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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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To the disappointment of the Democratic Socialists of America, Francesca Hong lost her race in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary. Much like Abdul El-Sayed, Hong was seen as a test of the progressive left’s capacity to win statewide elections in battleground states. Also like Abdul El-Sayed, the polls were way off. Pollsters accurately predicted Hong’s vote share at around 39%, and she received 40%. What was misjudged was support for David Crowley. The race began with a crowded centrist field vying for the right to challenge Hong, the unchallenged progressive torchbearer. Lackluster support and scandals forced many of the centrist candidates out, including Crowley. After Mandela Barnes, the leading establishment pick, dropped out after personal allegations, outgoing Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers resurrected Crowley and anointed him as his successor. The pair spent the last two weeks of the race joined at the hip. Beloved by Wisconsin Democrats (Evers’ favorability is a towering 85%), Evers hammered Hong on her perceived weakness in general-election electability. When asked if Francesca Hong could defeat Republican Tom Tiffany, Evers was blunt: “Probably not.” Electability is a top concern for Wisconsin Democrats. The state is still haunted by the disastrous austerity of Republican Governor Scott Walker, who used Wisconsin as a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation agenda. From 2011 to 2019, Walker cut education spending, stripped public-sector workers of bargaining rights, rejected Obamacare expansions, and gave large tax breaks to corporations that promised jobs that never came. Most disturbingly, Walker and the GOP legislature tried to disempower the incoming Democrat Tony Evers during the final weeks of his term. Much of the Trump Administration’s Project 2025 program was tested in Wisconsin. And Wisconsinites hated it. To Hong’s detriment, Evers and Crowley’s electability strategy worked. Over one third of Democratic primary voters said Evers’ endorsement drove them to support Crowley, giving him just enough to eke out a half-point victory.

As expected, the media and conservative Democrats seized on Hong’s defeat to announce victory on par with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The New York Times declared the loss “stunning” and said it “shows the left’s limits.” But they said the exact same thing about Abdul El Sayed’s victory, so we all see what’s happening here. Politico, ever eager to defend the entrenched powers of the status quo, declared, "The Socialist Fever Breaks.”

The naysayers are overplaying their hand. Four years ago, there was no socialist caucus in the Wisconsin legislature. In less than one presidential term, Wisconsin socialists went from nothing to coming within .5% of winning the governor’s office. Stepping back from the national focus, DSA endorsed twenty candidates who stood for election on August 11th. Fifteen won. “Limited” is not the word I would use to characterize a 75% success rate. Outside DSA, the broader progressive left also had a strong showing last Tuesday. Running on abolishing ICE, Luke Bronin unseated incumbent Connecticut Democrat John Larson, who ran on the centrist alternative of reforming ICE. Right next door to Wisconsin, Bernie-backed Peggy Flanagan blew out her opponent by 20-points. Afterward, Flanagan immediately called to replace Chuck Schumer.

Hong’s loss was disappointing. But overall, the insurgent war against the Democratic establishment wages on. DSA continues gaining seats and members, adding to our strength and putting more pressure on complacent liberal politicians. This rising is sometimes referred to as the “Democratic Tea Party,” but that comparison doesn’t fit. The Tea Party was driven by conservative billionaires pushing far-right conservatism through reactionary media figures. The right insurgency was a top-down political movement, while DSA and the progressive left are building from the ground up. This is why, as states, the left insurgency of 2026 has already outperformed the ultra-rightist movement of the 2010s.

“Contrary to the media’s lazy comparisons to the Tea Party — primaries of which saw defeats of just four House members in 2010 — the current cycle has already seen primary defeats of ten House members. That’s the most in a non-redistricting year since 1970, with more primaries yet to come.” — The Rebels Already Won

Though we are not without defeats, the left is marching strong. There are only two DSA members seated in the current Congress. Five more have won primaries in comfortable Democratic districts, ensuring at least seven DSA members will be seated in the next Congress. If Oliver Larkin wins his primary against Jared Moskowitz, it sets up the potential to quadruple DSA’s presence in the House of Representatives. These Congresspeople will be supported by the soft and hard power of hundreds of other socialists in local and state office, as well as the D.C. mayorship of Janeese Lewis George and the ever-expanding cultural power of the Islamic Soviet People’s Republican Caliphate of Mamdanistan (formerly “New York City”). Include our fellow travelers, and there are numerous non-DSA progressives such as Brad Lander and Analilia Mejia who bring us closer to our goals of ending arms shipments to Israel and guaranteeing healthcare to every American. No amount of bad-faith headlines can change this reality.

Francesca Hong’s hard-fought defeat was heartbreaking for many on the left. Specifically those in DSA. As with any political tendency, the blame game began almost immediately. Some were extremely critical of Hong, blaming her for not running television ads or failing to clearly disavow her past tweets. Others placed the blame on fellow socialists, accusing Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and national DSA for not endorsing in the race. There are countless factors that determine an outcome, and there’s no one reason why Hong lost. Yes, her comms strategy was subpar, and she should’ve said, “No, I don’t want to cancel Thanksgiving” when asked the first time. This was one of many campaign missteps, which Hong recognized. Had Hong won, she planned a post-primary staff overhaul to bring in much-needed experience for the general election. There is always frustration when high-profile endorsements don’t appear, but I’m unsure Hong sought them. As a member of DSA’s National Electoral Commission, I can confirm Hong did not seek National DSA’s endorsement, likely because she didn’t want the national attention on her race. She wasn’t the first DSA member or adjacent politician to make this choice, and she won’t be the last. Furthermore, like leftists organizations, leftist politicians have finite resources. An AOC or Bernie endorsement might have tipped the scales for Hong, but that would have meant less money and time to support Abdul El-Sayed. As the razor-thin margin of his race shows, those resources were necessary. This isn’t to say the biggest progressives were right to not endorse. Rather, there are a myriad of factors (including the candidate’s desire for endorsement) that outside observers have no way of knowing. I think it’s much better for the left to focus on improving things we can confirm went wrong, rather than getting very angry about what we can only guess happened.

This is a long-winded way of saying that there is no single reason why Francesca Hong lost. And anyone telling you something is The Reason is likely venting outrage at a person, group, or phenomenon they already disliked. The real reason Hong lost is that, well, she lost. The establishment made a compelling case against our candidate. They had more money to spend, and the benefit of a highly popular governor who offered a solution to Hong’s perceived weakness. Francesca Hong did not "flop." Her loss was not "stunning." She was not “betrayed.” She was a long-shot candidate who did exceptionally well given her starting position and the establishment's overarching power. Like the left, Francesca Hong fought hard, lost, and will be back stronger.

I’m not going to tell you this was a moral victory. I hate moral victories. If your campaign lost and didn’t build any lasting infrastructure or relationships for further organizing, then it was a failure. Obviously we want to win as much as possible. But victory is not the only means of progress. Francesca Hong’s campaign involved multiple Wisconsin DSA chapters, which grew in strength, size, and skill. The prioritization of organization building over individual candidates is what separates DSA from less effective leftists and enables our movement to continue despite depressing defeats. Americans were recruited to the socialist cause, trained to organize, and enlisted in an organization. Now, that capacity can be directed to other campaigns, electoral and otherwise, and continue to advocate for socialism in every avenue of politics. Hong herself greatly increased her name recognition, setting herself up for future campaigns. Now, the Democratic centrists face a test. If David Crowley loses in November, then Wisconsin voters might be a little more willing to tap the socialist next time around.

Francesca Hong is a fighter. And as any experienced pugilist will tell you, sometimes a gut punch knocks you down. It takes resilience, courage, and a belief in your cause to get back up and keep fighting. If you think the establishment’s weaknesses and the DSA’s strength will last forever, I’ve got some bad news for you. It won’t. This fight will be long, hard, and likely continue long after most of us are gone. The good news is, we’re the insurgency. Every victory, no matter how small, adds to our movement. Francesca Hong and DSA came up short. We don’t need to make excuses or turn on each other. It was a valuable effort that provides lessons, infrastructure, and energy for DSA’s surging movements.

On to the next.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

Last Sunday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC’s This Week. As tends to happen whenever the New York congresswoman appears on a screen, everyone lost their goddamn minds. Something about this woman makes people from across the political spectrum throw context, rationality, listening skills, and the most fundamental skills of human interaction out the window. You either must believe she’s the next Martin Luther King Jr., or the next Nancy Pelosi who is secretly trying to trick you into sending weapons to Israel. And if you try to hold a position inbetween those, people get furious.

Insanity spiked when AOC was asked about Francesca Hong’s past tweets about “canceling Thanksgiving” and “abolishing prisons and police.” AOC responded by quoting New York councilman Chi Ossé, who laughed off his own absurd tweets by saying “Woke 1 was crazyyy.”

Jonathan Karl: What do you make of those controversial statements? I’m sure you’ve seen the Thanksgiving dust-up. She says she doesn’t still believe that, but the “abolish prisons, abolish police” positions, which have also been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who’ve won, how do you get around that?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Those are not positions that are supported by... I think a lot of these races, even right now, have a tendency to be nationalized, but these races are ultimately local — all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances for her election.

Jonathan Karl: Yeah, she’s moved away from a lot of it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Right, she’s moved away from it. I have a local city councilman who has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’

Jonathan Karl: ‘Woke one was crazy.’ Okay, that’s interesting. But did the movement go too far with some of those positions? You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I think during that time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. We saw some of the highest unemployment rates because of those shutdowns. I think the doors were really open to entertaining any and every policy that might get us to a better place. And I actually think the discussions we had in that time were quite fruitful. I think when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way we talked about bringing crime down back then. I think we all share the goal of having as low a crime rate as possible. During lockdown, of course, the rhetoric of that time isn’t rhetoric we’d use today. And I’m grateful these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they’re campaigning on in this moment.

Because “Woke 1” is a nonsensical term born from too-online Twitter culture, everyone got very mad at AOC based on their specific definition of “Woke 1,” which was not AOC’s definition of “Woke 1,” because she was quoting this stupid meme born from this stupid reference about Chi Ossé's stupid tweets.

The more reactionary elements of independent media accused AOC of making light of the 2020-era, which they consider “a deeply authoritarian, mob-driven, sinister, coercive, and bloodthirsty" movement that “sought to destroy anyone and everyone who did not immediately submit to and recite all of its new jargon and dictates.” Another conservative podcast host (you’ll notice a trend that the people most mad at AOC speak into microphones for a living) demanded that AOC apologize for her role in driving wokeness, which he called “the worst movement in modern American history,” marked by “mass-looting and rioting” and the “chemical castration of little kids.” In my opinion, the resurgence of fascism and the Republican Party’s attempt to resegregate the country were worse than “Woke 1.” (Which again, isn’t a real thing.) But that’s just me.

AOC was also criticized from the left, but for different reasons. Some commenters accused AOC of making light of the horrendous police murder of Black Americans such as George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor. This critique didn’t come close to the absurdity of the reactionary freakout. (By nature, it never will.) But what these critics missed was that AOC wasn’t laughing off the righteous outrage against police brutality, or any of the protestors. I sound like a broken record here, but when Ocasio-Cortez mentioned “Woke 1,” she was referring to a stupid Twitter term that brushed off stupid things leftists said on Twitter, during a conversation about stupid things leftists said on Twitter, when asked about the stupid things Francesca Hong said on Twitter. She was talking about Tweets, because she was asked about Tweets. Then, when the interviewer asked her about policy, she called many of the 2020-era discussions around policing “fruitful” and admitted the rhetoric of the late Trump-1/early Biden years is different from the message socialist candidates are running on.

This was obvious if you watched the interview. But, as is common with sufferers of AOC Derangement Syndrome, many leftists simply imagined AOC laughing at Black Lives Matter protestors, drove themselves into a rage, and raced to the nearest keyboard to make very serious allegations against the congresswoman for things they imagined she said, but never actually said.

