It’s impossible for me to talk about Yesteryear without kissing Caro Claire Burke’s ass.

I’ll be honest. I doubted the Yesteryear hype. With a parade of 5-Star pre-launch reviews and comparisons to the greatest American novels, I got the sense the literary world was caught up in the moment. I always thought the book would be good. But the universal acclaim created the creeping suspicion that the publisher had found a marketable bestseller and thrown the entire Q2 marketing budget behind it. It’s not like my concern was unfounded. Hype and quality are often uncorrelated in the publishing world. The last six months of 2025 were a full-court press for American Canto. Every magazine, talk show, and podcast in America told me that Olivia Nuzzi’s love affair with the worm devouring RFK Jr.’s last brain cell was the greatest political tragedy since Princess Dianna. When I picked up Yesteryear from Barnes & Noble, a pile of dusty American Canto copies under a “50% Discount!” sign reminded me that booksellers are as sensationalist as they come.

So, when I opened Yesteryear, I was optimistic for an enjoyable satire of American patriarchy. After a furious weekend reading marathon during which I ignored every responsibility in my life, I set Yesteryear down. Stunned. The reviews were wrong. Giving Burke’s debut novel a meager 5-star rating is an insult. (As I said, it’s impossible to talk about this book without kissing Caro’s ass. Before you call me a sycophant, read it for yourself. You’ll see)

Yesteryear is the defining cultural product of contemporary America. Through the time-traveling life of trad wife Instagram influencer Natalie Heller Millls, the book captures what it’s like to live in a society burdened by the social media paradox: As the hyper individualization of American capitalism separates each citizen into an isolated unit of consumption and production, we Log On, hoping digital connections will fill the hole of human camaraderie the profit-driven world tore out of our evolutionary psyche. Only once we’re immersed in the world of follows and likes and friends and trolls do we realize our mistake. The more time we spend online navigating algorithms to maximize our disconnected connections, the less human we become and the more alone we feel.

At first glance, Yesteryear appears to be about the pitfalls of patriarchy and America’s genetic hatred of women (The only time the Constitution mentions “women” is when it gives them permission to vote after 150 years of codified second-class citizenry). There’s no denying that misogyny is Yesteryear’s home-grown bread and hand-churned butter. But the novel speaks to social dynamics far beyond the scope of gender relations. Or at least issues that seem gender-agnostic.

In both her glamorous present and dystopian past, Natalie considers everyone and everything bullshit. From the well-rehearsed script for her social media posts to the old classmates she runs into at Target, every interaction of Natalie’s seemingly perfect life is fraudulent. No one knows this better than the protagonist, whose vicious inner monologues skewer anything caught in her path. Including herself. The self-loathing runs between her thoughts and drips off her every word. The only thing Natalie sees as real is her religion. God is always a certainty, whether Natalie is thanking Him for gifting her a million followers or begging Him to free her from the horrors of life on the antebellum frontier. When I asked about Natalie’s unwavering faith during her author event here in Denver (well, asked her on my behalf), the Yesteryear author challenged my framing: Natalie might be religious, but does she really have faith? After all, her relationship to God is transactional. As is common in Evangelical and Protestant sects, Natalie’s religion is purely Old Testament. She believes she is in covenant with God. She glorifies Him, and He gives her followers. She accepts His “test,” and she expects Him to free her from the unbearable past once she passes it. She does X, so He should provide her with Y. Faith is trusting even against the unknown. Natalie trusts no one. She is certain, to a fault.

“Now if you will obey me and keep my covenant, you will be my own special treasure from among all the peoples on earth; for all the earth belongs to me. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.” — God comands Abraham about his covenant with anceint Israel, Exodus 19:5-6.

Not every American shares Natalie’s transactional Christianity. But all of us can relate to the frustration of being handcuffed to a voided social contract. Whether through God or government, the powers that be have offered every American a deal. We were required to go to school, get a job, start a family, and follow the law. As a result, we were promised that Star Spangled capitalism would carry us into the joy and prosperity of a middle-class, white-picket life. Like Natalie waiting on divine deliverance, we plebeians did our part. But the higher powers never delivered. Income inequality skyrockets. Politicians ignore us. Life gets harder. Opioids and booze become more appealing. Instead of proving themselves to be honest partners, the powerful laughed at us for being foolish enough to trust them.

Americans from all walks of life played by the rules and have little to show for it. Now, they’re left asking the all-powerful deity — Uncle Sam or Father Yahweh — why he’s not holding up His end of the bargain. Grappling with this betrayal is sure to drive us into psychosis. Not because we lost our grip on reality, but because the reality we were promised was waiting for us was revealed to be a lie. Like the despondent Natalie Heller Mills during her first days in 1855, much of America wallows in pitiful deterioration. Need a way out? Why not log on to the internet? Speaking from personal experience, it’s the perfect place to accelerate your mental breakdown into stage five Computer Madness.

Though Yesteryear satirizes the domestic side of a collapsing misogynistic nation, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between the tradwife and the cowboy, each a romanticization of America’s brutal history. Much like Natalie’s idea of 19th-century homemaking is a far departure from historical reality, so is America’s silver screen view of the Western vigilante. Historically, cowboys were the American proletariat — wayward young men lured to the frontier by promises of gold and adventure, a much more tempting offer than working in the deadly factories that gave rise to European labor movements. While real cowboys were too broke to even buy a gun, the Hollywood gunslinger has rewritten national history, and by extension, our modern self-image. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood thrilled generations by giving Manifest Destiny a handsome face and a chiseled jawline. In the process, they helped American audiences forgive themselves for our nation’s sins, much like how predators manipulate religion to self-foregive for their transgressions. (Why would Pete Hegseth need to ask the women he raped for forgiveness? God already forgave him. After all, He is God. They’re only women.) Rescuing white women from savage Apaches and masked gunmen wasn’t just entertainment. It was a permission structure for American audiences to move past the guilt of the genocidal project that we all benefit from.

If a tradwife is the misinformed rosey face of America’s domestic past, then her counterpart, the cowboy, is the handsome and daring personification of American imperialism. Much like the bearded, grizzled cowboy gunslinger was used to humanize and justify America’s 19th-century westward expansion, the bearded, grizzled special operations soldier is used to humanize and justify America’s 21st-century global expansion. No one has done more to connect the past and present of Hollywood misrepresentation than screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. With a world-renowned collection of neo-Western titles such as Yellowstone, Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River, Landman, and 1923, Sheridan has repurposed the classic cowboy aesthetic to justify every social failing conservatives love to love. From beneath the sun-tinted brims of prop cowboy hats, Sheridan’s male characters lecture woman characters (who represent the liberal audience) on the need for unregulated oil drilling, drone strikes in Afghanistan, CIA intervention in Mexico, and, most importantly, male dominance in the household. In the scene below from Landman, good ol’ boy Tommy Norris drives the uptight, coastal elite lawyer Rebecca Falcone into the Texas desert just to lecture her about how windfarms are wasteful and she’s stupid for thinking otherwise. To a male audience, this is an enjoyable, Emmy-worthy scene: the American Hero tells the Lib Lawyer Lady how it is. (You woke dumb bitches don’t understand REAL America!) I imagine this scene is experienced very differently for the female viewer, who likely assumes a visibly angry, half-drunk 60-year-old man carrying a young woman into the wilderness is the start of an unsolved murder.

The entire time I was reading Yesteryear, I couldn’t help but equate the fictional Natalie Heller Mills to the very real Taylor Sheridan. With Natalie’s father-in-law, Doug, a classic MAGA senator, Burke expertly draws a parallel between the hyper-masculine world view of American reactionaries and the feminine, domestic face of their political project. The two characters have a mutually beneficial relationship, exchanging money and electoral support. If Senator Doug represents the conservative worldview Taylor Sheridan seeks to promote with the modern retelling of American cowboys and special forces operators, then Natalie represents the homemaking foundation on which that worldview rests. Both then and now, protecting white women has often been the justification for America’s most heinous acts — slaughtering Natives, enslaving Blacks, and deporting immigrants. (Except the ones that work on Yesteryear Farm, of course.)

Like Natalie, Sheridan’s western bona fides are aesthetic, not material. Natalie purchases Yesteryear Farm in pursuit of a lifestyle reset. Sheridan’s mother bought her family a farm to “have an opportunity to learn firsthand about the peaceful feeling of freedom in nature.” He visited on “holidays and weekends,” playing cowboy part-time while his real life was that of a theater kid, starring in Grease and Piaf at his well-funded high school. Still, he projects the Western Way of Life to his audience, frequently appearing on-screen as the sun-weathered cowboy he very much is not.

While Sheridan’s modern cowboys lionize modern capitalism and imperialism through American television screens, Yesteryear gives a more honest look into the domestic hellscape this bipartisan project has brought us. Not just the subordination of 51% of the population, but soulless consumerism, social isolation, a pathological need to be liked by those we despise, and the greatly mistaken belief that if only we were someone else, somewhere else, our problems would be better. And, of course, it’s all monetized.

In my experience, no show, movie, album, or book embodies the 21st-century American experience as well as Yesteryear. Succession came close, but its focus on the inept, oligarchical class failed to convey the madness experienced by those of us subject to their whims. It’s a unique comparison, but I haven’t felt that a media project has captured its moment this well since The Sopranos. Decades after it aired, the ballad of Tony Soprano remains a widely watched show because it conveys the unique malaise of 1990s America through a compelling story. Strippers and shotguns are foreign to middle-class suburbanites. But Tony Soprano’s struggle to protect the dying empire of organized crime from modernity’s crushing persistence reflected the anxieties of Americans coping with life inside the dying empire of the United States of America. When the series debuted in 1999, the end of the Cold War had left the militant nation without purpose. For so long, the American identity centered on defeating communism. Like a star high school athlete after graduation, America didn’t know what it wanted to become now that the Soviet Union was gone. After 9/11, the metacommentary of a declining empire within a declining empire broke the fourth wall. When the greatest military defeat on the American homeland since Pearl Harbor knocked down the Twin Towers, the showrunners removed the iconic shot of American Prestige — a representation of the powerful New York mafia families that Soprano’s New Jersey empire sat beneath — from the show’s famous theme song. From there, The Sopranos created an unforgettable yet significantly heightened representation of the struggle to balance family, work, and happiness in a world in which the old rules, the ones every character believed would exist in perpetuity, no longer applied. What The Sopranos did for the uncertainty of turn-of-the-millennium America, Yesteryear does for the 2020s. Only it’s better.

For a book review, I’ve talked very little about Yesteryear’s plot or the overarching theme of the persecution of women. I’ve steered clear of both these topics simply because I cannot do them justice. More adept feminist reviewers than I have spilled considerable ink and typed many a key on the book’s wonderful satire of the harms of patriarchy. (Which hurt the male characters as well as the female ones.) And I have little interest in mansplaining patriarchy’s gender penalty to those who understand it better than I do. As for the plot, I have nothing to say other than you should go buy Yesteryear and read it. At a time when every piece of entertainment is a product of AI and capitalist slopification, Yesteryear feels like the first original, dare I say human, major American cultural contribution in a long, long time.

Things used to be better back in the day, huh? If only I could go back there…

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In Solidarity — Joe

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief experienced by terminal patients: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Though Kübler-Ross’s work focused on humans grappling with the end of their lives, grief and the strategies for coping with it appear whenever there is loss. That loss can be physical, mental, or ideological, as is the case with liberal Zionists struggling to rationalize the slow death of their namesake ideology.

The demise of liberal Zionism was inevitable. Liberalism believes in democratic equality regardless of race, religion, or other protected traits. Alternatively, Zionism is the belief in a Jewish supremacist ethnostate, a direct violation of the liberal belief in legal equality. Liberal Zionism is an inherently contradictory ideology, no different than being an anti-racist segregationist or a MAGA socialist. Political projects can exist and thrive with contradictions, but only if the contradictions are acknowledged as temporary. If there is no plan to resolve the contradiction, or if it is ignored, the project will implode. Slavery was the prominent contradiction for 19th-century liberal democracies. The British Empire resolved this contradiction by prioritizing liberty over bondage and legislatively abolishing the slave trade in 1837. Because the United States refused to address the contradiction and kept kicking the can down the road, the lack of a resolution led to the bloody Civil War.

“In the [liberal Zionist] view, Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity, or gender.” — Carlo Strenger

“Liberal Zionism is an ideology that provides cover for and advances the settler-colonial conquest of Palestine in the name of rationality, progress, equality, tolerance, democracy, and even anti-racism.” — Muhannad Ayyash

Much like the slave states that tried to hypocritically justify slavery by pointing to the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of liberty, liberal Zionists’ refusal to address their ideological paradox has led to its demise. As support for Israel craters in the United States, with the largest drop-offs among left-leaning and younger Americans, liberal Zionists see the writing on the wall. Their belief that Israel could exist as a liberal democracy for one ethnicity and a racial caste system for the rest is nearing death. So, they are grieving. Not just for the loss of liberal Zionism as an acceptable political belief in the United States, but also for the loss of their place as political thought leaders directing the national Democratic Party.

As support for Israel began dropping in 2023, liberal Zionists went through the anger and denial stages to cope with their loss of stature. Throughout the Biden presidency and into Trump’s second term, aggressively defended Israel as waging a “just war” and denied that the Gaza genocide was a political liability for Democrats. (May, 2024: “Is Gaza hurting Biden in the eyes of the public because voters are pro-Palestinian? No.”) Liberals have always been sour that the pro-Palestine left opposes Israel. But the post-October 7th reaction went from annoyance to psychotic fury. In August of 2024, Jonathan Chait spewed his rage at anti-genocide protestors across the pages of New York Magazine, accusing them of wanting to genocide Jews.

“The [Palestine liberation] movement could not be any clearer on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.

What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program. In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.

To advance justice for Palestinians and Jews does not require placating, forming alliances with, or ceding “leverage” to followers of this hateful program. The morally just response is to meet this ideology the way liberals meet other forms of hate: by calling it what it is.”

Even well-mannered Ezra Klein has previously struggled to contain his distaste for critics of Zionism. Not long after the start of the “Israel-Hamas War” (his framing), Klein made explicitly religious arguments for Israel’s ethno-nationalism, derisively saying:

“When people read [the Torah], it is an account of the Jewish people being expelled violently, repeatedly, from Jerusalem, which was not located at that time in New Jersey; it was there in the same place. There's a very ancient connection for the Jewish people to that land. When did the statute of limitations on Jewish expulsion run out?”

(Though Ezra Klein believes a 3,000-year-old religious history should determine modern Israeli politics, he’s also argued that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s incorporating the legacy of Jim Crow into modern politics is “too wide a historical scope.” Ezra Klein’s body of work shows that Zionism cannot be separated from its racist underpinnings, even if the Zionist believes they are fighting for social justice.)

While anger and denial still linger in the liberal Zionist psyche, the complete collapse of Americans’ sympathy for Israel has forced these prominent pundits into the bargaining stage of grief. As more and more Democratic politicians call to end funding for all Israeli weaponry, and the party opens up to anti-genocide voices such as Hasan Piker, liberal Zionists have filled the pages of America’s most prominent newspapers with their inner negotiations, attempting to convince their readers and themselves that Israel can still be a peaceful democracy — if only we ignore all evidence to the contrary. Each of these attempts to strike a bargain makes concessions to the anti-Zionist left. With Israel critics racking up wins in Democratic primaries, liberal Zionists are bargaining for a tactical retreat within the Democratic tent. Not because their morals compel them to stop Zionism’s century-long killing spree, but to ensure Israel maintains some relevance in the Democratic Party.

In a recent essay, Jonathan Chait implores his fellow liberal Zionists to make concessions to the “Hasan Piker extremist wing” of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, Chait warns, the establishment won’t be able to “hold on to the party.”

“A debate over American policy toward Israel is likely to divide the party in the next presidential-primary cycle even more clearly than Medicare for All divided it in 2020—even as many voters aren’t invested in the debate at all. The Democrats’ establishment opposes terrorism and backs a two-state solution; Piker and his allies want to cast that position as de facto support for the status quo, which is a single state controlled by Israel. If the establishment has any hope of holding on to the party, rather than surrendering it to the Piker wing, it will need to defy that characterization by recognizing that facts on the ground have changed. Political morals and public opinion are pushing in the same direction: ending American financial support for Israel.

The most essential task for liberal Zionists is to separate their ambitions from the stubborn realities of Israel’s government. Liberal Zionists can say that they oppose the status quo and favor two independent states, but as Israel’s willingness to trade land for peace recedes further into historical memory, those pleas sound detached from reality. The traditional Democratic posture is becoming outright impossible as long as the party continues to support sending billions of dollars to Israel every year.”

Conceding to pro-Palestine Democrats is a massive shift for Chait, who just two years ago demanded Democrats shun the anti-Zionist “hate movement.” His complete heel turn isn’t because Chait is concerned for Israel’s victims, but because he’s concerned for Israel — specifically, the flow of American weaponry it relies on. I’m sure this was a hard pill for Jonathan Chait to swallow. Which is why he’s being extremely honest with the like-minded The Atlantic readership by telling them that if the Democratic establishment continues supporting Israel uncritically, the progressive left will defeat them and transform the party into a fully anti-Zionist organization. To be fair to Jonathan Chait, he’s right. Democratic voters hate Israel almost as much as they hate Donald Trump. AIPAC-backed Senate candidate Haley Stevens was recently booed at the Michigan Democratic Convention. Staying the course is political suicide for Democratic Zionists.

Chait tries to make his message more palatable to his audience by offering them the easy way out: criticize Netanyahu. He is warning them that either liberal Zionists must retreat and concede the battle, or they risk losing the war.

“Liberal Zionists can win an intra-Democratic argument against anti-Zionist radicals, but they can’t win it while burdened with support for subsidizing settlements and a strategy of endless conflict. The most extreme anti-Zionist activists won’t be satisfied with anything short of committing the Democratic Party to Israel’s demise. But the most left-wing position in recent Democratic primaries—on Iraq in 2004, on health care in 2016—has rarely been adopted by the candidate who emerges as the party’s eventual nominee. The decisive bloc of Democrats includes those who are disgusted with Israel’s policies and ready to wash their hands of American support for its maximalist strategy, but wary of going full Piker. Either mainstream Democrats will give up any illusions they have about the ugly nature of Israel’s current government, or they will no longer occupy the mainstream of their party.”

