In the run-up to the November election, we are witnessing a massive expenditure of “dark money” in a disinformation campaign designed to depress the Arab American vote in Michigan and the American Jewish vote in Pennsylvania.

During the past three election cycles we’ve seen “dark money” play an increasingly important role in U.S. elections. Dark money refers to expenditures from groups that ostensibly operate independently from official campaigns and whose funds need not be reported. We’ve also seen disinformation campaigns before; that is, organized efforts to use deceptive, misleading, or exaggerated claims for political advantage.

A dark money group undertook such an effort in 2020, when it sought to derail Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) presidential campaign with a sizable television ad buy claiming he was too old (despite the fact that the candidate against whom he was running was about the same age), or that he was too radical to win (despite the fact that Sanders had already won most of that year’s primaries and polls showed him beating the expected Republican nominee by a larger margin than any of the other Democrats in the field). What made the effort more dishonest was that the group sponsoring the ads was the Democratic Majority for Israel. They wanted to defeat Sanders because they didn’t trust his more balanced approach to the Middle East. But knowing that argument wouldn’t win over Democratic voters, they never mentioned Israel in their ads—a clear case of using both disinformation and misinformation for a political end.

“What would be the impact of these ads if they were reversed, with Arab American voters targeted with the pro-Palestinian ads and American Jewish voters targeted with the pro-Israel ads?”

That effort’s success encouraged more pro-Israel dark money groups to join the fray in 2022 and 2024, spending well over $100 million in more than a dozen congressional races. Once again, they promoted misleading or exaggerated claims calling into question the character or leadership qualities of the candidates they opposed without ever mentioning that their goal was to defeat those whom they deemed insufficiently pro-Israel.

What we’re seeing in this election is more dark money disinformation, but with a deceptively ingenious twist. A pro-Donald Trump group is spending tens of millions of dollars targeting both Arab American and American Jewish voters in two battleground states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with contradictory messaging designed to discourage them from voting for the Democratic nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. This effort includes direct mail, and digital ads on social media platforms like: X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.

Almost daily, Michigan’s Arab Americans voters in precincts of heavy concentration are receiving glossy mailings with messages like: “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff: Unwavering Support for Israel” or “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, the ultimate pro-Israel power couple” or “Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotkin [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan]: The proven team we can trust to stand up for the Jewish community.” And targeted video messaging on social media sites saying things like “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

Meanwhile, in areas of Pennsylvania where there are heavy concentrations of Jewish voters, homes are receiving messages like: “Kamala Harris will embolden antisemites” or “Donald Trump always stands up for the Jewish people.” And targeted video messaging on social media platforms saying “Kamala Harris will not be silent about human suffering in Gaza” or “Two-faced Kamala Harris: Standing with Palestine and not our ally, Israel.”

These mailings and social media posts are paid for by a dark money group, Future Coalition PAC. Researchers have identified that one of the major donors to this group is Elon Musk, the principal owner of X and a strong supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.

It’s important to note that the videos used in these ads contain Harris speeches in which she, in fact, makes statements that are very supportive of Israel and others in which she expresses sympathy with Palestinians suffering in Gaza or the right of students on campuses to protest injustice. What makes this effort classic disinformation is the selective use of these quotes and the way they are used to make exaggerated claims in an effort to mislead targeted groups of voters, discouraging their support for the Democratic candidate. To look at it in another way, we can ask, “What would be the impact of these ads if they were reversed, with Arab American voters targeted with the pro-Palestinian ads and American Jewish voters targeted with the pro-Israel ads?”

Disinformation has long been a problem in American elections. Now with massive expenditures from dark groups and their ability to use advanced micro-targeting to identify and deceive specific voter groups using their social media behavior, what was a problem has now become a crisis.

I am reminded that on two separate occasions in the last two years a group of Democratic National Committee members tried to get the party to ban the use of dark money in primaries. We warned that allowing billionaire Republican donors to skew our elections with disinformation and misinformation was a threat to our democracy. Both times the party leadership blocked our effort to have a vote on our resolution. Little did we know that just a year later, the very dark money disinformation effort funded by Republican donors about which we warned could very well contribute to upending the campaign of the Democratic nominee for president.

The recent natural disasters caused by the Helene and Milton tropical cyclones in the Southern U.S. have triggered unfounded and ill-informed conspiracies about the origin of the disasters and the government’s involvement in weather modification. Despite being based on ill-informed claims that defy common sense, these conspiracies have historical contexts.

In a broader sense, the modern state’s drive to dominate nature and its rich history of accumulation by dispossession are the prototypes and contexts for such conspiracies. Environmental conspiracies have long been an integral part of the larger conspiracy against nature, which treat nature as a cornucopia of resources external to human identity and society that must be dominated to maximize its utility.

Environmental conspiracies have long served the interests of power structures, enabling them to control people and societies by dominating nature. These false claims have significantly shaped modern Western techno-bureaucratic approaches to nature and the environment. Interestingly, many of the dominant misguided claims were not propagated by ordinary people but by epistemic circles within the state apparatus, including scientists, ecologists, geographers, and naturalists who were and are part of the bureaucratic and technical machinery of the colonial or neocolonial states.

The rhetoric and discourse about the “brutality,” “ferocity,” or “violence,” of nature imply the pressing necessity for the state to manage, regulate, and exert control over nature and natural processes.

One of the conspiracy theories surrounding recent natural disasters involves the alleged involvement of the U.S. federal government in controlling and harnessing these disasters for political and economic ends. Although this claim that the Biden administration has manipulated Hurricane Milton is ludicrous, the desire to exert control over nature and natural processes has long been the inspiration of the modern state and its techno-bureaucratic machinery, at least since the European Enlightenment. From the colonial state manipulating and altering ecological landscapes, socio-ecological practices, and dismantling traditional knowledge sources, to current efforts to manipulate and control planetary processes through techno-bureaucratic techniques, such as geoengineering and planetary management, the domination and control of nature have remained an active pursuit within the state’s or state-supported technocratic and epistemic circles. Control over nature is part of the rationalizing and moralizing mandate of the modern state.

Embedded in the works of influential Enlightenment thinkers was establishing mastery over nature. This maxim provided a clear intellectual foundation for the systematic and cumulative progression in the understanding of nature through the means and tools of natural sciences within the epistemological fabrics of empiricism. Francis Bacon, an early Enlightenment philosopher, advocated for scientists to meticulously observe and accurately measure natural processes to gain mastery over them. He also proposed that the government should financially support these scientific pursuits to achieve such mastery. Consequently, in tandem with the progress in natural science, Western colonial and post-colonial states financed and endorsed scientific, and at times pseudo-scientific, undertakings to exert dominance over nature.

Colonial Fabrications

Although Bacon proposed a methodical approach to gathering evidence, involving a continuous interaction between theory and evidence, in the colonies, the European colonial states couldn’t afford to postpone their loot and plunder for the sake of a time-consuming scientific process or exert their power over nature and people. Instead, they resorted to ecological conspiracies and ill-informed theories to justify and rationalize their socio-ecological intervention and domination.

During colonial rule in al-Maghrib, French colonial ecologists expounded ecological conspiracies that gained widespread acceptance as scientific facts, even to an extent today. Drawing on biblical narratives, they claimed that the Sahara Desert had once been a fertile and lush geography that had served as the Roman Empire’s granary. They further doubled down on the conspiracy and blamed the native people’s social and ecological practices for transforming the once lush region into the arid Sahara. Scientifically, there is no evidence suggesting that the Sahara Desert was green during the Roman Empire. Contrary to the colonial ecologists’ claim, recent scientific evidence indicates that the Saharan region was just as arid and harsh at the end of the last Ice Age as it is today.

India essentially served as a testing ground for British colonial “experts” to validate and perpetuate their ecological conspiracies and schemes and violence against nature.

The environmental conspiracy provided a convenient excuse for colonial powers to justify their oppression and domination by blaming the natives for an imagined ecological catastrophe. It also justified European dominance and invasions by claiming a historical responsibility to restore the Sahara to its original fertile state, which they portrayed as a region that could once again supply Europe with agricultural goods. This justification not only upheld European colonial control but also moralized and materialized their plunders by dispossessing Indigenous people of their lands and resources.

In South Asia, the colonial administrators, experts, and operatives faced the challenge of dealing with unpredictable rivers, especially those originating from the Himalayas. They devised environmental conspiracies that long served as scientific claims. In Northern India, facing persistent failure to contain and control the flow of the Indus and other mighty rivers for centralizing irrigation practices, British colonial experts wrongly attributed the frequent destructive floods in the upper Indus Valley to the obstruction of the rivers by glaciers in their upper regions. Lacking evidence, they based their speculative scientific claims on their knowledge of European rivers.

Environmental conspiracies by the colonial British in India were mostly due to the unscientific socialization of colonial experts. Many of these experts, such as ecologists, hydro- and civil- engineers, and geographers, were not trained as scientists but rather as soldiers, military officers, or colonial operatives. Their roles as scientists in India were more out of necessity, primarily driven by the need to assert control over nature by manipulating socio-ecological practices to maximize economic plunder. As a result, these colonial agents engaged in extensive and unregulated ecological experimentation, which resulted in numerous human tragedies such as floods, famines, and diseases. India essentially served as a testing ground for British colonial “experts” to validate and perpetuate their ecological conspiracies and schemes and violence against nature.

U.S. Misinformation

Environmental conspiracies and conspiracies against nature for ecological and social exploitation were not confined to 19th-century European colonial powers; similar ideas flourished in the United States as well. James Espy, the first official American meteorologist, lobbied Congress for funding to burn forests of Appalachia in hopes of inducing rain. A storm enthusiast, much like today’s amateur storm chasers, Espy initially worked as a schoolteacher before he devoted himself to studying storms. He believed that burning forests could trigger rain.

Although Congress ultimately declined to back Espy’s proposal, it did allocate funds for Robert Dyrenforth’s rain theory. In the late 19th century, the Senate approved funding for Dyrenforth, a former Civil War general and an engineer by profession, who proposed that creating loud noises through explosives in the atmosphere could agitate clouds and cause them to release rain. Drawn from his experiences during the war, Dyrenforth’s idea was a bold attempt to manipulate weather patterns.

After his experiment of tossing dry ice into the cloud at the Schenectady airport in New York caused a cloud to dissipate and turn into rain, Irving announced in joy that mankind finally learned how to control the weather.

In the summer of 1891, Dyrenforth and his team of rainmaking enthusiasts, which included a meteorologist from the Smithsonian Institute and a college professor, embarked on a series of experiments by waging several attacks against the atmosphere. They launched an all-out assault on the sky detonating blasting dynamite, firing mortar shells, igniting smoke bombs, flying electrified kites, setting off oxy-hydrogen balloons, and even unleashing a spectacular array of fireworks. The intention was to manipulate the natural process of rainmaking.

Controlling the atmospheric dynamics in the United States has not been the hobby or fixation of weather enthusiasts. Scientists equally contributed to the fascination of dominating and controlling the atmosphere. During the initial years of the Cold War, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Irving Langmuir claimed to have developed a method of harnessing and controlling hurricanes. After his experiment of tossing dry ice into the cloud at the Schenectady airport in New York caused a cloud to dissipate and turn into rain, Irving announced in joy that mankind finally learned how to control the weather. Around this time, weather manipulation became a strategic goal during the Cold War. The political and geopolitical landscape of the era compelled the two superpowers to engage scientists and harness scientific advancements to manipulate weather and nature for their strategic objectives and goals.

