heard of Hasan Piker), then relentlessly criticizes him to taint their more progressive-minded party members as bigots.

Coordinated media narratives, false charges of anti-social behavior, and other tactics pulled from Richard Nixon’s Ratfuckers’ Playbook are the establishment’s only ways to fight the factionalist contest taking place within the Democratic Party. The left vs. establishment fight is often referred to as a “civil war.” Realistically, it’s more like a rebellion. As primary elections have overwhelmingly shown, Democratic voters prefer socialist and progressive candidates who will fight oligarchy, imperialism, and Trump over the establishment candidates who protect oligarchy, imperialism, and Trump. In the few races where a conservative Democrat has defeated a viable progressive challenger, they require overwhelming and unsustainable money and support to win by the skin of their teeth. No one can deny that if primaries were a level playing field, the left’s already-impressive gains would be even more triumphant.

Currently, Democratic voters are joining the left rebellion and advancing it. So, it’s no surprise the establishment is fighting back with dirty tricks. Like any noteworthy rebellion, the insurgents have popular support, and the powerful have power. The left is confident our message of anti-corruption, anti-genocide, pro-worker, and pro-family policies can attract more votes to win primary and general elections. Comparatively, the establishment is not confident they can win democratically, and for good reason. Americans don’t like our billionaire ruling class and are furious at Democratic leadership for failing to stop Trump. But lack of grassroots support doesn’t mean the establishment will surrender.

To the extent it has one, the dominant ideology of the Democratic establishment is reactionary centrism. They’re not Republicans, but they agree with the GOP that the world requires hierarchy: Israelis over Palestinians, corporations over workers, and politicians over voters. Just as conservative reactionaries resort to violence to defend their unnatural hierarchies, centrist reactionaries lash out against progressive threats with a variety of anti-democratic tactics ranging from bad faith media narratives to assisting the right’s state violence. These aren’t “failures” to live up to liberal values. They’re a revelation that much of the Democratic establishment is highly illiberal, only wielding the cudgel of “democracy” and “freedom” every four years to guilt-trip Americans into voting for them.

As these actors believe, the nation’s political fate should rest in the hands of the oh-so-intelligent, so enlightened Adults In The Room who know better than you what’s in your best interest. (Spoiler: It’s cutting grandma’s Social Security to fund more corporate tax breaks.) This is why Chuck Schumer told The New York Times his priority is keeping the Democrats pro-Israel. The Senate minority leader doesn’t believe he should follow voters’ wishes, but rather manipulate and trick voters to achieve his political goals. It’s also why the most reactionary elements of the Democratic world no longer feel the need to conceal their anti-democratic beliefs and whine that everyday Americans are increasing their political engagement.

This is the ethos that dominates the Democratic Party orbit: Sure, the voters made a decision. But it’s the wrong decision, so the ‘experts’ have to correct them. It also explains the latest obsession with Hasan Piker, who is being used as a proxy target to attack Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Though the primary ended last month, reactionary centrists don’t believe the voters’ decision is the final say. As Yglesias expressed above, much of the Democratic establishment believes Michiganders made the ‘wrong’ decision. So, they’re still fighting to sink Abdul El-Sayed in hopes Republican Mike Rogers will win. After sabotaging El-Sayed, they’ll point to his loss as ‘proof’ progressives can’t win in swing states, giving them ammunition against the insurgent revolution and continuing the politics they believe are ‘correct.’ Of course, this will only embolden the fascist project. But it will put the ‘right’ voices back in charge of the party.

It will come as no surprise that the sabotage of Abdul El-Sayed is primarily conducted through the establishment’s ideological allies in the media. Jeff Bezos’s Substack (The Washington Post) is scaremongering with absurd headlines such as “El-Sayed’s Ties to Firebrand Influencer Threaten Democrats’ Path to Control the Senate,” as if an unknown Twitch streamer is to blame for the party’s electoral woes, rather than decades of incompetent leadership. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait went further, sending up a batsignal to his conservative Democratic friends that it’s necessary to sink El-Sayed for pro-Israel forces to maintain control of the party. Chait’s tantrum frames the Michigan Senate race as a “grim choice.” As a refresher, the choice is between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who supports universal healthcare and opposes genocide, and Mike Rogers, a Trump sycophant who will further accelerate Republican fascism and send more bombs to baby killer Bibi. Calling this a “grim choice” says more about Jonathan Chait than Abdul El-Sayed. Fearful of the backlash, Chait doesn’t explicitly say that he wants El-Sayed to lose to protect Israel. So he couches his argument in false accusations of bigotry and signals that if the Democrats win in Michigan, more anti-genocide Democrats are on their way.