To a rational observer, Jonathan Chait’s quick change from “pro-Palestine voices should be shunned” to “we must give in to their demands for our own survival” shows that his original ideology was extremely flawed. Someone with sensible control over their beliefs would stop and ask, “Two years ago, I said these people wanted to kill me. Now I’m saying we must admit they’re right. What else am I wrong about?” But in the liberal Zionist mind, which has psychologically invested in the worldview of Zionist founder Theodore Herzl that Israel is “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” it is too difficult to admit they were fooled. It’s important to remember that liberal Zionists don’t consider their beliefs contradictory. Instead, they subscribed to Zionism’s racist belief that Arabs cannot accept pluralistic democracy, which justifies the suppression and expulsion of Palestinians and the Lebanese as a necessary step to spread Israel’s “liberal values.” Essentially, liberal Zionists think it's okay to have Jim Crow apartheid if the oppressor also hosts an annual gay pride parade.

Rather than resolve this contradiction plaguing his beleaguered mind, Jonathan Chait is watching liberal Zionism disappear before his eyes. Too late to stop it, all he can do is bargain with the Democratic Party, his fellow liberal Zionists, and most obviously, himself, to maintain a shred of credibility as liberal Zionism falls into the historical dustbin alongside segregation and colonialism.

A more polished episode of liberal-Zionist bargaining appears in Ezra Klein's recent work. Arguably the most prominent liberal Zionist in mainstream media, Klein deserves credit for criticizing Israel more than his peers. Still, that criticism always ends with him throwing up his hands and saying, “Nothing we can do!” instead of calling for international pressure to stop the slaughter he claims to oppose.

In a recent episode of his podcast, Ezra Klein discusses Israel’s colonization of Palestine with the editors of The One State Reality. The conversation centers on the West Bank, the arena in which liberal Zionists are most likely to criticize Israel because its apartheid policies are the least defensible. (When I reviewed Alan Dershowitz’s book for Jacobin last year, even he admits the West Bank segregation is indefensible.) Like Chait, Ezra Klein goes out of his way to argue that making concessions to the anti-Israel forces in the Democratic Party is a painful but necessary tactic to preserve long-term American support for Israel. Here’s him saying so in the episode prelude:

“I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist. But what Israel is choosing here — a one-state reality, which already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid — endangers that state, too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians.

In February, Gallup found, for the first time, that more Americans polled sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents, whose views of Israel were forged in another time, around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. But it will — and soon.”

Throughout the conversation (which is worth listening to), Ezra Klein attempts to delicately walk what I previously called his “genocide tightrope.” On one side, Klein strongly criticizes Israeli settler terrorism and apartheid in the illegally occupied West Bank. On the other side, he tries to protect Israel by arguing that this violence is something new, a deviation from the “true” version of Israel. He also cynically suggests that the victims of Israeli violence bear some of the blame for their condition, saying the “wars” in Lebanon and Gaza are justified — they are not, and have been internationally condemned as illegal and immoral.

To give himself plausible deniability that he’s supporting radical religious militarism, Ezra Klein uses the framing of “Israeli Jews say” to advance the Zionist argument. It’s a cop-out that I’ve never heard Klein use for any other demographic, the media version of “i’M jUsT aSkInG qUeStIoNs BrO!” Here’s Klein using the “Israeli Jews say” framing to advance the argument that Gazans must be concentrated for Israeli “security.”

“When I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza. They had withdrawn from Gaza, and after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. And eventually the result was Oct. 7. And so to many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control but that they had too little — that they had offered too much autonomy and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that.”

Klein uses “Israeli Jews” again to argue that West Bank aggression is the result of the Palestinian refusal to accept earlier peace accords:

“I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation, and one of the things I found myself talking about with a number of Israelis was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews in simply the idea of political deals. This was true with their views after the peace process: ‘We tried a peace process, and we got the second intifada.’ This was also true, to some degree, in what you’re saying about Hamas and Gaza. There was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize [Gaza].”

And once again to suggest that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is to keep Israelis “safe.”

“I’ve talked to Israeli Jews who live in the north, and they say: ‘Look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home. How am I supposed to allow my family to live there?’ During the Gaza war, there was rocket fire. You had the evacuation of the Israeli north. The people I spoke to felt completely failed by this.”

By claiming he’s speaking for “Israeli Jews” and not himself, Ezra Klein is arguing for his Zionist beliefs without compromising his liberal ones. He doesn’t want to say, “Israel might need to occupy Lebanon so that Israeli Jews feel safe,” because that directly violates liberal values. Instead, he pretends Israel is like any rational actor, then uses the framing of “Israeli Jews” to argue for the specific violations of democratic values. He further tries to protect Israel by claiming that the current Israeli government and military are somehow a bastardization of real Zionism.

“One of the things that we were looking at when we were preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military, Israeli cabinet officials, but also Israeli military leadership, has changed. The Israeli military leadership used to be highly professionalized, often very centrist. There’s been a rolling purge, replacement, under Netanyahu, as he’s tried to put people who are more loyal to him into senior positions. In order to sustain itself, his coalition has had elements — like Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — who in Israel had been seen as much more extreme.”

Of all the excuses liberal Zionists make for Israelis, the attempt to portray the Israeli government and its military as separate from the Israeli people is the most pathetic. Israel is an ethnic democracy. If you are Jewish, you have full democratic rights. Israeli Jews have repeatedly elected Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu. By passing race-based execution laws, massacring Palestinians, and cleansing Shia Muslims from Lebanon, the Netanyahu government is not acting against the wishes of the Israeli people — it is fulfilling them. Polling shows Israelis overwhelmingly support the IDF’s cleansing of Lebanon, as they did with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza at the height of the genocide. If the Israeli people were unhappy with the Netanyahu government, the Israeli Knesset could vote to dissolve itself and trigger elections. It has not, because Israelis support their national violence. It is also disingenuous of Ezra Klein to imply that a more “centrist” Israeli political coalition would be less imperialist. His conversation is about the West Bank and Lebanon. Leftist, centrist, and right-wing Israeli governments have occupied the West Bank since 1967. As for Lebanon, the pre-Netanyahu government shelled the civilians of Beirut back in 1982. With the October election looming, Netanyahu’s centrist opponents are attacking him for being too soft on Israel’s enemies. The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, condemned the ceasefire in Lebanon (which Israel immediately broke) and stated the only way to end the “war” is the “permanent removal of the threat to the northern settlements.” By which he means a permanent Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The far-right, hyper-militaristic government of Benjamin Netanyahu is not an affront to Israeli society, its citizens, or their values. It is a product of them.

What’s most striking about this episode is how clearly the contradictions of Ezra Klein’s politics are. Well, they’re clear to everyone but him. At one point, Klein explicitly details the reality of what Israel is, accusing it of “building illegal settlements at a record pace,” “protecting a terrifying rise in settler violence,” and “using the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people.” And yet, in the very next sentence, he retreats into the Zionist safe space of saying Israel has to do something about Hamas and Hezbollah.

“I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They’re defending themselves in a way any state would. But this is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese are not all Hezbollah.

Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 is very real. Its determination to make sure that never happens again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah is undeniable.”

Ezra Klein seems to honestly think Israel is invading Lebanon for any reason except to cleanse and occupy it. It is a truly revealing admission, considering he has previously suggested Democrats abandon trans rights and reproductive rights to win elections. It appears the Zionist belief that Israel is a perpetual victim that should always be given the benefit of the doubt is one of the only true values Klein holds.

The jumping back and forth between accusing Israel of war crimes and saying the context of those crimes is justified shows that Ezra Klein has yet to reach the acceptance stage of grief. He claims Israel is “defending itself” from Hezbollah. But Hezbollah was only created to defend Lebanon from Israel. He also says Israel has a “right to reprisal.” It does not. International law specifically rejects the right to reprisal by targeting civilians, which none can deny Israel has done over the last two and a half years. As for the claim Israel should defend itself from paramilitary resistance groups, in 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel has no right to claim “self-defense” in areas it illegally occupies. Despite his willingness to criticize specific actions of the Israeli state, Ezra Klein is unwilling and unable to accept the reality of what Israel is, of what it always has been. Not yet ready to accept the death of liberal Zionism, Ezra Klein bargains with himself by promoting blatant lies about Israel’s nature or its violations of international law. But he is also putting forth another offer to Israel’s critics, one that the anti-Zionist left should reject.

It is clear that Ezra Klein believes the path to peace is through Israeli goodwill. It is not. Palestinian rights are not contingent on whether the “Israeli Jews” Ezra Klein loves to center feel like giving it to them. Rights and safety are often inversely correlated. I would be “safer” if every person except me were put in prison. But my “safety” is of far lesser importance than the right of everyone else to be free. While Chait and Klein’s encouragement for concessions is aimed at their fellow liberal Zionists, they are attempting to reach an agreement with the anti-Zionist left that Palestinian rights must be agreed to by the Israelis, and their “security concerns” are valid. They are not. The truth is that the Israelis are not good-faith actors. They bombed seven countries in 2025. A new U.N. report shows Israel killed forty-seven women and girls every day during the Gaza genocide (which is still happening, despite Israel’s agreement to the “ceasefire”). Disturbing reports from Israel’s infamous Sde Teiman torture camp show IDF guards are using dogs to rape detainees. All of this on top of the valid charge of genocide, which the international community has a duty to prevent.

There is no deal to be struck with the Israelis or the media allies that defend them. The Palestinians want equal treatment. The Israelis want to deny it to them. That is the situation. Much like apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow South, or Nazi Germany, the solution to genocidal Israel is for those of good conscience to use economic, cultural, and political leverage to impose a transition to democracy and dignity for all, regardless of whether the Israeli people want it. If Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait had wanted a different outcome, they should have resolved the contradiction of liberal Zionism long ago. They chose ignorance, so this is the solution they’re getting.

There is no bargain to be made. So liberal Zionists should hurry up and get to acceptance. Your ideology was always wrong. Time to take it off life support.

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We also covered how JD Vance is freaking out that this war is destroying his chances of becoming president. He’s been leaking to The New York Times repeatedly, trying to show that he’s really against this war — but not willing to say so publicly.

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When Donald Trump reentered the White House in 2025, he had far more international allies than he did in 2017. From Buenos Aires to Budapest, far-right politicians and their movements were winning democratic elections on explicitly reactionary platforms. In each case, the national conservative agenda was the same: cut social programs, scapegoat immigrants, persecute queerness, and defend “Western civilization” (whatever that means). The timely ascendence of fascist leaders was no coincidence. It was a meticulously planned political project that crossed oceans and traditional geopolitical divisions. Covering this phenomenon in 2023, The Institute for Policy Studies warned 2024 was the far-right’s “greatest opportunity since the 1930s to push the needle towards fascism.” This sentiment was echoed by the fascists themselves. At the conclusion of one international rightist gathering in 2024, the keynote speaker announced that “An international coalition of national forces has been established.” When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, it seemed to confirm that this international nationalism was shaping the future of geopolitics, replacing the liberalism in the post-World War II liberal order with an illiberal substitute. Writing in Jacobin days after Trump was sworn in, international relations scholar Somdeep Sen warned that this movement was nearing global hegemony.

“From Rome to Buenos Aires, and from San Salvador to New Delhi, right-wing leaders are similarly optimistic that, with a friend like Donald Trump at the helm in Washington, an illiberal reconstruction of global politics is within reach.” — Far-Right Leaders Are Forging a Gobal Alliance

Sen was foresightful. When Trump was inaugurated for the second time before an audience of oligarchs, he had friends in every corner of the map. Libertarian Javier Milei held the Argentine presidency, Mussolini-praising Giorgia Meloni was prime minister of Italy, Salvadorian Nayib Bukele fancied himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” and anti-feminist Prime Minister Yoon Suk Yeol welcomed Trump’s return from South Korea. These newly emerging international nationalists were supported by long-standing fascist icons such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have long shared Trump’s disdain for Muslims and other religious minorities. From the perspective of January 2025, it also appeared that this national conservative network would quickly expand. With Trump-inspired far-right political movements surging in Britain, Romania, Canada, and Australia, the speaker, who predicted an “international coalition of nationalist forces,” appeared to know what the future held. Which is no surprise. After all, this was his project, the lifelong work of the fascist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Trump Before Trump

While many have referred to Viktor Orbán as a Trump-like figure, a seeming Hungarian clone, this framing misunderstands the order of events. It was Orbán who first pioneered the quasi-populist far-right blueprint in 2010, which The Apprentice host borrowed to create the MAGA movement during his 2015 entry into electoral politics. The Trump-Orbán connection wasn’t personal, but ran through conservative strategist Steve Bannon. After Orbán won the Hungarian presidency in 2010 by railing against immigration, social justice, and other progressive causes, he became the shining beacon of reactionary conservatism, turning heads across the rightist world. As Bannon said in a speech in 2018, Orbán was “Trump before Trump” and “the bridge between the United States and Europe.”

The American and Hungarian far-right quickly strengthened their ties and laid the foundation for the international nationalist coalition they hoped to build. Conservative influencers such as Tucker Carlson flocked to Hungary and praised Orbán’s “defense of Western civilization,” as if the former Soviet satellite was some kind of White Boy Wakanda. By 2022, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), known for its outlandish right-wing conventions, expanded to Europe and began holding annual events in Budapest. Running for five consecutive years, CPAC Hungary is home to the longest-operating CPAC outside of the United States. As is the case with most conservative projects, the spectacle of American conservatism was far from organic. It was recently revealed that Viktor Orbán was funding CPAC Hungary with taxpayer money. As the old conservative saying goes, “What’s good for the goose is good for the grift.”

With American conservatives so heavily invested in Victor Orbán’s project (both financially and ideologically), it was no surprise to see the Trump Administration supporting him in the recent Hungarian election. Trump promised to give Hungary the “full Economic Might of the United States” if Hungarians re-elected Orbán, and J.D. Vance flew to Budapest to stump for him. (Don’t worry, J.D. It’s not like your country is at war or anything.) It’s also likely that Vance’s international campaign is only the tip of the iceberg, the only visible part of the Trump administration’s support for the Hungarian despot. Recent reporting shows that the State Department’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, was bolstering fascist and reactionary programs across Europe, with particular focus on uplifting the Hungarian regime. With the U.S. State Department openly shaping American foreign policy to protect the President's ideological allies, one can only imagine the illicit support the United States government provided Viktor Orbán behind the scenes.

However, whatever Trump gave, it wasn’t enough. Despite the American government’s full-throated support for the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party were resoundingly defeated in the recent elections. In the highest-turnout election since 1989, Hungarian voters delivered 137 parliamentary seats to the opposition party, while only 55 went to Fidesz. With his rivals winning over two-thirds of the majority, Viktor Orbán conceded to his opponent, Peter Magyar.

The architect of the international nationalist coalition had fallen.

The Coalition Crumbles

As the creator of the global rightist alliance, it’s not surprising that Viktor Orbán was one of its last surviving members. With the Hungarian fascist ousted, Trump’s once dominant coalition of far-right and fascist international partners has been scattered to the wind.

Across the globe, Bannonite candidates have suffered landslide defeats, legal losses, and major setbacks. Within the first year of Trump’s second term, both Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and South Korean Prime Minister Yoon Suk Yeol were jailed for coup attempts. Javier Milei’s chainsaw austerity ran the Argentinian economy into the ground, forcing Trump to save his government with $40 billion in credit swaps: an embarrassing display for two men whose ideology centers on effective economic management. As a result, Milei’s disapproval rating has skyrocketed.

While the conservative ideology has always done well attracting voters (Republicans’ two favorite presidents, Trump and Reagan, are actors for a reason), its Achilles Heel has always been governing. (Which is kind of important.) Just a few months of far-right governance in America was enough to make MAGA-curious voters across the world sprint in the opposite direction. Pointing to the glowing dumpster fire that is the United States of America as an example of what Trumpist politics would bring to their countries, centrists and liberal parties pull off major upsets against Trump-like nationalists in Romania, Australia, and Canada. The Canadian result was particularly shocking, as Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party was expected to be wiped out by the same North American rightward wave that defeated the American Democrats. But with a front row seat to MAGA madness, Canadian voters backed the Liberals, reversing the Conservatives’ 20-point lead and handing the prime ministership to Mark Carney. The reversal was so stark that, in just a couple of months, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre went from the frontrunner for Prime Minister to losing his seat in Parliament.

While Trump’s Italian ally, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, is still in power, she’s suffered a series of notable recent defeats that have forced her to break with Trump. Last month, Italian voters rejected Meloni’s motion to overhaul the judiciary, and she was forced to fire multiple members of her cabinet for corruption and sex scandals. As the global support for MAGA-style politics has cratered, Meloni has effectively severed her relationship with Trump. She rejected Trump’s request to send the Italian Navy to the Strait of Hormuz and rebuked his attacks on Pope Leo. Trump didn’t take kindly and denounced Giorgia Meloni, saying she is “no longer the same person, and Italy will never be the same country.” Considering Giorgia Meloni was the only European Prime Minister invited to Trump’s second inauguration, and once said she would work with him to “make the West great again,” the reversal of position from close ally to opponent in one year shows the rapid pace at which the international nationalist coalition deteriorated.

Broken. Not Gone.

While Viktor Orbán’s loss shows his coalition of international nationalists is no more, this does not mean the ideology is defeated. Or even that this break is permanent. Rightists may have lost the battle, but the war is far from over. Like after any climactic battle, the forces of global reactionaryism have been scattered. They are disunited on the international stage, but 21st-century fascism has not been obliterated.

After J.D. Vance traveled to Germany last summer to stump for the Nazi-adjacent AfD, the party secured the second-most votes in the election. Fortunately, the center-right honored the German firewall (a gentleman’s agreement not to build coalitions with the far-right) and formed a government with the center-left. While they are still barred from power, the AfD is not unpopular, and the firewall will not hold forever. In France, the most recent elections went to the socialists, who maintained control of the nation’s four largest cities. But the far right also showed signs of increased support, building on previous gains by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Meanwhile, the British far-right party Reform has seen a meteoric rise since 2024, largely driven by Keir Starmer’s Labor Party cratering to Liz Truss-levels of disfavor. Reform’s position remains troubling, but recent elections show the eco-socialist Green Party is beginning to challenge the xenophobic narrative and give Britain a better alternative.

