After a Democratic "tsunami" in this week's midterm elections that has been widely seen as "a mandate to deliver big change," progressives within and beyond Congress have cast doubt on whether the New York Democrats likely to lead both chambers are actually up for facing Republican President Donald Trump's veto threats and fighting for the "bold agenda" sought by US voters.

As critics of artificial intelligence data centers prepared for a Friday protest outside the Brooklyn home of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over a "dirty" bill that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is suddenly speaking out about, political organizer Corbin Trent argued that "Schumer is bad at his job" and "Jeffries is not ready for this moment."

Although some races haven't yet been called, "Democratic voters, independent voters, and even some Republican voters spoke loudly and clearly: They want this country to go in a different direction," wrote Trent, a former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and two-time presidential campaign staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Trent, who also co-founded Justice Democrats and now runs the super political action committee A Fight Worth Having, stressed that "this is an amazing, unprecedented moment in my lifetime. I'm 46 years old, and this is the most hopeful political moment I've ever experienced."

"Democrats have spoken loudly and clearly that they want new leadership. Unfortunately, too many of the people in Washington aren't listening," he added. While Trent and his group are far from alone in calling for new Democratic leadership when the party takes over Congress in January, Schumer and Jeffries are expected to become majority leader and speaker, respectively.

"Do you expect to face any kind of challenge in the election for Senate majority leader?" Michael Barbaro, who hosts The New York Times' podcast The Daily asked Chuck Schumer on Friday. He simply responded, "No."

Schumer ultimately added that "our caucus is focused on moving forward. Everyone's very happy with what we all did. But this is just the beginning. As I said before, and I'll say it again and again to my caucus, to the country, to everybody: If we don't deliver, all this will go away. This is just the first step. But I think we're united together to do that."

He delivered a similar message of unity during a Thursday night appearance on MS NOW, telling host Lawrence O'Donnell that the victorious Democrats—so far the party has 54 seats in the Senate and 253 in the House of Representatives, but those numbers could rise—were "all running on the same basic themes: costs, chaos, corruption."

As both majority and minority leader in recent years, Schumer has faced criticism from the party's left flank—and, as Al Jazeera noted Thursday, at least seven Democratic senators-elect have signaled or outright said they will not support him: Abdul El-Sayed (Mich.), Peggy Flanagan (Minn.), Adam Hamilton (Kan.), Chris Pappas (NH), Juliana Stratton (Ill.), and James Talarico (Texas).

However, as Fox News chief congressional correspondent Chad Pergram explained Friday, basic math and a lack of clear challengers suggest Schumer will win: "The selection of Senate majority leader is not a vote which plays out on the floor. The concept of 'Senate majority leader' has only been around since the early 20th Century and is not mentioned in the Constitution."

"Let's say Democrats do win Mississippi and Alaska, giving them 56 senators who caucus with the Democrats. All Schumer needs is 29 Democrats to support him in caucus, and he's the next majority leader," Pergram wrote on social media.

He noted that other possible contenders are Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Chris Van Hollen (Md.), but the former is running to succeed retiring Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and the latter reportedly isn't seeking the post—though Van Hollen has said publicly that Democrats should demand an ambitious progressive agenda before backing Schumer or anyone else.

"Progressives are flipping Republican seats and winning critical battlegrounds where pundits told us our politics could never compete. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Troy Jackson in Maine. James Talarico in Texas. Sam Forstag in Montana. Randy Villegas in California. Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania," said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, which grew out of Sanders' 2016 presidential run. "We gave people something to vote FOR, and they showed up."

"The progressive movement drove this victory. We spent a decade building the infrastructure, developing leaders, and making the argument that brought us here... This is a vindication of our politics and our theory of change: Organized people can beat organized money when we advance an anti-corporate, working-class agenda," he stressed, recalling when "the talking heads, academics, and party establishment scoffed at Bernie Sanders and our movement for talking about oligarchy."

The organizer said that "this was the corruption election. Affordability was central, but people were also asking why life keeps getting more expensive and who keeps cashing in. From AI and data centers to healthcare, Big Pharma, crypto, oil, and the war industry, people want a say over decisions being made at their expense. Corporate control of government is making their lives harder."

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—which notably congratulated Jeffries and Schumer, who wasn't even on the ballot this cycle, by name on Wednesday—along with GOP megadonor Elon Musk "and other billionaires and corporate interests have poured money into shaping our politics," Geevarghese continued. "Our victories show that their money does not make their agenda inevitable. People can organize, fight back, and win."

In the wake of these victories "powered by a progressive wave," Geevarghese called on Democrats to "use every committee, hearing, and budget negotiation. Follow the contracts and conflicts of interest. Put executives and administration officials under oath. Fight for concrete gains and make Trump answer for what he blocks."

"People need to see Democrats using every bit of power they have to fight for them," he said. "That requires leadership ready to meet the moment. Chuck Schumer should step aside. Bernie Sanders has provided the clarity and urgency a real opposition party needs. Leadership must match that ambition, including by investing in candidates and communities too often written off."

Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, similarly said in a statement after the midterms that "young people voted for change. We deserve a Senate majority leader who will end the filibuster so we can stop the Iran Oil War, end corporate control of our government, and create good green jobs, not more data centers."

"Young people won't get that with the same old Democratic leadership. Schumer, it's time to put the American people first–commit to ending the filibuster or step aside," Shiney-Ajay added, referring to controversial chamber rules that effectively block legislation unless at least 60 of the 100 senators support advancing it to a final vote.

As for Jeffries, he got "the majority of his dreams," as Axios put it earlier this week. The outlet reported:

The left's strategy is "going to look different from what it would have been with a smaller margin," one incoming House progressive told Axios, noting that "leaders have more flexibility when they have big majorities.

Progressives "can't really extract much now [with this] colossal majority," a progressive strategist acknowledged, adding that "we don't have to do this high-stakes Jeffries fight."

Although Jeffries is on track to secure the role, there are calls for him to not be the next speaker. Nearly 900,000 people have signed a related Change.org petition, Nicole Whitted, an author and social media creator who receives compensation in connection with the effort.

"After historic wins on Tuesday, I believe the Democratic Party and our country as a whole is at a crossroads," Whitted told Newsweek. "My opposition to Hakeem Jeffries is about more than any single policy disagreement. It's about real leadership that aligns with today's Democratic voter, real accountability, and whether the party is genuinely listening to the voters demanding change."

In anticipation of Jeffries serving as speaker, the outlet Sludge examined his "financial backing from executives at Anduril and Palantir, cryptocurrency industry interests, and major Wall Street investors—business interests with a stake in how aggressively the new majority pursues corporate beneficiaries of Trump's presidency."

In response to that reporting, Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the pro-single-payer Campaign for New York Health, said that "you can't lead the opposition party while being bankrolled by the opposition. This should not be a controversial take."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani this week was unimpressed with Vice President JD Vance's attempt at soberly diagnosing the problem that caused the Republican Party to lose their majorities in the US Senate and House, with Democrats flipping seven Senate seats and 43 House seats and stunning the GOP with victories in Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina.

After the election, Vance wrote a lengthy post on the social media platform X, saying, “The reason we lost is the war" in Iran, which President Donald Trump joined Israel in launching in February—sending gas prices soaring to over $4 per gallon in a country where working families were already struggling with the cost of living, a problem Trump had pledged to solve.

Vance was initially unsupportive of Trump's decision to go to war, but has been one of the administration's staunchest defenders of the United States' actions in Iran—declaring that the US "never targets civilians" despite multiple bombings of schools; writing another verbose social media post falsely claiming that the decision to go to war lies only with the president—not Congress; and denying in September that the conflict that has killed more than 3,400 Iranians, 13 US service members, and thousands of people across the Middle East, is a war at all.

On Thursday, Mamdani expressed disbelief that Vance, thought to be the likely heir to Trump's MAGA movement and a potential 2028 presidential contender, would attempt to distance himself from the war the US is waging while still serving as one of the highest-ranking political officials in the country.

Holy shit! I 'd like to report a murder. https://t.co/pqABCoLTS9
— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 5, 2026

"I find it quite ironic to read a post from the vice president as if he's describing the actions of a different administration," said Mamdani. "He's the vice president of the United States of America. He is not just some commentator online. And there has to be a reckoning of the fact that this is a war that they started."

"It's a war they can end," continued the democratic socialist mayor, who since entering the mayoral race in a long-shot bid early last year has rapidly become one of the most influential and popular Democratic politicians in the country. "If they think it was a part of their political demise, then why don't they actually start to take some action to reflect that?"

Vance said in his post that Republicans must focus on ending the Iran War, bringing down the cost of living, putting "America First," and changing the US relationship with Israel, which the administration has said pushed it to launch its attacks on Iran.

Vance's comments were taken by some as an initial attempt to begin distancing himself from the actions of an increasingly unpopular administration, in preparation to run for president.

Mamdani's response, said Jacobin writer Branko Marchetich, offered a "preview of the struggles" that the vice president will face in doing so.

"He's done his best to leak stories that he opposed it and thread the needle in public," said Marchetich. "But end of the day it's his administration too, so he owns it."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration's widely decried mass deportation policy, has received a promotion to be the next White House chief of staff.