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Earlier this year, I defended the Democratic Socialists of America’s electoral strategy in Left Voice, an ultra-left publication that argues socialists must reject all cooperation with bourgeois parties such as the Democrats. I defended DSA’s strategy of competing on the Democratic Party ballot line by showing how it led to DSA’s rapid rise and made it the torchbearer of socialism within the United States. The editors must have felt my argument was strong, as they held my essay for months until they could publish a same-day rebuttal. In their response, they highlighted Kshama Sawant, an independent socialist of the Trotskyist tendency, as proof that the left can build electoral power while abstaining from the Democratic Party ballot line and remaining ideologically “pure.” They wrote:

“Long before AOC and Mamdani used the Democratic primaries to win their elections, and two years before Sanders chose to run as a so-called democratic socialist, independent socialist candidate Kshama Sawant won a seat on the Seattle City Council. This victory provided her and her tiny party of fewer than 300 members a national platform to promote socialist ideas and advocate for a national $15 minimum wage, which Sawant spearheaded in Seattle. Imagine what could be accomplished with 100,000 dedicated members. Unfortunately, Sawant’s party, Socialist Alternative, which had grown dramatically thanks to her victory, ultimately undermined its own strategy by endorsing Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. This led to a mass exodus of members and contributed to the party’s eventual decline. Nevertheless, her victory showed that independent socialist campaigns can not only win but can also serve as a banner for socialist ideas, even in the United States.”

The Left Voice thesis was recently put to the test. Last week, Kshama Sawant ran for Congress in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, a left-wing enclave that voted for Kamala Harris by 41 points in 2024. This presidential margin is the exact same as Michigan’s 13th district, where DSA member Donavan McKinney unseated establishment incumbent Shri Thanedar just last week. The incumbent in Washington’s 9th, Adam Smith, is a 30-year Do Nothing Democrat, just like Dianna DeGette, who was recently defeated by DSA member Melat Kiros. Washington’s 9th is the exact type of district where DSA and progressive candidates have been taking the fight to the corporate establishment. It has a progressive electorate, is represented by an out-of-touch Democrat, and the only political activity is the same duopoly figures running again and again, offering voters no change, only the status quo they despise. Besides Sawant, participants in this race included Republican Doug Basler, who has run six times, and Democrat Melissa Chaudhry, who fell to Smith in 2024. To give Sawant even more of an advantage, this district includes Seattle, which elected socialist mayor Katie Wilson just nine months ago. As this is the most favorable environment to insurgent socialist challengers in a generation, if Kshama Sawant’s political project was going to succeed anywhere, this was her chance.

Instead, Kshama Sawant got obliterated. She didn’t lose by a hair, nor was this a result that showed she came close and would be back stronger next cycle. With over 95% of the votes reported, Kshama Sawant sits in a distant third, about seven thousand votes shy of making it through the runoff and into the November general election.1 Currently, fourth-place Melissa Chaudhry is closer to overtaking Sawant than Sawant is to overtaking Basler. To make matters worse, Sawant’s campaign wasn’t the rag-tag, bootstrapped operation that we typically see from insurgent socialists. Sawant reported $607,493 in campaign spending, meaning she outspent Republican Doug Basler by over six-to-one and still lost to him. The Sawant campaign spent $25.33 per vote, the highest for any candidate in the race. Neither AIPAC, crypto, or any other well-funded lobby saw Sawant as a threat to their interests. The only registered PAC that spent on the race was Sawant’s Revolutionary Change PAC, which raised $5,600 through ActBlue and spent it on billboards.

Typically, when insurgent leftists challenge the Democratic and Republican establishment, we see the opposite. The challenger has a lower cost per vote, as their campaigns are driven by grassroots volunteers who easily win over the electorate with a working-class message that resonates with the voters. I’m not surprised Adam Smith has a high cost-per-vote, as he’s flush with establishment cash. The fact that Kshama Sawant had to spend more than Smith to receive substantially fewer votes is a sign that the candidate and her message were a failure. As if that weren’t disappointing enough, outspending a Republican by over 600% and still losing in a dark blue district that just elected a socialist mayor is a disaster for a leftist campaign. Evidently, the independent socialist model of electoralism, what Left Voice referred to as “revolutionary parlimentaryism,” is a dead end.

Part of what leads Sawant’s style of socialism to perpetual failure is its obsessive compulsion with tearing down more successful socialist projects, particularly DSA. This isn’t new. Sawant is a self-described revolutionary Trotskyist. Her theory that “ideological purity” will lead to communist revolution has been attempted for over a century, dating back to the split in the international communist movement between Stalin and Trotsky in the late 1920s. In the U.S., the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party USA expelled Trotsky supporters, who, led by Max Shachtman, bounced between Trotskyist splinter groups, fighting, bickering, and breaking with one another over who was the most “pure” socialist. While Leon Trotsky had valid critiques of Stalinism, his ideological followers forgot you’re actually supposed to do things, not just endlessly criticize other socialists for doing things. This compulsive pursuit of ideological purity remains a core component of Trotskyist, ultra-leftist, and radical liberal politics to this day. As the editors of Left Voice reminded us, Sawant was a member of the ultra-left Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative, which splintered over the irrelevant question of endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2016. And they’re not the only ones. One of the largest active Trotskyist groups, the Party for Socialism & Liberation, also just underwent another split.2 In a scathing resignation letter, the party’s top propagandist accused PSL leadership of “bastardizing Leninism,” along with more sensationalist claims outsiders have no way of validating. This strain of ultra-leftism, which seeks ideological purity over effective political action, is so sectarian that Sawant wasn’t even the only “revolutionary Trotskyist” in the Washington 9th race; Jacob Perasso ran as a revolutionary socialist for the Socialist Workers Party, one of the many aforementioned splinter groups.

The central message of Kshama Sawant’s campaign was that she was the most “pure” socialist. For every criticism Sawant leveled against her opponent Adam Smith, she also threw one at Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and DSA. Bizarrely, Sawant still asked for an endorsement of Seattle DSA. But rather than show up to the endorsement meeting and argue for their support, she left Washington to attend a California Single Payer rally hosted by Green Party gubernatorial candidate Butch Ware. Before a crowd of maybe two dozen people, Sawant blamed Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal as the reason America doesn’t have Medicare for All. As I said, literally the only thing Sawant and her allies can do is criticize and complain. Shockingly, “AOC bad” isn’t a compelling electoral message. Who knew.

Sawant is the most extreme version of this leftist purism. But the tendency is all too common. Sawant has found a home in the Green Party, which serves as a loose collection of various socialists, environmentalists, radical liberals, and left-wingers that oppose running on the Democratic Party ballot line. As I said in my response to Caitlin Johnstone, there’s nothing wrong with a leftist not wanting to associate with Democrats. If you think you can win gains for the working class in a different way, you have my full support! The problem is the pursuit of purity does not deliver gains for workers. Debates about “real socialism” are obscure pursuits of the intelligentsia, not persuasive programs that attract support and build sustainable coalitions by fixing the problems created by capitalism, with the goal of replacing it.

Unable to offer Americans solutions to their ills, the only thing Trotskyists, ultra-leftists, and radical liberals can do is endlessly shit-talk more effective leftists as sellouts, sheepdogs, reformists, and other insults you can probably find in the comment section of this article. As practical socialists succeed, the purists are increasingly threatened, so their attacks grow increasingly vitriolic as they stray further and further from reality, driving them to despise fellow leftists.

During the Cold War, Trotskyists were so high on themselves that they believed their own rhetoric. Misbelieving that the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist allies were the reason their ultra-leftism failed, Trotskyists collaborated with the U.S. government to undermine the U.S.S.R. On the eve of World War II, Trotsky himself agreed to testify before the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee, and many Trotskyists were the founding fathers of neoconservatism. In the early 1970s, followers of the aforementioned Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman were so convinced about the need to stop “Stalinism” that they steered the Socialist Party, the iconic vehicle of Eugene Debs, to support Richard Nixon and American imperialism in Vietnam. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between historic ultra-leftism and its modern form. As DSA’s popularity grows, Green Party figures are increasingly sympathetic to fascists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. The delusion is so strong that some have begun whitewashing the genocidal crimes of Donald Trump, saying he is a preferable anti-imperialist force than Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There’s much to critique about the New York congresswoman’s record. But if you’re arguing the President who cut off fuel from Cuba, bombed Iran, and colonized Venezuela is lefitstly* better for the Global South than a House member who strongly opposed those things, you’ve lost the plot.

I’m not surprised Kshama Sawant’s candidacy went down in flames. Nor am I surprised about the excuses the candidate and her sycophants have offered. In her post-election statement, the revolutionary socialist gave herself a participation trophy by stating her campaign was “by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for U.S. Congress,” an objective lie given multiple Marxists have been elected to Congress. As expected, Sawant concluded her campaign by attacking DSA and further undercutting her own political theory.

“Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers. The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.”

Here, Sawant and I are in total agreement. Palestine is being cleansed. The planet is burning. Capital is accruing more and more wealth, solidifying its control over everything and anything. Every minute and month the left is out of power, more people die, and the possibility of a better world grows narrower. Which is why it’s a waste of resources, time, and political energy to keep running vanity candidates who can’t even beat historically unpopular Republicans in a socialist-voting district despite having a six-to-one funding advantage. Say what you will about DSA, but we have a plan to cut off arms to Israel. Seize power, throw sand in the gears, end weapons sales, and establish an arms embargo. It will be difficult, but it’s a plan, and we’re working towards it. After last week’s election, DSA will have seven members in Congress. Not enough to end the genocide, but it’s a start. Alternatively, I genuinely could not tell you how Kshama Sawant or any other ultra-leftist plans to stop the genocide. As far as I can tell, it seems to be:

Step 1: Get mad at DSA

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Free Palestine/Global Communist Revolution

Aside from its inability to win elections, one problem with ideological purism is that it doesn’t exist. There is no “pure” socialist party, because there is no “pure” socialist, because there is no “pure” human being. Everyone is subjected to countervailing forces that push us to violate our values every day. The phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is not an excuse, but an analysis that simply existing in the modern world forces us to sacrifice our egalitarian values. The clothes we wear, the food we buy, and the cars we drive are produced through exploited labor, just as we ourselves have our labor exploited for others’ profit. If your goal is to achieve a level of self-anointed godliness as the One True Socialist, then you’re in the wrong place. Organized religion would be a better fit than politics.

As I always do, I must reiterate that I’m not saying DSA’s way is the only way to do socialism. There are many avenues to collective power, both within and outside the electoral arena. But as Kshama Sawant’s loss, and the inability of ultra-leftists like her to muster any concrete political activity over the last century shows, the pursuit of ideological purity and stubborn rejection of effective politics shepherds the left into a dead end, where we are unable to save Gaza, the climate, or ourselves.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

But the night was not without disappointment. Cori Bush, Kyle Blomquist, Dr. Nila Devanath, and Hartzell Gray came up short. The toughest loss was Bush’s race, where she fell to Wesley Bell by over twenty points. For all Bell’s faults, he is popular with his constituents, which I underrated. A sizeable money advantage helped him remind his constituents why they liked him, and the election-season progressive veneer was enough to coast to a comfortable victory.

My disappointments aside, it was a fantastic night for the progressive left. But you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the media. The New York Times admitted the left beat the establishment, but said the election “showed our limits.” I can only speak for myself, but I feel victorious, not limited. They also claimed DSA had a “mixed night,” pointing to victories for El-Sayed, Rabhi, Lawrence, and McKinney, and the loss for Bush. Putting aside that El-Sayed and Lawrence aren’t DSA (it’s a group, not a vibe), four victories and a sole loss is not “mixed.” It’s a strong showing with an unfortunate defeat. Politico jumped into the fray, announcing early on Wednesday morning that “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.”

This is pure cope. The polling did have El-Sayed winning by double digits, and the race was much tighter than expected. But if you take away those polls, and the pre-election over-confidence they instilled in leftists such as myself, the Michigan race shows the undeniable conclusion strongly that Democratic voters prefer progressive candidates over establishment ones. The final result was close. But the resource expenditure was not. Combining outside spending (lobbyist groups, PACs, etc.) and money raised by the campaign, Abdul El-Sayed spent a total of $15.5 million. He won 741,000 votes, meaning he spent about $21 per vote. Comparatively, Haley Stevens’s war chest exceeded $72 million. Having won 726,000 votes, Stevens spent a jaw-dropping $99 per vote. Stevens also had the full-throated support of the Democratic establishment and its media allies. She was hand-picked to run by Schumer and was endorsed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, making her the second establishment-chosen Senatorial candidate rejected by Democratic voters this cycle.

