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Liz Truss spent her childhood accompanying her father, a leftist University professor, on marches against the Thatcher government. It might be reductionist to suspect that one woman’s daddy issues have turned Britain into Europe’s leading political basket case,

In the long out-of-print “The Making of a Counter-Culture,” journalist Theodore Roszak argued that the 60’s-era left was greatly underestimating the ability of capitalism to co-opt their movement and sell it back to them. One example he cited was how Playboy had taken the sexual revolution and connected it to an upscale, sophisticated lifestyle. He was right then, and his insight still holds true today, extending far beyond Playboy.

In his recent “Soul of the Nation” address, President Biden spoke for 25 minutes about the threat to democracy posed by the Trump movement. Making a point to differentiate MAGA Republicans from the more “mainstream” ones, he explained:

“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement - I would not have cared.”

Believe it or not, that’s actually the least controversial thing Sam Harris said in a recently released clip from his appearance on the “Triggernometry” podcast. He followed that up by asserting that “Whatever [the] scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is, if we can just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in…it doesn’t even stack up against Trump University.”

The recent raid - ahem, pardon me - execution of a search warrant- on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was an escalation of the Cold Civil War that’s been raging beneath the surface these past several years. Remember the second Presidential debate of 2016 when Trump threatened to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of classified information if he won the White House, and the press gasped in collective horror? Well as it turns out, it was Democratic Attorney General Merrick Garland who ended up authorizing such a severe and unprecedented act against Trump himself - a move that, justified or not, is likely to further destabilize our already volatile political ecosystem.

While most oddsmakers seem fairly confident that a Biden vs. Trump rematch is the most likely scenario in 2024, it’s clear that both the Democratic and Republican parties are exploring alternatives. A Biden-Trump rematch would be a unique occasion: a race between two highly unpopular Presidents each rife with vulnerabilities that would sink any other candidate against any other opponent. Therefore, there’s reason to believe that neither party is all-in on Biden or Trump just yet.

Arming Saudi Arabia; drilling on protected lands; draconian, inhumane border enforcement; blocking a path to citizenship for DACA recipients; cutting taxes for the rich; banning trans people from the military; defunding health centers that perform abortions; preventing the government from negotiating for lower prescription drug prices; opposing sensible gun laws; opposing a $15 minimum wage; opposing restoration of the Voting Rights Act. These are just some of many issues in which Liz Cheney and Donald Trump are in full agreement.

In January, The Brookings Institute published a report entitled “Is democracy failing and putting our economic system at risk?” Baked into its thesis is the faulty presumption that democracy can and should exist to accommodate capitalism - a practical impossibility since capitalism is inherently antidemocratic. And so truly, it’s the failure of our economic system that’s exposing our so-called democracy for the sham it’s always been.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted from office last week in a recall election. The vote wasn’t close: 60-40 against Boudin.

And while mainstream media outlets - both liberal and conservative - have emphasized the recall’s support among San Francisco’s poorer communities of color, the reality is that Boudin was also rejected - perhaps even in larger numbers - by the city’s affluent white liberal (and conservative) residents. Like in New York City, where a mixed coalition of working class people of color and affluent white cosmopolitans elected Mayor Eric Adams based largely on the perception that he was “tough on crime,” a similar dynamic took shape in the effort against Boudin.

Gregg “Marcel” Dixon is a candidate for Congress in South Carolina’s 6th District, currently represented by James Clyburn. Dixon is mounting a primary challenge in which early voting is already underway.

As the 212th shooting of 2022 goes down, Americans still refuse to confront their dark side

This constant nonsense of rotating between “No, we need gun control!” and “No, it’s a mental health issue!” has gotten absurd. What else do people expect from living in the most murderous empire in human history, where we are socialized from cradle to grave to believe in the legitimacy of a government which commits genocide 365 days a year simply to preserve world economic domination for the benefit of a handful of billionaires - all while a full half of American citizens couldn’t survive a $400 emergency?

Anyone who has ever tried to reason with, cajole, prevail upon, talk sense to, or in any other way, shape, or form, get anything out of the Democratic Party, has come to discover pretty quickly that there’s no one manning the phones. At least not if you aren’t promising to show up at their next fundraiser with a T-shirt gun stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills.

It’s well and good to cite the statistics and reasons (which should not actually have to be explained, but Gabrielle Blair puts it so well here) on why women need to control their own bodies, but it doesn’t do much when we have a population that can’t even correctly identify the cause of why we’re still fighting for this. Only then can anyone clearly see what we need to do if we want this to change. Thus, rather than stating all the obvious things, I’m going to talk about what should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Let me connect the dots for everyone that wants to blame the Republicans for Roe v. Wade.

Dear Nasty Woman,

I know you’re angry right now. So am I. I’m a firm believer in a woman’s right to choose, and so the leaked SCOTUS opinion which shows them poised to overturn Roe v. Wade is a cataclysmic, and yes, terrifying development. (Luckily, Democrats have the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, and they could move quickly to codify abortion rights in federal law if they wanted to. Unfortunately though, they’re not willing to suspend the filibuster in order to do so - what a surprise.)

Biden’s ungodly proxy war with Russia, this time using Ukraine as a pawn to force regime change against Putin (it was Syria the first time), seems like a moment to remind people of one key point: When the government tells you something or some nation is a “threat”- a “national security threat” or threat to “U.S. interests”- just remember that it has absolutely nothing to do with you. State power brainwashes us from birth to death into falsely identifying ourselves with its agenda and believing that the State represents what is best for the people.

As the world watches the war in Ukraine drag on, Western states are upping the ante by offering more and more military aid to Ukraine. After all, we can’t just stand by and do nothing as a small country gets pummeled by the aggression of a bigger state (hold your tongue, Yemen).

Taylor’ Lorenz published an article in The Washington Post this week in which she outed the owner of the infamous “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account.

However you feel about the content of Libs of TikTok - and we certainly find it objectionable - the biography of the person behind it would only be newsworthy if they were a particularly extreme character with a documented history of illicit or illegal behavior. For example, if the person had been successfully sued for defamation in the past, this would make her identity relevant to the story, because we would have reason to believe that perhaps she is fabricating some of the content on her account. If she had been indicted for inciting racial violence, this would out her as a particularly odious and perhaps even criminally malevolent actor.

Bernie Sanders turned some heads this week when one of his advisors disclosed that he is not ruling out a third run for the presidency in 2024. The announcement came with the caveat that he would only consider entering the race “in the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary,” meaning that should Biden decide to seek re-election, Bernie wouldn’t challenge him for the nomination.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC announced its slate of endorsements for the 2022 midterms. Among them was Shontel Brown, the newly elected incumbent from Ohio’s 11th district, who defeated Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner in a primary for 2021’s special election to fill the seat.

Those who’ve decorated their social media accounts with Ukrainian flag decals but had nothing at all to say about the U.S.-sponsored Saudi genocide in Yemen these past eight years get really annoyed when they’re reminded of this inconsistency. These same people want the international community to shun and isolate Russia, but can’t say whether the United States deserves the same punishment for its numerous 21st century war crimes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” said Joe Biden in Poland on Saturday in reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House quickly tried to walk back the statement, insisting that “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” The Democratic Party-aligned media is doing their part to convince their consumers that Biden’s remarks were merely an unfortunate gaffe, and not a reflection of the United States’ true policy aims.

“If you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life, Dragging behind you the silent reproach of a million tear-stained eyes, don’t be surprised when a crack in the ice appears under your feet.”

The Trump era was one of unrelenting malaise for the political class. Democratic politicians roiled in resentment and righteous indignation at every word and deed of the 45th President. The beltway media became, more nakedly than ever before, a propaganda arm of the DNC, and central command for the #resistance.

The great Lenin once said “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Now we are living in such a moment. Putin’s risky ploy to overturn American unipolar global hegemony has crashed onto the rocks of poor planning and Ukrainian resistance and is turning into a catastrophe of historic proportions. Decades of history have been unleashed, but as Marx said, “Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” On this knife’s edge of history, things could go in one of two radically different directions.

According to new reporting by Axios, President Biden is considering a trip to Saudi Arabia this Spring in order to mend relations and convince the Kingdom to produce more oil to offset a potential U.S. ban on Russian imports following their invasion of Ukraine.

After weeks of building up his forces in a way that screamed, “This is not a drill,” Vladimir Putin finally gave the order on Thursday morning to invade Ukraine. This was perhaps the single greatest act of white-on-white violence since the release of Taylor Swift’s Welcome to New York album.

Several accounts of the Canadian trucker convoy make the point that it’s about much more than vaccine mandates. Bill Maher’s recent guest Vivek Ramaswamy described it as an uprising “against the biggest threat to democracy, the rise of the managerial class.” Rupa Subramanya, a resident of Ottawa, interviewed 100 protesters, and her reporting challenges corporate media narratives that the movement is steeped in white nativism. In her article, she speaks to truckers of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds whose common grievance is that they’re being told how to live and how to act by a comfortable upper class who’s been able to ride out the pandemic from home, working cushy white collar jobs on their laptops.

Ben Burgis, our most recent podcast guest, chose the late Christopher Hitchens as the topic for his latest book entitled Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters. In it, he examines the ideas and influence of one of the most enigmatic and entertaining public intellectuals of our time.

A recent Pew poll shows waning confidence in President Biden’s ability to “handle the public health impact of the coronavirus outbreak.” As shown below, Biden’s numbers on covid have plummeted more than 20 points in less than a year. Last March, 65% of Americans were optimistic that the new administration would effectively pull us through the pandemic - currently, only 44% feel that way. Most troublingly for Biden, the number of people who say they’re “very confident” in his handling of covid has decreased by more than half. A mere 15% of the public now expresses such a level of trust.

Liberals flooded the streets in jubilation when the Presidential election was finally called for Joe Biden. After four anxious days of counting returns, major media organizations declared the winner on November 7, a Saturday, at around 11am - serendipitously, right around brunchtime. Alas, they thought, the Trump era was over.

**UPDATE: Since this article’s publication, ABC has suspended Whoopi Goldberg from The View**

ICYMI, Whoopi Goldberg recently espoused perhaps the dumbest and most ignorant opinion ever expressed in the history of television. While discussing the Right’s plans to ban books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus from academic curriculum, Goldberg proclaimed, “The Holocaust isn’t about race.”

Mostly, the podcaster gig is a blast. Get yourself a microphone, connect it to the internet, and start spewing your opinions consistently and with some modicum of wit, or at least personality, and while the world might not beat a path to your door, a small following is sure to come a’ knocking. Keep it going long enough and that following can grow into the thousands, and maybe more, even in this environment of ever more repressive algorithms constricting our rights to free speech and virtual-public assembly.

Last week, the Senate’s 52-48 vote against filibuster reform drove yet another nail in the coffin that is the Biden presidency. After having failed to whip his own party’s votes to pass Build Back Better in the last months of 2021, Biden attempted a “pivot” to voting rights legislation in 2022.