In a Friday social media post, President Donald Trump announced that Miller next week will take over for Susie Wiles, who served as his chief of staff for the past two years.

Critics of the administration were quick to denounce the appointment of Miller, who has a long documented history of promoting white nationalist literature and conspiracy theories.

"Stephen Miller is a vile, hate-filled extremist who has made cruelty his life’s work," wrote the social media account of Democrats serving on the US House Committee on Homeland Security. "America just rejected the fear and bigotry he peddles and Trump handed him a promotion. They have learned nothing."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—likely the chamber’s next speaker—described Miller as a "dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands."

"His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor," Jeffries added. "Fire him today."

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who is in line to be the next chair of the House Oversight Committee, issued a statement advising Miller to "lawyer up," echoing his message to Trump earlier this week.

"Stephen Miller is the architect of the unconstitutional [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids that have terrorized our communities and kidnapped and killed American citizens and immigrant families," Garcia said. "Oversight Democrats will continue to investigate Miller for his misconduct, and we will fight against his hateful policies in Congress and the courts."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said appointing Miller was "a giant middle finger to every single voter who came out to the polls and demanded a change from the corruption and cruelty of the last two years."

Jayapal vowed that Democrats in Congress would deliver "real accountability for the corruption that Stephen Miller and Trump profited from."

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) marveled that Trump elevated a hard-liner like Miller, even after his party suffered a historic defeat this week in the 2026 midterm elections.

"Tell me you learned nothing about why you had a devastating loss at the polls in November without telling me you don’t know why," wrote Pocan. "Stephen Miller. The solution to nothing."

Pocan's remarks were echoed by Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who responded to news of Miller's appointment by writing, "These losers learned nothing."

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), in a statement sent to independent journalist Marisa Kabas, warned Miller to not "get too comfortable with your new title."

"Part of the benefits package for your promotion is accountability for all the pain you have caused," Ramirez added.

Democrats weren't the only ones panning the appointment of Miller, as some Republicans criticized the decision as well.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), who earlier this week called for Miller's firing, told Semafor reporter Nicholas Wu that making him White House chief of staff was a "horrible decision" by the president.

Outgoing Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told CNN's Jake Tapper that picking Miller was "not a good choice" on Trump's part.

"He’ll have an antagonistic relationship with many," Bacon explained. "He did take the immigration issue for President Trump from a two-to-one favorable to a two-to-one unfavorable. He went from the Biden extreme to the other extreme. He cost us seats in Texas and Arizona by alienating many Hispanic voters who voted for Trump in 2024."

Olivia Troye, former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, expressed disgust at Miller's promotion.

"Stephen. Fucking. Miller," she wrote. "What a dangerous joke. Except no one is laughing."

Discussing the political ramifications of Miller's appointment, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie mused that it could be a long-term benefit to Democrats.

"On the one hand, I think putting Miller in the driver's seat puts all of us in genuine danger," Bouie wrote. "On the other hand, if you want a path to 60-plus Senate seats in 2029, this is it."

MS NOW host Chris Hayes expressed a similar sentiment.

"If you were thinking: What could Trump do to push his approval rating down even further and open up the possibility of a 1964/1980/2008-style victory for Dems in 2028?" wrote Hayes. "The answer is: put Stephen Miller in charge of everything. And guess what?"

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks during a midterm campaign rally at JRJ Construction on Oct. 29, 2026, in Weatherford, Texas. Photo: Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

To say that Americans were pissed off is an understatement.

On Tuesday, Democrats didn’t just seize control of both houses of Congress. They redrew the American political map, capturing offices that had remained reliably Republican for generations, from the Deep South to Kansas and Texas. The Lone Star State alone, with its 40 Electoral College votes, now raises the possibility of a seismic shift in the calculus of future presidential elections.

The sheer scale of the historic Democratic surge⁠ delivered an unmistakable rebuke to America’s supposedly populist president. The message was clear and simple: We do not like you.

Much of Americans’ rapid disillusionment with the Trump administration can be traced to a single word — Iran — and the cascading economic hardships Americans have endured as the war has dragged on.

The Iran war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross.

For the GOP, the threat is existential. The war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross for many of its former supporters, one that many Republicans are now jettisoning themselves away from to salvage their own political futures.

By Wednesday, it had become the chief explanation for the party’s sweeping electoral defeat, with Vice President JD Vance declaring unequivocally on X that “the reason we lost is the war.”

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” he wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Coming from Trump’s own vice president, it was a striking about-face.

[

Related

Is There a Left Candidate for President?](https://theintercept.com/2026/11/06/democrats-left-presidential-candidate-2028/)

The tirade also raised an awkward question ahead of the 2028 presidential race: How does a potential successor to the MAGA mantle campaign against a war waged by his own administration?

Trump, however, has not gone nearly as far as his VP. Although the president acknowledged the war hurt Republicans, he still defended it on its merits. Speaking with reporters Wednesday after expounding at length about his White House ballroom, Trump said, “The Iran thing we had to do, and we continue to do it.”

Where Did All the Warmongers Go?

But on the campaign trail, Republicans were not completely oblivious to Americans’ collective frustration with the Iran war.

In September, ABC News identified 17 Republican lawmakers and candidates who had called for ending the war through public statements or votes. Much of the pressure came in competitive midterms races, as the conflict’s effects on oil, diesel, and fertilizer prices reached American households.

In Iowa, Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson called for a “successful and immediate end” to the war in September, warning that voters were paying the price at gas pumps and grocery stores. Yet she voted six times against House measures directing Trump to halt the attacks. During an October 25 ABC interview, Hinson said she would not rule out a post-election U.S. offensive and said she trusted Trump and the military to choose the right timetable. Despite the president praising her weight loss at a recent rally, tepidly breaking with Trump wasn’t enough to get Hinson over the line, and she lost to Democrat Josh Turek by 4.5 percentage points.

[

Related

Abdul El-Sayed Won His Senate Seat With a Mandate on Palestine. Can He Deliver?](https://theintercept.com/2026/11/05/abdul-el-sayed-senate-israel-palestine/)

Michigan also had its share of Iran backtrackers. Republican Senate hopeful Mike Rogers described Iran as an “imminent threat” when the bombing began on February 28. In May, he called the conflict a potential “win-win-win.” But with the midterms fast approaching, Rogers released a campaign ad declaring “the war with Iran needs to end” quickly and warned Michigan families could no longer afford the economic fallout.

Rep. John James, the Republican candidate for Michigan governor, likewise praised Trump’s use of force early in the war, saying the president “had the balls” to “assure the survival and success of liberty.” He voted against six House war-powers resolutions, including as recently as September. Days after that vote, he said the war needed to wrap up “quickly.” He went on to declare in an interview, “the position has always been, I hate war.”

Both Rogers and James lost their races.

[

Related

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/17/trump-iran-war-matt-duss/)

Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible contender in the Republican Party’s next presidential contest who could reportedly be up for Pete Hegseth’s job, warned Monday that the war was a “big, big drag” on his party. Trump, DeSantis pointed out, campaigned against another Middle Eastern war. Now voters are dealing with higher fuel costs, and Republicans who refuse to acknowledge the connection are “gaslighting” them. But back in spring, DeSantis defended the strikes on Iranian leadership, describing its government as “a fanatical, apocalyptic, militant Islamist regime.”

The polling helps explain the Republican panic. An Associated Press poll found roughly 6 in 10 voters believed the U.S. made a “wrong decision” in attacking Iran. And it’s not as though Republicans weren’t warned. A handful within their own ranks, including Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, opposed the war from its earliest days and backed efforts to rein it in. But those criticisms seemed to fall on deaf ears.

A Hasty Retreat

With plenty of blame to go around, the criticism has gone beyond candidates and into the conservative media ecosystem.

[

Related

Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran](https://theintercept.com/2026/06/15/trump-us-iran-war/)

During the network’s primetime Election Night coverage, Fox News host Sean Hannity told his colleague Bret Baier that the results would have been different without the Iran war. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called the war a betrayal of America First principles, demanded new Republican leadership, and labeled the conflict a “catastrophically stupid decision.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Trump breaking his promise not to start another foreign war his “biggest betrayal” and said “Americans are fed up with it.”

Other commentators placed the responsibility squarely on Trump himself for sucking his own party into a political quagmire. In The Federalist, senior editor John Daniel Davidson blamed the party’s collapse on Trump’s undermining of a GOP coalition built upon rejecting the interventionist politics of the George W. Bush era.

Some prominent Republican operatives are sure to be thrown under the bus by their own party in the retreat. The first to get the boot may be none other than Hegseth, America’s chief “warfighter,” who has been one of the war’s most enthusiastic, and public, cheerleaders. The defense secretary responded to the criticisms in a nearly six-minute-long video posted online on Thursday, in which he seemed to make the case for keeping his job, touting his elimination of the “Marxist ideology” of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and tarring transgender troops as having a “mental illness.”

“Regardless of how people care about the war, which I believe is a courageous and historic effort that will ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, we need to continue, as President Trump did in his first term, to rebuild our military,” he said. “This is not about me, but of course, the other side, in case you noticed, they’re obsessed.”