The media threw everything it had at El-Sayed, calling him a sexist terrorist, because calling a Muslim a #notallmen terrorist just doesn’t do it anymore. Politico, a self-described Zionist publication, tried to whip up an eleventh-hour scandal after audio leaked of El-Sayed calling John Fetterman an ogre. Which is pretty accurate and mild given Fetterman’s unprecedented assholery. It wasn’t enough. The Democratic primary voters chose El-Sayed. As more data comes in, it looks like Republican votes were a source of Stevens’ late-night comeback. Michigan has open primaries, so getting Republican votes is all fair and good. But those claiming this election shows Abdul El-Sayed’s general election chances are slim, or that the progressive message doesn’t work outside deep blue districts, are lying to themselves. Take away Haley Stevens’ $30 million AIPAC donation (the largest AIPAC spend this cycle), and El-Sayed beats her by thirty points. I also don’t see how a close primary is a sign of El-Sayed’s doom. Stevens’ largest base of support was Black Detroiters, who are sure to come out big for the Democratic nominee. Is El-Sayed a shoo-in? Absolutely not. A Michigan Senate seat is never a given, especially when AIPAC has already announced it will be backing Republican Mike Rodgers in the general. The work is far from done. But Michiganders were clear: they’d rather fight with the progressive candidate they believe in than roll the dice with another establishment fence rider.

Don’t listen to the media and our sectarian opponents who try to dampen the left’s excitement. They can cope and seethe all they want. Already they’re crunching the numbers in a million different ways to find some stat that shows that their losses are actually victories. What they can’t deny is that something big is happening in the United States of America. Ever since Bernie Sanders stepped on stage to announce his 2016 presidential run, Americans have grown more favorable to socialism and progressivism and less favorable to the political status quo. AOC won in 2018, DSA’s growth has skyrocketed, Zohran Mamdani is the most popular elected politician in the country, public opinion of Israel is in the toilet, and huge majorities of Americans are looking for systemic change. Not just in the way politicians talk about Hope and Change, but in the actual sense. They express it in different forms, and they don’t always gravitate to the causes or candidates I champion. But what cannot be denied is that Americans have been radicalized over the last decade. “Radical” does not mean bomb thrower. It means to change at the core, to uproot and regrow. That is what Americans want, and the left is the only coherent political force offering it to them.

So, the media tries to delegitimize the progressive and socialist movements with excuses: “It was just one race.” “Okay, you can only win in deep blue districts.” “You won outside a deep blue district, but only because you’re good at Instagram.” “Those wins don’t count because you’re white gentrifiers.” “Sure, you won a swing state primary against all odds, but you didn’t win by enough, so that means you lost.” Excuses, excuses, excuses, as we grow bigger, better, and stronger. As the left wins, the contradictions within the Democratic Party and the larger political system expose themselves. These contradictions are what people hate about politicians. Simply by forcing them into the arena, we force them to show themselves. And people don’t like what they see.

This isn’t to encourage the left to get overconfident. We do not have a mandate for socialism, or even for the Working Families Party platform as a whole. What we have is the answers to Americans’ problems, which the bipartisan establishment told them aren’t real. Keep addressing working class issues, and the working class will keep rewarding us.

Onwards. We have a world to win.

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In Solidarity — Joe

Here are the key races to watch, and what their results will mean for the future of American politics.

Abdul El-Sayed, MI-U.S. Senate

The most watched race of this cycle, Abdul El-Sayed has a chance to disprove the narratives about who is “electable.” The Michigan Senate Democratic Primary gave voters the full array of politics represented within the Democratic Party. None are surprised that Haley “Israel comes to me in my dreams” Stevens was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate for the Senate, and he put his thumb on the scale for her throughout the contest. El-Sayed isn’t a socialist, but his advocacy for Medicare for All and an end to the Gaza genocide puts him in the progressive lane. Mallory McMorrow tried to triangulate between the two as the “responsible progressive.” But neither the Zionist center nor the progressive left wants half measures, which led to McMorrow’s early exit.

Multiple polls have shown El-Sayed with a double-digit lead over Stevens. But you never know. Over $60 million in dark money and AIPAC money has carried Stevens to the finish line, raising serious concerns about her electability. After all, if you can only win with billionaire money, it’s a sign that your politics and message aren’t resonating on their own. Stevens has also resorted to outright bigotry to defeat El-Sayed. The majority of her cash has been used to portray the Muslim-American doctor as an antisemite, misogynist, and most confusingly, anti-Black.

The stakes of the race could not be more evident. On one side is a populist insurgent backed by grassroots energy running on leftist policies popular with the American public and Democratic electorate. On the other side is a Chuck Schumer-chosen Zionist who has doubled down on Israel and seems to only offer the same hollow platitudes that voters have tired of. For years, the establishment has defended its milquetoast conservative centrism as the only way to win in a swing state such as Michigan. (Trump won Michigan by two points in 2024.) We won’t know the veracity of this campaign until after the November general election. But what we know after the primary is whether swing-state Democratic voters, the most conservative of the Democratic coalition, will choose the progressive or moderate arguments. If Stevens can’t even win a primary amongst a conservative voting group, it’s lights out for the establishment’s “electability argument.” After all, if you can’t win an election, you’re not electable!

This race also has larger implications, specifically for 2028. How Abdul El-Sayed performs will be a weathervane for the national mood. If Trump-voting states elect an Egyptian, Muslim doctor who advocates for Medicare For All, then I think it’s much more likely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president. Franchesca Hong’s August 11th primary for Wisconsin Governor will give us more data on this point. If a self-described socialist can win statewide where Kamala Harris lost, it’s hard to argue an AOC run wouldn’t have a serious chance of success.

Cori Bush, MO-1, National DSA-endorsed

Cori Bush is one of the most underrated figures in leftist politics. From healing injured protestors during the Ferguson Uprising to winning an eviction moratorium by sleeping on the Capitol steps, Bush has consistently put her body on the line to help those in need. This race is unique, as it is a rematch of the 2024 matchup that unseated Bush from Congress. Back then, Wesley Bell’s campaign received significant AIPAC backing, making the 2024 MO-1 primary the second most expensive primary in American history. (The first was George Latimer’s defeat of DSA-endorsed Jamaal Bowman, which also took place in 2024.)

This time, Wesley Bell is backed by AIPAC and the Democratic establishment, while Bush is carrying the DSA torch. While the race hasn’t reached last cycle’s $9 million price tag, the same dynamic is at play. Cori Bush raised $1.3 million, compared to Bell’s $3.6 million. Outside spending has, predictably, come in heavy for Bell. AIPAC’s shell group The United Democracy Project has spent $2.5 million for the incumbent, and New Democrat Majority PAC, the spending arm of Blue Wave consulting group, has spent another million.

In my view, this race is a toss-up. There’s not a lot of polling for Missouri’s 1st. The only reputable poll I’ve seen has Bell leading over Bush, 44% to 40%. That said, the poll has a 5.4% margin of error, Bush’s favorability is higher than Bell’s, and Bell’s commitments to ICE and Israel are weighing him down. Like the Michigan Senate primary, there’s little argument that the left candidate has the more popular ideas and is in line with the voting base. As I wrote last week, this race shows that the left has won in The Marketplace of Ideas™️. All polling indicates voters prefer Bush’s policies, but whether we can overcome the establishment’s entrenched political advantage and their Scrooge McDuck-level coffer is another question.

Cori Bush made a bold statement during her 2024 concession speech in which she was coming to tear down AIPAC’s kingdom. That kingdom has high walls, a vast treasury, and soldiers ideologically committed to keeping Israel-critics such as Bush out of Congress, no matter the costs. This election will give us good data on AIPAC’s strength in the near future.

Donavan McKinney, MI-13, National DSA-endorsed

I got to hang out with Donavan a bit while he was in Denver to support Melat Kiros’s campaign. Truly a good dude. My personal fondness aside, McKinney is a stalwart labor champion who could greatly boost DSA’s profile if elected to Congress. A former union organizer with the Service Employees International Union, McKinney is backed by nearly every union in the race. Most crucially, the United Auto Workers, who represent Michigan’s iconic auto industry workers. I want McKinney to win for numerous reasons. Chief among them, I despise how the media talks about unions and labor as the “white working class.” The typical union worker isn’t a socially conservative coal miner with a MAGA sticker on his lunch box. Black people are the most unionized racial group, and it’s time to start giving Black labor the respect it deserves. I think a Black labor organizer who can eloquently speak about what labor actually is, and not the caricature it’s been turned into, is powerful in more ways than one.

The race for Michigan’s 13th is a bit weird. The incumbent, Shri Thanedar, made billions in the pharmaceutical industry before buying his way into Congress in 2023. He’s what you expect from a pharmaceutical capitalist. His early campaign was plagued by scandals involving his lab’s abuse and abandonment of test animals. A big fan of Israel, Thanedar occupies the peculiar #epicbacon tech bro personality, not unlike Elon Musk, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, or the worst guy from high school you still follow on Instagram.

As expected, Thanedar is strongly backed by Democratic leadership. House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar all endorsed Thanedar’s re-election. Usually, this means McKinney would be on his own. But in an unusual move, many House Democrats broke with leadership to endorse McKinney. He received extensive support from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and for good reason. The district is majority-black, so I’m not surprised to see Black representatives back a working-class Black man over a billionaire conman. This is the toughest primary Thanedar has faced, and the flood of endorsements to McKinney shows he’s weak and almost friendless. That said, Democratic leadership is a powerful force, and Thanedar recently received $2 million in crypto lobby donations, on top of his personal expenditures.

If Thanedar’s outsized spending helps him hang on, it will be a victory for Hakeem Jeffries. But if McKinney topples Jeffries’s personal pick, it would be another feather in the cap of DSA and Bernie Sanders, whose endorsees have, so far, cut through Democratic leadership’s picks like a hot knife through butter.

While not every progressive candidate I like is DSA-endorsed, DSA is the vanguard of a larger progressive, anti-establishment movement. The Democratic Socialists of America have become a boogeyman for both the right and center, and for good reason. We’ve chalked up thirty-eight wins this year already, defeating some of the Democratic establishment’s strongest soldiers. House Hispanic Caucus leader Adriano Espaillat fell to Darlializa Avila Chevalier, and 30-year-incumbent Dianna DeGette was ousted by Melat Kiros. While the names mentioned above have gotten the most attention, DSA’s model works because the so-called Big Names are supported by the Little Names. Not just in endorsements and cross-promotion, but in the continuous work of building hard political power and soft cultural power. This is why DSA’s biggest names, such as presidential contender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are endorsing DSA candidates for New York state assembly. Every victory amplifies the others, accruing power, influence, and popularity from the ground up.

For federal races, local DSA chapters have endorsed Hartzell Gray III (MO-4), Kyle Blomquist (MI-1), and Dr. Nila Devanath (VA-02). Gray has a significant challenge. He’s taking on incumbent Jeanette Cass in a district racially gerrymandered moments after the Supreme Court repealed key parts of the Voting Rights Act (which was unconstitutional, by the way). The district’s demarcation line is now Troost Avenue, the historic dividing line between White and Black communities in Kansas City. Much like Oliver Larkin running in recently-redistricted Florida, this change will serve its purpose of aiding the more conservative candidate in both the Democratic primary and the general election.

Kyle Blomquist is running for Michigan’s 1st district in a situation similar to the one El-Sayed faced a few months ago. Blomquist is in a three-way race against two more conservative opponents. The more effective opponent is Callie Barr, who is endorsed by Pete Buttigieg and has led the fundraising efforts, over quadrupling Blomquist’s intake. Gray’s predicament is common among other DSA and progressive insurgent candidates. He faces a visibility issue, and this election will be a stress test of how effective the progressive movement is at generating attention to lesser-known races.

