As democratic socialists secure primary victories across the country — from New York City to Colorado and beyond — many capitalists wonder why the electorate is shifting left. After decades of rising income inequality (the U.S. Gini coefficient has hovered around 0.41–0.49 in recent years, up significantly since the 1980s), limited expansion of social safety net programs, and Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund now projected to deplete by 2032 (with only about 78% of scheduled benefits payable thereafter without congressional action), the real surprise is that this leftward turn took so long.

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Under the dictatorship of the Shah, Iran was a close U.S. ally. There are tantalizing indications that American policymakers are looking to recreate that Cold War-era partnership and kick Israel to the curb.

This seems crazy.

Just a few months ago, the Trump administration and Israel went to war together against Iran, assassinated its Supreme Leader and other top officials and attempted to decimate its military and spark a popular uprising against the government. Against the odds, Iran prevailed by leveraging its control of the Strait of Hormuz—through which 20% of the world’s oil (and thus much of its economy) flows. Iran flipped the script, transforming U.S. bases in the Gulf from encircling threats to convenient targets.

Lest there be any doubt, 92% of Israelis—in a right-wing apartheid state whose Left has been hollowed out and radicalized by Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack—say they believe that Iran has won.

The Islamic Republic has emerged with newfound respect not only from the Sunni Arab street but also its own restive population and its American attackers, as well as stronger economic alliances, the unwinding of sanctions, and hundreds of billions in war reparations. America is desperately suing for peace; demands that Iran give up its nuclear research and medium-range missiles have vanished into the “nuclear dust.”

Arguably the most significant transformation to come out of the 2026 Iran War has been severe damage to the US-Israeli alliance, which dates to 1948. For most of that time, the U.S. extended Israel a blank check. Whatever the Jewish state did—launch wars of aggression against its neighbors, capture territory it never intended to liberate or annex, build secret nuclear weapons, create an apartheid state, kill American sailors, undermine efforts at regional peace—the U.S. poured in arms, cash, intelligence support and U.N. security council vetoes whenever needed, no questions asked.

Like a kid with a permissive parent, Israel repeatedly tested its limits. Finally, they crossed the line.

Not only did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seduce President Trump into a military misadventure that failed overnight, bringing about a humiliating defeat. There is broad consensus in official Washington that Israel was either stupidly naïve or outright lied about the war’s chances of success.

In their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe the extraordinary Iran War sales pitch Bibi delivered to Trump and his top officials at the White House on February 11th: “Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory. Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within a few weeks; Iran would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz; the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was minimal. Besides, Mossad intelligence indicated that protests inside Iran would begin again and—with the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion—an intense bombing campaign could create the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.”

All wrong.

Not everyone in the Situation Room was sold on a set of optimistic predictions that quickly proved disastrously mistaken. “Sir,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told Trump, “this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.” Trump overruled Caine.

As the president sees it, Israel dragged him into a losing war. And now they’re sabotaging his efforts to end it.

“As far back as March, when the Trump administration began to explore diplomatic options for ending the war, U.S. officials told Israeli counterparts not to continue killing Iran’s political leadership,” The Washington Post reported. It’s hard to negotiate peace when your ally keeps whacking your enemy’s chief negotiators.

“Washington’s objection to killing Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s parliamentary speaker, was so acute that this spring it took the extraordinary step of asking intermediaries to warn Iran,” the Post continued.

“Everybody hates you now,” Trump shouted at Netanyahu last month. “Everybody hates Israel because of this,” he said, referring to the IDF’s latest invasion of Lebanon. He could just as easily have been thinking about the genocide in Gaza and thuggish IDF-backed settlers in the West Bank.

The U.S. thinks Israel is feckless and ungrateful—vice president and likely 2028 GOP presidential nominee J.D. Vance said so in public. Israel’s support in the U.S. is at a record low and sinking.

We have good reason to start looking for a new Middle East bestie.

Iran would be a far more valuable ally in the region. As we’ve seen, Iran borders and controls the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. It offers vast strategic depth, access to Central Asia, and leverage over energy pipeline routes. Israel, on the other hand, is tiny and comparatively ill-situated.

Iran has enormous oil and gas reserves, the third largest on earth. As a stable ally, it could be a major, reliable supplier and stabilizer of Gulf energy. Israel has negligible oil or gas. Iran’s 92 million people (Israel has 10 million) and large landmass provide a much bigger consumer market and recruitment pool. Thanks to the U.S.-Israeli disaster, most analysts agree, Iran is now the regional hegemon in the Middle East.