"SEC Rule 10b-5 prohibits corporate officers and directors or other insider employees from using confidential corporate information to reap a profit (or avoid a loss) by trading in the Company’s stock. This rule also prohibits “tipping” of confidential corporate information to third parties.

Bernie Sanders has been fighting the good fight for longer than I’ve been alive, and so it ought to go without saying that I’m forever grateful for his efforts to make the country and the world a saner, kinder, and more civilized place. But in his recent interview with The Guardian, he once again doubles down on the failed strategy of reforming the Democratic Party from within.

In his recent article in The Guardian, Stephen Marche argues that the United States is facing a crisis of institutional legitimacy that has split the country into already warring factions. He writes:

“My dad was a… petty thief. Never could hold down a job, so, he just robbed. Convenience stores, shops, small-time stuff. One time, he sat me down, he told me something I never forgot. He said, ‘Everyone steals. That’s how it works. You think people out there are getting exactly what they deserve? No. They’re getting paid over or under, but someone in the chain always gets bamboozled.’ I steal, Son, but I don’t get caught. That’s my contract with society. Now if you can *catch* me stealing, then I’ll go to jail, but if you can’t, then I’ve earned the money.”

Climate change isn’t a comet hurdling towards Earth whose sudden and dramatic impact hasn’t yet been felt. Rather, it’s a slow burn already underway whose effects become more and more intense every year as the planet becomes decreasingly habitable for us humans.

When President Biden first assumed the office, his support for universal pre-K, a children’s UBI, and paid family leave came as a pleasant surprise to many progressives who went into this administration with the lowest of expectations. Shortly after inauguration day, stimulus checks were being shipped out and vaccines were being administered by the millions. For a minute there, it seemed like perhaps good things were possible again.

This is a strange holiday season. To gather, or not to gather: that is the question for many as Omicron bursts onto the scene just in time to turn our seasonal festivities into millions of individual party games of Covid Russian Roulette.

Since his acquittal, Kyle Rittenhouse has been on a high profile right wing media tour. Days after his trial ended, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show for an exclusive interview. He then dropped by Steven Crowder’s podcast to discuss, among other things, his taste in women. His latest stop was an appearance at Turning Point USA’s four-day conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Amazon won’t let us leave.” These were the last words Larry Virden communicated to his girlfriend via text message before being killed when a tornado struck his place of work, an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, moments later. Virden was one of six Amazon workers to die that night.

It’s been a week that could arguably described as the effective end of the Biden presidency. Over a span of just 72 hours, the administration announced that the student loan payment freeze would expire at the end of January, that they would defer to Congress to deliver the $10,000 in student debt forgiveness they promised on the campaign trail, and that they’re shelving Build Back Better until 2022.

Even Joe Biden’s insultingly meager campaign promise of $10,000 in student debt relief for borrowers in exchange for public service seemed dubious at the time he made it. After all, this is the guy who deemed it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, and has been a lifelong prostitute for credit card companies and big banks, both of whom profit greatly off the interest from their clients’ crippling debts.

In her December 6th press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki sarcastically mocked a reporter’s suggestion to make Covid tests free of charge to whoever needs them. Instead, she described a convoluted scheme in which qualifying individuals would be able to seek reimbursement from their insurance companies after being tested, and implied it would be too expensive to simply provide them outright (watch the exchange below):

“We need somewhere to live,” says Alex to her social worker in episode 6 of Netflix’s Maid, “I’m on seven different types of government assistance right now, and I’m working the maximum amount of hours I can work without getting my benefits cut. But after food and gas and daycare co-pay, we have a total of nine dollars extra every week. . .How am I supposed to afford rent, even subsidized rent. . .How is this assistance assisting me?”

“I am not right wing, I am very much a Democrat,” said Henry Bridger, campaign manager for the recall effort against Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant in a televised debate earlier this month. Whether Bridger is himself deluded enough to earnestly believe what sounds like a literal punchline to many on the actual ’left wing’ is besides the point.

Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all five counts: first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of reckless endangerment.

The verdict was met with predictable backlash from the Left, who are calling the trial a disgraceful miscarriage of justice, and another victory for the white supremacist Right. To them, this was more than a trial - it was a proxy for a larger political struggle in which privileged white men seem to win all too often. They rightfully point out that were the shoe on the other foot, and Rittenhouse was a black man showing up armed to a MAGA rally and killed two people, he’d have likely not lived to have his day in court.

Hey, Little Liberal. We know you’re probably feeling pretty betrayed right now, and maybe you feel like you can’t express those emotions because they’re too big and scary. Especially because it didn’t just happen to you - most of your friends and family were right there with you hanging on every twist and turn of the Russiagate story for four whole years. What’s even worse is most of them still have a relationship with your abuser. How can you save yourself without confronting them?

Kyle Rittenhouse’s homicide trial is the latest in a continuing series of high profile court proceedings to be televised for all to see. Yesterday, Rittenhouse burst into tears when recounting the events leading up to the moment he shot three men, killing two.

From a drunken, jibbering James Carville appearing on CNN to lament the state of the race in Virginia a few days out, to the NBC poll that dropped over the weekend showing Joe Biden with a 42% approval rating, there was bad Juju for the Democrats written all over the first major election night of the Biden Presidency. As the results unfolded, with Youngkin holding a lead from jump that shrank but never disappeared, and Ciatterelli holding a much tighter, but also consistent lead in New Jersey, a state that should have been an easy lay-up, the punditocracy cast around for easy explanations while diligently avoiding the hard ones that get your network barred from sit-down interviews with the President.

Yes, 90% of the “Let’s Go Brandon” chanters have politics that are pretty different from mine. After all, the phrase was born at a NASCAR event. During a TV interview with winning driver Brandon Brown, an NBC reporter nervously interpreted the crowd’s chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” as “Let’s Go Brandon.” Ridiculous as her attempted coverup was, she deserves credit for thinking on her feet.

“McNulty: I’ve gotta ask you: if every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away… why’d you even let him in the game?

Kid: What?

McNulty: Well, if every time, Snot Boogie stole the money, why’d you let him play?

Joey Holz went viral shortly after posting the following to his Facebook page on September 29:

At this writing, the post has been shared 18,000 times, and has gotten the attention of multiple media outlets, including, most famously, Business Insider, who wrote a full article on his experiment entitled “A worker in Florida applied to 60 entry-level jobs in September and got one interview.”

At the start of negotiations, President Biden seemed to throw his weight behind the progressives’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package to supplement the bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

But as centrists in both the House and Senate raised objections to what Joe Manchin calls a “reckless expansion of government programs,” Biden began to cave to their demands. A couple of weeks ago, he lowered the proposed amount to $2.3 trillion. Just yesterday, he came down even further - his new number stands between $1.75 and $1.9 trillion.

“She literally has the devil on speed dial,” says terrified intern

A special Halloween-time investigation

Senator Krysten Sinema this week denied claims that she sold her soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power and riches after several former and current aides came forward to make the accusation.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Alexander Sammon, staff writer at The American Prospect, wrote a recent article entitled “The Undignified Demise of Centrism.” In it, he concludes:

“Centrism, now, is imperiled as a political orientation not for its competitive viability, but for the emptiness and corruption that has been exposed at its heart. Not a single young voter, or someone politically up for grabs, can look to the leadership of Kyrsten Sinema or Scott Peters and see a politician with a positive vision for governance and society, one they could believe in, knock on doors for, or turn out to vote for.”

As you’ve probably observed if you’ve been paying any attention to the ongoing negotiations over infrastructure spending, Democratic lawmakers and voters are growing increasingly frustrated with Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. She is one of two Senators currently preventing the passage of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill which would finance long overdue additions to the social safety net, including universal pre-K and expansion of Medicare.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that President Biden, in meetings with House Democrats, has significantly lowered his goals on additional infrastructure spending. Until now, he has thrown in with progressives who insisted on passing a $3.5 trillion package in addition to the $1 trillion bipartisan bill.

These days Joe Biden is a tragic figure and also a symbolic one. As he dodders and mumbles his way through the rare press conference and occasional speech, it’s hard not to feel like we’re into the final scenes of King Lear, with the monarch’s mind crumbling under the weight of too many cruel realities arriving at a time in life when he is least able to manage them. Watching him try - and fail repeatedly - to master situations from Covid to Afghanistan to a dysfunctional Congress, gives one the uncomfortable feeling, no matter your politics, of catching a glimpse at our own national reflection.

Whether to DemExit or to primary centrist Democrats and elect progressives within the party has been a contentious debate in Left circles since the 2016 election. Those in the latter camp argue that the party can be reformed from within if enough insurgent candidates can successfully defeat incumbent moderates. A common retort among the former is some version of the phrase, “You don’t change the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party changes you.”

(originally published on An Appeal to Reason)

Class collaboration occurs when a member of one class is given special benefits by another class in order to contain or coopt revolutionary spirit. This happens in many different ways and is antithetical to the class struggle. The actions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) at the Met Gala made quite the splash recently. Her “Tax the Rich” message at a multi-million dollar event only open to the rich was certainly cringeworthy. It is a good example of the larger systemic problem of class collaboration. As Earl Browder described, “It is not the personal corruption of an individual leader, but the ‘impersonal corruption’ of a whole section of workers that is involved. And it is far more important to understand such roots of class collaboration than the phase of direct bribery of individual leaders.” This is not an individual problem with AOC or other legislators, but rather a systemic problem which will require revolutionary system change to solve.

Liza Featherstone recently wrote an article for Jacobin entitled [“Barack Obama Has Been One of the Worst Ex-Presidents Ever.”](http://Barack Obama Has Been One of the Worst Ex-Presidents Ever) In it, she argues that Obama’s post-presidency has been “strikingly bereft of public-spiritedness,” the most recent example of which was his opulent 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard mansion amidst surging Covid numbers.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at Monday night’s Met Gala when she appeared in a white dress with bright red lettering that read “Tax the Rich.” Immediately, “Tax the Rich” was trending on Twitter (at this writing, it still is), as well as - of course - AOC herself.

In December of 2020, we published an article entitled “Why Progressives Joining the Republican Party Isn’t as Crazy as You Think.” In it, Russell Dobular argued that because of the shifting class dynamics within the Democratic and Republican electorates (Republicans have become more working class, Democrats more upper-middle class), populist Left economic policies could catch on in Republican circles more so than in Democratic ones. Additionally, in deep red states and/or districts where Democrats have virtually no chance of beating Republicans, it makes more sense for progressives to primary Republican incumbents than to try and oust them as Democrats.

The Supreme Court recently voted 5-4 not to intervene and block the implementation of Texas’ anti-abortion law SB8, which bans all abortions past six weeks and offers monetary incentives for citizens who report anyone “aiding and abetting” an abortion.

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on August 9. The team of 230 scientists said, “Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years…unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.”

In the wake of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan and the subsequent usurpation of the Afghan government by the Taliban, there seem to be two competing widespread opinions. Predictably, the corporate media, essentially an arm of the military industrial complex itself, has been nearly unanimous in its messaging that the turmoil in Afghanistan is a cautionary tale for why America must remain the World Police, and that the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw was a disastrous one.

