The Panopticon Review

Jean Guerrero wrote a definitive biography on Stephen Miller, now chief of staff of the Trump fascist regime, entitled 'Hatemonger' which was published by William Morrow in 2020. In the video below Guerrero explains exactly why Trump has chosen his favorite advisor and in-house henchman to be his new chief of staff at the White House

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:39:59 +0000

Jean Guerrero wrote a definitive biography on Stephen Miller, now chief of staff of the Trump fascist regime, entitled 'Hatemonger' which was published by William Morrow in 2020--(See details following the video below in which Ms. Guerrero explains who and what Miller is and has always been and why Trump has consistently chosen him as his primary advisor and in-house henchman for the past decade)...

VIDEO:
https://youtube.com/shorts/q7GZAxoo3Uc?si=nN8ana82s8fD7uwA

Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda
by Jean Guerrero
William Morrow, 2020

[Publication date: August 11, 2020]

“A vital book for understanding the still-unfolding nightmare of nationalism and racism in the 21st century.” –Francisco Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River

Stephen Miller is one of the most influential advisors in the White House. He has crafted Donald Trump’s speeches, designed immigration policies that ban Muslims and separate families, and outlasted such Trump stalwarts as Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions. But he’s remained an enigma.

Until now. Emmy- and PEN-winning investigative journalist and author Jean Guerrero charts the thirty-four-year-old’s astonishing rise to power, drawing from more than one hundred interviews with his family, friends, adversaries and government officials.

Radicalized as a teenager, Miller relished provocation at his high school in liberal Santa Monica, California. He clashed with administrators and antagonized dark-skinned classmates with invectives against bilingualism and multiculturalism. At Duke University, he cloaked racist and classist ideas in the language of patriotism and heritage to get them airtime amid controversies. On Capitol Hill, he served Tea Party congresswoman Michele Bachmann and nativist Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

Recruited to Trump’s campaign, Miller met his idol. Having dreamed of Trump’s presidency before he even announced his decision to run, Miller became his senior policy advisor and speechwriter. Together, they stoked dystopian fears about the Democrats, “Deep State” and “American Carnage,” painting migrants and their supporters as an existential threat to America. Through backroom machinations and sheer force of will, Miller survived dozens of resignations and encouraged Trump’s harshest impulses, in conflict with the president’s own family. While Trump railed against illegal immigration, Miller crusaded against legal immigration. He targeted refugees, asylum seekers and their children, engineering an ethical crisis for a nation that once saw itself as the conscience of the world. Miller rallied support for this agenda, even as federal judges tried to stop it, by courting the white rage that found violent expression in tragedies from El Paso to Charlottesville.

Hatemonger unveils the man driving some of the most divisive confrontations over what it means to be American––and what America will become.

REVIEWS:

“Investigative reporter Jean Guerrero deftly uncovers how Stephen Miller—as a privileged California teenager desperate for attention and power—immersed himself in right-wing dark arts, attracting a motley crew of white supremacists and extremists eager to cultivate the precocious boy's interests. Under their tutelage, Miller developed a talent for twisting progressive rhetoric to his will—a skill the Trump administration has used to shape its most sadistic policies. Hatemonger is a must-read for those who want to understand how small minds steeped in extremist methods have amassed great power in the 21st century. A superbly reported and haunting American tragedy.” --Rachel Slade, author of the national bestseller Into the Raging Sea

“In Hatemonger, Jean Guerrero doesn’t just catalogue Stephen Miller’s scorched-earth campaign to relentlessly vilify and abuse migrants from the nucleus of American politics—she also shines a light on the casual radicalization of a life-long troll and his gleeful ascendance to the halls of power, revealing the insidious inner workings of modern-day white supremacy. A vital book for understanding the still-unfolding nightmare of nationalism and racism in the 21st century.”
--Francisco Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River

“An urgent story. Jean Guerrero writes with piercing clarity about one of the most powerful and elusive figures in America today.”

--Wil S. Hylton, author of Vanished

"A brilliant and necessary look into the making of the mastermind behind the worst of America's policies. Guerrero's deep dive into Stephen Miller was enlightening and terrifying all at once. Hatemonger is required reading to understand what we are truly up against in America."
--Julissa Arce, bestselling author of My (Underground) American Dream and Someone Like Me

JEAN GUERRERO
(b. March 31, 1988)

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Writer, Philosopher, Public Intellectual and Activist M. Gessen On Why We Must Not Misread the Complexity or Contradictions of the Results Of the Midterm Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:59:52 +0000

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/opinion/trump-era-blue-wave-democrats-midterms.html

Opinion

The Most Dangerous Way to Misread the Midterm Results

Credit: Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times

Listen · 5:31 minutes

by M. Gessen
November 6, 2028
New York Times

The air in this country has been easier to breathe since Tuesday’s election results started coming in. With majorities in both chambers of Congress, Democrats can now place limits on the Trump administration’s destructive powers. It would be foolhardy, however, to conclude that the Trump era is therefore necessarily coming to an end.

In midterm elections, voters express their dissatisfaction with the present. In presidential elections, on the other hand, people vote based on their hopes and fears for the future. The experience of other countries shows that autocratic leaders are peculiarly difficult to unseat, and not just because they have a tendency to undermine the voting process itself. The more instability voters live with — the higher the gas prices, the more tenuous their access to health care, the more palpable the threat of war — the stronger the autocrats’ appeal, even when it was their policies that caused the instability.

I have just returned from Israel, where an unpopular autocrat’s party won the largest number of votes even though the worst security failure in the nation’s history took place on his watch, even though he has dragged his country into one forever war and started several others, even though he is under investigation for corruption. How did this happen?

Fact is, it happens all the time. Viktor Orban, who led Hungary for a total of 20 years, enriched his family and his cronies while his country grew poorer than its European neighbors and many of its citizens lost access to decent health care and education. As successive elections approached, his party’s popularity seemed to falter. And yet, he kept winning — in 2014, 2018, 2022.

Even Vladimir Putin fits this pattern. These days, criticizing him can be deadly, but back when Russians could still express their opinions, they consistently gave Putin poor marks for several aspects of his job performance. They said he had not improved their economic well-being or done a good job ending the very long war in Chechnya, and they held him responsible for the self-dealing and corruption among the Kremlin elite. And yet, even when they had a semblance of choice, most Russians voted for him.

This is a pattern, not a coincidence. Many people — generally speaking, majorities — vote for ineffective, corrupt, warmongering autocrats not in spite of the hardships and dangers that their governments impose but because of them.

Autocrats rise to power in times of fear and dislocation. They get elected on promises of stability and security. Most of the time, they also promise a return to a glorious imaginary past, when the world felt safe and you didn’t feel poor. They never deliver. Instead of stability, they bring chaos, confusion and often war.

Rather than expose the autocrat as a liar, however, the instability affirms the worldview that brought him to power in the first place. The world, it seems, really is terrifying. Life really is hard and getting harder. We really are on the verge of catastrophe. Just weeks before the Israeli election, an apparent terrorist came within seconds of crashing an airplane full of Israelis — another catastrophic security failure on Netanyahu’s watch. Two days ahead of the vote, he shared an artificial-intelligence-generated image of a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, warning that “the State of Israel is in real and tangible existential danger.” You’d think the airplane incident and the danger warning would work against the sitting prime minister, who has instigated two wars with Iran, but Netanyahu’s message is I alone stand between you and annihilation. A critical number of people appear to believe this.

I don’t know if every language in the world has this expression, but English, Russian and Hungarian have an identical idiom: “Don’t change horses midstream.” The Hebrew equivalent is “Don’t change horses while climbing a hill.” The harder life gets, the more this message resonates. And the autocrat continues feeding the people the same old promise: We just need to cross the waters and climb the hill, and then we will reach stability. Hunker down and vote for me again.

The classic mistake the opposition to such leaders makes is to affirm the terrifying worldview but argue for a more measured, reasonable solution. This is what much of the anti-Netanyahu opposition did, what the Hungarian opposition used to do. Democratic politicians in the United States do it, too, when they agree with Trump that immigration is a gigantic security problem — and merely offer less extreme solutions. Or when they agree with Republicans that “wokeness,” of all things, is an urgent problem America needs to address. But if the autocrat is essentially right in his analysis, what is the argument for voting for someone else?

By now, we know what does work. We saw it in Hungary. We saw it in New York when Zohran Mamdani came out of nowhere to wipe the floor with the sitting mayor and the former governor. We saw it in midterm campaigns across the country, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Texas, in James Talarico’s winning campaign for the Senate and Gina Hinojosa’s for the governorship. What works is opposing the autocratic worldview itself. It’s asserting that while life really is hard and the world really can be scary, we need not live in fear and isolation. Rather than conjuring an imaginary past, it’s promising an achievable future. Rather than setting people against one another, it’s helping them to find common ground. Rather than asking voters to hunker down and trust the leader to guide us toward stability that will never arrive, it’s inviting them to create a better world right now, together.

The Always On Time and Truly Ready to Rumble Danielle Moodie, one of the most dynamic and effective progressive organizers, journalists, FIGHTERS, and public intellectuals in the country today tells us what we NEED to hear and once again ACT ON. See hear and share the video below and PASS THE WORD...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 13:58:39 +0000

VIDEO:
https://youtube.com/shorts/qbehjORI8RE?si=2sfBJ24DVx5em7-O

The always on time and truly ready to rumble Danielle Moodie, one of the most dynamic and effective progressive organizers, journalists, and public intellectuals in the country today tells us what we NEED to hear and once again ACT ON. Listen and Learn as Ms. DM throws it all down as usual for all of us…So let's join her, kick ass, and take names and like ALWAYS: Pass the Word...

A Very Important And Necessary Message From Sentor Bernie Sanders. We All MUST ACT on Everything He's Putting Forth Here And More. There is No More Time To Hesitate Or Simply Fail Out of Fear, Cynicism, Or Hubris. Or complacency. This Is In Fact the Greatest Chance We Have To Positively Change The Fundamental Direction Of the Country Since The 1960s. So Let's Follow Bernie's Lead and Do It. And Remember: PASS THE WORD...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 13:35:37 +0000

Sisters and brothers -

Tuesday was an extraordinary day for the United States. All across the country the American people made it clear that status quo politics and status quo policies were no longer acceptable. They stood up and demanded, in record breaking numbers, REAL change. And it was not just the election results. According to a recent AP poll, 80 percent of registered voters want either “complete and total upheaval” or “substantial change” in how this country is run - including 97 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of independents and 58 percent of Republicans.

Bottom line: the new Democratic majority must deliver. No more empty rhetoric. No more telling us how terrible Trump and the Republicans are. No more excuses. We now have the votes to pass legislation that will demonstrably improve the lives of millions of working families. And that’s what we must do.

What does that mean?

HEALTH CARE: In America today, our healthcare system is broken, dysfunctional, and wildly expensive. We spend twice as much per person on healthcare as other major countries. Yet more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, over half a million people go bankrupt each year because of medical debt, and we pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. Tragically, more than 60,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year because they cannot afford medical care.

Healthcare must be considered as a human right for all, not a privilege. That means passing Medicare for All, legislation now supported by a record 66 percent of the American people. In the first year of a four year transition process, Democrats must lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing, and guarantee universal healthcare coverage for every child from birth through age 19.

INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY: In America today, income and wealth inequality have reached unprecedented levels. The top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 93 percent. One man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53 percent of American households.

Democrats cannot ignore this grotesque inequality. That means a Democratic Congress must pass a wealth tax on billionaires, now supported by 61% of Americans. At a time when billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers or nurses, we must enact a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires to provide every working-class family of four with a $12,000 direct payment, build 7 million units of affordable housing, make public colleges and universities tuition-free, establish free childcare for 13 million children and greatly improve public education.

RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE: In America today, while the rich get richer, 60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck, and millions work for inadequate wages. That must change. The $7.25 federal minimum wage is a starvation wage. Democrats must raise it to a living wage of at least $20 an hour and make it easier for workers to form unions by passing the PRO Act. A job must lift people out of poverty, not keep them in it.

PROTECTING SENIORS: In America today, one-third of our seniors are struggling economically, and more than 20 percent are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year. Nearly half of older Americans have no retirement savings and no idea how they will retire with dignity. Meanwhile, Elon Musk pays the same amount into Social Security as someone earning $184,600 a year.

That is obviously absurd. By applying the Social Security payroll tax to all income above $250,000, including capital gains and dividends, we can increase benefits by $2,400 a year, lift millions of seniors out of poverty and keep Social Security solvent for generations - without raising taxes on the bottom 91 percent of Americans. We must also restore the traditional pension plans corporate America took away so that every worker can count on a guaranteed income in retirement.

AI AND ROBOTICS: In America today, Big Tech oligarchs are spending trillions of dollars on artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics with virtually no regulation. This revolutionary technology will transform the lives of every man, woman and child in America and around the world.

Left unchecked, AI and robotics will destroy tens of millions of jobs, devastate our children's mental health, eviscerate our privacy, drive up electricity rates and strain water supplies. If AI becomes smarter than human beings, and escapes human control, it will pose an existential threat to the very existence of humanity.

We cannot allow a handful of Big Tech oligarchs to become even richer and more powerful by ramming this dangerous technology down our throats. Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers which is now supported by 63% of Americans, pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.

CLIMATE CHANGE: The planet is becoming warmer and warmer. Tens of thousands have died in the last year from heat waves, and we are seeing unprecedented extreme weather disturbances including massive forest fires. If we don’t act boldly, the future will only become worse. Democrats must create millions of good paying jobs moving our energy systems away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

MILITARY SPENDING: Let’s be clear. The war in Vietnam was based on a lie. The war in Iraq was based on a lie. The current war in Iran is based on a lie. Democrats need to take a very hard look at the very foundation of American foreign policy and the outrageous amount of money we spend on the military.

In America today, we spend more on the military than the next six countries combined. Despite massive waste, fraud and abuse, the Pentagon has repeatedly failed independent audits and cannot account for trillions of dollars in spending. Adding insult to injury, Trump dragged us into an illegal war in Iran that could cost another trillion dollars.

We must end this disastrous war, cut off all funding for the genocidal government in Israel and substantially reduce military spending.

ICE AND IMMIGRATION: As most Americans understand, since Trump took office ICE agents have shot American citizens in cold blood, have broken down doors to arrest people and sent 5-year-old children to detention centers. These actions are not only immoral and disgraceful. They are unconstitutional and economically counterproductive.

Democrats must immediately rescind the $75 billion Republicans gave Trump to fund his ICE domestic army. Instead of ICE Agents terrorizing communities throughout the country we must finally move to comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship for the undocumented.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM: Elon Musk and his billionaire friends have poured a record-breaking $2 billion into the recent elections. That is absurd. The American people, in overwhelming numbers, want Congress to overturn Citizens United and abolish super PACs. Democracy must mean one person, one vote — not billionaires buying elections.

Let's be clear. While wealthy campaign contributors and establishment politicians may disagree, none of the policies I have just discussed are “radical.” They are now mainstream concepts supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people.

At this extraordinary moment in American history, we must restore faith in democracy. And the way we do that is by actually delivering for working families, allowing every man, woman, and child in this country to see that they have a government that works for them, and not just the 1%.

In the last year we have come a long way. Now, let’s finish the job.