DSA’s only endorsed candidate in Virginia is Dr. Nila Devanath, a physician and lawyer who is centering family wellbeing in her campaign for Virginia’s 2nd seat. In addition to Medicare for All, she’s running on ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, earning her the endorsement of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Currently, Devanath is behind the frontrunner, Elaine Luria. Luria held the Virginia 2nd seat before being ousted by the current incumbent, Republican Jen Kiggans. Luria is a good example of how conservative Democrats’ pleas for “electability” are really just a shell to protect their conservative ideology. We know Luria isn’t the most electable, because she already lost this exact district to this exact Republican! Still, the establishment has lined up behind her. All the Chuck Schumer identity groups (Emily’s List, Vote Vets) are supporting her, as are conservative Democrats such as Jason Crow. Luria has raised a whopping $4.7 million so far, drowning Devanath’s $286,000. I sound like a broken record, but, like every other DSA candidate on the ballot, Dr. Nila Devanath is in the people vs. money dynamic that runs through almost every Democratic primary this cycle.

Returning to Michigan, DSA has another opportunity to pick up a crucial mayor’s seat. Yousef Rabhi is running for Mayor of Ann Arbor, with a strong lead headed into election day. The Democratic incumbent, Christopher Taylor, is backed by Gretchen Whitmer and Elissa Slotkin. But Rabhi’s affordability campaign, which is backed by Bernie Sanders and Abdul El-Sayed, has given him the edge. It’s hard not to look at Rabhi’s campaign and see Ann Arbor voters’ eyes tempted by the glimmer of Mamdanistan. In addition to hard power, DSA’s continued success is giving us soft power. The cultural jubilation under Mamdani’s leadership is now the envy of many Democratic voters, and they seem to be leaning towards candidates who are singing Mamdani’s tune. Yousef Rabhi’s election will give us good data on how far Mamdani’s light is shining.

These are not the only DSA candidates I’m excited about. Nor are they the only impactful races I’ve got my eye on. It’s a sign of the left’s success that there are simply too many DSA-endorsed and progressive candidates for me to cover them all.

Whatever the results may be, three things are for certain. First, the left has the Democratic establishment fighting off the back foot. Democratic donors and interest groups are spending heavily to protect unpopular incumbents, and even a few challengers. This is not to say the left’s challenge is impervious. The battle for public opinion enables us to fight the political battles. After the Citizens United decision and the Democratic establishment’s abandonment of campaign finance reform, conservative Democrats are flush with corporate PAC and wealthy donor money. Money and power, not popularity, is the left’s biggest obstacle.

Second, there’s going to be the mother of all establishment-media overreaction. If DSA candidates perform well, defeated fundraisers and operatives will run to Politico and The New York Times to call their own voters antisemitic. If DSA stumbles, they’ll run to Politico and The New York Times to say our previous victories were a red mirage. (I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these response articles are pre-emptively written and waiting to be published.) Brace yourself. Nuclear takes are coming.

The third thing we can say for sure is that the left marches on. Our recent success is not an accident, nor have our opponents been caught asleep at the wheel. If we lose, we learn, regroup, and try again. That’s how we got to where we were, and it’s how we’ll keep progressing.

I’ll see you on the other side.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

It remains to be seen if the left can win all the political battles it has taken on. Progressives and socialists are making their Democratic opponents sweat in primaries from Madison to Miami. Francesca Hong, Abdul El-Sayed, Oliver Larkin, Cori Bush, Donavan McKinney, and many other leftists are either leading or in close races with their more conservative opponents. However, the full weight of the Democratic establishment is trying to stop them. For all my complaints about Democratic ineptitude, the establishment holds considerable weight and sway in primary elections, and isn’t afraid to use it against insurgent challengers.

While I’m feeling good about many of my preferred candidates’ chances, they all have uphill battles ahead of them. If they win their primaries, they’ll face Republicans, who will be supported by the entire GOP and what parts of the Democratic establishment have already announced their plans to defect over Israel. While political battles remain uncertain, what no one can deny is that the left is dominating the ideological battle. Over the last few years, the heavy political presence of socialists and progressives both inside and outside the electoral arena has greatly shifted the tide of public opinon, the American electorate, and even the Democratic Party to the left.

The biggest sign of growing left influence is that leftist policies considered fringe a few years ago are now popular with the American public. In 2018, abolishing ICE was unpopular, even with Democrats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez popularized the slogan during her 2018 challenge to then-incumbent Joe Crowley, but only the most left-wing Americans supported it. Eight years ago, only 25% of Americans and 43% of Americans wanted to end the agency. But after nearly a decade of consistent messaging and the horrible record of ICE, support for abolition is at an all-time high. Now, 50% of all Americans want ICE disassembled, including 52% of independents and nearly a quarter of Republicans (23%). This is remarkably impressive. In less than a decade, the left changed so many minds about the need to abolish ICE that as many Republicans want ICE abolished today as did Democrats in 2018.

Similarly, the left has won over many former detractors to our preferred healthcare option, Medicare For All. When Bernie Sanders popularized the phrase during his 2016 presidential bid, it had mixed results. About half the public liked the idea, but 43% were strongly opposed. Today, support has increased while opposition decreased. 63% of Americans support Medicare For All, even when they’re told it would eliminate private insurance plans and increase taxes.1 Only 29% oppose it, and only 9% are unsure. The left hasn’t just swayed fence-sitters to support Medicare For All — we’ve convinced Americans who were once strongly opposed to it to support it. The program now has strong support among independents (+40%), and is even favored by Republicans (+1%). At the risk of overconfidence, absent serious reform, I only see support increasing. Healthcare costs rank among the top concerns for Americans, and 70% of Americans say the current system is in crisis or has major problems.

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, a leading voice on the anti-imperialist left, recently published a critique of the political theory of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America. Entitled It’s Been Ten Years. It’s Time To Admit Bernie Sanders Was Wrong, Johnstone takes aim at the democratic socialist movement, particularly DSA’s strategy of running socialists on the Democratic Party ballot line. While Johnstone’s coverage of American imperialism is top-notch, she both misunderstands and misrepresents the strategy and objectives of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest and most effective anti-imperialist political force in modern America. Here is Johnstone's description of the last decade of American left electoralism, as represented by Bernie Sanders:

“Some DSA guy told me the best way to make changes in US politics is to work within the Democratic Party to elect left-wing candidates and advance progressive agendas.

I said, ‘You guys have been trying that for ten years with nothing to show for it.’

I mean, how much longer is it going to take before people admit that the ‘change the party from within’ strategy isn’t working? Do you want another twenty years? Another fifty? Do you need to spend the next century watching a handful of vaguely progressive imperialists getting elected to Congress and then getting primaried out by opponents with mountains of special interest funding before you admit that you’re not making any meaningful gains? Our planet could be lifeless before then.

The Bernie Sanders ‘revolution’ was ten years ago. Large factions of the American left took up his call to take over the Democratic Party using primary elections throughout the nation, and ever since then it’s been a two-steps-forward, two-steps-back addition of zeros. The people never got President Bernie, and the few progressive gains made on Capitol Hill were either kicked out like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman or went full pro-establishment like John Fetterman. The few who stuck around have turned out to be perpetually disappointing empire managers like AOC, who know how to straddle the line between left-wing lip service and status quo swamp monster.”

There are many misconceptions here, but the biggest is that one decade is enough time to pass final judgment on Bernie Sanders’ efforts. There is no political project on earth that has achieved its end goals within ten years, especially one starting from the disadvantage of advocating for socialism in history’s most anti-socialist society. In addition to the straw man time limit, Johnstone’s description of DSA’s electoral success is categorically false.

She points to the 2024 defeats of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman as proof that the socialist left has only achieved an “addition of zeroes.” Johstone knows this is untrue. Her essay was published on July 9th. The week before, Denver DSA member Melat Kiros unseated a 30-year, AIPAC-backed Democratic incumbent in a blowout. The week before that, NYC DSA members Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez defeated the Democratic establishment in their backyard. Avila Chevalier, a former organizer of the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Encampment, unseated the chair of the House Hispanic Caucus, while Valdez defeated the Brooklyn Borough President supported by dark Israel money. All three of these women are shoe-ins to win their general elections. So, while Johnstone points to two DSA losses, we had already recouped those seats and more in just the three weeks before she published. In all likelihood, more socialist victories are on the way.

DSA members are currently leading or in close races with their establishment opponents everywhere from Florida to Wisconsin to Michigan. DSA-backed Oliver Larkin’s is showing strong support in Southern Miami, forcing his hyper-Zionist opponent Jared Moskowitz to drop out of last night’s debate. After Bernie Sanders and DSA endorsed Donavan McKinney for Michigan’s 13th, Democratic leadership backed incumbent Shri Thanedar. Now, they’re leaking to Axios that they really don’t care about Thanedar, a sign that they’re pessimistic about the billionaire’s chances of maintaining his seat. Speaking of Cori Bush, she’s neck and neck with AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell to reclaim her old seat. And these are just the household names. According to DSA’s election tracker, our candidates have won 38 local, state, and federal races this year, with 87 more to go. Of course, the larger progressive movement led by Bernie Sanders is wider than DSA. Non-socialist progressives such as Analilia Mejia are flipping former Republican strongholds on strong anti-genocide, pro-worker platforms.

John Fetterman has never been associated with DSA, but he was considered part of the progressive wing while seeking election. Personally, I think people make way too much hay about Fetterman’s “political journey.” He was a vaguely progressive Democrat who had a stroke, gave himself multiple head injuries by repeatedly crashing his car at 80 mph, and is barely able to speak. Now, he has the cognitive function of a decaying grandfather, so I’m not surprised he became a far-rightist. As for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she was the first congressperson to call for a ceasefire in Gaza after October 7th. Her recent amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act attempted to cut off all weapons sales and transfers to Israel by tightening the Foreign Service Act and its Leahy Amendments. As far as I can tell, it’s the most restrictive measure on Israel ever introduced to Congress.

The continued presence of DSA candidates and our progressive allies has shifted American politics in a way no one can deny. Two years ago, only thirty-seven House Democrats voted to stop sending weapons to Israel. But after the election of Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avil Chevalier, Claire Valdez, Melat Kiros, and the grassroots energy nurtured and effectualized by DSA, things have changed. Two weeks ago, over one hundred House Democrats voted to cut off military aid to the genocidal state. Not because they had a change of heart. But because left-wing political pressure has them scared.

Johnstone’s article declaring this project a failure was published five days after the Democratic Socialists of America reached 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist party in American history. (We’ve added an additional 5,000 members since then.) To call this an “addition of zeros,” or say DSA has “nothing to show for” the past ten years of political organizing, is to greatly mislead readers about material facts.

Like many of DSA’s critics, on both the right and left, Johnstone misunderstands what DSA hopes to achieve by running candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line. This is born from a misunderstanding of both the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Party, which is not really a party.

The best-kept secret of American politics is that neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are actual political parties. In other countries, political parties control their membership. Members must apply, pay dues, and submit to party-decided standards, giving the party extraordinary control over the individual. Comparatively, Americans don’t actually join the Democratic or Republican non-parties. They register as a “D” or “R” with their state government so they can vote in primaries, but that only matters if state law restricts voting by party affiliation, which most don’t. They also don’t pay dues or submit to party-determined guidelines.

This is why the British Labour Party was able to expel Jeremy Corbyn over his anti-Zionism, while the Democrats can’t expel Zohran Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or any other DSA member who advocates for workers and Palestine. In 2024, Labour’s National Executive Committee voted to prevent Corbyn from receiving the Labour endorsement in his election, then revoked his membership when he decided to run as an independent. Much to the Democratic establishment’s chagrin, they can’t do this to DSA candidates, which leaves an opening for the socialist movement.