Against Nature

These examples could easily, and also rightly, be viewed as anecdotal. However, beyond these specific instances, there exists a common and overarching ontological premise that has led to various scientific and pseudo-scientific experiments. Moreover, this premise also influences popular environmental conspiracies and techno-bureaucratic/epistemic conspiracies against nature. The premise is the aspiration to dominate nature. Although Irving was indeed a bright scientist, the setting of his experiment parallels those of colonial scientists—or so-called scientists—active in regions like al-Maghrib and South Asia. They all sought to assert control over natural processes. In the 21st century, amid ongoing ecological crises, this mission has broadened its scope to include the manipulation and management of global planetary systems and processes.

The enabling context for popular environmental conspiracies, such as those that emerged following the two tropical cyclones in the southern United States, is an overarching reductionist, simplistic, and anthropocentric understanding of nature. It isn’t, however, an outlook born from the minds of everyday individuals; rather, it reflects a deeper understanding of modern civilization rooted in the logic of the modern state, influenced by Enlightenment ideals. It is further implemented through the techno-bureaucratic apparatus of the state that aims to realize the state’s legal and moral duty of monopolizing violence, whether caused by humans or nature. The rhetoric and discourse about the “brutality,” “ferocity,” or “violence,” of nature imply the pressing necessity for the state to manage, regulate, and exert control over nature and natural processes.

Nature is not an external entity out there to be controlled and dominated. On the contrary, it is a complicated self-regulating and self-perpetuating collection of processes, elements, and mechanisms, where humans are as much a part of it as non-human living and non-living elements. Although contemporary humans, through their advanced material-technological culture, can manipulate various aspects of nature, we—along with our political and social structures, including the state—often struggle to predict or design the outcomes of such interventions.

Nature is an agent of its own. It can reset the disruptions and offsets caused by humans. How this happens remains a mystery. Although we can understand its processes to some extent, the reactions and resetting mechanisms are ultimately unknown. This highlights an important lesson for modern humanity, especially for the power structures: Rather than trying to manage, regulate, or control the planetary processes, we must focus on minimizing our footprints and encroachment into the boundaries of nature now more than ever.

I was 10 years old when Hurricane Sandy hit my home city of Baltimore, Maryland. I remember vividly my family all sleeping in the living room together, towels covering the floor to soak up the water that seeped into our house from unexpected places. I remember watching the storm from the dining room window and seeing a tree fall—just missing my next-door neighbor, who was outside in the storm. There were 72 direct deaths as a result of Hurricane Sandy in the Mid-Atlantic region alone.

Sandy was only a Category 1 Hurricane when it hit Baltimore, but it was seared into my mind as one of the scariest events of my life. It was also one of the first times I felt unsafe—even though I was at home and under the watch of my parents.

In the span of 12 days, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and surrounding states were hit with not one, but two deadly hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Milton, that were far more destructive and traumatic than the one that I experienced 12 years ago. So far, it has been recorded that more than 250 people have died as a result of Hurricane Helene and Milton. There are still over a million people without power, or access to food, water, and shelter.

Extreme weather is killing people long after the weather event is over.

The destruction from a hurricane or any extreme weather event doesn’t just end when the power lines are restored and the schools open again. To most victims, the physical rebuilding is only the beginning of the recovery process. The rest remains invisible to everyone else.

Survivors of hurricanes grapple with losing family members and neighbors, homes, and local businesses like cafés and movie theaters that make their communities special. It isn’t hard to understand why the climate crisis and mental health crisis go hand in hand.

Currently, our rates of mental illness—especially that of young adults—are at an all-time high. It has been shown that suicide rates in the two years after a hurricane significantly increase by 31%. And this doesn’t account for the effect of extreme weather on the exacerbation of PTSD, substance abuse disorders, depression, and other mental illnesses. Extreme weather is killing people long after the weather event is over.

Climate change in general can have a detrimental impact on mental health—especially for young people. In a survey of more than 10,000 children and young people around the world, almost half stated that their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life and functioning. As Dr. Britt Wray writes in her book, Generation Dread, young people’s distress is also “linked to perceptions of government betrayal and being lied to by leaders who are taking inadequate climate action while pretending otherwise.”

It is crucial, now more than ever, that we elect leaders who will fight climate change and all the destruction it causes to our communities, homes, minds, and spirits.

While in office, former U.S. President Donald Trump withheld disaster and emergency aid multiple times—initially refusing wildfire assistance in California in 2018, withholding wildfire assistance to Washington in 2020, and refusing hurricane disaster funds to Puerto Rico in 2017, all because he didn’t receive political support from those places. And he continues to invest in the companies that are fueling this extreme weather.

It’s clear that Trump isn’t concerned about helping disaster victims, and it’s also clear that with an exponentially warming climate, we will continue to see increased extreme weather events and consequently more victims in need of support.

Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, understands the urgency of tackling the climate crisis while also recognizing that investing in technologies of the future can fuel economic growth.

In fact, with the Biden administration, she’s created over 300,000 new clean energy jobs through the Inflation Reduction Act and spurred a clean-energy manufacturing boom, all while investing billions in climate resilience—making sure that victims and potential victims are supported by the federal government even before a disaster happens. She has also prioritized tackling the youth mental health crisis, announcing $285 million earlier this year for schools to hire 14,000 mental health counselors to give students the support they need to thrive.

What America needs, now more than ever, are leaders who will take climate change and the mental health crisis seriously, and who will assist anyone who is victimized by extreme weather, not just those who are politically like-minded. That’s why we should elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“The past carries unforgettable trauma and pain across the land and among generations of refugees; yet we choose to transform victimhood into agency. We want to be the authors of our future.”

Let these words resonate. In a sense, they’re all we have—if we oppose war and envision a future that transcends it. I’ve quoted these words of Ali Abu Awwad before. They’re part of the Palestinian Nonviolence Charter, but they reach beyond Palestine: deep into the soul, and the hope, of all humanity.

Is there a human future that isn’t in the hands solely of global militarism—war—and the “world leaders” who serve it? Are ordinary people no more than spectators in a world in which some 13,000 nuclear weapons remain stockpiled and ready for use, with our collective suicide an ever-present possibility? Can the pursuit of peace—dismissed by so many with a cynical shrug—ever truly challenge the legitimacy of war?

I nonetheless celebrate and honor every proponent of peace, as they push beyond their spectator status and do what they can to help author humanity’s future.

There’s an irony to these questions, because peace means understanding one’s enemy, not destroying him—something far more complex than a “fight or flight” mentality can comprehend. Intensifying the irony is the fact that those who pursue peace at the deepest, most profound levels are oh so often those most victimized by the global racists and warmongers. Whereas waging war—waging murder—seriously minimizes the scope of one’s humanity, enduring its consequences can expand it.

I confess to a deep frustration about all this. While waging peace means embracing the uncertainty of who we are, waging war is psychologically simple and linear: good verus evil, us versus them. Organizing a social structure—e.g., “the USA”—around war and militarism is far easier than organizing it around wholeness and understanding. Does that mean we’re stuck with war—at least until we nuke ourselves out of existence?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I nonetheless celebrate and honor every proponent of peace, as they push beyond their spectator status and do what they can to help author humanity’s future.

Consider, for instance, the Hibakusha... the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (which killed some 200,000 people), as well as survivors in later years of the fallout and hellish effects of nuclear testing around the world.

And yes, 79 years later, some survivors of the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs are still with us. Many of them have devoted their lives to telling the world about the realities they endured in those bombings. And last week, the organization Nihon Hidankyo, to which many Hibakusha belong, received the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been a long time coming!

Nihon Hidankyo was founded in 1956, essentially in defiance of Japan’s U.S. occupiers, which, according to the organization’s website, “strictly prohibited the people to write or speak about the bombing and damages, including the miserable deaths of 200,000 people, from the Japanese government even after the country regained its sovereignty in 1952.”

They knew the world needed to know what they had endured. The world still needs to know. Yes, seven years ago, the United Nations (by a vote of 122-1) created the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, declaring nuclear weapons to be... uh, illegal. But the vote was boycotted by the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations, along with all of NATO—and, in any case, the treaty only applies to the countries that have signed and ratified it: 73 countries as of today.

So something is happening here. Post-nuclear peace—or simply peace itself—may still be confined to the social margins, but peace proponents, especially those who have transformed their own victimhood into agency, continue pushing against the norm.

“For over half a century since its founding,” the site informs us, “Nihon Hidankyo has sent Hibakusha delegations to many parts of the world in order to give testimonies on the atrocious damage and human sufferings caused by the use of nuclear weapons, and endeavored to ensure no more Hibakusha would be created anywhere in the world, calling for creating a ‘nuclear weapon-free world.’”

This is not an abstraction, even though the perpetrators of war do their best to make it so. For instance, some months ago, as the Israeli assault on Gaza was getting underway, Israeli cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested during an interview that using a nuclear weapon on Gaza was a distinct possibility.

In response, 85-year-old Toshiko Tanaka, who lived in Hiroshima and was six years old when her city was nuked, said in outrage that Eliyahu “doesn’t realize how terrible the use of nuclear weapons is...”

“I hope,” she added, “that the leaders of each nation will not put their own national interests first, but look at the world as a whole and determine a path toward peace.”

If only she could be heard—across the infinite divide separating those in power, especially members of the so-called “nuclear club,” from ordinary humans! “The world as a whole” is where we all live. It’s one entity. If we don’t learn how to live as one, we’ll die as one.

In the heated run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris has increasingly focused her campaign rhetoric on portraying former President Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy. Her warnings, particularly regarding Trump's recent comments about eliminating the "enemy within," have struck a chord with many voters concerned about the potential for authoritarian overreach. However, this narrative, while addressing a genuine concern, risks oversimplifying the complex realities of the American political system and its relationship with capitalism.

Trump's portrayal of those who oppose him as enemies of the state aligns with a global trend of populist leaders leveraging such rhetoric to consolidate power. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, populist leaders have employed similar narratives to justify authoritarian policies that weaken democratic institutions, muzzle the press, and erode civil liberties. Harris is positioning herself as a staunch defender of the rule of law and democratic norms in this broader context. She frames Trump’s potential resurgence as an existential threat to American democracy and underscores the importance of resisting the erosion of democratic principles that have, thus far, defined the U.S. political system.

Yet, while Harris is right to sound the alarm on the dangers of authoritarianism, her narrative risks oversimplifying the complex relationship between democracy, inequality, and power in the United States. By focusing solely on Trump’s authoritarian threat, Harris potentially reinforces a narrow conception of American democracy that ignores deeper, structural forces. Specifically, it neglects how the capitalist underpinnings of the U.S. political and economic system have long facilitated the marginalization and criminalization of vulnerable populations—particularly poor and working-class communities—through neoliberal policies that commodify punishment.

The Authoritarian Specter: Trump's Rhetoric and Harris's Response

Trump's recent statement on Fox News that "the enemy from within... is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries" has sparked widespread alarm. Harris, seizing on these comments, has positioned herself as a defender of democratic norms against what she describes as Trump's "unstable and unhinged" pursuit of "unchecked power."

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris played a recording of Trump's comments, telling the crowd, "A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America." This framing of the election as a battle for the soul of American democracy has become a central theme of Harris's campaign.