If God is a novelist, he has a disposition towards the trite, the obvious, and the too on-the-nose. Case in point: Andrew Cuomo. If one wanted to write a book whose theme was personal and political hypocrisy, you couldn’t do any better than to produce one in which liberals rally around one notoriously corrupt bully, in order to demonstrate their rejection of another. In the annals of liberal idiocy, the cult of Cuomo ranks right up there with running Hillary Clinton for President and Michelle Obama unironically describing real-life war criminal George W. Bush, as her “partner in crime.”

Nina Turner entered her primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District with massive advantages in name recognition, fundraising, and polling. In fact, as recently as June 1, her lead seemed insurmountable; she was polling at 50% to Shontel Brown’s 15. When Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown a couple of weeks later, progressives mostly laughed it off, seeing as Turner seemed like a lock to win anyway.

At her press conference last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked a question about the Biden administration’s policy on the issue of student loan debt forgiveness. As we on the Left have long known, neither Biden nor Democratic leadership have any real interest in forgiving student loan debt, and so it wouldn’t have come as much surprise to see Pelosi dodge the question by muttering a stream of meaningless, meandering gobbledygook.

We on the Left had always assumed that the defense of free speech and freedom of expression were core principles of Leftism, and that the impulse to censor and ban was a right-wing phenomenon. Boy, were we naïve. Turns out that whoever has institutional power will use that power to try to shut down dissenting voices, no matter where those voices may fall on the ideological spectrum. For most of the post-war period, the center-right had all the power, which created the false impression that censorship is always coming from a Victorian prudishness, or Russophobia. But in this new bizarro world where a fringe identarian movement has seized control of academia, the media, and for the moment, the government, we’ve made the mind-blowing discovery that it’s possible to be prudish from the Left, and when you give the Left the power to make that prudishness actionable, all that ACLU stuff goes right out the window. Strangely, the Russophobia part has carried over unchanged.

“You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy.”

Arthur Jensen, Network

For years, leftists have been digging through the internet archives to prove that when Democrats are in power, they never actually deliver on their promises to the voters, even when it’s fully within their power to do so. It’s been a tough case to make, especially to Blue Magaworld, for whom Barack Obama is something akin to a secular saint. Try to talk about how he abandoned the public option before negotiations on Obamacare even began, or about how he put pressure on Senators who refused to vote for the bill without it instead of on the ones who dug their heels in on having it included, and the most common response from Democrats will be, “But the Republicans!” Never mind the fact that Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote, which means the Democrats could have done anything in theory, right up to and including Universal Health Care. The idea that the party, or God forbid, Obama himself, might have anything to do with the band-aid-on-a-gunshot-wound nature of the policy is anathema to most Democrats. Any attempt to persuade them otherwise is quickly vaporized by their repeated exposure to brain-melting doses of Morning Joe.

Progressive candidates swept control of the Nevada Democratic Party on Saturday, March 6th. With the backing of the local DSA chapter, Judith Whitmer was elected chair of the state party, and four other Left candidates also prevailed in their respective races. Immediately following their victories, they received word that the entire staff of the state party was quitting, and terminating their contracts with independent consultants as well. The Intercept also reported that before Saturday’s election, the Nevada Democrats transferred $450,000 out of the party and into the DSCC, which will work to re-elect incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022. Whitmer, in her appearance on the Deconstructed podcast, did not confirm or deny that, but she said that she has enlisted an attorney to try and prevent any similar shenanigans.

I’ve been holding my fire, ‘cause fair is fair; we had to give Biden a little time to either break his previous mold or prove to be the war mongering corporate stooge he’s always been. The latter was always more likely but there was a slim chance that a man of his advanced years would want to be remembered for something besides mass incarceration and making it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. I know exactly two voters who thought Biden should be the president on his own merits, and not just relative to Trump, but I know a lot of people who got caught up in the “Dear Leader,” state TV style coverage of the inauguration. Those folks are mostly silent now as Biden demonstrates the kind of bait and switch “leadership” that’s made the Democratic brand so toxic since the Clinton era. Let’s take a look:

When Barack Obama took the lead in the 2008 primaries, many of us who supported him at the time were surprised to learn of people called superdelegates: party big-whigs who got to cast their own heavily weighted votes in the Democratic primaries. At the beginning of that race, a great majority of them had pledged their support to Hillary Clinton, and it seemed possible that if they remained committed to her, she might prevail over Obama in the end, despite losing the pledged delegate count. Chris Rock famously joked that “nobody had ever heard of a superdelegate until it looked like a black man was about to win the nomination,” a humorous nod to the idea that whenever it seems something good might be on the horizon, some unexpected obstacle presents itself and threatens to thwart progress.

“The Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security,” proclaims Martin Sheen as J. Edgar Hoover at the beginning of the new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, “Our counter-intelligence program must prevent the rise of a Black Messiah from among their midst - one with the potential to unite the Communist, the anti-war, and the New Left movements.”

Last week, The Washington Post published an article entitled “A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble.” The article found a pattern of bankruptcies, tax liens, and defaults on loans amongst those charged with breaking into the Capitol on January 6th. This revived a fairly old debate over what is the driving force behind Trumpism - is it racism and white nationalism, or is it economic anxiety?

For a brief few days after the inauguration, it seemed as though the country actually had been unified. Not by Biden’s speech, or the pageantry, or the poetry, but by the virally memed image of Bernie Sanders, sitting by himself in his winter jacket and giant mittens, with his cheap blue mask on crooked, arms and legs crossed. His attire and attitude reflected the opinion that yeah, electing this asshole was probably necessary, but man, is this some bullshit. This is a mainstream opinion in America, as post-election polling shows that even a vast majority of Biden voters are more thankful to have ousted Trump than to have elected Biden.

Christian Smalls was a supervisor at Amazon’s JFK/Staten Island warehouse until Spring of 2020, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. When he noticed workers had been falling ill on the job with severe flu-like symptoms, he approached his local HR department to inquire about workplace protection measures against Covid-19.

“We like the stock.” - Jim Cramer, January 28, 2021

Except for a few rare moments of populist uprising big enough to force concessions from elites (the labor movements of the late 19th-early 20th century), the story we tell ourselves about our own history, is mostly the story of the upper classes. Thus, when we think of the 60’s, we think of hippies at Woodstock, even though there were never more than 500,000 hippies, and they were mostly drawn from middle to upper-middle class homes. The majority of young boomers at the time were too busy working, raising families, and fighting in Viet Nam, to be cheering on Hendrix at Woodstock.

The “short sell” is a somewhat common practice on Wall Street. It’s a technique in which an investor will borrow a stock and instantly sell it at the market price, in the hopes that when the stock is due to be returned, it will have declined in value. At that point, the borrower buys the stock for the reduced price, and the transaction is completed. The difference between the market price at the time the stock was borrowed, and the lower price at the time it was returned, is the investor’s profit.

Last summer, Nathan Robinson reviewed Krystal Ball’s and Saagar Enjeti’s book, A Populist’s Guide to 2020. He criticized the authors for overstating the compatibility of Left and Right wing populism, stating that Right wing populism is more or less “just fascism,” and that the Left should confront supposed Right wing populists, rather than court them and seek common ground with them.

The alliance between the liberal establishment and big tech has so been long entrenched that it’s difficult to discern where one ends and the other begins. It became obvious in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory that this amorphous yet coordinated power structure would stop at nothing to ensure that such a thing could not and would not ever happen again.

At around this time last year, Bernie Sanders was surging in the Democratic primary polls, causing panic amongst his centrist rivals and their media mouthpieces. Op-eds abounded, sounding the alarms about Sanders’ vulnerability in the general election, largely due to his calling himself a democratic socialist. Despite winning the first three states, Sanders suffered crushing losses on Super Tuesday to Joe Biden, who Democratic voters were convinced was more “electable” due to his rejection of the socialist label.

At the start of the House session (January 3), Democrats will hold the narrowest majority by either party in modern American history. It’s still unclear at this writing what the exact makeup will be at the swearing in ceremony, as one House race is still too close to call, and some members are stuck in quarantine. Jimmy Dore’s initial estimate that 15 Democrats would be needed to withhold their vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House unless she agrees to bring Medicare For All to the floor, seems off by about a factor of 3; turns out, if current projections hold, around 5 Democratic defectors would suffice. Furthermore, conservative Democrat Elissa Slotkin has already pledged to vote against Pelosi for other reasons. Assuming she keeps her word, we’ve got one vote already that we didn’t even ask for.

Over the past couple of weeks, we saw the United States Congress in lockstep agreement over the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act renewal. The bill includes the following:

• 93 new F-35 fighter jets to be manufactured by Lockheed Martin (even though the Pentagon only requested 79).
• $23.4 billion to build 9 new battleships, nearly $20 billion more than the Navy asked for.
• A second attack submarine, which the Navy also says is unnecessary.
• $2.2 billion for increasing U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.
• $69 billion for a “separate Pentagon war account.”

The NDAA passed in the House with 335 votes, and later cakewalked through the Senate by a score of 84-13; sufficient margins to override President Trump’s veto.

Publisher’s Note: This article was first published in December of 2020. Given recent developments in which many Republican candidates and politicians are running on policies like a public healthcare option, marijuana decriminalization, and Universal Basic Income, we’ve decided to recirculate it for your reading pleasure.

Few intellectuals on the left are as widely respected as Cornel West. Because he is a decorated, recognized leftist intellectual and activist, West has been placed on a pedestal, and many on the left take his words as gospel. While many of West’s critiques of power are spot on, the left’s canonization of him makes it difficult to challenge him when he is wrong, and when it comes to the issue of neoliberalism, his framing couldn’t be more flawed. Every great intellectual has their blind spots and, whether intentionally or not, West’s views ultimately serve the establishment power structure. Rather than an attempt to cancel West, my critique should serve as a warning against elevating any individual to the status of moral beacons deserving of total deference.

As coronavirus cases surge throughout the country and the death toll climbs by thousands per day, it seems, as widely predicted, that Americans are staring down what will likely be the darkest and deadliest winter of our lifetimes. If we stand any chance of mitigating the suffering that awaits us, we must all take it upon ourselves to take necessary safety precautions and stop the spread. Social distancing, mask wearing, and minimizing in-person contact are all tried and true methods of accomplishing this - so why aren’t more of us doing it?

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Photo: Serge Melki

I understand that Time magazine has a long history of making Presidents-Elect their “Person of the Year.” This tradition started in 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected on the promise of a New Deal to rebuild America’s economy. To this day, FDR has been named Person of the Year (at the time, “Man of the Year”) more than any other individual.

Barack Obama, in one of his latest interviews following the release of his presidential memoir, A Promised Land, sounded off on the Black Lives Matter movement’s “Defund the Police” slogan:

“If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like Defund the Police, but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done. . .So the key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with? And if you want to get something done in a democracy, in a country as big and diverse as ours, then you’ve got to be able to meet people where they are.”