[

Related

Pentagon Officials Float Names of Hegseth’s Replacement](https://theintercept.com/2026/11/06/pentagon-hegseth-replacement-desantis-waltz/)

Already facing growing Republican dissatisfaction and a ballooning roster of disgruntled and ousted senior military officials, Hegseth now faces the prospect of investigations by a Democratic-controlled Congress and an impeachment effort led by Massie. And while Trump has so far publicly defended his defense secretary, he has also reportedly consulted allies about whether to hit the ejector seat on Pete.

Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless war.

But while Republicans and Democrats read polls and calculate the political currency of war and economic hardship, the human cost cannot be measured in votes. At least 3,636 people had been killed in Iran as of early April, including 1,701 civilians and 254 children, according to human rights monitors. More fighting has followed and likely driven that number far higher.

[

Related

The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War](https://theintercept.com/2026/08/18/iran-war-civilian-deaths-families-infant/)

At least 23 American service members have died in operations connected to the war, with almost 900 wounded by enemy fire. But these are estimates, and the Trump administration has worked to actively obfuscate the true casualty rates of the war. These are not electoral statistics. They are lives lost, families shattered, and consequences that will endure long after administrations swap office spaces.

For Republicans now scrambling to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular war, the political consequences may be harder to escape than their own voting records. Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless wars, and the suffering inherited from them.

The post Republicans Are Desperate to Pretend They Never Supported the War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

---

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a major escalation of his war against left-wing nonprofits with an executive order that would seek to suspend their tax-exempt status with the stroke of a pen.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the order plans to label some nonprofit groups as having "terrorist" ties—an act that would immediately suspend their tax-exempt status, dramatically imperiling their ability to operate and raise money.

According to the report, the administration is seeking to use a little-known provision in the federal tax code to strip nonprofits of their status without going through the normal Internal Revenue Service investigation and appeals process.

The law, signed in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush, allows the president to identify an organization in an executive order as supporting or engaging in terrorism. The law also prevents organizations from challenging designation or suspension in proceedings concerning federal tax liability.

It’s not clear yet which groups will be targeted, but the administration and its allies in Congress have already signaled their intent to go after left-leaning groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The latter was forced to cease operations in Florida Thursday following a state-level "terrorism" designation by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In September 2025, weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which identified “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as ideological characteristics associated with “domestic terrorism.”

The memo directed the IRS and other federal agencies to investigate nonprofits and their funders for alleged connections to political violence.

Shanna Singh Hughey, a policy strategist at the anti-authoritarian watchdog group Protect Democracy, said in September that the memo's vague and subjective language gave the administration expansive powers to target the nonprofits of its political foes.

“It goes way beyond that to the organizations that are connected to the folks who might be accused [of violence], including board members and staff, as long as that organization is accused of either funding or facilitating the violence done by the target," she told Inside Philanthropy.

“This is exactly what we expect to see when authoritarians attempt to consolidate and hold power,” she said. “There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”

Then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller speaks during an event with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on August 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump's reported plan to attack nonprofits comes on the same day that he named Stephen Miller, the chief architect of NSPM-7, as his new White House chief of staff.

Weeks before the memo was signed, Miller vowed to "dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence." He has said that descriptions of Trump and his immigration policies as "authoritarian" or "fascist" were examples of language that "incites" violence.

He has also referred to the Democratic Party itself as "not a political party," but "a domestic extremist organization."

During a State Department ministerial on terrorism in July, Miller said that under NSPM-7, the administration was empowered to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” what it called terrorist organizations.

In the same speech, he claimed that left-wing extremists invoke "civil liberties" disingenuously to evade criminal punishment.

Describing leftists as the "enemies of civilization," he said, "It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears."

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Salt Lake City, UT – On November 4, dozens of LGBTQ students, youth and community allies gathered on the steps of the University of Utah’s President’s Circle to demand “Transphobes off campus.” The rally was called after Amber Grace, a U of U student and local anti-war activist, was followed and transphobically harassed by the U of U College Republicans.

The protest was the first political rally on the U’s campus in over a year. The College Republicans attempted to intimidate the protesters through heckles and invasive filming. The crowd shouted these agitators into silence with chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, transphobes have got to go!” Protesters held a banner reading “Protect queer youth, not bigots” and signs reading “We are a priority, not a minority!”

U of U College Republicans conduct transphobic and anti-immigrant outreach on the U’s Marriott Plaza, where students must walk to go to class. After filming the angry reactions of people who are angered by hate speech; they gain social media likes from right-wingers.

After being followed and filmed by one such transphobic U of U College Republican tabler, Grace was assaulted. Her glasses were punched off her face. Despite being the victim of a hate crime, Grace faces a trumped-up misdemeanor citation for assault. Protesters held signs reading “Drop the charges on Amber!”

U of U College Republican leaders Rylie Barnes, Riley Beesley and Daylan Alzamora took to social media to deadname and attempt to intimidate Grace. They then handed footage over to right-wing outlets like Fox News, leading to death threats against Grace.

“We have seen the University of Utah enable the reckless, harmful and discriminatory actions of the College Republicans, who are given free rein to harass marginalized students on their way to class,” said Grace.

“Last Tuesday, I should have also made it to class, and I should have not been on Fox News and other far-right outlets. Because I was followed, because I was recorded without my consent, and because I had transphobic language hurled at me, the situation turned into a hate crime against me.”

Organizers distributed a call urging people to contact Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill to drop the charges on Amber Grace ahead of her first court appearance.

At the rally there were U of U College Republican hecklers and a heavy-handed University of Utah Police presence. At the University of Utah, transphobes are emboldened by the police and campus administration, but LGBTQ youth and students are strong and brave. They are ready to organize for LGBTQ liberation.

The rally was organized by the Utah Anti-War Committee and Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

#SaltLakeCityUT #Utah #SaltLakeCity #LGBTQ

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From Fight Back! News via This RSS Feed.

Despite an expensive campaign to distort his vocal criticism of Israeli crimes in Palestine as "antisemitic," progressive Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won his US Senate race with the support of a majority of the state's early Jewish voters, while a survey published Thursday revealed that 8 in 10 Jewish Americans believe Israel's actions and lobbying increase antisemitism.

An analysis of Michigan voting data published by the Jewish newspaper The Forward found that El-Sayed, who will be the first Muslim senator in US history, received approximately 60% of the vote among Jewish early voters.

The survey's results imply a rebuke of the efforts by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent nearly $30 million on opposing El-Sayed and supporting his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).

"The media spent October obsessing over Abdul El-Sayed's 'problem' with Jewish voters," writer and labor organizer Joe Wrote said on social media, noting that corporate outlets including The Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, and NPR "ran constant articles."

"In the end, El-Sayed got 60% of the Michigan Jewish vote, 1.3% less than Elissa Slotkin did in 2024," he added, referring to Michigan's Democratic junior US senator, who is Jewish. "The mainstream media is a joke."

While AIPAC's enormous spending helped make the contest one of the most expensive Senate primaries in US history, El-Sayed's focus on issues affecting working families—the affordability crisis, fixing the nation's broken healthcare system via Medicare for All—in addition to broader topics like getting money out of politics and ending US militarism and aid to Israel, led to his Tuesday victory.

AIPAC—whose super political action committee, United Democracy Project (UDP), only started financially supporting congressional candidates in 2021—has flexed its electoral muscles in recent years. In 2024, it helped defeat progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.). However, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) survived a UDP spending blitz during the previous midterms in 2022, and El-Sayed's victories in both the Michigan primary and general election demonstrate the limits of its largesse.

El-Sayed's victory coincided with the release of a new GBAO survey commissioned by the liberal Jewish lobby group J Street showing that overwhelming majorities of Jewish Americans believe the actions of Israel and AIPAC contribute to antisemitism in the United States.

According to the survey, 80% of respondents believe that Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase hatred of Jews, while 66% said that AIPAC funding advertisements against candidates who criticize Israel worsens antisemitism, and 60% agree that "Jewish organizations that condemn harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are exploiting concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli government policies."

Tellingly, more respondents believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (31%) than that Israel deserves unconditional support (30%).

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, as well as many experts, including Israeli and other Jewish scholars, say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally backed by nearly 20 nations is proceeding through the International Court of Justice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation, committed during a war that has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded and nearly 2 million people forcibly displaced.

In the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel has been accelerating its decadeslong campaign of apartheid, settler colonization, land theft, and ethnic cleansing, expanding illegal settlements and outposts while systematically dispossessing Palestinians of their homes, farms, and ancestral lands.

The far-right Netanyahu government has openly embraced annexation, with ministers pushing to formally absorb Palestinian territory into Israel and explicitly declaring their intention to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Armed Israeli settler-colonists, frequently operating with the protection, participation, or complicity of Israeli occupation forces, have unleashed increasingly brazen pogroms against Palestinian communities, burning homes, mosques, and vehicles, destroying olive groves, stealing livestock, beating residents, and killing Palestinians.

Appearing Thursday on MS NOW's "Morning Joe," El-Sayed was asked by host Willie Geist what message he had for Jewish voters who had been concerned about his positions and how he would protect them against antisemitism.

"I was really privileged to grow up in a community where about 40% of my high school class was Jewish," he said. "I grew up going to synagogue, going to Seder, going to bar and bat mitzvahs growing up. I have so much respect for the Jewish faith and Jewish contributions to American life."

"I also know what it's like to be discriminated against for how I pray," the senator-elect continued. "And I want an America where nobody is discriminated against under our Constitution."