“What’s more, El-Sayed has already said that he intends to use his victory as a platform to reshape the party. Him winning could invite a future in which the United States has not just one party that is open to bigots but two.”

New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer took a similar approach, racing to CNN to say he wouldn’t support El-Sayed. Neither will Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Michigan state representative Jeremy Moss, nor Michigan representative Hillary Scholten. Though these narcissists think they can trick voters by talking about Hasan Piker, Americans are much smarter than politicians think they are. Tensions boiled over during a recent Michigan Democrats conference when attendees chastized these politicians for refusing to support their party’s nominee for a crucial Senate seat. One attendee yelled at Scholten, “Your inflammatory rhetoric has nothing to do with creating a better economic future for the people of West Michigan, and everything to do with protecting the pipeline of our tax dollars to Israel.” Absolutely cooked her. A 10-8 round for the unnamed “attendee” over the two-term congresswoman.

While callouts and condemnations of stubborn zionists and corporatists are always good, we must understand the reactionary centrists are not going to change. Appeals to their better nature or justified calls to “Vote Blue No Matter Who” won’t stop undemocratic Democrats’ war on the left. There are many non-reactionary liberal Democrats who have shifted left rhetorically and on policy along with growing progressive popularity and force. But the reactionaries won’t, because they don’t believe a democratic majority is the decision-maker. Rather, they believe it is their right to control political decisions, and the common folk should shut up and agree with whatever they decide. As a more democratically-minded force is leading the American people in the fight for universal political and economic democracy, the reactionaries are resorting to dirty tricks, media manipulation, and sabotage to put these everyday Americans back in their place. That’s why they’re singularly focused on attacking Abdul El-Sayed by way of Hasan Piker. For most of us, the Michigan Senate primary concluded when the voters chose El-Sayed over Stevens. But for the reactionary centrists, the voters’ will is irrelevant. To them, the election barely matters. Their tactics have slightly shifted to fit their post-primary reality. But the battle to keep another Israel-critic out of the Senate continues.

It is no coincidence that the most reactionary elements of the Democratic establishment love Israel, and don’t mind breaching democratic norms to protect it. Israel is a fascist apartheid state. Its entire existence is based on the premise that the in-group, in this case Jewish Israelis, have a right to suppress the democratic majority of the out-group Palestinians. Conservative Democrats think that’s a justified system. So it should come as no surprise when they see no reason to adhere to democratic legitimacy at home.

What is currently being thrown at Abdul El-Sayed is just a taste of what’s to come. As the left keeps growing, the center will become more reactionary, anti-social, and undemocratic. With just over sixty-four days until the midterm elections, Representatives Gottheimer, Scholten, Moskowitz, and Suozzi are wasting time introducing a resolution to condemn DSA. Hakeem Jeffries recently appointed ultra-Zionist Moskowitz to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a signal to donors that he will try to keep the House caucus pro-Israel, going against voters’ wishes to stop the genocide in Gaza. Be warned. If AOC or another progressive runs in 2028, we’re going to see an establishment ratfucking campaign that puts the 2016 Democratic primary to shame. They can’t win elections, and they can’t persuade voters. So tricks and deceit are the only weapon they have to fight with.

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In Solidarity — Joe

"At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies! It is a day-and-night difference. Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness — the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior is the only focus of our department. colorblind, gender-neutral, merit-based — that's it. We want the best! And anybody with half a brain knows that's common sense! I guess common sense isn't all that common in Washington."

These recent comments by Secretary of War/Defense/Whatever Pete Hegseth at the Iowa State Fair perfectly summarize the offensively stupid nature of the Trumpist military. A transphobic slur smothered in drug-fueled false bravado, easily swallowed by the Republican hogs as if it were any other diabetes-inducing meal peddled at the annual Real America Circle Jerk. For all Hegseth’s talk of creating high testosterone “warfighters,” the only fight the American military can win is against unarmed South American fishermen. As we begin the seventh month of the “two-week” Iran War, it's clear the highest-funded military on earth, the core function of the American state since 2001, can’t defeat a competent foe, even with its unparalleled advantage. (Not that I would want it to.) If past and present are any indication, then Pete Hegseth’s “warfighters” are the cutting edge of modern warfare, unless their enemy can shoot back. Which, according to my extensive research, tends to happen in war.