At this writing, Democrats have lost 8 seats in the House of Representatives, as results from the 2020 election continue to be finalized. As predicted, much of the blame for Democrats’ losses is being laid at the feet of the progressive movement, with particular admonishment given to Black Lives Matter activists over their controversial “Defund the Police” slogan. Old guard establishment figures like James Clyburn have insisted that this demand hurt down-ballot Democrats and should therefore be silenced, while newly elected progressives like Cori Bush have defended the use of the phrase.

There is only one party in the US, the corporatist party. This is a fact that that is readily apparent and has been well documented by many people, from pundits like Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges and even Ann Coulter to comedians like George Carlin, Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore.

The formal presidential transition process is now underway, according to a letter from the General Services Administration sent to Joe Biden sent on November 23, signaling the beginning of the end of a bizarre and mostly incoherent effort by the Trump campaign to challenge the results of the 2020 election. After having lost over 30 cases in court, and with state after state certifying their results, it seems the Trump team is starting to accept their fate. If this was indeed an attempted “coup,” as many in the media were calling it, it was among the lamest ever.

The Democrats have won a Pyrrhic victory with Joe Biden. They got rid of Trump, but in electing Joe Biden they may have set the Democratic Party on a death spiral that could culminate in four years.

I was very excited to receive an email this afternoon from Movement For a People’s Party announcing that they will be seeking ballot access in their first state, the state of Maine, next month. Maine has a quirky rule requiring parties to file for ballot access in December of an even-numbered year, and so MPP is weeks away from their official party launch. In order to get on the ballot, they of course need to formalize their party name, and, keeping true to their promise of being a “people’s party,” they are holding a vote this Thursday on their national call to determine what this party should be called, and are taking recommendations from us, the people. I submitted my suggestion earlier today: the Four Freedoms Party.

The Associated Press called the 2020 Presidential election for Joe Biden in the late morning on November 7, after days of suspense-inducing vote counts in 7 states that were too close to call on election night.

According to polling, betting markets, and professional oddsmakers, Joe Biden is the clear favorite heading into Tuesday’s election. He has Donald Trump spread very thin across the electoral map, leading in states like North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio, and within striking distance in even the traditionally red states of Georgia and Texas, which have not gone blue since 1992 and 1976, respectively.

Noam Chomsky says we “must push the lever for the Democrats” in order to oust Trump.

Briahna Joy Gray says we need to “leverage” our votes against the Democratic Party in order to force them to take the Left more seriously.

Noam Chomsky’s recent appearance on the Bad Faith podcast has been fodder for debate among Leftists as Election Day draws near. Hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas challenged him on his support for Joe Biden, claiming that progressives pledging their unconditional allegiance to Democrats in general elections has led to a decades-long rightward shift in Democratic politics, and American politics more broadly. Chomsky fired back by accusing them of “helping Trump win,” and that they were making a “terrible choice” by considering boycotting the Democratic ticket in the hopes of forcing the Democratic Party to court the Left vote more aggressively in future elections.

Given the massive groundswell of anguish and fury over the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, one might expect to see more news coverage of the multiple ways Congressional Democrats are trying to block her nomination. Yet, the corporate media, and top Democrats themselves, have seemed strangely silent, as if they had already surrendered to the inevitable. Why this silence and why a lack of options, when progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for using “every tool at our disposal,” and when Congressional aides are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill outlining multiple tactics for stalling this nomination?

In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, more commonly known as the “Trump Tax Cuts,” effectively eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s controversial individual mandate by reducing the penalty for not having health insurance to zero dollars.

Writer’s Note: This piece was originally published in October of 2020. Slight adjustments and updates were since made to reflect the results of the presidential election.

As Inauguration Day approaches and Joe Biden is poised to become our 46th President, many on the Left are concerned that a Biden presidency will usher in an era of liberal complacency and neoliberal normalcy - the exact things, they would correctly argue, that led to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the first place. They’re worried that the Left was “asleep under Obama” and that they’ll go back to sleep under Biden, killing any momentum for key progressive reforms like Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, debt forgiveness, etc. These same Leftists often argue that a silver lining of the Trump presidency is a reawakened progressive movement that formed in response to it, and they are nervous that replacing Trump with a moderate like Biden will cause their movement to fizzle into obscurity. I’ve heard these points made literally hundreds of times online; I’m sure you have as well. But I’ve never found them particularly convincing, and I especially don’t right now.

In his recent essay titled “Why Liberals Hate Poor White Trash,” River Page writes the following:

“The term ’liberal,’ in the popular imagination, has become synonymous with upper-middle-class white urbanites, a stereotype borne out by statistics. They are a well-educated cohort—widely-read enough to understand the problems with society and capitalism but too insecure in their position to do anything that might challenge the system that has brought them relative benefit—and therefore enjoy programs which give the surface-level appearance of progress and equality. . .Liberals support gay marriage or the right for trans people to use a particular bathroom in public precisely because it does not cost them anything. They can support open borders because it makes their juice cleanse cheaper, and comes with the added benefit of being baptized in the sweat of a Mexican immigrant to cleanse them of their original sin of whiteness. Through charity and means-testing, they can help the poor think they are moral enough to deserve it. They hate the white trash because of the insecurity of their class position. At any time they can look into the eyes of some poor honkey in the trailer park and see themselves looking back. It frightens them, and that fear turns to anger. But they can still pity the poor black person because they know they will never be one.”

“Protect our democracy!” has become a rallying cry in the final weeks of this election season, as moderate, liberal, and progressive Democrats seek to coalesce behind Joe Biden for the sake of ousting the increasingly authoritarian Trump regime and letting our democratic institutions live to fight another day. And while the case can certainly be made that the current administration poses certain unique threats, it has also become apparent that the biggest threat to our democracy is the one that no one in establishment political and media circles wants to talk about: the growing income and wealth gap.

I am, and have been for some time, what many would call a “conspiracy theorist.” In a friendly game of Zoom trivia a couple of weeks back, there was an “assassinations” category, and I found myself blanking on obvious answers like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray - that’s how skeptical I tend to be of mainstream narratives. Given my tendency to doubt the official stories that come out of our government and media, I feel that if I’m convinced that Donald Trump actually has COVID-19, you ought to be as well.

“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”

-President Roslin, Battlestar Galactica

If there had been any doubt about the notion that the collapse of the American Empire was no longer ahead of us, but something that we’re now experiencing in real time, the first presidential debate of 2020 should have settled the question once and for all. If candidates for a nation’s highest office in some way reflect the zeitgeist of the society, then we are a nation torn between the dying echo of a weak, senile neoliberalism, and a uniquely American spin on fascism in the form of a blustering game show host. Whatever the outcome, no great nation that’s belched up these two men as the only choices in a country of 330 million people, can be said to be truly great, much less qualified to take a leadership role in the world.

So, the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is in the books. And if the next two debates are canceled, as some have suggested they ought to be, and we complete our slide into authoritarianism, this could, in theory, have been the final debate in American history.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, and Donald Trump’s subsequent nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, has us all rightly worried about the impending collapse of voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights, labor rights, and civil rights more broadly. Also in the news this week, a new start-up called Civvl recruits gig workers to sign up as independent contractors to serve as eviction agents for landlords looking to get rid of tenants behind on their rent.

If you live in New York City and you’ve watched a New York crime show in the last twenty years, it probably felt a lot like alternate history science fiction. *What if you put Starsky and Hutch in a world with cell phones and the internet?*Those realities never co-existed, but that doesn’t matter for the vast majority of viewers who not only don’t live in New York, but in most cases have never even been there. The city only functions as a symbolic stand-in for everything they find threatening and mysterious about urban life. You don’t need New York crime to make a New York crime show, anymore than you need real cowboys roaming around Wyoming to make a Western. Its become a beloved genre, completely independent of the actual place that is its theoretical setting.

Last week, MSNBC’s Morning Joe did a segment on Joe Biden’s low Latino support in Florida. According to recent polling cited in the segment, Trump leads Biden among Cuban Americans by a whopping 68-30 margin. Among non-Cuban Latinos, Biden leads, but only 58-32, which is well behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin of 71-27 with the same group.

As a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, I canvassed in three states talking to voters about Bernie’s policies, including the Green New Deal. It was clear that the climate and environment was an important topic for many of the citizens with whom I spoke. These people wanted a clean future for themselves, for their children, and their grandchildren. Even if they were undecided on Bernie as a candidate, they agreed that the climate crisis was a top concern. And this was before a powerful derecho storm blew through Iowa, leaving areas that I had canvassed without power and destroying hundreds of homes. This was before the Pine Gulch fire became the largest in Colorado history and left the entire state in a smoke cloud.

“Of course Democrats will blame the Left if Biden loses!” You say, “Isn’t this old news?!”

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that Green Party voters, Bernie-or-Busters, and all other lefties who withhold their vote from Joe Biden will be chided and shamed by Democratic leaders, voters, and pundits. This is nothing new, and it will surely occur to a certain extent should Joe Biden lose the election. But this isn’t the only way the Democrats will scapegoat the Left for their failings. This year, the Democratic Party has sleazily, but effectively, created a win-win dynamic in their ongoing war with their progressive faction.

On the morning of September 3, Rick Snyder, former Republican governor of Michigan, announced he would be voting for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Calling Donald Trump a “bully who lacks a moral compass,” Snyder declared he would “continue to support and stand up for Republican policies and values,” but would not support Trump for re-election. The Biden campaign, which has made outreach to Republicans the linchpin of its 2020 strategy, was quick to promote this endorsement, sending out an email blast that evening touting Snyder’s support.

It seems like hardly a day goes by that we aren’t being urged to cancel somebody. Whether it’s a media celebrity who lacked the foresight to behave according to current standards, 10 years ago, a historical figure who had the poor judgement not to be woke in the 1700’s, or just some poor schmuck who didn’t get the memo on the universal hand gesture for “okay,” no longer being okay, the list of non-persons just keeps on growing. But there’s one group that seems uniquely impervious to cancellation: establishment Democrat politicians. It’s very odd that folks who want to throw Ulysses S. Grant into the dustbin of history, would overlook some of the most powerful and influential people in our society in the course of deciding who does and doesn’t belong in the public sphere. But if you’re a prominent Democrat in good standing with the party’s leadership, there doesn’t seem to be very much you can’t get away with, from overt racism all the way up to rape, with nary a peep from the Twitterverse. Let’s take a look at a few prominent examples.

As the George Floyd protests erupted in late May, Dr. Cornel West appeared on CNN and said, “We are witnessing America as a failed social experiment.” He went on to lament the United States’ seemingly unbridgeable racial divide, our biased and unjust legal system, and our brutal market-driven economy that renders far too many of our citizens unable to live with dignity. At first, it’s easy to accept his premise that the American experiment has been a dud, but before we finalize this diagnosis, it’s necessary to ask ourselves: who exactly is America failing, and who is it not failing? The more we ponder that question, the more convincing the position that America was designed to fail the majority of its people all along, for the benefit of those equipped to flourish amongst its twisted and perverse set of cultural norms and societal priorities.