The vice president's focus on Trump's authoritarian tendencies is not without merit. Trump's presidency was marked by numerous challenges to democratic norms, from attempts to overturn the 2020 election results to his handling of the January 6th insurrection. His recent comments about the "enemy within" echo authoritarian rhetoric used by leaders who seek to consolidate power by demonizing opposition.

The real challenge to U.S. democracy lies not just in resisting populist leaders, but in addressing the structural inequalities that render large segments of the population politically and economically disposable.

Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, has gone even further, suggesting that Trump's musings about using the military against domestic foes was unAmerican, proclaiming at a recent rally “He crossed a line that, I have to tell you, in my lifetime, I would have never imagined because we know our history.” This escalation in rhetoric reflects the Democratic campaign's strategy to paint Trump not just as a political opponent, but as a fundamental threat to the American system of government.

However, while the threat posed by Trump's rhetoric is real and concerning, the narrative put forward by Harris risks reinforcing a simplistic view of American democracy that overlooks deeper, systemic issues. It also raises questions about the role of fear in political discourse and the potential consequences of portraying political opponents as existential threats.

The Creation of "Disposable" Populations

While Trump’s rhetoric undeniably carries authoritarian overtones, the existence of an “enemy within” is not solely a product of populist demagoguery. It is, in fact, a feature that has long been ingrained in the U.S. capitalist system. Underlying the fabric of American democracy is a system that routinely designates certain populations as “disposable” for the sake of profit and control. These populations—often defined by race, class, and immigration status—are rendered politically and economically expendable, targeted by punitive systems that feed into the broader machinery of profit-driven incarceration and surveillance.

The prison-industrial complex in the U.S. is one of the clearest manifestations of how capitalism creates and profits off a constructed “enemy within.” The United States, with only 4% of the world’s population, houses nearly 20% of the world’s prison population. The private prison industry, coupled with the massive expansion of surveillance technologies and for-profit rehabilitation services, has transformed incarceration into a multi-billion-dollar industry. This system is deeply racialized and class-based: people of color and economically marginalized groups are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population, while wealthier individuals are more likely to escape punitive measures altogether.

Kamala Harris, in her previous role as a prosecutor and later as California’s Attorney General, was often seen as part of this very system. Though she has since positioned herself as a reformer, Harris was, during her tenure, known for supporting “smart on crime” and “tough on crime” policies that contributed to the growth of mass incarceration. Her decisions not to pursue wrongful conviction cases, or to defend the use of cash bail, played a role in perpetuating a system that disproportionately punished marginalized communities under the guise of public safety.

This complicity points to a broader political dynamic that extends beyond partisanship. Both Democrats and Republicans have, over the years, embraced punitive policies to address social inequality, often framing criminal justice as a mechanism for maintaining law and order, rather than acknowledging the systemic inequalities that drive crime in the first place. This bipartisan embrace of "tough on crime" policies is symptomatic of neoliberal governance, which responds to social problems with punishment rather than investment in communities. The focus on crime control serves to obscure the deeper economic and racial inequalities embedded in American capitalism, allowing political leaders to position themselves as defenders of public safety while neglecting the underlying social conditions that create cycles of poverty and criminalization.

The Myth of U.S. Democracy and Capitalist Authoritarianism

Kamala Harris’ warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism rest on an implicit assumption: that the U.S. is, at its core, a liberal democracy under threat from an aberrant figure. However, this narrative reinforces a myth about American democracy that ignores the capitalist mechanisms that have always shaped the country’s political system. The danger of framing Trump as a singular threat to democracy is that it obscures the extent to which capitalist democracy itself has always been exclusionary, privileging certain groups while marginalizing others.

The U.S. has long upheld the notion of democracy alongside policies that systematically disenfranchise the poor, the racially marginalized, and the working class. Voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and the overwhelming influence of money in politics have all functioned to limit true democratic participation. At the same time, economic inequality continues to deepen, with a small percentage of wealthy individuals and corporations exerting disproportionate influence over political decision-making. This capitalist framework creates the conditions for authoritarianism, even within a supposedly democratic system, by concentrating power in the hands of a few while rendering large swaths of the population politically and economically invisible.

[A] capitalist framework creates the conditions for authoritarianism, even within a supposedly democratic system, by concentrating power in the hands of a few while rendering large swaths of the population politically and economically invisible.

Trump’s populist authoritarianism thrives on these very contradictions within American democracy. His rhetoric about eliminating the “enemy within” speaks to a broader fear among many Americans that their interests are being ignored by political elites. However, what Trump capitalizes on is not a departure from American norms, but rather an intensification of a process that has been in motion for decades. The designation of certain populations—immigrants, the poor, people of color—as enemies of the state has long been part of the U.S. political landscape. This is not solely the product of Trump’s authoritarianism, but of a system that treats marginalized groups as expendable in order to maintain the political and economic status quo.

Harris, by focusing on the authoritarian threat posed by Trump, risks reinforcing the notion that American democracy is fundamentally democratic and that the primary danger lies in external forces like Trump or populist movements. This analysis, however, overlooks the ways in which capitalism itself breeds forms of authoritarianism that target the most vulnerable populations, regardless of who is in power. The bipartisan embrace of neoliberal policies has resulted in the mass incarceration of millions, the erosion of labor rights, and the deepening of economic inequality—all of which contribute to the creation of a political system where large segments of the population are disenfranchised and left vulnerable to state violence.

Moreover, the private prison industry, which profits from the criminalization and incarceration of these populations, exemplifies how capitalism and authoritarian practices are interwoven. The commodification of punishment, surveillance, and rehabilitation has created a system where justice is not about accountability or rehabilitation, but about profit. This is the essence of capitalist authoritarianism: a system in which marginalized populations are rendered disposable for the sake of economic gain, while the rhetoric of democracy is used to justify these actions.

The U.S. political system, underpinned by neoliberal capitalism, has long designated certain populations as “enemies within”—those who are economically, racially, and socially marginalized. The private prison industry, the mass surveillance apparatus, and the commodification of punishment are all products of a capitalist system that thrives on the creation of “disposable” populations. Harris’ own history as a prosecutor highlights the complicity of centrist politicians in this process, as “smart on crime” and “tough on crime” policies have perpetuated the cycle of inequality and incarceration.

The real challenge to U.S. democracy lies not just in resisting populist leaders, but in addressing the structural inequalities that render large segments of the population politically and economically disposable. Without a reckoning with these deeper forces, warnings about authoritarianism will continue to ring hollow, while the underlying system of exclusion and inequality remains intact.

Last academic year saw university students across North American campuses form Gaza solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins received widespread media coverage and helped carry Israel’s crimes against Palestinians to the top of the Western news agenda.

Although these campus protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and included many anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty, Israel’s supporters in media, politics, and academia itself responded to the demonstrations by accusing protesters of peddling antisemitism and intimidating Jewish students. Toward the end of the academic year, police dismantled most of these campus protests, arresting hundreds of students in the process and charging them with crimes ranging from third-degree trespass to felony burglary.

Now, as a new academic year starts and Zionist genocidal aggression continues in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon students are once again mobilizing in protest. These student protesters are already facing further intimidation from university administrations, threats from political leaders, abuse from the police, and unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism from mainstream media. Moreover, campuses this academic year are facing a new threat: intimidation from so-called Zionist “self-defense” groups with far-right links.

Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality.

At the University of Toronto, Magen Herut Canada (Defender of Freedom Canada), a volunteer-based Zionist vigilante group affiliated with Herut Canada—an organization tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, revisionist Likud Party, which advocates for the “Greater Israel” settler-colonial vision—was mobilized to ostensibly “defend” Jewish students from what they claim to be protesters’ antisemitism.

Magen Herut plans to expand its “volunteer safety patrols” across Canada and into the United States. Membership requires ideological alignment with Zionism and experience in policing, security, or the military. With more than 50 members, Magen Herut coordinates through WhatsApp groups to patrol up to 15 zones, including university campuses, and to appear at Gaza solidarity protests, where they intimidate attendees. They go on patrol in sizeable groups, wearing black T-shirts that identify them as members of the Magen Herut “Surveillance team.” The group’s leader, Aaron Hadida, a security expert, teaches “Jewish self-defense,” including the use of firearms. Magen Herut works closely with J-Force, a private security firm that provides “protest security” for Israel supporters. J-Force deploys volunteers to pro-Palestine events in tactical gear. Both groups are expected to remain active on campus throughout the academic year.

Zionist activists with the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group whose stated goal is to “protect Jews from antisemitism by any means necessary,” have also been spotted at pro-Palestinian events at the university. The group, which was largely inactive prior to October 7, was deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001,

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that several “counter-protesters” waved flags with the JDL or the Kahane Chai symbol on them at a small pro-Palestine march at the University of Toronto on September 6. Kahane Chai is a fascistic Israeli group tied to JDL, which advocates for the forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Other participants in the Zionist action, the newspaper said, were seen wearing Kahane Chai caps and shouting chants calling for violence against Muslims and Palestinians, including “Let’s turn Gaza into a parking lot.”

The JDL has a long history of racist violence and terrorism. Its members bombed Arab and Soviet properties in the U.S. and assassinated those it labelled “enemies of the Jewish people,” focusing on Arab American activists. They were linked to several 1985 bombings, one of which killed West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh; the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre when 29 worshipers were fatally shot in a Hebron mosque during Ramadan; and a 2001 plot targeting U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in his San Clemente, California district office and the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California.

The presence of uniformed far-right Zionist “patrol teams” and JDL flags at the University of Toronto is alarming. It means that persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported into North American university campuses, which in the past year became epicenters of anti-Zionist resistance and solidarity between anti-colonial movements in the West.

The aim of these Zionist groups is twofold: fracture, weaken, and defame intersectional resistance to white supremacy, which of course includes Zionism, and provide support for U.S.-led Western imperial expansionism and genocide, spearheaded by Israel.

To divert attention away from their far-right ties, fascist roots, and blatant aggression against anti-genocide student protesters, the Zionist vigilantes active at the University of Toronto duplicitously frame themselves as Jewish “self-defense” forces.

The concept of “self-defense” has vastly different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, “self” is tied to cultural identity, ancestral land, and vital resources. Whereas for the colonizer, it is grounded in a constructed identity, land theft, and the protection of stolen resources along with shifting blame for resistance to colonization onto the colonized victims. Indeed, the leading Zionist militia from 1920 through the 1940s, the precursor of the “Israel Defense Force,” was named Haganah, meaning “defense” in Hebrew, and was a major force in appropriating Palestinian land and ridding it of its native population.

Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “ self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality. They invoke fear in order to produce subservience and support for their eliminatory agenda. These groups rely on the concepts of deterrence and dehumanisation of Palestinians to justify extreme measures, framing their actions as defensive, thus obfuscating the potential illegality that comes with offensive aggression whilst responding to perceived threats with lethal force.

Zionist vigilante groups on Northern American university campuses target anti-genocide protesters under the guise of “Jewish defense” as a means of defending white supremacy in its Zionist and American forms and fracturing anti-colonial resistance led by Palestinian, Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and Jewish anti-Zionists.

In contrast, the anti-colonial alliance, both in North America and globally, is built on a shared understanding that white supremacist oppression is entrenched in systemic racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and imperialism. By presenting a united front against all forms of racism and capitalism, it challenges the colonial and neocolonial establishments. As part of this resistance, it rejects Zionism as a white supremacist, European-driven project, drawing parallels to other manifest destiny ideologies that have fuelled Western settler-colonial ventures, including in the U.S.

Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. elections, white supremacy, Islamophobia, and antisemitism continue to rise across North America. Additionally, the election discourse risks diverting attention from the threats posed by the increasing presence of Zionist groups with direct ties to far-right violence. To challenge it, people, including Jews, must stand against all forms of ethnocentrism and exclusion. The Jewish community’s long history of trauma and persecution should inspire a unified pursuit of justice, freedom, and equality for everyone, rejecting Zionist vigilante terrorism.

The United States is the single most powerful supporter of the Israeli settler colony.

The U.S. government heavily arms and gives political cover to Israel, and considers the people at the mercy of its aggression as America's enemies. And president after president, Republican and Democrat, has enabled Israel to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide with total impunity.

The current genocide Israel is committing in Palestine is legally and morally placed at the doorstep of the U.S.

Therefore, what happens in the U.S.—especially when the political mainstream begins to wake up and see Zionism for the apocalyptic genocidal fanaticism that it is—matters for world peace.

For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.

Zionists—whether Israeli or American, Christian or Jewish—do not like the prospects of that awakening.

As the racist and colonial nature of Israel's regime became more widely recognized, the experiences between Palestinians and the African American community also became more prominently linked, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Over the last year, several outlets—from The New York Times to Politico, Vox, and others—published articles examining the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity.

Indeed, these discussions emerged in full force after 7 October 2023 as several leading African American public figures and intellectuals made clear their stance on Israel—even making headlines on "how Gaza has shaken Black politics."

When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand and vetoes one Security Council resolution after another to stop the Israeli murderous machinery; when we see U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III in the news pledging his mighty military will protect Israel against attempts to stop its rampage; when the irredeemably corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivers nauseating "stand with Israel" speeches, something deep in the history of African American experience cries foul.

And when Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri avows: "Aipac [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], I'm coming to tear your kingdom down!" she invokes an entirely different legacy of solidarity with Palestinians in African American history, as Israel systematically unleashes its savageries against Palestinians and other Arab nations like Lebanon.

Towering figures like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West have been bold, precise, and hard-hitting when it comes to condemning the criminal atrocities of the U.S. and Israel in cahoots together.

Reenter Ta-Nehisi Coates

It was not too long ago when the heat on Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent African-American literary and critical voice, got so bad he ran out of the kitchen.

Back in 2017, he deleted his Twitter account with millions of followers and went into occultation following a scathing critique levelled against him by the unflinching moral conscience of Cornel West, a distinguished scholar and activist who called him "the neoliberal face of the Black freedom struggle."

Coates soon left his main outlet, The Atlantic, a major Zionist operation run by former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, that was grooming him as a feather in their Israeli hat. For years, he would oblige.

Coates published his 2008 hymn for Israel, " The Negro Sings of Zionism," which he followed with "The Case for Reparations" in 2014. The essay, which sparked criticism among Palestine advocates, made him a darling of American Zionists.

Coates presented Israel as the model for reparations and thought African Americans ought to do the same as the Israeli state did with Germans.

For a decade now, that bit of Zionist newspeak he embraced under the condition he now calls " default Zionism" has haunted his conscience. Rightly so: Today, when he appears for public interviews, he repeatedly says: "I am ashamed!"

He should be.

Had he not heard of Edward Said when he was entrapped in that "default Zionism"? Any answer he might give to that simple question would be even more incriminating.

The most damning assessment of Coates, however, was not by West, who said in 2017 that Coates "reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people."

In his characteristically patient and precise prose, the eminent Indian public intellectual Pankaj Mishra published a major review of Coates' 2017 book on the Obama era, We Were Eight Years in Power, in the London Review of Books.

Mishra detailed and dissected Coates' deeply white-identified career, which banked on his Black identity to drive guilt-ridden white America to celebrate him—just as Barack and Michelle Obama had done. This was a fact that West had also intuited and laid bare to him.

Mishra picked up on Coates' own sense of wonder in himself, "Why do white people like what I write?" and analysed with surgical precision:

[Coates] also visibly struggles with the question, "Why do white people like what I write?'' This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonized countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by "legacy" periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people—or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in The New York Times's praise for Salman Rushdie: "A continent finding its voice"). Relations between the anointed "representative" writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.

This was published in February 2018, just a few months after West had, with the stroke of a few bold and brilliant paragraphs, forced Coates into early withdrawal from the public to lick his wounds.

It did him good and well.

His new book, The Message, is his deliverance from error, as it were, his version of al-Ghazali's classic al-Munkidh min al-Dalal/Deliverance from Darkness, published nearly 1,000 years ago.

Imagine that! A young African American writer publishes a book that reminds me, a Muslim, of the autobiographical masterpiece of a towering Muslim philosopher mystic. This should mean more to him than any Pulitzer or Booker.

But Coates' visit to Palestine for just 10 days is reminiscent of another even closer Muslim to his home and habitat when Malcolm X visited Gaza in September 1964.

On this occasion, he wrote: "The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders, and also divide the Africans against the Asians."

Bearing witness to Palestinian suffering and Zionist thuggeries, Coates has a giant pair of shoes to fill if he continues on this path.

The long essay Coates wrote on his visit to Palestine, which is included in his book, marks his deliverance from Zionist prose.

For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.

Deliverance from Zionism

Immediately after the publication of Coates' latest book, the pro-Israel hasbara machinery, of course, went berserk and unleashed its furies, the racist nature of which managed to surprise even Coates himself.

Other liberal Zionists like Ezra Klein of The New York Times tried to undermine his arguments by asking him why he did not consult with rabid Zionists in Israel when he was there, and of course, setting the usual propaganda trap, "What about Hamas?"

As defined and determined by well-endowed and ideologically committed outlets like the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, the U.S. media is a well-oiled propaganda machinery of hasbara-informed pro-Israel newspeak.

The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.

Previously, when others like Coates suddenly found a conscience, the mainstream press just turned a deaf ear and pretended it did not happen. Perhaps one recent example is New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, whose changed position on Israel not only cost him his reelection campaign but has largely relegated him to obscurity.

Given his influence on the white liberal establishment and their understanding of race and diversity in this country, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?

The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.

More than half a century after the Civil Rights movement—when the world thought racism had been dealt with—Americans gave Donald Trump to the world right after Obama lent his Black identity to career opportunist liberal imperialism of the worst kind.

The stockpile of bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others remains Obama's legacy in the Middle East.

As I write, Americans are almost evenly split on the upcoming presidential election, poised to vote for either a Mussolini wannabe rank charlatan fascist or a Genocide Joe replacement who, like a parrot or a broken record, can only repeat AIPAC talking points.

Between a genocidal administration with the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese on its hands and a fascist wannabe, the future of the U.S. and all its global warmongering, particularly its Israeli garrison state, is now being determined.

The significance of what Coates has written weighs far less for Palestinians who have equally if not more eloquent voices to speak on their behalf.

But for Americans, Coates' corrective message may both inspire and signal a broader cultural shift in which this country may be liberated from the curse of Zionism.

In 1968, when I was twenty years old, I volunteered to serve with the Marines in Vietnam. I was trained to be a Navy Corpsman (medic) and attached to the Marines. I was only in Vietnam five weeks before being seriously wounded. I was with a company of 83 Marines when we were given orders to go to the top of a mountain, where we became completely surrounded by 1500 North Vietnamese Regulars. It is impossible for me to describe what it was like to be the target of 1500 machine guns firing all at once. Eighty percent of us were either killed or wounded in the first ten minutes of the battle. When the firing quieted down, I belly-crawled over to a Marine whose left arm was blown off and that’s when I was shot in the hip. My hip was blown off.

For most of the past fifty-plus years, I have been cared for by the VA Healthcare system. I’ve watched with admiration as the system has consistently improved - sometimes, remarkably - over those five decades. But now I watch with alarm as former President and current candidate for another term Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance and their allies at the Heritage Foundation threaten the existence of the kind of care veterans like me depend on.

Trump and Vance and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 accuse the VA of making veterans dependent on care they don’t really need. They attack the dedicated nurses, doctors and countless others who have cared for me as being bad apples and callous sadists, and they claim that our PTSD is nothing more than having a bad hair day. They want to privatize the system and make sure that future generations of veterans who have sacrificed so much for their country don’t get the kind of care that has literally saved my life.

Let me tell you more about my journey and about the care I have received. After being shot in the hip, I lay with an open wound in dense jungle for five days before help could reach me. After being rescued by helicopter, it took seven days at a field hospital for surgeons to stabilize me enough to be flown to a much larger and better equipped hospital in Japan. My whole right hip joint was destroyed, plus my hip was horribly infected with osteomyelitis, a recurrent life-threatening bacterial infection. The kind of care I received back in the early 70’s at the VA was too often hit and miss, so I stopped going. But I returned in the mid-1990’s to find that the quality of care had radically changed for the better.

The change was so obvious when I walked in the door. The attitude towards us by the staff was wonderful. The whole VA staff had learned a lot about how to manage the complex symptoms of PTSD. When I went back to the VA hospital for care I knew I needed help dealing with psychological and emotional issues, not just my physical illness and injury. I was angry at my country and thought I had every right to be angry, even the responsibility to be angry. VA healthcare has helped me find the options I needed to deal with my anger.

Pain management has been another major challenge for me and many other Vietnam veterans over the past five decades. If I hadn’t had constant care from the VA, I strongly believe I wouldn’t be here today.

Over the past five decades I have seen first-hand how VA doctors and nurses have evolved in their understanding of the complex issues that veterans are dealing with. I experienced horrible healthcare treatment back in the 1970s and 80s, but now I’m receiving what I consider the best care there is. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

This is why I urge all veterans and non-veterans to pay close attention to the anti-VA messages that are being broadcast by folks whose main goal is to send veterans to private sector doctors and hospitals.

People often wonder what actions they would have taken to prevent atrocities of the past. It’s a rather common litmus test for morality or ethics. Depending on how we respond, it can reveal vital information about what we’re willing to accept or not.

As I watched Palestinians, some of whom were still attached to IVs, scream out in agony as they were burned alive due to a recent Israeli strike on a tent hospital, I wondered, what is the “red line” for people in this genocide?

We’re well over a year into Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, which has killed approximately 43,000 Palestinians and rendered the area largely uninhabitable. This scale of mass murder is the result of relentless airstrikes, ground invasions, starvation tactics, and a blank check for violence and war crimes signed by the United States.

Everyday Americans do have a red line—and a majority of likely voters want a cease-fire and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel.

Israel has now expanded the violence into Lebanon, including a recent airstrike that killed at least 21 people. Despite expressions of “concern” from U.S. officials about civilian casualties, U.S. taxpayers are continuing to fund Israeli aggression, which may soon include a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli officials have indicated a desire for regional war. As my colleague, Middle East expert Khury Petersen-Smith, wrote in The Hill, “millions of lives throughout the region hang in the balance.”

Despite mass Jewish-led protests against Israel’s genocide across the United States, a movement of “uncommitted” primary voters protesting the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war, and an International Court of Justice ruling ordering Israel not to commit acts identifiable as genocide in Gaza, our legislators continue to publicly support Israel’s campaign of terror and greenlight billions of dollars of our tax money for their war.

However, everyday Americans do have a red line—and a majority of likely voters want a cease-fire and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel.

