The Democratic Party is trying to get born again.

For forty years it didn’t want to be. Since Reagan, the Democrats stopped fighting the world he built and started managing it. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and sent the factories south. He signed the crime bill Joe Biden wrote and helped fill the prisons. He ended welfare and called it reform. He tore down the wall between the banks and your money, and a few years later the banks lost your money and got bailed out for it. Obama bailed them out, let the houses go, deported people by the millions, and kept the drone war and the surveillance state running without missing a step. On the things that decide who holds power, money and war and the police and the spying, our party and theirs were one party. That was never where they fought.

What they fought over was the rest of it, and even there they did the least they could get away with, because anything real would have cost their donors. They told us things were getting better and better. They told us they were on our side. They put out a statement for women and Black people and immigrants and Latinos every time one was due, and then they went back to managing the decline. And every couple of years they came back and told us this was the most important election of our lifetimes, so hold your nose and vote, and we did, and the rent went up anyway.

The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border.

Then Trump stood up and said the whole thing was a fraud and the country was a wreck. Media talking heads were appalled. They laughed at him. But he connected, because it rang true. We’d been told for thirty years that we’d never had it so good while the ground gave out under us, and here was a man saying out loud that it was a lie. The trouble was where he pointed. Trump took the truth of our condition and aimed it straight down, at the immigrant and the poor and the weak and the despised, the people with the least power in the whole arrangement. He found the real anger and fed it to the worst part of us.

The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border. We’ve been unjust. We’ve been immoral, paying for a genocide in Gaza with our own tax money while we couldn’t house our own people. We are failing, and we need to be redeemed. Trump never offers that last part, because his whole act runs on it being someone else’s fault. The left says it plain. We did this, and we can undo it, and we can make this country great, the real kind, not the red hat version.

So this is a fight about which future we get. One is the future the war party keeps selling, a trillion-dollar arsenal standing guard over a pile of money while the killing goes on. The other one has to be built, and it starts by telling the truth about where we’re standing. The whole question is which one we choose.

On Tuesday we got our first real look in a while at people choosing the hard one. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and he spent his own standing to back primary challengers against sitting Democrats. Three of the House candidates he backed won, two of them democratic socialists. They ran against the party that signed the checks for Gaza, and they won anyway. Krystal Ball put it as plain as anybody, that the real radicals are the politicians who back the killing of children. Jaime Harrison, who used to run the party machine, told people like Mamdani that if they hate the Democratic Party they should stop using its name and go build their own. We’re not going anywhere. The party was never Harrison’s to hand out, and the people who actually built it just voted for the truth.

It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it.

We’ve been here before, and the last time we got it right. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Democrats and socialists fought over the future and then they built one. They passed Social Security and the right to a union into law. They strung electric lines out to farms that had never seen a light bulb. They sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and gave the old and the poor a doctor with Medicare and Medicaid. They put us on the road to the moon. They built the biggest middle class the world had ever seen and pulled millions out of poverty doing it. They argued the whole way, and the country came out stronger for the fight.

But we forgot the other half of the job, which was the building. A roof you can afford. A doctor you can see. A job that holds a family together. We handed all of it to the market, and the market handed us back rent we can’t pay and care we can’t afford and kids who don’t believe they’ll ever own a home. The rights we won, for Black people and women and immigrants and gay and trans people, were real and worth every fight, but they don’t pay the rent, and the party that told us to clap never wanted to talk about the rent.

The Democratic Party needs a rebirth not a rebrand.

We’ve done it before, so we know it’s not a dream. We need a politics and an economy and a democracy and a country that works for all of us, and not for the shrinking few who bought up the last one. We can build that. And the thing they have left to stop us with is fear.

Jesse Watters went on television and said the New York socialists aren’t even socialists, they’re communists, and you can’t reason with them, you have to crush them. That’s the same move Trump makes, the powerful turning your fear on someone weaker than you. Be scared of your neighbor, and keep trusting the people who paid for a genocide and couldn’t fix a thing here at home. We’re done taking that.

So the party is trying to get born again. It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it. We tell the truth about how far we’ve fallen, and then we build our way back up. We make it great for real, or we don’t get it.

The saying “that’s history” is usually meant to be dismissive, but in politics the past casts a long shadow over the future. Now, two years after President Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the patterns that dominate the Democratic Party are damaging its prospects for the elections to come.

When Biden left CNN’s debate studio after an often-incoherent performance on the night of June 27, 2024, his re-election goose was cooked. With voting for president set to begin within three months, time was of the essence to replace Biden as the party’s presidential candidate. But excessive loyalty and outright denial kicked in immediately among top Democrats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on MSNBC telling viewers that they didn’t see and hear what they’d just seen and heard. “I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done,” Newsom said. He voiced transactional gratitude: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance.”

Such tap dancing was common among party operatives who stayed publicly stoic. “Joe Biden has always had our back,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said, “and we’re gonna have his.” Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned, “Let’s just stay the course.”

Biden loyalist Heather Cox Richardson tried to reassure her several million readers via Substack, writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”

Not all of the usual Biden boosters were disingenuous after the debate. Quite a few high-profile commentators were quick to say that Biden should drop out of the race. Among them, within hours, was the New York Times editorial board.

But five days passed before the first Democrat in Congress called for Biden to step aside. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas was alone among his colleagues when he said that Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times belatedly reported: “In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”

Thirteen days passed after the debate before a single Democratic senator urged Biden to step aside. At that point, only 4 percent of congressional Democrats had publicly said that Biden should exit the ticket.

By July 19, a full three weeks after the debate, only 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress had called for Biden to withdraw. Three days later, at last, Biden announced that he would not run.

The Democrats who did openly urge Biden to leave the race were a mix across the party’s ideological spectrum. Two renowned progressives were among the most outspoken advocates of the president soldiering on: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sanders encouraged the illusion that Biden had the capacity to be an effective candidate. Reporting that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside,” the Associated Press quoted the senator as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”

While that statement was true as a generality, it notably failed to meet the moment.

Sanders, who enjoyed a warm friendship with Biden, had his ear at that pivotal time. Ten days after the debate, Sanders said on the CBS program Face the Nation that Biden “has spoken to me in recent days.”

Eleven days after the debate, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters: “I have spoken to the president over the weekend. I have spoken with him extensively. He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed.”

More than a week after the debate, a prominent progressive writer oddly blamed “the pundit class” for “suggesting Biden is unfit” and wanting him “to get lost.” Such undue allegiance to Biden was similar to what had enabled and bolstered his disastrous choice to run for re-election in the first place.

Consciously or not, too many self-described liberals and progressives took their cues from Democratic leaders who were routinely deceptive on behalf of the president. In a typical episode of dissembling, the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer said from a podium on Capitol Hill in mid-February 2024: “I talk to President Biden regularly, sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it’s fine, it’s as good as it’s been over the years…. He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”

We should remember that the Biden who insisted on running for re-election – despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats – was the same Biden who insisted on shipping billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel while it proceeded with genocide in Gaza, despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats.

Looking ahead, a great need will be to overcome the ongoing culture of conformity that so badly damaged the Democratic Party in 2024 and helped Trump get back into the White House.

The necessary leadership will not come from the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee; its 450 members have remained overwhelmingly deferential to the hidebound dictates of the DNC chair. Nor will the needed leadership come from Democrats in Congress, who couldn’t bring themselves to call for Biden to stop running for re-election during the crucial first weeks after his debate disaster.

The vital leadership must come from grassroots activists.

For millions of workers, the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of work is no longer theoretical. It is already showing up in layoffs, hiring freezes, shrinking departments, and growing anxiety about whether the paycheck families rely on today will still exist tomorrow.

But the most important question is not simply which jobs AI will eliminate. It is whether workers will have any real support when those jobs disappear.

While policymakers, executives, and economists debate which industries will thrive and which occupations will disappear in the age of AI, working Americans are focused on more immediate concerns: paying rent, affording groceries, covering childcare, and figuring out how they would support their families if their income suddenly vanished.