As the national conservative projects are retreating around the world, now is the time to step on their throats. Trump is deeply unpopular, and his legacy will likely kneecap the GOP in upcoming elections. But as his reelection shows, Americans have short memories. Steve Bannon and the architects of Project 2025 are not viewing the end of Trumpism as the end of their project. And if liberals and centrists around the globe insist on returning to the broken order that gave rise to Viktor Orbán’s project, they will only return. That is why it’s so troubling to hear DNC Chair Ken Martin refuse to release the party’s 2024 post-election autopsy on the grounds that the Democrats are winning elections, so there’s no need to look backward. This is like a football coach saying there’s nothing to learn from a 31-30 win in which the opponent fumbled five times. If return to disorder is the only response to fascists coming within striking distance of establishing a global reactionary order, then it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be back, stronger and harder to kill. If the problems that created the Trumpist movement are not addressed, then it can never truly be defeated. Unless there is a serious reckoning with capitalism and the inequality, imperialism, and individualism that it creates, then it’s a matter of time before there’s another Jair Bolsanaro, Donald Trump, or Viktor Orbán — or God forbid, someone much worse.

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Folks, I regret to inform you that the Democratic National Committee is back to its usual hijinks. Last week’s spring meeting in New Orleans showed that, despite Democratic voters’ overwhelming antipathy to Israel and sympathy with Palestine, the Democratic establishment is still choosing to anchor itself to the genocidal apartheid state.

During the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting last August, DNC Chair Ken Martin displayed a masterclass in political ratfucking to silence criticism of Israel at the behest of Zionist donors. (I apologize for the language, but “ratfucking” is the actual term for political sabotage associated with Richard Nixon.) At the 2025 summer session, progressive DNC member Allison Minnerly introduced a resolution calling for an arms embargo on Israel and recognition of a Palestinian state. Both proposals were in line with the beliefs of the Democratic base, who were turning away from Israel too quickly for pollsters to track. To circumvent the will of voters, Ken Martin worked with the lobbyist group Democratic Majority for Israel to co-write a competing Israel-Palestine resolution. The text wasn’t made public, but I’d bet my net worth it was the boilerplate statement with many words, but ultimately saying nothing. Something like: “We must find peace in the region… Israel’s right to defend itself… something something Palestinian self-determination…etc. etc.”

Martin introduced his resolution first, and it was passed. Next, the committee voted against Minnerly’s arms embargo resolution, pointing to the first resolution to say hers was repetitive and unnecessary. With the resolution calling for an arms embargo out of the way, Ken Martin withdrew his already-passed resolution, leaving the DNC with nothing to say about the ongoing genocide. Instead, Ken Martin proposed a Middle Eastern working group that would “have the difficult conversation” and “bring solutions back to our party.” At the time, many leftists (including yours truly) suspected that Martin was using this "working group” as a release valve for the anti-Zionist energy building in the Democratic coalition, a place he could send progressive-minded members to waste time and preserve Israel’s position in the Democratic Party. Of course, we were criticized for daring to make such baseless accusations. (“We need a big tent!”) Now, I’ll give you three options to guess what has happened in the eight months since Ken Martin created the Middle East working group:

A) The working group collaborated effectively and suggested an arms embargo on Israel in compliance with international law,

B) After watching another eight months of Israeli crimes in Gaza, Ken Martin personally intervened to ensure Democrats oppose genocide, or

C) The leftists were right, and Ken Martin used the working group as a shell to protect his Zionist donors.

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Not only has Ken Martin’s Middle Eastern working group not produced anything, but it‘s only met four times: once in person in December, twice over Zoom in March, and again in person last week at the meeting in New Orleans. It’s been the exact time-wasting excuse many leftists claimed it would be. One working-group member was so dejected that he didn’t bother to appear in New Orleans, and another said the group isn’t even a group, as there’s been no “consistent progress or even forward motion.” As if killing last year’s resolutions for Palestine wasn’t bad enough, Ken Martin is still using the Middle Eastern working group to hold conscientious members of the Democratic coalition in purgatory.

Undeterred by last year’s shenanigans, Allison Minerly went to New Orleans and introduced three resolutions communicating Democratic voters’ wishes: the first recognized Palestinian statehood, the second called for conditioning military aid to Israel, and the third condemned AIPAC’s dark money expenditure in Democratic primaries. Neither of the first two resolutions is outside the scope of already acceptable Democratic politics. AIPAC-backed Democrats play the “Two-State Solution” like a Get Out of Jail Free Card, so recognizing a Palestinian state, which is the second state in “two-state,” should be no issue. As for conditioning military aid, that’s already required by the Foreign Assistance Act and its Leahy Amendment. It speaks volumes of Ken Martin’s priorities that he sabotages any attempt to hold Democratic politicians to their flimsiest commitments to Palestinian dignity, or even asks them to be in line with American law. Instead, the DNC Chair chose to direct the Democratic base’s energy away from the center of institutional power and into the black, sucking hole of dead-end bureaucracy. While Ken Martin claims the Middle Eastern working group is designed to “find solutions,” his pro-Israel allies don’t even bother to lie about what’s happening. After the spring meeting, Haile Soifer, the head of the Jewish Defense Council of America, was clear about the results, writing:

“The Committee voted in both cases to refer [the resolutions] to the Working Group, effectively defeating them ahead of today’s full DNC meeting.”

That’s exactly what Ken Martin did. He defeated the resolutions encouraging the Democratic Party to listen to its own voters and act in accordance with international law. He did it to protect powerful, wealthy Zionist interests in the Democratic Party, many of whom helped him ascend to party chair. The man has no interest in democracy or humanity. He is an empty vessel, a hollow soul who carries water for one of the most murderous regimes on earth.

While the first two resolutions could be comfortably “defeated” by passing them off to the Middle Eastern working group, Ken Martin knew the resolution condemning AIPAC spending in Democratic primaries was too big to ignore. AIPAC has been a helpful ally in the Democratic establishment’s war against insurgent progressive and leftist challengers, so Martin likely felt he had to protect a crucial factional ally. The resolution condemning AIPAC couldn’t be ignored. It had to be destroyed.

Much like he did in August, Ken Martin undercut the resolution condemning AIPAC (which was also authored by Allison Minnerly) by introducing a milquetoat competing resolution. Before Minnerly’s resolution against AIPAC was introduced, a vague resolution condemning “all dark money” spending was approved. Yet again, this watered-down dummy resolution was used as justification to vote down the serious one. Ken Martin said this was done to save time rather than going “one by one,” though it’s not clear that any other dark money group was named by a resolution. So going “one by one” was most likely, “We condemn AIPAC.” And then you’re done.

Predictably, the Israel Lobby responded to Minnerly’s proposed resolution by crying antisemitism, saying the condemnation of AIPAC “singled out” the group.

As Minnerly accurately pointed out, there is no entity in the Democratic tent that does more to single out, and dare I say #cancel, oppositional voices than the Israel Lobby. Specifically, AIPAC.

“Members like to say that we don't want to single out AIPAC, but AIPAC will entirely single out them and all of our different progressive leaders when it comes to primary elections.” — Allison Minnerly speaking to ABC News

This is an undeniable conclusion. Last month, AIPAC and its shadow arms spent heavily against progressive and Muslim candidates in the Illinois Democratic primaries. While no lobbying group is entirely above board, AIPAC used some of the most deceptive campaign tactics in recent memory. Knowing they’re toxic in Democratic circles, AIPAC used three erroneously named Super PACs — United Democracy Project, Elect Chicago Women, and Affordable Chicago Now! — to pump over $14 million into just two races. With names hiding AIPAC’s true intention, the expenditure of these three innocuous-sounding groups accounted for over 60% of all out-of-state spending during the entire Illinois primary season. To add to the deceit, AIPAC scheduled payments through UDP to arrive at ECW and ACN after the reporting deadline, hiding the funding source from voters. So, these AIPAC affiliates were running attack ads against progressive challengers, while their ties to the Israel Lobby weren’t revealed until after the election. Unfortunately, the scheming worked.

During the Illinois primaries, AIPAC won two pro-Israel victories, one loss, and one mixed outcome that they’re not too upset about. Melissa Bean and Donna Miller won their House primaries over progressive opponents, while La Shawn Ford weathered a last-minute influx of attack ads from AIPAC and Crypto SuperPACs. The Israel Lobby got a halfway victory when “progressive Zionist” Daniel Bliss defeated Kat Abughazaleh, who is Palestinian and an outspoken opponent of Israel. Bliss had met with AIPAC early in the race, but they ultimately backed state senator Laura Fine, a more vocal defender of Israel’s militancy. But as Fine faltered and the race came down to Bliss and Abughazaleh, AIPAC-aligned groups stopped airing ads attacking Bliss. Suddenly, a new group, Chicago Progressive Partnership, appeared out of nowhere and began running ads supporting long-shot Bushra Amiwala as the most progressive option in the race. This was a naked attempt to sap support from Abugazaleh, and Amiwala condemned the ad. Speaking to reporters after the results, the United Democracy Project (really AIPAC) showed no shame in their deceit and openly boasted about misleading Illinois voters.

“Obviously we have our differences with Daniel Biss but at least he’s a Zionist — and he’s far better than Kat Abughazaleh. We are going to use every tool in the toolbox to try to get the best possible, pro-Israel results. Sometimes it means we’ll have an extremely pro-Israel candidate, but in these multi-candidate fields, sometimes it’ll be a pretty good candidate that we can live with.” — Patrick Dorton, spokesperson for United Democracy Project

Dorton was also blatant about what he saw as an unmitigated success for AIPAC, telling the press, “By any measure, the Chicago delegation is more pro-Israel today than it was before the primary election.”

From the Chair of the Democratic National Convention undemocratically killing arms embargo resolutions to AIPAC running ads under the name “Elect Chicago Women,” we’re witnessing a full-throated Zionist campaign to stall, exhaust, and ultimately cheat Democratic voters out of their democratic right to oppose the colonization of Palestine. While it’s clear to any neutral observer that this is obvious ratfucking (again, not my word), those fornicating with the rodents are trying to play their debauchery off as acceptable. Speaking of the resolutions, Hailee Sofer tried to use the opportunity to portray Israel-skeptical Democrats as a “far left minority.”

“There are misconceptions because there is a vocal, far-left faction of our party, but they are in no way leading here. The DNC as a whole has not shifted from where it has been … which is an organization that is inclusive of Jewish Americans and is supportive of the U.S.-Israel security relationship, as well as Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.”

This one sentence tells us so much. Yes, the DNC party insiders and the Chair, who was installed to protect Zionist interests, have not moved much on Israel policy. But Democratic voters have. Over two-thirds of Democratic voters sympathize more with the Palestinian people, while only 17% favor the Israelis. A plurality of Americans and the majority of Democrats have a negative view of Israel, a drastic shift from just three years ago.

As Hailee Stoifer and Ken Martin have shown us, the Democratic establishment has no plans to accommodate the democratic will of their voters. Instead, they still believe they can suppress the left with political sabotage and accusations of antisemitism. We see signs of this inability across the nations. When Michigan Senator Elisa Slotkin was asked about receiving donations from the Israel Lobby, she immediately accused the participant of being an antisemite.

A child could tell you this is a terrible political strategy. Well, at least for the Democrats. They’re looking like heavy favorites headed into the midterms. But if there’s one way to blow a huge lead, it’s to piss off all your voters by refusing to listen to them and calling them bigots. However, let’s remember that this is not a bad political strategy for AIPAC. The group is largely associated with Republicans, and only spends in Democratic primaries to advance the most Zionist candidate. So, if it comes down to a Zionist Republican and a 90%-as-Zionist Democrat, it makes no difference to the Israel Lobby which one wins.

One would think this very obvious conclusion would cause Ken Martin and his fellow DNC members to want to separate from AIPAC. If for no other reason than just political survival. But as we can see, the Democratic establishment is too trapped in its own echo chamber to recognize its feeding the tiger that plans to eat them. And when fellow members try to warn Ken Martin that he’s only strengthening the beast that will deliver his demise, he tells them to fuck off. Lovely party, Ken! I can’t imagine why you’re less popular than stepping on a rusty nail.

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Let’s be honest. The media has nothing on Zohran Mamdani. Ever since the socialist achieved double-digit support in last year’s Democratic mayoral primary, establishment media have been trying to sink him. From the New York Post scandalizing his relocation of collegiate furniture to The New York Times calling his primary victory a “spiritual Kristelnacht,” there’s been a concerted effort to drive Mamdani out of political relevancy. The campaign continued even after Mamdani assumed office. A few weeks back, Jake Tapper used primetime to criticize what Ms. Mamdani posted on Twitter when she was fifteen, and reporters tried to force Mamdani into a negative press cycle by imploring him to ban snowball fights.

As each attack falters and Mamdani’s mayoralship looks better and better, the press is growing more desperate to find something to hold on to. Which is how we arrived at this latest New York Times article that dares to ask: Is Mayor Mamdani too successful? Are too many children being cared for?

As the headline indicates, this article attacks Zohran Mamdani’s universal preschool program from a pseudo-populist position, implying it’s a benefit to the rich at a cost to the poor. The author, Eliza Shapiro, focuses on a planned public childcare center opening on the Upper East Side, one of New York’s richest neighborhoods, portraying it as if Mamdani is betraying his progressive values. Shapiro writes:

“The notion that Mr. Mamdani — a democratic socialist elected on a tax-the-rich platform — would end up being the mayor to answer the Upper East Side’s pleas for more child care illuminates a fact about his administration that neither the mayor nor his critics seem eager to acknowledge.

If he is able to deliver on his promise to make New York City more affordable for struggling New Yorkers by adding a slew of new, free services available to all, he may end up making it easier for the wealthy to live here, too.

It’s not exactly the stuff of populist campaign slogans.”

This is such a petty argument to make. Mamdani did not campaign on driving all the rich people out of New York City so poor people could move into their apartments and hire their nannies. He ran on making NYC more affordable, which free pre-school does by putting downward price pressure on private childcare options. Shapiro is intentionally trying to sow division between the mayor and his progressive base because that’s the only thing the media has left. They’ve called him a Jew-hater, godless communist, and acted like he was going to turn New York City into the lawless anarchy of The Dark Knight Rises by locking all the cops in the sewer. Now, all they’ve got is the same pathetic excuse as the ultra-left: Socialism betrayed???

Also, Shapiro's claim that Mamdani isn’t “eager to acknowledge” opening a pre-k center on the Upper East Side is a lie, given that Shapiro’s article discusses the many press conferences Mamdani held to draw attention to this specific center.

This fake populism is a common attack from centrist politicians and media figures. During the 2020 primary season, Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Kloubachar attacked Bernie Sanders’ plan for tuition-free college with the same pseudo-left language, claiming it would be a gift to rich people.

“I’m skeptical of spending [tax revenue on millionaires and billonaires.” — Pete Buttigieg, 2019

Much like the establishment’s attacks on Sanders, this article is written in extraordinary bad faith. That said, it’s worth addressing why social programs should be universal. (Spoiler alert: universal programs help the poor and means-tested programs hurt them.)

Define “Rich”

The premise of Eliza Shapiro’s article is this: the Upper East Side (UES) is a wealthy neighborhood, so the mayor shouldn’t open a publicly-funded preschool there. This might be a good argument if everyone in this neighborhood could afford a private nanny, but that’s not the case. The median household income on the Upper East Side is approximately $165,000, more than double the New York City average of $79,000. That’s a lot of money, but so is the cost of childcare.

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Much like “neoliberal” or “communist,” “grifter” has been so overused in political discourse that it risks losing its meaning. Though it’s commonly used as a derogatory catch-all for “someone I don’t like,” a grifter is really a specific type of political showmans that seeks to capture genuine energy and harness it for personal advancement and enrichment. The best example of a grifter is Alex Jones, who used right-wing conspiracy theories to sell InfoWars supplements to guys who think woke is why they can only see their kids with court supervision.

Given that conservatism is a hierarchical ideology, grifting comes naturally to the right. Donald Trump can easily sell branded Bibles to Republicans with the same pitch he uses to win their votes. “I have the best brain for thinking, and I’m the holiest man ever” works just as well as a stump speech as it does an infomercial. The capitalist dogma and everyone-for-themselves worldview make it impossible for conservatives not to grift, even in dire times. Just days after Charlie Kirk was violently murdered, leaked audio shows Erika Kirk was ecstatic about merch sales at her husband's memorial service, which she referred to as “the event of the century.” The father of her children was executed in public, and Erika Kirk left her children at home to sell T-Shirts with his face on them. Grifting is in the conservative DNA, right next to their love of apple pie and their hatred of the Civil Rights Act.

While grifting is par for the course for Republicans, it’s rare on the left. Most people who seek money and fame pursue careers that tend to deliver, well, money and fame. The systemic nature of political ideologies makes the right (and the centrist establishment) attractive to ladder-climbers, while the horizontal, mass-movement design of left-wing politics makes it a poor fit for aspiring glory-hunters. While the conservative worldview requires dominant, masculine figures (Donald Trump) and the centrist strategy seeks political celebrity (Barack Obama), socialist politics emphasizes the common good over the individual. It’s difficult for one to harness the enthusiasm for the collective good and channel it into personal elevation.

But ss Green Party California gubernatorial candidate Butch Ware is showing us, just because it’s difficult to grift on the left doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Failure To Launch

I first heard about Butch Ware back in 2024, when he became the Green Party’s 2024 Vice Presidential candidate. Almost immediately, it became clear that he wasn’t interested in serious political activity. Five days before the election, Butch Ware appeared for an interview on “The Black Channel” and said he supported banning trans girls from sports and a 16-week abortion ban. For context, Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign published a report calling for a 16-week ban, but later walked it back because it was too conservative. So, the ostensible left-wing presidential ticket had a candidate who was more conservative on abortion than the president who facilitated the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. (You can watch Ware’s abortion answer at 48:30 below.)

I strongly disagree with Butch Ware’s abortion and trans stance, but disagreeing with me doesn’t make him a grifter. I don’t think third-party bids are an effective strategy for left-wing politics. But some leftists do, and they run genuine third-party campaigns. At least they take their bids seriously. While the social conservatism was surprising, the real red flag I took from Butch Ware’s 2024 campaign was the revelation that he and Jill Stein, who were running for President and Vice President of the United States, had never even discussed abortion policy, which was one of the most important issues of the 2024 election. As the host pointed out, they had two completely different answers, just days before the election!