But so far our lawmakers have been more responsive to donors than voters. AIPAC has poured nearly $42 million into this election cycle, while the top 20 defense sector contributors have already spent nearly $23 million from 2023-2024. These organizations are buying off candidates and undermining our democracy.

I do have hope though.

Despite all of the concentrated power—and outright propaganda—in support of Israel, groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Rabbis for Cease-Fire, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, and many others have successfully forced the American public to confront our complicity in genocide “through mass mobilizations, direct actions, bridge and roadway shutdowns, airport and port shutdowns,” according to Mohammed Nabulsi of the Palestinian Youth Movement.

You can measure the effect of these strategies by looking at the shift in attitudes of the American public regarding U.S. backing of Israel. A majority of Americans reject this war and our government’s support for it.

If you’re reading this and you’re in that majority, then let’s turn our despair into action.

Let’s fight for an end to the supply of weapons to Israel. Let’s fight for an end to the occupation of Palestine and all occupied territories across the globe. Let’s settle for nothing less than Palestinian self-determination and justice for Israeli war crimes.

Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”

Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.

No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.

Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”

The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.

Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”

Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.

Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.

That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”

Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.

These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.

President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”

Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbes real-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.

Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”

Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”

All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.

Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.

In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.

In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.

Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.

In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.

“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”

Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.

About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania — introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.

Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.

Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.

For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.

Once you’ve been told you have cancer, waiting is the last thing you want to do. As a practicing Gynecologic Oncologist, I know patients with so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans will be waiting—waiting to find a specialist like me within their network, waiting to get pre-authorization for the tests they need so we can discuss their diagnosis and possible treatments and, ultimately, waiting to get approval for their surgery and treatments.

Unfortunately, Project 2025 would make this already difficult process even worse. By fully privatizing Medicare, this Heritage Foundation plan would shift even more power into the hands of corporate insurers, who prioritize profits over patient care. The result would be even narrower provider networks, more restrictive approvals for tests and treatments, and a system designed to delay or deny care to those who need it most. For patients, that means critical time lost—time that may mean more pain, more symptoms, and a decreased chance of being cured.

Under Project 2025, the burden of navigating these hurdles would fall not just on patients, but on physicians and health care workers who are already stretched thin. Physicians for a National Health Program estimates that doctors and their teams would spend up to 43 million hours annually dealing with prior authorizations alone. This clinically meaningless administrative burden steals time that should be spent caring for patients, wastes resources that we can’t afford to lose, and is a source of burnout and moral distress for healthcare professionals.

Corporate insurance plans are designed to make profits, not take care of patients.

I feel helpless to overcome the negative impact that delays in care have on patients’ chances of being cured. But delayed care is often the best-case scenario for seniors in “Advantage” plans, because there is a high potential that the best cancer center in their area is outside of their narrow network and that treatments will be denied.

Research shows seniors with corporate “Advantage” plans have lower access to the high-volume hospitals that most successfully care for uncommon cancers. For example, people with stomach, pancreatic, and liver cancer requiring surgery were shown to have a higher likelihood of dying when compared to seniors with real Medicare.

Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that privatized Medicare does not serve our seniors’ best interests and wastes money, Project 2025 wants to take over all of Medicare by automatically enrolling seniors in corporate insurance plans without their full consent.

This will be catastrophic for people on Medicare, who will face increasing financial burdens and decreased access to care. An estimated 24 million seniors in corporate “Advantage” plans would face limited provider networks that exclude up to 70% of the doctors in their regions. And more than 15 million people would be considered underinsured due to the reduced benefits available under privatized plans. Without the choice of sticking with real Medicare, our seniors would all be threatened by the health impacts of delayed and denied care.

Instead of funneling money into the hands of corporate insurers, we should be cracking down on overcharging and using those savings to strengthen Medicare.

Corporate insurance plans are designed to make profits, not take care of patients, and so they use shady techniques such as upcoding, which boost payment rates by making patients seem sicker than they are. In 2024, so-called “Advantage” plans overcharged the American people by as much as 140 billion dollars—and provided less care with worse health outcomes. If this system of skimming funds were extended to all seniors, the Medicare trust fund would immediately begin deficit spending, leading to insolvency within five years. It would cost $1.5 trillion more than real Medicare over 10 years.

Congress must take a stand to protect American seniors and the Medicare Trust Fund by rejecting Project 2025’s dangerous push to privatize Medicare.

Instead of funneling money into the hands of corporate insurers, we should be cracking down on overcharging and using those savings to strengthen Medicare. For example, a cap on out-of-pocket spending is crucial to ensure seniors receive the financial protection they deserve. We should also invest in much-needed dental, vision, and hearing coverage for everybody on Medicare.

It’s time to give all seniors access to the best care possible and stop wasting our healthcare dollars on corporate profits.

It was William Shakespeare who, in Troilus and Cressida, wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” And yet, in the polarized news cycle since Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States and the hurricanes have kept coming, we’ve heard a tale not of shared humanity, but of ruin, discord, and political polarization.

Hundreds are dead from that storm—the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005—hundreds more are missing, and hundreds of thousands of residences are still without power or clean water. And in addition to the staggering human loss and physical damage, a hurricane of misinformation and division has continued to pummel the region.

There’s Elon Musk’s politicized deployment of Starlink satellite internet access, which he’s used to credit Donald Trump less than one month before the November election, while undermining the legitimacy of federal recovery efforts. Indeed, listen to Fox News or read Musk’s claims on his social media platform X, and there’s no mention of the pre-arrangements the federal government made with Starlink through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide internet access—for local governments and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

The economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump falsely claiming that the federal government’s response to Helene was delayed and insufficient because the funds that might have gone to hurricane victims are instead being used to house undocumented immigrants. (FEMA does spend some money on migrant housing, but through an entirely different program.) With this outrageous fearmongering, he’s fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate that are already raging during this election season. His racist and xenophobic rhetoric has also forced FEMA and the White House to spend precious time and energy trying to counter his lies, rather than focusing their full attention on saving lives and rebuilding broken communities.

And don’t forget Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who insisted that the government actually controls the weather. This ludicrous claim is taken from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (notorious for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax), who suggested that the government directed Helene towards North Carolina “to force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy.”

Such hateful lies and conspiracy theories (and there are more like them!) conveniently ignore the fact that conservative Republican lawmakers passed a funding bill that failed to allocate additional money to FEMA just days before Helene hit, even though the country was entering peak hurricane season in a time when the weather is growing ever more extreme. And it’s no surprise that these lawmakers are backed by billionaires who own some of the very companies most responsible for climate change. Through their scare tactics and anti-government misdirection, they have also provided rhetorical cover for the Christian nationalists and other extremists who were some of the first responders after the hurricane. The Southern Poverty Law Center confirms reports I’ve heard from local sources that “far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance—and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.”

Those Who Are Hit First and Worst

Hurricane Helene (like Hurricane Milton that followed it in a devastating fashion) should be a brutal reminder that none of us are truly safe from the worsening effects of the climate crisis. For years, local officials and real estate developers marketed Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven.” With its temperate weather and mountain vistas 300 miles from the ocean, many falsely believed the area would be shielded from storms like Helene. No such luck.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks have also served as a stark reminder that the climate devastation increasingly coming for all of us is experienced most intensely by poor and low-income communities. Just look at the (lack of) full-scale evacuation plans for Hurricane Milton in Florida and it’s clear that those who cannot afford a $2,400 flight or have access to a car and enough gas money to wait out the massive traffic jams of those fleeing such storms may just be out of luck.

In western North Carolina, as rising waters from Helene consumed entire communities, many had nowhere to evacuate. Poor people living in rural areas, often with preexisting health conditions and without health insurance, skipped hospital visits in the chaotic days immediately after the storm. Thankfully, some hospitals opened up beds for patients whose homes were destroyed. But those who don’t have flood insurance—and the residents of the areas hit hardest by Helene were the least likely to have such insurance—and can’t afford to rebuild may soon find themselves joining the many others who have been displaced and made homeless by the storm.

Truly, as the experiences of Hurricane Helene—and now Hurricane Milton, Nadine, and potentially others, too—have proven, the economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and JD Vance. In fact, it was Vance who called the study and analysis of climate change “weird science” during the vice-presidential debate. He has also praised the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposes gutting FEMA, making it harder for states to get disaster relief, and blocking federal agencies from fighting climate change (not to mention 400 pages of other suggested cuts to this country’s social safety net).

And although they claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is looking after the interests and profits of the wealthy, it’s Vance and Trump who have regularly belittled the poor and cozied up to venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and others among the nation’s corporate elite. In fact, the decades-old abandonment of rural Appalachian communities destroyed by Helene has long been justified by the patronizing and classist “culture of poverty” arguments that Vance himself helped keep alive with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies. Worsening poverty and widening economic inequality should be considered preexisting conditions that are only magnified during moments of crisis. Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, recently put it this way: “The tragic flood event in the southeast U.S. is a poignant example of the confluence of multiple factors, including development in floodplains, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and management, and the specter of climate change, whose compounding effect can amplify the disaster.”

From Mutual Aid to Community Power

In the face of so much loss and destruction, the heroism of impacted communities, which have joined together in extraordinary acts of solidarity, has been tragically underreported in mainstream media outlets. Much of the mutual aid and community support for those affected by the hurricane has come from community members themselves, who are working tirelessly to ensure that everyone in need is cared for. The streets of Asheville and neighboring towns have been filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, as everyday people with various skills have driven in from all over the country to lend a hand. On social media, it’s been heartening to see all of the love and support that has poured into these communities.

In Asheville, the stories of this local solidarity are many. There is the Asheville Tool Library, which, while officially closed, is supporting repair projects, including the fixing of generators and chainsaws. There are medics and doctors running free clinics. There are local breweries that are using their equipment to make sure desperate communities still have clean and safe water. There are young people passing out free gasoline to anyone who needs it and others who are writing out instructions in English and Spanish on how to make dry toilets.

The ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.

These examples of grassroots leadership offer hope in hard times. After all, this is how bottom-up movements have so often begun throughout American history. In pre-Civil War America, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery and igniting a movement to end it. In the 1930s, the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions even before President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. In the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities organized themselves to oppose lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence. And no one can deny the powerful example of the carpools and other community projects of the Montgomery, Alabama freedom struggle during the 1950s.

Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.

The Black Panthers’ Projects of Survival

Consider the free breakfast program organized by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. For many Americans, the enduring image of the Black Panther Party is of Black men in berets and leather jackets carrying guns. The self-defense tactics of the Panthers were an emphatic rebuttal to a society that regularly dehumanized and exacted violence on Black Americans. But in truth, most of their time was spent then meeting the needs of their communities and building a movement that could transform the lives of poor Black people. The Panthers bravely stepped into a void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for the poor. But their survival programs weren’t just aimed at meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used such programs to highlight the failures of government policymaking to deal with American poverty. By feeding tens of thousands of people, they also forged community-wide relationships and developed widespread trust among the poor, not just in Black communities but in poor white and Latino communities as well. The Panthers’ survival programs were always meant to be launchpads for a wider movement to end poverty and systemic racism.

Indeed, the Panthers consciously called out the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, while it spent billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (This paradox continues today, as the U.S. has been funding Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, one of the poorest places on Earth, and now its invasion of Lebanon). Their survival programs gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human rights movement, interweaving all of their community work with political education and highly visible protest.

At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials feared that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In that context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.