Workers are right to worry, because the system meant to help them through job loss is already failing to meet this moment.

While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone.

America’s unemployment insurance system was built for a different era entirely, one in which AI was nonexistent. It was built for an era that assumed stable full-time employment, long-term employer relationships, and relatively predictable layoffs. Today’s economy looks nothing like that.

Millions of workers now move between part-time jobs, contract work, temporary positions, caregiving responsibilities, and periods outside the workforce entirely. But unemployment insurance rules still exclude many of those workers from receiving help when they need it most.

Today, only about 1 in 4 unemployed workers receive unemployment benefits nationwide. In some states, fewer than 13% received support at all. And even when workers do qualify, benefits are often too low and too short-lived to keep families financially stable while they search for new work.

The result of this broken system is families scrambling to avoid financial free fall: draining savings accounts, falling behind on rent, or taking the first low-paying jobs they can find because they can’t afford to wait for something better.

That disconnect is already visible. While the number of unemployed workers has climbed sharply over the past year, unemployment claims have remained relatively flat—not because people are unaffected, but because so many workers are locked out of a system that no longer reflects the realities of modern work.

The first wave of AI disruption is already here. As adoption of these technologies increases, more workers will cycle between jobs, more families will navigate periods of unemployment, and more people will be forced to rebuild after losing work through no fault of their own.

And those burdens will not fall equally. Women—especially Black women, who are disproportionately represented in clerical and administrative jobs—are among the workers most vulnerable to displacement. Workers of color already face persistently higher unemployment rates because of structural inequities in the labor market. Yet when they lose work, they are significantly less likely to receive unemployment benefits and the economic stability those benefits are supposed to provide.

That reality is colliding with an already fragile economy. Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that college graduates are now experiencing recession-level rates of unemployment. Over the last year, unemployment among young college graduates averaged 5.5%—the highest sustained level outside the brief peak of the Covid-19 pandemic since the aftermath of the Great Recession.

These are graduates who were told that if they worked hard, earned a degree, and applied themselves, they would find stability and opportunity. Instead, many are entering a labor market defined by uncertainty and shrinking opportunities, all while facing a weakening safety net.

That is why modernizing our unemployment systems must be part of the AI conversation.

A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers. It would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work. It would make it easier, not harder, for eligible workers to receive support. And it would actually be prepared to withstand economic downturns.

Unemployment insurance should be understood for what it truly is: economic infrastructure.

Just as roads and bridges help goods move through the economy, unemployment insurance helps people move through economic change without falling into crisis. A strong UI system gives people the stability to search for good jobs instead of being pushed into the first low-wage position available. It stabilizes families, communities, and local businesses during periods of disruption.

The age of stable employment is fading. More workers will inevitably face periods of transition, disruption, and job loss in the years ahead.

While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone. Modernizing unemployment insurance is not simply a matter of compassion. It is a matter of economic readiness.

Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower. Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016.

But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s, and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.

Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right.

There is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.” This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and, after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.

On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decision was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view.

Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws.

Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisions on the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America.

In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice… who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.”

Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars.

Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial, and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant.

n a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket… in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing:

It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government… [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”

All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

Amazon wanted to build 250 diesel generators in a working-class Minnesota community and skip an environmental review that would have scrutinized emissions and pollution. A local organization decided to fight anyway, banded together with others, and won.

That organization was CURE, a grantee of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, and last year's fight was about more than a data center. It was about whether Amazon could run 250 diesel generators next to a retiring coal plant in Becker, Minnesota without answering for what it meant for the air and water in a community already in the middle of an energy transition.

Those generators would have produced 600 megawatts of backup power, without the environmental review that would have examined their emissions impact. The community had no interest in absorbing the pollution costs of Amazon's AI ambitions.

I have spent 25 years in this work, first as an organizer and now as someone who helps fund it. What happened in Becker does not surprise me. CURE did not win because it got lucky. It won because someone had invested in that organization years before Amazon showed up, building the staff, the community relationships, and the knowledge of how a state utilities commission actually works. That is how organizing operates. The results are visible. The groundwork is not. And right now, that groundwork is being torn up on purpose. Philanthropy helped build it. Now it needs to decide whether it will defend it.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources.

I saw what patient investment makes possible in the early 2000s, when I was part of an immigrant women's organization in San Francisco called Mujeres Unidas y Activas. We had four staff members and a big dream. Over the next decade MUA grew to 40 people and became one of the founding members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which we built alongside a dozen other domestic worker groups who came together in Atlanta and decided to act as one.

The alliance went on to help win legal protections for the nannies, housekeepers, and home aides that federal labor law had excluded since the New Deal. None of that came from a single breakthrough. It came from funders who stayed in it long enough to see something grow.

That infrastructure is being dismantled right now, and the attacks are not accidental. When voter registration drives signed up new voters by the thousands, lawmakers in several states moved to criminalize the groups behind them.

Nick Tilsen founded the NDN Collective to defend Indigenous rights and land sovereignty in the Dakotas, and that work made him a target. He faced aggravated assault charges and the prospect of more than 25 years in prison for monitoring a police encounter in Rapid City before a jury deadlocked and all charges were dropped earlier this year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked hate groups for more than 50 years, was federally indicted on fraud charges in April. You do not need to ban organizing if you can make it too expensive and too frightening to sustain.

What disappears when this work gets defunded does not make the front page. A permit gets quietly approved. A workplace complaint never gets filed. A hearing happens and no one is there to speak. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities have always been powerful. What they have not always had is the sustained investment they deserve.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources, and it has to change. We call on donors to fund grassroots organizations now.

Fund them for years, not grant cycles. Do not pull back because the political moment got harder. That is precisely when this work needs you most.

Republicans hold complete control of state government in 23 states today, Democrats in 16. That map does not change through advertising. It changes through patient, ground-level organizing in the places the political class has written off, on a timeline of years, not election cycles. Cutting that work now is not fiscal discipline. It is a strategic concession.

Climate, democracy, and economic justice are not separate fights. They are the same fight, and the communities on the frontlines of all three have been saying so for years. “Affordability,” the latest political buzzword, is not new or distinct from these ongoing fights. In Becker, what was at stake was clean air, democratic accountability, and a community's right to shape its own energy future. CURE understood that. The question is whether the people and institutions with the resources to back that kind of work will understand it too, and soon enough to matter.

I still think about those four staff members at MUA, and what became possible because someone believed in the work long before there were results to show for it. Frontline communities are not waiting to be rescued. They are building, organizing, and winning. The question is whether philanthropy will stop watching and start investing.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

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

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

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

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Three Democratic candidates for House seats in New York prevailed on Tuesday night in a massive rebuke to the party establishment. Though each race was representative of a broader dissatisfaction with incumbents and specific district-level dynamics, the US relationship with Israel and funding from big-money lobbies, including AIPAC, became central components in each of these races.

Following in the footsteps Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election in 2025, Brad Lander (NY-10), Claire Valdez (NY-7), and Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13) all scored wins in Tuesday’s primaries, putting them on a glidepath to Congress in November. Both Lander and Avila Chevalier defeated sitting House members.

Particularly in the 10th District, where Lander won nearly two-thirds of the vote, those questions were seen as central. As Politico put it, the challenger knocked out the “two-term lawmaker after a bruising campaign that focused heavily on their differences over Israel.”

“There is very little daylight between Brad Lander and Dan Goldman ideologically, except when it comes to Israel,” Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster, told Responsible Statecraft (RS). “Yes, Lander has a long tenure representing much of the district, but he won by a nearly 2:1 margin because Goldman is deeply out of touch with the base of the party on Israel—and his association with AIPAC.”

“Some have criticized my supporting progressive insurgents. Tonight shows we have a new party.”

In a sign of how much the discourse of the Israel’s war in Gaza and US support for it has shifted since October 2023, Valdez, who ran for an open seat, criticized her leading opponent, Antonio Reynoso, for not calling the war a “genocide” until he announced his run for Congress. Nydia Velasquez, the popular incumbent who held the seat for more than three decades, endorsed Reynoso before Tuesday’s election.