In Solidarity,

Bernie

LONG LIVE MEHDI HASSAN!--"HE WON!" SO..."CRY MORE"--SEE VIDEO BELOW. And Once Again Congratulations Abdul...Welcome to the U.S. Senate...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:36:14 +0000

https://youtube.com/shorts/T4DxXscSqVw?si=Cu4MeFJyBmJwM0Dh

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Elevation of the Notorious Fascist Advisor Stephen Miller To the Position of Chief of Staff in the White House Is a Loud and Malevolently Direct Signal To This Country That the Criminally Corrupt and Deadly Trump/GOP/MAGA Regime Is Dangerously Intent On Continuing Imposing Its Will on This Society and Its Democracy Regardless of the Results Of The Midterm Elections Which Overwhelmingly Repudiated And Soundly Rejected Its Despicable Authority

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 11:47:01 +0000

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/06/us/trump-miller-wiles-chief-of-staff

Trump Elevates Stephen Miller, a Fiery Hard-Liner, to Chief of Staff

The promotion of Mr. Miller, who has led the administration’s immigration crackdown, signals a doubling down by the president on policies that voters decisively rejected in the midterm elections.

November 6, 2026
New York Times

Stephen Miller with President Trump in the Oval Office in August. Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Latest
Pinned

Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan and Tyler Pager

Here’s the latest:

President Trump is elevating Stephen Miller, his powerful domestic policy adviser, to be his next chief of staff in the wake of shattering Republican losses in the midterm elections. The decision to replace Susie Wiles, set to take effect on Monday, will fundamentally shift the circle of advisers around the president.

Mr. Miller, a deeply ideological Trump loyalist, has been the architect of some of the most polarizing domestic policies in Mr. Trump’s second term. His promotion signals an aggressive doubling-down by Mr. Trump days after voters delivered a decisive rebuke of his handling of a range of issues, including the economy, the war with Iran and the aggressive deportation campaign directed by Mr. Miller.

The Republican wipeout has inflamed tensions within the administration, as officials brace for congressional investigations by Democrats and further turnover in the West Wing and the cabinet. Mr. Miller’s pitch for the job as the gatekeeper to the president, according to people who heard it, was that Mr. Trump needed to wind down the Iran war, a conflict that the president’s core supporters viewed as a betrayal.

People familiar with Mr. Miller’s views say he is also likely to steer the president away from his early instinct after Tuesday’s losses to seek deals with Democrats. That could involve leaning even more into culture war issues, such as hard-line immigration enforcement and efforts to target diversity initiatives.

Democrats immediately criticized the decision, and Mr. Miller. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat who is poised to be the next House speaker, called Mr. Miller “a dangerous xenophobe” who should have been fired instead. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said that handing Mr. Miller an even more powerful role showed that Mr. Trump had “learned nothing” from Republicans’ losses on Election Day.

Ms. Wiles, who said Friday would be her last day, is the highest-ranking White House official to leave in the wake of the midterm elections, which cost Republican majorities in the House and Senate. The first woman to hold the top staff job in the West Wing, she helped steer Mr. Trump to his election victory in 2024 but now joins a recent exodus of high-profile women from the administration in his second term.

Here’s what else to know:

Miller’s move: For weeks, Mr. Miller had been making known his interest in the job if Ms. Wiles left, and Mr. Trump had been asking people privately in recent days what they thought about him for the job.

Loyal ally: Mr. Miller, 41, has worked for President Trump since his first presidential campaign, served all four years in the White House during the president’s first term and has amassed immense power since Mr. Trump retook office.

Internal criticism: Before the departure of Ms. Wiles was announced on Friday, a former Trump health official, Calley Means, accused her of bowing to “unrelenting” pressure from industry lobbyists while prioritizing political fund-raising over Americans’ health.

Read more ›

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/us/politics/susie-wiles-chief-of-staff-trump.html

In Elevating Stephen Miller, Trump Doubles Down on Hard-Line Agenda

The new White House chief of staff is responsible for some of the most provocative policies of President Trump’s second term, as well as an aggressive approach to executive power.

Listen · 8:13 minutes

VIDEO:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000011269719/trump-stephen-miller-chief-of-staff.html?smid=url-share

Stephen Miller has replaced Susie Wiles as President Trump’s White House chief of staff. Miller is the hard-line policy adviser responsible for many of Trump’s most aggressive immigration policies. Credit: Alex Kent/The New York Times

by Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan and Tyler Pager
November 6, 2026
New York Times

In the initial days after the staggering rebuke Republicans suffered in Tuesday’s midterm elections, President Trump appeared subdued — almost conciliatory.

He said he would work with Democrats, claiming as he has over the years that he could forge a deal with them on immigration, perhaps the most polarizing domestic issue of his second term.

But near the week’s end, instead of ceding to the clear evidence of voter displeasure, Mr. Trump pivoted to a familiar move: more MAGA.

On Friday, the president ousted his onetime close adviser, Susie Wiles, from the role of White House chief of staff, replacing her with Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff. More than any other top adviser, Mr. Miller encouraged an aggressive flexing of executive power when Mr. Trump returned to office.

Mr. Miller has been the driver of the president’s most muscular actions, including the use of increasingly hostile tactics to capture immigrants across the country and the bombing of small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that he and Mr. Trump declared constituted a foreign invasion.

The president’s choice sent a clear signal about the posture he intends to strike in his final two years in office and how little he intends to alter his approach in response to the most decisive political rout in half a century. He also put on center stage a figure who had already been a galvanizing target for Democrats intent on using their new powers in Congress to check the administration.

In a social media post, Mr. Miller praised Mr. Trump as “the most transformative political leader” in U.S. history, saying that he had “single-handedly saved America from those who would destroy it.”

“The mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our president and defend this magnificent Republic,” he added.

People close to Mr. Miller said he had shown no interest in compromising with congressional Democrats and was ready for a fight over subpoenas and investigations that are expected to emanate from the Hill. His top priority, they said, is rebuilding the fractured MAGA coalition and pursuing policies that will energize the voters who elected Mr. Trump in 2024.

“Stephen is and always has been the eternal flame of the MAGA movement — putting the president’s words and policy into action,” Hunter Morgen, who worked as a deputy to Mr. Miller during the president’s first term and is now a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, wrote in a text message.

While Ms. Wiles made clear she did not consider her job to be protecting the country from the president, as some of his first-term senior aides did, Mr. Miller is far more willing than she ever was to push legal boundaries.

He knows how the levers of government function. He is one of two top West Wing staff members who were part of the first administration when the House majority flipped in 2018, prompting a blitz of subpoenas from Congress.

Mr. Miller spent the years between Mr. Trump’s two terms recruiting a team that would help him put in place a sweeping agenda once back in power. Today, he has allies among the lawyers in key agencies across the executive branch, as well as a running dialogue with Attorney General Todd Blanche and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth celebrated Mr. Miller’s promotion with several posts on social media. “Huge CONGRATS,” he wrote, calling Mr. Miller “a true patriot and America First fighter.” He followed that with a post that declared: “Patriots in control,” and a subsequent one that included a picture of himself and Mr. Miller.

Still, Mr. Miller’s allies have indicated that he understands the Iran war has been a political disaster, and believes the president needs to get back to policies that are popular with the MAGA base.

While Ms. Wiles may be staying in Mr. Trump’s orbit by moving to the president’s outside political operation in a still undefined role, her departure and the ascent of Mr. Miller will fundamentally shift the circle of advisers around the president as the White House absorbs the shock of the midterm elections.

“I wanted to make a change,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Florida. Ms. Wiles did a “great job,” he said, but added: “Sometimes in life, you have to make moves.”

Asked what he wanted Mr. Miller to do differently than Ms. Wiles, who he had previously claimed wasn’t going anywhere, the president said, “Just run things well.”

Ms. Wiles, the first woman to hold the top staff job in the West Wing, played a central role in President Trump’s return to power. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Trump, in his private conversations as well as his public remarks, has not accepted blame for the election results.

Instead, he repeatedly blasted Ms. Wiles and his other political advisers, insisting he was poorly served in the lead-up to the midterms. He criticized Ms. Wiles in front of several people at an East Room election watch party Tuesday night, according to people with knowledge of the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Mr. Trump has also been privately critical of James Blair, Ms. Wiles’s ally, who ran the president’s outside political operation, people with knowledge of the comments said.

Mr. Trump publicly expressed his confidence in Ms. Wiles in recent months. But behind the scenes, there were signs that her standing with the president was shaky, according to officials with knowledge of the dynamics.

He has berated Ms. Wiles in front of other staff members about his frustrations that his administration has not moved faster to find people he brands as “leakers,” as well as the stalled prosecutions of his perceived political enemies, they said. In front of several advisers, he would accuse her of being among the leakers.

Mr. Trump began cutting Ms. Wiles out of hiring decisions, including when he chose an inexperienced television pundit to replace the departing press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

Allies of Ms. Wiles described her as prepared to leave her role, and uninterested in fighting to stay in it. Her supporters saw the criticism of her as an effort to assign blame for a political and policy strategy largely driven by Mr. Trump himself. And they faulted her detractors inside and outside the administration for spreading information meant to undercut her with Mr. Trump, including stories about her daughter’s lobbying work.

In her own statement posted on social media, Ms. Wiles described working for Mr. Trump in the White House as the “honor of a lifetime.”

“While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will,” she added.

Ms. Wiles, the first woman to hold the top staff job in the West Wing, helped steer Mr. Trump to his election victory in 2024, playing a central role in his return to power four years after his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2026. Ms. Wiles stayed in her role as she started treatment and recently announced that she was cancer free.

Ms. Wiles came into the job having established a rapport with Mr. Trump and a level of trust that none of his four first-term chiefs of staff had enjoyed.

She tried to influence his decisions on core issues including his immigration crackdown, even if only on the margins, according to people with knowledge of her role. She pushed for the appointments of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and both have been seen by many outside the government as stabilizing figures.

But Mr. Trump has relied primarily on his own instincts this term, and few advisers have engaged him in the kind of direct confrontations over policy that characterized his first administration.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 7, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Miller Promoted To Top Trump Aide In Staff Shakeup

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/07/trump-stephen-miller-midterms

Donald Trump
Analysis

Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller a middle finger to millions of voters

David Smith in Washington

Architect of Trump’s far-right immigration agenda is now most powerful unelected figure in government – it suggests White House is moving to a war footing

Saturday 7 November 2026
The Guardian

PHOTO: Stephen Miller outside the White House in October. Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Reuters

Donald Trump just gave the middle finger to millions of American voters.

Any other president who suffered the kind of drubbing at the polls that Trump did this week might have felt at least a sliver of humility – and perhaps even an obligation to work with the new opposition in Congress.

But not for the first time in his political career, Trump veered in the opposite direction. On Friday he made Stephen Miller, condemned by Democrats and civil rights groups as a white nationalist, one of the most powerful unelected officials in Washington by naming him White House chief of staff.

What happens after the ‘blue wave’? Your questions on the US midterm election results answered

Read more

Miller is the architect of Trump’s far-right, nativist immigration agenda. He is, therefore, arguably the architect of the blue wave that engulfed Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections as voters – including many Latinos – expressed their disgust. Yet instead of firing Miller, Trump promoted him.

It was a declaration of war. Miller, 41, is a longtime proponent of the presidential authority that Trump has spent the past two years expanding at the expense of Congress. In 2017 he declared: “The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Now Republicans’ catastrophic defeat is likely to leave Trump more reliant on unilateral executive action than ever to advance his domestic agenda.

“In a lot of ways Stephen Miller has been the id to Trump’s authoritarian impulses and machinations,” Kurt Bardella, an adviser to Democrats in Texas, said. “I have to imagine that anointing this person chief of staff – the most powerful non-elected position in all of government – is a signal that they intend to double down on that authoritarianism.

“You’re going to see a lot of executive orders, unilateral action and stress testing of the checks and balances system continue for the final two years of his presidency.”

Trump’s second term has presented a concerted effort to dismantle those checks and balances that have traditionally constrained the occupant of the White House. He has signed 292 executive orders in less than two years, more than in his entire first term and a record pace for a modern presidency.

He has bypassed Congress on military action and tariffs, withheld congressionally approved spending, deployed the National Guard against the will of state authorities, politicised the justice department, punished critics and challenged judicial independence. Congress, dominated by Republicans reluctant to confront him, offered little resistance.

But this week’s landslide, the biggest in a midterm election since Watergate, puts Democrats back in charge of the House of Representatives and Senate. That the elections were free and fair, and that Trump did not dispute the result, was itself a victory for democracy.

Democrats will now seek to rein in the president and block his legislative agenda, bringing them into direct conflict with Miller, who was already a hugely powerful deputy chief of staff at the White House and now takes over from Susie Wiles.

Miller has been a champion of the Iran war and prominent voice on many of the president’s other priorities, including countering diversity initiatives and targeting transgender rights. He is reportedly one of a small group of White House staffers who approve all executive orders.

He is best known for driving the ‌immigration crackdown in Trump’s second term, setting ‌a target of 3,000 arrests per day – far above levels under previous administrations. He has pushed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target anybody in ‌the country illegally, not just those with criminal records.

There are limits on what Democrats can do to stop the immigration drive since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included major increases for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that will keep it funded for the rest of Trump’s term.

Even so, they will now chair House committees with the ability to launch investigations, issue subpoenas and hold high profile hearings. Along with ICE, they might scrutinise Jeffrey Epstein files and the department of government efficiency (Doge). They have also vowed to look at how Trump and his family have become wealthier since he returned to office.

The appointment of the pugnacious Miller as Trump’s consigliere suggests that the White House is moving to a war footing. He is likely to marshal a team of lawyers and attack Democrats by accusing them of weaponising the deep state against the president. As a frequent guest on the conservative Fox News network, he will also wage war in the court of public opinion.

“Trump’s decision to elevate Stephen Miller means that he’s spoiling for a fight with Democrats and they’re going to just rely on executive action to try and push their agenda through,” said David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, who studies the American presidency and White House staffing.

Cohen added: “It’s a White House that doesn’t seek out cooperation with Congress. It’s their way or the highway, essentially, and it’s possible Stephen Miller is relishing this because he’s a believer in the unitary presidency and executive presidential action and he views this as a way where he can expand the powers of the presidency.”

Trump is not the first president to seek to consolidate authority. Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s 1973 book The Imperial Presidency warned that an accumulation of presidential power threatened the constitutional separation of powers.

In 1989 the American Enterprise Institute thinktank published The Fettered Presidency, a counterpoint arguing that legal and congressional constraints had unduly weakened the executive. It helped inspire a modern conservative drive to expand presidential authority, which accelerated under George W Bush and was subsequently exploited by Barack Obama as congressional gridlock made legislating increasingly difficult.

The combination of Trump and Miller, however, takes the concept of an American Caesar to a new extreme – and flies in the face of the verdict delivered by the electorate on Tuesday.

“It’s a step that I find hard to fathom except as the president giving the middle finger to the American public,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington.

“In the same way that he ransacked the state of Texas for the very worst senatorial nominee imaginable, now he’s done the same thing with the chief of staff position. This is simply outrageous.”

Explore more on these topics

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FASCIST AMERICA 2026: In The Following Three (3) Pivotal Articles Here Are Two (2) Crucial, Groundbreaking, and Absolutely Significant Reasons To Pay Very Close Attention To Where American Politics Is And Where It Is Going Now And In The Future--And For Two Entirely Opposite Reasons

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 18:46:16 +0000

Black voters turned out at their highest rate since 2008 and delivered decisive margins for Democrats, helping elect the first Black woman governor (Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia) and the first Muslim U.S. senator (Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan), while also boosting Democratic Senate candidates in Texas and Mississippi. Roughly nine in 10 Black voters backed Democratic House candidates, according to AP polling, underscoring their pivotal role in shaping the 2026 midterm outcomes.

https://www.axios.com/2026/11/05/black-voters-democrats-2026-midterms-trump

Politics & Policy

Black voters deliver a GOP reckoning
by Russell Contreras
November 5, 2026
AXIOS

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Keisha Lance Bottoms (2nd R) appears onstage during her election night watch party in Atlanta. Bottoms defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson to become the nation's first Black woman elected governor. Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images

Why it matters: Democrats feared the Supreme Court's decision weakening the Voting Rights Act would threaten their political future in the South. Instead, Black voters helped deliver historic Democratic victories in Texas and Georgia, with a potential upset brewing in Mississippi.