Along with losing wars, drunk texting strike plans to The Atlantic, and snorting enough cocaine to kill a horse, Pete Hegseth’s tenure as Secretary of War has been defined by his aggressive imposition of MAGA cultural values on the American military. Like most armies, American soldiers lean conservative. But that doesn’t mean they’re down with ‘Deus Vult!’ and the other White nationalist slogans Hegseth tattooed over his gin-fueled body. For all its faults, the military was an early victory for the Civil Rights Movement. Truman desegregated it in 1948, two decades before the movement won its historic 1960s legislative victories. Naturally, the armed forces have become the first target for resegregationists, who seek to reimpose as much of the pre-1960s social hierarchy as possible. Along with racist symbolism — the restoration of a Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery, and renaming forts after Confederate generals Benning and Bragg — Hegseth’s regressive impulses have driven a political purge of the American military that holds no equal in our two-hundred-and-fifty-year history.

Since taking command, Hegseth has tried to rid the American military of women, Black people, minorities, and anyone else likely to object to illegal orders. So far, Hegseth has forced out the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first woman to serve as the Navy’s top admiral, and the first woman to lead the Coast Guard. The Secretary has personally intervened to block women and Black men from being promoted to brigadier general, as well as striking many off the Navy’s promotional list. Racial, gender, and ideological purity of high command is Hegseth’s top priority. He’s personally intervened to stop over a dozen more Black and women senior officers from receiving promotions, something that is far, far beneath the job description of the Secretary of Defense. Currently, the military is without leadership. The Army has not had a chief of staff since Hegseth fired General Randy George and his three top officers in April. No explanation was given for George’s termination, but political ideology is the obvious answer. George was the senior assistant to Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which is unacceptable to Trump and Hegseth. To make matters worse, The New York Times reports that Hegseth is forcing out the current Army Secretary, the service’s top civilian leader. As all signs indicate, the purge is far from over, and will likely continue until Hegseth has run out of enemies. He makes a new one every time a Black person says hi to him in the hallway. So, prepare for this to continue indefinitely.

The mass firings come on top of an aggressively bigoted effort to expel soldiers who don’t fit the MAGA archetype. As his statements above make clear, Hegseth is strongly opposed to “DEI.” The military does have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. But Hegseth is using “DEI” as a dog whistle. He’s ended many race-, sex-, and ethnicity-based recruitment goals in the military, indicating his preference for a strictly White, male service. It’s not about merit. It’s about remaking the military to fit Pete Hegseth’s vision (which is usually blurry and spinning).

The White supremacist push is the by-product of the Republican Party’s core beliefs in neo-Confederatism and resegregationism. Depreciating Black, minority, women, and queer officers advances the White supremacist culture war. But it also poses a concrete political threat. By removing non-traditional military identities from the chain of command, Hegseth is carrying out a political purge of officers more likely to object to illegal orders — such as ordering the overturning of a democratic election because Donald Trump didn’t like the results.

American veterans lean conservative in a 60-40 split. But that’s likely not enough to carry out a political coup. Pete Hegseth holds many grudges against this “woke” military because it forced him out over his extremist tattoos. For all my critiques of American militarism, I don’t believe its typical form would follow orders to turn its guns on Americans. (It could have on January 6th, 2021, but did not.) However, the military is not in its typical form. That is the point of a purge: to get rid of the rule-followers and turn the military into a loyalist private army.

The Times story I mentioned above calls the Army “rudderless” and condemns Hegseth for failing to adequately prepare Patriot missle stockpiles for the Iran War. There’s no doubt Hegseth is a bad military leader in the most basic sense: he doesn’t know how to win the war he started. But I don’t think that’s Hegseth’s goal. If a general wants to win a war, they’ll fill every post with competent commanders. Failing to do so is, quite literally, suicidal. However, if the administration's priority is domestic control and repression, it's better to fire top officers and leave the top command a hollow shell. With fewer generals, admirals, and secretaries, there are fewer roadblocks to whatever Hegseth orders, and fewer commanders who will instruct their soldiers to refuse orders that violate the rules of war or the U.S. Constitution. Trump and Hegseth correctly recognize their goals require silencing any and all dissent. After the military publication Stars & Stripes reported on the inhumane conditions on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, its publisher was fired for telling the press Pentagon censorship was unacceptable. Clearly, Hegseth believes censoring the military press (and, as I fear we’ll learn, the civilian press) is within his powers.