In the 13th District, meanwhile, Avila Chevalier, who centered her opposition to US policy toward Israel, shocked Adriano Espaillat, the current chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Avila Chevalier has said she would support the “Block the Bombs” Act that would halt arms shipments to Israel and made headlines for attending a protest one day after the October 7 attacks, which she said was in recognition of “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”

Her victory was seen as notable not only because it pitted an outsider with no prior elected experience against an established incumbent, but also because she won in a less affluent, less white district. As Alex Kane wrote in Jewish Currents before the race, progressive activists saw her race as “a sign that anti-AIPAC politics can win outside of wealthier, more highly-educated progressive districts where it’s had success so far.”

In New York’s 12th District, an area of the city which is older and more Jewish than some other neighborhoods with competitive races, there were further signs of the degree to which the politics of the US-Israel relationship has changed. Carlson told RS before the vote that they would be watching for whether Nina Schwalbe, the only candidate to call the war in Gaza a “genocide,” could run close to George Conway, a former Republican and strong supporter of the traditional relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.

At the time of writing, Schwalbe had garnered 7% of the vote compared to 6% for Conway. The two top vote-getters in the race, who were running to replace outgoing Rep. Jerry Nadler, both described themselves as pro-Israel but anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said they would not vote to end military aid to Israel.

AIPAC itself kept some distance from the races in New York, though reporting indicated that apparent front organizations for the lobbying group have continued to fund candidates. Espaillat was the only candidate explicitly backed by AIPAC. Other pro-Israel groups, such as the Democratic Majority for Israel, have reportedly given money to Super PACs supporting Goldman and Espaillat.

More pro-Israel candidates have also had successes in other races, including in a Maryland Democratic primary race on Tuesday and in an earlier effort to oust incumbent Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky earlier this year.

Some sitting members of Congress framed the news as indicative of a larger wave sweeping over the party. “The progressive movement is crushing the establishment in NYC,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on X. “Some have criticized my supporting progressive insurgents. Tonight shows we have a new party.”

This week’s races in New York, all in deep blue districts, were certainly tied into other political dynamics, including the power of Mamdani (who endorsed all three progressive winners) and other district-specific issues. But as Democrats gear up for more primary races, ahead of November’s midterms and 2028’s presidential elections, it has become increasingly clear that unconditional support for Israel is no longer a winning issue in the Democratic Party.

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you. 

Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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Many of the criticisms being leveled against the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran—namely, that it is not that great a deal—are accurate and worthy of attention. But under the disastrous set of circumstances resulting from the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is probably the best deal that can be realistically hoped for, given that Iran clearly has the upper hand. Unfortunately, that has not stopped some Washington politicians, including many prominent Democrats, from attempting to undermine it.

Iran has suffered enormously in terms of damage to its military and civilian infrastructure and the killing of many in its clerical, political, and military leadership, among many other thousands of deaths. In response, the regime has demonstrated an effective new form of asymmetrical warfare, in which relatively cheap drones can continue to inflict an enormous amount of damage on US assets in the region, as well as on the military and civilian infrastructure of US allies, even when more than 90 percent of such projectiles are successfully intercepted via more costly technologies.

The United States cannot win this war against Iran.

The deal outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding is decidedly of greater benefit to Iran than the terms agreed upon in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—an agreement primarily negotiated by the Obama Administration and signed by six other nations with the support of the United Nations and the European Union. That deal was unilaterally broken off by President Donald Trump during his first term.

Trump’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Iran calls for Iran’s enriched uranium to be blended down inside the country rather than removed to another location. In addition, as much as $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets will be released, although Trump has repeatedly criticized the JCPOA for unfreezing billions in Iranian assets. And, unlike the JCPOA, this deal lifts sanctions prior to Iran’s implementing the nuclear provisions.

The Trump Administration emphasizes that its agreement forces Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commits Iran to not developing a nuclear weapon. However, both of these were already the case prior to Trump’s launch of the war four months ago on February 28.

For Republicans who attacked President Barack Obama for the JCPOA to now defend Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding is beyond hypocrisy. But many Congressional Democrats are demonstrating their own hypocrisy in claiming that they oppose the war while actively undermining efforts to end it.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, referred to the agreement as “the art of surrender.” Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, deemed it “despicable.” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said it was a deal in which Iran gets all the benefits. Former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice dubbed it a “jaw-dropping, horrific surrender.” Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said it was “a thorough capitulation.” Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, similarly claimed it was “basically a surrender document.” And Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, also called the agreement as an “unconditional surrender” by the United States, insisting it would be “dead on arrival in the Senate”—even though, since it is not a formal treaty, it does not require ratification or any other action on Capitol Hill.

Under international law, countries that engage in aggressive war are generally held liable for the damages inflicted upon the country they attack. The costs to Iranian society of the US-Israeli bombing has been estimated to be nearly $300 billion. The Memorandum of Understanding does not call for reparations, but it does make reference to a reconstruction fund in that amount, apparently led by Arab Gulf states; payments will likely be in the form of loans with a decent return on investment for those Gulf states. It is not US tax dollars that are being spent. It is not money that Trump is giving to Iran.

This has not stopped some Democratic leaders in Congress from claiming this is somehow a taxpayer-funded cash grant to the Iranian regime. Schumer insists the agreement would force the United States to “send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are severe here at home.” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, falsely claimed these funds could be used to “end homelessness, fund cancer research for forty years, and give every child free pre-K for over seven years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran.” Blumenthal even claimed that Iran would be able to spend the money on supporting Hezbollah and other extremist Iranian allies, and rebuild its nuclear program. However, the investments would more likely actually be directed towards specific civilian infrastructure development projects under the supervision of the donor countries and private investors.

Misrepresenting arms control agreements is a time-honored tactic used by militarists. During the Cold War, these agreements frequently prompted rightwing claims that arms control locked in Soviet nuclear superiority. Trump himself insisted that the JCPOA, rather than make it physically impossible for Iran to develop a weapon, would have enabled them to do the opposite and destroy Israel and attack the United States.

By falsely claiming that the United States would pay Iran $300 billion, Schumer (who also opposed the JCPOA) and other Democrats are essentially trying to mobilize popular opposition to the ending of the conflict.

The big question: What is the alternative?

A return to a war on Iran that brings retaliatory attacks on a half-dozen Middle Eastern nations? The continued devastating Israeli bombardment of Lebanon? The indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its disastrous global economic impact, particularly on families worldwide living under the poverty line?

Some Democrats recognize this reality. “There is no good way out of a bad war,” noted Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “When you're in a hole, stop digging.” Similarly, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, observed, “It’s a disaster, but it’s probably a necessary disaster.”

But the Democratic politicians who are joining rightwing Republicans in claims of “surrender” are assisting in the creation of a climate that might indeed lead the hawkish Trump Administration to break off the current agreement and return to war.

In many respects, this is nothing new. Democrats played an important role in working to undermine Obama’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran, in discouraging President Joe Biden from returning to the deal, and in promoting a war in Iran that Trump finally brought to fruition in recent months.

Those of us interested in peace and security, however, should not encourage these actions. It is easy to criticize the agreement as a means of underscoring the tragedy of this reckless and illegal war, and to further discredit Trump as we approach the midterm elections. We must resist the understandable temptation to forward the memes, cartoons, and late-night jokes critical of the deal on our personal listservs and social media.

Doing so simply reinforces the efforts by Republican hawks, rightwing Zionists, and others who seek perpetual war. The unfortunate reality is that the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding is probably the best hope at this point to end—or at least suspend—this tragic conflict.

Alan Greenspan, who served as chair of the Federal Reserve from to 1987 to 2006 and who died on Monday, was a monster. He was the Henry Kissinger of economic policy. Like Kissinger, he was mistakenly considered a genius. Reporters, businesses, and many members of Congress hung on his words—more accurately, his jargon-filled word salad, which obscured more than it explained—to understand what was going on in the economy. Despite the fact that his policies, like Kissinger's, were a blatant failure, he was, also like Kissinger (who also died at 100), still taken seriously by the media after he left government service, and made a ton of money as a consultant. Both men caused enormous harm and suffering for which they were never held accountable.