"I know what it's like to drop off my kids to a mosque and wonder if they're going to be safe, and am I going to be able to pick them up safely afterwards," El-Sayed continued. "I'm committed to the safety of Jewish children like I'm committed to the safety of my own children."

"But I want to ask us this," he said. "We spend billions of dollars subsidizing a foreign government unconditionally buying bombs and tanks that have been used to do genocide and apartheid and make war we have no business fighting."

"And we're told that if you want to stand up against the murder of innocent Palestinian children, that that's somehow about hate for anybody. It's not about hate for anybody," El-Sayed stressed. "It's about equal love for those Palestinian children, as you would have for a Jewish child growing up in the Holy Land."

"So if I stand up and say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be sending our money to do the worst things to other people, people are like, well, it must be because you hate the people who are doing the worst things," he said. "I'm like, that's insane."

"We have to separate between Judaism and the Jewish people and Israel and its actions," the senator-elect asserted. "And by the way, I apply the same approach to the government of Egypt where my family came from. And I would hate that somebody would assume that I would be OK with the human rights abuses of the government of Egypt simply because I share the ethnicity of the majority of people who are in Egypt."

El-Sayed concluded by saying he wants to see a world in which "a Palestinian child and a Jewish Israeli child growing up in the Holy Land can look forward at their life and say, my life is not going to be curtailed by somebody's violence."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

While President Donald Trump this week indicated he's standing by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the wake of brutal midterm election losses, Democratic Party leaders have indicated they'll use their new majorities in Congress to remove him from office, one way or another.

The Intercept reported on Thursday that source in the US Department of Defense, as well as on Capitol Hill, believe Hegseth's days are numbered due to a number of factors, including an "endless raft of scandals, culture-war clownishness, and senseless policies."

Wes J. Bryant, a senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon who was pushed out of his job last year, told The Intercept that Hegseth’s extrajudicial killings of people in the Caribbean and Pacific constitute war crimes.

"He is conducting state terrorism," said Bryant. "He is 100% a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted."

A senior congressional staffer told The Intercept that a resolution to impeach Hegseth being offered in the US House of Representatives by outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) could gain significant bipartisan support if the defense secretary refuses to step down.

“There are very angry senior Republicans in the national security space who honestly pin a lot of their election losses on [Hegseth]," the staffer said. "They are furious... So they’re asking themselves, ‘What is even the harm in voting to impeach Hegseth?'"

In a Thursday social media post, Massie advised Trump that forcing Hegseth to leave right now is the best option he has.

"If Trump’s going to replace appointees like Hegseth, he should do it while he can still get the replacements confirmed in the Senate," Massie wrote. "Also, my Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what’s coming when Dems control Congress. They’ll have hearings and trials."

Hegseth, however, remained defiant in the face of the impeachment threat and posted a video on social media where he vowed to remain at the Pentagon.

"A disgruntled, defeated Congressman, along with all his Democrat allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly—just like they tried against President Trump twice," Hegseth said. "It didn't work against President Trump, and it won't work with me."

At the War Department: We Stand.We Fight. We Defend the Republic. https://t.co/Kkr0DazmCE
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) November 5, 2026

Richard Ojeda, a retired US army major who on Tuesday won an election as the Democratic Party's nominee in North Carolina's 9th congressional district, was less than impressed by Hegseth's bravado.

"Trump took five deferments to keep from serving in Vietnam so you can shove that tough guy talk up your ass," Ojeda wrote in response to Hegseth. "You are a war criminal. Tick tock."

Former Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was similarly dismissive of Hegseth's video and urged Congress to "impeach and remove Hegseth" then "prosecute him for war crimes."

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) predicted that Hegseth would soon be out of a job, whether he knows it or not.

"After failing our servicemembers and starting new forever wars, Pete's desperate to keep his job," wrote Crow. "Tick tock, Mr. Secretary. Better start packing up your make-up room at the Pentagon. Time's up."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, who represents New York's 18th congressional district, said on Friday that his party's victory in this week's elections has given it a mandate to take on billionaires and corporate interests.

In a multi-post thread posted to social media, Ryan sought to challenge predictable political narratives taking shape in the corporate media about the reasons for Democrats’ historic wins.

"While pundits do the same-old tired debate of whether Tuesday’s election results mean Democrats should be more progressive or more moderate, they’re missing the whole damn point," Ryan began. "This was an election about POWER."

"Over the past two years, Trump has made it abundantly clear who’s in power," Ryan continued. "And big surprise, it's not the American people—who are getting screwed over by a political and economic system rigged in favor of the top 1%."

Ryan then listed off a number of bad actors who have been rigging the system even further to their benefit under Trump's watching, including "AI oligarchs getting tax breaks to build a technology that could kill us all," "UnitedHealth denying your insurance claims (from the provider they own!), while you go bankrupt," and "[SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk spending $750 million to buy our elections, while making billions in government contracts."

"Voters see how Trump and Republicans are using their power, and they said HELL NO," Ryan said. "They want to feel in control of their own lives again. They want elected leaders who will listen to THEM, fight for them, and deliver for them. Not for the ultra-rich and the Epstein class."

Now that voters in 2026 have firmly rejected the GOP, Ryan said, it is now up to Democrats to deliver a fairer economic system that doesn't simply funnel money to the ultrarich.

"Democrats who won across the country understood that voters don’t just want lower costs," Ryan emphasized. "They want us to fundamentally fix this broken system. They want us to call out and take on the villains screwing them over, whether corrupt politicians or greedy CEOs, and put power back in their hands. Be a leader who works for the PEOPLE—not the billionaires and corporations funding our politics."

Ryan's post echoes a report published on Thursday by Data for Progress, which found that populist economic appeals were central to Democrats' Tuesday electoral success.

The report also found robust support among voters for a number of specific populist policies, including higher taxes on millionaires, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and a temporary moratorium on building artificial intelligence data centers.

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

One of the easiest ways to spot a supporter of US President Donald Trump is a red hat declaring "Make America Great Again," but after a Democratic "tsunami" in the midterms earlier this week, the Republican leader unveiled a new cap that says "VETO."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an incoming committee chair who's long sparred with Trump, responded Thursday by making clear that Democrats are determined to pass far-reaching legislation after securing significant—but not veto-proof—majorities in both chambers of Congress.

"If Donald Trump wants to be Mr. Veto, let's test that out," she wrote on social media, replying to a White House photo of the hat placed next to the president as he signed an executive order declaring the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room national monuments. "The new Democratic majority in Congress should pass bills to make life more affordable and our government less corrupt."

Warren's X post echoed her Thursday op-ed about "why Democrats won the midterms"—as of Friday, they have at least 54 senators and 253 seats in the House of Representatives—and how they now "must deliver... even with Donald Trump in the White House."

"Trump says he welcomes the nickname 'Mr. Veto.' Well, let's test that out by passing legislation the American people support," she wrote for Time, urging Democrats to stop the Iran War, reverse GOP healthcare cuts while expanding coverage, fund universal childcare, and cancel "the tax breaks Trump and the Republicans handed out to corporations, ultramillionaires, and billionaires."

Other priorities for the progressive—who is set to lead the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs—include "bills to ban stock trading by federal officials or crack down on Trump's corruption in plain sight," as well as efforts to make "Big Tech CEOs, Wall Street executives, and giant corporations... answer tough questions" about "ripping off the American people."

Warren isn't alone in urging the party to call Trump's bluff once Democrats have enough votes to pass bills without GOP support in January. Also responding to the White House's hat post, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) declared Friday, "Let's do it."

"Let's dare him to veto" legislation on the following, Duckworth said:

• Ending the Iran War;
• Canceling $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts;
• Restoring Affordable Care Act tax credits;
• Raising the federal minimum wage;
• Terminating tariffs and issuing refunds to consumers;
• Forcing data centers to pay for their own energy and water; and
• Banning presidential and congressional stock trading.

Democratic victories on Tuesday also generated fresh hope about eventually replacing the US for-profit healthcare system with Medicare for All—a hallmark issue for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is expected to chair the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and has been credited with making the party's policies more progressive via his presidential runs and engagement with voters across the country on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour..

As political observers asserted that "Bernie made the path" for progressive candidates who campaigned on economic populism to win key elections this week, Sanders has said in multiple interviews that the incoming Democrat-controlled Congress should pass Medicare for All—which would save over 114,000 lives and $1 trillion annually—and see if Trump vetoes it.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a possible 2028 presidential contender who previously led Senate Democrats' campaign arm, similarly argued that despite Trump's threats this week, the new majorities should fight to improve affordability and tax the rich.

"It is essential that we show the American people where we stand," Van Hollen told Politico. "If Trump vetoes it, it will just show people that he's on the side of billionaires."

While he is reportedly not going to challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to be Senate majority leader post, Van Hollen has also suggested that Democrats should not back the current minority leader without securing his support for a "bold agenda."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

After voters delivered a clear rebuke of President Donald Trump’s Iran War on Election Day, a senior US House Democrat said ending the conflict will be a top priority when his party assumes control of Congress—one made even more urgent after the president's renewed threats to "destroy" Iran on Thursday.