By the numbers: Roughly nine in 10 Black voters backed Democratic House candidates Tuesday, according to the AP Voter Poll.

Only about one in 10 Black men backed Republicans.

For context, a separate 2024 national House exit poll found Black voters favored Democrats 84%–14%. Black men split 75%–24%, while Black women backed Democrats 90%–8%.

State of play: Two Democrats who faced questions about their support among Black voters won crucial Senate races.

Michigan: Progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated Republican Mike Rogers, becoming the nation's first Muslim senator. A late-October poll showed El-Sayed drawing 87% support among likely Black voters.

Texas: Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton after courting Black voters who overwhelmingly backed Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary. An August Texas Southern University poll showed Talarico leading Paxton 79%–12% among likely Black voters.

Zoom in: Talarico built commanding margins in Harris County, home to Houston, and Dallas County, both home to large Black electorates, according to AP county-level returns.

Zoom out: Black voters helped elect former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first Black woman governor in U.S. history.

About nine in 10 Black men voted for Bottoms, compared with roughly three-quarters who supported Kamala Harris in Georgia in 2024, according to the AP Voter Poll. Black women's support remained around 90%.

In majority-Black Clayton County, Bottoms received nearly 86,000 votes — about 13,600 more than Democrat Stacey Abrams received in the 2022 governor's race, AP reported.

In Mississippi's U.S. Senate election, Democrat Scott Colom built commanding leads over Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in heavily Black Hinds County, home to Jackson, and majority-Black Claiborne and Jefferson counties, according to unofficial overnight returns.

Colom held a narrow statewide lead Thursday morning, with thousands of ballots outstanding and the race still uncalled.

The intrigue: Florida Republican Byron Donalds became the state's first Black governor, but most Black voters backed Democrat David Jolly.

About one-quarter of Black men voted for Donalds, compared with just one in 10 Black women, according to the AP Voter Poll.

Between the lines: Election returns don't prove a nationwide surge in Black turnout or establish that anger over civil rights rollbacks motivated voters. But early voting offered signs of heightened Black participation in Georgia.

Black voters accounted for 32.4% of Georgia's early ballots, up from 30.2% in 2022, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis. The figures don't establish whether the overall Black turnout rate increased.

Voting rights concerns may also have motivated some Black voters.

A Democratic-aligned August Data for Progress survey in Mississippi found 43% of Black voters more enthusiastic than usual about the midterms, compared with 31% of white voters.

Another 53% of Black voters said politicians making voting harder, gerrymandering and spreading false election claims made participation feel more important.

Worth noting: Yolanda Renee King, the 18-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., cast her first ballot Tuesday in Atlanta.

The bottom line: Democrats needed Black voters to win.

Tuesday's results suggest they held together a coalition that looked vulnerable after 2024 — potentially giving Black voters more leverage heading into 2028.

https://jointcenter.org/black-representation-in-the-2026-midterm-elections/

Black Representation in the 2026 Midterm Elections

Joint Center

November 4, 2026
Listen

The 2026 Midterm Elections produced several historic wins, including gains in Black representation in gubernatorial offices and the Senate. At the same time, Black representation may decrease in the House. Our overview is below.

This will be updated as races are called. The most recent update happened at 12:05 pm ET on Nov. 6, 2026.

120th Congress: 60 Black members of Congress so far, down from 65. That’s 58 voting House members and 6 to 7 senators. Both totals leave out the two non-voting delegates.

Senate: 6 to 7, which is a record number of Black representation in the Senate, however, this would only make the Senate 6% to 7% African American, while African Americans are about 14% of the population.

Elected Tuesday: Senator-elect Juliana Stratton (D-IL), the only new member, and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), re-elected.

Not up this year: Senators Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), and Tim Scott (R-SC).

Black senators go from 5 to 6, but the results of the Mississippi Senate race are still underway, so the total of Black Senators could rise to 7 if Scott Colom (D) wins.

House: 58 voting members, down from 61.

Starting point (119th Congress): 58 Black lawmakers in total, including 2 delegates. That’s 5 senators and 61 voting House members.

Seats moving to non-Black members (−8):

All 4 Black House Republicans: Congressmen Byron Donalds (R-FL), Wesley Hunt (R-TX), and John James (R-MI) ran for higher office, and Congressman Burgess Owens (R-UT) seat was redrawn.

Al Green (D-TX), whose districts were redrawn. Leticia Gutierrez won the seat.

Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), who retired. Adam Hamawy (D-NJ) won the seat.

Cleo Fields (D-LA). That seat won’t be decided until Dec. 12, but the district is now only about one-quarter Black.

New seats won by Black candidates (+5):

Melat Kiros (D-CO), the first Black woman Colorado has sent to Congress.

Adrian Boafo (D-MD), who replaces Steny Hoyer (D).

Lakesha Womack (D-NC)
Cyril Jefferson (D-NC)
Donavan McKinney (D-MI)

Black successors to departing Black members (no net change):

Donna Miller (D-IL)

La Shawn Ford (D-IL)

Jasmine Clark (D-GA)

Oliver Gilbert (D-FL)

Frederick Haynes III (D-TX)

Chris Rabb (D-PA)
Colin Allred (D-TX)
Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-NY)

Held despite redrawn maps: Shomari Figures (AL-02) and Don Davis (NC-01).

Net: About 61 − 8 + 5 = 58 voting House members, a loss of about 3. All four Black Republicans left, while Black Democrats gained one seat from the record high representation of the 119th Congress in 2025.

Governor Races:

Five Black governors were elected Tuesday. That’s more than double the number ever elected in U.S. history, from three to seven. Before this election, no two elected Black governors had served at the same time. In January, five will.

Lost: Jermaine Johnson (D-SC), John James (R-MI), Lisa Demuth (R-MN), and Fred Love (D-AR). This makes 5 of 9 Black major-party nominees who won.

In history

Ever elected: 7. Before Tuesday, there were three: Governors Doug Wilder (D-VA, 1989), Deval Patrick (D-MA, 2006), and Wes Moore (D-MD, 2022). Bottoms, Donalds, Ford, and Crowley bring it to seven.

Ever served: 9. Two Black governors took office without being elected: P.B.S. Pinchback (LA, 1872-73) and David Paterson (D-NY, 2008-10).

Joint Center

Array

Tagged Policy Analysis & Commentary, Policy Analysis and Commentary

Eddie Glaude, Jr. on the grave necessity of the Democratic Party winners of midterm elections in Congress and State Governor races and Local legislatures to fight for major reforms and clear alternatives to the corruption, cruelty, and incompetence of reactionary governments throughout the country as well as the fascist federal administration in Washington D.C.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 08:29:17 +0000

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.

VIDEO:

https://www.anativeson.org/p/weekly-wrap-up-november-6-2026

Weekly Wrap Up - November 6, 2026

Eddie

12 hours ago

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie looks at the historic midterm results and credits record Black and Latino turnout, achieved without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act after *Louisiana v. Callais*, with defeating gerrymandered maps and electing a series of firsts, from Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia to the first Latina governor in Texas, Gina Hinojosa. He warns that “elections are not absolution”: treating the vote as a moral cleansing risks a national ritual of forgetting that leaves untouched the selfishness, greed, and hatred that brought Trumpism to power. Eddie argues that Democrats should not simply return to the pre-Trump status quo but reframe American politics around a transformative agenda for the public good, including Medicare for All, a living wage, and housing, in service of a thriving multiracial democracy.

A Native Son is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. on X: "Buckle up. Trump and MAGA have their perfect theater. For them, the existential threat is now in full view."

https://t.co/FvPccGYgNJ

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/06/susie-wiles-stephen-miller-trump-chief-of-staff-01154493

Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff

“I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job!” Trump said.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles look on during the G7 Summit at the Pomeroy Kananaskis Mountain Lodge in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16, 2025. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

by Megan Messerly and Sophia Cai
11/06/2026
POLITICO

President Donald Trump announced in a Truth Social post Friday that longtime aide Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, elevating the immigration hardliner to one of the most important roles in the White House.

Trump said in the post that Wiles had “done an outstanding job” and would be moving to his political operation. He later told reporters that Miller “gets it very good politically, and he’s a very [good] guy. He’ll do a great job. Great manager.”

The surprise move came just days after Republicans faced a humiliating midterms defeat at the hands of Democrats, who flipped control of the House and Senate and made significant inroads into some deep red states, including Texas.

Asked for comment about Wiles’ departure, the White House referred to Trump’s remarks earlier Friday before reporters. When asked why he made the change, Trump said Wiles has done a “great job. But I just wanted to make” a change.

Miller, who accompanied Trump on Marine One departing the White House earlier Friday, in a post on X praised the president and thanked Wiles while striking a familiar combative tone.

“The mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President,” he posted.

A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, said Wiles likely wouldn’t have been ousted if Republicans had done much better on Tuesday night, but added “it’s important to get some fresh blood” into the White House.

“I know for a fact that the president was frustrated that Susie acted as a restraining bull,” said another person familiar with the relationship between Wiles and the president.

While some Democrats predictably reacted with derision — Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries Friday called Miller a “a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist” — some Republicans, GOP lobbyists and former officials praised Miller for being a tough leader who could help fight Democrats’ oversight in the next Congress.

“I would put Stephen as a war-time general. I’m not going to say a very good one,” said a former Trump official who worked with Miller, granted anonymity to discuss the internal moves. “You got to be ready for combat.”

Miller referred comment to the White House.

Wiles, 69, has been one of the president’s closest and most trusted political advisers, helping spearhead his political comeback after his 2020 election defeat and serving as co-manager of his successful 2024 presidential campaign, alongside GOP operative Chris LaCivita.

A longtime Republican with significant roots in Florida politics, Wiles became the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff when Trump returned to office in January 2025.

Under her purview, the White House has been far steadier than it was during his first term, when the president cycled through four chiefs of staff amid frequent infighting and staff turnover. But it hasn’t been turmoil-free. This year the president’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, attorney general and Labor secretary have all exited the administration amid scandal or unrest over how they ran their agencies.

Wiles’ departure comes amid widespread recriminations over Republicans’ blistering defeat at the polls on Tuesday night, which led to calls for her resignation.

Wiles was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in March but continued to serve as chief of staff while undergoing treatment. In September, she announced she was cancer-free.

Wiles, in a post on X, said that serving Trump has “been the honor of a lifetime.”

“More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will,” she said.

Some Republicans blamed Tuesday’s massive midterm loss on Miller, who has served as the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, whose enforcement tactics have been deeply unpopular. In border states, especially Texas and Arizona, Hispanic voters turned out for Democrats and helped drive Republican defeats.

Miller, 41, got his start in Washington working for conservative Republican members of Congress after graduating in 2007 from Duke University, where he was involved in campus conservative activism. He started working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in 2009 and was involved in the conservative senator’s opposition to a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013 that passed the Senate but died in the House.

Miller joined Trump’s first presidential campaign as a policy adviser and speechwriter, where he helped shape Trump’s immigration platform. After Trump’s victory, he moved into the administration and helped develop several of the first Trump term’s high-profile immigration policies, including the family-separation border policy and the 2017 travel ban targeting several predominantly Muslim countries.

He returned to the White House with Trump in the second administration as the principal architect of the president’s immigration and border security directives.

Caroline Wren, a GOP operative, praised Miller as someone who could reinforce Trump’s America First agenda, especially in the face of Democratic opposition.

“The next two years are going to be a battle for the future of our country and I can’t think of any better wartime consigliere than Stephen Miller,” she said.

But two GOP lobbyists, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they expected the transition would make the White House less effective at engaging with K Street and Capitol HIll.

“Your chief of staff becomes the president’s voice and face in negotiating with Democrats, and I don’t think he has proven any ability to do that,” said one of the lobbyists. “His sensibilities aren’t the type that can have a reasonable discussion with Democrats on issues … and he’s such a lightning rod for most Democrats, particularly this progressive wing, that I find it difficult to believe that he’s going to be able to have kind of conversations to forge bipartisan agreement on any number of things.”

The first lobbyist added that Miller “has never been accessible to downtown either in the first term or now,” comparing the new chief to Wiles, a former lobbyist for K Street firm Ballard Partners who made it a point to maintain downtown relationships.

“This doesn’t make it seem like the White House is interested in working on getting a lot of bills that the president will be interested in signing to his desk,” added the second Republican lobbyist who is also a GOP donor.

Alex Gangitano, Jacob Wendler, Ben Johansen, Casey He and Elleiana Green contributed to this article.

Related Tags:

Donald Trump
Susie Wiles
Stephen Miller
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Conversation

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
@esglaude
Buckle up. Trump and MAGA have their perfect theater. For them, the existential threat is now in full view.

Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff
From politico.com
11:15 AM · Nov 6, 2026·
7,827
Views

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
@esglaude
Nov 6
Democrats must understand these people for who they are and act accordingly. An election does not mean absolution.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
@esglaude
Nov 6
Trump, Miller, and the loyalists will see the next two years as war. Democrats cannot respond with political calculation. This is a fight for what this country will be!

O Slark
@OSlark2000
Nov 6
Trump's lawlessness and corruption and the vile hatred in his administration will be unleashed like we have not yet seen. Trump now sees everyone - the entire country that didn't give him his way - as the enemy. It's going to get uglier.

Continue Reading…

Midterm Election Analysis

Trump’s Influence Wanes as Republicans Suffer Midterm Losses – The New York Times

Democrats Secure Historic Midterm Victories – Common Dreams

Exclusive: Democrats’ Memo on Voters of Color and the ‘Blue Tsunami’ – TIME

Voter Demographics and Impact

Black Voters Drive Democratic Success in the South – AP News

Gen Z Is Heading to Congress, and Melat Kiros Is Making History as Colorado’s First Black Congresswoman – TheGrio

Candidate Agendas & State Races

Elizabeth Warren Lays Out Democrats’ Midterm Agenda – Common Dreams

Live updates: Mississippi Senate race

– The Washington Post

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Renowned Journalist, Political historian, and Public Intellectual Jamelle Bouie Reminds Us That Fascism Never Goes Down Anywhere Without a Massive Fight And Even With The Absolutely Important and Necessary Wins In the Midterms two days ago the United States Is No Exception. So Stay Tuned. Stay Vigilant, and Make Sure You Go For the Jugular of Trump/GOP/MAGA Because Our Lives and the Very Future Of The Republic Depends On OurWell Organized and Essentially Mass-Based Success

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:45:48 +0000

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/04/opinion/trump-midterms-democracy-threats.html

Opinion

Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.

Credit: Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times

Listen · 6:47 minutes

by Jamelle Bouie
November 4, 2026
New York Times

There are two basic stories to tell about the 2026 midterm elections.

The first, obviously, is the political collapse of President Trump and the Republican Party in the wake of authoritarian repression, economic mismanagement and a failed war of choice. That story explains the results of Tuesday’s elections, in which Democrats swept to victory across the country in a total repudiation of the president’s vision for American life. In addition to Congress, Republicans lost state legislatures and governor’s mansions, losing power up and down the ballot in the most stark rejection of a political party since 2010.