The New York Times obituary has a few paragraphs about writer and pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on Greenspan, but doesn't do justice to the fact that Rand's inner circle wasn't just a discussion group. It was a cult. Greenspan absorbed her belief that selfishness was the highest principle. It was that view that guided his economic thinking, including when he was Fed chair, and before that, chief economic advisor to President Gerald Ford.

The core of Rand's influence was Greenspan's belief that government should play no role in regulating business. He believed that corporations could police themselves without any government rules. He reflected Rand's belief that corporations' self-interest and greed, and those of major shareholders, would lead them to behave responsibly.

Greenspan was appointed Fed chair by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and reappointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. He was also part of the corporate ruling class, serving on the boards of several Fortune 500 corporations, including Mobil Oil, J.P. Morgan, the Aluminum Corp. of America (Alcoa), Morgan Guarantee Trust Co., Automatic Data Processing Inc., Capital Cities/ABC, Pittston Company, and General Foods.

Greenspan's influence, along with the intense lobbying by the banking industry, provided the justification for the dismantling of dismantling of decades of government bank regulations, providing lenders with the leeway to engage in an orgy of mergers, speculation, and risky and racist lending practices that ultimately led to the collapse of major Wall Street firms.

The banking industry's greed—its insatiable appetite for profits and wealth—led to the 2007 mortgage meltdown, the implosion of the housing market, the near-collapse of the financial industry, and the breakdown of the whole economy, including widespread layoffs and foreclosures, from which we have still not fully recovered. But it was made possible by the see-no-evil views of Greenspan and his ilk.

In the late 1990s, during Greenspan's watch at the Federal Reserve, banks and private mortgage lenders began pushing subprime mortgages, many with “adjustable” rates that jumped sharply after a few years. These risky loans comprised 8.6 percent of all mortgages in 2001, soaring to 20.1 percent by 2006. That year alone, 10 lenders accounted for 56 percent of all subprime loans, totaling $362 billion. These loans were a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode.

Starting in 2007, housing prices fell by third. Americans lost $7 trillion in wealth. Over 5 million Americans lost their homes. The drop in housing values affected not only families facing foreclosure but also families in the surrounding communities because having a few foreclosed homes in a neighborhood brings down the value of other houses in the area. The neighborhood blight created by the housing collapse was much worse in African-American and Hispanic areas because they were the primary victims of subprime loans and almost twice as likely as whites to lose their homes to foreclosures.

Brooksley Born, chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999, wanted her agency to regulate derivatives and other exotic financial investments (including credit default swaps) that she accurately predicted were too risky and would lead to disaster. But Greenspan, along with President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and economic advisor Larry Summers, stopped her from exercising the kind of regulatory authority that would have prevented the calamity. In 2000, Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve Board member, repeatedly warned Greenspan about subprime mortgages and predatory lending, which he said jeopardized the twin American dreams of owning a home and building wealth. He tried to get Greenspan to crack down on irrational subprime lending by increasing oversight, but his warnings fell on deaf ears.

Greenspan was the leading culprit of the policies that led to the economic collapse. He allowed the banks' short-sighted gluttony to cause enormous human suffering.

It wasn’t until the system imploded that Greenspan gained any insight about the fundamental flaw of his belief that greed is the best operating principle for the economy. In 2008, testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan admitted: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief…. This modern [free market] paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Of course, there was plenty of evidence throughout history that big corporations do NOT behave responsibly unless they are required to do so by government regulations and enforcement. This has been especially true of banks. But because Greenspan was such a libertarian ideologue, in thrall to Rand and others, he could not, or refused to, see what was right in front of him. For the millions of Americans who lost their homes, their jobs, and their small businesses through no fault of their own. Greenspan's self-awareness came much too late.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

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

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

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

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I’ve written repeatedly about community resilience over the years; for example, I penned an article in 2017 for Bloomberg on rebuilding for resilience after the devastating wildfires in Sonoma County, California, where I live.

In this piece, I want to tackle an even tougher case. The city of New Orleans dramatically exemplifies all the paradoxes, problems, and opportunities of resilience building. It is also a second home to me and my wife Janet: She was born there, many of her relatives still live there, and we spend at least a week each year in the Big Easy. So, I know a bit about New Orleans, and I care about the place and its people.

New Orleans also happens to be a lot of fun to write about. So, let’s go!

Vulnerable, Precarious, Beautiful

Just 21 years ago, New Orleans was nearly wiped away. Hurricane Katrina brought high winds and drenching rain; after levees and pumping stations failed due to human error, much of the city was flooded. It took 43 days to pump the floodwater into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Nearly all the surviving residents had been evacuated. They returned after weeks or months to find buildings destroyed, possessions ruined or gone, entire neighborhoods devastated, and the city steeped in the stench of decay. Over a thousand fatalities were recorded. The hurricane quickly achieved a mythic status, and, today, every New Orleanian over age 30 has an emotion-charged story to tell about loss and survival.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned.

This wasn’t the first hurricane or flood for New Orleans. The city is geographically disaster prone, built on a subsiding river delta, mostly below sea level, with a bowl-like topography. The metropolis is squeezed between two major bodies of water, making it highly susceptible to catastrophic storm surges and flooding, which have taken a heavy toll on several occasions. One was Hurricane Betsy (September 9, 1965), a massive Category 3 storm that flooded eastern New Orleans. It was the first US hurricane to cause $1 billion in damages.

The Crescent City is kept habitable by a 90-mile system of canals and pumping stations, along with huge levees along the river and lakefront. The stations together can pump a staggering 24,300 cubic feet of water per second. Yet, during heavy rains, they sometimes struggle to keep up. That struggle is about to get harder in the context of more extreme temperatures, ongoing loss of coastal land, stronger hurricanes, and rising seas.

New Orleans also faces inherent economic challenges. Its revenues derive mostly from tourism, offshore oil and gas production, shipping, and fishing. Oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico oil is currently riding high, but oil is, after all, a depleting non-renewable resource. Tourism is sensitive to gasoline and jet fuel prices, and dependent on tourists having disposable income. Fishing is vulnerable to a host of environmental and economic issues, including overfishing, oil spills, runoff pollution from the Mississippi (which has created a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf), and rising ocean temperatures.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned. I’ll return to that.

Still, New Orleans residents are fiercely protective of their city. And lots of folks who live elsewhere love to visit the Big Easy. That’s because New Orleans has some things going for it.

Is New Orleans America’s Most Magnetic City?

A Maison Bourbon sign is shown. (Photo via Adobe Stock)

The Crescent City has a long, colorful cultural history; for a taste, I recommend Gary Krist’s book Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans. Today, the city’s culture persists in a unique dialect (“Yat,” derived from the common greeting, “Where y’at?”), as well as foods, architecture, and music that often make you feel you’re somewhere in the Caribbean rather than the United States.

Of all the city’s unique cultural achievements, its music is perhaps its greatest source of pride. Hundreds of full-time musicians carry on New Orleans-related traditions, somehow making a living alongside potential competitors. The fact that so many succeed is largely due to the city’s plethora of live music venues. WWOZ (a listener-supported radio station that plays New Orleans music of all varieties 24/7) publishes a daily online and radio-delivered summary of who’s playing where (the Livewire); even on a weekday, it usually takes the announcer several minutes to name all the performers and venues.

What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

To illustrate the degree to which New Orleans’s music culture has gotten under my own skin, permit me to divulge a little personal info. When I first started visiting the Crescent City, I was a semi-professional classical violinist. Most of the music I listened to consisted of Bach, Brahms, and Paganini. Gradually I added a little Louis Armstrong to my sonic diet. Then, in 2021, a fingertip injury forced me to abandon the violin altogether. I decided to learn piano instead (its flat keys don’t trigger the same nerve pains that metal strings did). I started with a few easy pieces by Bach and Scarlatti but soon found myself gravitating to the New Orleans sound.