Unlike in Britain, to be listed as the Democratic nominee in a general election, all a candidate must do is win the Democratic primary. This open membership format is a major reason the GOP and Democrats control 99% of effective political activity in the United States. But the duopoly’s strength is also its Achilles Heel. By including every American, the Republican and Democratic non-parties forfeited the right to exclude any American. Unable to stop us from convincing Democratic voters, all the Democratic establishment can do is beg. The day after DSA candidates swept the New York City primaries, former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison was reduced to pleading with democratic socialists to stop running on the Democratic ballot line.

Johnstone’s critique that DSA is trying to “change the Democratic Party from the inside” is common, but misinformed. We also receive this criticism from the right. A recent Atlantic essay warned Democrats that DSA was reusing the old Trotskyist tactic of entryism, joining the Democrats to cynically warp the party from within. But DSA does neither of those things. We are simply running socialists where they have the best chance of reaching the working class and winning power. In Democratic strongholds, DSA runs in primaries to conquer the Democratic ballot line. But not if we don’t need to. The night Zohran Mamdani won his iconic victory in New York City, DSA had endorsed twenty-three candidates across the country. Only five were Democrats, and one of those five was a member of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). What puzzles me about Johnstone’s critique is that DSA is not the first socialist organization to seize the opportunity of the Democratic ballot. CPUSA has been doing it for decades. In 1973, Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland on the Democratic ballot line. In an election-time interview with The Iconoclast, the iconic revolutionary warned against the abstentionist thought embodied in Johnstone’s essay:

Iconoclast: “I guess the main questions have to be why are you running for mayor of Oakland? Can you win? And why have you decided to work within the system?”

Bobby Seale: “First thing is you can’t drop out of the system, because the system itself becomes interconnected with the very oppression. You cannot have exploitation without having somebody there being exploited. You cannot have racism without somebody having racism perpetrated upon them. So what we call the “power structure” is the system becomes interconnected with our total existence on the face of this earth. Agnew lives on this Earth. Nixon lives on this earth. Black people are oppressed on this earth, be they in Dallas, Oakland, California, or Africa. We all live on this earth. So our earth and our people and the system become interconnected with the universe, and the system is as broad as the universe. If you think you can drop out of the universe, try doing it.”

Though Seale lost his race, he forced the establishment Democrat into a runoff that gave both Seale and the Black Panthers much-needed national attention and legitimacy. Like Seale, DSA holds little regard for the status of the Democratic Party. It is simply a de facto part of the American electoral process. Engaging with it can unlock progress, while refusing it leaves socialism obscure and ineffective.

We also must examine what Johnstone provides as an alternative to the Bernie Sanders and DSA strategy. Here is what she writes:

“It’s time to admit the commies were right, kids. The factions on the so-called “far left” who’ve been rejecting electoral politics and calling for real revolution against a system designed to suppress leftward movement have been completely vindicated over the last decade.”

There are many words I would use to describe the DSA-critical leftists who reject electoral politics. “Vindicated” is not one of them.

Since Bernie Sanders announced his campaign in 2016, there has been a persistent chorus of voices from “far left” (to use Johnstone’s terminology) telling DSA and progressives that their efforts would be in vain. As Johnstone states, these leftists prefer “real revolution.” As we’ve seen, the Democratic Socialists of America and its progressive allies have achieved great success by running on the Democratic ballot. Meanwhile, those to our left have achieved, to be charitable, absolutely nothing.

The problem with critiquing the “far left” is it doesn’t really exist. What party should I be looking towards for non-electoral socialism? Is there a political leader whose work I am unfamiliar with? The closest thing this DSA-critical tendency has to a party is the Green Party, which has gone off the rails in the last few years. During the 2024 election, many on the “far left” insisted the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Butch Ware were our saviors, and if you didn’t support them it was because you loved capitalism and Israel. The Stein-Ware campaign aimed to receive 5% of the vote, which would unlock public funds for a 2028 rerun that (according to the Stein supporters) was guaranteed to win and magically topple the duopoly. But the online hype never translated to actual success. The 2024 Stein-Ware ticket failed to achieve its modest goal, only receiving .56% of the total vote share, 600,000 votes less than Jill Stein had received in 2016. What few leftists are willing to defend this record claim this was an “educational” campaign for future Green Party efforts. But Butch Ware couldn’t even get on the ballot for California’s gubernatorial race, something sixty other candidates were able to manage. So even the educational aspect failed. Outside the Green Party, there’s a scattering of socialist microparties that share Johnstone’s preference for “real revolution.” But they’re too busy fighting with themselves to build anything close to an effective national political platform, which is why you’ve probably never heard of them.

What little energy remains for this strain of purity leftism has been channeled into Kshama Sawant’s long-shot independent bid for Congress. An orthodox Trotskyist, Sawant sees enemies in everyone, everywhere, at all times. After months of running for Seattle’s 9th Congressional district by criticizing DSA, AOC, and Mamdani, Sawant is currently in a multi-month Twitter feud with her own SuperPAC. The Trotskist also rejects the Palestinian-led movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel, putting her well to DSA’s right on the Palestine issue.

I’m not someone who will tell you that DSA’s approach to socialism is the way. This is why I’m baffled Johnstone uses the term “vindicated” to describe her political tendency. No socialist will be vindicated until their program creates a society in which each labors according to their ability and receives according to their means. And, most bafflingly about Johnstone’s claim of vindication is that there has not been a communist revolution in the United States, so it’s not like the “far left” has achieved its goals. I’m not even sure what their goals are.

There are many ways one could build socialism in the United States without engaging with the Democratic Party, or even independent electoral politics. The “far left” could have spent the last decade building militant rank-and-file trade unions to challenge capitalist power in the workplace, constructing an anti-war street protest network that frightened politicians away from belligerency, or organizing cross-city tenant unions to take the fight to landlords. But the far left didn’t do any of that. They mostly posted and podcasted, while DSA won massive gains on and off the Democratic ballot line while building the non-electoral infrastructure the far left claims to want. That’s the ironic thing about this conversation. If you Thanos-snapped every DSA Democrat out of existence, the Democratic Socialists of America would still be far ahead of our left-wing critics. We have a fully functioning labor organizing arm, unparalleled cultural power, and connections with international socialist and communist parties. The relationship between DSA and our left-wing critics isn’t one of competing parties driven by ideological agreements. Rather, it’s more akin to the relationship between an NFL team and Monday morning armchair quarterbacks. After all, “far left” isn’t really a political movement. It’s mostly the small but vocal audience of bloggers and podcasters who are focused on monetizing their niche, not driving change, revolutionary or otherwise.

I don’t believe DSA’s theory of socialist change is The Proven Way to do socialist organizing. We won’t have the right to claim vindication until socialism has been achieved. But, thanks to our Marxist analysis of contemporary America and our realistic theory of change, we are light-years ahead of every other sect, tendency, and party on the American left — especially Caitlin Johnstone’s “far left,” which doesn’t even exist.

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In Solidarity — Joe

Before you watch the video below, you must know this is Mary Julia Koch, daughter of the late David Koch, libertarian billionaire and funder of far-right projects. Mary’s mother, Julia, is one of the richest women in the world. It’s important to understand that we are dealing with a Faildaughter. We’re all well aware of Failsons — Eric Trump, Hunter Biden, Kendall Roy, and other unimpressive children of the capitalist elite whose luxurious upbringing left them too emotionally and professionally stunted to be productive members of society, never mind live up to their parents’ legacy. Failsons are hilarious because their last name traps them in a prison impossible to escape. Wealth and comfort protected them from the world, and as a result, they’re supposed to lead it. Once appointed to high-profile positions, Failsons inevitably bumble around and mess everything up. But it’s the 21st century, and feminist activists fought hard to ensure Faildaughters have just as much right to make a fool of themselves in front of the world as their equally stupid brothers. (#ally) So, that’s how Mary here ended up as an associate opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal just two years out of college. But maybe I’m being too harsh. Let’s hear her out.

Yeah. That went about as well for Mary as I thought it would.

Instead of engaging with the merits of Scandinavian socialism, The Wall Street Journal decided to let David Koch’s daughter play journalist with a two-minute lecture on how DSA-associated politicians are foolishly looking to Northern Europe as a model to replicate. In the accompanying article, Mary lists DSA-elected officials who have mentioned Norway and Finland, Denmark, and Iceland as examples of socialist success, then tries to explain why they’re wrong:

“The issue is that Nordic countries aren’t socialist. Their economies are highly competitive free markets, built on private ownership and global trade. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden consistently rank among the top 15 countries with the most economic and personal freedom. And Scandinavians aren’t simply sitting around snatching up government benefits. The labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the U.S.”

With the exception of private ownership, this paragraph doesn’t mention anything that would determine whether Scandinavia is capitalist or socialist. Markets predate capitalism, exist in socialist-run nations, and will continue long after capitalism has disappeared. “Global trade” doesn’t mean anything, because it too long predates the economic system that made Mary’s dad rich. Saying high rates of labor force participation make the Nordics capitalist might be the most ridiculous thing Mary said, as that implies America’s lower labor force participation makes it socialist.

None of these factors determine whether a country is socialist. A nation’s mode of production — socialism, capitalism, feudalism, etc. — is determined by who owns and controls society’s productive forces — factories, industries, and other things that make things. Here, Koch stumbles into being correct by saying the Nordic countries are “built on private ownership.” This is true. Like the rest of Europe, these nations are capitalist. The productive forces are largely privately owned and operated for personal profit. American socialists don’t point to these countries because they are the end goal of our project. Rather, we highlight them because they are capitalist liberal democracies, in which Marxists, socialists, communists, and labor activists have won substantially more for the working class than in any other comparable Western democracy — the United States included. DSA politicians aren’t saying we want to establish the exact balance of free enterprise and social welfare that exists in Norway, Sweden, or the Faroe Islands. We’re saying that these countries have political systems similar to ours, and are a shining example of why working-class Americans should support DSA and vote for our candidates.

DSA politicians are clear about this, which is why Mary Julia Koch misconstrues what Darializa Avila Chevalier said in an interview. Mary writes:

“Asked by radio host Brian Lehrer if there has been a “successful model of socialism anywhere in the world outside the United States in terms of both human rights and widespread economic justice,” Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic congressional candidate and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, cited Sweden and Norway.”

And here’s what Avila Chevalier actually said in the interview. Notice how the future congresswoman insists we look at the socialist programs present in these countries, not just the current state of the nations themselves.

Host: “Has there been a most successful model of socialism anywhere in the world outside the United States in terms of both human rights and widespread economic justice that you would point to as something to emulate? Because you know what the critics say: they always point to the worst examples — the Soviet Union, some of the dictatorships in Latin America at various times, communist China, things like that.”

Avila Chevalier: “I think there is a lot we can learn from many parts of the world. I think places in Europe like Sweden and Norway, for example. But I think looking specifically at the programs themselves — what the models are and how we can implement them here — is how I envision this. And I think the other thing that gets lost is the democratic part of the phrase “democratic socialism.” We are making decisions in a democratic way about how we use the wealth that we have produced in society, because the people who are producing the wealth are the people who produce the labor: the workers.”

“It is not owning something that makes this country wealthier; it is the product of the labor of working people. And so we should be able to make decisions about how we use that wealth. Programs like Medicare for All are not only popular, they have been proven to work in places like Sweden and Norway, and across Europe and even Latin America. So we should be fighting for things like free college, universal health care, and other programs that have been proven to better the lives of working people.”

“Even the child tax credit, for example, was one of the most popular programs we have had in recent history, and it was cruel to end it. We should have never ended it because it brought childhood poverty to historic lows, and had we expanded it, we could have eradicated childhood poverty.” — Darializa Avila Chevalier’s Victory Lap

Avila Chevalier is correct. American socialists don’t look to Scandinavian social democracies as the ultimate goal of our movement. Rather, we highlight them because they are successful examples of what strong socialist movements can achieve inside liberal democracies such as the United States. (Though the U.S. is far less democratic.) The biggest misconception about the Nordic countries, which is common among the left and right, is that these are harmonious social democracies, where pure white populations unanimously agreed that private enterprise and union rights were the optimal form of economic development. This is, quite obviously, false.