The whole episode led me to believe Butch Ware never intended to be any sort of political leader. Rather, he was using the campaign to get invited on podcasts and launch himself as the Green Party heir apparent to Jill Stein. Honestly, once the Stein-Ware ticket fell short of its goal of winning 5% of the popular vote to trigger federal funds (they got .5%), I thought I’d heard the last of Dr. Butch Ware. So, I stored the Green Party abortion snafu in the “Weird politics stuff - FORGET” box of my mind’s attic, right next to the obscure fact that Ronald Reagan is the only U.S. president to lead a union. (I’ll pull them out at trivia night twenty years from now.) However, when Butch Ware announced his campaign for California governor, it was difficult not to see the similarities between his past behavior and his current shenanigans. Which are honestly, so much worse.

California Scheming

The first sign that Butch Ware’s California gubernatorial campaign was more of the same arose when the campaign manager, Jason Call, was accused of sexual assault late last year. What made the episode even weirder is that Call was accused of assaulting the woman he lived with… in Spain. This raises the obvious question: Why did Butch Ware’s campaign manager move to Spain during the election?

On January 1st, the Ware campaign released a statement calling Jason Call the “former campaign manager” and said it was conducting an investigation. A week later, the campaign updated the statement to say that Call had quietly resigned as campaign manager on November 10th to “pursue a career opportunity in Spain,” but he remained a campaign employee until January 1st. First, I have a hard time buying this timeline. With lines such as, “The campaign is under no legal, professional, or ethical obligation to intervene in a conflict between its staff and private individuals,” it’s clear the statement was written purely to avoid a lawsuit, not reassure supporters that Butch Ware took this accusation seriously. To my ear, claiming Call resigned as CM before the alleged assault but was still a campaign employee after it sounds like a nifty way to downplay the campaign’s responsibility for the alleged assault while explaining why Call was still being paid. This whole thing got weirder when Jason Call messaged me on Twitter/X to say he was working with Kshama Sawant's Washington congressional campaign. For a guy “pursuing career opportunities in Spain,” Jason Call seems to be working on a lot of West Coast political campaigns.

Second, this whole episode raises the question of why Butch Ware doesn’t feel the need to have a campaign manager. There are only two explanations for this bizzare episode. Either Jason Call was Butch Ware’s campaign manager through 2025 and moved to Spain during the campaign, which would mean no one in the Ware camp is taking this project seriously. Or Jason Call actually resigned on November 10th, and Butch Ware didn’t see any need to replace him. The Ware campaign statement claims they didn’t announce Call’s November resignation because they were waiting to “recruit a full-time replacement for the CM position.” If that’s true, then the campaign has been without a manager for five months. No new campaign manager has been announced, and the Butch Ware campaign hasn’t responded to my multiple requests for information about who is managing it.

No matter which version you believe, the Jason Call episode shows that Butch Ware has no intention of using the campaign to build progressive momentum. It’s clear the Ware camp doesn’t want to win, but winning isn’t the only reason to run for office. Many high-profile long-shot bids have been used to bolster support outside of traditional electoral channels for future political activity. (Bernie Sanders' two presidential bids are perfect examples.) But even if non-electoral activism was Butch Ware’s goal, he’d still need a campaign manager to oversee fundraising, volunteer outreach, voter mobilization, and everything else to maximize the reach of your message. Currently, there’s no one doing that, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Instead of running an actual campaign, Butch Ware seems to be using the governor’s race to get invited on podcasts and talk about how great he is — while insulting everyone else.

Posting & Wrecking

Obviously, the lack of a campaign manager shows that the Butch Ware campaign has no interest in serving as an effective vehicle for left-wing politics. And while Ware is not responsible for Call’s alleged actions, it’s not cool for the only campaign mention of the serious allegation to be a lawsuit-avoiding memo. At a minimum, Butch Ware should at least address it, but he has not.

Taken with the clownery of his 2024 goal line fumble, I think it’s obvious Butch Ware is more interested in how socialism can benefit him than how he can help socialism benefit working people. And if he were just another opportunist, riding the popular wave, I likely wouldn’t care. Sure, it’s sucky. But opportunists can be found anywhere, and leftists have a pretty good track record of sniffing them out. But where Butch Ware crosses a line is by trying to defame other left-wing parties and organizations, all of which are more serious and successful than he is, to make himself look like the second coming of Malcolm X.

In late March, the Ware campaign published the video below on social media. In what I’m sure was his idea, Butch Ware sips tea while “spilling the tea” on why there are two Black socialists running for California governor: himself, and the other being Ramsey Robinson, a member of the Party of Socialism & Liberation running as the Peace & Freedom Party’s gubernatorial candidate. For some reason, Butch Ware decides to attack PSL, P&F, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), all while claiming to be advocating for “left unity.” The fucking ego on this man. Without a shred of proof, Ware accuses all three parties of acting against him. First, he accuses Peace & Freedom Party chair Kevin Atkins of agreeing to make him the Left Unity Slate’s gubernatorial candidate, then going back on his word and running Ramsey Robinson. Ware calls this a “shocking breach of integrity” from Peace & Freedom and PSL. Then Ware says DSA conspired to sabotage a joint endorsement between him and Lieutenant Governor Oliver Ma.

As if this weren’t bad enough, Butch Ware decides to take even more shots at his fellow socialists in the caption, writing:

“Here’s the truth: losing PSL and Peace & Freedom doesn’t hurt us electorally. They’re polling under 0.5%. PSL gets motion on TikTok, but TikTok isn’t where elections are won. We’re at 5%. We’re within single digits of the lead.”

My god. I don’t think there’s a word to describe this level of narcissism. Butch Ware accuses PSL of focusing only on TikTok in a gossip video he posted on TikTok. I’ve seen rocks with more self-awareness. Saying “TikTok isn’t where elections are won” is so rich. How many elections have you won, Butch? You fell flat on your face in 2024 and didn’t even get 1%. This one doesn’t look to be going any better. Despite what Ware claims, he’s not polling at 5%. Not even half that. Butch Ware is so far below the other candidates that most polls don’t bother to include him. The only two I could find have him at 2% (PPIC and Eric Salwell internal).

Unsurprisingly, Peace & Freedom state chair Kevin Atkin refuted Butch Ware’s claims. As Atkins states, he couldn’t have promised Butch Ware he’d be the Left Unity Slate gubernatorial candidate because he doesn’t make that decision. In addition to everything else we’ve learned about Butch Ware, it says a lot that he believes Kevin Atkin’s ‘promise’ to make him the gubernatorial candidate means it would come to pass. Butch Ware literally tried to rig a party nomination in his favor by backslapping and dealmaking with a party insider — the very corporate-esque scheming he claims to oppose in both the Democrat and Republican Parties. As if that’s not bad enough, his dumbass bragged about it on camera and posted it to social media, as if it would make the people who refused to rig a nomination for him look bad. When people tell you who they are, listen.

It’s also not hard to tell which side of this schism is more interested in building progressive momentum and which is interested in bullying everyone else into supporting him under the guise of “unity.” As Atkin points out, Peace & Freedom and Ramsey Robinson have supported the Left Unity Slate, which includes many PSL, P&F, and Green Party candidates. Butch Ware has refused to publicly support them.

It’s not surprising that Butch Ware felt the need to attack the Peace & Freedom Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Unlike the right, the left is naturally inoculated against snake-oil salesmen and grifting because broad, mass-based political movements don’t tend to glorify a single individual. There have always been figureheads and leaders on the left. But their power comes from speaking to the needs of the masses, not from building a cult-like following that idolizes them. Donald Trump can easily sell Trump Phones to his gullible followers, claiming he got them “the best deal” on mobile calling rates and international negotiations. But if Bernie Sanders ever tried to push half-assembled iPhone knockoffs through his email list, all he’d get is angry responses and unsubscribes. This is why Butch Ware needs to attack other socialists and parties. The elevation of his personal stature only works if left-leaning individuals see him as the only “true” chance of left-wing politics. The existence of another socialist California gubernatorial candidate draws eyeballs away from Butch Ware, and the continued success of the Democratic Socialists of America has proven beyond any doubt that a flexible ballot strategy is more successful than whatever he’s doing. As long as these alternatives exist, Butch Ware’s financial potential and ego remain limited. So, he decides to start drama on social media, telling his followers that every other left-wing party is full of duplicitous liars, and he is the one they must “unify” behind. Of course, if Butch Ware had any interest in winning, or even promoting the Green Party as a viable coalition partner for other socialists, the last thing he’d be doing is starting political fights. His decision to do so tells us a lot about who Butch Ware is and why he is running for governor of California. Though I’m very critical of Ware, I do want to acknowledge that I don’t think his tendencies are shared by the Green Party as a whole. I’ve met wonderful and dedicated Green Party activists and organizers who, like the other Green Party members supporting multi-party candidates on the Left Unity Slate, don’t view politics as a means to personal enrichment. To any Greens reading this: I love you guys, but you have to ditch Butch Ware asap. His starting fights with every other socialist group for his own ego is actively degrading all the other work the Green Party does.

Last week, a judge rejected Butch Ware’s lawsuit and officially removed him from the ballot. Ware claims it’s a ploy by the Democratic establishment to silence him, and the court says he didn’t file the proper paperwork. (I don’t deny the Dems are shady, but stuff like this is why you need a campaign manager.) Currently, Butch Ware is asking followers to donate to his legal fund, even though the case is closed and appeals have been denied. For obvious reasons, you should not give Butch Ware your money. Unless you want it to fund his backup career as a Soundcloud rapper.

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In Solidarity — Joe

I joined my friends Frank and Riv at Movies Vs. Capitalism to discuss the 1997 Paul Verhoeven classic, Starship Troopers. Though the movie is based on the 1959 book of the same name, the two couldn’t be more different. While the book is an explicit argument for martial fascism, the movie is a satire that relentlessly mocks the fascistic elements of 1990s America. As Frank points out early in the episode, the satire went over the heads of audiences and critics, leading many to criticize Starship Troopers as endorsing fascism.

If you watch the movie today, it’s hard to miss the satire. Verhoeven’s depiction of the futuristic military society is what I imagine Pete Hegseth dreams of — a society in which only soldiers can vote, guns are locked in FULL AUTO mode, and women are allowed in the army only if they’re a solid 10. As the war on the bugs rages, the movie grows bolder with its message. One of the last shots is a young Neil Patrick Harris in a complete Nazi uniform, making Verhoeven’s point inescapable.

What surprised me the most about rewatching Starship Troopers was how much Verhoeven got right about the future. Premiering four years before 9/11, the movie accurately predicted so many of our modern-day problems: the collapse of democracy, the asexual misogyny of the Manosphere, and the wartime indoctrination that eventually drove American society collectively insane.

This is my third appearance on Movies Vs. Capitalism. I was invited back for a farewell tour as Frank and Riv sunset the podcast and move on to other projects. Though I’m sad to see one of my favorite podcasts go, the Movies Vs. Capitalism backlog will remain open. If you’re unfamiliar, I highly suggest checking out some previous episodes.

You can listen to the episode here, or wherever else you get your podcasts. (Also, it’s 100% my fault that my microphone was too low.)

Enjoy!

In Solidarity — Joe

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Last week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly stated that she opposes all military funding to Israel, including for the Iron Dome. A so-called “defensive weapon,” the Iron Dome is a counter-missile system that Israel uses to destroy incoming rockets, typically from Iran, Hezbollah, and Palestinian resistance groups located in the illegally-occupied West Bank and Gaza. AOC has a complicated history with the Iron Dome. She’s supported it rhetorically in the past, but has consistently voted against sending military aid to Israel and called for an arms embargo during the Gaza Genocide. As the Palestine issue is crucial to the socialist left, the New York Congresswoman formally announced her opposition to all military funding at a New York City DSA forum. (I’ll write about the intra-left dynamics surrounding AOC’s Iron Dome history shortly, so subscribe if you want to read it.)

As soon as AOC’s declaration hit the airwaves, all hell broke loose. Stories about the congresswoman’s statement spread like wildfire and were reported by every major news outlet. There were positive developments, such as Representative Ro Khanna, another likely 2028 progressive presidential contender, matching Ocasio-Cortez’s pledge and reversing his earlier position of funding the Iron Dome. Of course, as is expected in modern Democratic politics, the bad outweighed the good. Members of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s own party immediately accused her not just of antisemitism, but of wanting Jews to die. Here’s Representative Josh Gottheimer, showing us that nice Zionist charm we all know and love.

Putting aside his slanders, Gottheimer is making what I consider the strongest argument for funding the Iron Dome. It may be the strongest, but it’s still pathetically weak. As Occasio-Cortez said in a follow-up statement, American military assistance must be consistent with the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which bars funding to human rights violators.1

“No security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” — Foreign Assistance Act, Section 502B

Josh Ghotheimer’s “question” is backward. The burden is not on Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to explain why we should follow American law and withhold military assistance from Israel. The burden is on Josh Gottheimer and his fellow Zionists to explain why we should break American law to arm Israel.

The subtext of Gottheimer’s whining is another common Zionist argument, which claims the Iron Dome is purely “defensive” and thus defunding it will lead to the death of Israeli civilians. As the liberal Zionist argument goes, even if we disagree with Israel’s government, we shouldn’t punish the Israeli people by subjecting them to rockets! This argument is so stupid, I can’t believe I have to refute it. But here we are.

If the Iron Dome is a purely defensive capability, then shouldn’t the United States buy one for China? Or Russia? Or, Iran, whose civilian population is currently being bombed? After all, the political establishment’s position on Iran is that the Iranian people are a victim of their undemocratic regime, and we must help liberate them to preserve their rights and lives. If this is the case, shouldn’t we buy Iran a “defensive” weapons system and let them install it in Tehran to save innocent Iranian lives? Or better yet, why not send an Iron Dome-type system to Russia? Putin’s Russia and Israel are both illegally occupying another nation. Just like Palestinians, Ukrainians have the right to fight back. If these “defensive” weapons only save lives and have no offensive capability, then shouldn’t the United States install them in Moscow to protect innocent Russians from Ukrainian missiles?

Of course, this is a ridiculous position that no American official would ever agree to. That’s because the distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” weapons is fake. I first saw this fake category of “offensive” and “defensive” weapons used to argue for arming Saudi Arabia during its genocidal war on Yemen. As is the case now, the argument was that these “defensive” missiles would knock out Houthi drone factories, therefore saving innocent Saudi lives. It’s almost shocking how similar the excuses for “defensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia five years ago are to the same arguments for “defensive” weapons to Israel today. One would have thought they’d changed it up by now.

“The Biden administration’s foreign military sale package to KSA included $650 million in air-to-air munitions. These systems are purely defensive and every time one of those Advanced Medium-Range-Air-to-Air-Missiles (AMRAMM) or Guidance Enhanced Missiles (GEM-Ts) is fired, it knocks down a drone that could take out a hospital or orphanage. And these defenses are not new; the Saudis need them because they depleted their munitions in the ongoing war with Iranian proxies in Yemen. The Saudis will absolutely defend their people, so if they do not buy defenses from us, they will buy them from countries that are eager for their business.” — Why the Saudi Arabia Weapons Deal Was a Strategic Necessity, December, 2021

All weapons, regardless of their function, increase offensive capability. When a mass shooter wears body armor on their rampage, the armor enables offensive violence. Sure, armor doesn’t shoot bullets; it only stops them. But protection from incoming-fire only keeps the gunman alive so he can continue his slaughter. If a mother gave her son body armor to “defend him” while he carried out a school shooting, would we excuse that as the mother trying to “defend” her son? Of course not. The same is true for Israel. By funding the Iron Dome and allowing it to be partially manufactured in America, the United States is bolstering Israel’s offensive capabilities, which are currently being directed at innocent civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq, and probably another country by the time I finish typing this sentence. By stopping U.S. funding, Israel would be forced to direct more of its military resources to sourcing a 100% Israeli-made anti-missile system. That means the IDF would have less money, time, personnel, and productive capacity to spend on making missiles, bombs, bulldozers, and the other deadly instruments of colonization. Every shekel Israel spends on the Iron Dome is one less shekel they have to buy bullets shot at children like Hind Rajab. Defunding the Iron Dome won’t cost innocent lives. It will save them.

Congressional candidate Melat Kiros made this point about “offensive and defensive” weapons during my interview with her last month.

At this point, I feel the need to go further than Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state a position that is unacceptable in the current realm of electoral politics. Though Israel and its supporters always portray Israel’s militancy as “defensive,” the truth is, Israel has no right to defend itself. Contrary to what American politicians say, Israel’s “self-defense” is typically offensive and a violation of international law. A perfect example of this is the West Bank apartheid wall, which Israel calls a “security barrier.”

In the Summer of 2000, after the failure of the Camp David Summit and Ariel Sharon’s provocative march on the Haram al-Sharif, Palestine rose against Israel with a wave of protests and resistance in the Second Intifada. To suppress the uprising, the Israeli government built a 440-mile concrete wall that segregated the West Bank, including areas the Oslo Accords declared to be Palestinian territory. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled the wall violated Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits “the use of force against any territorial integrity.” While the result was welcomed, how the ICJ ruled is what is most interesting.

During the hearing, Israel’s written argument defended the apartheid wall on the grounds that it was a mechanism of self-defense, specifically to stop the suicide bombings carried out by Palestinian militant groups. The ICJ took this into consideration, but ultimately ruled Israel had no right to self-defense on land it was illegally occupying. In other words, Israel is the attacker. And the attacker cannot claim to be defending themselves.

“In conclusion, the Court considers that Israel cannot rely on a right of self-defence or on a state of necessity in order to preclude the wrongfulness of the construction of the wall. The Court accordingly finds that the construction of the wall and its associated regime are contrary to international law.” — International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Construction of Wall, July 9th, 2004

This decision was not a case ruling, but an Advisory Opinion. An Advisory Opinion is essentially a fact-finding mission that the ICJ uses to inform the United Nations General Assembly. A few weeks later, the United Nations General Assembly voted 150-6 to endorse the ICJ opinion, officially stating Israel has no right to claim self-defense during its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine.

This is why I am fully unconvinced by arguments that the United States should provide the Iron Dome for the purpose of Israeli “defense.” Just as Israel has no right to build a “defensive barrier” on the land it illegally occupies, neither does it have a moral or legal right to invoke the principles of self-defense against Iran or Hezbollah. Just like in Palestine, when it comes to Iran and Lebanon, Israel is the beligerent party. There’s no denying that the United States and Israel began the latest war with Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told us it was Israel’s idea. Currently, the Israeli Army is openly admitting to cleansing Shiite Muslims from Southern Lebanon, which it has invaded repeatedly over the last four decades. IDF commanders are even warning Christian and Druze communities to stop sheltering Shiite Muslims and hand them over to the Israeli Army. Gee, that sounds familiar. I wonder where I heard that before.