New Orleans boasts a long tradition of jazz and blues piano playing, stretching from Jelly Roll Morton in the early years of the 20th century to Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Dr. John in the rock era; to Jon Batiste, Tom McDermott, Jon Cleary, Harry Connick, Jr., and many others today. There are currently so many great New Orleans pianists that WWOZ hosts an annual “Piano Night” of live performances, during which each of the invited piano pros is given 10 minutes to shine; the quality of their playing ranges from terrific to phenomenal, and the event typically lasts five to six hours. That’s plenty of inspiration for an aspiring keyboard novice like me. These days, I’m working on learning several songs by Jelly Roll Morton and one by Dr. John.

It’s a common story: Many of the “New Orleans musicians” I’ve talked to were born elsewhere, but then became so enraptured by the relaxed, bluesy style of the city’s music that they decided to move to the Big Easy and devote their lives to its culture. One example is a band of 40-somethings called Tuba Skinny, whose eight-or-so members formerly played in grunge bands around the US (its leader, cornetist Shaye Cohn, had a legit musical education on piano). They individually moved to New Orleans after Katrina, then gradually coalesced into a street band with a shared interest in the collective improvisation of 1920s and ’30s jazz and blues. There are plenty of other trad jazz (and so-called Dixieland) groups in New Orleans, but Tuba Skinny has brought an admirable commerciality-be-damned dedication to their art. They can still be heard on the streets of the French Quarter playing for tips, but they also perform at many of the city’s music clubs, and they’ve recorded numerous CDs and toured North America and Europe.

Okay, so New Orleans has plenty of unique culture. What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

Community Resilience, New Orleans Style

Political scientist Daniel Aldrich, who was living in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached, later decided to conduct a sociological study centered on the question, “Why do some communities recover more quickly and successfully than others in the wake of disaster?” He reported his findings in a book, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery.

Aldrich’s research suggested that an important factor in determining how well communities recover from crisis is social capital (specifically, the balance of three different kinds of social capital; see my interview with Aldrich). Social capital is essentially the relationships that people in a community have with one another, manifested in trusting neighborly relations, local gatherings and celebrations, formal and informal community “institutions” (e.g., a convivial neighborhood cafe, a quirky local tradition, a long-standing religious community), and participation in civic life, etc.

New Orleans has a lot of social capital, including not only thriving community organizations but also identifiable local traditions in food, architecture, and music. People talk to one another on the street and ask about their families. Still, as Aldrich found, this fabric of social connections does vary from one neighborhood to the next.

After Katrina, Aldrich studied two neighborhoods, both with approximately equal per capita pre-Katrina incomes: the Lower Ninth Ward, and the largely Vietnamese Village de l’Este in the northeast corner of the city. The Ninth Ward was still devastated years after the disaster, whereas Village de l’Este was 90% repopulated within two years. The difference: While there was plenty of one-on-one social bonding in the Ninth Ward, the neighborhood had poor bridging with government at all levels. Social capital isn’t just about the richness of direct contact between people (though that’s vital), but also the functionality of connections between different ethnic and religious groups within the community, and between ordinary people and the holders of resources and decision-making power both within the community and in the larger society.

Tragically, social capital is undervalued in modern society: Globalization undermines it, and usually only deep cultural traditions and activist efforts can preserve it against the onslaught of atomizing trends. We stare at our screens rather than talking to our neighbors.

The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce lists 66 community and civic organizations currently active in the city—but this is a fraction of the institutions supporting social capital. There are countless informal clubs, interest groups, and associations, and the city is chock full of locally owned businesses, religious communities, gorgeous parks and museums, vibrant music venues and art galleries, and is home to several community-oriented local radio stations.

In short, New Orleans has tons of social capital. But sadly, its cultural richness and rootedness may not be enough to enable it to survive much longer.

The Last Second Line

I think a lot about the future of New Orleans, so naturally I watched Dr. Emily Shoerning’s recent climate video on the prospects for Louisiana in a 2°C world. Her forecast for the southern region of the state, based on the most recent county-by-county National Climate Assessment, is devastating. Later this century, New Orleans will be an island effectively cut off from the Mississippi River and hence its main source of fresh water. Even if people continue living in the parts of the city that are still above sea level and they manage to harvest and purify rainwater on a sufficient scale, the prospects for maintaining anything like current levels of population and economic activity are dim indeed.

A recent study published in Nature Sustainability concluded that New Orleans residents should plan now to move away from the city. For the hundreds of thousands who live in New Orleans, and the millions of others, like me, who love the Crescent City, this is an incredibly sad conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that many other cities rich in culture and history will face around the world as sea levels rise.

We’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling.

Somehow, we must imagine ways to transplant the culture of New Orleans to other places. Musicians and listeners can adopt the city’s music anywhere, and chefs in Los Angeles and Peoria can learn to make decent beignets and red beans (many already do). But it would be even more important to identify one or two places where archives, people, and perhaps even some buildings could be rehomed. The American Resiliency climate video for Louisiana, linked above, suggests Lafayette or Baton Rouge as possible sites.

It’s been a life-changer to know New Orleans these last 35 years or so. I hope to keep going back as long as I can. I feel as privileged as the folks who knew Paris in the 1890s or Harlem in the 1920s must have felt. Those of us who’ve been to the Big Easy can make our own communities more resilient through what we’ve seen, heard, and tasted there.

Meanwhile, we’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling. Still, if we face a century of crises, it’s good to have songs to sing, friends you can count on, and recipes that remind you of good times. Those are just some of the gifts of New Orleans.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has waged war on nonprofits. Actions have included federal funding cuts to the tune of billions of dollars, targeting of specific organizations with investigations or indictments, and threats to tax-exempt status. While some efforts have been turned back by the courts, the administration has been unrelenting and, sadly, every American community will suffer as a result of this sustained attack.

Presidential announcements warn of “anti-American NGOs” and allege without any credible evidence that networks of nonprofits are acting as “domestic terrorist organizations.” Recently, the administration issued proposed regulations intended to impose sweeping new restrictions on nonprofits that receive federal funding—including that such organizations not advance diversity, equity, and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The consequences of these attacks are dire. New data from a survey our organization conducted earlier this year show that nonprofits, which employ 1 in 10 Americans, are reeling. We see a dramatic increase in burnout among nonprofit leaders, whose stresses often include new worries about the safety of their staff and those they serve; financial distress as more organizations book deficits; increased difficulty raising funds from foundations (which are facing unprecedented demand as nonprofits look to replace lost government funding); and cutbacks to programs and staff in order to keep their doors open. On top of all this, demand for nonprofits’ services has increased as communities struggle amid higher inflation and cuts to federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Fully two-thirds of nonprofit leaders say they have concerns about their organizations’ financial sustainability. We’re seeing a growing number pause operations, scale back services, or close altogether. This is happening to organizations that provide vital services to people of every geography, party affiliation, and political ideology—services such as food, housing, and substance abuse prevention; assistance for survivors of sexual assault; teen violence prevention; and general community support.

The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about.

This attack on the nonprofit sector is unprecedented. In his 1988 Republican National Convention speech accepting the nomination for president, George H.W. Bush famously talked about local nonprofits as “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” In a similar vein, nonprofit leader and former Democratic cabinet official John Gardner once quipped, “If you can’t find a nonprofit institution that you can honestly disrespect, then something has gone wrong with our pluralism.”

This vision of organizations pursuing varied and diverse objectives has its roots in the origins of this country and in the First Amendment, and was famously observed by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 who remarked, with admiration, that Americans are “forever forming associations.” He saw these organizations as a ballast to a strong democracy—and a deterrent to despotism.