It’s September, and both major party conventions have come and gone, which means the general election has officially begun. To say that 2020 has been a volatile year would of course be an understatement. As coronavirus raged out of control, Donald Trump’s abysmal handling of the crisis caused his poll numbers to plummet, and it looked for a month or so that Joe Biden, despite lacking a message, a platform, and a constituency, was on the path to victory. In the past couple of weeks, however, the race has tightened, and betting markets are now considering the race a virtual dead heat. How did this happen?

PART 1: A LITTLE REVOLUTION CAN BE GOOD

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is often credited with having “saved Capitalism in America”. Indeed, FDR even described himself as “the greatest friend the profit system ever had.” This is an obvious truth when taken in the historical context. When FDR took office, the country was in the midst of a deep depression which for many signaled the impending fall of capitalism. Working people were being recruited in droves by a very active and vital American Communist Party as well as the American Socialist Party, and populist movements were sprouting up all over. In the face of these poplar uprisings, the American ruling class was (rightly) worried that the militancy caused by massive wealth inequality and worker exploitation that had toppled the Czar’s regime only a few years earlier could spread to the shores of the USA.

As the DNC and RNC reality TV shows wrap up, an Orwellian mood fills the air. We are told from all corners that now is not the time to raise uncomfortable questions about Biden’s record. Right now, one thing matters, and one thing only: voting Trump out. Everything we say, do, and think must serve that end. Now is the time for total ideological conformity. Don’t step out of line! Any deviation and you may be a Russian agent! Trump is such an exceptional threat to our liberty and democratic values that anything other than a vote against Trump is simply irresponsible, if not treasonous!

“Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere.”

I know people are angry at this 17 year old kid, Kyle Rittenhouse. I get it. I am too. But please keep in mind, and in heart, he’s just a 17 year old boy. I was his age when the U.S. Army trained me to kill people - only 17 years old. I didn’t know anything. I believed in something that deceived me on purpose. I was manipulated, like Kyle was. I was Kyle. Kyle is me. Me: your beloved, loving friend, neighbor, caretaker, student, teacher, healer, spicy activist, brother, son.

“To vote, or not to vote…for Joe Biden,” is the soliloquy on the lips of the Left as this foul year of our Lord 2020 approaches its sure to be spectacular, in an Irwin Allen disaster movie kind of a way, conclusion. But looking beyond the ‘Towering Inferno’ of this election, progressives are going to have to make some hard choices about where to put our energies. Do we continue to press for reform of the Democratic Party from within, or take on the admittedly daunting project of building a new party from without?

On the third night of the Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. In what’s being described as a “stark, sober address” intended to frighten Americans about the dangers of a second Trump term, the former president took a moment to acknowledge the hopelessness and cynicism that has become so prevalent in today’s political discourse:

Opening night of the Democratic National Convention ended with a performance of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth” by Billy Porter, accompanied on guitar by Stephen Stills. The intention was clear: to invoke the rebellious spirit of the 1960’s and package it as a multigenerational call to action from both the old white man who wrote the song and the openly gay African American superstar singing lead vocals. The performance earned rave reviews from the liberal Twitterverse and various mainstream publications, but was greeted less warmly by the accounts I tend to follow. Call me a curmudgeonly disgruntled commie if you must - you certainly wouldn’t be the first to do so. But this performance crystallized for me a realization that I had actually come to four years ago during the 2016 campaign, but couldn’t quite articulate at the time: liberals just aren’t cool anymore.

As the Democratic National Convention kicks off, so begins perhaps the most hopeless general election season this country has ever seen. Predictably, progressives are debating each other over how to vote, if at all, in November. Some are voting Green, some are doing write-ins, some are staying home, and some, of course, are voting for Joe Biden. You can hardly visit a Facebook group, Reddit forum, or Twitter thread without seeing Leftists arguing their cases on this question.

Jim Langford is one of over 700 delegates who will be voting ’no’ on the DNC platform at next week’s virtual convention over the party’s rejection of Medicare for All.

He supported Bernie’s 2016 campaign, but in 2020, four years into a Trump presidency with the stakes even higher, he decided to get more involved in Sanders’ second presidential run. He managed a volunteer field office in his home state of Florida, led phone banks, canvassing trips, and barnstorms, and, with Florida for Bernie’s endorsement, made a successful run to be selected as a delegate.

Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Brana, founder and national director for the Movement for a People’s Party. Anticipating a possible repeat of the 2016 primary in which Bernie Sanders would be denied the nomination by a combination of Democratic Party chicanery and Democratic voter vapidity, I asked him how he thought his organization should approach the question of how progressives ought to vote in the general election, assuming someone like Joe Biden would be the nominee.

The primary contests on August 4th were a major boon for down-ballot Leftists, and a much needed lift for the progressive movement. Following Jamaal Bowman’s decisive upset victory over incumbent Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th Congressional District primary on June 23, the spotlight turned to St. Louis, where Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush was looking to unseat 10-term incumbent William “Lacy” Clay, Jr..

On July 18, a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally was planned in Pleasant Valley, NY. Permits were secured, arrangements were made with local law enforcement, and trained peacekeepers had volunteered to attend to ensure the safety of all participants. What ensued instead was a violent ambush by pro-police counter-protesters. The cops on the scene did little to intervene and keep the peace, which of course has given many rally-goers the impression that they sympathized with the counter-protesters.

It has been several weeks since Valerie suffered a nightmare. After falling asleep, instead of suddenly finding herself at a grocery store checkout counter with no money, as happened so often in the past, or under arrest for crossing state lines to find shelter with her children, she has dreamt simply of flying, traveling, being alone in quiet fields, and reading.

In spite of what you might have heard, Democrats aren’t stupid. Nor are they spineless, cowardly, incapable of messaging, or any of the other things offered as explanations for their decades-long failure to win most elections in most places, or to secure meaningful policy reforms for their voters. In the now famous words of Marco Rubio, spoken during his campaign-ending broken robot moment on the 2016 debate stage, “Lets dispel with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

We published a podcast a couple of weeks ago about the differences between “leftists” and “liberals.” It was our most listened-to episode ever. There’s obviously an appetite out there for a deeper understanding of political philosophies, how they come to be, and how they manifest themselves in real world conflicts and struggles. And so we thought we should follow up on this topic and dig a bit deeper into the psychology of people’s political tendencies - how people’s anxieties, fears, hopes, and dreams, influence their political opinions.

In the pre-Covid world, Trump was consistently favored across numerous betting markets and forecasting models to win reelection, and the Republicans maintaining control of the Senate was a virtual lock. Alas, however, times have changed. As the coronavirus rages out of control throughout the country, Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to plummet, and his chances of victory dwindle by the day. Suddenly, it seems the Republican Party is in danger of losing not only the Presidency, but their Senate majority as well, a prospect thought to be unthinkable just a few months ago.

Below is the Majority Report’s tribute show to Michael Brooks, who died suddenly and tragically on Monday, July 20. I’ve also listed some of my favorite Michael Brooks videos here as well.

Lately, we’ve published a few blog posts whose headlines have used the word “liberal” in the headline. I myself published two pieces titled “Black Lives Matter is Winning, and They Don’t Need Advice from the Liberal Establishment,” and “Our Useless Liberal Media Still Won’t Commit to Medicare For All.” Our friend Kristoffer Hellén contributed a great piece just last week called “How Liberals (Yes, Liberals) Hijack Discourse to Undermine the Left.”

Writer’s Note, 2/17/21: This article was first published in July of 2020, and the podcast interview attached was recorded during the summer of 2019. Given President Biden’s recent rejection of the $50,000 debt relief proposal put forth by progressive, and even some moderate, Democrats, I thought the article and the podcast were both worth re-posting.

How is the Democratic establishment able to exert so much influence over American society when its hypocrisy is so blatant? Why are so many Americans prepared to throw away any hope of progress just to “stop Trump”?

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is a book by Robin DiAngelo about her experiences as a for-hire diversity trainer for corporate America. The book was first published in 2018, but has recently soared atop the New York Times bestseller list as race relations are back in the forefront of our collective consciousness.

“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” was recently published in Harper’s Magazine and co-signed by dozens of writers, authors, and academics from all corners of the political spectrum. The letter praised the new wave of activism that has swept the nation in response to the murder of George Floyd, but expressed concerns about the growing zealousness of the emerging Left, and warned of an “intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.”

Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave a speech at Mt. Rushmore. Unlike his failed rally two weeks prior in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which he delivered off-the-cuff remarks including a bizarre twenty minute tangent about his difficulty descending a ramp at West Point, this was a prepared speech delivered more or less as written, with minimal Trumpian improvisation.

RootsAction.org and Progressive Democrats for America are urging Joe Biden to select Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, as per an open letter they published just this week addressed to his campaign. Their reasoning is consistent with what we’ve heard from many progressives sympathetic to the idea: Warren can unite the party by healing the rift between centrists and progressives, thereby bolstering Biden’s chances in the general election, and she will advance the cause of the progressive movement by pushing a potential Biden administration to the left.

Progressives have been widely sharing the new Op-ed in The New York Times by its editorial board member Jeneen Interlandi entitled “Employer-Based Health Care, Meet Massive Unemployment.” Finally, it seems, liberal establishment outlets have realized the necessity for universal healthcare in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. And sure, on its face, it’s nice to see the Times publish a piece like this. Call it better late than never, I suppose. But as Lefties who have been on board with Medicare For All for years already, our response to Interlandi’s article should be more than just a moral victory lap. Because despite the highly shareable headline, the piece still gets quite a bit wrong, and most of what it gets right is such old news that it gives us an opportunity to demonstrate that we were out in front of this issue long before the liberal intelligentsia caught on.

An interview with Brett Story by Keaton Weiss and Richie Rosencrans

Brett Story is a Candian author, filmmaker, and prison abolitionist. In 2016, she released her documentary film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, and three years later, published a book called Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America.

Since the murder of George Floyd, a massive protest movement has sprouted in cities across America, large and small. Out of this uprising, a political demand has emerged: “defund the police.” Simply put, police budgets should be cut, and money should be re-allocated in ways that help alleviate problems that we currently rely upon police to manage. These would include on-call mental health specialists, drug abuse intervention professionals, unarmed city employees to issue citations for minor traffic-related violations, and funding increases for social programs, housing, infrastructure, etc.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton raised some eyebrows when she implied that President Lyndon Johnson deserved more credit for the passage of the Civil Rights Act than Martin Luther King, Jr. She said in an interview, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act…It took a president to get it done.” This remark came in the heat of her primary against Barack Obama, and so it was rather obvious how she meant it. She sought to compare Obama’s powerful rhetoric with that of MLK, while emphasizing the necessity for adept, cunning political insiders such as LBJ (and, of course, herself) in order to implement actual policy.

Polling indicates that 74% of Americans believe that George Floyd’s death is a symptom of a broader, systemic racial injustice. In a separate poll, that same percentage support the massive protest movement that arose in the aftermath of his horrific murder. By a 2-1 margin, Americans are more upset by the police’s actions in the Floyd case than they are by the violent incidents that have occurred at some of the protests. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Black Lives Matter now has the support of 57% of the public, including 55% of independents, and even 27% of Republicans.