Pete Hegseth’s political purge of top commanders and the resegregation of the military are among the many ways the Trump Administration has already begun to steal the 2026 midterms and, likely, the 2028 presidential election. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court reviewed Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. And wouldn’t you know it, the Roberts Court ruled that Republican Presidents can make it harder to vote in an election largely understood to be a referendum on the Republican Party. What a surprise! The Department of Homeland Security says it has no plans to send shock-gloved ICE agents to polling stations this November. But the agency left the door open, saying it was possible they would arrest voters during a “targeted enforcement action.” Sure, whatever you say, Mark Wayne Mullin.

There’s an entire cottage industry that covers Trump’s threats to democracy and autocratic tendencies. Much of this coverage focuses on whether Trump ‘will’ try to cling to power against democratic wishes. The question of whether Trump ‘will’ try to overturn elections is irrelevant. He’s already doing it, and the entire Republican Party, from the lowly congressman to the esteemed Supreme Court justices, is helping him. The GOP is a well-oiled fascist machine that knows how to ratfuck opponents, steal elections, and bend this supposedly democratic country to its minoritarian will. In years past, it hasn’t had the military support needed to drop the mask and go fully authoritarian. It’s not clear that Pete Hegseth has achieved his goal of purging the Army, Navy, and Air Force of dissent, nor is it determined that the military would follow his illegal orders. But that is Hegseth’s goal, and he is aggressively striving for it. The intent alone should alarm us all.

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In Solidarity — Joe

“The great political organisations which have successfully revolutionised the systems of governments under which they lived, have had their origin, not in the brains of mighty leaders, but in the daily and hourly needs of the multitude, and have acquired force and power only in so far as those needs became sharp and pressing enough to goad that sluggard multitude to action…

Examine the great revolutionary movements of history and you find that in all cases they sprang from unsatisfactory social conditions, and had their origin in a desire for material well being. In other words, the seat of progress and source of revolution is not in the brain, but in the stomach. The fact that this truth has hitherto been obscured, or even denied; that the pioneers of progress uniformly clothed their political demands in the most idealistic language and the most flowery phraseology; or that they constantly appealed for the support of ‘all unselfish and generous souls’, rather than to commonplace interests, only proves that we are all too prone to hide even from ourselves the real nature of our impelling desires, and, even when most stubbornly following our grossest instincts, to throw around our actions all the glamour of ‘spiritual cravings’, or ‘patriotic hopes’.”

Connolly made his point more sardonically in his satirical essay, Let Us Free Ireland!, in which he ruthlessly mocked the liberal and conservative revolutionaries who failed to address material needs:

“Let us free Ireland,” says the patriot who won’t touch Socialism. Let us all join together and cr-r-rush the br-r-rutal Saxon. Let us all join together, says he, all classes and creeds. And, says the town worker, after we have crushed the Saxon and freed Ireland, what will we do? Oh, then you can go back to your slums, same as before. Whoop it up for liberty!

And, says the agricultural workers, after we have freed Ireland, what then? Oh, then you can go scraping around for the landlord’s rent or the money-lenders’ interest same as before. Whoop it up for liberty!

After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn’t that worth fighting for?”