Israel still offers advanced technology, intelligence and military innovation, but it is small, with few natural resources, politically toxic—especially post-Gaza—and keeps trying to manipulate us.

Still, inertia tends to rule (until it doesn’t).

“If Trump were to bring serious pressure on Israel, it would have to be in pursuit of a significant breakthrough that would make him look good,” a skeptical former diplomat, Aaron David Miller, told Al Jazeera. “There’s no issue out there—not Lebanon, Gaza, [or] Israeli-Saudi normalization—that’s close to a breakthrough that would warrant sustained pressure on Israel.”

What about US-Iranian normalization?

That would be huge.

The question then comes down to this: After 47 years of U.S.-imposed sanctions, proxy wars, isolation, assassinations, and two recent sneak attacks during peace talks, could the Iranians ever bring themselves to trust us?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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• Hamas will dissolve its government and hand over power to a new, Palestinian technocratic governing authority. The move comes as a US-backed peace process, which resulted in a ceasefire last year, has largely stalled and as Israel’s bombardment of the Strip continues regardless. Hamas is looking to pressure Israel by appealing to Trump, and show that the group is committed to handing over governance and allowing the peaceful rebuilding of a devastated Gaza.

• A month after he captured the Democratic Senate nomination in Maine with a fiery populist message, Graham Platner is facing mounting pressure to leave the race after a woman accused him of rape.

• Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, faces a legal reckoning today that could disqualify her from running for France’s presidency next year. A French court will rule on her appeal of her conviction on charges of embezzlement stemming from her party’s use of European Parliament funds to pay its own staff. She was barred from running for public office for five years.

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• As Americans take on a positive view of socialism — and more candidates who embrace that label win elections — Republicans are using a different label: communist. Right-wing influencers and Republicans used the words “communism” or “communist” in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year — a 43 percent increase.

• Two Tennessee National Guard members in Memphis kill Tyrin Johnson, 20, who allegedly turned toward the soldiers with a gun during a downtown pursuit, according to the police.

• American concerns about the targeting of two Iranian peace negotiators — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April. Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility. For many in Israel, it appears inevitable that Trump will re-evaluate Washington’s ties with Israel.

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After Democratic socialists swept the June Democratic primary races, the centrist-controlled Democratic National Committee resorted to its usual tactics. Rather than unifying the party’s progressives and corporate liberals, liberal right-wingers declared the DSA insurgency an emergency that had to be stopped. They claimed—against all the evidence—that voters are in the mood for militant milquetoast moderation.

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Americans routinely dismiss engaging in diplomacy with their adversaries on the ground that their enemies cannot be trusted and that only force will work. Does it ever occur to us that that’s the way we are perceived overseas?

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• Fireworks for this year’s July Fourth celebration are expected to cause hazardous levels of pollution around the National Mall and “very unhealthy” conditions in central D.C., according to internal National Park Service documents. The show, billed by the Trump administration as the largest pyrotechnic display in history, will include 850,000 fireworks in a roughly 40-minute show expected to start at 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m. Combustion from large fireworks displays generates fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5. These small particles can penetrate deep into the heart and lungs, causing irritation and in some cases asthma attacks and other illnesses.

• Russia launches a large-scale missile and drone attack on Ukraine, targeting Kyiv and other regions across the country. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it carried out a “massive strike using long-range precision air, land, and sea-based weapons and attack drones.” Moscow said the strikes targeted military-industrial facilities, fuel and energy complexes in Ukraine’s capital and the Kyiv region, as well as military airfields in the Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Cherkasy and Chernihiv regions.

• Ohio cities have canceled activities, opened cooling centers and made public transit more accessible as the blistering heat wave crawling across the eastern US appeared to be especially intense midweek over an area that stretched from Cincinnati to Cleveland. On Wednesday afternoon, it was 103 in Athens, 102 in Toledo and 113 just north of Columbus.

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The United States is heavily invested in Israel and Ukraine. One of the primary arguments used to justify extravagant American military spending, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic support on those two nations is that they are both democracies—not merely countries with elections, and not merely flawed democracies, but shining beacons of democratic representation surrounded by regions where authoritarianism and dictatorship are the norm.

What garbage! To characterize either Israel or Ukraine as a democracy, much less an exemplar of liberty, is grotesque.