At least seven times this week, I’ve sat down and tried to write about what’s going on right now in this country. And every time, I found myself staring at a blank screen, not because I didn’t know what to write about, but because I didn’t know what notto write about. So many layers, so many angles, so many challenges, so many pitfalls, and yet so many opportunities. The prospect of picking and choosing which thoughts to put into writing, and then organizing them in such a way that they made sense to you, my dear readers, just seemed impossible. And, quite frankly, it still does.

Last week, news broke that YouTube had censored the new film *Planet of the Humans,*from executive producer Michael Moore, director Jeff Gibbs, and producer Ozzie Zehner. On Tuesday, Michael tweeted out an open invitation for anyone with the ability to help distribute the film independently to write him. I reached out, and was honored to be enlisted by Michael and his team to host this urgent, essential, and powerful film on our platform.

“Which side are you on boys? Which side are you on? Which side are you on boys? Which side are you on?” -Pete Seeger “The Hamptons are not a defensible position. The Hamptons are on a low-lying beach. Eventually the people will come for you.”

“I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” said Amy Cooper, as she took out her phone to call the police on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black man who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with the rules of Central Park’s “Ramble,” where their paths happened to cross early Monday morning. She made sure to mention his race again to the police once she got them on the phone, only this time, in a strained, high-pitched tone of voice she employed to make herself sound distressed, or even endangered by Christian, the benign birdwatcher who was calmly documenting this entire exchange on video. She told the police, “There is a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog!”

On Wednesday, May 13, The New York Timespublished yet another absolutely fucking horrible op-ed entitled “These Young Socialists Think They Have Courage. They Don’t.” The article’s main point (do I even have to tell you?) is that certain young progressives who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary are a bunch of privileged white people who are being selfish and egotistic for not sucking it up and supporting Joe Biden in the general election.

A new Emerson poll has found that 51% of Bernie Sanders supporters are considering casting their vote for an independent or 3rd Party candidate in November. In my previous piece on the movement to #DemExit, I explored the reasons why so many were planning on leaving the party in response to the way both the 2016 and 2020 primaries were conducted. In this article I’ll explore how ill-equipped Democratic voters are to understand this phenomena, how they got that way, and why their fury at those voters couldn’t be more misdirected or counterproductive.

**See update at the bottom of this review and watch Planet of the Humans on our site!**

About halfway through *Planet of the Humans,*filmmaker Jeff Gibbs narrates the following:

“We humans are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height. Not because of one thing. Not climate change alone, but all the human-caused changes the planet is suffering from. So why are bankers, industrialists, and environmental leaders only focused on the narrow solution of green technology…And why, for most of my life, have I fallen for the illusion that green energy would save us?”

I keep thinking of the movie Network lately, as I watch the Democratic Party’s current demonstration of its ability to absorb every well-intentioned social movement in our society and spit it back out in a corrupted and meaningless form. In the film it was television that had the power to turn activists into performers and idealists into ratings-obsessed monsters. And indeed, Paddy Cheyefsky’s prophetic vision holds true today in that medium, as demonstrated nightly by formerly progressive radio host turned corporate shill, Rachael Maddow. But the idiot box has nothing on the Democratic Party for its capacity to taint everyone and everything it comes in contact with, including its own voters. That’s how people who are ostensibly anti-war, have ended up lionizing a figure like Obama, who inherited two wars, and left us with seven. That’s how people who are in theory fiercely protective of civil liberties, have ended up touting the CIA and the FBI as defenders of the nation’s freedom. And that’s how people who have been drawing public attention to the issue of sexual assault for several years can resort to using the same smear tactics against Tara Reade that they’ve been rightly calling out as disgraceful when deployed by others. In some ways it isn’t their fault really. A fish rots from the head, and once again the party’s leadership is forcing its voters to make a choice between their convictions and their candidate. It’s a lot harder to choose the candidate if you don’t first find a way around your convictions. Denying Tara Reade’s allegations is the shortest path to that goal, so they’re cranking the denialism up to 11, with a big assist from the parade of sociopaths and narcissists that have come out to run cover for Biden this week. So, without further ado, here are this week’s contestants in the Big Democratic Party Hypocrite-Off:

Chris Hayes is one of the more honest and insightful MSNBC commentators, which is akin to saying Bobby Baccalieri is one of the kinder, gentler members of the Sopranos crew. Bobby ‘Bacala,’ as he was called, had never personally whacked anyone until well into the show’s final season (and even when he was called upon to do so by an increasingly sociopathic Tony, he was hesitant to go through with it), but he was nonetheless a willing profiteer in a criminal enterprise. Hayes, in holding down a primetime slot for a ‘round the clock propaganda network like MSNBC, is no more innocent than Bobby (proportionally speaking, of course). He could get a real job and make an honest living at an outlet like The Nation, where he once wrote, but he knows TV is far more profitable, and conveniently, Comcast’s blood money gets transmitted via direct deposit; no briefcases or duffle bags necessary.

Rumblings have been afoot in recent days that Jesse Ventura, former radio host, Navy SEAL, pro wrestler, sports commentator, and governor of Minnesota, is considering a run for the presidency. This is hardly the first time he’s sparked such rumors. In 2016, he told The Daily Beast that he wouldrun as a Libertarian if Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary. He obviously reneged on that commitment, and so there’s no reason to be too excited just yet. This morning (April 27), however, Ventura validated such speculation about a potential 2020 run by tweeting that he was “testing the waters,” and that the Green Party would be his first choice should he ultimately decide to do it. Smart money says he won’t - but he should.

**The following memo was written to the Bernie Sanders campaign in September 2019 at their request.**

From: Anis Shivani

To: Heather Gautney, Nina Turner

Subject: The Campaign Has a Warren Problem

I was down in New Orleans back in May, and I took a swamp tour with a fella who was right out of central casting for a Cajun character, and he knew it, and he played it up pretty good. Tall, mustached, sun tanned, jovial, and full of stories about the friendly alligators who visit his back porch, and deep knowledge of all the plants in his domain that could heal, kill, or feed. He knew how to soften up crab shells by keeping them submerged for awhile, and he even grabbed a baby alligator right out of the water with his bare hands. And I thought, This motherfucker will survive anything. I’ve been thinking about that guy a lot lately. I should have gotten his number.

Forcing the March 17 primaries in Florida, Arizona and Illinois to go forward, despite reports of exceedingly low turnout throughout the day (which miraculously and quite expectedly turned into higher turnouts than 2016 in both Florida and Arizona by the time the final reporting came in), was the last straw. This farce occurred despite the Ohio governor postponing their primary on the same day. This slap in the face of voters was then compounded by the even worse parody of the April 7 Wisconsin primary being allowed to go ahead at the peak of the pandemic, with polling stations vastly reduced (from 180 to just 5 in Milwaukee alone) and absentee ballots often not received or recorded, while maintaining the pretense that somehow all of this constituted a legitimate election.

Of course, now that the Democratic presidential primary has all but officially come to a close, we’re in that familiar phase of the campaign cycle when the discussion turns to how everyone is going to vote in November, if at all. The Bernie supporters argue amongst themselves about whether or not to fall in line behind the nominee, the blue-no-matter-who people start ranting about Orange/45/Cheeto/tRump/Chump, etc., the more good faith Democratic loyalists start reminding everyone that there’s a Supreme Court, and the more bad faith Democrats start laying the groundwork to blame the Bernie supporters anyway when their establishment candidate crashes and burns. We know how this goes.

I’ve been a registered Democrat for my entire adult life, like my parents before me, and their parents before them (although my grandfather was of the “Nixon is just the one who got caught,” school of thought on Watergate. In his defense, it was a pretty common take back then). But in this election cycle, I’ve reached a breaking point with the party and there’s just no turning back. To riff on Groucho Marx’s famous formulation, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member,” I personally can’t belong to any club that would have someone like Neera Tanden as a member. Are the Republicans worse? I guess it kind of depends on what your definition of ‘worse’ is.

In the summer of 2019, there was much debate among progressives as to who to support in the Democratic presidential primary. At the time, Elizabeth Warren was surging in the polls, and many took the position that she, while perhaps not as committed to the cause as Bernie Sanders, was the best horse to back, because she had what at the time seemed like a more viable path to the nomination. There are of course a great many reasons why I was never on Team Warren, but now that Bernie has suspended his 2020 campaign, there’s one in particular that’s worth revisiting in this moment.

From the moment I saw the first video ad of her long-shot primary challenge for New York’s 14th Congressional District in 2018, I knew that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the real deal. She’s proven me right ever since.

Personally, I believe in democracy. I believe that given accurate information and the necessary education to process it, a majority of people will correctly discern their own best interests and vote accordingly. But that’s very different from the situation that we have in America. What we have is a generation raised on the internet and born into an America coming apart in the wake of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and now a global pandemic, doing its own research and mostly tuning out official narratives, in conflict with an older generation that mistakes Anderson Cooper for Edward R. Murrow, and doesn’t seem to understand, or even want to understand, that the America they knew is long gone. For the latter, Joe Biden is familiar and comforting. For the former, his nomination is a cruel joke and in many ways a gob of spit in the eye of the people who are going to live with the consequences of his past policies the longest. 70% of voters under 50 voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Sev-en-ty percent. While much has been made on the op-ed pages of Biden’s demographic coalition, that coalition is a mirage. The single greatest predictor of Biden’s support isn’t race or gender or socio-economic status; its age. Old people took their cues from cable news and party leadership, while younger people tuned those voices out. Unfortunately, the elderly are much more reliable voters than the young, and as a result, Biden is on the verge of becoming the party’s nominee. But the nature of Biden’s geriatrically driven victory raises an obvious question: if young people didn’t come out in large numbers to support a candidate they were passionate about, what makes you think they’re going to come out on Election Day to cast a ballot for Joe Biden? For this reason alone, Biden is very likely to lose to Trump, with or without a formal #demexit.

From the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primary season, I could tell what it was all going to be about. It was clear from day one that this would be a contest amongst a crowded field of over two dozen candidates to convince the Democratic electorate not of whose vision of the future was most compelling, or whose policy set was most appealing, but of who stood the best chance of defeating Donald Trump in November. And I was right. Despite Bernie Sanders’ polling strength on every major issue from healthcare to immigration to climate to income inequality, Democratic voters have, in greater numbers, chosen to vote for Joe Biden, based on his perceived strength in the all-important issue of “electability.”