Connolly’s thesis remains true to this day. Sinn Féin, a democratic socialist party that is the largest political unit on the island, is rapidly building support for a referendum on a united Ireland. While national unity is a key focus for the party, Sinn Féin political campaigns lead with economic populism in housing, jobs, and healthcare. Socialists call these “material interests.” In America, they’re referred to as “kitchen table issues.” Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains. In every part of the world, across cultures and eras, people’s main concern is a matter of resources — in one way or another, politics boils down to income versus expenses. James Carville, as far from a socialist as one could get, summed up politics perfectly: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The centrality of economic interests is reinforced in every election. Many sensational media narratives attempted to explain Donald Trump’s second victory. The Republicans claimed their 2% margin gave them a full cultural mandate. Misbelieving they had the full support of the American public, the GOP went full steam ahead with mass deportations, attacks on free speech, and a white nationalist agenda greatly out of touch with the wishes and needs of American voters. With Russiagate disproven and needing an excuse, many Democrats accepted this interpretation, admitted Republicans had won the culture war, and blamed the party’s left flank. They urged “cultural moderation” by moving away from Democratic support for trans rights, abortion rights, and other socially progressive measures. Both of these were wrong. Broadly speaking, Americans elected Trump because they were unhappy with the economy. They gave candidate Harris a chance, but when she moved too far right and failed to address their economic needs, they decided to replace the incumbent administration with the only realistic option. Eight-in-ten voters said their top 2024 priority was the economy, a statement that could’ve been written after any election in American history. Trump’s second term is a disaster, and voters’ chief dissatisfaction is his economic performance. Trump’s economy is so poor that voters now trust Democrats to handle the economy better than Republicans for the first time in a decade. Of course, Americans aren’t excited for the milquetoast corporatism that they recently rejected in 2024. They’re optimistic about programs proposed by progressives and socialists, such as Medicare for All, universal childcare, and stronger unionization, as well as about anti-establishment candidates who speak to their struggles and provide real solutions. This gives the anti-genocide left a wide opening to bring liberatory politics into the halls of power.

The mayorship of Zohran Mamdani provides a good example of how economic populism and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand. A municipal leader, Mamdani’s control of American foreign policy is next to zero. So, outside a few welcomed steps such as evicting Israeli drone manufacturers from New York City, his contribution to the cause has been mostly rhetorical and symbolic. He was the first mayor not to attend the Israel Day Parade since it began, and his viral video calling for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu propelled the topic into mainstream discourse. Two days after the mayor posted his video, pollsters began asking Americans if the United States should arrest Netanyahu. Guided by courageous moral leadership, something hard to find amongst American politicians, the country followed Mamdani and declared it would like to see Benjamin Netanyahu in chains.

The greatest testament to the impact of Mamdani-style politics is that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party is campaigning against him. With Israeli elections fast approaching, the ultra-Zionist coalition has raised campaign billboards in Tel Aviv depicting America’s Mayor as an equal threat to Zionism as Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem. Though extreme, Likud is not wrong to view pro-Palestine politicians such as Mamdani as a challenge to Zionist supremacy. The guarantee of American weapons shipments weakens with every progressive victory. Without American arms, Israel’s military might would be severely diminished, forcing it to negotiate with rather than dominate its more peaceful neighbors.

While Zionists are obsessed with Zohran Mamdani and constantly trying to besmirch him as an Israel-obsessed anti-semite, the truth is he did not run on the Palestinian cause. Though a longtime supporter of Palestinian liberation, Mamdani did not campaign on decolonization, because that is not New Yorkers’ top priority. He ran on affordability, specifically three economic planks: universal pre-K, fast and free buses, and freezing the rent. This is also why New Yorkers elected him. Election day exit polls found 51% of NYC voters were voting for “affordable prices.” 78% of Mamdani’s ads mentioned affordability or high prices, while only 32% of Andrew Cuomo’s ads did.

Delivering on these economic promises, as well as responsible and impressive municipal governance, has propelled Zohran Mamdani — and his anti-genocide advocacy — to international stardom. Zionists know cultural significance is a threat, which is why they try to brutally cancel human rights activists with accusations of bigotry. It’s also why Israeli spy firms attempted to derail Mamdani’s campaign, as well as those of several other Israel-critical politicians around the globe. And it was that cultural power, which has turned into political capital, that Mamdani used to uplift the congressional candidacies of anti-Zionists Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, as well as anti-genocide candidate Brad Lander. Mamdani explained how he was using political capital in his recent interview with The New York Times:

Interviewer: “We’ve talked about your endorsements. And I would like to talk in particular about Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ran successfully against Adriano Espaillat, the head of the Hispanic caucus. He’s a former undocumented immigrant. He has strong progressive credentials: dismantle ICE, supportive of Medicare for All. Did you privately promise him that you were going to support his re-election campaign during your campaign for mayor?”