Whether they know it or not, every American’s life is touched for the better by nonprofits: through an after-school program, visits to a museum or a trail created by a local land conservation nonprofit, or help provided by frontline human services organizations like food pantries or domestic violence shelters. Nonprofits provide job training to veterans and other populations needing support. They do crucial research on diseases. They staff crisis hotlines, clean up parks and streets, and rush in to help after a natural disaster. “Nonprofits have been taken for granted in American society as institutions that will always be there to catch us when we fall,” notes Akilah Watkins of Independent Sector.

Most nonprofits are small and community based, and they are the infrastructure of American communities. They are, by law, nonpartisan; many are religiously affiliated. In practice, local nonprofits are one of the few places that volunteers and staff come together in pursuit of the common good without regard to political party or ideology.

This crisis is unlike anything either of us have seen in our 25-year careers working in philanthropy. Nonprofits experienced a similar increase in demand in 2020 during the pandemic, but, at that time, the federal government increased funding to nonprofits to help them navigate the crisis. This time, it is the government that has created the crisis, by cutting funds that have been duly congressionally allocated and by targeting organizations with which it disagrees.

The federal government has historically relied on nonprofits to deliver a range of essential services to people in communities across the country, regardless of their political affiliation. While the government has targeted specific nonprofits before—during the civil rights movement, for example—this administration is going after the entire sector as a whole.

It is this attack on nonprofits that is, in fact, anti-American.

Every American should be concerned about the health of the American nonprofit sector. The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about—whether that’s money, time, or both.

As Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits says: “Nonprofits are the backbone of this country, providing critical support to improve communities and save lives. Defending and supporting them should not divide us along political lines—it should unite all Americans.”

Years before Republicans overturned Roe v. Wade, I sat in a hospital bed, preparing for my own abortion after a devastating pregnancy loss.

The grief was consuming. My husband and I were mourning the abrupt loss of a future we had longed for. At the time, I never considered myself to be fortunate. That feeling didn’t seep in until nearly eight years later—when Republicans began passing extreme abortion bans across the nation, unleashing widespread, preventable suffering upon millions of women.

In that hospital room, I was surrounded by compassionate doctors who offered me a choice between a surgical or medication abortion—the best forms of treatment available to prevent severe bleeding and infection. Yet now, those same methods of care are considered felonies across dozens of states, and are being actively targeted by Republicans. While I was welcomed into the wing of my local hospital for the procedure, women today are forced to travel hundreds of miles for care or told to wait in hospital parking lots until their lives are in jeopardy before they can legally be treated. While I took time to recover at home—both physically and emotionally—after leaving the hospital, women today are handcuffed, investigated, and even threatened with murder charges after suffering their own miscarriages.

Republicans have made it clear: They don’t care about the cruelty of their bans, the women’s lives that are being lost to them, or that the vast majority of Americans want abortion access to be legal and protected. Their extremist agenda has not only stripped women of their freedoms; it has caused widespread pain—including sharp spikes in life-threatening infections, infant and maternal deaths, and worse miscarriage outcomes than in states without abortion restrictions.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms.

But the most horrifying part of all is that Republicans are not stopping here.

Emboldened by extremist MAGA allies, the US Supreme Court is currently considering whether to outlaw telehealth, mail, and pharmacy delivery for abortion medication, instead requiring patients to obtain it in person. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is conducting a sham Food and Drug Administration “review” of mifepristone—a safe, effective, and FDA-approved medication used in the majority of abortions in the US—in order to lay the groundwork for national restrictions. These attacks could result in the biggest rollback to abortion access since the Dobbs decision.

As the president of EMILYs List, I’ve seen firsthand that Republicans’ relentless pursuit of their anti-abortion agenda remains a motivator for voters nationwide. American women are fed up with their bodies, their health, and their lives being treated like political pawns—and until Republicans stop attacking our rights, the desire to protect abortion will continue driving voters to the polls.

That proved true in 2025, when Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won historic governorships against anti-abortion Republicans who had clear intentions of enacting extreme restrictions in their home states. Abortion was also one of the most powerful drivers of Democratic wins downballot across Virginia, where every EMILYs List-endorsed woman running to flip a Republican-held seat did just that in November, protecting our majority in the House of Delegates and protecting Virginians from a surefire ban.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms. Over the last two months, I’ve met with voters on the ground across the nation, including in key US House flip districts, where Denise Powell (Neb.-02), Lindsay James (Iowa-02), and Marni Von Wilpert (Calif.-48) battled out competitive primary victories solidified by their staunch pro-choice bonafides. We’re seeing this at the state level too, like in Pennsylvania, where Brittany Bloam (Pa.-HD45) cruised to a primary win over Pat Catena, a Democrat who unsuccessfully tried rebranding as pro-choice, despite a record proving the exact opposite.

Voters trust women like these to fight for abortion access in their communities because they have never wavered in their support of women’s right to choose, and they have the track record to prove it. These women are our strongest pathway to taking back power in Congress and pumping the breaks on Republicans’ unhinged agenda.

Four years without Roe, it’s clearer than ever: As long as Republicans are in power, none of our rights are safe. They are decided election by election, one seat in Congress at a time. And this November, they depend wholly on firing anti-abortion Republicans, and electing Democratic pro-choice women to lead the fight to take back our freedoms.

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

The post War Is Peace appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

During the pandemic, I did something stupid: I published a book. Bookstores were closed, so authors obviously could not promote their books by going on tour. Like a lot of other titles that came out in 2021, “The Stringer”—a graphic novel written by me and drawn by Pablo Callejo—got lost in the shuffle.

Too bad, and not just for my bottom line. It was a good read about an important topic: deepfakes. What would happen, I wondered after considering the intersection of underemployed reporters in an age of decline with their deep connections to the dangerous places some of them cover, if a rogue journalist were to manipulate global politics—and even start wars—by creating fake imagery and audio of world leaders insulting one another?

Behind that question lies a deeper philosophical and psychological concern. What do human beings do after they come to accept that they cannot believe anything they read, hear, or see? What if there is no reliable way to tell the difference between reality and artifice? What happens?

Learned helplessness?

Revolution?

Nothing?

Americans have always lived in an era when politicians lied and news organizations misled, typically through sins of omission. Democratic-aligned news orgs ignore Benghazi and Biden’s mental decline; Republican ones neglect to follow up MIA WMDs and promises of $2-a-gallon gas.

There used to be ways to triangulate the truth. A myriad of news sources from a wide range of ideological viewpoints and formats, all financially incentivized to check and criticize one another, competed within metro areas and across the nation. The decline of print as a profit model, corporate consolidation, and legacy journalists succumbing to the race for clicks in a highly polarized political landscape have since reduced both the frequency and the reliability of verification and debunking between rivals.

Until a few years ago, stories were almost never made up of whole cloth. Bias manifested itself through which aspects of a story were emphasized or ignored in order to decontextualize events. Now, if you are a reasonably savvy news consumer, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: Is this real? Did this really happen?

Ninety-four percent of U.S. social media users told a recent CNET poll that they encounter AI-created or altered content, but only 44% of adults feel confident that they can tell real photos and videos from fakes. I’ve been fooled. Now, when I watch a video, I tell myself: Wait a minute. This might be BS.

Eighty-four percent of respondents to an international March Malwarebytes survey say that video evidence no longer feels like proof.

Nor does lack of evidence. When Trump’s ballyhooed $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., turned sour—with algae blooms turning the water green and the newly installed blue bottom disintegrating—the president quickly blamed unidentified vandals for using some sort of box cutter to create a 350-foot-long slash a foot and a half below the water line. No one, not even Trump-affiliated media outlets like Fox News, presented visual evidence. Right-wing influencers spread Trump’s ridiculous lie. Those are the people I worry about most—those who believe everything they see and hear, as long as it originates from a source they’ve decided to trust because they agree with its politics or some other cultural signifier.

Evolution did not prepare us for this tsunami of digital slop. Human cognition evolved for smaller-scale, lower-volume information environments. AI deepfakes flood us with hyper-realistic, unverifiable content, overwhelming our common sense and prompting us to check out in order to stay sane. They also feed into the “liar’s dividend” paradox, where the existence of deepfakes allows politicians and other liars to dismiss inconvenient facts: “That’s a deepfake! Fake news!”