Thanks for reading JoeWrote! Please click the ❤️ to help this article rise in Substack’s algorithm. If you’re a first-time reader, make sure you subscribe so future articles are delivered to your inbox. If you’re a JoeWrote veteran, consider upgrading to a paying membership. For the cost of just one cup of coffee a month, you can unlock everything JoeWrote has to offer. Plus, your support ensures I can keep writing articles just like this. Thanks in advance!

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In Solidarity — Joe

Luke and I discuss the election, the Canadian media’s freakout, and how the country is reacting to America’s war on Iran. Check out Luke’s articles on the NDP below.

In Solidarity — Joe

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Luke Savage

"A political instrument of the people"

Note: You can listen to my full conversation with Avi Lewis, the new leader of Canada’s NDP, here. Until April 1st, I’m also offering annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. There’s never been a better time to subscribe, and you can redeem the offer by…

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a month ago · 35 likes · 5 comments · Luke Savage

Luke Savage

So it begins

Note: You can listen to my full conversation with Avi Lewis, the new leader of Canada’s NDP, here. Until April 1st, I’m also offering annual subscriptions at 50% off the regular rate. There’s never been a better time to subscribe, and you can redeem the offer by…

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Recent polling from Groundwork and Data For Progress shows an overwhelming majority of Americans (+25) want electric utilities to be publicly owned and operated.1 It’s not hard to imagine why. Electricity rates have increased an average of 33% over the last five years, costing households approximately $420 per year. If you live near an AI data center, it gets even worse. Forced to compete with well-funded tech companies building these centers, some residents have seen their electricity bills increase by 267% once a data center comes to town. Then there’s the economic impact of Trump’s illegal war on Iran. With the Straight of Hormuz closed, American oil prices have increased more than 30%. A gallon now costs well north of $4. With over a quarter of all U.S. households and two-thirds of low-income households considered to have a “high energy burden” (spending over 6% of gross income on energy), electric costs are top-of-mind budget items for most American families. So, we don’t need to wonder why Americans would like to take electric utilities out of private hands and place them under public control. In other words, Americans want to socialize their electric grid.

Capitalism Is Not Markets

The most difficult challenge of advocating for socialism isn’t that people don’t know what socialism is — it’s that they don’t know what capitalism is.

Thanks to centuries of capitalist propaganda, most Americans believe capitalism is the “free market,” while socialism is when a government does something. This is incorrect. Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production (businesses) are privately owned. They can be owned by one person, a small group, or many shareholders, as is the case with publicly-traded companies like Amazon and Google. Ownership determines whether an enterprise is capitalist or socialist. If workers own a business, either through a cooperative model or through nationalization by a democratically controlled government, then that enterprise would be socialist, not capitalist. This is because a business’s ownership structure determines the workers’ relationship to their workplace. Currently, Walmart is privately owned by stockholders, with the Walton family heirs controlling about 50%. So, when Walmart employees go to work, their relationship to their workplace is one of subservience — they have no control over working conditions, and most of the value their labor creates goes to the private owners. This is called profit. Comparatively, in a socialist model, workers control their workplaces. They’ll still have to follow the rules and can’t show up late or slack off, but they make company decisions democratically. More importantly, because there are no private owners taking profit, workers in a socialist model receive higher paychecks and better benefits.

It is the relationship between the worker and the workplace that determines whether an enterprise, and by extension our society, is capitalist or socialist. The biggest misunderstanding about capitalism is that it's defined by markets, which are a method of distribution.

Markets and central planning are two methods of distribution: how we allocate goods and services produced by enterprises. With over 70,000 worker-owners and businesses in most major industries, The Mondragon Corporation is the world’s largest worker cooperative. Because workers own and control their corporation, it is a socialist organization. Yet, many of these goods reach consumers through market interaction. With a strong retail presence, many consumers find Mondragon’s socialist-produced clothing in stores, hanging right next to clothes produced under the capitalist model. To the consumer, buying a Mondragon shirt is the exact same experience as buying an Abercrombie shirt. Though the former is produced by socialists and the latter by capitalists, because they are both distributed by a market, the consumer never notices a difference.

America Is Already Centrally Planned

While central planning is often used as a pejorative, an anti-socialist trigger word, many aspects of America’s capitalist economy are centrally planned by the state. The best example is the American energy grid. Outside of necessities needed to satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, electricity is arguably the most important commodity in the 21st century. If you don’t have electricity, you are deprived of modernity. Though electric companies are capitalist enterprises, with private stockholders making decisions and profiting from the company’s sales, the distribution of electricity is centrally planned. When you move into a new house or apartment, it’s likely you have only a single choice for which company to buy electricity from. This is because local, state, and federal governments work with private energy companies to plan which one is delivering electricity to your house. It’s always why private companies must deliver energy to rural areas under a duty-to-serve provision. Unless you have an exceptional circumstance, you didn’t choose your electric company through the market. There’s no Energy.gov to log onto and compare rates between EverSource and Xcel, then make the best choice. That decision has already been made for you by bureaucratic planners. You can either pay the company that has been centrally planned for you, or live in the dark.

Because of this dynamic, America’s energy grid is both capitalist and centrally planned. While capitalist production adds an unnecessary layer of fat and raises energy prices, centrally planning electric distribution is absolutely necessary. If every power company were free to install power lines wherever it wanted, neighborhoods would become perpetual construction zones. The street would have to be torn up and new lines buried every time someone signed up for a new provider. Dozens of wires would hang overhead, blotting out the sky. It would be a logistical nightmare, never mind the safety concerns. As the electrical grid is already centrally planned, it would benefit American society to streamline the operation and remove the middlemen from the equation. It’s not like these owners provide any integral service. The government tells them where they can and can’t put their lines and power stations. All they do is sit on their hands and collect checks from American families who are forced to cut back elsewhere to keep the lights on.

Of course, a majority of Americans don’t want to socialize the energy grid because they have strong beliefs in the supremacy of socialism over capitalism. It was their material conditions, the increasing cost of electricity shown in their budgeting apps, that led them to the obvious conclusion. As I wrote about recently, the stomach, not the brain, is the engine of social progress. Speaking to voters’ material needs, such as the potential to decrease their electricity bill by socializing the electricity grid, is the path to a better world.

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In Solidarity — Joe

During a recent interview with Politico’s Dasha Burn, Beshear was asked if he thought Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Rather than answer the question, Beshear dodged, dismissing the term “genocide” as “one of those litmus tests.”

Burns: “Some of your fellow Democrats have called Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide.’ Do you agree with that?”

Beshear: “That’s becomeing one of those new litmus tests we said we would never do as a party again. It’s trying to throw out a word and are you going to raise your hand or are you not going to?”

First, this answer indicates Andy Beshear is seriously considering running for president, if not already fully committed. When Beshear said, “Are you going to raise your hand or not?” he was referring to questions in Democratic primary debates in which candidates are asked to raise their hand if they agree with the moderator’s statement. It’s a perfectly fair way to ask a question, but politicians like Beshear hate it because it gives them no chance to squirm and sidestep. “Raise your hand if XYZ” is quite literally one of the only times our media holds politicians to a straight yes or no answer. If asked to raise his hand if he thought Israel committed genocide, Andy Beshear would be forced to pick a side, which would cause him problems. If he raised his hand, he’d be attacked by the Israel lobby. If he didn’t, he would be discredited in the eyes of Democratic voters, who overwhelmingly think ‘genocide’ accurately describes Israel’s actions. (He’d also lose many general election votes, as over half of independent voters also think Israel committed genocide.) Knowing his response to this one question could determine the fate of his political career, Beshear is trying to discredit the “Raise your hand if you think Israel committed genocide?” question years in advance. Personally, I would just give the correct answer. It seems simpler.

Which brings me to my second point. Beshear hand-waves away the issue of genocide as a “litmus test,” the catch-all term used for questions centrist Democrats don’t want to answer. To be fair to the Kentucky governor, he’s right. When we ask politicians, “Did Israel commit genocide?” it is a litmus test — one he should pass with flying colors.

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“[Piker] is somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Nick Fuentes, I wasn’t being hyperbolic. He’s a self-avowed Nazi who openly praises Hitler for being “awesome” and “having aura.” (All of these guys are maximum virgins.) He’s also said, “Black people should be in prison” to achieve his goals of a “total Aryan victory.” Basically, he’s one of those knuckle-draggers who couldn’t find a way to contribute to humanity, so he says the most outrageous stuff to get attention. You know the type. “The Holocaust didn’t kill six million Jews, but even if it did, that was a good thing.” That sort of thing. Fuentes also claims to be asexual and live streams his dates with catboys. So there’s a good degree of repressed homosexuality driving his lifelong temper tantrum. Like I said, an actual Nazi.

There is not a single thing Hasan Piker has said that puts him anywhere close to Nick Fuentes. As we’ll cover later, the media has dredged up a slew of old Piker clips and presented them out of context, but comparing him to someone who advocates for a second Holocaust is a lie. Here’s Piker explicitly calling out antisemitism and specifying why it is important to separate anti-Zionism from anti-semitism to more effectively stop the apartheid state of Israel. If you want more evidence of Piker’s history opposing anti-semitism, here’s a thirty-minute montage of him denouncing it. If you want to criticize him for old social media statements, fine. But equating this person to a Nazi says far more about the accuser than Piker.

The only way one can honestly see similarities between Piker and Fuentes is if they are an Islamophobic bigot who thinks Arabs and Muslims are inherently anti-semitic. Evidently, Mallory McMorrow falls into this category. Speaking of, Mallory McMorrow is far closer to the Nazism of Nick Fuentes than Hasan Piker or Abdul El-Sayed is. McMorrow’s campaign financial chair, Kelly Neumann, has openly praised her Nazi grandfather. “Sure, he helped murder six million Jews and decimate Europe. But he hugged me when I came out of the closet.” If McMorrow is going to attack the El-Sayed campaign for stumping with someone they say is an antisemite, then what should we think of her campaign run by a Nazi-lover?

Mallory McMorrow’s decision to go low caught many people, myself included, by surprise. Previously, the Michigan Senate Democratic primary was understood as a three-way race between two progressives and a centrist. McMorrow and El-Sayed were competing for the progressive vote, while AIPAC-backed Haley Stevens stood for the establishment. Previously, McMorrow had been painting herself as a softer, more electable progressive than Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. She supported “universal health coverage,” but not Medicare For All. She correctly accused Israel of genocide, but then later said the term is a “progressive purity test,” which is quickly becoming the establishment’s excuse for dodging the question. Until her latest stunt, many progressives saw her as a better option than Haley Stevens, who was Chuck Schumer’s hand-pick. Just two weeks ago, Sam Seder was discussing a potential need for progressive unification behind McMorrow if the El-Sayed campaign didn’t turn out as he hoped. But now that dynamic has changed. By coddling up to Zionists and launching bigoted accusations of Muslim Jew-hatred, McMorrow has shown she’s far closer to Haley Stevens than Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. So, why did McMorrow decide to go hood-off at this moment? Occam’s Razor points to fear.

With Haley Stevens campaigning as well as a goldfish taken from its bowl and dropped on the kitchen counter, McMorrow went to Jewish Insider to signal to the Israel lobby that she’s willing to do their bidding. By attacking Hasan Piker, McMorrow sent a message to Israel-aligned donors and Zionist politicians — specifically Chuck Schumer — that they can pressure Stevens to drop out and support McMorrow, who will happily protect Israel in the Senate. Though AIPAC is officially backing Stevens, McMorrow is closely aligned with the group’s Israel policy. Back in September, published a leaked donor call in which McMorrow campaign manager Wellesly Deniels told Zionist donors that AIPAC found McMorrow’s policy paper “outstanding.” Because she doesn’t want to be accused of explicitly attacking El-Sayed, and because she’ll still have to win a general in Muslim-populated Michigan, McMorrow chose to attack Hasan Piker. This gives her the plausible deniability to say she didn’t call Abdul El-Sayed a Jew-hating Muslim; she only inferred it by saying he hangs out with Jew-hating Muslims.

Obviously, the McMorrow camp thinks this is what they need to do to win the August primary. But I’m not sure they calculated correctly. I wasn’t persuaded by McMorrow's argument about “electability,” but maybe some Michiganders were. By coming out as a staunch Zionist who is willing to slander her Muslim opponents with the same bigotry as Jonathan Greenblatt, I think a lot of former McMorrow supporters might be reconsidering their support. Today, the race looks very different from just a few weeks ago. With El-Sayed being the only candidate supporting Medicare For All, calling to abolish ICE, and not cozying up to the Israel lobby, it’s fair to say the Michigan Democratic Senate primary is between a progressive, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and two pro-establishment candidates, Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens. There are already signs that the McMorrow campaign’s AIPAC Batman Signal backfired. Following her stunt, donations poured in for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, making him one of the top donation recipients on ActBlue, alongside James Talrico and Jon Ossoff. The attack also earned McMorrow increased scrutiny from progressives, whom she’ll need to win both the primary and the general. With many Democratic voters rightfully angry at McMorrow’s low blow, the campaign tried to shift the news cycle with a populist-coded video of McMorrow opposing corporate surge pricing. But as pointed out, there are multiple anti-surge-pricing bills in the Michigan state senate. McMorrow is the Democratic majority whip, but she hasn’t sponsored a single one. In just a matter of a few weeks, McMorrow has revealed herself to be the duplicitious Washington-insider many Democratic primary voters are tired of.

Sirota

Mallory McMorrow's Cartoonish Cynicism

In her high-profile campaign for Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, Mallory McMorrow has suddenly gone viral with an explainer video depicting herself as crusader against surveillance pricing. It’s a solid video boosted by legacy media and…

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a month ago · 39 likes · 5 comments · David Sirota

It’s unknown whether McMorrow’s gamble will pay off. But what is undeniable is that the McMorrow campaign is feeling enough pressure from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed that they felt the need to ditch their progressive veneer and join the establishment smear campaign of Hasan Piker. In this way, her attack on El-Sayed’s relationship with Piker was two-fold. Yes, it stoked anti-Islamic bigotry among the electorate, but it also broadcast to the national Democratic establishment: “I am on your side, and I will do your bidding. Help me.” It’s important to note that Mallory McMorrow didn’t start the national smear campaign against Hasan Piker. The leftist streamer has been the central target of shady centrists attempting to disempower the left and keep the Democratic Party aligned with capital, crypto, Israel, and other things that suck. What I’d be curious to know is whether she saw an opportunity to join this campaign, or if the Democratic corporatists reached out to her with an invitation. Regardless of how she joined the Zionist movement, this background is why we can’t view Mallory McMorrow’s snakeism as a single tactic in an isolated race, but the opening of a new front in a larger establishment war to discredit the left and rig the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

Anti-Pikerism

I know almost nothing about war and military strategy. But even as a movie-educated armchair general, I know that the first thing you do in battle is take out your enemy’s communications. Unable to promote their messages and coordinate counterattacks, your enemy would be disoriented, increasing your chances of victory. Right now, the left-of-right political world is on the eve of the battle for the 2028 Democratic primary. On one side is the Democratic establishment, which wants to keep the party tethered to Israel and oligarchy. On the other side is the progressive left, which wants to follow the will of Democratic voters by sympathizing with Palestinians and taking on corporate power. Since the establishment lost all three branches of government in the 2024 election, these forces have been skirmishing and waging proxy conflicts through numerous left vs. center Democratic primaries, general elections, and media wars. But with the 2026 midterms creeping closer and closer, and likely 2028 candidates teasing their announcement, the battle to control the next phase of Democratic politics is just over the horizon. To help their ideological forces win that battle and keep the party aligned with capitalism and Zionism, the pro-establishment forces are attempting to take progressive communicators off the board — just like bombing the enemy’s radar station before you invade. This isn’t conjecture. Last year, the pro-establishment think tank Third Way released a memo advising Democrats to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure.” To achieve that goal, they are launching a coordinated smear campaign against arguably the most effective leftist commentator, Hasan Piker.

The sheer volume of anti-Piker content published in mainstream media shows how this is a coordinated attack. On March 19th, Third Way founder Jonathan Cowan co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling Piker a “Jew-hater.” On March 23rd, The New York Times covered the Cuba Humanitarian mission by hinting Piker was a hypocrite for staying in a four-star Havana hotel, even though American law forced him to stay there. (This article served the dual-purpose of hippie punching at Piker while obscuring the important issue of American starvation of the Cuban people.) In just one week, Jewish Insider has published seven articles urging Democrats to “shun” the streamer. Politico piled on by asking fourteen potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates if they’d appear on Piker’s Hasanabi stream. Of course, Corey Booker raced to say Piker’s “terrible comments about Jewish people” meant he “would not be joining Piker’s stream.” In response, Hasan Piker clarified he never invited Corey Booker or any of the other candidates on.

As was McMorrow’s slander, this is a racist smear campaign to disempower leftist criticism of Israel and silence calls for economic populism. When NY-17 congressional candidate Effie Phillips-Staley visited the West Bank and described the conditions as apartheid, her local Democratic committees tried to sabotage her campaign by refusing to support her ballot petitions. While Phillips-Staley agreed to join Piker’s show while he was in New York over the weekend, the Westchester County Democratic Committee denounced her and released a statement accusing Piker of “anti-American hatred, the dehumanization of Jews, the minimization of horrific sexual violence against women, and other forms of bigotry.” While statements such as these have considerable sway amongst the Democratic elite, they are out-of-touch with the electorate, which is more observant and distrustful of political subservience than ever before. Effie Phillips-Staley bravely stood her ground and called out the Democratic establishment for trying to “narrow the tent” and silence Piker’s voice. I especially appreciated Phillips-Staley's use of the “tent” metaphor, as centrists have been lecturing everyone else about the need to “grow the tent” since November 5th, 2024. (Typically, one would think losing would drive you to call it quits on giving lectures. But hey, what do I know?) So, if the democratic establihsment wants to “have a big tent,” why are they taking Jonathan Cowan’s advice to “draw a line in the sand” and exclude “Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters” from entering the Democrats’ big tent? It’s simple, really. The Democratic establishment wants a “big tent,” but only if it’s filled with people who don’t threaten their grip on the tentpole.

A Big Tent. But Not Too Big.