Those results are so striking that the second story might go by the wayside — dismissed as immaterial to the bigger picture. But that would be a mistake, because the second story is ultimately the most important one.

The core of the problem is that Trump turned the federal government against American democracy in a relentless effort to challenge, subvert and undermine the nation’s election infrastructure. All in an effort to disrupt the conduct of free and fair elections and hold on to power in the face of popular discontent.

Trump has always rejected the idea that he could legitimately lose an election. In 2016, he insisted that illegal voting by noncitizens had given Hillary Clinton her winning margin in the popular vote. In 2020, he blamed fraud for his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden and then started a monthslong attempt to overturn the election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. There was, unsurprisingly no such complaint of fraud or illegal voting after the 2024 election, which he won. But that just proves the point.

Direct control of the election system was, along with mass deportations, border security, tariffs and an attack on civil society, a top priority for Trump at the start of his second term. In March of last year, claiming extraordinary authority over Congress and the states, Trump issued an executive order purporting to overhaul — and seize control of — federal elections. His decree would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, decertified voting machines used in dozens of states, penalized states that count timely ballots received after Election Day, opened voter files and registration lists to both the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and conditioned federal grants and awards on whether states had worked with the Department of Justice to prosecute election crimes.

The president’s order was, from top to bottom, a lawless exercise of executive authority and a blatant violation of both federal law and the Constitution, which delegates the power to run elections to the states, with the caveat that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.”

Following a lawsuit, a federal court enjoined the executive order and in a final decision issued later that year, the court permanently blocked the president’s attempt to take control of American elections.

But Trump is nothing if not persistent, and he continued to look for ways to commandeer the voting system. He pressured Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which would have codified his executive order into law. He pushed the Department of Justice to validate his election conspiracies. In January, the F.B.I. raided the election office of Fulton County, Ga., a frequent target of Trump’s claims of voter fraud. The Department of Justice made repeated attempts to try to get access to state voter files, ultimately losing each time. “Put simply,” as the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia put it in League of United Latin American Citizens et al. v. Executive Office of the President, “our Constitution does not allow the president to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”

And still, Trump was not deterred. In late March, he issued another executive order, this one aimed at the United States Postal Service, in which he ordered the service to determine who can vote by mail and deny ballots to anyone not deemed eligible. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of eligible voters.

The ultimate aim of this order was to undermine mail-in voting — a frequent bête noire of the president’s — and effectively block millions of eligible voters from casting their ballots. To try to compel compliance, Trump also ordered the attorney general to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who issue mail ballots to voters deemed ineligible by D.H.S.

As this order made its way through the courts, Trump administration officials also tried to put their thumb on the scale, threatening state and local election officials for not following the president’s dictates. In July, the Justice Department sent letters to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., threatening criminal prosecutions if election officials counted ballots cast by noncitizen voters. In a similar move, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin alleged that over 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in four states, a claim that rested on a flawed system for seeking out noncitizen voters. Analysis by independent groups as well as the states themselves has found that noncitizen voting is practically nonexistent.

In September, the Supreme Court blocked the president’s attempt to use the Postal Service to undermine mail voting. But still Trump pushed forward. In a set of last-ditch efforts to undermine the midterms, the Justice Department has tried to make hay of ballot stacking in Alaska, using reporting from The Times to argue that the Democratic Senate nominee, Mary Peltola, broke the law when her campaign worked to recruit an independent candidate, Dan Sullivan, who shares a name with Peltola’s Republican opponent (an accusation that Peltola denies). It has also tried to force California to segregate suspected noncitizen ballots from the rest of the pool. In both cases, courts have smacked down the administration for overstepping its authority.

Most Americans who voted had a normal Election Day. Some, often those in majority Black or Hispanic precincts in states controlled by Republicans, faced the usual challenge of long lines and limited places to cast a ballot.

But the long effort to subvert the elections and keep the Republican Party in power, against the will of voters, fell flat. And while there are still avenues for chaos and disruption, the scale of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box makes it very unlikely that he’ll have anything more than token support from his party. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the elections.

That is no reason to breathe easy. What we know is that, if he thinks he might lose, the president is opposed to free and fair elections. He is opposed to the idea of electoral accountability. He rejects the fundamental republican principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. If he could act unimpeded, he would make the United States a Potemkin democracy.

This election cycle may be over, but as a threat to our freedom to govern ourselves, Trump still looms.

More on the midterms:

Opinion | The Editorial Board
Trump Has Met His Match
Nov. 3, 2026

Opinion | New York Times Opinion
8 States. 8 Democratic Wins. This Is Seismic.
Nov. 4, 2026

Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘Something Is Changing With Trump’
Nov. 3, 2026

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 6, 2026, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Even in Defeat, Trump Looms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

THE LEFT HOOK: Post Election Analysis with Waj and Danielle!-- How independent media, real accountability, and community mobilization exposed the limits of corporate-backed politics.--November 4, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 01:53:17 +0000

https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/post-election-analysis-with-waj

Post Election Analysis with Waj and Danielle!

How independent media, real accountability, and community mobilization exposed the limits of corporate-backed politics.

VIDEO:

https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/post-election-analysis-with-waj

THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie

November 4, 2026

Here’s Danielle’s write-up from today’s Democracy-ish!

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Political earthquakes rarely announce themselves with subtlety. They arrive with the roar of a seismic shift, exposing the deep fault lines of a nation long papered over by consultant-driven platitudes, defensive gatekeeping, and institutional complacency. The recent electoral beatdown—where a energized coalition of working-class voters, Black communities, Arab and Muslim Americans, and shifting electorates handed a decisive rebuke to political orthodoxy—was not merely a win. It was a cultural and political reckoning.

For too long, mainstream political establishments have operated under the comfortable assumption that voters possess the attention span of gnats and the memory of goldfish. They have relied on sanitized talking points, avoided pressing material crises like skyrocketing costs and AI data center sprawl, and hidden behind defensive maneuvers while marginalized communities bore the brunt of naked bigotry. But as the dust settles on a historic night, one fundamental truth stands clear: celebration without strategy is capitulation.

The Anatomy of an Uprising

What happened on election night was a masterclass in grassroots mobilization defying top-down consultancy. In places like Michigan and beyond, communities that faced vitriolic, supercharged bigotry didn’t retreat; they organized. From door-to-door canvassing to multiracial, cross-generational coalitions, voters rejected the cynical calculus of establishment gatekeepers who refused to invest in transformative candidates or confront entrenched power structures.

The playbook of the status quo—characterized by performative concern paired with active hostility toward progressives—was laid bare. When establishment figures attempt to retroactively crown themselves the architects of a movement they actively tried to suppress, it reveals an astonishing level of shamelessness. But voters are no longer willing to turn a blind eye. The veils have been lifted, exposing the transactional nature of corporate donors, compromised leadership, and a political class more interested in preserving institutional hierarchies than delivering material relief.

The Realignment of Accountability

True democratic renewal does not stem from maintaining the status quo or accepting hollow promises from leaders who cozy up to corporate interests behind closed doors. It requires demanding accountability over revenge, substance over spin, and structural change over cosmetic tweaks.

As the pendulum swings, the true bellwether of American politics has been unmasked. It is not found in the mythic, suburban swing demographics frequently romanticized by cable news pundits, but in the multiracial coalitions of working people who demand an economy that works for everyone—an economy free from corruption, algorithmic exploitation, and endless foreign entanglements.

Winning a single election is merely the opening salvo. The real work—building enduring institutional power, fostering local pipelines of progressive leadership, and holding party leadership accountable—starts now.

There are no paywalls, and The Left Hook continues depending on the kindness of our readers

LONG LIVE ANGIE NIXON! She is an extraordinary organizer and political leader and despite the brazen political malfeasance of the national Democratic Party leadership who failed to properly support her for the Senate seat in the absurdly super corrupt and obsessively MAGA jurisdiction of FLORIDA (of all places). The only good news in all this however is that ANGIE NIXON will be back in 2028. So there is something worth waiting for after all.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 22:03:26 +0000

All,

In my view and the views of many others in the U.S. the dynamic rise and now pervasive impact of Florida state representative Angie Nixon an extraordinary union and political grassroots organizer was easily one of the most important and inspiring campaigns of any truly progressive campaigner for the Senate in the entire country. The ugly fact that the national political leadership of the Democratic Party did not see fit to fully support her very important and thoroughly innovative campaign in one of the most consequential states for finally determining exactly where national politics is going generally, is political malfeasance of the highest order. Yet even the DP’s gross mismanagement and indifferance in the name of–let’s face it– brazen white supremacy and misogynoir will not stop this dynamo of a woman because her integrity, honesty, and courage simply will not allow these vile distractions and stupidities to stop her in any way whatsoever going forward. As her campaign ending speech makes crystal clear Ms. Nixon is not going anywhere and this means she will not only prevail but triumph over not only her but our collective enemies in the very near future. STAY TUNED because we haven’t seen anything yet. THE BEST IS YET TO COME…To say that we all very much need her and her outstanding contributions on not only a local or state level but nationally as well is a massive understatement…

Kofi

Angie Nixon Delivers Fiery Concession Speech After Losing Florida Senate Race

Forbes Breaking News

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhtcLwEYCU0

ANGIE NIXON. Lynne Sladky/AP Photo

When former Sen. Marco Rubio stepped down to join the Trump administration as secretary of state in 2025, Ashley Moody, the state’s attorney general, was appointed to take his place by Gov. Ron DeSantis. She was expected to serve comfortably for the remainder of her term, but this was rattled by the results of the special election, where Democrat Angie Nixon came within spitting distance of a remarkable victory.

Current ballot counts show that Moody only won by around three percentage points, 50.9-48 percent.

Florida hasn’t seen a surge in Democratic voters the way it has this year since the second time former President Barack Obama was elected. Nixon enjoyed a last-minute endorsement from Obama himself, joined by other Democratic heavyweights like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez joined Nixon on the campaign trail.

Nixon’s identity as a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Working Families Party candidate put her in a difficult position in Florida, a state with a strong red voter base. Receiving official support from center-left, establishment Democrats might have made a difference when it came to encouraging more undecided voters to vote for Nixon. Receiving funding from the national party could have helped even more.

“I think the national [Democratic] party and a lot of Black female candidates, especially, would look at Angie Nixon’s situation and question whether or not the Democratic Party provides enough support for Black women when they’re running for long-shot offices,” says Sharon D. Wright Austin, professor of political science at the University of Florida.

National Democratic PACs were hesitant to divert finite resources from high-profile Senate races to Nixon’s insurgent campaign. One of the reasons for that might be Nixon’s unabashedly pro-worker, anti-establishment platform. Another feels like the inevitable outcome of a myopic intraparty perception that her chances in the great state of Florida were slimmer than they turned out to be.

Neither the Senate Majority PAC nor the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) spent a dime to support Nixon through Election Day. Yet they allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to boost Democratic Senate candidates elsewhere, nearly none of whom are Black.

For instance, the Senate Majority PAC dropped $87.4 million to support Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown in his challenge against incumbent Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH); the DSCC doled out $10.4 million to promote Brown. The Senate Majority PAC spent $46.5 million in support of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, $37.3 million for Troy Jackson in Maine, and $27.6 million in favor of James Talarico in Texas.

Other Democratic PACs did show up for Nixon to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, but without the institutional backing of the party’s national apparatus, it just became that much harder for Nixon to surmount the ostensibly insurmountable.

Although spending from the DSCC was noticeably absent in Nixon’s race, her campaign was fueled by individual donations. Out of the nearly $11.5 million raised, around $11 million came from individual donors. These numbers are testimony to the power of Nixon’s grassroots campaigning approach. Campaigning on the ground, including with Ocasio-Cortez, clearly played a significant role in tonight’s election results as well.

The impact in down-ballot races was noticeable. Though Florida did not flip its governor’s race, Democrats won enough seats in the state legislature to deny Republicans a supermajority.

Prior to running for the Senate, Nixon worked as a union organizer and served as a state representative, representing Jacksonville. Her campaign was marked by consistent attempts to connect with a diverse array of voters, leading with unifying messages such as combating the affordability crisis. Although it’s too early to concretely say, Black voters in Florida most likely provided the backbone for Nixon’s success.

Despite a lack of investment in Nixon’s campaign from both Democratic PACs and bigwigs, Black voters appear to have proved that in the face of daunting odds, they’ll show up and out at the polls. This certainly has been reflected across the country. Black voters have been especially motivated this election season, particularly in states that have redistricted, such as Florida. It’s moved the needle in other races and has handed Democrats a much-needed boost.

Moody will have to run again for a full term in 2028. Given how close the matchup between Moody and Nixon ended up, the energetic progressive insurgent is expected to try again.

“The sky’s the limit for her because now she also has a national following because her campaign has gotten so much national attention, and it also shows the power of grassroots campaigning,” says Austin. “Even though she didn’t win the election, a lot of people really listened to her, and she had a message that a lot of people really wanted to hear.”

Tagged: Angie Nixon, Congress, Democrats, Election 2026, Florida, Politics

Our New Senator in Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is for Truth and Justice. He is also a human being first and foremost, and as such he is for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole. The beauty of what Dr. El-Sayed represents and most importantly stands for is that he too ike so many of us all has had enough of someone else's propaganda." Just like Malcolm X 60 years ago. Aren't we the lucky ones that like Malcolm (and Dr. King, and Ella Baker, and Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Ladner Sisters and W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and Angela Davis, and Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, and Langston Hughes, and C.L.R. James, and Claudia Jones, and so many others in the Black Radical Tradition is diligently upholding and expanding its profound principles and values in the 21st century (and beyond)? THANK YOU ABDUL...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 19:15:01 +0000

"I've had enough of someone else's propaganda. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

–Malcolm X, 1965

Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging interview

MS NOW

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv4jxetO8R4

November 5, 2026

#AbdulElSayed #Michigan #Democrats

Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging interview following the big wins by Democrats in the midterm elections.

https://www.ms.now/ #AbdulElSayed #Michigan #Democrats #News #Politics #Midterms

Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Muslim Senator as Democrats Rout GOP Across the U.S. in Rebuke to Trump

Democracy Now!

November 4, 2026

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qTfkOLx7jg

In a stunning repudiation of President Trump, Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's midterm elections, flipping seven Senate seats: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina. Meanwhile, progressive Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated former Republican Congressmember Mike Rogers for an open Senate seat in Michigan with over 52% of the vote. El-Sayed campaigned on a platform of Medicare for All, tackling economic inequality and getting big money out of politics — as well as ending military aid to Israel.

He is the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. El-Sayed faced vitriolic, Islamaphobic attacks by top Republicans throughout the campaign. "Last night wasn't just about Dr. Abdulrahman being a Muslim, winning and going to the United States Senate," says Palestinian American organizer and author Linda Sarsour, who has been campaigning for El-Sayed. "It demonstrated that progressives can win in states like Michigan" and that "we can win on standing up for the human rights of the Palestinian people." Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

Latest Shows

Support our work:
https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de…

Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed On Big Pharma, Capitalism, Mike Rogers, Islamophobia + More --VIDEO

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:24:34 +0000

Abdul El-Sayed Talks Michigan Senate Race, Big Pharma, Capitalism, Mike Rogers, Islamophobia + More

Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRB0_JP9T3I

August 31, 2026

#BreakfastClub

Catch the FULL EPISODE right now on Netflix! Get MORE of The Breakfast Club:

► DISCORD: / discord

► LISTEN LIVE: https://bit.ly/3r17qJm

► INSTAGRAM: / breakfastclubam

► TWITTER: / breakfastclubam

► FACEBOOK: / breakfastclubam

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: STREAM TONIGHT Mehdi and Prem Are Going Live From Michigan Tune in at 9pm ET for Zeteo’s packed results-night coverage from Abdul El-Sayed HQ in Detroit. And Remember to VOTE FOR ANGIE NIXON in Florida. Whether you believe it or not Fascism is ALSO on the ballot,,,,

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:48:59 +0000

https://zeteo.com/p/stream-tonight-mehdi-and-prem-are?