Solidarity Among the Poor

The experience of the Black Panthers features prominently in the anti-poverty organizing tradition that I come from. In fact, the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union, sibling poor people’s movements that I was part of in the 1990s, used to teach new organizers the “Six Panther Ps” of poor people’s organizing: 1) Program, 2) Protest, 3) Projects of survival, 4) Publicity work, 5) Political education, and 6) Plans, not personalities. When combined, these six principles form a model for the poor organizing the poor that has been responsible for creative nonviolent action that has called America to conscience and for anti-poverty policies that have impacted millions.

Much like recent beautiful acts of local solidarity in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee and in low-income communities across Florida reeling from Hurricane Milton, the significance of the historic work of the Black Panther Party or of unhoused leaders and welfare-rights activists across the decades begins within poor communities themselves, where people are already engaging in life-saving actions. Out of such depths, grassroots leaders find new and creative ways to connect survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement focused on building and wielding political power. From such local struggles come the very policy solutions to a community’s (and even this country’s) varied problems. This is what it means to work bottom up, not top down!

In a world whose weather is growing grimmer by the year, such examples of mutual solidarity and mutual aid are perhaps the most concrete and material form of hope in these hard times. Such scrappy and life-giving action needs more than acknowledgment and appreciation. Those facing injustice, violence, and displacement need more than thoughts and prayers. Rather, to turn the tide on division and lies, as well as deeper impoverishment and pain, heroic and creative community-building—or what I like to call “lifting from the bottom so that everyone can rise”—must be spread, scaled up, and significantly supported by the larger society. Our politicians, news agencies, and larger population must stop paying homage to billionaires who will profit off our predicaments or politicians who will try to capitalize on any crisis. It’s time to see that projects of survival and solidarity among those struggling the most are our only true hope for a future that will otherwise be ever more perilous.

Because American voters want to prioritize climate-action in the voting booth, Vote Climate U.S. PAC is releasing our 2024 presidential, congressional and gubernatorial Voter’s Guide, making us the only website in the country to provide a climate change Voter’s Guide for candidates for U.S. president, state governors, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and Statehouses (partial) all in one convenient, user friendly site, making it a unique resource. (Always click the green + button to the left of the candidate's name, for detailed research and sources.)

American voters will also be able to use Vote Climate U.S. PAC’s Voter’s Guide to see if a candidate supports Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The right to choose safe and legal abortion is a fundamental human right and is a top priority voting issue.

On June 24, 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court took away American women’s essential right to bodily autonomy when they overturned Roe v. Wade. Just like climate change, the inevitable compulsory pregnancy that results from losing access to abortion, poses an existential threat to American women. It threatens their lives and health, imposing crippling economic hardships on them and their families. Unwanted pregnancies and births stress the environment, driving climate change and related weather extremes. Now with our Voter’s Guide, Americans can elect pro-choice, climate-action candidates.

We are the only website in the country that gives incumbents and challengers for U.S. president, state governors, U.S. House and U.S. Senate a Climate Calculation, a score ranging from Climate Hero to Climate Zero, helping Americans to vote for climate action. Like most Voter’s Guides, we score incumbents on pivotal climate votes in Congress. But Vote Climate U.S. PAC is the only organization that goes well beyond votes to assess incumbent’s position: what do candidates say about the issue; leadership: what do they do; and putting a fee on carbon polluters. (For more details see our 2024 U.S. House and U.S. Senate – Incumbent Scoring Criteria and 2024 U.S. House and U.S. Senate – Challenger Scoring Criteria)

Our incumbent Governor’s Voter’s Guide also looks at their climate plan. We want to see: support for using 100% renewables by 2030; keeping fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) in the ground; support for zero human-made, greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; and support for at least one of four particular types of carbon dioxide removal, not carbon capture and sequestration,” said Strickler. (For more detail see our Scoring Criteria for Incumbent Governors and Scoring Criteria for Gubernatorial Challengers.)

The following categories, analyzing the politics of climate change, are also updated:

• Climate Heroes: Incumbents and Challengers Who Rated 100%
• Climate Zeroes: Incumbents and Challengers Who Rated 0 %
• Best to Worst Individual Incumbents and Challengers on Climate Change

Our Voter’s Guide helps every American to prioritize reproductive choice and climate action, from the statehouse with a stop in the White House, the halls of Congress and the Governor’s mansion. In fact, if used as intended to create a large, climate-action majority, our Voter’s Guides will revolutionize the politics of climate change.

Given that we’re in the midst of a vote that will determine the fate and future of democracy in America, let’s review what Donald Trump has already said he will do if he gets back into the White House.

In theory many of these things would also require a compliant House and Senate, but with the recent Supreme Court rulings about presidential power he may be able to do many or even most of them by executive order or simply by fiat.

If lower courts rule his actions as criminal, the Roberts Court has already given him immunity from prosecution, so nothing short of a military coup against him or, like four years ago, the refusal of his subordinates to act, could stop him. And he’s going to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Everything mentioned here is based on statements Trump, Vance, or people close to them have already made. And it’s important to realize that most of these things will not directly impact the lives of average working class people so, like when these same things happened in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, etc., the pushback will most likely not be strong or immediate.

His first step would be to gut the press, because the more widespread his actions are publicized the more they’re likely to stir up opposition. He’s already told us how he’ll do this: change the nation’s libel laws so he, his administration’s officials, and his billionaire friends can sue reporters and media outlets for “defaming” and “libeling” them with negative reporting or opinion pieces.

This is a well-trod path; both Putin and Orbán did the same. Much like the way JD Vance’s billionaire mentor went after Gawker when it outed him, the lawsuits will both put out of business the publications and bankrupt the individual reporters and writers. Just like in Russia and Hungary, once the nation’s media outlets are crippled, the billionaires close to Trump will buy them for a song and turn them all into the equivalents of Fox “News.”

Now, like Putin and Orbán, he can work in darkness, or at least have friendly media “explain the necessity” of the unpopular steps he takes.

He begins by firing the entire senior staffs of the DOJ, FBI, and across all branches of the US military and the Department of Defense. They’re all replaced with Trump sycophants who will prevent junior officers or enlisted people from speaking out or taking action to preserve our democracy.

He then orders the indictment and arrest of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Leticia James, Jack Smith, and the entire senior staffs in the various prosecutors’ offices that worked with them to “go after” him. As Trump told a TV interviewer:

“Doing what they did — using the DOJ & FBI to go after their political opponent, that means that I can do it too. In other words, the Pandora’s box is open, and that means that I can do it too.”

And his plans are already well-formed. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported:

“In one post about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, he warned there will be ‘repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand’ and that if the investigations continue, it would open a ‘Pandora’s Box’ of retribution. In another post, Trump wrote that his federal indictments are ‘setting a BAD precedent for yourself, Joe. The same can happen to you.’ In July Trump reposted rally coverage quoting him that ‘Now the gloves are off.’ ‘When will Joe Biden be Indicted for his many crimes against our Nation?’”

Next, as promised, Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was used during the war of 1812 and to inter American citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII. This weekend he said he would immediately launch “Operation Aurora” to begin rounding up “illegals” and “the enemy within”:

“Can you imagine? Those were the old days when they had tough politicians, have to go back that long. Think of that, 1798. Oh, it’s a powerful act. You couldn’t pass something like that today.”

Private prison contractors begin building massive concentration camps capable of holding over ten million people as Trump’s ICE officers — their ranks swelled into the hundreds of thousands — along with state and local police departments begin going house-to-house looking for people who appear Hispanic and can’t immediately produce their citizenship papers.

He’ll also go after Haitians and other legal immigrants from “shithole countries”; the only immigrants and naturalized citizens who’ll be safe will be those of European origin with white skin. Or, as Trump said:

“We should have more people from Norway.”

Large sections of the detention camps are reserved for “the enemy within,” including people like “Adam Schiff” and other “Marxists and communists and fascists.” As he told Fox “News”:

“We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”

The FBI begins examining the records of social media companies, which then begin restricting posts. The feds subpoena the social media habits of “suspicious” Americans and begin making arrests of those who have spoken out against Trump; it plays out just like in Hungary and Russia where people who have posted negatively about Orbán or Putin get arrested.

The new leaders of Trump’s military order the former soldiers he considers disloyal — like General Mark Milley and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper — back to active duty so they can be court martialed. Hundreds are rounded up to “cleanse” the ranks of our current and former members of the armed forces as the firing squads Trump has said he wants back begin to operate daily.

The new, all-pro-Trump media assures us, like they do on every channel daily in Hungary and Russia, that it’s all a “difficult” and “unfortunate” but a “necessary effort” to “stabilize America” and “preserve the Constitution.” Nothing to worry about here.

In a repeat of his attack on Portland, Oregon in 2020, Trump sends tens of thousands of federal officers without any uniforms or identification in unmarked vans into “liberal” cities where they begin kidnapping and beating civilians. As he told a Fox “News” town hall, comparing American cities with large Black populations to the poorest parts of big cities in Honduras and Guatemala:

“We have cities that are worse—in some cases, far worse. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at what’s happening in Oakland. Take a look at what’s happening in Baltimore. And everyone gets upset when I say it. They say, ‘Oh, is that a racist statement?’ It’s not. Frankly, Black people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you. Thank you, sir, for saying it.’ They want help. These cities, it’s like living in hell.”

Abortion ends: Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, personally oversees the enforcement of the Comstock Act with the approval of six Republicans on the Supreme Court. The law is already on the books, bans all abortions (and pornography) nationwide, and Vance has already written a 2023 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding it be enforced immediately.

Physicians and companies running health apps are required to report fertile women and girls’ menstrual periods to a national database; those who resist are arrested or their companies or apps are taken over and handed to Vance allies to run.

Trump then pulls the US out of NATO and announces America is forming a strategic alliance with Russia, China, and North Korea. India, Turkey, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary quickly join. Ukraine is overwhelmed and falls to Putin, who then invades Latvia and Lithuania to re-establish his old Baltic Soviet ports. Europe’s NATO countries, lacking the support of the US and hindered by objections from Hungary and Turkey, dither and pray he won’t take Poland, Estonia, and Finland next.

Jared Kushner begins developing “beachfront properties” on the land previously known as Gaza.

All US efforts to mitigate climate change and shift away from a carbon-based economy are ended as a gift to Trump’s fossil fuel donors; high internal and foreign import tariffs are put on electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind power systems. All tax breaks for green energy are ended, while those for oil and gas are expanded.

Claiming that America’s unionized public school teachers are a threat to our country, and Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, is “the most dangerous person in the world,” the Trump administration outlaws teachers’ unions (much like Scott Walker did in Wisconsin) and puts into place a national clearinghouse for school vouchers, paving the way for virtually all elementary and secondary education to be provided by churches and for-profit operations. Trump University reboots itself in collaboration with a nationwide Christian chain.

Citing nationwide college student protests against his policies, Trump — repeating his promise that “I will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers” in our colleges — orders a one-year moratorium on university education in all institutions that he deems “still hire or employ subversive professors.” Conservative or Christian/Catholic institutions of higher education become the only option for young people who can afford them and want a degree.

Pointing to the Bill of Rights, Trump fulfills his promise to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.” Armed militias of Trump followers sporting their trademark red hats and AR15s — led by January 6th “patriots” pardoned by Trump — begin “the great purge” of America, rousting and sometimes burning down the homes (as was done in Hungary against Roma people) of their “liberal” or “subversive” neighbors, often with the assistance of local police.