Mamdani: “I told him that I appreciated his support when he endorsed me in the general election after I won the Democratic primary. And the promise that I made to New Yorkers was to use any tool that I had to further that affordability agenda. And in Darializa, I see a congressional candidate, soon to be a congresswoman, who really has built a campaign on a vision of babies, not bombs. And I think that that speaks to what it means to invest in affordability, and also reckons with the bankruptcy that has typified a lot of our politics, especially when it comes to our foreign policy.

You were asking me earlier about political capital. I think the point of political capital is to spend it to deliver material change. And these are not intellectual arguments. When it comes to Darializa’s district, this is one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States of America. And as I walked that district with her, we were discussing the amount of money that our federal government sends, billions of dollars, to the Israeli military, and as we were doing so, a man came out of a bodega with his hands full with two packages of Huggies. And you see what the priorities are of people living in the district, and yet you see what the priorities are of the federal policy that represents the district. And you see this chasm. And the more that you tolerate that kind of chasm, the more you tell people that politics is something to tune out, as opposed to something to be a part of.”

As Darializa and Claire ran for federal office, foreign policy was a more prominent issue in their election and will play a more central role in their political impacts. These candidates and many others blended their anti-genocide platforms with affordability issues to great effect. Seizing on voters' dissatisfaction with high gas prices, Chriss Rabb combined the affordability and anti-war message into a juggernaut campaign that steamrolled the establishment-backed Sharif Street by fifteen points. Each one of these candidates has brought us closer to ending weapons sales to Israel and reaching a full arms embargo. Not just because of their additional votes on future legislation, but because of the magnetic pull of their influence. Every new anti-genocide legislator gives the emancipatory left an additional soapbox to highlight the rank hypocrisy of liberal Democrats who preach domestic liberty but foreign oppression. As we force these deceivers to defend their indefensible positions on the national stage, they appear weak, unprincipled, and duplicitous. Voters recognize them as hollow suits and place their support elsewhere. More left candidates are elected, and more centrist candidates move left to avoid voters’ scorn. Though not yet victorious, we can already see the fruits of this strategy in practice. Two years ago, only thirty-seven House Democrats voted to stop sending weapons to Israel. Last month, that number jumped to one hundred, including hard-line Zionists such as Jake Auchincloss and Nancy Pelosi. Have these politicians seen the light? Of course not. They are simply opportunists moving left to match the current political environment. The truth is, we don’t need a supermajority of anti-zionists in the House and Senate to cut off arms shipments. We only need enough to wield the bully pulpit and cajole the opportunists into voting how we want.

This is not to say that socialist politics should replace single-issue advocacy on Palestine. Quite the opposite. It is to point out the indisputable fact that, in our undemocratic system, single-issue projects of any sort do not reach the levers of power. Not because they are wrong or misguided, but because voters will always prioritize their economic needs, and if the single-issue doesn’t address those needs, it will fail to win support. The American public was sternly against Israel in November of 2024. But it did not elect any of the single-issue microparties running on Palestinian liberation. Unfortunately, it chose the most pro-Israel candidate in the race because he at least spoke to their material concerns. Any political program that does not include a broadly applicable economic package will fail to win the mass base necessary to achieve its goals. This is why it is important to package liberatory politics inside socialism, its natural home.

Fortunately, the left has a legacy of effective politicking to take inspiration from. The Bolsheviks won power in the Duma (tsarist parliament) and soviets (workers councils) on a platform of peace, land, and bread. Behind each plank of these easily understandable words lay a set of policies that explained how the party would deliver on the masses’ desire for sustenance and safety: removing Russia from World War I, land reform for the peasantry, and an end to the tsarist mismanagement that had created near-famine conditions in Petrograd and other major cities. Today, the American masses have very similar demands. They don’t like Trump’s Iran War, $6 gas prices, the high cost of living, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. During a recent conversation about the explosive success of the electoral left, acclaimed journalist Amy Goodman articulated a succinct slogan for modern progressives to use to similar effect:

“Some people call it sewer socialism, some people call it pothole politics, but they are deeply concerned. I was summarizing it the other day, saying its gas, groceries, and Gaza. And each word represents something much bigger than that. But it’s a new way of how do we take care of this planet? Beginning with individuals, families, and communities all over the world.”