As Mary Julia Koch states, capitalism underlies the Nordic economies. However, these countries have high rates of unionization, state ownership, welfare programs, and social goods thanks to centuries of militant socialist struggle against the capitalist class. Capitalists don’t just give workers healthcare or submit to heavy state control of their own volition. They never have, they never will, no matter what country they operate in. The only reason these countries are recognized as social democracies is that socialist, communist, and labor parties birthed from revolutionary Marxism made them so.

Born from the Second Communist International, the Swedish Social Democrats (SAP) fought against the turn-of-the-20th-century blacklists, strike-breaking, and anti-union laws, just like their American counterparts. Iconic Swedish Prime Minsiter Olof Palme, who openly challenged the Soviet Union that he would achieve socialism before they did, came from the SAP. In 1973, Palme’s socialist coalition ran on a long-term plan to transition Sweden to Marxist utopia and defeated their liberal opponents. The SAP remains a strong force in Swedish and European politics to this day.

Similar communist and socialist parties are scattered all across Scandinavia. The Danish Social Democrats boast of their 150-year tradition fighting for the working class. Last month they were re-elected to lead the country, giving the Social Democrats a third consecutive term as prime minister. The current Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, comes from the Labor Party, which also has roots in the Second Communist International. These parties are typically referred to as the “center left” in Scandinavia, with smaller communist groups campaigning to their left. But the prevalence of European communism should not lead us to believe these parties are only slightly more progressive than American Democrats. They are openly socialist with deep roots in the Marxist tradition, and proud of it.

As a result of this heavy socialist presence in Nordic politics, Scandinavia is rife with some of the most effective socialist policies in the modern world. Ironically, Denmark has no minimum wage. They don’t need one. Minimum wages are set at the sector level through collective bargaining agreements between employers and trade unions. This social pact is called The Basic Agreement, and is the result of over 120 years of militant unionism. About 70% of the Danish workforce is covered by one of these agreements. As a result, the average Danish salary is 10% higher than in the United States, despite Denmark having higher unemployment rates and a lower GDP per capita. Simply put, Denmark’s multi-century tradition of unionism ensures Danish workers receive more of the value they create than American workers receive. So, when our libertarian oligarchs’ nepobaby says Nordic countries have higher labor force participation, that’s because workers get more for their labor. More reward, more participation. That’s just economics 101.

Mary Julia Koch also falls flat on her face when describing Norway’s oil sector, stating:

“By the way, Norway is Western Europe’s largest oil and natural gas producer. That’s the reason for their economic success, not the welfare state.”

Of all the things American socialists preach about the Nordics, nothing is cited more than the Norwegian energy sector. That’s because… it’s highly socialist!

In the late 1960s, Norway discovered massive oil reserves in its territorial waters. Thanks to socialist presence in the halls of power, the government moved to ensure the expendable resource worked for the benefit of the Norwegian people, not energy capitalists. In addition to taking a stake in private oil companies, the Norwegian government taxes oil drillers at a marginal rate of 78%. While there are still private aspects of the Norwegian drilling process, the Norwegian people democratically control the vast majority of oil profits. In the 1990s, parliament set up the Government Pension Global Fund to reinvest oil revenues, ensuring the expendable resource leads to sustained prominence for future generations. Today, the Global Fund is the world’s biggest single owner of listed stock shares and generates significantly more income from Norway than the oil revenue itself. The Global Fund is also limited by a tight ethics policy. In accordance with the socialist commitment to social justice, the Global Fund does not invest in tobacco companies, weapons manufacturers, companies deemed corrupt or emission-heavy, or any companies involved in the colonization of Palestine. In 2024, the Global Fund divested from Bezeq, a communications company that worked with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

When it comes to judging Norway’s oil sector, Faildaughter Koch and I are in unanimous agreement. The socialist management of the energy sector is the reason for Norway’s financial success, and the United States would be wise to replicate it. We don’t even need to start from scratch. A similar system exists in Alaska, where the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation collects oil revenue, invests it, and uses it to fund the state’s social programs. Declaring all oil under American soil the birthright of the American people would significantly decrease the value of Mary’s trust fund. So I doubt she truly wants us to replicate the model.

These are just two of the many ways Nordic socialism has delivered for their national working classes. With a pro-worker sentiment instilled in Nordic populations through long histories of Marxist and labor struggle, strong social programs have made the nations of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway enviable in the eyes of all who seek to uplift the global working class. These countries have significantly lower levels of income inequality, a requirement for any healthy democracy. The populations are happier, suicide is lower, the press is freer, and they consistently rank highest among gender equality. Most importantly, all five of the Nordic countries lead the United States and the United Kingdom in the most crucial economic metric: life expectancy. In 2026, the lowest life expectancy throughout the Nordics was 82.4 years, a tie between Finland and Denmark. The U.K. and U.S. sit at 81.8 and 79.8, respectively.

Even worse than Mary Julia Koch’s analysis of Nordic social democracy is her explanation as to why these nations are able to institute these programs. To quote from Mary’s video:

“[The Nordic countries] are ethnically homogeneous and so much smaller than America. The entire metro population of New York City is four times the size of Norway. We’re comparing apples to oranges."

These are common arguments we hear from the right. For the question of size, they get it backward. If you want robust social programs such as Medicare For All and unemployment insurance, a bigger population is better. When more people pay into the pool, risk is spread out, and costs are mitigated. It’s actually better to have a bigger tax base for social programs than a small one. So by saying America is bigger than Norway, Mary is only giving us more ammunition to argue that these programs would be more efficient in the United States. This nonsensical argument about population size also ignores that the United States already has the foundation for many social programs. Infrastructure for Medicare for All, strong unemployment insurance, and universal child care has been built through Medicare, weak unemployment insurance, and the public school system. American socialists seek to broaden these programs’ mandates and fund them through higher taxation to serve our larger population. It’s really not that complicated.

As for the claim that Scandinavian nations have strong social welfare programs because they’re “socially homogenous,” this is thinly veiled racism that only exists in the reactionary mind. No, Norway does not socialize oil profits because there are no Black people in Oslo. And Denmark’s iconic sectoral bargaining doesn’t exist because the country is mostly Lutheran. This falsehood relies on the fantastical assumption that the Scandinavian social democracies became social democracies because a bunch of pasty-White people sat down at a table and agreed to turn the dial halfway between socialism and capitalism. These countries are only social democracies because labor fought capital and won a significant portion of the fruits of productive value. This is the battle between capital and labor that happens in every society, no matter what label you give it. And if these nations didn’t have strong socialist tendencies, then they would be just as deep in a capitalist hellscape as the United States.

I don’t know why everyone thinks Northern Europe is White Wakanda. They are not without class and violent conflict. In 2011, Neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik killed seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers at the Norwegian Social Democrats’ summer camp. It was a political attack that was mostly covered as mindless violence by the American press. A leading financial sponsor of Ezra Klein’s Abundance movement granted $100,000 to the Swedish Neo-Nazi group Stiftelsen Nya Dagbladet in 2022. Reactionary rightism is alive and well in Scandinavia, thankfully suppressed by the socialist representatives of the working class.

Unlike in the United States, the Scandinavian nations generally adhere to the “democratic” part of liberal democracy. One reason Nordic socialists have had success is that these countries have a more level political playing field, enabling the working class to advocate for their interests. This is why American capitalists are so eager to suppress, diminish, and exclude DSA and other socialists from fair electoral participation. Until recently, there was little effective socialism in the United States thanks to decades of McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, blacklists, and assassinations. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America don’t highlight Norway, Sweden, and Finland because they are socialist utopias. We do because they show the first, welcomed step in what our project can achieve absent interference.

Not to brag, but this essay is 1000x more lucid and substantiated than anything Faildaughter Koch has put into the world. I’ve been told capitalism is a meritocracy, so I expect a job offer from The Wall Street Journal any minute.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

On the eve of World War II, one-third of Earth’s population was colonized. Everyone had a one-in-three chance of being born into a nation ruled by foreign, undemocratic leaders who exploited the indigenous population’s labor and resources for profit and prestige. Then war came. After the dust settled, a wave of decolonization emancipated what is now called the Global South (Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean) from what is now called the Global North (North America, Europe, and Russia). Within a few decades, Europe’s once-mighty control of overseas territories disappeared. In 1925, Europe held almost one hundred colonies. By the 1980s, none.

Though the developed capitalist nations of the North Atlantic relinquished formal sovereignty of these emerging nations, they continued to dominate them through exploitative economic arrangements. Though the British Union Jack and French Tricolore were lowered from flagpoles overlooking India and Algeria, European and American capitalists structured the global economic system to ensure that decolonization did not disrupt the flow of money from poorer Southern countries to richer Northern countries. This new form of colonialism was dubbed neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist president of Ghana.

“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.” — Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism

Each developed nation had its own one-sided trade treaties and economic arrangements that could be described as neocolonial. But the highest form of neocolonialism was the Bretton Woods system, which made the U.S. dollar the staple global currency and established the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Uncoincidentally, this system was configured towards the end of World War II by the Allied Powers, just as decolonial momentum was sweeping through the Third World.

The IMF positions itself as a friend to the Global South by offering formerly colonized nations much-needed loans. After all, these governments don’t have much money, because the colonizers took it. To receive these loans, borrowing nations must cut social programs such as unemployment and public-sector jobs. Allowing investment from foreign capital isn’t required to receive an IMF loan, but it happens in almost every situation. This devious combination does two things. First, because the capital base is international, the majority of the value created will leave the country in the form of profits. Second, the austerity program squeezes the working class and forces them to accept even lower wages, keeping the population impoverished to ensure foreign capitalists reap the maximum profits. A Harvard study found the IMF’s exploitation of West Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s decreased education spending by 25%, healthcare spending by 50%, and caused an estimated half-a-million unnecessary childhood deaths in Africa. Another study from 2022 called the IMF’s entire existence into question:

“Although the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claims that poverty reduction is one of its objectives, some studies show that IMF borrower countries experience higher rates of poverty. This paper investigates the effects of IMF loan conditions on poverty. Using a sample of 81 developing countries from 1986 to 2016, we find that IMF loan arrangements containing structural reforms contribute to more people getting trapped in the poverty cycle, as the reforms involve deep and comprehensive changes that tend to raise unemployment, lower government revenue, increase costs of basic services, and restructure tax collection, pensions, and social security programmes.” — The effects of IMF loan conditions on poverty in the developing world

While neocolonialism might be cancer upon the Global South, it’s a perpetual cash cow for the Global North. In just 2020 alone, Global South nations paid over $1.2 trillion in debt servicing to capitalists in the Global North. Not only is neocolonialism lucrative, but it also offers plausible deniability. The powerful nations that extract resources portray themselves as mutually beneficial business partners to their economic subjects, avoiding the stigmatization associated with the brutal colonization of centuries past. While I won’t say neocolonialism is good, at least it involved less violence directed at the subjected population. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration, specifically Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has reasserted the rhetoric and violence of the colonizers of old.

As soon as he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump instituted a “maximum-pressure” foreign policy with specific hostility towards Latin America’s two socialist-led countries, Venezuela and Cuba. On his very first day back in office, Trump revoked Biden’s decrees and reclassified Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, severely restricting the financial flow to and from the island. By the end of the first week, an executive order declared Cuba “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US, and within a few months, Trump re-imposed travel restrictions, prohibited more financial transactions, and reinforced the already-suffocating embargo. In January of this year, Trump blockaded fuel from reaching the island, then tightened the noose in May with even more sanctions on Cuba’s energy, metals, mining, financial services, and security sectors.

The impact has been devastating. The United Nations accused the United States of driving Cuba towards a “humanitarian collapse.” As with every catastrophe, Cuba’s most vulnerable populations are the most impacted. Infant mortality has doubled in recent months, childhood cancer survival rates have fallen by 20%, and supplies of life-saving medicine are at 30%. Defenders of the U.S. embargo often claimed it didn’t prevent food or medicine from reaching the island. This was dubious in the pre-Trump era. Now it’s laughable. The U.S. government is depriving the Cuban people of food, medicine, and a modern life because it disagrees with the Cuban government’s ideology.