There have been a lot of explanations offered for the unlikely victory of Donald Trump in 2016. Russia, racists, James Comey, economic distress, sexism, voter suppression, and the missteps of the Clinton campaign, have been the most common. There has probably never been an election in American history more pored over and dissected in the aftermath than the one that made a (maybe) billionaire reality TV star, with no previous political experience, the leader of the free world. And while with Clinton having crushed Trump by 3M in the popular vote, the electoral college has gotten a lot of attention, our undemocratic way of practicing democracy long pre-dates 2016, and can only be blamed on the nation’s founders. But there’s one explanation that no one has ever offered for Donald Trump’s victory; no one has ever said that he bought the office. The reality is quite the opposite. Trump won in spite of a huge cash deficit, being outspent 2 to 1 by the Clinton machine. Thus, whatever strange brew of unlikely events you believe led to his presidency, you can’t really say that Donald Trump wasn’t duly elected, based on the admittedly unfair terms by which we’ve been deciding these things for 200-plus years, or that his ideas didn’t have greater appeal to roughly half the population (or at least 46% of the population, located in just the right places), than his opponent’s. By contrast, if Mike Bloomberg were to emerge victorious, it could only be through means that would end up making Trump’s campaign look like a Capraesque paeon to the virtues of representative democracy. While Trump may be anti-democratic, Bloomberg is post-democratic, and once we go down that road as a nation, it’s unlikely we’ll ever recover.

In 2016, I was more or less Bernie or Bust. I registered as a Democrat for the first time in my life in order to vote for Bernie Sanders in the closed primary state of New York. That summer, after the primary, I DemExited and did not cast a vote in the general election.

It was early 2016. Hillary Clinton was a virtual lock for the Democratic nomination, and Donald Trump was leading a crowded field of Republicans all vying for the opportunity to take her on. This was a very high stakes contest for Republican voters, who absolutely loathe Hillary Clinton. The thought of her in the Oval Office had been haunting their dreams for the past twenty-five years. Republicans dreaded a Clinton presidency exactly as much as Democrats dreaded a Trump presidency. They really, *really,*wanted to beat her. And lucky for them, they had a candidate who was very well positioned to do it. He was beating Hillary in all the head-to-head nationwide polls, and leading by significant margins in all of the important swing states. He was even polling well against her in traditionally blue states like Connecticut.

James Carville - there’s a name you haven’t heard in a while, and for good reason - is looking pretty upset these days. Over the weekend, Voxpublished an interview with Carville in which he bemoaned the current state of the Democratic Party, most especially, the continued momentum of Bernie Sanders, who has now achieved bona fide frontrunner status as the favorite to win the nomination.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably at least a little bit of a politics junkie, so I’m going to assume you don’t need to have the caucuses explained to you. The fact that anyone who doesn’t make the 15% threshold in the first round of voting will be eliminated, with their voters free to caucus for other candidates, makes predicting Iowa notoriously treacherous. Nonetheless, I’m going to risk it here, and either hang my head as Keaton mocks me unmercifully on our next podcast, or demand a raise if I called it right. Here goes:

There’s a great scene in Oliver Stone’s classic Viet Nam War movie, Platoon, where a black soldier questions Charlie Sheen’s protagonist on how a college educated white boy ended up in Nam. Sheen explains that he dropped out to enlist because he didn’t think it was right that only poor kids had to go fight. The soldier laughs and responds, “Man, you gotta be rich to think like that in the first place.” I’ve always found that scene very profound and revealing (given that the film was semi-autobiographical, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t taken from an actual exchange). It illustrates how when you’re coming from a place of privilege, even the way you think about fighting against privilege, reflects a privileged perspective. And so it is with “woke culture.” And that’s why it’s electoral poison, as virtue signaling media darlings like Harris and O’Rourke discovered when their campaigns both imploded on the launch pad, in spite of all the encouraging words from the Twitterverse.

A few weeks ago, as we entered the year 2020, Bernie Sanders’ campaign was surging. Endorsements were pouring in, poll numbers were rising, and the betting markets were starting to respond accordingly, placing Sanders’ chances just 0.6 percentage points behind Joe Biden’s to win the Democratic nomination, as of January 12.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you’re probably furious with Elizabeth Warren right now. If, like me, you’re a Sanders supporter who’s been going out of their way to say nice things about Warren, you’re probably a little embarrassed too. And if, in spite of her long history of stretching the truth, you’ve been looking the other way, you might feel like you should have seen this coming. I know I have all those feelings, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been responding to her fundraising emails with the kinds of comments that are likely to drive the poor bastards manning her campaign’s info@ box to double down on the Xanax and re-evaluate their life choices. But it’s time to take the win and move on.

“You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”

Ricky Gervais’ monologue at the Golden Globes this past Sunday is getting rave reviews, particularly from the right wing media. Greg Gutfeld, Fox News host and closest thing to a real comedian they could find to put on TV, called Gervais’ bit “a dream come true for anyone tired of Hollywood telling you how dumb and racist America is.” Sean Hannity’s website posted an all-caps headline, “RICKY RIPS HOLLYWOOD.” Ben Shapiro hasn’t stopped tweeting about it, and wrote a piece in which he celebrates Gervais’ monologue and piles on the humorless Hollywood elite who “swill from the ocean of self-aggrandizing leftism,” as he puts it.

President Trump has used the word “fake” so often, he seems to think he invented it. In a 2017 interview with Mike Huckabee, he said, “I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is *’*fake’.” Liberals, in predictably snarky fashion, scoffed at the remark, because of course Trump didn’t actually invent the word itself. But in a decade defined by institutional corruption, deception, greed, negligence, and hypocrisy, is it really any wonder we’ve elected a president who weaponizes the concept of “fakeness” as frequently and aggressively as Trump does?

Melissa Henneberger, a regular contributor to the KC Star, and the political editor for the Huffington Post, recently published an article in USA Today that explains the unfathomable in a way that no other pundit has managed to do: who the fuck are these people keeping Joe Biden at the top of the polls month after month? Whether they’re progressive, centrist, Republican, what have you, I’ve never talked to a single person who actually wants to see Joe Biden become the Democratic Party’s nominee. At best, I’ve spoken to a few who have swallowed the “electability” narrative. But an enthusiastic Biden supporter is virtually impossible to find in the wild. We owe a debt then to Ms. Henneberger for voicing her full-throated support for Biden in a column that reflects not only her worldview, but, in all likelihood, the worldview of a lot of these mystery voters who think a man whose every public appearance is a nerve wracking, suspense filled exercise in waiting for him to say something horrible, is the best person to run against Donald Trump.

Sci-fi writers have a long history of predicting future technologies and social transformations. From Jules Verne and H.G. Wells predicting the submarine and the tank, respectively, to Philip K. Dick describing CGI, and Isaac Asimov foreseeing the self-driving car 50 years before Tesla began experimenting with the idea, science fiction authors have an uncanny track record of nailing the future. But aside from tech predictions, the heart of most great sci-fi lies in its vision of social and economic arrangements. In cinema, these visions are generally dystopian and/or apocalyptic, although in literature there’s a more balanced ratio between positive and negative imaginings. For every 1984 nightmare, there’s a Stranger In A Strange Land, projecting a future in which humanity overcomes it pettiness and learns to live in peace and prosperity.

I love wine. My wife loves wine. The first vacation we ever took together was out to Portland, Oregon to visit her uncle, who took us wine tasting there. Then we rented a car and drove down to Napa for another two days of wine tasting before flying out of San Francisco back to New York. But until last week, neither of us had ever heard of a “Wine Cave.”

Corporate media is a helluva drug. Its single-handedly kept Democrats chasing one Trump scandal after another for the past three years, without ever telling them how little actual “resistance” to Trump’s legislative agenda there’s been from the same Congress that’s impeaching him now. Even as Pelosi and Schiff were straight out claiming that Trump was a Russian agent, they were simultaneously voting to expand his spying powers. Then they went on to vote for his military budgets time and time again. They gave him an extra $22 billion just this past week, even as they were preparing articles of impeachment. That’s on top of the $108 billion in increases they’ve already given him over the past three years. Democrats in Congress also joined with Republicans this past June to approve a $4.6 billion no-strings attached border bill, that included continued funding of ICE, even as children were being put into cages (more on that later). These are very peculiar votes to take if you believe the president is a Russian agent, and/or that he’s dangerously unfit for office. But you’ll rarely hear about that on CNN, or read about it in the pages of The New York Times. Just like if you’re a FOX viewer, you won’t hear much about Trump admitting to charity fraud. In the end, these are business decisions. If you tell people what they don’t want to hear, pretty soon they’ll stop watching. This kind of “siloed” reporting, as Matt Taibbi calls it, produces news consumers who are so ignorant and propagandized that not only don’t they know what’s actually going on in the country; they actively resist knowing. Information that doesn’t fit the script goes right down the memory hole or gets branded as somehow “Russian.”

So, it’s on. Democrats announced this past Tuesday morning that they are moving forward with the impeachment of Donald Trump on two counts: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The House Judiciary Committee approved these articles on Friday, and a final House vote on impeachment seems poised to take place next week. Democrats, including many progressives who I know and love, are giddy with excitement. But they shouldn’t be. Impeachment is a loser, both politically and Constitutionally. In fact, it’s a Constitutional loser precisely because it’s a political loser, but for clarity’s sake, let’s take these one at a time.

No sooner had Donald Trump won the Presidency than centrists launched an all-out assault on every external force they could think of that would deflect responsibility away from themselves and their anointed candidate. Russia, racists, and third parties were the preferred boogeymen, and the number of reassuring articles written in the first six months after the election blaming one, or all, of these factors for Clinton’s loss, was truly staggering. But no matter what cause that in no way involved Clinton’s missteps, DNC rigging, the failure of neoliberal policies leading to the hollowing out of the middle class over several decades, exploding Obamacare premiums, low black voter turn-out, etc., any given pundit chose to explore, the theme was always the same: people who didn’t vote for Clinton were dumb, and people who did vote for her were smart. Those dummies out there off the coasts had either been duped by Russia, seduced by white supremacy, or maybe worst of all, been perverse enough to vote for candidates like Stein and Johnson who had no chance of winning. Nowhere outside alternative media did anyone stop to consider the idea that in a country where 63% of the citizens say they couldn’t afford a $500 emergency, a lot of people decided that given a choice between a candidate who not only defended the status quo, but explicitly ran on the promise of maintaining it, and one who at the very least would function as a big “Fuck You,” to an establishment they had grown to despise, enough people in enough key swing states found the Fuck You option irresistible to make Donald Frikkin’ Trump the President.

Most corporate media horse race coverage focuses in on traditional metrics; donations, money on hand, endorsements/institutional support, and polling of likely voters. It always worked before 2016, and in an industry where the Chinese adage, “The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down,” is the guiding editorial principal, careerist journos are slow to change their methods even in the face of overwhelming evidence that those methods are outdated and useless in the face of a rising populist wave. It’s a big part of the reason that they never saw Trump coming, and it’s the reason they underestimate the very real possibility that Sanders will take Iowa and New Hampshire. Here’s why:

Yesterday I returned home after two weeks on the road, clocking in 2,300 miles. My trip had one purpose: to chalk Bernie’s name at as many colleges as possible across California. I managed to make 45 Bernie chalks, which, on top of the 24 chalks I did prior to my trip, comes to a total of 69. At first my goal was 50, but now I’m well on my way to 100. Next week I will set out again. I don’t plan to stop chalking until I’m physically unable to.