Just like a tent needs a central load-bearing structure, so does a political party. What is your headline to voters? What are you rallying Americans around? Workers’ rights? Equality? Democracy? The Republicans have a tent pole: Donald Trump is the most America-first candidate in history. It was always bullshit. That pole has been wavering since Trump reclaimed the White House, and the GOP tent has shrunk as a result. But it was a convincing mantra that won Republicans a trifecta of control over the American government. We can’t say it didn’t work. Weak as the Republican pitch was, the Democrats’ current tentpole is even worse. I’m not sure it exists. To the extent the Democratic establishment has a tent pole, it’s something about them being the adults in the room. Instead of speaking to voters’ concerns about Gaza and economic vulnerability, the Democrats chose to message what party insiders want to hear. Liz Cheney implored Republicans to choose “Country over Party,” swinging tens of votes to the Democrats. Harris promised to create “the most lethal American military.” Literally no one wanted that, except the people who wrote the speech, thinking, “Aha! Let’s see the Republicans try to call us weak now!” (They still did.) Harris even got closer to corporate interests than Biden, letting her Uber-executive brother-in-law serve as a close campaign advisor. As a result, the campaign signalled to corporate donors that a Harris presidency would abandon Lina Khan’s antitrust project, a move welcomed by economic corporatists represented by groups like Third Way. So yes, the Democratic establishment is interested in “growing the party tent” to win elections — but only if the people in that tent don’t threaten their position holding the tent pole. As a former John Fetterman staffer and current Vice President of the Searchlight Institute (it’s junior varsity Third Way), Tre Easton put it, newcomers to the Democratic tent should show deference to those who were “there before you.” This is why they want to move the Democrats’ right — it will strengthen the establishment’s control of the party. Alternatively, moving the party left will weaken their hold by including more progressive-minded members.

Because Hasan Piker is threatening the establishment’s grip on the Democratic tentpole, they are smearing him as an antisemite. Speaking anonymously to Politico, one adviser to a potential 2028 candidate said they see Piker as a “gatekeeper” to the 2028 primary. If that sentiment is true, which, given the streamer’s growing audience and influence, it appears to be, then we see why Third Way and the democratic establishment are trying to scare politicians away from appearing with Piker. In this scenario, the goals of a 2028 contender differ slightly from the Democratic establishment. Not only do the corporatists not want a leftist shaping the discussion surrounding the 2028 primary, but they don’t want to validate his project with the attention of their “serious” candidates. Gavin Newsom might go on Hasanabi and dodge Piker’s questions about Israel, which the California governor will consider an increase in his presidential chances. But that would have come at a cost to Third Way, as it would have increased Piker's relevance and the left’s influence while decreasing theirs. If the left is holding the Democratic tentpole with one hand, and rallying voters to working-class issues with Hasan Piker’s “megaphone,” then the 2028 Democratic primary is a greater risk to benefactors of Democratic centrism than is the 2028 general election.

The duplicitousness of this media smear campaign reached its zenith under none other than Jake Tapper. Citing Third Way’s op-ed, Tapper had on a “panel” (really two people who agreed with him) to cover Piker’s “antisemitism.” To show the real purpose of false accusations of anti-semitism, the same day Tapper chose to make out-of-context clips from a streamer as his headline, Israel passed a law legalizing the execution of Palestinians, but not Israelis. Because that’s the real purpose of the anti-Hasan Piker smear campaign. Distract from the indefensible actions of apartheid Israel, silence critics of the Democratic establishment, and make sure Medicare For All stays on the sidelines. That’s the plan. But the existence of this plan shows how weak the Democratic establishment is. Previously, Third Way, Chuck Schumer, and other centrist voices would point to polls as evidence that their politics worked. But now the polls are saying the opposite, Third Way is lying about them and trying to cheat its way back into relevance. Much like McMorrow’s slanderous attack on Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the attacks on Hasan Piker arise from a place of establishment insecurity.

Sorry centrists. People like Hasan because he’s right about you. And your attempts to sink him are only showing them that, if anything, he was too kind to you.

Thank you for reading JoeWrote. If you appreciated this article, please tap the ❤️ and subscribe to receive future articles in your inbox. And if you’re enjoying JoeWrote (even sometimes), please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work. Thanks in advance!

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In Solidarity — Joe

I wrote this article last spring about the “Hands Off” protests, which were a predecessor to No Kings. Much like with Hands Off, many leftists critique No Kings’ protests as “too liberal” and not worth attending. This is the wrong attitude. While the demands of No Kings organizers aren’t what I want them to be, that’s not the point. Millions of working-class, politically motivated Americans will attend No Kings to show their frustration with the Trump administration. Leftists, progressives, socialists, whatever-else-ists should be there to meet them and channel their energy into effective organizing structures — DSA, unions, immigrants’ rights groups, and other progressive outlets.

The left should think of protests like these as organizing fairs. There will be a large population of left-leaning Americans wandering between booths and speeches, looking to learn and get involved. If we refuse to because of a misguided attachment to ideological purity, then No Kings attendees, and America, will be left with the milquetoast liberal centrism that put us in this terrible situation.

Enjoy this article, find your local No Kings, and go. Stay safe and have fun. Joy is contagious.

In Solidarity — Joe

With over 1,400 protests across the country, last weekend’s “Hands Off” demonstrations signaled America’s distaste for the Trump-Musk agenda. Organized by multiple advocacy groups, protests stretching from Alaska to Florida denounced pretty much everything the administration is doing. Placards and speakers condemned cuts to social security, the imprisonment of political prisoners, deportations, the infringement of free speech, and every other Trump-caused crisis. What’s most inspiring about Hands Off is that not only do the protestors reject Republican fascism, but they’re willing to mobilize against it. Disliking Trump is one thing, but proving that disdain through physical presence is something else entirely. As the government is disappearing dissidents and is known to attack left-wing rallies with police riots, Hands Off attendees were willing to accept some risk to make their voices heard. That’s a good sign for anti-fascist resistance.

Plus, Hands Off provided some of the funniest protest signs in recent memory.

But not everyone shared my appreciation. Given Hands Off was planned by groups inside the Democratic coalition (Indivisible, Move On, and the ACLU were core organizers) and included many state Democratic parties and PACs,1 I wasn’t surprised that some leftists were dissatisfied with the event’s character. And their critiques were well-founded. Many elected Democrats who spoke at the protests have shown little resistance to Trump, even voting to confirm his cabinet nominees. Those pursuing the 2028 party nomination were at the forefront, shaking hands and kissing babies to portray themselves as anti-Trump leaders. It’s more than fair to criticize those who speak against fascism before a crowd but bow to it inside the congressional chambers. The espoused goals of the protest were also off-putting to the left. The organizers omitted Palestine from their list of issues but celebrated NATO, the exact opposite of an anti-imperialist foreign policy the political left aims to build.

Especially after the anti-police message of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests was diluted into an encouragement to vote for former segregationist Joe Biden, leftists are more than warranted to be skeptical of Democrat-aligned movements. There’s a strong anti-fascist, progressive sentiment sweeping across America, and you can bet the house that Democratic strategists are seeking to limit and channel that grassroots energy into whichever campaign employs them. Given Democratic liberalism has twice succumbed to Trump at the ballot box, anyone disapproving of the Trump-Musk program should share this concern. Whether they’re a Never Trump Republican, an Obama-loving liberal, or a gun-toting communist, one must admit the Democrats have failed to stop the twice-elected president. You know what Albert Einstein said about the definition of insanity. An anti-Trump protest is fantastic! But if the result of that protest is to encourage DNC donations and voting for AIPAC-backed Senators in three years, it will not accomplish its stated goal of countering the GOP’s fascist agenda.

If leftists want to avoid this outcome and harness populist enthusiasm for meaningful change, we should not condemn these protests—we should join them. Not because we agree with every issue on the docket or every line in the headliner’s speech but because they provide us the fuel that has driven progressive movements around the globe and throughout history: an energized, mobilized working class.

When the median American joins a Hands Off protest, they are demonstrating. Not just their dissatisfaction with the government but their willingness to act against it. Yes, every registered Democrat voter likely hates Trump as much as the person marching with a “Dump Trump” placard. The difference is that the person marching in the street has shown they’ll do something about it. While joining a mass protest might be a small display of commitment, it’s still a display of commitment. Labor organizers don’t start campaigns by sending workers to march on the boss. They start with tiny asks. “Can you come to this meeting?” “Could you wear this pin on Thursday?” As the workers show their commitment by completing small tasks, organizers build momentum with larger asks, such as pledging to vote YES or petitioning management. Someone attending a Hands Off protest should be viewed as a worker completing those tiny asks. They’ve displayed discontent with Trump and a willingness to mobilize against his project. That’s the first step to organizing them, which is how we defeat fascism.

If there is no progressive voice at these protests, then leftists’ fears will come true. Millions of politically active Americans will attend anti-Trump demonstrations and be sold an inadequate prescription. Politicians will tell them the key to ending oligarchy and disempowering Trump is making Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House in 2026. As Jeffries is backed by the Worst People Ever,2 I can confidently say neither he, his party allies, nor the interests they represent will solve the issues that inspired Americans to protest.

The motivating problems — oligarchy, attacks on social programs, an inhumane foreign policy, and more — can only be solved by addressing their source: capitalism and imperialism. To make this point and end the fascist absurdity, leftists need to call this out. And who better to educate than those who have shown an appetite for political change?

As socialists, leftists, or whatever “-ist” or “isim” you identify with, we recognize that the American reality is very different from the American ideal. The country is not a democracy, the media has no journalistic integrity, and neither political party really cares if we live long or die young. While we recognize this, most Americans don’t. Not because they’re stupid, but because they’re busy working forty hours a week, raising their children, and fighting a To Do list emulating the Hydra: cross one task off and two take its place. As the masses are dissatisfied with Trump, they turn to the expected opposition, the Democratic Party. Democrats will encourage them to donate, like Chuck Schumer’s Tweets, and attend the upcoming rally. When they show up, leftists should be there to greet and educate with the intention of organizing. It doesn’t take much, and we don’t have to move someone from Maddow to Marx in one conversation. People aren’t radicalized overnight, so there’s no point in trying to do it in an afternoon. All you need to do is open the gate to the wider world of progressive politics. Table for your socialist organization, hand out flyers for your union, or turn to the person next to you and ask, “What brought you out today?” No matter their answer, whether its immigrant rights, tariffs, or foreign policy, you affirm their feelings and direct it to the conversation you want to have. “Oh, you don’t like ICE dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night? I agree. We need something entirely different.” You’ve now steered the conversation towards abolishing ICE, something I doubt they’d hear from any of the event’s centrist speakers. Give them your contact info and suggest an immigrant rights group or other leftist organization for them to get involved with. My DSA chapter took this approach and tabled the Hands Off rally in Denver. Not everyone they spoke will become a member. But some will.

This is how we organize America. This is how we win. Leftists must meet the working class where they’re at, then explain why our approach, the one of labor and power, is the best way to fight *this* [gesture to the American Hellscape around me]. Our pitch doesn’t need to be aggressive, nor openly hostile to anyone at the event. We’re there to recruit, and you’re not going to recruit anyone who showed up to the Pancake Convention by telling them pancakes are dog shit and they’re stupid for thinking otherwise. You simply introduce the waffle and explain why you believe its the better choice. Of course, we’re selling anti-fascist activism instead of breakfast food, but you get the idea.

I’m pleased to say many progressive groups understand this dynamic. The Watertown Citizens for Peace & Justice cancelled its weekly vigil for the Palestinian victims of genocide, instead encouraging participants to bring their pro-Palestine message to the Hands Off rally in Boston.3 This was a smart move, as Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student detained by ICE for writing a pro-Palestine op-ed, was arrested in nearby Somerville. She was explicitly named at the Boston Hands Off rally by Senator Ed Markey.4 The Massachusetts Senator doesn’t share my desire for Palestinian liberation, so its crucial there are activists groups present that can connect the audience’s alarm for the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk to the larger Palestinian cause.

While the hostility towards the Democratic Party is warranted, progressives shouldn’t let it deter us from our goal of building collective power amongst the working class. Only when working Americans are organized through labor unions, tenants’ organizations, and political groups will the American public hold real power. With power in our hands, as opposed to already inside the Democratic Party, workers can bargain, form coalitions, and win political concessions. “Do X and will vote for you. If you do Y, we won’t.” Right now the American working class is unorganized, so of course they believe the only recourse against Trumpism is supporting Democrats! They haven’t been told an alternative exists! How can we blame Americans for not walking the better path, when every aspect of our society has deceived them that the path isn’t real? To turn the median Democrat-voter into fellow travelers, we can either hope a copy of A People's History of the United States falls into their book bag as they leave the library, or we can meet them we’re they’re at (physically and politically) and guide them into our movement. As they’re currently in the streets looking for an alternative to Trump, there is no better time to whisper in their ear. This is important for every issue we hold dear, but I find it most crucial for the cause of Palestine. As more than half of Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians over Israelis, we should be climbing over each other to introduce them to anti-Zionist politics.5 With few Democrats speaking to this pro-Palestine sentiment, it’s the ideal opportunity for us to bring people into the Palestinian liberation movement.

The leftist criticism of the Hands Off rallies and the unwillingness to participate in them is not a new phenomena. It reminds me of the the early-20th century German Left Communists, who insisted parliamentary participation was obsolete, despite holding no seats in the parliament. Correcting their mistake, Vladimir Lenin wrote:

How can one say that “parliamentarianism is politically obsolete”, when “millions” and “legions” of proletarians are still in favor of parliamentarianism!? It is obvious that parliamentarianism in Germany is not yet politically obsolete. It is obvious that the “Lefts” in Germany have mistaken their desire, their politico-ideological attitude, for objective reality. — Left Wing Communism6

Those discouraging joining mass-action have made the same mistake Lenin identified in the German Left. They believed parliamentarianism was obsolete, but the German working class did not. In refusing to engage in elections, they were missing an opportunity to make their case to very people they advocated for. Many leftists in modern America, myself included, believe the Democratic Party is obsolete. However, the American working class doesn’t believe that. At least not yet. The public still looks to the Democrats for political leadership, shows up for their planned demonstrations, and listens to their elected politician. If we want that to change, we should tap into the energy of the masses and guide them down a superior path, encouraging them to focus on political and labor organizing that builds power outside of the two-party system. When our power is organized external to the Democratic Party, it is immune from the internal party dynamics that tamper down progressive sentiment. Organizing a tenants’ union not only empowers you with renters’ rights, but it gives you ability to collectively give or withhold votes from political candidates. Now, you have leverage, as opposed to volunteering fro the Democrats and limiting your voice to what is acceptable within their party.

It is my belief socialists, labor organizers, and progressives should be a single step in front of the American working class, advocating for true solutions to their problems. We should go to the demonstrations they go to, and show them we care about their pain. Hell, they should leave thinking we care more about their high rent than they do! However, we must remain only one step in front of the masses, as not to lose sight of what they care about. If we cannot draw a connection between the issues that drove Americans to join the Hands Off protests and our positions, then they will turn away and retreat inside the Democratic Party. As history has shown again and again, centrism is an ineffective mechanism of stopping fascism. So let’s give the American working class a better way to fight.

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In Solidarity — Joe

“In the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.” — Mark Zuckerberg, 2021

For the most part, the business world bought into the Metaverse. Atari bought $4.3 million worth of Metaverse “property.” Someone paid $450,000 to be SnoopDog’s “neighbor.” Another $650,000 was spent on a yacht. Big-name brands such as Gucci and Crate & Barrel bought stores in the Metaverse. Disney hired a “chief metaverse officer.” More absurd than any of these worthless purchases was McKinsey’s report, titled Value Creation In The Metaverse, which claimed that 15% of all corporate revenue would come from the Metaverse by 2027. The report also predicted that by 2030:

• 50% of live events would be held in the Metaverse,

• 80% of commerce would be impacted by in-Metaverse consumer activity,

• Most learning and development would happen in the Metaverse,

• Manufacturers and telecommunications companies may have virtually all assets and processes represented in the Metaverse,

• The average internet user would spend six hours a day in the Metaverse,

• The Metaverse would generate $5 trillion in value.

Yeah, none of this came true. Not even close. The Metaverse “stores” are more deserted than shopping malls. Nobody logs on. I imagine the crew of the derelict digital yacht committed mutiny and turned pirate. With little consumer interest and no financial return in sight, Meta recently announced it was sunsetting Horizon Worlds, the name of the Metaverse app. The company soon walked that back to say they weren’t closing the Metaverse, but rather “shifting focus” away from it. About 10% of Meta’s virtual reality workforce was laid off, and Meta recruiters soon began poaching talent from Robolox, signalling that its VR work would focus on video games rather than a digital world going forward. All told, Meta lost about $80 billion on the Metaverse, to say nothing of the other companies and consumers that spent tens of millions buying worthless digital trinkets.

I Thought They Were Geniuses?

My gleeful schadenfreude at rich a-holes wasting money aside, the Metaverse saga shows how hollow capitalism is as an ideology. At every point in our lives, we are told that success in the capitalist system is the result of hard work, intellect, and a general superiority over those making up the unwealthy masses. Capitalism is the ultimate meritocracy, I’m told. Like the most courageous lion rises to lead the pride, billionaires have achieved their high social position on merit. Therefore, the capitalist ideologues say, we should let them command and dictate not just the global economy, but the conditions of our everyday lives. After all, who are you, a mere peasant, to doubt the greatest of Mark Zuckerberg, our modern monarch?

“You merit wealth, fundamentally by creating it (or otherwise obtaining it through voluntary trade). It is the creation of value that determines one’s wealth on a free market and it sets the standard for what it means to ‘earn’ wealth.” - The real reason J.K. Rowling deserves her billions, by the Ayn Rand Institute

This argument was always weak. But it's even more ridiculous to stand by in modern times, when every billionaire is broadcasting their idiocracy through every microphone they can find. For example, here’s Marc Andresen saying introspection was invented four hundred years ago.

First, Andresen thinks introspection is “talking about the past.” It’s not. To be introspective is to look inward and study yourself to better understand and control your future motivations and actions. It’s actually the exact opposite of looking backwards. Second, “Before four hundred years ago, it never would’ve occurred to anybody to be introspective.” Yikes man. Socrates’ “The unexamined life is not worth living” is the oldest and most notable phrase in all of philosophy. Such a big head, such a little brain.