Polls show that Americans (and citizens of other countries) are tuning out the news and social media because they do not know what to believe. Only 25% of Americans trust what they see on the news, a record low.

Our situation is not without precedent. Soviet citizens consumed sports scores, the weather, and other apolitical content readily, but when it came to politics, they relied on rumors, personal networks, foreign and opposition broadcasts, and samizdat. Soviet citizens were not passive dupes. They were active interpreters navigating a polluted information environment, and they knew it.

What can we do? In a global news environment riddled with deepfakes, there is no alternative to the lies—we need a relatively objective extraterrestrial broadcaster with no stake in Terran affairs. Deepfake technology is improving by the day; soon that telltale “AI sheen” will disappear altogether.

Human beings are highly adaptable and require accurate, reliable information in order to conduct business and live their lives. So we will eventually figure this out.

Independent fact-checkers have largely proven ineffective in discouraging misinformation. Some that purported to be unbiased turned out to be tainted, and partisans reflexively reject truths that run against their narratives. Watermarking, cryptographic signatures, and mandatory disclosures for AI-generated content, however, are already emerging as warning signs that you are being exposed to artificial material. Public funding for nonpartisan journalism would help, but ironically that would require bipartisan congressional approval. We should all adopt a tone of epistemic humility. It is okay to admit that you know that you do not know, and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude before reacting to an outrage that may or may not have really occurred.

Until we unravel the deepfake mess, politics in particular—and the public square in general—is going to get a lot rougher, stupider, and less responsive to our wants and needs. The first step, after all, is admitting we have a problem, and we’re not there yet.

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

 

The post Is This Column Real? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and her 3-year-old son were drumming. The celebration was filled with spirited performances, great food, and camaraderie. Historical reflections centered on the origins of Juneteenth, commemorating June 19, 1865, when African-descended people who were enslaved in Texas finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had officially declared them free. Many gave shout-outs to African American ancestors for all of their visions, sacrifices, and accomplishments. It was a joyful space.

While we are still in the Juneteenth celebratory spirit, we should not sleep, lest it will be another two-and-a-half years when we wake up and realize that our freedom has been lost through a series of recent institutional white supremacist political maneuvers such as: weakening voting rights; attacks on Black political districts, and bans on African American studies.

In his classic 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, warned Black people not to believe the lies taught in school that are full of distortions, intentional inaccuracies, and omissions. He also warned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation. Nearly 100 years later, we are still facing the revision and erasure of Black history.

For example, PragerU—a conservative website that promotes conservative viewpoints via digital media—has produced a series of edu-tainment videos full of revisionist historical distortions and half-truths.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told.

One video, "The Inconvenient Truth About Juneteenth," is narrated by a young Black man, Xaviaer. In the 56 second TikTok-style video, the narrator presents himself as an “influencer” and is casually walking down the street, iced coffee in hand, as he opines that Black folks are mentally enslaved for believing the conventional story about Juneteenth.

Immediately, evoking the name of Rosa Parks, Xaviaer signifies that Rosa should have made the viewers sit in the front of the bus and take a history class. The cleverness of the misinformation, though, is apparent when he says that Democrats kept Black people enslaved two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This slight of hand fails to clarify that the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties switched around 1870. Before that time, Republicans controlled the government and used its power to protect Black people who were formerly enslaved and guarantee their civil rights during Reconstruction. Most Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed many of these efforts. However, as the nation shifted its attention toward economic growth and industrial expansion, support for Reconstruction began to wane. Many Northern Republicans became less willing to invest political capital in protecting Black rights in the South.

By the mid-to-late 1870s, the Republican Party had largely retreated from its commitment to reconstructing Southern society and safeguarding the rights of African Americans. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, White Democrats regained political control across much of the region and systematically dismantled many of the gains Black people had achieved during Reconstruction. Over the following decades, political allegiances gradually shifted, and by the mid-20th century, many African Americans increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly as it became more supportive of civil rights initiatives.

Xaviaer concludes "The Inconvenient Truth about Juneteenth" by admonishing Black people for referring to Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day. He argues that the political left has repackaged the holiday through what he characterizes as a segregationist lens. He adds a mocking remark, suggesting that if viewers truly believe Juneteenth is a separate Black Independence Day, he does not want to see them "twerking on a boat" on the Fourth of July—not resisting the urge to slide in a stereotype.

The comment is intended to be humorous, but it serves a deeper purpose. By ridiculing those who celebrate Juneteenth, the video dismisses the historical reality that many enslaved African-descended people were excluded from the freedoms celebrated on July 4, 1776. Rather than engaging this historical contradiction, the video substitutes mockery for analysis and caricature for historical understanding.

From a critical perspective, Black people should not be getting history lessons from social media influencers, political propagandists, or organizations masquerading as educational institutions. History is too important.

Fortunately, other scholars have challenged the distortions and omissions that permeate traditional historical narratives. While Dr. Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro remains one of the most important warnings about the dangers of accepting history uncritically, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, exposed how textbooks sanitize and distort the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States intentionally centers the experiences of people who were oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from dominant historical accounts.

Misinformation is not merely about getting facts wrong. It is about shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and their possibilities. Dr. Carter G. Woodson once reflected that it took him 20 years after earning his doctorate from Harvard University to recover from what he described as his intellectual conditioning. James Baldwin similarly observed that it took years to free himself from the myths and falsehoods he had been taught about race, history, and human worth.

The stakes are especially high when misleading narratives are packaged in entertaining videos designed to reach young people. And by the way, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, cautioned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told and the understanding of the need to seek truth from credible sources.

It’s still hard to swallow, almost 24-hours after one of the most intense, indeed stressful election days in Colombia that I’ve witnessed, albeit from here in New York.

Colombian right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella does appear to have clinched a very narrow victory in Sunday's presidential election, at least according to the initial ballot count that still needed to be officially verified as of this writing.

De la Espriella had 49.66% of the vote while his rival, Senator Ivan Cepeda, trailed by roughly 250,000 votes at 48.70%, according to the national registrar's tally of just under 100% of ballots in the runoff election.

In trying to make personal sense of the closest presidential elections in recent Colombian history, I can’t help but think that the final results are a reflection of how Colombia has failed to acknowledge its stained history of state-sponsored, politically motivated violence, even ten years after a fragile peace accord was signed that put an end to one aspect of the decades-long conflict.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country.

This latest election represents a national rejection—albeit by a very narrow margin—of the policies of “total peace” of the current administration of President Gustavo Petro. The results are an affirmation of and an open call for “total war,” reminiscent of some of the darkest days of the widespread regional violence that occurred throughout the country at the turn of the century and the early stages of this century.

A portion of the Colombian electorate—almost half—continues to view the country’s troubles through a fractured lens of national security, of unrepentant militarism, and of the firm belief in the need to apply the heavy hand of the state to confront criminality. These Colombians have essentially vetoed their collective memory of generational violence, of a civil war whose origins have always been traced back precisely to the lack of a state presence where it is most needed—in a sustainable public health system; in accessible housing and education; in the opportunities that come with equitable distribution of land, the protection of human rights, and universal support for robust democratic participation across the citizenry, regardless of race, class, or political affiliation.

Instead, they’ve voted for a person openly committed to gutting 40% of the already weakened state in all these sectors. De la Espriella has blamed Petro, the former M-19 guerilla leader and outgoing president, for the country's current economic and security troubles. The growth of these armed groups throughout the country in recent years are attributed to Petro’s attempt to negotiate directly an end to the violence during his time in office. Rarely are the policies of Petro’s predecessor, Ivan Duque, mentioned in this context, despite his deliberate efforts to jettison just about every aspect of the 2016 peace accords between FARC and the Colombian government, leading in many ways to the expansion of these groups.