This is an effective, easily understandable platform that shows Americans the left is focused on their priorities and has a plan to address them. Affordability, safety (as in, abolish ICE), and an appeal to human rights are the keys to strong democratic majorities that can stop American weapons from being used in Palestine and eventually win a full arms embargo. As Darializa Avila Chevalier said — “Babies. Not Bombs.” Of course, more will be necessary to truly free Palestine. But disrupting the flow of American weaponry is the immediate political objective and, I would argue, a moral responsibility for the American left. As Palestinian scholar and author of The Hundred Year War on Palestine Rashid Khalidi said, ending our nation’s support for the genocidal state is the chief priority, taking precedent over concerns of ideological purity in our organizing. The legendary Palestinian intellectual argues class-based politics is the path to an anti-genocide majority.

Interviewer: “You were telling us in your talk here at Georgetown to move beyond the politics of purity—to stop making people answer checklists before you work with them. I’d like to hear more about that, especially because within the Palestinian movement there tend to be divisions over what’s going on in Palestine and Gaza, Hamas, armed resistance, and so on. People tend to butt heads over armed resistance versus nonviolent resistance, especially when armed resistance has been such—”

Rashid Khalidi: “Can I say something about that? I’m perfectly happy to have people in Gaza or Nablus talk about armed struggle. What the hell business is it of ours in the United States? I mean, really, seriously: if you want to support something, support it. But to make that a debate among us divides us and brings unspeakable joy to our enemies."

Let them fight about armed struggle, because we’re not going to struggle or be armed. We’re sitting in Georgetown or at the University of Chicago. What does that have to do with what we have to do? We live in the belly of the beast. We live in the country that sustains this genocide. Our work has to do with the United States…

What is our objective? Is our objective stopping arms sales? I can agree with some Zionists on that. Is our objective BDS—the divestment of universities? I can agree with some people I don’t agree with on anything else.

If you want to change anything, and you don’t just want to be pure and self-satisfied—to know that you’ve done the right thing—if you’re willing to actually decide, “This is the objective, and to achieve it we’re going to have to get our hands dirty and talk to people we don’t really like,” imagine creating a coalition that effects change with people you don’t really agree with, but that is effective. The alternative is completely ineffective.”

Interviewer: “To stray away from this very narrow view of Palestine and Israel, I think the global movement has looked at the connections to the military-industrial complex. It has looked, for example, at what communities need before they can go protest—people’s basic needs in the streets, such as class struggles.”

Khalidi: “I think we can be more effective if we’re thinking about ways to reach beyond the narrow group of people who are active around Palestine—to people who don’t have proper schools or hospitals, or whatever, because so much money is spent on the war machine.

Then we’re talking about a majority of Americans who may agree: Let’s stop arms sales to Israel—not only because those weapons are killing Palestinians, but because they’re killing people who don’t have proper hospitals, contributing to the miseducation of youth, and leading to the worst railway systems and the worst bridges in the world because we’re not spending on infrastructure. A third of the budget is going to weapons to kill people—not just Palestinians, of course. So I agree with you completely.”

This is the path to achieving the pinnacle objective of anti-genocide politics: the end of all American bombs, guns, tanks, and planes going to Israel. A broad coalition that speaks to the economic needs of the majority and ties a direct line between their suffering and that of colonized peoples everywhere. As Khalidi said, this coalition will at times be uncomfortable. But as the great civil rights organizer Bernice Johnson Reagon once said, “If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.”

Some will read this and accuse this strategy of deprioritizing the Palestinian cause behind American domestic issues. As I’ve been critiqued before, it will probably sound like, “How can you care about free childcare for Americans when Palestinian children are being bombed?” The prioritization is not my choice. If the options of a free, peaceful Palestine and universal childcare were mutually exclusive and readily available, I would choose the former without thought. But that is not the situation we face. Much like the left’s relationship to the Democratic Party, we are not the ones who dictate the political reality in the United States. That is determined by the masses, who have, in every nation, at every point in time, prioritized their access to resources, the precondition to their survival, above all else. Our list of political priorities is not the list of our moral priorities. If we ranked them morally, and each issue was simply a matter of what to solve first by directing resources, then anti-genocide would be first on the list. Politics is not the practice of telling other people what you care about. It’s the art and science of showing others why your concerns should also be theirs, then mobilizing them to act. That is the task facing the anti-genocide American left. If we can solve the working class’s most pressing issue, the matter of survival and security inside the capitalist system, they will follow us on more radical avenues - from Palestine to policing. But if we lose sight of our mandate and stray from our core belief that capitalism is the primary issue facing the working class, then our project will crumble, and imperialist slaughter will continue unabated.