*STREAM TONIGHT* Mehdi and Prem Are Going Live From Michigan

Tune in at 9pm ET for Zeteo’s packed results-night coverage from Abdul El-Sayed HQ in Detroit.

Team Zeteo

The 2026 midterm elections have so many high-stakes races and candidates, but very few media organizations you can trust to cover them all; these are the moments Zeteo was built for.

Join our election livestream TONIGHT, starting at 9pm ET (6pm PST / 2am GMT) to watch Mehdi and Prem usher in the results from Detroit, Michigan, and speak to people on the ground at one of the most-watched Senate races of the year, Abdul El-Sayed vs. Mike Rogers. But stay alert! We might go live as early as 8pm ET (5pm PST / 1am GMT) if results from other races start pouring in.

Speaking of other races, Zeteo's Swin Suebsaeng will support our live election coverage in Ohio to see Vivek Ramasawmy’s gubernatorial campaign through to the end, and Andrew Perez in Maine will report whether this is finally game over for Sen. Susan Collins. Safe to say, Zeteo has both you and the news covered this upcoming election night.

Every media organization in the U.S. will compete for your attention tonight; be sure to give it to an outlet that will deliver the results as they are – unfiltered and without a hidden agenda.

Watch our live midterm election coverage on YouTube or Substack to support independent journalism on the night MAGA looks to bolster its numbers and take it away from you.

We’re bringing this livestream to all subscribers without a paywall. If you believe in the work we do and want to see more of it, do consider becoming a paid subscriber. And if you’re not ready for the commitment, then a donation would still go a long way.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Magnificent Dynamic Duo Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie On "The Grotesque Normal: How We Got Numbed to Political Absurdity"

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:06:47 +0000

The Grotesque Normal: How We Got Numbed to Political Absurdity

Danielle Moodie

November 1, 2026

The DAM Digest | Substack Videos

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWsJwbCquXY

When political commentary becomes an exercise in chronicling the absurd, the line between satire and national tragedy dissolves entirely. In this episode of Democracy-ish, we cut straight through sanitized mainstream talking points to confront a uncomfortable truth: our political leadership is a direct reflection of a culture refusing to reckon with its own foundation.

From bizarre podium spectacles to mounting ledgers of sexual assault allegations—including recent testimonies from elite pageantry circuits—we break down the normalization of depravity and how impunity became standard political theater. Key Topics Covered: The erosion of public standards in modern political commentary The history of elite modeling circuits and systemic exploitation

How media ecosystems numb the public to institutional failure #election #Trump #politics #news #midterms

An Unflinching Examination of Power, Accountability, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

https://daniellemoodie.substack.com/p...

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED is an outstanding candidate for Senate in Michigan and deserves our uneqivocal support and vote on tueday November 3, 2026. Here are a few of the many reasons why it is essential that he win on behalf of Michigan in particular and the United States in general--VIDEOS and news coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:26:00 +0000

Abdul El-Sayed Brilliantly Breaks Down Why Trump Is an ‘Absolute Fool’ as Bernie Watches On

Hook Global

Premiered October 27, 2026

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1yikXiHLJk

#usnews #trump #uspolitics

US News: Bernie Sanders and Abdul El-Sayed rally in Michigan, sounding the alarm over Donald Trump’s policies, rising costs, healthcare cuts, corporate greed, and billionaire influence ahead of the midterms. Sanders slams Trump’s Iran war, tax breaks for the wealthy and attacks on democracy, while El-Sayed highlights the struggles facing young Americans, from student debt and housing costs to AI-driven job losses. Together, they call for Medicare for All, taxing billionaires, stronger unions, AI regulation, and an end to endless wars. They also condemn racist and Islamophobic campaign attacks and urge voters to organize for change.

#usnews #trump #uspolitics #berniesanders #midterms #abdulelsayed

FULL SPEECH: Abdul El-Sayed Slams Trump, Iran War, Mike Rogers, Billionaires at Obama Rally for his campaign | AC1G

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/x2WCimQzeIY?si=8HLEHY7z5iUXmAU2

Abdul's response at church - standing with James Clyburn:

El-Sayed speaks out after Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens publicly endorses his rightwing Republican proTrump/MAGA Mike Rogers

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/N1m_ewBl2t0?si=fC1Z1OAGFdGhfAHD

'What the HELL?!': MS NOW panel on Dems REELING behind the scenes over Haley Stevens betrayal:

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/DxJYdkHSlY0?si=OZaX8-hqp099QnbD

MS NOW EXCLUSIVE: Abdul El-Sayed SPEAKS OUT in first interview since Haley Stevens' shock betrayal:

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/bshC4TqxmRc?si=NZBMuQSUPOKUxxq5

Wajahat Ali - 'Left Hook' Podcast:

Haley Stevens BACKSTABS DEMOCRATS and Reveals Herself as the Phantom Menace:

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/LKUiRQKMi80?si=Xtjxwkh_Ef8tfwCE

THANK YOU MACKLEMORE!

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 18:31:25 +0000

"...This is what solidarity looks like: tens of thousands of people showing up against the genocide of — and for the full humanity of — the Palestinian people. They are families, artists, doctors, teachers, and children — who deserve to grow up with the freedom to determine the course of their own lives.

Every dollar from tickets, merch and donations on the Free Palestine Tour goes to twelve organizations working for Palestinian life, dignity and freedom..."

jewishvoiceforpeace.org

Six weeks ago, two words got Macklemore canceled from the biggest stadium tour in America:

"Free Palestine"

Opening for Ed Sheeran in front of tens of thousands of people at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore told Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank that they have not been forgotten.
Next, billionaire and hardcore Israel supporter Robert Kraft organized stadium owners to bar Macklemore from performing. Macklemore was dropped from the tour — which backfired spectacularly.

He answered with a letter read by millions, in which he refused to let the focus wander from Israel's genocide in Gaza. Then he went bigger. He took the dates he'd lost and built the Free Palestine Tour: three arena shows across Europe, in Dublin, Paris, London, that sold out almost instantly.  

This is what solidarity looks like: tens of thousands of people showing up against the genocide of — and for the full humanity of — the Palestinian people. They are families, artists, doctors, teachers, and children — who deserve to grow up with the freedom to determine the course of their own lives.

Every dollar from tickets, merch and donations on the Free Palestine Tour goes to twelve organizations working for Palestinian life, dignity and freedom.

We are honored that Jewish Voice for Peace is one of those twelve organizations.

Together with Macklemore’s team, many of these organizations are working to make this moment even bigger. We’re each inviting our communities — that’s you — to be a part.

Stand with us in four ways:

1 Tell Congress: “Fund people, not bombs.” Call Congress or email Congress to tell them they must vote to block bombs to Israel and oppose any funding for Trump’s illegal war on Iran.  

2 Keep speaking up — you don't need a massive platform to make an impact. Read or subscribe to JVP's Wire, and you’ll be one of 100,000 reading critical news and analysis from Palestine, the United States, and the Palestine solidarity movement — and ways to take action.  

3 Support our work, and give what you can to JVP. Every gift enables our work for Palestinian freedom.  

4 Support aid to Palestinians on the ground and our partners in the U.S.-based solidarity movement. Please consider matching any gift to JVP with gifts to one or all of the other organizations: Anera, Glia, Gaza Soup Kitchen, Taawon, HEAL Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, Middle East Children’s Alliance, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Institute for Middle East Understanding, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and UNRWA USA. 

They tried to cancel Macklemore. Instead, he’s filling arenas. And using that platform to support JVP and other organizations. Will you chip in to keep our work going?

Onward in solidarity,

Jason Farbman
Digital Director

P.S. When you support JVP, every gift enables our work for Palestinian freedom

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: NEWS ALERT!: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN BOTH MICHIGAN AND NATIONALLY IS TRYING TO OPENLY SABOTAGE AND THUS DESTROY ABDUL EL-SAYED’S CHANCES OF WINNING ON TUESDAY THROUGH THIS INCREDIBLY RACIST AND ISLAMOPHOBIC CAMPAIGN TO PUSH ABDUL AROUND AND TELL HIM WHAT TO DO LIKE HE WAS A 8 YEAR OLD CHILD! THANKFULLY ABDUL HAS PUSHED BACK HARD AT THE PRIMARY OPPONENT WHO LOST TO HIM AND THE THE REST OF THE EGREGIOUSLY MANIPULATIVE DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERSHIP IN MICHIGAN AND NATIONALLY...See the ugly details below

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 17:06:05 +0000

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/10/31/us/midterms-elections-trump

SUNDAY NEWS ALERT:

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN BOTH MICHIGAN AND NATIONALLY IS TRYING TO OPENLY SABOTAGE AND THUS DESTROY ABDUL EL-SAYED’S CHANCES OF WINNING ON TUESDAY THROUGH THIS INCREDIBLY RACIST AND ISLAMOPHOBIC CAMPAIGN TO PUSH ABDUL AROUND AND TELL HIM WHAT TO DO LIKE HE WAS A 8 YEAR OLD CHILD! THIS IS SO FUCKING EGREGIOUS. I’M GLAD THAT ABDUL PUSHED BACK HARD AND TOLD HALEY STEVENS--WHO LOST TO HIM IN THE PRIMARIES!-- THAT SHE AND THE REST OF THE DP LEADERSHIP HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TO DEMAND ABDUL DO AND SAY WHAT THEY WANT HIM TO ABOUT ISRAEL, THE GAZA GENOCIDE AND THE U.S. COMPLICITY IN IT.

WHAT THE FUCK?!?

Democratic Discord Intensifies in Michigan Senate Race

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, said Representative Haley Stevens, his former primary rival, should not attend Sunday’s party unity event in Detroit.

Published October 31, 2026

Updated November 1, 2026, 10:14 a.m. ET

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Latest

Reid J. Epstein Tim Balk and James C. McKinley Jr.
Here’s the latest.

As candidates on Saturday barnstormed to make their final case in a midterm election that will decide control of Congress, a feud among top Democrats in Michigan escalated, throwing new doubt into a race that could determine which party controls the Senate.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee, said Saturday that his former primary rival, Representative Haley Stevens, should not come to a Detroit church service he was planning to attend Sunday. The event had been billed as a Democratic unity gathering.

“I don’t want any distractions,” Dr. El-Sayed told reporters after a campaign rally in Sterling Heights, a Macomb County suburb. “It seems as though other folks are more interested in making this race about things that it’s not about.”

The growing tensions between Dr. El-Sayed, a progressive, and Ms. Stevens, the more moderate representative he beat in the primary, have taken on an outsize importance at a time when strategists on both sides say that Democrats are within striking distance of winning a slim majority in the Senate. The fault line between them has differing stances on U.S. support for Israel.

The Democrats must flip at least four seats and retain all of their own to regain control of the upper chamber, and Michigan is seen as the best opportunity for Republicans to pick up a seat.

Dr. El-Sayed and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, were campaigning a few miles apart in Macomb County, Mich., on the final Saturday before Election Day, as both parties fanned across the country in a late attempt to drive turnout and persuade undecided voters.

President Trump hosted six tele-rallies on Saturday targeting five states — Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania — and is scheduled on Sunday to visit two others, Iowa and Kansas, which have recently become pivotal Senate battlegrounds.

On Friday, Ms. Stevens had demanded in an open letter that Dr. El-Sayed disavow a political ad from a left-wing political group suggesting U.S. support for Israel was a reason for high prices, which she said was antisemitic. That afternoon, Dr. El-Sayed fired back, accusing Ms. Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”

Ms. Stevens has in recent weeks done a series of interviews criticizing Dr. El-Sayed for his stance on Israel — he has called the Israeli offensive in Gaza a genocide and has questioned U.S. military aid to the country. She has also repeatedly condemned his refusal to fully disavow the advertisement.

On Saturday, Dr. El-Sayed said: “I’ve already been clear that that ad was not made by me, and I do not agree with the contents of that ad.”

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 15:31:01 +0000

Reckoning with Racial Capitalism: Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Left Critique Beyond Neoliberalism
by Siddhant Issar
Columbia University Press, 2026

[Publication date: ‎ October 6, 2026]

In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?

This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.

REVIEWS:

"Racial capitalism is everywhere. It is the answer to everything, or a dead end; it has been lambasted, celebrated, contested, and mostly misunderstood. Reckoning with Racial Capitalism moves beyond the noise and critically situates its meaning, origins, and analytical purchase within its historical and contemporary context. The result is a revised, sharpened understanding of the term and concept indispensable for our current anticapitalist struggles." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism is among the most important critical theory texts of the post-2008 interregnum in its convincing explication of the centrality of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism to capitalism and neoliberalism. Siddhant Issar offers a timely and unimpeachable rebuttal of both leftist screeds against "identity politics" and critiques of Western Marxism as irrelevant to, and detracting from, real class analysis." -- Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism does what I wish all academic texts did: It recognizes Black and Indigenous social movements as theorists who can and should guide not only our collective knowledge about capitalism but also our collective struggle to free all life from the racial, colonial, and patriarchal violence that makes capitalism tick." -- Melanie K. Yazzie, coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation

"The framework of 'racial capitalism' was originally forged in the context of a mass struggle against a regime of racial domination, exploitation, and dispossession. In this book, Issar simultaneously returns us to these political roots while bringing it into the present conjuncture. He deftly reveals the imbrications of white supremacy, colonial dispossession, and neoliberal financialization, addressing Black and Indigenous social movements as fellow theorists and co-conspirators, all the while inciting us to solidaristic collective struggle to forge alternatives beyond the given world." -- Robert Nichols, author of Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory

"Siddhant Issar’s Reckoning with Racial Capitalism offers an account of U.S. racial capitalism that encompasses settler colonialism and uses it to theorize neoliberalism anew, accounting for the uneven work of capital’s violence within it. To understand this unevenness, Issar grounds neoliberalism in the history of racial, colonial, and patriarchal domination and explicates how they are articulated with the exploitation of the working class and emerging financialization and privatization. A great achievement!" -- Inés Valdez, author of Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Siddhant Issar is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville.

Harold Cruse: Critic, Writer, Teacher
by Vincent W. Lloyd
Yale University Press, 2026

[Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 6, 2026]

The first biography of a controversial, iconoclastic architect of Black Studies, from a leading scholar of the Black intellectual tradition

In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Cruse (1916–2005) was one of the most prominent Black intellectuals in the world, mentioned in the same breath as James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X. Today, Cruse is nearly forgotten. In this biography, Vincent W. Lloyd reclaims the story of an influential contrarian, a man who was beloved, feared, hated, reviled, praised.

Cruse grew up poor in Virginia and Harlem, worked as a critic and organizer, and then spent years making his living through manual labor while writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). The book electrified Black America, and the activist who never finished high school became a tenured college professor, a founder of the field of Black Studies, and a mentor to countless student activists. By the 1980s, however, Cruse’s distaste for integration, liberal pluralism, and multiculturalism meant that his influential work was fading from view.