Trump decrees that American law will only recognize two genders and, with the assistance of six Republicans on the Supreme Court, reverses all legal protections for the queer community, including voiding all gay marriages and adoptions by gay parents (as Putin recently did). The question of criminalizing birth control is, per Clarence Thomas, returned to the states just like abortion was, and within two weeks several former Confederate states end access to contraception.

Criminal law and restraints on police are altered to allow “shoot to kill” orders against anybody caught committing a property crime in any American city. As Trump told a crowd in Anaheim, California recently:

“Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. The word that they shoot you will get out within minutes, and our nation, in one day, will be an entirely different place. There must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country.”

Citing comments by John Roberts that there is no longer racism in America and Clarence Thomas’ opposition to affirmative action programs, Trump issues an executive order declaring all laws against racial and religious discrimination null and void. He reverses the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Churches, stores, restaurants, and hotels begin putting back up the “Whites Only” signs they were forced to take down in the 1960s and 1970s.

Widespread arrests begin and Louise and I, along with thousands of others in politics and the media, flee the country or go into hiding.

And then things begin to get really bad.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that pig farms in Ecuador's Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas region generated roughly 15 million pounds a day. It has been corrected to reflect the fact that 4.4 million pounds of waste are generated per day.

Our natural world is in crisis. An area the size of Portugal is deforested every year on average, and wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. Deforestation is a leading driver of the climate crisis, and wildlife loss can destabilize precious ecosystems.

To tackle this, two years ago governments agreed on the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a set of goals and targets to protect nature. On October 21, leaders will meet at the United Nations biodiversity COP16 summit in Colombia to formally review their progress for the first time.

The industrial animal livestock sector is by far the largest driver of biodiversity loss, and must be where attendees at COP16 focus their attention.

“There is no nature anymore. Pollution in the air, pollution in the river.”

In the last 50 years, global milk production has more than doubled and meat production has more than tripled. This increase has been achieved through industrialisation—by putting more and more animals in smaller spaces, in worse conditions, feeding them more supplements and medicines, and using resources more intensely. It has led to poor animal welfare, low quality of food, and health risks for humans and other animals, including antibiotic resistance.

It has also led to hugely negative impacts on the environment, including for wild animals and their habitats. Livestock farming is the leading driver of deforestation—with clearing of forests for land for cattle accounting for 42% of all deforestation. The production of farmed animals and the feed for them now occupies 80% of the world’s agricultural land, yet provides just 17% of humans’ global calorie supply.

As a result of these factors, today 70% of all birds on Earth are farmed poultry, and 93% of all non-human mammals are livestock with just 7% wild. Overhauling the way we produce food is vital to protect our natural environment and to stem species loss.

Multilateral development banks (MDBs)—such as the World Bank Group—have made a series of commitments to protect nature, yet despite this the five biggest MDBs invested over $4.6 billion in factory farming between 2011 and 2021, and have shown no signs of reducing their spending since.

At the U.N. climate conference COP26 in 2021, leading MDBs released a Joint Nature Statement promising to support governments and the private sector to tackle nature loss. And at COP28 last year they went a step further, including committing to “tackl[e] the drivers of nature loss by fostering ‘nature positive’ investments” and “valu[e] nature to guide decision-making.”

In addition, Target 14 of the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed by world leaders requires public and private financial flows to be aligned with the goals of the GBF. This means MDBs must ensure their investments align with other GBF targets, like Target 4 to halt species extinction, and Target 10 to enhance biodiversity and sustainability in agriculture.

But rather than investing in sustainable forms of food production, MDBs are propping up a broken model of factory farming that is totally at odds with these pledges.

For example, the private sector branches of the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank Group have together invested over $200 million into PRONACA, Ecuador's largest pork and poultry producer. PRONACA used the funds to build and expand a series of factory farms, including in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, an area of Ecuador home to Indigenous peoples and tropical forest.

According to a shocking report by the Ecuadorian Coordinator of Organizations for the Defense of Nature and the Environment (CEDENMA), PRONACA's pig farms in the area generate roughly 4.4 million pounds of toxic waste each day, fouling the soil, air, and waterways.

CEDENMA surveyed local communities about the impact of the factory farms. Interviewees told them that PRONACA contaminated rivers, killing off fish that local people rely on for food and jobs, and harming local tourism. One intensive pig breeding farm was set up just meters away from a sacred site.

“There is no nature anymore. Pollution in the air, pollution in the river,” said one local resident.

Investments like in PRONACA are unfortunately just one of hundreds of harmful factory farm investments made by MDBs. Similar investments have been made or are being planned in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Poland, and elsewhere all over the world.

Ahead of COP16, we and other members of the Stop Financing Farming coalition are calling on MDBs to stick to the commitments they’ve made to protect nature by ruling out any further finance for factory farming and instead supporting more nature-friendly forms of agriculture. This means investing in the production of more plant-rich foods, and when they do finance animal agriculture, ensuring it is sustainable, following the principles of agroecology.

Shifting finance in this way would not only help protect nature, but also promote nutritionally superior diets, create jobs, and tackle climate change.

Yahya Sinwar’s death, which was confirmed by Israeli authorities Thursday, was long anticipated. Within Gaza, he was one of three key targets; the other two, Mohammad Deif and Marwan Issa were killed months ago.

Sinwar will be remembered by some as an inspired, defiant champion of Palestinian rights, by others as a false prophet and by still others as a bloodstained villain. The one aspect of his role in the 100-year war over Palestine, to paraphrase Rashid Khalidi’s book title, that most will agree upon, is that he failed to understand not only his adversary, but also his friends. He believed, among other things, that his October 7 attack would precipitate Israel’s collapse and that others in the Axis of Resistance would coordinate serious attacks against Israel with his own.

He timed his “big project,” as its planners called it, to exploit civil discord in Israel over Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to hamstring the country’s Supreme Court and subordinate it to the will of the right-wing legislature. Netanyahu’s gambit spurred massive demonstrations against the government and led some in the reserves, including pilots, to declare that they would not serve until the court reform measure was shelved.

Sinwar interpreted this unrest as cracks in the foundation of the Israeli state. In the very long run he might well prove to have been right. But he was very wrong to think that these cracks could be widened by the big project. Indeed, Sinwar’s assault on Israel and the taking of hostages, was not the wedge he thought it would be, but rather the cement that instantaneously sealed the fault lines.

Sinwar united a factionalized society, reminded them of the rationale for their state and the dark history preceding it.

The result was an all-out war on Hamas. Traumatized Israelis, humiliated and scandalized by an historic intelligence failure, quickly coalesced in favor of a scorched-earth response and Netanyahu’s aim of total victory. And it was understood that as of October 7, Sinwar was dead, if unburied. Sinwar’s hubris triggered a massive assault that eviscerated Gaza’s civilian population and was — is — apparently replete with war crimes related to Israel’s failure to protect Gaza’s civilian population from attack, the targeting of humanitarian agencies, and the failure to ensure that Palestinian noncombatants had adequate access to food, water, and medical care.

Sinwar’s colossal misperception also led to Hezbollah's involvement, which to the grief of both Gazans and Lebanese, was too trivial to fulfill Sinwar’s expectations, but too much for Israel to ignore, as it emptied northern Israel of its inhabitants. This in turn brought Israel and Iran into direct conflict and threatened the escalation of a regional war. And it is undeniably regional — as Houthis increasingly target U.S. vessels in the Red Sea, the U.S. deploys B-2 bombers from Missouri to drop bunker busters on deeply buried installations in Yemen, and the Israelis bomb Yemen’s only port for the transfer of humanitarian assistance.

Sinwar understood well enough that many ordinary Gazans would die in furtherance of his vision of victory. In this, he evidently confused himself with Vo Nguyen Giap, who likewise understood that many Vietnamese would die, particularly in vast U.S. air raids on the North, but was correct in assessing that this would weaken the U.S. internationally, legitimize his campaign to destroy South Vietnam, and unify the country under Hanoi’s rule.

But North Vietnam had a powerful ally, a population many times the size of Gaza’s, a much larger land area, and a highly mobilized society and powerful army. And his adversary to the south was, unlike Israel, fatally divided against itself.

The question for both the Palestinians and Israelis is what happens next. If the two are smart, Sinwar’s successors will offer to release all the remaining hostages, dead and alive, in exchange for an immediate ceasefire and a massive influx of humanitarian aid. The Israelis would be well-advised to declare victory and accept such an arrangement.

The Biden administration, and presumably Vice President Harris, have signaled that Netanyahu’s government is skating on thin ice. The prime minister might calculate that he need only wait a few weeks for a president-elect Donald Trump and therefore pocket Sinwar’s death and carry on with business as usual. This might be a good bet.

But hedging might be a better bet, and that would mean using Sinwar’s death as a face-saving way to manage White House pressure.

It should be self-evident that genocide is bad because it’s genocide, but apparently it isn’t—at least, not to everyone. There is, however, another reason to demand an immediate ceasefire: Unless they change course, the Democrats are much likelier to lose in November than most people seem to realize. That thought should terrify anyone who dreads the prospect of another Trump presidency—potentially with control of both houses of Congress.

A recent poll from the Arab American Institute (AAI) 1received some much-deserved attention (if not enough) because it showed a massive decline in support for Democrats among Arab American voters because of White House support for Israel’s attack on Gaza. That decline could cost the Democrats several swing states.

The AAI poll has, it seems, gotten some Democrats’ attention. The Washington Post reports that this voter shift is a “huge concern” for a Harris campaign that, in the Post’s words, “sees the images of dead civilians as complicating her path to victory in key swing states ...”

Democrats could conceivably recover many of these votes, but it would require concrete action.

That’s a rather cold-blooded way for the Post to phrase it, but it’s certainly accurate. As an unnamed advisor to the campaign told the Post, “It comes down to people saying, ‘I can’t support anyone who supports a genocide.’”

The problem is even bigger than they think. The U.S.-backed violence in Gaza will also cost the Democrats votes in other groups—I estimate more than 60,000 total lost votes in Michigan alone—losses that could demolish Democrats’ chances in November.

Arab-American Voters in Swing States

The AAI poll showed Trump leading Harris by 46 percent to 42 percent among Arab American voters, a dramatic shift from Biden’s lead of 59 percent to Trump’s 35 percent at the same point in 2020. (This polling was conducted before Israel attacked Lebanon, where ongoing events may make these numbers even worse for Democrats.)

To explore the impact of this shift on swing states, I put the AAI’s new polling numbers into a spreadsheet, cross-tabulated them with the total number of eligible Arab American voters in swing states, and used past Arab American voter participation rates to estimate the shift in votes,

(Note: The AAI was kind enough to provide one data point for this effort, but the consultant in me demands that I point out a) that these are approximations based on available data, and that b) that any errors are mine alone.)

That said: There are more than 750,000 Arab Americans of voting age in swing states. Based on AAI’s polling shift, Democrats could lose between 115,000 and 130,000 Arab-American votes in these states.

If the losses were proportional to the voting-age population by state, Democrats could lose:

• 50,000 votes in Michigan
• 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania
• 50,000 more in other swing states

That’s 100,000 swing-state votes lost because of the ongoing U.S. support for carnage in Gaza.

But Arab Americans aren’t the only voters Gaza will lose for Democrats.

A surprising number of people, including some news staffers, tend to conflate Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. That’s a major mistake. Most Arab Americans are Christian, while only about one in four is Muslim.