"I think it’ll be one of the first things we do, and strongest things that we should do," said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who is slated to chair the House Armed Services Committee, when asked by The New Republic's Greg Sargent whether Democrats will use their newfound majorities in both chambers to cut off funding for the war, which just entered its ninth month.

Smith said he expects Democrats will pursue a bill that forbids any further funding for the conflict, which the Pentagon says has cost over $47 billion, though independent estimates put the cost much higher.

A bill of this sort, Smith said, would almost certainly be vetoed by Trump, meaning Republicans in both chambers would need to provide enough votes to override his veto.

Overwhelming opposition to the Iran War, which has dragged on without an end in sight and caused inflation to surge, played a central role in the electoral beatdown Republicans suffered on Tuesday. Nationwide, 63% of voters said launching the war was the "wrong decision," according to an NBC News exit poll. Among those voters, 82% favored Democrats.

Nearly three-quarters of voters (74%) said that the war was a "crucial or major" factor in their vote, and 63% of them said they chose Democrats.

But even as members of his party, including Vice President JD Vance, state plainly that "the reason we lost is the war," Trump has continued to defend it and suggested he may pursue deeper intervention.

"I would rather not destroy the rest of the country if possible, but maybe I'll have to," he told reporters in the Oval Office. "You'll know soon enough."

Trump has made similar threats to "annihilate" Iran, "blow up" the country, and eradicate the "whole civilization" for months. But now that the midterms are over, there are fewer political pressures holding him back from following through on these threats.

The administration reportedly has plans drawn up for a renewed, large-scale bombing campaign that could target the country's energy infrastructure, military installations, and nuclear facilities, possibly with Israeli participation. Last month, it was reported that Trump was mulling dropping "the mother of all bombs," the largest nonnuclear bomb in the American arsenal, on Iran, which poses the risk of massive civilian casualties.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who received a classified briefing about the plans days before the midterms, called them "insane" and said they involved deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), the only Iranian American Democrat in the US Congress, said that Trump's renewed threats on Thursday only increase the urgency of ending the war.

"He’s once again threatening the annihilation of a country of 90 million people," Ansari wrote on social media. "A crime against humanity. Democrats must work urgently to end Trump’s reckless war of choice when we take back the House and the Senate. Enough is enough."

A "flurry of diplomatic activity" has followed the midterms, according to reporting by Axios' Barak Ravid. Iranian negotiators have spoken with regional mediators about a possible deal for the US to lift its naval blockade and release some of Iran’s frozen funds in exchange for nuclear talks and an end to Iran's travel restrictions through the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the same report, US Central Command was "finalizing preparations" to restart major combat operations in Iran, though there has not been an official directive from Washington.

"The American people delivered a clear mandate to end the illegal war on Iran," said the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) on Thursday. "Trump instead suggests he may escalate the war and commit war crimes to 'destroy the rest of' Iran. This is outrageous and unacceptable."

"Congress," it said, "must cut off funding for this war NOW."

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before speaking at Anduril Industries in Sparrows Point, Maryland, on October 6, 2026. (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Democrats may have opportunities to push for the end of the war before January.

Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), the leading Republican critic of the war, whom Trump helped to defeat in his primary earlier this year, has said he plans to force a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth next week for violating the war powers resolution passed by Congress.

"By every estimation, it will pass and he will be impeached," Smith said. "And off that goes to the Senate. Then the Senate is legally required to spend all of their time dealing with that until it’s done with."

Still, it remains an open question whether the necessary two-thirds of senators would vote to remove Hegseth and whether the pressure could meaningfully affect the war.

Another chance to stop the war will come on December 11, when Congress will need to approve another spending measure to prevent a government shutdown.

According to Roll Call, the progressive advocacy group Indivisible sent a memo on Thursday pushing Democrats to block a National Defense Authorization Act and refuse to fund the Pentagon if “it doesn’t cut off money for the war.”

“Voters have granted Democrats majorities in the House and Senate with a clear mandate: End this war," said Jamal Abdi, the president of NIAC. "The first test of the Democrats’ commitment to that mandate will be when Congress takes up legislation to fund the government before funding runs out on December 11."

"After having won Congress thanks to a massively unpopular war," he said, "the best way to squander this momentum would be for Democrats to turn around and provide funding for the president to continue the conflict."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

While President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance blame Republicans’ losses in the midterm elections on their war on Iran — with Trump flippantly saying that the war “drove the gasoline up a little bit short term” — Tuesday’s results also represent a rejection of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. In Texas, where Trump won a Latino majority in the presidential election in…

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From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

Billings, MT – On Monday, October 26, members of the Billings Alliance for Immigrant Rights (BAIR) attended a city council meeting to oppose plans to apply for the “Justice Assistance Grant” (JAG). This grant from the Department of Justice would split $164,000 between the Billings Police Department (BPD) and the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office (YCSO), with most of the funding going to BPD, for things like ‘less lethal equipment and munitions’ and ‘ballistic protective equipment.’

Hidden in the DOJ’s packet describing this grant was a small section about “Immigration Enforcement.” The section explained that “state and local agencies may use JAG funds to partner with federal law enforcement on immigration enforcement operations.”

BAIR member Ellis Tillery detailed another section in this DOJ packet about “unallowable activities.” The section explains “Out of program scope is any program or activity, impedes or hinders the enforcement of federal immigration law,” effectively barring local police from not cooperating with ICE, if the city's application was accepted. Tillery argued, “This is the same federal overreach that was voted against in the Model Cities Initiative Grant.”

BAIR co-founder Andreas Storey addressed recent attacks by immigration agents in Billings, stating, “At the United Way backpack drive, two families were kidnapped and taken to a modern-day concentration camp in Havre, Montana. Billings does not need any more ICE and Border Patrol collaboration.”

In September 2025, the home of 89-year-old Eva Sigsworth and her son, Arthur Alvarado, was raided by Billings PD in collaboration with Border Patrol and other agencies.

Arthur Alvarado gave a comment about his experience with federal agents, “I’m a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. I just cannot believe the way that we were treated. It really broke my heart to be questioned and interrogated by these federal agencies. And I just can’t see how you can give them any funds to terrorize other families.”

After Alvarado’s comment, Mayor Mike Nelson attempted to disprove the activists’ statements. Nelson asked City Attorney Gina Dahl ,“Could we take 12,000 for the Interior Patrol SUV equipment and use it for ICE operations?” Dahl was unable to give a definitive ‘no,’ responding, “I’m not going to say that we could not, but something like that would require coordination with the federal government, because that’s not what we applied for.”

This item was included in the consent agenda, meaning that it and several other items would be voted in one sweeping vote, unless council members asked for any items to be separated. BAIR’s demand was for JAG to be removed from the consent agenda, properly discussed by the public, and then voted down by council members.

However, after worming their way around the accusations made by BAIR, the seven city council members present voted unanimously on the consent agenda, moving forward with applying for the Justice Assistance Grant. Chants of “Shame on you!” rang out in the council chambers. Following BAIR’s disruption of the meeting, Billings Police escorted members out of the meeting.

BAIR members later returned to the council chambers to voice their disapproval of the vote. The Billings Alliance for Immigrant Rights will continue to fight against police cooperation with ICE, and for a sanctuary city.

To join the fight, attend a BAIR planning meeting every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in the Billings Public Library large conference room. Follow BAIR on Facebook or Instagram @billings_air for further updates.

#BillingsMT #Billings #Montana #ImmigrantRights #BAIR

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From Fight Back! News via This RSS Feed.

The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb. The White House’s point person on the effort, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation.

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From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

Kris Kobach // ag.ks.gov

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

State Rep. Abi Boatman, of Kansas’ 86th House District, won her reelection campaign this week. It was one of two resounding victories for her this election.

The other win is the likely downfall of some of the foremost architects of the crusade against transgender Kansans like Boatman.

In February, Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach helped orchestrate the mass invalidation of almost 2,000 birth certificates and/or licenses belonging to trans people in the state. He was also a staunch defender of SB 244 in court, the Kansas bill that stripped trans people of their right to accurate state ID and greenlit private citizen “bounty hunters” to sue anyone presumed to be a trans person in the “wrong” bathroom.

The Kansas attorney general race hasn’t been called, but with about 99% of the expected vote counted, Democrat Chris Mann is ahead of Kobach by roughly 13,000 votes, according to NBC News.

“Kobach’s loss is an important victory for all Kansans,” Boatman told Erin in the Morning the morning after the election. “It’s going to be refreshing to have an AG that isn’t the state’s biggest and most consistent embarrassment, costing taxpayers year after year to prosecute a culture war.”

The ACLU has filed a legal challenge against SB 244 and Kobach’s anti-trans crackdown. In the meantime, Boatman and countless others live in constant limbo. The state’s clumsy rollout of its anti-trans policies means trans Kansans have had their documents revoked seemingly at random; Boatman, for example, still has her license, but lives on edge in anticipation of the day that may suddenly not be the case. She must nonetheless continue to work for and govern a state where she cannot use the women’s restroom in her own place of work.

“It’s just another thing on the daily checklist of living while trans,” she said.

Kobach’s fall coincides with a nationwide reckoning in this midterm election. Texas turned blue for the first time in a generation. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, as the first Black woman governor in U.S. history. Nationwide, Democrats seized control of the House, Senate, and the majority of governorships.