Israel has 10 million people, of whom 7.8 million are Jews and 2.1 million Arabs. On paper, both groups have equal voting rights…in Israel proper.

But that’s only part of the story.

The problem for Zionists and their defenders is that Israel also occupies Gaza (2.1 million Palestinians) and the West Bank (3.4 million Palestinians plus 780,000 Israeli Jewish “settlers”). 5.5 million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation are stateless and have no right to vote.

That’s intentional.

Israel’s international image as a representative democracy depends on the legal fiction that the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is temporary. Eventually—sooner rather than later, one hopes—the IDF will withdraw and Palestinians will get their own state side-by-side with Israel.

In reality, the Israeli government officially opposes a two-state solution. It won’t even sit down to talk about one. While consideration has been given to the possibility of annexing the occupied territories, the U.S. is opposed—and many Israeli politicians fear annexation would lead to turning the Palestinians into Israeli citizens. Palestinians have no hope of becoming democratically enfranchised.

Israeli Jewish settlers living in the West Bank enjoy full voting rights in Israel proper. This exposes the regime’s apartheid system. Jewish and Arab residents of the same military administration are not only treated differently by the authorities; they are even officially subjected to radically different punishments for the same offenses. Occupation is a legal status that cuts only one way, against Arabs. If the West Bank were truly “occupied territory,” everyone who lived in the zone would be considered stateless, including the settlers.

Israel evacuated its Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 in order to focus on its campaign of land seizures in the West Bank; Israeli Jews in Gaza were entitled to full voting rights, even though they lived under occupation.

Adding to the sense that Israel is using the delineation between its own territory and those it captured from Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War (which it began as a war of aggression) as a fig leaf for de facto apartheid is the nearly 60-year length of the military occupation, widely regarded as one of the longest in the modern era. Most conflicts are resolved much faster, or lead to annexation and/or integration with the victorious invader. Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, intended to relegate them to a permanent state of legal purgatory, is incompatible with democratic norms.

Imagine if the United States were to invade Canada, and they created a new Black Zone under military occupation, then forcibly moved Black citizens there. Even allowing its remaining citizens to vote, the rump U.S. could safely ensure its white-dominated political and cultural character. But it wouldn’t be a real democracy.

That’s effectively what Israel has done to the Palestinians it controls.

Israel cannot permanently disenfranchise a third of the human beings under its control, yet call itself a democracy. It must either set the Palestinians free or annex their territory into a one-person, one-vote republic encompassing all of historic Palestine.

A representative democracy requires at least two political parties, which between them represent the majority of the population. Opposition parties must have access to public debates and journalistic outlets, and be permitted to campaign openly. Elections must be held on a regular basis in accordance with rules that are clearly defined and widely understood. By these standards, Ukraine is not a democracy either.

Ukraine justifies its abandonment of democracy with circular logic.

Ukraine’s constitution prohibits holding presidential, parliamentary, or local elections under martial law. President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law after Russia invaded in February 2022. The term to which he was elected officially ended in May 2024, but under martial law the constitution extends the incumbent president’s tenure until a new one is elected—in this case, perhaps never. Parliament’s term also gets extended until, possibly, forever. Martial law, declared by a president who stays in office indefinitely as a result, has been repeatedly renewed by a parliament which also gets to keep their jobs for the foreseeable future as a result.

Zelensky has repeatedly said that martial law is required in wartime, though his nation’s constitution is silent on that point.

When it suits him, that requirement becomes optional. In order to deflect criticism that his declaration of martial law is self-serving, especially when that criticism comes from the president and vice president of the United States, Zelensky began offering to hold elections last year. Despite the ongoing conflict and martial law, he said he was “ready” for elections and would push for legal changes to allow them during martial law.

Nineteen anti-Zelensky political parties have been suspended or banned. (Five remain.) Some banned parties had their assets seized by the government. Opposition leaders have been subjected to house arrest.

In a move that would have made Brezhnev blush, Ukrainian TV channels were merged into a single “United News” station broadcasting censored, government-approved content. Print and online news outlets that criticized the junta have been shuttered.

So Ukraine is a country that does not hold presidential or parliamentary elections, has no plans to do so, uses weasel words to explain its policies about suspensions of political rights, imprisons opposition politicians, censors the media, and bans rival political parties. If that’s a democracy, so is North Korea.