The sanctions regime has also ruined Cuba’s agricultural sector, forcing farmers to sell off large swaths of land to pay their bills. As a result, barely anything is grown on the island nation, severely accelerating the U.S.-caused crisis. Four House Democrats traveled to Cuba last week and described the situation as a “Silent Gaza.” The analogy is fitting. Not just because of the widespread presence of death and hardship, but because it is the deliberate choice of American foreign policy.

“Such severe sanctions packages that target entire sectors of an economy and produce broad, indiscriminate and harsh effects on populations are incompatible with basic principles of international human rights law.” — Volker Türk, United Nations Human Rights Chief

Under this cataclysmic pressure, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently liberalized the economy. With approval from parliament, Díaz-Canel allowed private real estate development, the operation of private banks, and the sale of state-owned companies to foreign investors. The Communist Party of Cuba, also known as the Partido Comunista de Cuba or PCC, justified the move as following in the footsteps of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties, which have urged Cuba to liberalize for many years. Truthfully, I think a man will say anything when you put a gun to his head. Still, Díaz-Canel’s retreat on the once-firm centralized economy wasn’t enough for the Trump Administration. Last week the U.S. Army leaked that it had begun preparing for an airborne invasion of Cuba. A year ago, I would have considered this bluster. But now that the United States has already recolonized Venezuela, any threat of military invasion must be taken seriously.

In the seven months since shredding international law to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro, the United States has turned Venezuela into an American colony. Under the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the gradual exploitation of neocolonialism has been discarded in favor of the direct colonial rule found in centuries past. This time, American colonialism is enforced with the murderous armaments of the 21st century.

Immediately after the deposition of Maduro, the Trump administration gave Venezuela leaders an ultimatum: submit or die. With direct threats to them and their families, as well as Venezuela’s civilian infrastructure, Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, and other government officials agreed to do as Rubio wished. As a result, nearly every government function is now being run by Washington. Marco Rubio’s Republican colleagues have begun calling him “viceroy”, a colonial-era title given to appointed rulers who oversaw colonies on a monarchy’s behalf. The American Secretary of State now controls Caracas’ finances. Revenue from Venezuelan exports is controlled by the U.S. Treasury, which distributes it to Venezuelan banks friendly to Washington’s interests. Sanctions still plague the Venezuelan people. Yet, American oil companies have been allowed to operate without penalty, ensuring the profits of the world’s largest oil flow to the Global North. Rubio has even pushed out some European oil companies that operated before the recolonization to make room for the GOP’s longtime allies in the American oil industry. Because it wouldn’t be colonization without a competition between rich Northern nations.

Marco Rubio also determines Venezuela’s foreign policy and international relations. The Rubio regime recently took full control of oil projects co-owned with the Russian state producer, bringing more energy assets under American control while pushing one of Maduro’s strongest allies out of the region. At this point, Venezuelan officials are puppets who dance on the world stage whenever Rubio tugs their strings. The Secretary of State publicly announced that Delcy Rodríguez would travel to India, something that greatly surprised the official Venezuelan President. After the U.S. attacked Iran, Rubio directed the foreign minister to delete social media posts criticizing the attack. He complied.

Last month, a pair of devastating earthquakes crippled Venezuela and killed at least 5,000. The disaster has only increased the hardship and suffering of recolonized Venezuelans. Crumbled buildings and makeshift field hospitals force images of Gaza back into our minds. No matter where in the world we look, the fingerprints of American imperialism are inescapable.

While neocolonialism sometimes requires military force, the second Trump administration’s Latin American policy goes far beyond what Kwame Nkrumah articulated. This is not neocolonialism. It is recolonization, the mindset of 19th- and 18th-century European imperialists empowered with the 21st-century weaponry of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. When Marco Rubio spoke at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, he identified his family ancestry as descending from Spanish colonizers, separating himself from Mestizo Latin Americans, who trace their ancestry to indigenous and formerly enslaved populations. The speech was telling. When Marco Rubio looks at the poor, despondent masses subjected to his dictatorial rule, he does not see people who remind him of himself or his family. Instead, he envisions himself as the European colonizer, the rightful overlord to those who dared challenge American hegemony.

“And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.” — Marco Rubio, February 2026

Donald Trump has been even more forthcoming with his imperialist designs. Long before Maduro was deposed, he said he wanted to “run” Venezuela because he “wanted their oil.” Unfortunately, that project was successful. Now, the same tactics of recolonization are being directed at Cuba, a far poorer, weaker nation than Venezuela.

By all available signs, Marco Rubio will not stop until he achieves his lifelong dream of recolonizing Cuba, killing thousands, and destroying the left-wing project that toppled the oppressive Batista regime, which Rubio’s own family fled from. (He must have forgotten that part of his family's history during his Munich speech.) A recent State Department “report” argued Cuba was the driving force of political terrorism in America. Entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the 100-page document manufactures consent for the military invasion of the island, as well as wide-reaching domestic political repression. Rubio lists forty-three individuals and groups as associated with Cuba’s terrorism, most notably the Amazon Labor Union, Code Pink, and the Democratic Socialists of America.

As with imperialist projects of generations past, recolonization will torment the Global South, scarring unfortunate nations and the American homeland long after its architects are dead and buried.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe

Enjoy!

In Solidarity — Joe

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A few weeks ago, Jenny Racicot accused former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner of rape. Twenty-four hours after Politico published her account, the Platner campaign collapsed. Endorsers withdrew their support, once-sympathetic leftist commentators called for Platner to drop out, and the campaign volunteers demanded a new candidate. Not everyone felt this way. Some commentators pushed back on the Politico story, contesting Racicot’s veracity, and warning this could be another bad-faith attempt by the political establishment to erase a candidate they couldn’t defeat fair and square. Such suspicion is warranted. The media overly criticizes and diminishes candidates who criticize Israel and billionaires. Graham Platner’s populist platform put a target on his back, no different from the one worn by Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and every other insurgent left challenger. So I’m not surprised some hesitated to ditch Platner and waive the White Flag on the populist campaign.

While skepticism of media attacks and establishment sabotage is warranted, the court of public opinion judged Graham Platner fairly over his short political career. When earlier accusations were raised, Maine voters and Platner supporters refused to disavow him over half-baked assertions or prejudiced prosecutions. But when an accuser came forward with a credible allegation with supporting evidence, the court of public opinion changed its mind and decided it was time for him to go.

Due Process

One of my pet peeves is when people call for “due process” during social accusations. Calls for Graham Platner to receive due process are misplaced. He has none. Not because of the severity of Racicot’s allegation, but because due process is not a social right. It is a limitation on the government, requiring that individuals be given the right to a fair and speedy trial before being deprived of life, liberty, or property. If Jenny Racicot presses charges against Platner, then he’s entitled to due process. But she hasn’t pressed charges. Rather, she shared her story to inform Maine voters about her experience with their potential next Senator. Politics is a social process, not a judicial one. Platner has no legal right to be a Senator. He has a right not to be slandered. But given Racicot’s persuasiveness, I doubt that’s what’s happening. Due process is a crucial plank of a free society. The government should have to jump through hoops and clear a high bar before it puts anyone in a cage. If anything, America doesn’t have enough due process. Public defenders are underfunded and overworked, leaving them unable to properly defend their clients. The profession has largely been reduced to helping poor Americans plead out to avoid inhumane sentences, which is as far from a fair trial as you can get. Trump’s fascist deportation regime rests on depriving suspected undocumented Americans of due process. There’s a severe lack of due process in the United States. But not when it comes to Senatorial candidates.

Graham Platner is not on trial. He ran for Senator. There is no formalized process to determine whether this allegation is sufficient to disqualify Platner as the Democratic nominee. That’s because the decision to support, oppose, or remain ambivalent toward a politician is not a single declarative decision. There’s no final verdict handed down by a jury empowered with the state’s monopoly on violence. In social situations such as this, every individual is free to judge for themselves. The court of public opinion isn’t a single court — it’s millions of them, continuously in session inside the minds of every Maine voter and national critic.

The Court of Public Opinion

Since the start of the MeToo movement, the conversation of how to protect vulnerable people, especially but not exclusively women, from powerful predators, who are especially but not exclusively men, has taken a backseat to the secondary discussion of MeToo “going too far.” Despite Harvey Weinstein being convicted in an actual trial with due process, The Free Press has taken up the mantle of defending the sexual predator as part of its anti-woke ‘journalism.’

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When bad men die, we’re commanded to forget they’re bad. Decorum decrees we overlook their moral failings and limit ourselves to the tragic moment. Context, history, and humanity are forcibly stripped from any conversation of the deceased’s legacy in favor of mandatory compassion and tears. ‘How dare you?’ the mourners ask the critic. As the critic, here’s how I dare.

Lindsey Graham was an evil man. His life’s work worsened the world for everyone except the privileged and powerful. Recent reporting says Graham’s final months were spent hyper-focused on furthering American imperialism and immiserating our neocolonial subjects and adversaries in the Global South. This isn’t surprising, given that bombing Muslims was Graham’s raison d'etre. The South Carolina Senator aggressively pushed Trump to go to war with Iran, to the point that it troubled his fellow Republicans. Graham’s bloodthirst has killed at least 3,500 Iranians and locked the United States in another forever war. His position on Gaza was very clear: “Flatten it,” the Senator told Israel. Morally, there’s no difference between Lindsey Graham and Osama bin Laden. They didn’t pull the trigger or fly the plane. But their planning and provocation killed thousands and destabilized nations in pursuit of a psychotic and self-centered worldview. The two terrorists differ only in their capacity. The circumstances of Bin Laden’s birth forced him to direct hijackings from an Afghan cave. Lindsey Graham was more fortunate. With the help of his close friend and segregationist Strom Thurmond, he waltzed into the House of Representatives and began naming countries he wanted to topple. Iraq, Libya, Palestine. For the most part, Lindsey Graham got his wish.

So focused on furthering American slaughter, Lindsey Graham disregarded the duties of a public servant. When Hurricane Helene killed over a hundred Carolinians, Graham dismissed his constituents' suffering to valorize Israel. Unsurprisingly, one former constituent told reporters Graham would be missed more in Tel Aviv than in Seneca.

Throughout his seventy-one years, Lindsey Graham challenged the English language to create a word more derogatory than “pathetic.” In 2015, Graham condemned Donald Trump as a racist demagogue. The Senator earned a brief moment of liberal praise for likening the 2016 GOP primary between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump to a Sophie’s Choice between being “shot or poisoned.” When Trump won the presidency, Graham shed his Trump-critical skin like the snake he is. Within months, he was Donald’s biggest sycophant. No shit was too large for Graham to swallow. From rape allegations to coup attempts, Graham was Trump’s go-to defender, tongue-washing the slide to speed America’s descent into its current hell. When E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, Graham called her a liar. When Trump was indicted, it was a “crock.” Meanwhile, the Senator protected himself behind the scenes at all costs, even “throwing Trump under the bus” to save his own skin. Somehow, Lindsey Graham’s personal life was even more craven than his professional one.

The secret of Lindsey Graham’s homosexuality was kept as well as the secret of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. That is to say, everyone in Washington, D.C. knew it, but didn’t talk about it because it raised uncomfortable questions. Since Graham’s death, a cascade of trans and queer sex workers, emancipated from their NDAs, have detailed their experiences with the currently decaying Congressman. Rather than grow a spine, Graham remained a closeted anti-queer crusader throughout his career. The first bill he ever introduced aimed to ban gay and lesbian Americans from serving in the South Carolina Army National Guard. It failed, but propelled Graham to GOP stardom. The rest of his years were spent campaigning against same-sex marriage and adoption.