Likewise, Mann wasn’t the only major Democratic victory in Kansas. Adam Hamilton beat incumbent Roger Marshall in the Senate, becoming the first Democratic Senator in Kansas since the 1930s. Cindy Holscher is similarly pulling just ahead of Ty Masterson in the gubernatorial race, although, like in Kobach’s race, votes are still being counted.

All of these races matter to Kansans like Theodore Laubengayer, a member of the Kansas Compliance Crew—a group of trans-masculine people dedicated to challenging SB 244’s bathroom ban.

“I’ve personally been affected by SB 244,” he told Erin in the Morning. “We deserve a state that works for all of us, not one that makes a political target out of a small part of its population.”

He’s not the only one. Matthew Neumann, founder of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas, was relieved by the outcome of this election—but he warns that the work isn’t done. “I have been battling him and his transphobia in this state for years, from one bill to the next,” Neumann said of Kobach. “He is just one of many in this state who have come after us. This is a battle won in a war that continues.”

It’s not wholly clear what the undoing of the ID revocation policy might look like. However, even without the political power to formally undo it, a Democratic AG could decline to enforce parts of SB 244 or potentially stop defending it from the ACLU’s legal challenge altogether.

Boatman, the lone transgender lawmaker in the state, is already thinking a few steps ahead. The GOP still holds the majority in the state legislature, but the midterms tipped the scales, if only just a little. She took office earlier this year, and has only ever served under a Republican supermajority. Democrats broke that stronghold in the Kansas House this week.

“I’m very excited that the GOP has to talk to us now instead of just running roughshod and reckless through the entire session,” Boatman said. Always the diplomat, she added that she was eager to pivot to other policy priorities—like legalizing marijuana or strengthening education in Kansas. The midterms are over, and now, there is work to be done.

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

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From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

Michigan was the epicenter of the cyclosporiasis outbreak that hit the United States last summer, and the state's new Democratic senator-elect plans to find out why after taking office in January.

Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who faced virulently racist attacks from members of the Trump administration, including Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during his campaign, told CNN Thursday that he plans to investigate Kennedy's handling of the outbreak of the illness caused by the Cyclospora parasite, which sickened more than 15,000 Michiganders, hospitalized more than 370, and killed two people in the state.

El-Sayed emphasized that he is not out for "retribution for something past," but said an investigation into staffing cuts at HHS would be focused on "understanding what happened, holding people accountable for what they did, and then solving the problem moving forward."

"People need to feel it in their back pockets and in their homes," said El-Sayed.

The former public health official said the Trump administration had "DOGE-ed out the part of the Food and Drug Administration and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] that was intended both to protect you from eating lettuce that had been defiled by somebody else, and counting the number of cases," referring to the Department of Government Efficiency.

Under the leadership of GOP megadonor Elon Musk, DOGE cut staffing at a CDC lab tasked with responding to Cyclospora and other parasitic outbreaks from 11 people to just three.

The US Department of Agriculture shut down three key research projects regarding the parasite, which can cause explosive diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms when it contaminates food. Two of the projects were defunded by the Republican-controlled Congress, while a third was moved from Maryland to Iowa as part of a reorganization of the agency, and the scientists working on the research declined to relocate, jeopardizing the study.

The CDC also removed Cyclospora from its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, in 2025 as part of Kennedy's changes to the agency.

Kennedy said the outbreak was "under control" on July 21, when 1,600 people were sick across the country. Dozens of people in Michigan continued to become ill over the following month. The outbreak was ultimately linked to lettuce that was grown in central Mexico by Taylor Farms de Mexico.

The HHS secretary claimed that the allegations that his cuts had reduced the government's ability to respond to the outbreak were "invalid," saying there were "no cuts in the surveillance program."

“We did cuts in the FoodNet program, but they were redundant surveillance," said Kennedy.

El-Sayed said Thursday that he aims "to understand why he's... done this, the decision-making that's gone on, and what we need to do to solve the problem in its depth. And that takes understanding the nature of the problem."

He added that legislation could come out of an investigation.

"There's no reason that we couldn't have one clean bill, right? The Crap Lettuce Elimination Act, whatever we want to call it, to just make sure that we have a FDA that's functioning," said El-Sayed. "It's not just lettuce. We're talking—seeing recalls in blueberries. We're seeing recalls in blackberries. We're seeing recalls in meat. And that's because the FDA's not working."

The senator-elect also said the ascent of Kennedy, who has publicly questioned the safety of vaccines and halted immunization research, is among the Trump administration appointments that raise questions about how President Donald Trump is selecting his nominees for top government positions.

“I think this administration has shown that the decisions that they make about who is engaged in government, leading government, that that's more about backroom deals and who curries favor than it is about their capacity to do the job," said El-Sayed. "When you nominate somebody like RFK Jr., who is anti-science, to run HHS, what you get is a bunch of nasty crap lettuce in the state of Michigan."

When considering Trump's nominees as a senator, El-Sayed added, "I'm going to assume I'm not going to support you until proven otherwise. So the bar is going to be extremely high. I want to know that this person was chosen on their merit and the capacity to serve the American public."

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has lost dozens of races in which it backed a candidate in this year’s midterm elections, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the spending by the once insuperable political lobbying group, in a sign of its waning influence. Politico found in a report on Thursday that more than 30 of the group’s candidates lost their elections this week.

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From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

Janine Jackson interviewed Panamerican Dispatch*‘s Brian Mier about the 2026 Brazilian election for the* October 30, 2026, episode of CounterSpin*. This is a lightly edited transcript.*

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261030Mier.mp3

CNBC (10/27/26)

**Janine Jackson: “**We don’t want dictatorship. We don’t want hatred. We don’t want guns. We want a country of love.” So said Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the night before his electoral victory over Flavio Bolsonaro, who has subsequently fled the country and been granted asylum immediately in the US, because of course.

I found that quote in the New Republic and the Guardian, but most of US corporate media ignored it in favor of hand-wringing, like CNBC‘s “Lula’s Election Win Leaves Brazil Facing a Fiscal Tightrope.” That included the note that his victory “wiped out a rally in Brazilian assets that followed Flavio Bolsonaro, seen as the more market-friendly and fiscally disciplined of the candidates.” And it added a familiar warning, “Lula has promised expensive measures that appeal to his grassroots base.”

We can expect more of this going forward, but US media certainly won’t be the only headwind that Lula will face. Still, his victory has brought relief, and maybe even a little hope, to millions of people in Brazil and around the world.

Brian Mier is an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. He joins us now by phone from Recife. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Brian Mier.

Brian Mier: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Listeners will know that the race was tight down to the wire, and that Bolsonaro had won the first round and, evidently, the runner-up winning the second round hasn’t happened for decades. And I just want to ask you, first, where were you when the results were announced, and what was that energy like?

BM: I was so stressed out about the election that I sat in a restaurant, with a buddy of mine, that didn’t have a TV. But we were just checking our phones sporadically, and we started hearing screams from the streets. And then when the tally got up to about 80%, it was pretty much guaranteed that Lula had it, and people were just running around screaming.

So we got on the subway and headed up to Paulista Avenue. The subway itself was like a carnival ride, full of hundreds of people in red, singing and chanting for Lula. And we arrived on Paulista Avenue, where an estimated crowd of 1 million came out for the victory celebration. And it was pretty intense. It was pretty big. It was a lot bigger than 2022.

JJ: I’m reading that the difference between the first round and the decisive round had to do with young voters in particular, but also in just increased turnout.

De-Linking Brazil (10/5/26)

BM: Yeah. Well, I wrote an article called “Glimmers of Hope From Brazil’s 2026 Election” like two days after the first round. It wasn’t as bad as people were portraying it. Basically there was a two-point margin of error, and polls had them pretty close to tying, and Bolsonaro won by like 1.8%. But the PT, Workers’ Party, analysis was that they would have a much better chance targeting people who didn’t vote in the first round than trying to change the minds of Bolsonaro fanatics.

And so that’s what they focused on, and they focused on it in two different ways. At the grassroots level, the way they always do, the old-fashioned way, because it’s a party founded by labor union organizers, which is knocking on doors, talking to people at bus stops, handing out pamphlets on the street, talking to your relatives, getting older relatives to come out and vote, because voting is optional for people over 70.

So a big untold story is just the massive amount of senior citizens who remember the dictatorship, who didn’t go out and vote in the first round because they thought Lula was going to win anyway, who put on red, got in their wheelchairs, got wheeled to the polling stations. Some people in their 90s, with their canes coming out to vote for Lula.

So in the end, 14 million more people voted in the second round than the first round. Of those 14 million, 10.3 million voted for Lula and 3.7 voted for Bolsonaro. So it was a good strategy, and it worked.

JJ: I saw that AP said that the victory depended on “younger, older and working class voters.”   And I thought, well, who else is there?

BM: Nazis.

JJ: Exactly. I don’t want to underestimate the difficulties that Lula faces now, besides these financial pressures and congressional hostility, but what would you say are the biggest kind of obstacles within Brazil itself, and the region? We’ll get to the US in a second, but what is he confronting out of the gate?

BM: You see the way the Western media is portraying him as being fiscally irresponsible, as all leftists are, according to their 19th century liberal doctrine of fiscal responsibility, a la Margaret Thatcher. But the fact is there’s massive climate change–related weather disasters that have to be prepared for, and the risks have to be mitigated, and this costs money.