And now, the president-elect has vowed to end all talks with the armed criminal organizations, while boosting the oil and gas sector, lowering taxes for the middle and upper classes, and building massive prisons to detain indefinitely all the criminals they can find in the process, a la strongman Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. He pledges to fortify the military and manage the state security forces with an iron fist, something that will be made much easier by a blank-check insurance policy granted to him by the Trump-Rubio-Hegseth Western Hemisphere doctrine of domination and control.

The opposing candidate of the left-of-center coalition known as Pacto Historico, Senator Ivan Cepeda, 63, had pledged to continue many of the policies of President Petro, the country's first leftist president. Those policies included state pension payments for the poor, union-backed labor reforms, a moratorium on new oil projects, and continued peace talks with armed groups to try to put an end of the ongoing violence. Some analysts think Cepeda should have distanced himself a bit more from Petro on the campaign trail, given how the media openly embraced the Kryptonite narrative that Petro represents for the left in Colombia. Instead, Cepeda, himself the victim of state-sponsored violence, stuck to a set of arguments tied to building peace through social justice, human rights, and most importantly, not returning to the past.

Despite the youthful energy and visible enthusiasm of the very diverse range of supporters who came out for Cepeda’s candidacy, it was not enough to put a pause on the establishment’s profound, almost religious hatred of left-wing leaders with social movement connections, who are almost instantaneously written off as puppets of guerrilla terror, branded threats to the Colombian homeland. In many ways, it’s much like the simplistic MAGA refrain for attacking their opponents as un-American or enemies of the people, except in the Colombian context, it is a recipe for extreme violence, death sentences for many of those on the receiving end.

Over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country, a tantalizing myth that somehow caught traction during the campaign in the Colombian corporate press and their counterparts in the US media. De la Espriella may not have the privileged political pedigree of the openly nepotistic tradition that has characterized over a century of Colombian political history, but to call him an outsider in 2026 is to ignore the foundation of his success as a defense attorney, a businessman, and of the fortune that allowed him to fund his campaign independent of the “mainstream” power bosses of the Colombian political elite.

He is an entrenched insider within the right-wing, para-state apparatus that had metastasized like a slow-moving blood cancer into every part of the governing class in Colombia since the early 2000s. This para-state infrastructure was built on the backs of the millions of internally displaced Black, Indigenous, and peasant communities; tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared; and the many innocent civilians murdered in countless massacres that brought fear to the countryside for decades.

While FARC rebels were guilty of much of the violence in Colombia since the mid-1990s, it was the brutal reaction to FARC criminality carried out by the unholy alliance between large landowners, narco-traffickers, and the military that blew the lid open for the widespread terror we saw from 2000 to 2010.

Behind this was a public discourse framed by the term “democratic security,” coined by former two-term President Alvaro Uribe Vélez, and backed wholeheartedly by the US under its Plan Colombia project. It was followed by eventual “negotiations” between the paramilitaries and the Uribe government, as well as a major scandal where it was exposed that almost half of the elected members of Colombia’s Congress had direct ties with the paramilitary organizations that were responsible for the above-mentioned crimes. De la Espriella understood this when he defended many of the paramilitary leaders and narco-traffickers implicated in these crimes. This is an insider who made his mark in this process. There’s no denying this.

The tough-guy approach to national politics that the “Tiger” so openly declared on the campaign trail is the continuation of a long process of authoritarian, right-wing extremism that emerged in the early 1990s, one that sees any opposition to their political, economic, or territorial control of the country as the equivalent of terrorism that must be liquidated militarily. This is the profound danger I see right now in the days, months, and years ahead for Colombia.

Nevertheless, with all these dark clouds on the horizon, for the millions of people who supported Ivan Cepeda in these elections, there is room for some optimism, albeit with considerable caution.

That is the fact that over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians. They hit the streets and attended rallies and posted online videos recalling the darkest days of the war, shouting the names of the victims of this violence, saluting the brave mothers who still demand justice for their sons killed by state security forces.

They did not vote against their collective memory.

They are a very powerful force today, and for the future of Colombia.

They will not be backing down any time soon.

For they’ve faced the barrel of many guns in the past, and they’re still here.

“The pump don’t work ‘Cause the vandals took the handles.”—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Sometimes President Donald Trump’s diatribes reveal his own guilty behavior. Take his disastrous promotion of the makeover of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not only did he hire an incompetent contractor whose prior work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago gave him the shady inside track, but also Trump’s insistence on an environmentally disastrous “royal blue” caused an increase in the amount of algae now polluting the pool. Perhaps it might be time to break out a new MAGA hat, all in green, with the words, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

Of course, neither Trump nor his buddy contractor would admit their malfeasance and responsibility for what has happened. Given Trump’s other corrupt vandalism of national sites in DC, why should we fleeced taxpayers and residents of the city expect accountability from such grifters? Instead, the predictable accusation by the Orange Menace is that vandals were the cause of the algae bloom. The real vandals, Trump and his enablers, were operating in plain sight and with presidential impunity.

Indeed, Trump’s vandalism has engulfed the White House and environs. From the destruction of the “Rose Garden” (heaven forbid that he would want to wake up and smell the roses) to leveling the East Wing for his ballroom and bunker (again, at the taxpayers’ expense), the wrecking of the grounds continues unabated. Added to this devastation was the garish Claw, erected for the UFC blood sport on the White House lawn. Oh, yeah, the lawn is gone. Perhaps to be replaced by what—a Circus Maximus!

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands.

And speaking of Rome, the actual sacking of the city by the Vandals in 455 only lasted some two weeks. Trump’s pillaging of the federal government has lasted more than a year. While the most obvious physical vandalizing is very evident, buried in much of the legislation and executive orders is a massive amount of damage to people’s lives and the future of the country and the world.

Only now are we reckoning with the harm caused by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Hundreds of thousands thrown off Medicaid, children and families denied basic foodstuffs. Trump and his Republican allies apparently aren’t even interested in offering “bread” along with the circuses that Trump revels in.

Meanwhile, Trump’s insane pal at Health and Human Services, brain-worm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sacking those doctors who believe in science in order to hire charlatans whose medicinal palliatives are hardly better than reading entrails. Eliminating tried and true medical practices, such as vaccines, has led to outbreaks of measles and will, undoubtedly, cause additional health problems.

And it should not be surprising that his toxic masculinist buddy, Pete Hegseth, the white Christian nationalist who occupies the office of the “Secretary of War,” now is overseeing a flu outbreak among the troops in the aftermath of making a vaccine “voluntary.” On the other hand, the 200-plus boaters murdered by Hegseth’s Pentagon pals in Latin America did not have the “luxury” of a choice about their well-being!

And speaking of well-being, the predictable worldwide deaths of people who relied on medical assistance from the United States was caused by DOGE’s slashing of international aide. Trump’s fellow vandal, the neo-Nazi Elon Musk, haughtily embraced such pillaging, seeing it as a way to extirpate empathy from any and all governmental policies.

Another fellow vandal on the world stage is Bibi Netanyahu. With the assistance of the US, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. (As the historian Tacitus reflected on the depredations of the Roman military campaigns: “They made a desert and called it peace.”) The devastation wrought by these two bullies has spread to Lebanon and Iran. However, these vandals may have overplayed their hand in Iran.

Finally, one of the most egregious examples of Trump’s vandalism is sending out legions of armed thugs to cause murder and mayhem on the streets of major cities around the country. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harass, intimidate, and kidnap thousands of innocent people, sending many to prison hellholes built by the private corporate buddies of Trump.

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands. Trump’s vandalism, and that of his enablers, will only be terminated when they are unceremoniously expelled to those islands of incarceration where others now languish.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Incumbents beware: The left-wing public is pissed off, too. As voters express frustration with the corporatist establishment, democratic-socialist congressional candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani have the potential to score upsets in New York’s primary elections today.

• The Senate passes, 85-5, a major housing bill with a goal of cutting housing prices by stopping Wall Street investors from buying up more than 350 single-family homes, among other things. The House will pass, Trump will sign, it will have no effect.

• A judge bans Trump’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements,(SAVE) because the national database of aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data could result in voters being wrongly purged.

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