Yearning for the death of Iranian kindergartners was Graham’s true passion. But he took great joy in his side hustle of stoking the trans panic. There’s only one word for a man who will voluntarily lead an international attack on trans rights while paying $10,000 to suck girl dick every Saturday night: coward. Too ashamed of himself to be honest with the world, Lindsey Graham used his power to punish those far braver than himself. He demeaned, degraded, and dehumanized openly queer Americans in hopes of differentiating himself as “one of the good ones” to his bigoted Republicans. It didn’t work. I’d bet every dollar to my name that Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Mike Johnson called Lindsey a Hard F as soon as he drifted away from the Mar-A-Lago table. (Laura Loomer even outed Graham during a deposition.) With his life now complete, all Graham’s performative hatred did was put him on the wrong side of history. He wasn’t just an opponent of human rights, equality, and dignity. He was worse: a traitor who actively persecuted those who dared to fight for the freedom he frequently enjoyed in private.

Despite Lindsey Graham’s lifelong dedication to murder and bigotry, which are excused as “politics” through his position in the Senate, many have celebrated the late Senator. Corey Booker called him a “hero,” and Meghan McCain is scolding anyone who says he wasn’t a perfect angel. Just like Lindsey Graham used ‘politics’ to normalize and enact his serial killer instincts, Booker, McCain, and other so-called “respectable” figures are relying on hollow decorum to force sorrow upon those who judge Graham soberly and impartially. There is a peculiar tendency in liberal politics to prove you’re Above It All by lionizing dead Republicans. It drove Ezra Klein to eulogize Charlie Kirk, who bused rioters to the Capitol on January 6th, as “doing politics the right way.” This is an expected product of the cesspool that is American establishment politics, which Americans hate, and Lindsey Graham embodied better than most. Personally, I think if you’re valorizing a man who slaughtered thousands, it says more about you than him.

Lindsey Graham’s death was bittersweet. I’m glad he’s gone. But I’m tired of evil people dying free. A crucial aspect of building a better world is ensuring those who make it worse are punished for their crimes and spend their last days in a cell. Lindsey Graham escaped man’s judgment. But he left a legacy that will be scorned for centuries. Just like Osama Bin Laden, his name will be synonymous with cowardice, genocide, and a wasted life dedicated to wrecking the beautiful fabric that unites humanity, something he was too small to understand.

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In Solidarity — Joe

The latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show features an interesting discussion with the directors of A Land For All, an Israeli-Palestinian peace group with a novel idea for the region’s future. Rula Hardal, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and May Pundak, a Jewish Israeli, make a strong case for their plan, which would recognize both the sovereign states of Israel and Palestine in a confederated system with equal rights and free movement for all. They liken their idea to a miniature version of the European Union, which enables citizens of any E.U. country to travel and work in another country while still retaining political rights in their home country. This idea has been used with success in previous peace-seeking initiatives. The Good Friday Agreement, which largely ended sectarian conflict in the North of Ireland, established the right of Irish Catholics living under British rule to opt in to Irish citizenship and hold a Republic of Ireland passport.

A Land For All’s confederate model holds promise. But ultimately, it’s not up to me, or you, or anyone except for the people who live in historic Palestine to decide what their society will look like. Palestinian self-determination means Palestinian self-determination, not another colonially-imposed defunct system, ala Lebanon. Whether the inhabitants choose to pursue a one-state, two-state, or hybrid solution is their prerogative alone. However, this is not to say that outsiders, particularly Americans, do not have a role in establishing a free Palestine. While we have no right to insist upon the final form of post-colonial governance, we do have a political, moral, and legal duty to dismantle the current Zionist entity, which was constructed to preserve Jewish supremacy that ultimately led to genocide. As required by our commitments to international law, the United States must assert that the status quo is unacceptable and insist that the future must be built on human rights, not biblical tales or the prioritization of one ethnicity over another. Which is why I take issue with the way Ezra Klein frames the path to peace like this:

“I don’t see how a two-state solution is still possible given the number and size of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They’re not going away. Or the insistence on a right of return for Palestinians. I don’t think a one-state solution is plausible or likely. The Jewish people in and around Israel want self-determination and sovereignty. So, too, do the Palestinians. Neither side, given their history, is going to willingly give the other that kind of power.”

The keyword here is “willingly.” Throughout the interview, Klein repeatedly asks the directors how they will enact their plan, given the polarization and distrust between the groups. In typical Ezra Klein fashion, he ignores international law and discusses the plan’s viability as one that requires changing Israeli minds — as if the genocidal power currently fighting a half-dozen wars of aggression is open to good faith debate and solutions. As Klein reiterates:

“And so I can read the polling there. For the commitment to this kind of vision that you’ve described needing, you would need a wholesale change in the structure of Israeli public opinion and leadership. What is your theory of what creates that change that makes this possible?”

And again:

“I know there are no shortcuts, but, even on a 10-year time frame, what do you believe will change attitudes sufficiently so that something like this becomes possible?”

Klein is missing, or potentially misconstruing, the nature of reality in Israel-Palestine. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Its leaders have made openly genocidal statements, which its military has enacted through unfathomable violence. A recent United Nations inquiry found the IDF “targeted Palestinian children in Gaza in two distinct ways: directly by shooting at their vital organs using precision weapons such as quadcopters and snipers; and through the use of high-impact weapons causing widespread and systematic attacks on residential buildings, schools, and displacement camps crowded with children.” The report lists several verified murders of children, including the shooting of a ten-day-old baby breastfeeding from its mother:

Injuring of a 10-day-old baby by quadcopter inside the tent in Nuseirat camp

On 12 April 2024 at 13:00, a 10 day-old-baby boy was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother inside their tent in Nuseirat camp. The mother was alone in the tent, breastfeeding her baby, when a single bullet from a quadcopter hit the baby in the head and exited through the back of his head, hitting the pillow behind her. The baby survived but sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures.

The Commission viewed and analysed images of the bullet that hit the baby. The Commission concluded on reasonable grounds that the bullet was fired from a sniper rifle mounted on a quadcopter. Considering that the shooting occurred in broad daylight, the Commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby.

With a few valiant exceptions, Israeli society does not recognize Palestinians as humans. There is no world in which the Israeli government, or its population, will operate as the good faith, egalitarian actors required for Klein’s theory of change to work. The Netanyahu government conducted the genocide, the opposition party is attacking him for not going far enough, and the Jewish-Israeli public largely supports the cross-partisan agreement on ethnic cleansing. A Haaretz poll conducted during the height of the genocide found 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the “transfer” (ethnic cleansing) of Gazans, while 56% support cleansing Palestinian citizens of Israel (such as Rula Hardal) from the country. Most shockingly, roughly half of Jewish Israelis encouraged the army to “act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants." Israel’s other wars with Iran and Lebanon have received similar public support. The Zionist state is not the only country aflush with belligerent sentiments. But it is the only one that has turned those sentiments into widespread slaughter.

Israel’s defenders will excuse atrocities, genocidal officials, and their public support by whatabouting with similar allegations against Palestinian militants and governing bodies. But that is beside the point. Only Israel has been credibly accused of genocide by almost every major human rights organization, including its own. The United States has a specific legal duty to “prevent and punish” genocide according to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. As decided in the 2007 International Court of Justice case Serbia v. Bosnia, signatories are obligated to step in on even suspicion that genocide is occurring, not wait for the ICJ to give a final declarative verdict. With a national sentiment seeking to eliminate the Palestinian people, a seemingly unquenchable desire for war, and well-documented genocidal crimes, the state of Israel has forfeited its right to control its future. Even if they were willing, which they are not, the Israeli state has no legal or moral right to determine what the future of Palestinian self-determination looks like, just as Germany had no say in how it was governed after World War II. Peace in historic Palestine won’t be won by debating Israelis with facts and logic. The only viable delivery of a solution, regardless of what it might be, is to employ international political, economic, and military power to force Israelis to accept a future in which everyone’s rights are respected and accepted — even if it goes against their wishes.

As with most conversations about the future of historic Palestine, this episode of The Ezra Klein Show referenced similar decolonial peace processes to find possible solutions to the enduring difficulties of settler colonialism. Specifically, the Land For All co-directors pointed to the North of Ireland Good Friday Agreement and the international movement that brought down apartheid South Africa. In both cases, justice did not arrive by convincing the dominant social group that the oppressed deserved equality. Rather, peace was achieved by forcing the prevailing power to recognize equality and codify it into law. President Bill Clinton took an active role in the Good Friday Agreement, most notably by allowing Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams to travel to the U.S. and serve as a representative of the Irish Catholic Republican faction. The Agreement was met with joyous cheers in the Irish nationalist communities and a funeral atmosphere in the pro-British loyalist districts. Which isn’t surprising. Outside power had forced the dominant, oppressive group to accept its victims’ humanity. Of course those who lost their social power resented the deal! They opposed equality, and it was forced on them by a combination of armed resistance, civil disobedience, and international pressure.

Even more outside pressure was required to decolonize South Africa. A global international anti-apartheid campaign, ranging from consumer boycotts to directed state power, helped bring down the segregationist government. In the United States, this led to the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which placed sanctions on South Africa that could only be removed by the end of apartheid. With its economy strangled and ostracized on the world stage, the South African government began talks with Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement. Within a decade, white minority rule had ended.

This is not to say that international pressure alone will free Palestine, nor are they the only important actors outside the territory illegally governed by Israel. Far from it. Neither the Irish nor the African peace campaigns could have succeeded without the internal work of leaders such as Gerry Adams and Nelson Mandela, just as peace in historic Palestine will require activists such as Rula Hardal, May Pundak, and many other activists locked in Israel’s draconian torture dungeons. Whether the future looks more like Land For All’s confederation or a hard border between the two independent states, there will need to be good relations and social connections between Israeli and Palestinian neighbors. That’s true for the highest levels of their governments and for the populations that will inevitably cohabit and mingle. Social repair is a necessary component of resolving the century-long struggle, and the Land For All directors rightly recognize its imperative. But as is evident by the lens with which Ezra Klein discusses the path to end this “conflict,” mainstream liberal Zionism still sees Israel’s illegitimate state as a body that needs to be respected and nurtured, as opposed to one that must be dismantled and replaced. Fortunately, the co-directors of Land For All recognized this bias and called it out. They corrected Klein when he attempted to draw false parity between West Bank settlers and Palestinian refugees.

Klein: “One thing that I find very interesting in this project is that — you can frame it in different ways, but in a way that is different from, I think, the two-state solutions with all of its land swaps and everything — you’re able, much more directly, to simultaneously accept the presence of Jewish people in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and accept the Palestinian right of return at the same time. When I read it, and I doubt this is how you all would frame it — though maybe you do — it almost feels like a trade.”

Pundak: “Well, first of all, we are very careful not to make that symmetry between refugees and settlers. It’s very important for us not to make that symmetry, for all the reasons. But what I would say—”

Klein: “Why?”

Pundak: “Because refugees have a right to be part of their homeland. They have been subjected to terror and to expulsion from their homes. The settlement enterprise is an illegal and immoral enterprise. It is against international law, a lot of it is against Israeli law, and it is based on a system of supremacy. There’s no question about that, and we are all in agreement with that.”

Ezra Klein’s frame that this is a problem for Israelis and Palestinians to reach a mutual agreement on is naive at best; at worst, it’s a way to burn out good faith efforts and preserve the Israeli-dominated status quo. Because the Israelis will never willingly sacrifice their ruling position in the power imbalance. By committing genocide, Israel, by which I mean the current apartheid nation state, has forfeited its right to exist. Never mind having a say in how to solve the problem it created. Colonization is a structure, not an event. Decolonial projects tear down those structures. That can be done through an outside force, whether through diplomatic or economic pressure, or something more drastic, such as the multi-decade occupation of Germany.

The anti-genocide movement, which Ezra Klein considers himself a part of, is a long way from holding the political and social power to enact sanctions or use the American government to force an egalitarian future in historic Palestine. But we should make no mistake in clarifying that outside actors such as ourselves have a legal and ethical responsibility to enforce equality, even over inevitable objections from Zionist Israelis and their allies. Because if Middle East Peace depends on waiting for the Israelis to willingly change their minds, thousands more will die.

The organizers of A Land For All know this. After outlining the plan and addressing some of the host’s questions, May Pundak called on the international community to end the current atrocities and secure a real solution. In response, Ezra Klein ended the conversation.

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

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In Solidarity — Joe