In terms of fiscal responsibility, when Lula took office the first time, Brazil only had $50 billion in foreign reserves. When Dilma Rousseff was impeached, the Workers Party had amassed $360 billion in foreign reserves. So they’re not a fiscally irresponsible party, and the amount of debt that Brazil is in is much lower as percentage of GDP than the United States, for example.

The economic issues are not the real problem. The problems facing Brazil, I think, are climate-related. They’re related to the wave of conservatism spreading across Latin America, animosity from neighboring Argentina that’s working very closely with Trump, future animosity from the Trump administration or the US government, and just being able to govern with a very right-wing Congress.

A lot of people are exaggerating how hard that’s going to be, because they don’t know the history of how Congress works in Brazil. But even at the height of Lula’s popularity, in the 2000s, the Workers Party never had more than 22% of the seats in Congress. Currently, after the last election, it has about 19%, 18%.

Lula has never governed in a situation in which Congress wasn’t dominated by right-wing political parties. And he’s been pretty good at stitching together workable coalitions that enabled him to push things through, like the constitutional amendment that he just pushed through, he spent four years working on, that reduced Brazil’s work week from five and a half days a week to five days a week, which was a historic victory that people have been working towards for decades.

But that being said, there are challenges in that. For example, it’s funny, you see people like Glenn Greenwald, people who read Glenn Greenwald and listen to Glenn Greenwald, and a series of New York Times articles trying to portray Brazil as this country that’s dangerously veering towards authoritarianism.

But the fact of the matter is Jair Bolsonaro’s wife was just elected to Senate. Jair Bolsonaro’s third son, Carlos, was just elected to Senate. The man who oversaw the kangaroo court procedure that culminated in Lula’s arbitrary imprisonment, with no crime committed, in 2018 was just elected governor of Parana state.

So he is going to have some headaches from these people, from Bolsonaro’s allies. Some of them are going to switch over to Lula’s coalition, but some of them are going to continue to give headaches to the government.

New Republic (10/25/26)

JJ: Well, Trump, of course, was out in front crying “corruption,” that’s no surprise. And then inventing new asylum rules that would allow Flavio Bolsonaro to just slide right in. And then I’m reading in the New Republic about behind-the-scenes State Department meddling, asking diplomats in Brazil to do everything possible to undermine Lula. What can we expect in terms of Brazil/US relations, and how much does or should that matter?

BM: It should definitely matter, because the US has a long history of intervening and propping up neo-fascist dictatorships and far-right-wing authoritarian leaders in all of Latin America. And traditionally, as laid out by Philip Agee in the CIA Diary, which is a great book from the 1970s, the State Department will first hope that their candidate can win in Latin America in a free and fair election. If that doesn’t look like it’s going to work, they start interfering in the election to prop up their candidate, which is what we just had happen in Brazil.

If that doesn’t work, historically, the next step would be to try and foment some kind of coup d’etat. And we saw this happen in Brazil in 2014, when the Democratic Party was gunning for Aecio Neves, an extremely corrupt neoliberal who used tax money to build a private airport on his uncle’s ranch. And he’s involved in all kinds of corruption scandals that they look the other way for.

When he lost the election against Dilma Rousseff, he immediately refused to recognize the results of the election. He called for an audit of the votes, which happened and confirmed Dilma’s victory. And then they paralyzed Congress, so that Dilma Rousseff could get nothing done.

The fact of the matter is that Lula is a more savvy politician than Dilma Rousseff. I don’t think he’s going to have that problem.

FAIR.org (3/8/21)

But that’s when they started the whole anti-corruption witch hunt called Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, which was a collaboration between the US Department of Justice, the FBI and this Curitiba public prosecutor’s office, in a case overseen by this judge who was just elected to be governor of Parana. And the New York Times gave that entire investigation glowing coverage, and it contributed to Dilma Rousseff’s illegitimate impeachment. So that’s the most recent time that the US has stepped in to overthrow Brazil when it wasn’t happy with the election result.

In this case, I think it’s going to be a little bit different, because it looks like Trump is already backing off in his support for Flavio Bolsonaro. I think in Trump’s mind, he’s got this mental list in his head, in that tiny brain of his, in which he categorizes people in binary fashion. They’re either winners or losers, and he doesn’t want to be around losers. And I think in his mind, Flavio Bolsonaro is now a loser. So even though Marco Rubio and other people in the Trump administration might be trying to help Flavio Bolsonaro, I don’t think Trump is on board with it.

And I think that if the Democrats win the majority in Congress, it’s going to create a bunch of headaches for Trump’s plans in Brazil as well, because the Bolsonaros made the very foolish move of completely siding with one political party in the United States.

At first, the Biden administration seemed happy to work with Jair Bolsonaro, but then a very good group of Democratic lawmakers—about 30 of them at the time, led by Hank Johnson from Georgia—managed to convince the rest of the party that, really, the closeness between Bolsonaro and Trump was bad for the Democratic Party. And so when Bolsonaro started trying to set up the coup, apparently, from what I know from Brazilian media sources, he sent an emissary to ask for help holding a coup to the Biden administration. And the Biden administration said no.

And so I think now, because of so much public association between Bolsonaro and Trump, if the Democrats take control of Congress, they’re going to look the other way at some of Lula’s annoyingly effective social policies, which the corporate Democrats seem to hate, like increasing funding for the free universal public health system, and free university tuition. And they’re going to at least try to cause some problems for Trump’s imperialist “Donroe Doctrine” ambitions for Brazil.

FAIR.org (12/20/23)

JJ: And I want to tell folks that you wrote about what you described as the “long coup,” and US media’s involvement in that, meaning that time between the 2014 Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and then 2019. And folks can look at FAIR.org for your 2023 piece on that. But what I want to lift up from that is your quote:

For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story. The second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.

And I think that’s where news media come in, right?

BM: Not just denying, but gaslighting journalists who try to talk about it. There’s an industry of denying the coup, but they don’t just stop at denying the coup. They try and destroy the careers of journalists that talk about it. Look at what happened to Gary Webb. They go after journalists for talking about US involvement in regime change.

Paul Krugman (10/26/26)

JJ: Well, we hear now from Paul Krugman that Meta, unsurprisingly, frankly, was doing some meddling, hobbling Lula’s account and promoting Bolsonaro’s. That’s kind of par for the course. But I understand that social media also played a positive role, such that people are asking, can they dress up for Halloween as Cyber Lula?

BM: This was really interesting, because the ex-girlfriend of Fernando Cerimedo, whose a kind of cyber-bag man for the international far right in Latin America—he was involved in generating thousands of deep fake AI images in the Colombian election based out of Argentina, friends with Milei—he was arrested for attempting to murder his girlfriend, a lawyer in Bolivia, and she survived and went on Mexican television, Channel 14. Nadia Beller is her name.

She went on Channel 14 and gave an interview saying that Fernando had told her that he and Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio’s brother, had gone to Meta headquarters in California and negotiated a deal for supporting the Flavio Bolsonaro campaign by boosting its algorithm and damaging the Lula campaign. And that seemed to be what was actually happening, as the two candidates had pretty much equal reach until about 12 hours before the first-round election. And then suddenly Lula’s reach remained the same, and Flavio suddenly had five or six times more reach than Lula, even though he had less followers.

Panamerican Dispatch (10/14/26)

And so then a bunch of Brazilian journalists did some really good work, and people started testing Meta AI, and Meta AI was refusing to design campaign logos for Lula, but designing them for Flavio.

And so the Supreme Court ordered Meta to provide equal reach for both candidates. Amnesty International and Eko both tested its system of monitoring, and proved that it was very easy to take out illegal campaign ads from outside of Brazil, that’s a crime in Brazil, and also to use them to present disinformation that made it past Meta‘s content moderation. So the Supreme Court ordered Meta to stop allowing that to happen and to provide equal reach, no pushing for either candidate’s reach.

And Meta initially ignored the court order, then protests started happening, then it started reaching the international media. Protests happened in London, in front of Meta‘s headquarters in Ireland and Sao Paulo. And it looks like by the end, the final week before the election, Meta made some kind of decision that it was too damaging to their reputation to continue favoring Flavio Bolsonaro in reach. And the Lula campaign ended up surpassing Flavio’s reach by like 400%.

And part of this is because of a really great congressman named André Janones. I say great, I mean, he’s just really smart, he’s from the working class. And he came up with this idea to bypass Meta‘s algorithms by creating this WhatsApp group and asking everybody to get everyone they knew to sign up to it. And by a couple days before the election, he had 10 million followers, in a group that was only a few weeks old.

And every day he’s just coming on, every hour, just yelling at the camera, sending these videos out where he’s yelling like, “Nobody sleeps. Nobody eats. We can’t do anything until the danger of return to dictatorship is permanently vanquished from our country.” And people are just sharing this stuff around. He’s like, “Go to this site. Use this hashtag. If you have a friend who doesn’t know who to vote for, send him this article.” Every hour he’s coming out with instructions like that, and it worked. It’s pretty incredible. And now leftist political parties around the world are asking him for help.

JJ: As well they should.