When the iconic Palestine scholar Norm Finklestein was asked how to stop the genocide, he reformatted a famous quote from Che Guevara on how to stop the American Empire. In a past age, Che called for “One, two, three Vietnams.” In this age, Finklestein called for “One, two, three Mamdanis.” Put as many Mamdanis in state, local, and federal office as we can, and American support for Israel will soon be seen as a relic of our savage past, akin to Jim Crow or allegiance to Apartheid South Africa.

If you appreciated this essay, please click the ❤️ to help it rise in Substack’s algorithm. Don’t forget to subscribe so future articles are delivered to your inbox. If you’re a returning JoeWrote reader, consider supporting my work with a premium subscription. For the cost of just one cup of coffee a month, you can help me keep creating content like this. Plus, you unlock everything JoeWrote has to offer.

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In Solidarity — Joe

For all the talk of China being a “communist” country, it’s not. At the 19th conference of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2018, President Xi Jinping outlined a two-step vision for China. The first step is “socialist modernization” from 2020 to 2035. This would set the stage for the second phase (2035 to 2050), in which China would be turned into a “modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, beautiful, and reasonably pollution-free.” 2050 has been the Chinese communists’ target for establishing socialism since 1987. At that year’s Party conference, the CCP declared that China was in the middle of a hundred-year primary stage, which began in the 1950s (the start of Communist Party rule) and would run until 2050. The 1987 declaration broke Marxist-Leninist doctrine and declared that the primary contradiction — i.e., problem — in China wasn’t between the workers and capitalists, but between underdeveloped China and the developed world:

“The primary task is to energetically expand the commodity economy, raise labour productivity and gradually achieve modernisation of industry, agriculture, national defence, science and technology.”

The CCP recommitted to this vision at the 20th Party Conference in 2024. So, what does this make China?

The Party still describes China as “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but those characteristics are very much capitalist. After the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Mao resigned as President in 1959. Aided by Deng Xiaoping, the new President, Liu Shaoqi began to liberalize the economy, particularly with food imports. After Mao died in 1976, Deng consolidated political power and rapidly expanded China’s openness under the Dengist theory, a combination of Marxist-Leninist one-party control with elements of neoliberal capitalism. China officially entered the international capitalist order by joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 with full American support.

Currently, China is a state capitalist country. There is private enterprise, entrepreneurship, and a labor market. Business owners hire laborers, who work for a wage. What separates China’s capitalism from American capitalism is the role of the state. Neoliberal systems like ours view the state’s job as creating the appropriate conditions for private enterprise to flourish. The American government sets minor regulations such as environmental practices and a minimum wage. But for the most part, it steps back and lets Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg cook. In China, the state oversees investment and large enterprises. State-owned enterprises dominate heavy industry, including telecommunications, military production, nuclear power, banking, and artificial intelligence. Some of these companies have reached enormous heights on international stock exchanges, blurring the line between socialism and capitalism. Even private companies are influenced by party cells, autonomous management units within the corporate structure that represent the CCP’s interests. There are also tighter regulations for private enterprises, which neoliberal say is unfair. Yea, that’s the point. The Chinese Communist Party prioritizes collective control over private control, so it tips the scales in the former’s favor. It’s common for the CCP to welcome foreign capital to compete in a particular sector, then support the winner with state subsidies and control. Critics and supporters will debate endlessly whether the market introduction is capitalism or socialism, good or bad, genius or betrayal. But what is undeniable is that it’s working.

Earlier this year, the CCP announced the start of its 15th five-year plan. (I know. Lots of plans, visions, periods, etc. The Chinese are nothing if not particular.) This plan accelerates Xi’s vision by moving the Chinese economy away from cheap manufactured goods and towards a leading industrial powerhouse. Basically, China wants to produce less of the plastic crap sold on TikTok Shop and more cutting-edge technology. In preparation for this five-year period (2025 to 2030), China waived its “special and differential” treatment at the WTO. This category is designed to give developing countries a leg up in resource sourcing and trade. Beijing’s willingness to forgo this privilege shows CCP leadership believes they can drop the economic training wheels. The result indicates they’re correct.

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