Drawing on Cruse’s letters and unpublished writings, along with scores of interviews, Lloyd offers a fast-paced narrative of an extraordinary life―and a new perspective on Black justice struggles. Ultimately, this is the story of a singular man: passionate, brilliant, strange, and visionary.

REVIEWS:

“A delightfully intimate scholarly encounter with the life and legacy of Harold Cruse, one of the foremost contributors to the discipline of Black Studies.”―Lawrence Jackson, Johns Hopkins University

“A beautifully written and impressively sophisticated portrait of a true intellectual whose name and writings should be known by everyone who imagines they know 20th century African American history.”―David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross

“Lloyd’s sympathetic portrait of Cruse perfectly captures the colleague I once knew: brilliant, stubborn, warm, irascible, unfiltered, enigmatic, sad, and hilarious. As contemporary Black intellectuals face what feels like an existential crisis, Harold Cruse could not be timelier.”― Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Vincent W. Lloyd is professor and former director of Africana Studies at Villanova University. His recent books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the coauthored Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons. His writing has appeared in Commonweal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Plough, and other publications.

The World Of Cecil Taylor: Essays, Poetry, Photographs, and Interviews
Edited by Peter Valente
SUNY Press, 2026

[Publication date: ‎ November 1, 2026]

A major contribution to the study of all aspects of this jazz master, from his groundbreaking compositions to his performance style and poetry.

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was one of the most influential pianists and composers in contemporary jazz. A pioneer as a leader/composer in the free jazz movement of the late '50s and early '60s, Taylor developed into a major voice in expanding jazz's harmonic and rhythmic languages. Through his career, he mentored and worked alongside other leading jazz stylists, including Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger, Jimmy Lyons, and Sunny Murray, as well as composed music for ballet and dance He also was a well-known poet whose work has been compared to Amiri Baraka's, among others. The World of Cecil Taylor contains essays from musicians who played with Cecil, jazz fans, academics, and critics, as well as in-depth essays on Taylor's poetry, photos, and interviews. Like one of Cecil's solos, the book is multivocal, with many nuances and changes in the rhythm. The World of Cecil will be a valuable resource for readers and scholars as an introduction and exploration of one of America's most original musical voices.

REVIEWS:

"Far more than a mere introduction to Taylor's revolutionary work." ― Kirkus Reviews

"This international, cross-disciplinary compendium of approaches to the maximalist art―music, poetry, dance―of challenging, profoundly rewarding Cecil Taylor is most welcome. There's no better way, other than listening to his recordings, to explore the complexly beautiful work of this unique genius." ― Howard Mandel, author of Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz

"What a marvelous book! Cecil Taylor was a great American artist―a one-of-a-kind pianist, composer, and poet who profoundly enriched those of us who were privileged to live in his time and to count him as a friend. Assembling a broad spectrum of interviews, memoirs, and analyses of Taylor's accomplishments by a bevy of musicians, writers, and poets whose lives were indelibly impacted by him, this anthology is worthy of its subject. It’s at once a terrific read and a textured, multi-angled mine of information about the life and work of a genuinely singular figure." ― Robert Levin, author of Going Outside: Fiction, Commentary, Jazz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twenty-two full length books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, which received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. His most recent books are The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes and his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan. He lives in Castle Hayne, North Carolina.

When Ignorance Governs:
Trump’s Return and Democracy Under Siege
by Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D.
SBDI Publications 2026

[Publication date: ‎ September 1, 2026]

What happens when weaponized ignorance returns to power?

In Weaponization of Ignorance, Stephen M. Fry examined how lies, misinformation, grievance, tribal loyalty, and media distortion helped divide America and make Donald Trump’s political return possible. But the deeper warning was never only about Trump’s dishonesty. It was about the ecosystem that protected the lies: the politicians who refused to correct them, the media figures who amplified them, the donors who tolerated them, and the voters taught to distrust every institution that might challenge the story they had been given.

When Ignorance Governs begins where that warning left off.

Trump’s return to the presidency has moved the crisis from rhetoric to reality. Claims that once circulated through rallies, cable-news segments, podcasts, social media, fundraising emails, and political memes have become justifications for executive orders, pardons, loyalty tests, investigations, funding threats, attacks on journalists, pressure on universities, assaults on civil servants, and open hostility toward democratic guardrails.

This book argues that weaponized ignorance becomes far more dangerous when it gains administrative power. In political campaigns, falsehood can distort public opinion. In government, it can reshape institutions. It can determine who is trusted, who is punished, who is protected, who is investigated, which experts are ignored, which judges are attacked, and which version of reality public power is used to enforce.

With chapters on loyalty, grievance, right-wing media, the Justice Department, the courts, Congress, immigration enforcement, civil service, election rules, and the 2026 midterm test, When Ignorance Governs is not simply a chronicle of Trump’s second term. It is a warning about democratic erosion while choices still-

The central question is no longer whether the warning signs were real. They are now visible in the machinery of government. The question is whether enough citizens will recognize them before they become normal.

The 2026 midterm elections will not decide the fate of American democracy once and for all. But they will teach political actors whether falsehood, revenge, intimidation, corruption, and attacks on democratic institutions carry a price—or whether they can be absorbed as ordinary politics.

A timely and urgent follow-up to Weaponization of Ignorance, this book is for readers who want to understand not only how democracy is weakened, but how citizens can still recognize, resist, and refuse to normalize its decline.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Stephen M. Fry Ph.D.

Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D. has had a varied career spanning physics, engineering, consulting, corporate management, and venture capital—as well as writing. He earned a Ph.D. in Quantum Electronics from UCLA, along with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and B.S. in Physics (also from UCLA), and an M.B.A. in Financial Analysis from National University. He has published extensively, including dozens of technical papers and presentations, and is the author or co-author of nine books on medical technology. Weaponization of Ignorance reflects his more recent focus—a decade of reading, research, and reflection on how media, psychology, and culture shape political belief. He lives in northern California with his wife, and their border collie.

Don't Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide
by Assal Rad
Vintage, 2026

[Publication date: September 8, 2026]

A searing indictment of Western media that lays bare how the "free press," long tasked with speaking truth to power, instead became a vital part of the machinery that enabled the genocide in Palestine

"In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth." —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country

If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.” —Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Eighty years ago, George Orwell wrote that ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.’ Assal Rad shows, in painful detail, that in the case of Israel-Palestine, this remains true.” —Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

“Throughout the course of the Gaza Genocide, historian Assal Rad has been a beacon of clarity in a media landscape clouded by lies. In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country

“Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past years, reality itself had been distorted to fit a political ecosystem. Western media does not simply omit or distort reality, but actively launders it. Language reframes and ultimately erases both violence and responsibility. ‘Self-defense’ replaces the naming of genocide. These linguistic choices reveal intentionality in complicity: not neutral but political, shaping whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are rendered acceptable. In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility, euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices. When those same institutions dictate what can and cannot be said, this is not press freedom but censorship. And when they uncritically repeat the claims of a state responsible for unprecedented violence, in ways that obscure or diminish its gravity, this is not reporting—it is complicity.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of When the World Sleeps

“Remember ‘reading comprehension’ in high school? And then, in college, if you were pretentious, ‘critical theory’ or ‘media studies’? It was all about learning how to read—harder than it sounds. It was a lesson that was valuable then and is even more valuable now. Nobody has been as relentless a promotor of reading comprehension as Assal Rad. By showing us the gulf between what is said and what is meant—and what actually should be said—she has offered a vital lesson in reading comprehension—showing us how words can kill actual people in this actual world.” —Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“If you’ve ever wondered how the media manipulated perception through subtle use of language, this is the book for you to read. Assal Rad in her superb book shows how no other institution is as instrumental in shaping perception like the media, which is not a record of truth-telling but a carefully curated narrative and elaborate system of erasure, euphemism, and deference to power.” —Raja Shehadeh, National Book Award finalist and author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

“A poignant reminder of the power of words to normalise, or legitimise, genocide.” —Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism

“When so many chose indifference and obfuscation, Assal insists on clarity, honesty, and integrity. She documents how complicity for a livestreamed genocide was perpetrated. It is a chronicle of depravity and the depraved, and of the operation of cynicism on a grand dehumanizing scale.” —Ussama Makdisi, author of Anti-Palestinianism

“Assal Rad offers a profound meditation on the role of the media in a democratic society, which ideally serves as a check against the interests of the powerful and lifts up the voices of those on the receiving end of brutal governmental policies. Yet, when it comes to mainstream media coverage of Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Rad expertly demonstrates how the media not only failed to uphold the ethical standards of its profession but, even worse, was and remains actively complicit in amplifying and reifying US and Israeli governmental talking points denying, excusing, and justifying Israel's crimes against humanity. This book is a shocking exposé illuminating the ways in which the media molds public opinion to help perpetuate and build consent for atrocities. A must read.” —Dr. Josh Ruebner, professor at Georgetown University and author of The United States and the Palestinian Nakba

“This is a searing indictment and a fierce demand for press accountability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Rad is a firebrand with receipts, and this blazing but clear-eyed work of media criticism should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got to this terrible place.” —Literary Hub, “34 Books You Need to Read This Fall”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Assal Rad is a historian of Middle East history and a Nonresident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and DAWN. Assal completed a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine. She works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, contemporary Iran, and Israel/Palestine.

Her first book, The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy, and other publications, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.

Follow her on X/Twitter: @AssalRad and IG: @AssalRad_

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
When Dehumanization Becomes Standard

I. Rationalizing Atrocities

As a society, we often reflect on historic human brutalities with dismay. Questions like “how could they let that happen?” or “how were people okay with it?” are raised in a manner that implies such cruelties would not be permissible today. Yet the world watched in horror as Israel’s most devastating assault on the besieged Gaza Strip to date unfolded with nightmarish scenes of entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, children pulled lifeless from the debris, and parents cradling shrouded bodies too small for graves.

By January 2026, the official death toll had surpassed 71,000, the majority of whom were civilians. According to researchers, these figures significantly undercount the actual death toll in Gaza. The evidence of atrocity was not only overwhelming, it was broadcast in real time by Palestinian journalists who remained on the ground, often until they themselves were killed by Israeli forces. And yet much of the Western media refused to name what was unfolding: a genocide.

Instead, we were told this was a “war” against Hamas, a “response” to the attacks of October 7, a part of the “conflict” between Israel and Palestinians—whose land Israel has illegally occupied for decades. The headlines echoed official Israeli and U.S. talking points nearly word for word. When entire families were wiped out, the language softened the crime: Israel said it was targeting Hamas. When children starved due to deliberate aid blockages, the narrative focused on logistics, not policy. Hospitals were not obliterated; they were caught in cross fire. All the while, Palestinian lives were rendered abstract, conditional, and unworthy of the same humanity as Israeli lives.

But this is not a book seeking to prove what is known to be true and what most of the world knows to be true. This is a book about how it was allowed to happen. This book is a study in how narrative shapes reality. It is not simply about media bias. It is about the weaponization of language to justify the most heinous of crimes. It is about how a self-styled free press became complicit in silencing the truth and shielding power. It is about how the media, rather than holding those in power accountable, became a vital part of the machinery that enabled genocide. It is about how Western media manufactured consent for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

To understand how this happened, we must first recognize the long history of how Palestine has been framed in Western thinking—not as a nation seeking liberation and self-determination, but as a problem to be managed. For decades, Western media have largely repeated the framing of Israel as a liberal democracy defending itself, and Palestinians as either obstacles to peace or threats to be neutralized. Long before the events of October 2023, this framing laid the groundwork for what would come. Israel’s actions were always couched in the language of self-defense, no matter the scale of violence; Palestinian resistance, even nonviolent protest, was criminalized or erased. Palestinians were described not as people with rights under international law but as figures in a security narrative dictated by Israeli and American priorities.

This is not new. Of course, there is the centuries-old history of Western colonialism in the Middle East and the language of Orientalism that was used to reinforce and justify the existing power imbalances, rooted in the exploitation of regional peoples. However, recent history may provide a more familiar case to illustrate this larger pattern. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers a useful precedent. Then, too, we were told stories about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that did not exist, and about liberating people who would suffer far more after U.S. intervention. The media, instead of interrogating the narrative, laundered it. The result was a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized an entire region. Then as now, consent was manufactured—not by flagrant censorship, but by selective storytelling, by privileging the voices of the powerful, by embedding with soldiers, which shaped the coverage, and by suppressing inconvenient truths.

In the case of the Gaza Genocide, the foundation had already been laid for its rationalization through years of political rhetoric that was unequivocally pro-Israel and media coverage that followed suit. The media were able to manufacture consent in real time and understate Israel’s atrocities by tapping into existing narratives and relying on the public to accept them without question. The only kink in their plan was the courageous work of Palestinian journalists and social media platforms, which showed the world the reality of Israel’s unprecedented slaughter in Gaza.

II. Selective Justice: The West’s Misleading Narrative of Palestine

Even before the Gaza Genocide, the Western narrative of Palestine—led by the United States, which is both the most powerful state in the world and Israel’s largest funder and supporter—had largely focused on Israel’s exclusive rights while relegating Palestinian rights to an afterthought. We are all familiar with the now ubiquitous language of “Israel has a right to exist” and “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which Western officials use to deflect questions about Israel’s actions or the plight of Palestinian people. Yet Western officials never acknowledge that Palestine has a right to exist and that Palestine has a right to defend itself, denying Palestinians the same protections enshrined in international law. In fact, when reporters pushed the Biden administration on the Palestinian right to self-defense, the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller refused to acknowledge that Palestinians have such a right.

They often get away with this by using legal language to create a paradox for Palestinians, wherein Palestinian statehood is denied and, because no official Palestinian state exists, they are deprived of the same rights afforded to other nations. Miller demonstrated this absurdity during a press briefing in November 2024, when reporters questioned the Biden administration’s selective support for the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, versus warrants for Israeli officials, which had been issued on November 21, 2024, “for crimes against humanity and war crimes.” Miller’s response boiled down to the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign state, but “there is no sovereign state of Palestine.”

Israel has intentionally thwarted Palestinian statehood—with help from the United States, which refuses to recognize a Palestinian state despite overwhelming international support—to create such a paradox, while feigning interest in the “peace process.” All the while, Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements continues unabated, Palestinians are subjected to apartheid and other mistreatment under Israel’s decades-long military occupation, and Palestinians are given no legal recourse to address this injustice.

Zealous support of Israel in the West, especially in the United States, goes unquestioned, whereas being critical of Israel can be seen as a political liability. The language of “unconditional support” that is commonly used to describe the U.S. relationship with Israel is plainly an extremist position, effectively saying the United States will support Israel no matter what it does, even if it is committing a genocide. Such a statement also defies international and U.S. domestic law, which prohibits aid and weapons being supplied to a state committing gross human rights abuses.

At the same time, anti-genocide advocates and pro-Palestine voices are forcibly silenced, raising questions about the values of liberty and freedom Western states claim to espouse. In the United States, campus protests were brutally repressed in the spring of 2024, under the Democratic Joe Biden administration. This chilling effect on basic constitutional rights like speech and protest continued under the Republican administration of President Trump. In Europe—especially in the U.K. and Germany, which vociferously support Israel’s actions despite the flagrant violations of international norms—human rights groups and experts have raised concerns over the suppression of pro-Palestine advocacy, targeting of free speech, and arresting of protesters.