It was April, year of our Lord 2019. Spring had sprung. The birds were chirpin’, and the bees were buzzin’, and Joe Biden had just launched his presidential campaign. His announcement video was lauded by the mainstream press as he called for a restoration of the soul of America and assured the good people of this ultimately still-great country that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was but an aberration, and that order would soon be restored, and that we’d undergo no final, irreversible fall from grace.

When this latest edition of the quadrennial shit show we call an American election first started, I was pulling for undiagnosed-sociopath Kamala Harris. Not to win, but to siphon off enough votes from Biden to allow either Sanders or Warren to emerge as the nominee. But sociopaths are innately creepy and even though Harris’ record is certainly no worse than Biden’s, (and in many ways considerably better in a leper-with-the-most-fingers-contest kind of a way), the voters, in a rare moment of perceptiveness, picked up on her weird vibes pretty quickly. The only person who doesn’t seem to know her campaign is over is Harris herself, which is pretty much what you’d expect, given the tendency towards grandiosity of people with her condition, along with an inability to take responsibility for one’s own failings (Russia is apparently to blame for her collapse, rather than her own miscalculations. Hmmm, where have we heard that before?)

I feel I should start by saying that, on the whole, I like Tulsi Gabbard. I first became familiar with her, as did many progressives, during the 2016 presidential primary, when she quit the DNC in order to endorse Bernie Sanders for president and to call to attention how the process was being rigged against him. That took guts, and whatever her motivation for doing so (be it to actually boost Bernie’s campaign or to raise her profile with what she saw as a growing progressive base within the Democratic Party), she deserves credit for having done it, as she was one of very few Congressional Democrats to stand up to the Clinton machine. She’s made her opposition to interventionist regime change wars known over the years, and as a veteran herself, she obviously brings a unique credibility to issues of war and peace. She was also one of just three House Democrats to vote against the austerity policy of “pay-as-you-go” when it was introduced as part of a rules package in January of this year. And when Hillary Clinton reared her ugly head last week to insinuate that Tulsi was a Russian asset being “groomed” to spoil the 2020 election as a third-party candidate, of course Tulsi was right to repudiate her as harshly and directly as she did. Tulsi is right to call out Clinton and the “corrupt elite” who have poisoned the Democratic Party, and she is absolutely justified in defending her reputation as a patriot against such abject, baseless smears. Furthermore, her stated mission to “take back the Democratic Party” from the oligarchs who have come to control it is of course a noble one.

Elizabeth Warren, in her escalating feud with Facebook, recently trolled the social media giant by deliberately posting a fake ad claiming that Mark Zuckerberg had formally endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

**This post contains some minor plot spoilers for the film Joker.**

Lets face it, Batman has always been a superman. Not in the red cape, allergic-to-kryptonite sense, but in the Nietzschean, ubermensch sense. Nietzsche believed that certain exceptional men (being of his time, women were presumably excluded from his philosophy) were beyond conventional notions of morality and thus were exempted from society’s rules. Laws and social mores are for the sheep, while the ‘ubermensch’ (literally, “superman”), due to his exceptional nature, is not bound by any such notions. He believed that these rare, gifted men were the true driving force in historical processes, and the natural leaders of the masses.

Kamala Harris this week, in her ongoing quest to find just the right parade to jump out in front of, suddenly reversed her position on impeachment by coming out in favor of it, and, for good measure, defended Joe Biden, saying, “Leave Joe alone,” when asked about the propriety of the Vice President’s son serving on the board of a foreign energy company. Still casting about for some way to win the hearts of Democratic voters, she then tweeted out a defense of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail clusterfuck, saying, “Hillary Clinton served our country with distinction and always put our country first — something Trump knows nothing about.” HRC herself responded to Harris’ fawning with the kind of finger-on-the-pulse instincts that made her such an effective campaigner. “But my e-mails,” she replied winsomely. Staff sources at Third Way claim that Neera Tanden literally busted a nut in the middle of a thus far unnamed fine dining establishment upon reading the exchange.

In 1995, political consultant Chris Lehane wrote an extensive memo which analyzed the conservative media, and, more specifically, its role in mainstreaming conspiracy theories related to, at the time, the first couple of the United States, Bill and Hillary Clinton. The impetus for Lehane’s authoring that memo came when he noticed speculation circulating on the then up-and-coming ‘internet’ about the circumstances of Vince Foster’s death, officially ruled a suicide, in 1993. A few years later, as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was consuming the country in 1998, Hillary herself popularized the term “vast right wing conspiracy” in a television interview with Matt Lauer, claiming that she and her husband had been the victims of several carefully co-ordinated, and completely bogus, smear campaigns, since Bill announced his candidacy for president.

Summer’s over, folks. And with the crisp air, falling leaves, football Sundays, and pumpkin spiced everything, comes the time for everyone to start getting serious about the 2020 Presidential primary. Contrary to CNN’s laughably, though predictably, biased analysis billing this a now two-person race between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, the primary campaign is now a pretty close three way contest which, despite the corporate media’s best efforts, does include Bernie Sanders.

Being a Democrat, even a nominal one like myself, is a lot like being a Mets fan. While there are plenty of teams in baseball with a losing record, the Mets are unique in their preferred style of losing: from ahead. Being a Mets fan means walking the dog in the 8th inning, feeling secure that a 12-run lead can’t possibly be overcome, and then returning home to find that lead has evaporated in the past twenty minutes and now you’re into extra innings. I found that constant disappointment so painful and frustrating that it turned me off to all sports by the time I was ten. Unfortunately, I remain a Democrat for lack of better options in our system, and that means having a similar experience once every four years.

First of all, it’s quite likely that Bernie Sanders actually won the rank and file vote for the Working Families Party endorsement. The party decides upon its presidential endorsement via a “weighted vote,” which is essentially a superdelegate model. In this case, unlike other years, they have decided to withhold the breakdown of “member votes” vs. “leader votes,” sowing doubts as to whether or not the party leadership acted to override the members’ consensus. For a succinct, detailed, and very persuasive analysis of why it’s quite likely that the member vote went for Sanders and that the party leadership voted to alter their decision, I’ll refer you to Matt Bruenig’s excellent piece in Jacobin Magazine.

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” - Fight Club

A recent Monmouth University poll showed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tied atop the 2020 Democratic field at 20 points apiece. Warren’s rise in the polls over the summer has prompted, and in some cases revived, a debate amongst progressives as to who exactly she is. To some, she’s the best suited to further the progressive agenda and enact progressive reforms. To some, she’s a close second to Bernie; to some, a distant second. To others, she’s a fraud; a neoliberal wolf in a progressive sheep’s clothing.

Bernie Sanders is the Jewish descendent of Polish immigrants who came to America to escape oppression and discrimination at home. The members of his family who stayed behind were wiped out in the Holocaust. And yet, his identity as a Jew and the barrier-breaking significance of his standing in the polls is rarely discussed.

Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar recently held a press conference after being banned from entering Israel and the West Bank. In her opening statement, Omar stated that their intended trip had been planned in order to “highlight the human cost of the occupation” by speaking not just with Palestinians, but also “to meet directly with members of the Knesset and Israeli security along with Palestinian civil society groups.“She went on to note that” all the activities on my trip had been done by members of Congress in the past, including a nearly identical trip a few years ago led by the very same Palestinian organization leading this trip.”

I know, I know, I know. If you’re a pussy-hat wearing, Chardonnay-and-Xanax mixing, blue-no-matter-who preaching, “resistance” liberal, your hair is probably on fire right now because I sound “JUST LIKE TRUMP!” Well, call Trump a broken clock. In fact, call him a doubly-broken clock, because he’s only right once a day. Better yet, call him a quadruply broken clock, because he’s only right once a day and for the wrong reasons. But he does happen to be right about one thing: corporate media is the enemy of the people.

We once had a president who proposed a health care plan that was far more generous than Obamacare. It never came to pass because members of Congress opposed it. This same president also seriously considered a Guaranteed Basic Income and created an entirely new government agency focused on the environment. That agency was the EPA, and that president was Richard Nixon.

The Republicans have already decided how to brand the Democrats for the 2020 election cycle: socialism, abortion, and open borders. This will be their line of attack no matter who the Democrats nominate for president. Democrats already know who the Republicans will nominate for president, and they know he enjoys a 90% approval rating within the party, even after this past week, in which he made abundantly clear that he intends to make the 2020 election a full-on race war. So for Democrats, the branding of Republicans is simple: racism, racism, and racism.

Vladimir Lenin once said, “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” The term “controlled opposition” isn’t widely used, but when it is nowadays, it typically refers to the likes of Alex Jones. The theory is that Jones, and other conspiracy theorists like him, by distracting his followers with paranoia and misinformation about fake conspiracies like the Sandy Hook massacre and 9/11, disempowers them and neuters their ability to effectively oppose real systemic forces that actually have tangible negative effects on their lives. In this example, the controlled opposition functions as a sensationalistic side show in which real world problems of oligarchy, militarism, and authoritarianism are caricatured to such extremes that people feel powerless to resist them.

Let’s start with the basics. All Beagles are dogs, but not all dogs are Beagles. All roses are flowers, but not all flowers are roses. Got it? Good. Now let’s apply this same principle to the fake-AOC-outrage-du-jour. All death camps are concentration camps, but not all concentration camps are death camps. A concentration camp, by definition, according to the radical left-wing site dictionary.com, is a “guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.” In fairness, the definition does go on to mention explicitly that the term is especially used to describe death camps established by the Nazis leading up to and during the second World War, but I’ll come back to that later.

Sanders’ speech on democratic socialism is the thing revolutions are made of.

“If there was ever a moment where we had to effectively analyze the competing political and social forces which define this historical period, this is that time. If there was ever a moment when we needed to stand up and fight against the forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism, this is that time.

If your social circle is similar to mine, you likely know which op-ed I’m referring to. In case you don’t, it’s the one by Farhad Manjoo dated June 5, entitled “I Want to Live in Elizabeth Warren’s America.” The condescension begins before the first paragraph, as the subtitle reads, “The Massachusetts senator is proposing something radical: a country in which adults discuss serious ideas seriously.”

In her recent appearance on the “Primo Nutmeg” podcast, Jill Stein recounts her public appeal to Bernie Sanders in July of 2016. Her offer was a simple one. She invited Bernie to replace her at the top of the ticket, and run for president as the Green Party nominee. She made this offer after all the primary states had voted, and just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, when Hillary Clinton was set to officially secure the Democratic nomination.

Joe Biden has a lot going for him, or so we’re told. He’s got a compelling personal story. He’s got experience. He’s got blue-collar, working class, Rust Belt appeal. He’s got policy solutions for America’s most urgent problems – oh, wait, he hasn’t announced any of those yet. Well, I’m sure he will soon. But even if he doesn’t, it shouldn’t matter, because by far the biggest boon to Joe Biden’s prospects for winning the Democratic nomination is not any personal trait, resume point, or policy position of Joe Biden’s. Rather, it’s the insufferable weakness of the Democratic primary electorate.

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