Though the dumbfounding public statements of billionaires indicate they’re far from the brightest humanity has to offer, the Metaverse catastrophe shows they’re not even the expert businessmen they’re made out to be. Elon Musk tweeting “my based 20-year-old son orders milk at sushi restaurants” while he’s found guilty of fraud shows these guys are pretty dumb, but Mark Zuckerberg’s Metafuckup disproves the theory of capitalist hierarchy altogether. The Metaverse wasn’t a half-baked idea taken on a whim. Zuckerberg had been building towards it for a better part of a decade, since acquiring the virtual reality headset company Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. By all accounts, the Metaverse was Zuckerberg’s brainchild. He e expected it to be bigger than Facebook, which is why he changed the company name and reoriented it away from social media. And because Zuckerberg said this is the next big thing, capitalist zealots who believe wealth = smart diligently followed along. It’s no surprise that the Metaverse items mentioned above cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those who have money are the most likely to believe in the hierarchical model, as it justifies their prestige. If someone wealthier than them, who is therefore smarter than them, says the Metaverse is the place to invest, they will happily do so. Unsurprisingly, some of the biggest dupes were the world’s richest people. Following Zuckerberg’s rollout, Bill Gates said most work meetings would take place in the Metaverse by 2025. Acclaimed venture capitalist Matthew Ball praised Zuckerberg’s bet on the Metaverse as a “brilliant example of founder conviction, ability, resources, and commitment.” He even equated the platform to the discovery of a livable solar system.

Right Place, Right Time

I’m not one to believe that every billionaire or millionaire is only rich because they had rich parents or friends. There is an element of skill and intellect that is required to acquire that much money. However, as all available evidence shows, those attributes are far less important to acquiring unimaginable wealth than simply being in the right place at the right time.

For the most part, our billionaire overlords are only wealthy because they had access to capital, connections, and a somewhat good idea at the birth of the internet. Elon Musk and the rest of the PayPal Mafia (Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, and many other tech capitalists) were the first to commodify sending money over the internet. It’s a good idea, but it was pretty basic. If they hadn’t founded the various companies that eventually merged into PayPal, there’s no doubt somebody else would have done it. It’s not like something only they could come up with. They deserve credit for getting it done, but the main ingredient that separates them from the rest of us is that they were fortunate enough to 1) Have or access the capital necessary to start a company, and 2) Be born at a time that put them at a professional age at the boom of the internet. The same goes for other members of the 1%. Dave Portnoy started Barstool as a sports-and-humor newspaper and was lucky to be the first to combine humor and athletics on a blog. If he’d been born a decade earlier or later, he’d have been too soon or too late for Barstool to become what it is. Mark Cuban became a billionaire when he sold Broadcast.com, a primitive streaming library hyped by the dot-com bubble, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, riding the wave of over-investment and cashing out at the right time. Though it propelled the Shark Tank host to billionaire status, the sale of Broadcast.com is considered one of the worst business deals of all time.

Because so many of our billionaire class owe their wealth to the good fortune of having early access to the internet, it’s best to think of these capitalists as those who seized land and resources during the 19th-century Manifest Destiny land grab. As the U.S. Army waged genocidal conquest across the continent, soon-to-be land barons tagged behind, snatching up “vacant” land and using it to build exorbitant wealth. I’m sure homesteading, mining, and railroading had their challenges, but those capitalists had the advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity that previous and subsequent generations did not. The same goes for most (if not all) modern billionaires who jump-started their bank accounts with early-internet adventurism. The public invention of the internet created an entire digital continent, just waiting for the lucky few to come and monetize it. As we’ve seen, it doesn’t take a genius to set up a digital payment transfer, online sports humor blog, or social networking site. They just had to have a leg up on everyone else and be in the right place at the right time.

While fortunate timing is the key ingredient in most billionaires’ success, Mark Zuckerberg got luckier than most. He was fortunate that no one was so much of a loser as to create Facemash, a Facebook prototype that ranked Harvard students' hotness using photos stolen from the school’s database. He got even luckier when he wasn’t kicked out of Harvard for the data breach, and his fortunate streak continued when the Winklevoss twins told him about their idea for a collegiate social site, which he took and turned into Facebook. He got even luckier when, after the school newspaper ran a story about his intellectual theft, he still wasn’t kicked out of Harvard for breaking into the editors’ email accounts by using their Facebook logins. Outside of Facebook, which you can’t really attribute solely to Zuckerberg’s ingenuity, the man really hasn’t invented or created anything. He bought Instagram explicitly to stop it from becoming a Facebook competitor. It’s a clear breach of antitrust law, but wouldn’t you know it, wealth brings special privileges. And as the complete worthlessness of the Metaverse shows, Zuckerberg isn’t good at product creation or business. Zuckerberg’s motive for creating the Metaverse arose from a desire to humanize the internet. As he told The Verge, living through “small, glowing rectangles” on our phones is “not really how people are made to interact.” That’s true. But humans aren’t supposed to interact on the internet. Normal people recognize that the internet is a proxy of human interaction, not a substitute for it. It’s fun and useful, but ultimately, we’d much rather live. So, when we’re done working on Zoom or scrolling TikTok, we log off, hang out with our friends, go to the gym, or do any of the other countless activities humans have been doing long before the internet was invented, and continue doing as long as it exists. We certainly don’t want to dehumanize ourselves further by taking our real-world experiences and putting them online. This is why the Metaverse failed. Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands why humans are on the internet in the first place. Because he’s kind of dumb. He thought that when people felt detached from reality after spending the entire work week on their computers and phones, they’d hop into the Metaverse and “go” to a concert with their friends. That’s pretty stupid. Everyone actually wants to get away from their screens and go to a concert with their friends. This fundamental inability to understand basic human desires is why Zuckerberg launched a $80 million cash-burning pit, and why every sycophant working at Meta and in the larger business world clapped like seals, because that’s what capitalist zealotry commands them to do. Which is why all the Metaverse promotional material looked like this.

It’s worth noting that Meta isn’t pivoting away from the Metaverse back to social media. Like every other billionaire born in the internet era, Zuckerberg is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Just yesterday, Meta announced a five-year, $27 billion AI partnership with Nebius. As with the Metaverse, the business potential of AI is theoretical. The product is nowhere near what we were told it would be, but investors keep investing in AI on the promise that it will revolutionize the world.

Don’t worry. I’m sure this time, the overhyped tech fantasy rapidly consuming humanity’s resources will work out. It’s not like the inventor of the Metaverse could be wrong.

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In Solidarity — Joe

“Israel, however, is a regional power. Its concerns are narrower. Put simply, it wants to cripple a country that has sworn itself to Israel’s destruction. So it keeps killing officials in Tehran, grinding down the government, blowing up oil facilities, and striking Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah.” — The New York Times, Who’s War, 3/20/26

Hezbollah Sustains Coordinated Attacks on Israel, Leveraging Lessons from Previous Wars: The Iranian proxy group is employing decentralized tactics, multi-front strikes, and psychological operations to pressure Israel and reinforce its regional influence — IsraelDefense.co, 3/16/2026

More often than not, Hezbollah, the Shia militia controlling southern Lebanon, is referred to by Western governments and media as “Iran’s proxy.” While the group is allied to the Islamic Republic of Iran, calling it a “proxy” is an intentional misrepresentation of the situation in the Middle East, designed to advance Israel’s imperialist aims in the region. By framing Hezbollah as if it has no reason to exist besides furthering the political goals of the Iranian government, Hasbarists whitewash history to promote the narrative that Israel is a peaceful nation, forced into war by its bloodthirsty Arab neighbors. This public relations strategy is as old as Zionism itself, as Zionist founder Theodore Hertzel sold Israel to the British government by describing, “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

Not only is the characterization of Hezbollah as “Iran’s proxy” wrong, but it legitimizes the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Much like the propaganda that arose after October 7th, Tel Aviv’s lies about its Lebanese opponent are used to mask the ongoing slaughter of innocent civilians.

The Origins of Hezbollah

By mislabelling Hezbollah as Iran’s proxy, Israel and its allies paint the militia as purposeless, implicitly saying it has no reason to exist except for Muslims’ inherent anti-semitism. It’s an attempt to delegitimize any opposition to Israeli militarism, just as the Israelis do with the many Palestinian militant groups that oppose them. This narrative is undercut by a simple examination of Hezbollah’s timeline.

Read more

I accepted Left Voice’s offer to respond. You can read my rebuttal in the original form on Left Voice, or below, where I have copied it in full. Whether you’re concerned with the debate or not, this essay gives a good view of my political theories on the relationship between socialism and electoral politics, and why I think the ultra-left fantasies of simply “doing a revolution” are silly.

I should also note that the editors of Left Voice clearly felt I made good points that disproved their claims (a few of them were just blatantly false). I turned this essay in back in early February, but they held it until they could write a response to my response. They published my essay yesterday, and immediately published their counterargument. I feel like their rebuttal to my rebuttal didn’t really address my points. As you’ll read, I point out the ineffectiveness of non-DSA left-wing American parties as proof that DSA’s strategy is the best path to socialism. The author of Left Voice’s response, James Dennis Hoff, counters this by pointing out the effectiveness of South American independent socialist parties (which misses my argument that the American political context is unique) and highlights Kshama Sawant as an example of independent American socialist politics. Like Left Voice, Sawant is a frequent critic of DSA. But the same day these articles were published, Sawant began begging for DSA’s help in her fledgling congressional race. I believe you see my point.

Enjoy.

In Solidarity — Joe

In critiquing the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the predominant socialist organization in the United States, of which I am a proud member, the editors of Left Voice have made several mistakes and miscalculations that are common among DSA’s left-wing critics. Before I address them, I’d like to thank the Left Voice editorial team for allowing me the opportunity to counter-argue against them in the spirit of comradely debate. While maintaining that any socialist is a comrade of mine, I must sternly correct their errors, which, more often than not, arise from a misunderstanding of the strategy, tactics, and character of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The main critique of Left Voice’s editorial concerns our relationship to the Democratic Party, specifically in our electoral strategy. The editors write:

Bernie Sanders’ 2015-2016 primary campaign and Trump’s subsequent victory in the presidential election fueled [DSA’s] rise even further, and the ranks of DSA swelled to over 90,000 members. Many of those members organized to fight for immigrants’ rights, environmental justice, housing justice, reproductive rights, and against the attacks of the first and now the second Trump administrations under the banner of socialism. In this context, the organization has become a household name for socialism in the United States. Unfortunately, DSA leadership has opted time and again to anchor the organization to the capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party — a choice that betrays the expectations of the tens of thousands of people who entered DSA precisely because they wanted a real break from the political order that has failed them and other young people and workers around the world. Despite important nuances, DSA’s main political organizations still cling to this strategy. This is a serious mistake.The bipartisan regime — and therefore the political power of our class enemies — won’t be seriously challenged if DSA continues this course. (emphasis added)

This statement is incorrect on multiple fronts. First, DSA’s electoral strategy is not to “anchor” ourselves to the Democratic Party. We encourage socialists to maximize their chances of victory, whether that’s running as Democrats, as independents, on the Working Families Party ballot, or however else they see fit. When candidates apply for a DSA endorsement, either with the national body or a local chapter, their chosen political party affiliation is considered by the voting membership, but it is not grounds for exclusion. DSA does not “anchor” itself to the Democratic Party anymore than it “anchors” itself to the Working Families Party. Of the twenty-three DSA-endorsed candidates that stood for election in November of 2025, only five appeared on the ballot as Democrats: Omar Fateh, Hanna Shvets, Jorge DeFendini, Daniel Atonna, and Zohran Mamdani. (Shvets is a CPUSA member, indicating America’s oldest communist party is adapting DSA’s electoral strategy.) These five also ran on the Working Families Party (WFP) ballot line. When America’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, voted for himself, he did so on the WFP line, not the Democratic one. It is demonstrably false to say DSA has “anchored” itself to the Democratic Party when 78% of our candidates don’t run as Democrats, and those who do seek the nominations of another party.

The editors also contradict themselves by claiming the bipartisan ruling class “won’t seriously be challenged” by DSA’s electoral strategy. A paragraph before claiming DSA cannot “seriously challenge” the political establishment, they write:

Even pro-Democrat pundits must admit what is obvious to all: Mamdani’s win is a challenge to the status quo. (emphasis added)

The most head-scratching accusation from Left Voice is that DSA has “betrayed” our membership by continuing the strategy that led them to join our organization. The editors correctly identify Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns and Trump’s presidencies as driving tens of thousands of Americans into the ranks of DSA, as did the campaigns of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and countless other DSA-endorsed politicians across the country. At the time of Trump’s second inauguration, DSA had approximately 55,000 members. DSA just crossed 100,000 members, meaning we’ve nearly doubled our size in a little over a year.

Are the editors to have us believe that these 45,000 new DSA members, who joined because they saw DSA electeds challenging the Democratic and Republican establishment, are “betrayed” by the strategy that captured their attention and brought them into our ranks? Please find me one DSA member who was inspired to become a card-carrying socialist through Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, who feels “betrayed” by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty? The editors cannot find such a person, for the same reason cryptozoologists have yet to prove Bigfoot’s existence. The only evidence they offer for this claim of “betrayal” is a false accusation of censorship. They write:

A few weeks ago, NYC-DSA endorsed a resolution that discouraged members from openly criticizing the Mamdani administration… This was the first of what will likely be many restrictions on free criticism imposed by NYC-DSA. (emphasis added)

This is not true. You can read the NYC-DSA resolution for yourself here. You will see it states the New York City chapter’s goals — Orient to an affordability agenda, Protect our neighbors and our work, Build the chapter, and Organize a strong and collaborative Left — without a word dictating speech or silencing criticism.

The editors’ incorrect accusation that DSA is betraying our membership is indicative of the long-standing ultra-left, Trotskyist tendency to mistake their criticism of a socialist organization (in this case, DSA) as widely shared throughout that organization, despite all evidence to the contrary. This tendency stems from an infantilization of the working class that portrays them as incapable of making their own decisions. For the editors to accuse DSA leadership of betrayal on behalf of DSA membership, when the leadership is democratically elected, and the members have not voiced the criticisms the editors claim, is to imply that the working class lacks the intellect to make the decisions that are in their best interest. If NYC-DSA members felt censored, they would say it and leave the chapter. If “tens of thousands” of DSA members felt betrayed, they would say it and leave the organization. They have not because they do not believe these things. Tell me, how can one be a socialist and desire the working class to democratically control their workplaces and society, but believe that the same working class is so easily duped? This is the same disrespect that causes some Leftists to claim DSA is “hindering” the creation of a “pure” socialist party, or that DSA “channels” our supporters into the Democratic Party, as if American socialists are mindless cattle led to slaughter. If you believe the working class is too naive to realize they’ve been tricked and “betrayed,” how do you expect that same working class to democratically control their workplaces and the nation?

DSA’s membership and supporters are not being foolishly misled. They are joining and bolstering DSA because they recognize our organization is the best path to build a better world. Skepticism is the greatest enemy of socialists. Americans are overworked, underpaid, and exhausted by the “nothing-ever-changes” nature of American politics. DSA’s success is downstream of our ability to deliver tangible results that shatter this skepticism. The greatest divide between DSA and our left-wing critics is not ideology, but practicality. DSA recognizes the state of American politics and meets the working class where they are. Much like the editors misassume that their critique of DSA is shared throughout our organization, they misassume that their eagerness for a fully independent socialist party is shared by the American working class. Their insistence that DSA commit political suicide by abandoning any association with the Democrats reminds me of how Lenin chastized the German and Dutch left communists for refusing parliamentary participation, which they considered “obsolete.” Lenin wrote:

It is obvious that parliamentarianism in Germany is not yet politically obsolete. It is obvious that the ‘Lefts’ in Germany have mistaken their desire, their politico-ideological attitude, for objective reality. That is the most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make.

A similar dynamic appears in 21st-century America. Much like the German and Dutch Leftists, the editors of Left Voice and many of DSA’s critics have mistaken their belief that the Democratic Party is obsolete for the masses’ belief that it is obsolete. Socialists know neither of these parties can deliver the transition to socialism that civilization needs; we also know that America’s political structure is anti-democratic and that capitalism cannot create an equitable existence or ensure humanity’s existence. But the American people, whom socialists claim to represent, still believe these institutions and systems can. Currently, the duopoly is the prism through which Americans understand politics. If you ask any of our countrypeople about politics, they will talk about Democrats and Republicans. Not because they’re stupid, but because that’s the only political reality they know. The editors are wrong to claim there are “hundreds of thousands” of socialist workers waiting to join an independent socialist party as soon as DSA severs all ties with the Democrats. Of the three major political identities in the United States — Republicans, Independents, and Democrats — only the last prefers socialism over capitalism. Potential socialists are not waiting for socialism outside the Democratic Party — they are waiting for socialism within the Democratic Party. Unless we give them a practical alternative, they will return to the false hope of the Democratic establishment. Despite socialists’ reluctance, Americans still vote for the Democrats and Republicans en masse and turn a blind eye to independent parties. The Green Party’s Jill Stein made a bold push for 5% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, but received only 0.56% — half of what she did in 2016. Meanwhile, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) ticket received about 168,000 votes — a quarter of what the Libertarian ticket received. The lesson of failed independent parties is clear. If we try to court the American working class without meeting them where they are, then socialism will remain irrelevant. We cannot expect Americans to come to socialism. We must bring socialism to Americans.

The great Irish revolutionary James Conolly once wrote, “The seat of progress and source of revolution is not in the brain, but in the stomach.” DSA is relevant and successful because we have shown American workers that our organization is committed to a realistic path to improve their material conditions. We speak to the needs of their stomachs, not the theories of the brain. Our organizing arm, EWOC, helps workers unionize. Our international committee forms relationships with and learns from international socialist parties. And, most importantly, our politicians win elections on platforms that improve the lives of working-class Americans. That’s why Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani are frequently ranked as the top five most popular politicians in the country.

Alternatively, like many of DSA’s left-wing critics, the editors misunderstand the state of American politics. This is evident in their claim that DSA breaking from the Democrats would usher in a new age of socialism.