For their part, legacy media have played the role of stenographers through all of this. Rather than challenging such repression of freedoms, questioning the legality of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel, or presenting the Palestinian perspective with any sense of balance, the mainstream media have acted as the propaganda wing of Western and Israeli governments. Moreover, the media’s tendency to compartmentalize the Palestinian cause into separate issues based on their geography influences public perception and understanding. Though treated as distinct concerns, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are all Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation. They are inextricably tied together through the struggle for Palestinian statehood.

The right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and the 1967 war, as well as their descendants, is also part of the broader story of Palestinian identity and liberation. There can be no “peace in the Middle East,” as Western states led by the United States profess to care for, without Palestinian liberation. There can be no Palestinian liberation without Palestinian people and their homeland. Yet Western narratives rarely question the injustice of denying Palestinians the right of return to a homeland they were forcibly expelled from over the course of the last century, as Jewish people across the world are granted the right to immigrate to Israel (historic Palestine) or illegal settlements in the occupied territories, simply because they are Jewish.

In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are expelled from their homes so that Jewish New Yorkers can take their place—and their actual homes. In the West Bank, Israel is enforcing a system of apartheid, expanding its illegal settlements, facilitating settler violence and pogroms against Palestinians, and moving closer to annexation of the occupied territory. These stories receive little coverage in the media, and when they do, the language often normalizes Israel’s actions. For instance, in early July 2025, the story of Israeli ministers pushing for annexation of the West Bank by the end of the month was only covered by one major Western media outlet. The Reuters headline read, “Israeli Likud Party Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex West Bank,” which failed to mention the brazenly illegal nature of this action or the fact that the West Bank is occupied and belongs to Palestinians.

In Gaza—prior to the genocide—Israel had imposed a blockade for more than a decade that significantly deepened existing restrictions and solidified Israel’s control over Gaza by land, air, and sea. Though Israel argues that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed in July 2024 what UN agencies and human rights groups had long asserted: Israel’s effective control over the Gaza Strip constituted an illegal occupation. Despite the dire reality of Israel’s occupation of Gaza before the Hamas attacks of October 7, this context was largely absent from the political talking points and media coverage that ensued. Yet articles covering Israel’s assault on Gaza in the wake of October 7 repeatedly contextualized the atrocities against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks, illustrating the selective nature of what qualifies as important background information.

For years, mainstream media have parroted the language of their own governments, and that of Israel, with little critical coverage of or challenge to the dominant political narrative in the West. Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized, along with the broader Arab and Muslim world, to serve the foreign policy objectives of governments without questioning the moral and legal implications. The horrors that have been normalized in Gaza are the culmination of this long history of racism and injustice. But it is not the first time in recent memory that the media have played a central role in legitimizing war crimes.

III. Iraq as a Precedent: The Death of Accountability

It is often said that hindsight is twenty-twenty—a phrase that suggests we are better equipped to judge past events once their consequences have come to light. This could not be truer than in the case of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. More than two decades after the incursion that claimed so many Iraqi lives, wrought havoc on the region, and sowed the seeds of ongoing conflict, there is now a clear consensus among analysts and the American public that the war was a catastrophic foreign policy mistake. Launched under the guise of national security, framed as a righteous mission to rid the region of WMDs and to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein—whom the United States had supported as early as the 1950s and in the 1980s during his war of aggression against Iran—the invasion stands today as a textbook case of how deceit, racism, and empire were packaged for popular consumption, with the U.S. media serving as willing accomplices.

Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as "children" and "civilians," while Palestinians are "people under 18" and "collateral damage"; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that "Gaza's living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5." No, Rad corrects: Gaza's living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.

In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis.

The 2026 midterm elections will not decide the fate of American democracy once and for all. But they will teach political actors whether falsehood, revenge, intimidation, corruption, and attacks on democratic institutions carry a price—or whether they can be absorbed as ordinary politics.

A timely and urgent follow-up to Weaponization of Ignorance, this book is for readers who want to understand not only how democracy is weakened, but how citizens can still recognize, resist, and refuse to normalize its decline.

Message From The African American Policy Forum: Renowned Scholars, Teachers, and Activists Carol Anderson, Nancy MacLean, Jason Stanley (with Katie Paris from Red, Wine & Blue, and April Albright from Black Voters Matter) will be in conversation with legendary moderator and AAPF Executive Director Kimberlé Crenshaw to examine and discuss the critical issues defining the election and what you need to know before hitting the polls.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:55:52 +0000

Dear Friends,

Join us TONIGHT at 7pm ET for UTB 51: Pre- Election Roundtable 2026! The conversation moderated by Executive Director Kimberlé Crenshaw features scholars Carol Anderson, Nancy MacLean, Jason Stanley, along with Katie Paris from Red, Wine & Blue, and April Albright from Black Voters Matter!

Ahead of midterms, our speakers will examine the critical issues defining the election and what you need to know before hitting the polls.

We will also hear directly how organizations on-the-ground, including AAPF’s Montgomery summit voting rights working group, are mobilizing to defend voting rights—and how you can get involved.

RSVP Now!

IMKC x Elections 2026

Last week, podcast host Kimberlé Crenshaw sat down with anti-racist educator and senior fellow at AAPF, Tim Wise, as well as VP of Content at iOne Digital, Kirsten West Savali. They took listeners behind the headlines for a nuanced conversation about what’s at stake in the upcoming election, including important issues flying under the radar. Listen here.

Hot off the Press: The News You Can Use

Vote Now!

In Solidarity,

The African American Policy Forum

ABOUT THE MODERATOR AND HOST:

Kimberlé Crenshaw J.D. Harvard; L.L.M. University of Wisconsin; B.A. Cornell University) is founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She is also Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing audiences across the country as well as in Europe, India, Africa and South America.

A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.

Her work has been foundational in two fields of scholarly study that have come to be known by terms that she coined: Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is the founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Outstanding Progressive Organizers and Political Representatives Ilhan Omar, Hasan Piker, Angie Nixon, AOC, Maxwell Frost, and Nydia Velázquez On What's Really At Stake in the Midterm Elections on November 3, 2026 throughout the United States And Why We Must Fight Back Against Fascism On Every Available Format Including Electorally. So Don't Forget To Cast Your Vote Next Tuesday November 3, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:36:50 +0000

Hasan Piker and Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis

Hasan Fan Replay

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwVUdZ_QusU

October 26, 2026

Hasan sits down with Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis, then joins her on stage at Omar Fateh's event: the media's lies about her, Islamophobia, "smile more, you're scaring the aunties," how she got started, why Minnesota is Trump's target, Somalis are not the people to mess with, and the moment

Hasan condemns himself.

0:00 I Condemn Myself
0:24 Ilhan Brings the Bad Weather
3:10 Smile More, You're Scaring the Aunties
6:22 We're the Normal Ones
9:35 Look Who Hates Him
12:50 Jesse Ventura Sends His Best
13:37 I'm the Host Now
15:40 How Ilhan Got Started
20:31 Minnesota Is Doing Too Good
25:46 Somalis Are Not the People to Mess With
34:19 We Say Hell No

From Hasan's Twitch stream, October 26, 2026:

Unofficial fan channel, not affiliated with Hasan Piker.

🔴
RALLY: Boricuas for Angie Nixon - w/ AOC, Nydia Velázquez & Maxwell Frost

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYXdUjPDMOs

Streamed live 13 hours ago

#BoricuasForAngie #AngieForFlorida #AngieNixon

With one week until Election Day, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nydia Velázquez, and Maxwell Frost are joining Angie to rally Central Florida behind her campaign. SPEAKERS: • Angie Nixon - Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Florida • Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez • Representative Nydia Velázquez • Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost • ...and more - a powerhouse lineup of special guests! The speaking program begins tonight at 7pm.

WHY IT MATTERS: Angie is a state representative, union organizer, and mom from Jacksonville who won her primary in an upset - without a dime of corporate PAC money. She's fighting to make healthcare and childcare a right, freeze rising rents, and beat back the corporate interests rigging Florida's economy against working families. It's one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, and it runs straight through the Puerto Rican and working-class communities of Central Florida.

This is the final stretch. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Make your plan to vote!

#BoricuasForAngie #AngieForFlorida #AngieNixon #AOC #NydiaVelazquez #MaxwellFrost #Florida #FlaPol #GOTV #Boricua

Public intellectuals, writers, scholars, journalists, and activists Tareq Baconi, Nesrine Malik, and Ta-Nehisi Coates On Zionism, Racism, Imperialism, Settler Colonialism,Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Self Determination in Palestine, Israel, North America, and the Rest Of The Globe in the 21st Century And What It All Means

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 15:32:51 +0000

All,

What is revealed in the following video below documenting the 2026 edition of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) is three of the most profound, important, and deeply necessary and dynamic voices in the now viscerally influential and meaningful global struggle against the massive organized forces of Zionism and its ongoing impact on the political economies, culture(s) and ideological contexts of settler colonialism, state violence, and apartheid in Palestine and Israel (and the larger heavily interrelated global imperialist projects emanating from North, South, and Central America as well as Europe, Asia, and the larger various ‘Middle Eastern’ territories and nation-states).

What emerges from this intensive, powerful, extremely informative and eloquent conversation is a fascinating and deeply challenging discourse about how and why the historical dimensions of these struggles are intimately connected to and thus are an inextricable part of precisely where the entire world is now going in the 21st century as we seek to make both individual and collective sense of this trajectory. Thus to say that this discussion and the voices that it represents and encompasses is both inspiring and liberating in a very distinctive and compelling manner is to understand and appreciate why real moral courage, deeply ethical commitment, and genuine painstaking engagement both in the world as it is and can be is what makes this interaction between Baconi, Malik, and Coates so valuable and important at this very moment and well beyond. Please enjoy and share its contents with as many human beings, communities and interested organizations as you can.

Love & Struggle,

Kofi

“Zionism is racist”: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tareq Baconi & Nesrine Malik On Freedom | PalFest

The Palestine Festival of Literature

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=652EVCK1UoQ

October 23, 2026
Premiered 16 hours ago

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tareq Baconi and Nesrine Malik discuss the struggle for justice in Palestine, its global ramifications, and strategies for decolonisation in the 21st century. The Palestine Festival of Literature hosted this landmark conversation at London's Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival 2026. Tareq Baconi is one of the foremost Palestinian intellectuals of his generation and we were honoured to be launching his new book What Now: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future.

The London Literature Festival is presented in cooperation with Service95 and Dua Lipa

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: How the Deadly Patriarchial Politics Of Male Supremacy and Gender Dominance and Toxicity Informs, Guides, and Provides Ideological, Social, and Cultural Support For Far Rightwing Positions and Policies That Aid and Abet the Trump Regime and his many far rightwing political acolytes and colleagues like the GOP Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, and Vice President JD Vance

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:58:29 +0000

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-vivek-ramaswamy-ad-amy-acton-parenting/

Politics

Why Trump Is Embracing Vivek Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad

The president is leaning into the politics of toxic parenting.

by Jeet Heer
October 23, 2026
The Nation

PHOTO: Donald Trump greets Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on stage at the Butler-Vandalia Student Activity Center during a campaign rally on October 03, 2026, in Vandalia, Ohio.

(Roberto Schmidt / Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s many offenses against decency should be viewed not only as moral transgressions, but as political acts. He has become the dominant political figure of our era in part by using vulgarity and nastiness to form a lasting bond with his supporters.

This is easy enough to understand when Trump makes racist, sexist, or transphobic comments that, alas, excite voters who want to roll back egalitarian politics. But sometimes Trump’s affronts to basic morality are harder to parse at first glance—such as his decision this week to champion a vile political attack ad aired by Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

The ad features Acton’s biological mother, Donna Arthur, describing her daughter as a “liar” and warning Ohioans not to vote for her. The major problem with the ad, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann deftly covered, is the context it leaves out. In 1978, Donna Arthur’s husband, Acton’s stepfather Cledith Arthur, was arrested for raping his stepdaughter. (This was just four years after Cledith had been charged with raping his daughter from another marriage, according to reporting from HuffPost.) Donna Arthur supported her husband in the case for the rest of his life, even as he skipped a bond and fled Ohio to evade arrest. The Arthurs lost custody of Acton and her brother (who supports his sister and was also abused). Donna Arthur hasn’t spoken to her daughter in nearly half a century.

The decision of the Ramaswamy campaign to weaponize this horrific family story has disgusted not just Democrats but also a wide swath of Republicans, including Ohio luminaries such as incumbent Governor Mike DeWine, Senator Jon Husted, former governor John Kasich and former senator Rob Portman. DeWine described the ad as “deeply, deeply troubling,” though he declined to withdraw his endorsement of Ramaswamy. Outside of Ohio, the ad was condemned by an array of prominent Republicans such as Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.

However, the two most powerful Republicans in the country, Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, are standing firmly by Ramaswamy (who is so unrepentant about the ad that he is spending $4 million to air it even more).

At a press conference on Wednesday, Vance—who, of course, is an Ohio native who represented the state in the Senate—said, “I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”

Vance’s logic here is strictly partisan: Republicans should back the red team, no matter what. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump echoed this factional reasoning. But he added an interesting twist, suggesting that he would welcome other ads from mothers denouncing Democrats:

Vivek Ramaswamy put up a very powerful Ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who is running for Governor of Ohio, is a liar, and much worse. The Press, in a concerted and well coordinated attack, is trying to get Vivek Ramaswamy to “take down the Ad.” Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor. If my mother, the legendary Mary MacLeod Trump, said anything bad about me, the Fake News would play it up. The Dumocrats would be totally supportive, and it would go down as the Ad of the Decade—Maybe the Century! It would win Awards for Excellence in Advertising.…. I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse.

This is a much bolder and more revealing defense of the Ramaswamy ad than Vance’s call for unthinking GOP loyalty. There’s something about the prospect of parents’ denouncing children that clearly excites Trump: It speaks to right-wing values of hierarchy, obedience, and deference to seniority. If Vance was content to leave things at “support Republicans, right or wrong,” Trump is offering a more primordial message: “parents, right or wrong.” Trump wasn’t just defending Ramaswamy; he was defending toxic parenting.

What makes Trump’s message shocking is that “right or wrong” in this case includes child sex abuse. But this is hardly new for Trump, whose defense of patriarchy has often meant supporting men accused of horrific child abuse. In 2017, the president gave unwavering support to Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, even after multiple credible allegations emerged that Moore had sexually assaulted teenagers. Trump has also been notoriously reluctant to release files relating to the criminal activities of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who had been a longtime close friend of the president from the 1990s to the early 2000s. (And, though he has never been accused of child abuse himself, Trump has a long history of sexualizing his daughter Ivanka, telling Howard Stern it was fine to call her “a piece of ass” and saying to the cohosts of The View that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”—while Ivanka was sitting next to him.)

Trump’s support of Moore and handling of the Epstein scandal have a political component: They help him maintain the ties cultivated with a reactionary base that feels that complaints of sex abuse have undermined male power.

Just as Trump understands the atavistic appeal of male dominance to his political base, he has a similarly instinctive belief in parental authority. In 2006, long before his career as a Republican presidential candidate, Trump talked to actor Jon Voight, who complained that his daughter, Angelina Jolie, herself an accomplished thespian, no longer talked to him. Trump took up Voight’s cause, going on CNN to complain that Jolie treated her father “terribly” and “like a dog.” The future president went on to add a characteristic graceless note: “I just don’t even find her attractive.”

Trump has a primitive ethics of personal relations: Men should be boss, women submissive, and children grateful and obedient. This explains his passion in vigorously championing Ramaswamy’s ad.