I wish we had more time, but I just want to say, I did notice some US press with an unsurprising emphasis, even within some ostensibly respectful coverage, but an emphasis on, “Lula has overpromised, like leftists do, but he won’t be able to deliver.” And it sounds like a threat, frankly. But I just wonder what you would have listeners take away, in terms of what you’re going to see in US news media about Lula, and what antidote should you take with that?

Carbon Brief (9/28/26)

BM: Yeah, it’s funny. This criticism of Lula has seeped into a lot of leftist commentary as well, that he didn’t really do anything for the last four years.

He ended hunger; he took Brazil back off of the the UN’s World Hunger Map. Annual above–inflation rate minimum salary raises. He lowered the work week, with no pay reduction for anyone, through a constitutional amendment. He ended a genocide that was underway against the Yanomami people in the Amazon, committed by illegal gold miners that had been encouraged by Bolsonaro to move into the area. He reduced Amazon rainforest destruction by like 79%, tripled money on renewable energies, and rebuilt the public university system and built new universities. But they don’t report on any of this.

So he’ll keep keeping his campaign promises, and the Northern media will just pretend he’s not doing anything, because a lot of the policies are too complicated to explain in soundbites anyway.

But it’s frustrating, because I’ve seen people, even on a Facebook page of a frequent FAIR contributor, I saw some guy arguing that Lula hadn’t done anything in the last four years. And well, first of all, it’s the government, right? If you’re a leftist, you shouldn’t individualize a leftist movement. That’s what capitalists do. But the fact of the matter is, just do some research and find out what they’re actually doing. And you’d be surprised. I mean, he promised to make online gambling illegal if he were elected, and then he just went ahead and did it anyway before the election.

He’s done a very good job, in three different presidential terms, of working around a right-wing Congress, and managing to make structural adjustments that have significantly increased the quality of life for Brazil’s large working class.

When he first took office, only 4% of the students in Brazil’s public university system—which is still tuition-free, even though Bolsonaro tried to start charging tuition for it—only 4% of the students were Afro-Brazilians from the working class. The PT, the Worker’s Party, set up an improvement over the US affirmative action system that’s locked into social class. So a requirement is that you have to have studied in public schools and come from a family that makes less than two times the minimum wage.

Today, 52% of the university population of the student body in a nationwide public university system is Afro-Brazilian and working class. And these were the young people who came out in massive numbers on the streets for Lula to protect the rights that they have earned, that they’ve won in the last 25 years, that the Bolsonaros, the US international imperialist class, want to remove.

Flavio Bolsonaro was promising to defund the public university system. Because it can’t end the affirmative action; that would be electorally impossible. So he was promising a backdoor strategy, transferring the public university system out of the Ministry of Education into the jurisprudence of the Ministry of Science and Technology. And that would have removed it from the constitutional requirement of funding from a certain percentage of income tax money every year, would have resulted in massive defunding for the entire system.

So since it’s politically impossible for them to end affirmative action, their plan was to destroy the system, and then say, you have to start charging for tuition, so that it transformed into another thing for only elites. Only the elites in Brazil would be able to afford it, which is what it was like until Lula first took office in 2003. And that’s just one example.

JJ: Yeah. And I will just say, the idea that folks will pay attention to Brazil and learn something from it—I understand why some people are afraid of that.

So, just finally, we understand the hope and the fear that is coming out of this victory, yeah?

Brian Mier: “I don’t know to what depths the United States government will go this time around to try and destroy Lula, which they’ve been working on for decades.”

BM: Yes. But I think that if you look at both the hope and the fear, the hope has definitely beaten the fear. And, if anything, people are going to remain vigilant to protect their rights and their government, more than ever right now, from US incursion. I don’t know to what depths the United States government will go this time around to try and destroy Lula, which they’ve been working on for decades. But I feel like he’s in a stronger position now than he has been for the last four years. I mean, it was a massive victory. If it weren’t for Meta, he would have won by 10 million votes.

JJ: Exactly. And what I mean is, I think that some people will be afraid that the involvement in Brazil means that, “Oh, maybe people will get an idea that people can fight for people, and we don’t want that.” So I think we can expect from media a kind of dampening down, because heaven forbid people take a lesson that you can have a bottom-up victory the way that we had in Brazil.

BM: It’s true. And they would much rather have someone like Gabriel Boric in Chile, who just was a lifestyle leftist who didn’t do anything economically, than have someone who might say inappropriate things now and again, and might not be very modern, but does a lot of transformative policies to improve the life of the working class at the expense of big business, redistribution and things like that.

JJ: All right. Well, we will end it there, but we’re going to have future conversations.

We’ve been speaking with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. Thank you so much, Brian Mier, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BM: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

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From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

Allies of progressive US Rep. Ro Khanna are hoping he can ride Tuesday night's blue tsunami all the way to the White House in 2028.

Former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and progressive activist Nomiki Konst announced Thursday that they'd formed a new group, "Run Ro," urging Khanna (D-Calif.) to become the first Democrat to formally declare his presidential candidacy.

Following Election Day victories by Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Troy Jackson in Maine, and other champions of left-wing populist economic policy across the country, they feel Khanna—a supporter of Medicare for All and leader of efforts to block President Donald Trump's wars—must strike while the iron is hot and set a progressive tone for 2028.

**“**By launching now, we are trying to ensure that the presidential primary debate is framed from a progressive populist perspective," Konst said.

Khanna has openly mulled a bid for the presidency for months. Although he is not involved with the "Run Ro" effort, he told MS NOW Thursday night he was "honored that people are encouraging me to run on a platform of Medicare for All, ending foreign wars and taxing the billionaires," and acknowledged that he was "thinking about it."

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) speaks alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) during a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Heuer/AFP via Getty Images)

Khanna has spent Trump's second term establishing himself as one of the most visible faces of resistance to the president, through frequent appearances on cable news and his actions on Capitol Hill.

With the libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) as an unlikely ally, he spearheaded a bipartisan push last year to force the US Department of Justice to release the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, an effort that intensified scrutiny of Epstein's relationship with the president. Khanna also coined the term "Epstein class" to describe the wealthy and powerful people shielded from accountability.

He's also been at the forefront of a growing anti-interventionist movement in Congress, leading efforts to halt Trump's war in Iran and pushing to cut off military support to Israel amid the genocide in Gaza. Earlier this year, Khanna made international headlines when he was detained in the West Bank by armed Israeli settlers while visiting Palestinian communities affected by Israel's occupation and escalating settler terrorism.

"My view is that whoever runs needs to first have absolute clarity on not being a uni-party on war," Khanna told the Breaking Points podcast on Thursday.

Khanna was among the first to back some of the progressive candidates who took on establishment Democrats in the 2026 cycle—including El-Sayed, Sen.-elect Peggy Flanagan (D-Minn.), and Reps.-elect Chris Rabb (D-Pa.), Adam Hamawy (D-NJ), and Claire Valdez (D-NY). Over the course of the midterms, he endorsed over 70 candidates, campaigning in person with many of them.

"Ro Khanna has shown the work ethic, the humility, and the vision that we need in this moment," said Bowman, who was ousted from his seat in New York in 2024 after a multimillion-dollar push by the pro-Israel lobby. “Now is not the time to wait for progress. With the wind at our backs after the midterms, we need a leader who puts everything on the line to fight for a better vision of America. That’s Ro Khanna."

US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) speaks as Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA members picket during strikes over contract negotiations at Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery offices in New York on August 17, 2023. (Photo by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress via Getty Images)

If he chooses to run, Khanna would be stepping into an ideologically divided and potentially messy Democratic primary that could include other candidates from his progressive wing, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has also publicly hinted at a run.

Khanna said earlier this week that he embraces the idea of the 2028 primary being an "open clash of ideas.” Beyond fights over single-payer health insurance and the country's relationship with Israel, Khanna's positions could put him at odds with many of his likely opponents.

He has clashed with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who joined the state's billionaire-led effort to kill a 5% wealth tax that would have funded healthcare programs in the state. His call for a pause on artificial intelligence development, meanwhile, goes further than the more limited oversight proposed by those like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez share many of the same priorities—Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and raising taxes on billionaires—but they are also not in lockstep on everything. While the Bronx congresswoman proudly identifies as a "democratic socialist," Khanna describes himself as a proponent of "progressive capitalism." He has also been critical of past positions she has embraced, like defunding police.

Konst has said it's critical for those seeking to take the progressive lane to begin making their case early and not give the establishment room to take control.

“The centrists organize and strategize early,” she said. “They have their donors, corporate consultants, and leaders lined up for years. Building off the lessons of past primaries, our goal is to channel the progressive energy into a vessel for organizing and spreading our winning message early, as we can’t wait for the politics to line up.”

Responding to a political climate of widespread anger at both parties, Khanna has emphasized that he wants to represent "a new politics in this country" and help turn Democrats into "a new party."

“We need America’s Next New Deal," he said on Thursday. "Whether I run or support someone else is something I will decide with my family after the holidays.”

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

She has advocated for greater Indigenous representation in U.S. political institutions.

The post Deb Haaland: the first Native American woman elected governor of a U.S. state appeared first on MR Online.

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From MR Online via This RSS Feed.

In 2020, millions of working people mobilized to the ballot box and voted for Joe Biden, in hopes he would alleviate economic and political crises.

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From Liberation News – The Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation via This RSS Feed.