Without ties to the Democratic Party, a socialist party would be far more appealing to the hundreds of thousands of workers who believe in socialism and the millions more who are fed up with the capitalist system…There already are tens of thousands of activists willing to put their energy into a party completely independent from the Democrats. (emphasis added)

There’s a hole in the editors’ logic big enough to drive a truck through. If there are “hundreds of thousands of workers who believe in socialism” and “tens of thousands of activists” eager for a socialist party with no association with bourgeois parties, why have they not joined PSL, Socialist Alternative, or Labor Notes, which the editors point to as a more valid socialist organization? Why didn’t these “millions” vote for either the Green Party or the PSL candidates in 2024, leaving both far below 1% of the 2024 vote share? In what world is there a secret army of socialists who have refused to organize with any socialist organization or start their own, because less than 25% of DSA-endorsed politicians run as Democrats? Shouldn’t these “millions” who are holding back from joining DSA swell into the ranks of these parties, which the editors view as untainted by collaboration with the Democrats? If the editors’ theory of a reservist contingent of American socialists is true, then we should have seen them deploy their efforts to any of the other socialist parties active in the United States. The undeniable fact that DSA dwarfs all other socialist parties in membership, political power, and relevance disproves the editors’ claim.

In addition to misanalyzing the state of America’s political reality and the ideology of the working class, the editors also misunderstand DSA’s rationale and strategy. They write:

It is impossible to take the fight [for socialism] to the end trapped within a bourgeois party.

Correct! But we are not at the end of the fight for socialism. We have barely begun. DSA has no illusion that a socialist society can be achieved through a bourgeois party. If DSA ever built a critical mass of the Democratic Party, the capitalists that comprise the Democrats wouldn’t just leave — they’d burn it down. Then they’d join the Republicans and block socialist policy through the courts. This is well known within DSA, which is why we operate knowing there will be a time to shed the Democrats entirely and transform DSA from its current state as a political organization into a true political party. But, as evidenced by the fact that the socialist parties that reject any association with the Democrats hold little relevance in American politics, it’s clear that the time has yet to come. This is what separates DSA from most of our left-wing critics. We recognize the limits of American political reality and respond accordingly by meeting people where they are and providing political solutions to their needs. Socialists should be a step in front of the working class, leading them toward a more equitable and democratic society. But we should only be a single step in front of them, so as not to lose sight of them. It appears many socialists in the United States have leapt too far ahead, leaving them unmoored to the everyday problems of American workers and unable to provide immediate solutions. As expected, the more progressive-minded elements of the working class see these distant socialists as unable to help them and return to the Democratic establishment, which at least pays lip service to their concerns, while the more reactionary elements cast their lot with the Republicans.

That is the unfortunate reality that American socialists must grapple with. Attracted by liberalism’s false promise of peace and equality, progressive-minded Americans have watched in horror as the Democratic establishment enables fascists, enriches oligarchs, and slaughters Palestinians. But because the Democrat-Republican binary is all they know, and because electoral abstention will only further Republican fascism, they put their effort into what they see as the lesser of the evils. We can criticize that decision all we want, but we cannot blame the Americans who prefer Democrats to Republicans. Let’s be honest, comrades. Occupy failed. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests didn’t translate into the policy we wanted. Two administrations have genocided the Palestinians. ICE is occupying cities and renditioning Americans, citizens included. These are political problems that demand political answers. Americans are looking for political solutions, and, for the first time in decades, the solutions they seek can only be provided by the socialist Left. But if we refuse to give the American people what they want out of ideological stubbornness, socialism will remain a subculture, not a movement. If given a choice between a Republican who will lower the minimum wage, an establishment Democrat who promises to raise it (*wink* *wink*), and an ultra-leftist who tells them the minimum wage is a bourgeois notion that will be irrelevant in the proletarian dictatorship, they will rationally choose the only one that has given them a realistic option to a better life: the Democrats.

The Democratic Socialists of America understand the need for political power. That’s why our political campaigns, labor organizing, and mutual aid give people a visible pathway to improving the nation, and by extension, their lives. It is why our numbers have swelled while other socialist organizations’ have dwindled, why a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America was the first to accuse Israel of genocide from the White House, and why a majority of Americans agree with AOC’s long-standing call to abolish ICE. It is also why, as the editors admit, DSA is a household name. That is the irreconcilable fact that left critics of DSA must reckon with: if our strategy of implementing socialism is so flawed, then why are we the only socialist organization that is a contending force in American politics?

The editors close their essay by encouraging DSA to hold assemblies for anti-fascist groups to debate and decide tactics “with complete freedom to criticize any administration.” My friends, you are describing a DSA meeting. Pop into any chapter’s general meeting, and you will participate in the limitless debate you are asking for. But if the editors insist that DSA transform itself into an organization that fits their designed strategy and tactics, we will not do that.

DSA does not agree with the editors that we need a “new movement.” DSA believes we are the movement. If the editors want to start this new group, they are more than welcome to do so. The repeated claim that DSA “hinders” the creation of a new independent party is nonsense. It’s an excuse made by socialists less effective than DSA to cope with the fact that we are larger, more influential, win elections, and are the torch-bearers of socialism in the United States. I can’t help but feel this accusation that DSA is “hindering” a burst of American socialism comes from a place of jealousy.

To speak plainly, apart from DSA, there is little serious political activity on the American Left. Too many American socialists prioritize proving their version of socialism is superior to the rest rather than proving to the American working class that socialism is superior to capitalism. Left Voice derides PSL as ‘the anti-imperialism of fools”, PSL and the Green Party both claim to have the only socialist in the CA governor’s race, and the manifesto of The Revolutionary Communists of America spends more time criticizing CPUSA than it does telling readers how the party will improve their lives. Of course, all of these parties relentlessly criticize DSA — often while riding our coattails. To be blunt, comrades, this is why non-DSA Leftists are largely irrelevant on the national political scene. You have become the “Not Like That Left,” scolding other socialists for attempting to build a movement in a way you disagree with, but seldom putting your own theories into practice. Too many are focused on “the brain,” engaged in endless, tiresome debates about how your particular form of socialism is better than the rest. There is too much time spent on social media sites owned by billionaires, arguing that each party is the true version of socialism, and those who differ are social fascists, reformists, tankies, campists, or any other insult meant to invoke a similarity with revered socialists of yestercentury. This is strikingly similar to how the Democratic establishment views politics. When socialists claim the reason for their low party membership or lack of influence is the fault of the American people for not realizing how great they are, such as the excuse that the working-class are gullible dupes misled or “hindered” by DSA, it sounds a lot like the Democratic establishment bemoaning American voters for not realizing how “great” Kamala Harris was.

This is, of course, not to say that DSA or our elected politicians are above reproach. DSA does not believe our methods are perfect, nor do we believe our elected politicians are above critique. For example, former congressman Jamal Bowman voted to fund the Iron Dome, and AOC repeated Harris’s campaign lie that she was “tirelessly working for a ceasefire.” Like others, DSA has condemned these breaches in our values. Our position is not to shield our representatives from criticism, but to reiterate that it is better to fight for socialism in the spotlight of the political arena, where our mistakes and flaws are revealed in pursuit of a greater victory, rather than haggle from the safety of the bleachers, where neither our limitations are exposed nor our goals achieved. There is no theoretical way to struggle for socialism. You’re going to have to jump into the fight, getting bruised, dirtied, and bloodied. I fear many American socialists are frequently more concerned with preserving their image as perfect ideologues than working to end capitalism. Such perfection does not exist. There is neither a perfect socialist nor a perfect political party, simply because we are all human. Mistakes, errors, and misbeliefs are inevitable — in DSA and elsewhere.

To close, I strongly encourage a disarmament in this pointless infighting. By now, the ideological differences among Left Voice, DSA, PSL, CPUSA, and the countless other alphabet-soup organizations that make up the relatively small American Left are well known. We will likely never reach an agreement on the endless theories, but we can settle our differences by uniting around proven methods for enacting socialism. Again, I return to the great James Conolly, who tried to end this same infighting over a century ago.

My position is that this union, or rapprochement, cannot be arrived at by discussing our differences. Let us rather find out and unite upon the things upon which we agree. Once we get together, we will find that our differences are not so insuperable as they appear whilst we are separated. What is necessary first is a simple platform around which to gather, with the understanding that as much as possible shall be left to future conditions to dictate and as little as possible settled now by rules or theories. As each section has complete confidence in their own doctrines, let them show their confidence by entering an organisation with those who differ from them in methods, and depend upon the development of events to prove the correctness of their position. (emphasis added)

So come, comrades. Join the Democratic Socialists of America. Let results, not words, prove that your theory is the best way to achieve the socialist mode of production. Or, you can remain external and validate your claims by surpassing DSA in relevance or power. But at some point, you’re going to have to admit that the results speak for themselves. The Democratic Socialists of America are proud to stand by our body of work, warts and all. Our successes greatly outnumber our missteps, and we are confident that our cultural relevance, political power, and growing influence validate our theory of change.

Can you say the same?

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Capitalism has many unique characteristics. Capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism without wage labor, the private ownership of businesses, and the permanent cycle of booms and busts. One of the most important features of our current economic system is enclosure, the process of privatizing a public good and making something that was once available to everyone into an instrument of private profit. Enclosure is how capitalism began in 16th-century England. Jealous of the increasing wealth and power of merchants who were capitalizing on technical improvements in maritime navigation to expand their trade empires, the land-owning English aristocracy enclosed the public lands that had previously been the basis of life for the commoners. The open fields that peasants used to graze their livestock and support their families were quickly enclosed with fences and marked as the private property of landlords. This privatization of the common space deprived the lower class of their food and income, forcing them to sell their labor to landlords for wages to survive. Often, they found themselves working the very fields they had once freely roamed. There had been capitalists operating across Europe and elsewhere for centuries prior to the English Enclosure Movement (though they wouldn’t have used that modern term), but enclosure birthed capitalism — the socioeconomic system based on the private ownership of land and industry, in which those who didn’t own either had to sell their labor for a wage to survive. Envious of the English aristocracy’s new source of wealth, aristocrats and monarchs across Europe soon followed the British trend, enclosing their common lands and establishing capitalism as the default European way of life, which they then exported worldwide.

Though most land on earth has been enclosed and is now private property, enclosure remains a defining characteristic of capitalism to this day. There is no capitalist in history who has ever been comfortable with their current profit rates. None have ever said, “This is enough profit for me! No more is needed!” The constant pursuit of more, more, more isn’t just because they’re greedy (though that’s part of it), but because for capitalist enterprises, stagnation is death. If Apple declared it would not try to increase profit, all its investors would divest and put their money in its competitor, Android, which promised a higher rate of return. Apple would lose important investments, decreasing its effectiveness and its profit. In more ways than one, capitalists are sharks. If they stop moving, they die. So, capitalism always requires more enclosure. To the capitalist, every public good, from your local park to grandma’s Social Security, is an untapped source of profit, ready to be enclosed. Enclosure is so common in America that we often don’t realize the public goods we have been deprived of. The internet was created by the U.S. government with funding from American taxpayers. Yet, it is only accessible by paying a private internet provider for access. “Privatization” is the modern term to describe the process of enclosure. Think of all the social aspects of society that conservatives aim to privatize: schools, prisons, public transportation, Social Security, and pretty much every other service the government provides. There is quite litterally nothing capitalists won’t try to take out of public hands and run for their own profit. And while tangible services and benefits are their most obvious targets, a few particularly devious capitalists are attempting to privatize the intangible, even theorizing about charging you for knowledge.

Of course, this idea comes from the most insufferable man on the planet, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. At a recent infrastructure summit hosted by BlackRock (of course), Altman envisioned a future ripped right from an episode of Black Mirror.

“Fundamentally, our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens. You know, they may come from bigger or smaller models which makes them more or less expensive. They may use more or less reasoning which also makes them more or less expensive. They may be running all the time in the background trying to help you out. They may run only when you need them if you want to pay less. They may work super hard, you know, spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on a single problem, right? That’s really valuable.

But we see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.

The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go [up]. And if we don’t have enough, we either can’t sell it or the price gets really high and it kind of goes to rich people, or society makes a bunch of sort of central planning decisions that I think almost always go badly. So the best thing to me throughout all the history of capitalism is to just flood the market.”

Oh boy. Where to even start with something like that?

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While he lived the life and died the death of a glorious left-wing revolutionary, spectacle is not why I’m fond of Connolly’s political theories. And though his demise was a story fit for film, the Irish socialist spent most of his time arguing for the slow, tedious work of building socialism through material organizing. Ironically, his role in armed revolution overshadows what I believe he would consider the core of his work, explaining how to organize workers to struggle for national liberation and international socialism. Connolly’s thoughts, which greatly influenced the Russian Revolution, are nicely summarized in the 1899 essay, The Economic Basis of Politics: The Stomach, Not The Brain.

“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’.”

In my opinion, this passage is the key to not just successful socialist politics, but all politics. Both in Connolly’s time and now, too many left-wingers expect socialism to be achieved through militant rhetoric, energetic protests, and extensive explanations of why socialism is superior to capitalism. But that is not what the working class responds to. As Connolly states, the only way to build strong, effective left-wing movements is to speak to the immediate, everyday problems of the working class: their wages, their healthcare, their rent costs, and their overall quality of life. Connolly validates this claim by pointing out that successful historical revolutions centered on material conditions, while failed revolutions made the mistake of appealing to people’s idealism or their better nature. He continues:

“The American Revolution was a revolt against the action of England in throttling the infant industries of America, and came to a head with a tax upon tea – all ‘base’ material reasons; the French Revolution was the revolt of an oppressed and famished people against outworn, medieval landlordism (feudalism) and the vexatious taxes upon industry imposed by a corrupt Court; the Irish Volunteer movement was, in its anti-English aspect, a revolt of the Irish manufacturing class against the restrictions put upon their trade by England, – “Free Trade, or else” was the motto they hung up on their cannon, and when that one point was gained all the ‘patriotic enthusiasm’ of the leaders vanished; Grattan termed the Volunteers, upon whose backs he had climbed to political eminence, ‘an armed rabble’, and the whole movement collapsed as suddenly as it had arisen – the economic basis being gone the patriotism was no longer evident.”

This is not to say that common people are selfish, lazy, or unmoved by high-minded ideas about national liberation, democracy, or justice. Rather, it is to point out the undeniable fact that any political movement needs widespread support, and the best way to gain it is to show how your ideology will solve the hardship facing the average person. In other words, politicians must speak to the aches of the stomach, not the theories of the brain.

Connolly’s historical evidence for prioritizing everyday issues is bolstered by modern examples. During the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani ran on a clear platform of improving the lives of New Yorkers. He pledged to freeze the rent, make buses fast and free, and provide universal childcare. These specific policies helped voters envision how their lives would be better under a Mamdani administration than a Cuomo one. As a result, voters flocked to the democratic socialist, twice defeating disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran on praising Israel and criticizing Mamdani for not condemning protest chants that most New Yorkers neither heard of nor cared about. I also believe the lack of focus on improving the American quality of life is why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign platform of lowering housing and healthcare costs through draconian deportations was vile and nonsensical. But he did tie every one of his proposals back to addressing a real pain felt by American voters. Comparatively, the Kamala Harris campaign ran on ideas: her advisors pushed her towards ideological moderation, something that only exists in the minds of high-paid Washington insiders, and she implored voters to choose “country over party.” But voters weren’t thinking about “country” or “party.” They were thinking, “Which candidate will best help me?” So while Kamala Harris was appealing to the “patriotic enthusiasm” of “all unselfish and generous souls” with a symbolic rally at the Wisconsin birthplace of the GOP, Donald Trump was in Michigan, promising to bring down housing costs. Weeks later, Kamala Harris lost both Michigan and Wisconsin.

The same year he published The Stomach, Not The Brain, Connolly poked fun at the ridiculousness of ideas-centered politics in his satirization, Let Us Free Ireland!

Let us free Ireland! Never mind such base, carnal thoughts as concern work and wages, healthy homes, or lives unclouded by poverty.

Let us free Ireland! The rackrenting landlord; is he not also an Irishman, and wherefore should we hate him? Nay, let us not speak harshly of our brother – yea, even when he raises our rent.

Let us free Ireland! The profit-grinding capitalist, who robs us of three-fourths of the fruits of our labour, who sucks the very marrow of our bones when we are young, and then throws us out in the street, like a worn-out tool when we are grown prematurely old in his service, is he not an Irishman, and mayhap a patriot, and wherefore should we think harshly of him?

Let us free Ireland! “The land that bred and bore us.” And the landlord who makes us pay for permission to live upon it. Whoop it up for liberty!

“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?

And when you cannot find employment, and, giving up the struggle of life in despair, enter the poorhouse, the band of the nearest regiment of the Irish army will escort you to the poorhouse door to the tune of St. Patrick’s Day. Oh! It will be nice to live in those days!

Much like a 19th-century Irish peasant with no reason to fight for a decolonized nation in which their lives would still suck, modern Americans see no reason to support a politician who won’t help them afford rent, groceries, or childcare. Connolly’s words were so profound that, with only a few tweaks, we can modernize them to fit our current situation perfectly.

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

Much like an independent and united Ireland in which rent is high and food scarce, what reason does the American worker have to believe in a politician’s appeals to “democracy” or “civility,” especially when those politicians have given the American worker neither democracy nor civility? They don’t. But when politicians heed Connolly’s advice and offer solutions laser-focused on making life easier, voters support them.

Unlike the Democratic establishment, which is at an all-time low in popularity, the Democratic Socialists of America have earned significant popular support for speaking to the immediate needs of the American working class. When Zohran Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, or Melat Kiros runs for office, they don’t say, “Cast off the chains of capitalism, comrades! Glorious socialist utopia awaits!” Instead, they acknowledge the hardships of everyday life and offer practical solutions to make it better. Healthcare costs are too high, so we’re running to enact Medicare for All. Rent is too expensive. Let’s freeze it. Your boss pushes you around and makes you stay late? Here, we’ll help you organize a union. This strategy has made DSA incredibly successful, rising not just above other socialist parties but often over the Democratic establishment itself. Of the five most popular active politicians in the country, three are associated with DSA. It is also no coincidence that this strategy is working well to bring about the cause of Irish Unity. Sinn Féin, the revolutionary democratic socialist party leading the charge for a united Ireland, holds the most seats in Stormont, the parliament in the North of Ireland. This is quite an accomplishment for a party traditionally representing the Irish Catholic minority. Still, Sinn Féin is gaining popularity in the North and South of Ireland by running on housing, workers’ rights, and other working-class issues. While Connolly rightfully mocked the Irish nationalist capitalists who thought they could bring a free Ireland through appealing to patriotism alone, Sinn Féin is validating his theory that working to improve the living experience is the path to the high-minded and righteous goal of a united island free from colonial rule.

No matter what cause we struggle for, ruthless dedication to improving the material well-being of the average American is the path to it.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Tiocfaidh ár lá

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In Solidarity — Joe