Conversely, while Muslim-American census information is hard to come by, an analysis of immigration data suggests that most Muslim Americans are not of Arab descent. Among immigrants, who comprised roughly 60 percent of Muslims in that study, South Asians were the largest group, making up roughly one-third of the Muslim-American population, while approximately one in four came from Arab countries. That leaves many lost votes uncounted.

How many Muslim-American votes could Democrats lose over Gaza?

Many Muslim Americans strongly identify with the plight of the Palestinian people. How would that affect the vote?

In 2018m Pew Research reported there were 3.45 million Muslims in the U.S., a figure that was growing rapidly. To estimate Muslim votes at the state level, I extrapolated from a 2020 survey of religious institutions conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB).

(I made sure not to double-count Arab-American Muslims and I subtracted people too young to vote. I can go through my methodology online if people are interested.)

Assuming Muslim Americans vote at the same rate as most Americans rather than at the unusually high participation rate seen among Arab Americans, that comes to approximately 40,000-50,000 additional lost votes in swing states.

And it matters where those votes could be lost. ASARB’s data includes state (and county) level totals. So, by my calculations, that means an additional 11,000 votes lost in Michigan, between 6,000 and 7,000 in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in North Carolina, and 5,000 in Arizona.

Other Vote Losses

There are other votes to be lost, too, most of them among Democrats’ core demographics.

Young voters? A University of Chicago survey found that “college students remain significantly more likely to support Palestinians than Israel, and significantly more likely to take action on behalf of Palestinians in the form of discourse or protest.”

Black voters? Another survey found over two-thirds of Black Americans (68 percent) “want an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, with a plurality (46 percent) strongly supporting the idea.” It also found that 59 percent believed conditions should be placed on U.S. military aid to Israel.

What about Jewish voters? There’s no sign they’re shifting to Trump on this issue. Seventy-one percent of swing-state Jewish voters say they plan to vote for Harris. Could a ceasefire cost her a chunk of these votes? There’s no evidence for that. Israel only ranks fourth in importance among these voters—behind “the future of democracy,” abortion, and “inflation and the economy.”

And some of these voters oppose Israel’s actions.

Besides, as the lead pollster noted (and which I repeat with a kind of familial pride), most Jewish Americans despise Trump. In his words, “Trump is as hated in the battleground states as he is hated in the general population among Jewish voters.”

Is It Too Late for the Democrats?

Here’s what won’t win these votes back: more empty words and rhetorical feints. Take, for example, a “stern” letter to Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant that became public after what looks like a calculated “leak” from the State Department. The letter, signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, asserts that the White House may invoke U.S. law against providing arms to Israel unless it eases its stranglehold on Gaza aid within thirty days.

Would the Democratic Party rather lose this election than end the U.S.-backed killing in Gaza? If not, there may still be time to stem its losses.

This move seems unlikely to win many hearts and minds, given that:

• As recently as August, “The top U.S. official working on the humanitarian situation in Gaza told aid groups in August that the U.S. would not consider withholding weapons from Israel for blocking food and medicine from entering the enclave”;
• the White House had issued empty ultimatums like this before; and,
• the deadline falls after the election, which understandably heightens skepticism.

Democrats could conceivably recover many of these votes, but it would require concrete action. The steps they could take include, for starters:

1. an immediate halt in arms shipments;
2. the delivery of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies within 48 hours—hand-delivered by the U.S. military, if necessary;
3. a demand to end the IDF-backed settler violence against the people of the West Bank.

Would the Democratic Party rather lose this election than end the U.S.-backed killing in Gaza? If not, there may still be time to stem its losses. But the hour is late—and it grows too late every day for more of the innocent victims of Gaza.

Project 2025 has become a 900-page millstone around the neck of Donald Trump. Whether out of self-delusion or hubris, the plan’s architects made a colossal mistake: they said the quiet part out loud. A recent poll shows that 57% of voters view the agenda unfavorably, and only 4% had a favorable opinion. It’s the reason why Trump has tried desperately to distance himself from the plan, even as Project 2025’s former head boasts about its influence on Trump’s policy priorities.

There’s no question Project 2025 is scary. But if all we do is talk about Project 2025 as a list of “scary things,” we’re missing the bigger picture.

When we talk about needing a long-term answer to Project 2025, we’re not simply talking about a list of ideas, but instead a broad coalition of groups all rowing in the same direction.

Project 2025 represents the consolidation of the authoritarian right. The fact that it was backed not only by the Heritage Foundation, but literally hundreds of other right-wing groups, shows the deep well of support around the plan. The authors aren’t armchair experts either. They’re former Trump officials and GOP heavyweights who know exactly what they’re doing. It means that we should take them at their word when they say they want to expel career civil servants, scrap the Department of Education, and remake government agencies in their own image.

More than just a catalog of sinister proposals, Project 2025 represents the ultimate goal of the authoritarian right: to seize control of every aspect of government and our lives. They want to do what authoritarian governments have done all around the world by limiting our rights, attacking the free flow of information, and undermining the integrity of our democratic institutions.

It’s not a pipe dream either. The right has been successful at installing its draconian laws at the state-level for years. They’ve used Republican-controlled states as laboratories to test out their ideas. As Nashville Rep. Justin Jones put it, “If you want to know what Project 2025 is, look at Tennessee 2024,” or Louisiana and Florida for that matter.

They want to do what authoritarian governments have done all around the world by limiting our rights, attacking the free flow of information, and undermining the integrity of our democratic institutions.

We can defeat Donald Trump on November 5th, but the threat of Project 2025 will endure long after election day.

While we work to block Trump and his MAGA movement, we need our own plan to strengthen democracy and redistribute power from the ruling class to working people of all races. That should begin with breaking the iron grip of the filibuster and getting rid of the Electoral College, both of which have been used to enshrine minority rule in our government. We need to expand the Supreme Court and stop right-wing authoritarians from operating behind the smokescreen of the court system. (Many of Project 2025’s policy prescriptions rely on legal battles that have already been waged and won in conservative-controlled courts.) We need to push through election and voting reforms to prevent the “New Jim Crow” of states blocking citizens from exercising their fundamental rights. Finally, we need to pass the PRO Act and restore the power of working people to organize their workplaces.

Our movements have shown—in state after state, city after city—what’s possible when we win elections and organize our groups around a specific set of policy goals.

Look at Minnesota, where with a razor-thin majority the State Legislature passed one of the most ambitious agendas that we’ve seen in any state: paid family and medical leave, codifying abortion rights, expanding the child tax credit, making school meals free and universal. People have called it the “Minnesota Miracle”—but this result was anything but a miracle. In fact, it was the result of decades of methodical organizing by labor and grassroots groups.

In New York, the Working Families Party and its partners joined together to unseat six Democratic legislators who—with the blessing of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo—caucused with the Republicans, handing them control of the chamber. The following year, the new majority in the Legislature passed landmark policies to protect abortion rights, strengthen voter access, protect the climate, and keep tenants in their homes.

We can defeat Donald Trump on November 5th, but the threat of Project 2025 will endure long after election day.

When we talk about needing a long-term answer to Project 2025, we’re not simply talking about a list of ideas, but instead a broad coalition of groups all rowing in the same direction. We’re not starting from square one either. The Working Families Party has been doing this at a local and state level for years, bringing together diverse coalitions of people to take ideas once seen as impossible and pass them into law.

The task now is knitting together these victories into a coherent whole, a bigger vision of how the government can work for everyday people. Project 2025 and its architects want to steer us to shipwreck. If we’re going to stop them, we need our own governing agenda and—just as importantly—a roadmap for how to get there.

Vice President Kamala Harris recently unveiled her new economic plan, a vision for America that not only charts a path to tackle climate pollution but harnesses it as an opportunity to build a more affordable, prosperous country. Her plans and record shows we can tackle the climate crisis while creating a more equitable economy. In fact, the Biden-Harris administration’s climate law has already spurred over $372 billion in investments and created more than 334,000 new jobs—with nearly half of the benefits going to historically marginalized groups, including low-income households and Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

At Evergreen Action, we’re fighting to enact policies to tackle the climate crisis head-on while making people’s lives better. One way we do that is by holding politicians accountable to their climate commitments and shining a light on the impact of climate policy, good or bad. This election, the choice could not be more stark.

This election isn’t just about choosing between two candidates—it’s about choosing between two radically different futures.

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would cost the economy billions, jack up household bills, and rob us of a safer climate future. It isn’t just a policy proposal—it’s a full-scale assault on progress. It would dismantle clean energy programs, roll back pollution standards, and undermine America’s global leadership in the clean energy economy.

If Trump’s Project 2025 becomes reality, America could lose 1.7 million jobs by 2030, and household energy costs could rise by $32 billion. The health impacts could be even more devastating: hundreds of thousands of new asthma cases and over 25,000 premature deaths by 2050, with marginalized communities bearing the brunt.

This election isn’t just about choosing between two candidates—it’s about choosing between two radically different futures. Vice President Harris offers a path where clean energy fuels economic growth, cuts costs, creates jobs, and protects our communities. Trump’s Project 2025, on the other hand, represents a future where corrupt polluters run the show, slamming the door shut on saving our planet—and blocking all the benefits that would come with it.

We don’t have to settle for Trump’s outdated, short-sighted approach. Continued climate leadership, supported by actionable policies, offers a pathway to a prosperous and healthy future. Earlier this year, Evergreen Action published a roadmap for the next president, built in collaboration with climate, environmental justice, and labor partners, to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s historic climate achievements and fight climate change while building a thriving clean energy economy.

This plan would set us on track to achieve 100% clean energy, revitalize American industry by onshoring manufacturing, create millions of good-paying union jobs, and ensure we lead the world in clean energy. And, our plan would make polluters pay, finally holding Big Oil accountable for its role in fueling the climate crisis.

Our plan would make polluters pay, finally holding Big Oil accountable for its role in fueling the climate crisis.

Rather than tie us to the expensive, polluting fossil fuels of the past, we can grow our clean energy economy that strengthens the middle class. Electing a Harris-Walz administration and advocating for robust climate policies like those in our plan can create 3.9 million jobs, save households $39 billion in energy costs, and protect thousands of lives by 2030 compared to Trump’s Project 2025.

In Pennsylvania, grants through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are propelling the Commonwealth’s clean energy industries, creating thousands of jobs, and ensuring American workers lead in producing clean energy technology. Meanwhile, Michigan is seeing an economic boom supported by federal investments that are projected to cut household energy bills by $713 annually by 2040 and generate $27.8 billion in public health savings.

Trump’s promise to repeal these investments wouldn’t just kill jobs and stunt economic growth—it would destroy America’s competitiveness in clean energy manufacturing and deployment.

Despite Trump’s insistence once again that climate change is “one of the great scams”—even as Hurricanes Milton and Helene brought catastrophic flooding across the South, killing at least 300 people and leaving thousands stranded and without power—climate change is no longer a distant threat. It’s powering a growing barrage of record-breaking weather events every year. Higher ocean temperatures fuel rapidly intensifying storms, making hurricane season even more deadly. Arizona is enduring record-breaking heatwaves, while states like North Carolina and Texas are being hit by once-in-1,000-year rainfalls with alarming frequency.

This is our last shot. If we make the right choice, we’ll not only preserve a safer future for all Americans, but we’ll reap significant benefits—good-paying union jobs, lower energy costs, and a healthier environment. The alternative? A future with rising temperatures, more extreme weather, and higher prices.