If you want to support Israel, there are many reasons to do so. It’s the only Jewish state, its high-tech sector has business relationships with Silicon Valley, and the Mossad is an intelligence partner of the CIA. But Israel is not a democracy. And you shouldn’t say or think that it is.

Similarly, there are reasons to support Ukraine. It was the victim of an invasion, and if you are worried about Russia, Ukraine is tying down Putin. But it’s not a democracy. And you shouldn’t say or think that it is.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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• President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in 2025, including $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. In total, he raked in at least $2.2 billion. That compares to a minimum of $622 million for all of 2024. One of his biggest hauls was when an investment firm tied to the UAE bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, blurring the line between foreign policy and private enterprise. He also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

• In another stunning victory for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, clobbers Representative Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent and Zionist, in the Denver area. Also, highly-connected Colorado Senator Mike Bennet becomes the first sitting Senator in 15 years to be primaried out.

• The US Supreme Court votes 5-4 against Trump, preserving birthright citizenship—barely.

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There really is a nation that has at least 100 nuclear weapons — and almost certainly ICBMs — and it is in the Middle East. It repeatedly attacks its neighbors, often without provocation. As you’ve guessed, that dangerous country is not Iran.

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• As Western Europe continues to bake, a dangerous heat wave will boil close to three dozen U.S. states in the days leading up to the Fourth of July holiday and put millions at risk for heat-related illness. High temperatures in the 90s to low 100s combined with high humidity will lead to heat indices of 100-110 degrees, and locally as high as 115 degrees.

• A record-breaking firework show in Washington, D.C., will be delayed as Trump turns the July 4th celebration into a two-hour-long MAGA rally starting at 11 pm. How is America doing on its 250th birthday?

• The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in this week on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order, a move which would upend more than a century of legal precedent and a national tradition that have said babies born on American soil are automatically American citizens.

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• The war is not quite over: After the U.S. and Iran exchange airstrikes and Bahrain and Kuwait take hits, Iran insists it is “in control” of the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides now say they will “stand now for now” as peace talks continue.

• 50,000 Venezuelans are missing after a pair of earthquakes. What responsibility does the United States bear for the death and destruction, following decades of sanctions?

• As France and other Western European countries bake under the worst hear wave in history, more than 1,000 people are dying from the heat every day. Funeral homes are overwhelmed. Most are elderly.

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Israel’s “hasbara” online goon squads flood online spaces with specious remarks, distractions, whataboutism, ahistorical claims, religious arguments, and every other form of verbal diarrhea in order to dissuade and discourage commentary on the State’s aggressive policy of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and genocide against the Palestinians. People are starting to see through it, but verbal abuse remains an effective way to make people check out.

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As J.D. Vance pointed out, the United States has poured billions of dollars into building Israel into the world’s neediest welfare state. But, as David Bowie used to say on MTV, too much is never enough for them.

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• For decades, the idea that Iran’s regime represented the worst of the world’s worst stood as a pillar of Republican foreign policy. A different perspective is taking hold in the American Right: Iran as a pragmatic country that the United States can, and must, learn to live with.

• Back-to-back major earthquakes strike Venezuela, destroying buildings in the capital Caracas and killing an unknown number of people in the economically-devastates nation.

• New York Attorney General Letitia James expresses frustration with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for endorsing a group of democratic socialists for statewide races, saying some don’t understand race and class. “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done,” James said.

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• A U.N. report says Israeli security forces target, abuse and deliberately kill Palestinian children as part of the genocide. One Palestinian kid has been killed on average every day since the start of the cease-fire 8 months ago, UNICEF finds. “They were killed in their homes, in their schools, playing football, fishing. They were shot, bombed and hit by airstrikes.”

• The leader of a group of protesters accused of being members of “Antifa” is sentenced to 100 years for an armed assault last summer against an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Six other defendants were sentenced to between 50 and 70 years. Another, who was not even present, was given 30 years in prison. A final defendant is scheduled to be sentenced next month. The remarkably stiff penalties were much longer than those handed down for the 1,500 rioters prosecuted — and then given clemency — for Jan. 6, 2021.

• Leftists and democratic socialists win all three New York City congressional races, as angry populist voters deliver a harsh rebuke to the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party.

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While the IDF was ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, razing 80% of its buildings and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of its people in an internationally condemned genocide, the Israeli people were calm and happy. Now that Trump is forcing Israel to stop attacking Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli warmongers are furious. This society has screwed-up priorities.

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