In recent years, family estrangement has changed from personal tragedy to a wider social phenomenon, one that is now motivating political organizing.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that experts believe that family estrangements are “becoming an epidemic in the U.S., just like divorce in the 1970s. Much like then, the movement is driven by a convergence of large societal trends—this time the rise of social-media algorithms, changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma.” The phenomenon of parents or children cutting off ties with each other seems to affect at least 10 percent of the population.

The seeming rise of familial rupture has created a new backlash politics, with parents blaming therapy culture for creating a new generation of unruly adult children that won’t defer to their elders.

It’s noteworthy that the Journal, a newspaper that caters to wealthy older conservatives, has repeatedly tackled this subject, one that this newspaper seems to find resonant. In late September, in a moment captured in a much-watched video, Florida congressman and Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds took a question from a grandmother who complained that her daughter wasn’t talking to her. The woman wanted federal legislation to mandate that grandparents should have access to their grandkids, over and against the wishes of parents.

Family estrangement is a complex and tragic phenomenon, one that eludes any simple political response. In cases such as that of Acton and her brother, it’s inhumane to call on children to maintain relations with parents who have committed or tolerated horrific crimes. In less extreme cases, there might be arguments that both parents and children should try to be more forgiving. But this is something each family has to work out itself. It’s not a problem that can be solved by legislation.

Yet even problems outside political control can still be exploited by demagogues. Trump, Vance, and Ramaswamy all know their audience. They know the political right includes many people who lament the passing of the imaginary good old days when children were always expected to defer to their elders. It’s this atavistic passion that animates Ramaswamy’s disgusting ad, and Trump’s defense of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: How As Usual in a Deeply White Supremacist and Misogynist Society (As the United States There Has Always Been and Relentlessly Continues To Be) Both Black Immigrants and Formerly Enslaved Citizens in Particular and Women From Every Ethnicity in General Also Continue To Be Among the Major Targets Of Structural, Institutional, and Systemic Oppression, Exploitation, Discrimination, Abuse and Ridicule When It Comes To the Deadly Fascist Violation of Their Human, Constitutional, and Civil Rights. The Fact that These Vile and Lawless Procedures Are Also Reserved For the Elected Representatives Of These Always Specifically Vulnerable 'Out' Groups and Communities Is As Always An Ugly and Entrenched Tradition in American Politics and Culture.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:38:26 +0000

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ilhan-omar-raid-trump-reaction/

Politics

Where Is the Outrage Over Trump’s Racist Targeting of Ilhan Omar?

The establishment press and some Democrats are strangely mute over the president’s flagrant abuse of the legal system.

by Jeet Heer
October 16, 2026
The Nation

(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images; Jim Vondruska / Getty Images)

Donald Trump has long fantasized about deporting Representative Ilhan Omar. In 2019, Trump lashed out against Omar and her congressional colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—all left-wing Democrats and women of color and part of the “Squad.” Deploying a familiar xenophobic jibe, Trump taunted, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” For three of the Squad, Trump’s threat was vile but empty: Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley were all born in the United States.

But for Omar, Trump’s words carried a direct intent of harm. Omar was born in Somalia, came to the United States at age 8 as a refugee, and was eventually granted citizenship at age 17 in 2000. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that in 2019, the same year Trump was telling Omar to “go back” to where she came from, his administration ordered immigration officials to comb through her personal records to find evidence of fraud that could lead to her removal from the US. This fishing expedition came up empty-handed.

Never one to be defeated by a mere lack of evidence, Trump has persisted in calling for Omar’s deportation ever since—calls that have ramped up over the last year. In January, he said Omar should be sent “back to Somalia,” a call he repeated the following month. In March, Vice President JD Vance joined in, bluntly declaring, without evidence, that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud.”

There are ample reasons why Omar has been one of Trump’s favorite punching bags. As a leading leftist in Congress, she is a natural antagonist. But, more importantly, as a fearless Somali American woman, she excites all the passions of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that animate Trump and his MAGA movement.

Given the long history of Trump’s vendetta against Omar, it was ultimately not surprising when the Department of Homeland Security raided her home this week in search of evidence of immigration fraud, a move that The Wall Street Journal reports is motivated by a goal of stripping her of her citizenship.

The campaign against Omar stinks to high heaven of partisanship and bigotry. It is also part of a larger pattern of Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement to punish perceived enemies. As The New Yorker documented recently, Trump’s persecutions have done immense harm to the Department of Justice:

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Numerous attorneys have been pushed out or fired after refusing to prosecute such Trump enemies as the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James. When these vindictive prosecutions eventually fell under scrutiny in courtrooms, they didn’t fare well. It is extremely rare for grand juries to dismiss charges brought by federal prosecutors, but the case against James, who was accused of committing mortgage fraud, has been rejected twice. Indictments of James and Comey were initially secured by Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and a former beauty-pageant contestant whom Trump had appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though she’d had no experience as a prosecutor. But a magistrate judge subsequently reprimanded her for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” including repeatedly misstating the law to grand jurors. Another judge then dismissed both cases, ruling that Halligan had been appointed unlawfully.

But there’s a striking fact that sets the malicious prosecution apart: Unlike earlier victims of Trump’s lawless abuse of the justice system, Omar isn’t getting a full-throated defense from the political and media elite.

Omar does have people fighting on her side. As my Nation colleague John Nichols reports, she remains popular with her constituents in Minnesota, and the state’s Democratic Party has rallied to her side. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries decried Trump’s “vile personal attacks” and the fact that Trump’s “violent mass deportation machine has descended upon the home of a duly elected Member of Congress and her family.” Even former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was critical of Trump. In a post on X.com, Greene asked how “pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???”

Greene’s pointed rebuke of Trump stands in sharp contrast to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who in the five days since the raid has yet to say one word in defense of Omar.

Schumer’s silence is hardly surprising. Because Omar has been outspoken in her criticism of Israel and the Israel lobby, establishment Democrats such as Schumer have often kept their distance from her.

Omar’s criticism of Israel and her larger anti-war stance are overwhelmingly popular with Democratic Party voters and have majority support with the general public. According to a recent poll by Project 270, 67 percent of the public want to end overseas war, and 51 percent believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza (as against 29 percent who deny that genocide has occurred). But these positions are less popular with the political and media elite.

Other victims of Trump’s wrath have been turned into media heroes. But Omar is being treated differently. Writing in The Intercept, Adam Johnson drew a pointed contrast between the Omar raid and the August 2025 raid on the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic.

The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.

The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone…

As Johnson notes, the reason for the difference in treatment is simply one of identity: Omar is a critic of the establishment, while Bolton is a fixture of the national security state.

On his Unpopular Front Substack, John Ganz also noted that the response to the Omar raid has been “muted” and “tepid.” He suspected the reason might be complacency, due to the “repeated failure of this regime to prosecute its enemies.” But Ganz rightly notes that the attack on Omar is one of the most disturbing events of Trump’s presidency, since it upturns the core principles of liberal democracy:

[T]he attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers.

Ganz is right to highlight the dangers of Trump’s actions. One could add that there is a dual threat: Trump’s subversion of liberal democracy is aided and abetted by an establishment that is so committed to fending off outsiders that it can’t be bothered to defend Ilhan Omar at this crucial moment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ramaswamy-acton-attack-ad/

Politics

Vivek Ramaswamy’s New Attack Ad Should Be a National Scandal

The Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate has accused his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about being raped when she was 12 years old.

by Chris Lehmann
October 22, 2026
The Nation

Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a rally with President Donald Trump in Youngstown, Ohio.(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

There are vile and amoral political actors who will stop at nothing to promote their venal interests—and then there’s Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. The biotech billionaire mounted a vanity 2024 presidential run to brand himself as a Gen Z mini-Trump and went on to codirect the nihilist DOGE assault on governance until Elon Musk’s more capacious ego muscled him aside. After both these self-branding efforts flatlined, Ramaswamy decided to emulate the career path of Vice President JD Vance, leveraging his sketchy venture-capitalist fortune into a run for statewide office in his native Ohio.

Ramaswamy has been in a tight and ugly contest with former state health commissioner Amy Acton that, against all odds, became exponentially more repulsive this week with the release of a digital ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother. At the age of 12, Acton and her younger brother had been removed from their mother’s home in 1978 after her stepfather, Cletis Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter. Their biological father, Gerald Stearns, was granted custody of Acton and her brother; her mother, Donna, and her accused rapist then skipped out on bond. Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator that her last contact with her mom came in the courtroom where the custody case was held: “I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away. That was the last time I ever saw her.”

Gleefully mining the trauma of an abused 12-year-old, Ramaswamy’s campaign cut an ad in which Donna Arthur proclaims, after 48 years of estrangement founded on her allegiance to her daughter’s abuser, that

I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.

When the ad surfaced as part of an online poll, it met with a proper wave of outrage and disbelief. A MAGA movement that’s long dismissed and excused sexual assault, up to and including President Donald Trump’s special pleading for the defendants in the Cornell gang-rape case, was now attacking the credibility of a 12-year-old rape victim. It’s a textbook illustration of the abusers’ defense tactic known as DARVO—deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.

Only this sleazy instance of the practice was doubling as a political attack ad. Acton’s campaign responded with a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, pointing out the obvious: “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point. After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” Acton’s campaign then released an ad in which her brother explained, “I experienced a lot of abuse, but Amy got the worst of it…. Shame on Vivek. It’s the contempt he has for Amy. It’s the contempt he has for Ohio. He’s not fit to lead.” Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley and conservative pundit Meghan McCain echoed the same sentiment, and a host of other political figures have denounced the gutter attack.

But Ramaswamy, being Ramaswamy, is unfazed—indeed, after his campaign initially wouldn’t avow responsibility for the spot, it announced that it was spending $4 million to broadcast it during the homestretch of the race. (Ramaswamy’s campaign has so far spent more than $100 million, more than tripling outlays from Acton’s team.) His press flack, Connie Luck, continued playing up the smear, with a disingenuous disclaimer professing that “we don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020,” and then parroting the mother’s attack: “We know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”

Ramaswamy has duplicated the same sleazy rhetorical two-step, telling USA Today that Acton’s mother “has spoken out for years,” adding that “Amy Acton has been repeatedly and serially dishonest during this campaign and for much of her record in public service.” (The charge of unhinged mendacity coming from Ramaswamy is, shall we say, a rich one, given that his campaign had unleashed an earlier attack ad featuring the testimony of an Ohio resident blaming Acton’s handling of the Covid crisis for her mother’s death—only for it later to emerge that the woman had actually lived, and died, in Kentucky.)

The fallout from the ad seems likely to backfire on Ramaswamy, who clearly possesses even worse political instincts than his Buckeye State mentor, the gilded hillbilly-whisperer Vance. (Indeed, in an Ohio campaign stop, the vice president reprised the anemic bad-faith defenses Ramaswamy and his flack offered for the spot, complaining in his trademark online-bro register of rudderless grievance that “the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and call Amy Acton a liar.”) Acton had already opened a seven-point lead in the race, according to the latest Marist poll, and it’s hard to see how Ramaswamy’s desperate smear job will bring independents, suburban women, and anyone still maintaining a shred of common human decency into the GOP camp. Any honest assessment of Ramaswamy’s prospects in the race’s final week and half should begin and end with the 2012 saga of Todd Aiken, the Missouri GOP Senate candidate brought down by his demented comments on how “legitimate rape” rarely produces pregnancies—and therefore its victims should be denied access to abortion.

But to judge by the media coverage thus far, there’s a good chance that the Ramaswamy rape ad will escape Midwest containment, and come to symbolize the depravity and corruption of today’s Republican Party in the minds of many voters. There is a striking precedent for such a development—the impact of Florida GOP Representative Mark Foley’s resignation from Congress just prior to the 2006 midterms. Foley, the longtime director of the House page program, had long been rumored to have abused that post for sexually predatory ends. After a series of damning messages proving out those charges in unmistakable intimate detail surfaced, Foley resigned from Congress on September 29.

The scandal crystallized many impressions of rampant GOP corruption then percolating through the mediasphere, from the crass cynicism and greed dramatized in the downfall of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff to the epic mismanagement of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. The Democrats had indeed sought to make Republican corruption a central issue in that midterm cycle—but until the Foley scandal broke, their pitch came across as too procedural and removed from the daily lives of most Americans to land effectively; it hinged mostly on Abramoff’s convoluted deals to represent Native American casino interests, and pay-to-play accords in the gilded precincts of the Beltway. But here was the Republican congressional leadership plainly covering up the actions of a sexual predator targeting idealistic young men under his direction. (The reasons for then–Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s dilatory handling of the Foley affair would later become painfully clear when he was also exposed as a serial sexual predator, who had exploited the high-school students in his charge when he was a high-school teacher and wrestling coach.)

It’s striking how many parallels this midterm cycle shares with 2006, from a Republican Party at a loss to distance itself from its president’s unpopular war in the Middle East, his mishandling of the economy, and his breathtaking record of corruption. But Ramaswamy’s blunder, like the earlier Foley debacle for the GOP, may well reinforce the party’s justly earned reputation as an enabler of sexual predation and an enthusiastic defender of the manifold abuses of women normalized by the online manosphere. Especially after the uprising over the horrific gang-rape at Cornell, which has led to the predictable doxing and defamation efforts from the online right, the bid to discredit a rape victim who was 12 years old when her predator was arrested looks pathological in the minds of fair-minded observers. It’s now up to Democratic leaders to make sure no one in the country is allowed to forget Vivek Ramaswamy’s moral depravity—or his ambition to be the Trump figure for the next generation of right-wing misogynists—between now and November 3.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/won-t-stop-ilhan-omar-183904936.html

It Won’t Stop With Ilhan Omar
by Branko Marcetic
October 15, 2026
Jacobin

PHOTO: Across the world, right-wing and even occasionally liberal governments are using the immigration system as a way to punish and silence individuals whose speech those in power disagree with. (Angelina Katsanis / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Up until now, the Donald Trump-J. D. Vance administration has been busy weaponizing the US immigration system against fairly low-level political opponents: college students protesting US support for Israel's genocide, independent journalists applying scrutiny to government policies, or random tourists who happened to be critical of the president and his lackeys. Now it's taking the unprecedented step of turning it against a sitting member of Congress.

The federal raid on Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar's home carried out earlier this week has now all but officially been confirmed to be an immigration-related investigation trying to strip her of US citizenship and deport her, as sources separately relayed to Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It is just the latest and most extreme case of Trump and his people using the US immigration system and the massive bureaucracy that exists to enforce it as a vehicle for political repression based on a thinly veiled excuse.

There's little doubt this is politically motivated. It's not just that Omar has already been investigated for this with no charges to show for it, that this immigration history has been a right-wing media obsession for years, or that Trump and his underlings — who have turned the Department of Justice into the president's personal vehicle for score-settling on his many grudges — have singled out Omar as a target for the better part of a decade, often by flinging around wild and unproven accusations about her immigration history and repeatedly threatening to deport her.

It's clearly politically motivated because they've been openly saying they would do exactly what is happening now. Besides Trump's constant threats to deport her, the wife of one of Trump's top advisers, Stephen Miller, reacted to the news of the raid by tweeting, "Promise made, promise kept," before swiftly deleting it. Vice President Vance declared seven months ago that Omar "definitely committed immigration fraud."

Vance is now saying that the White House isn't involved and that they simply want "to let the law, the facts drive this" — but immediately undercut this cleanup attempt by then railing against Omar for "hav[ing] such disdain and such rage at the country that gave her a better life," before reminding the interviewer they would "follow the law" if they discovered a crime. They get so excited at the idea of deporting one of their fiercest critics that they can't help themselves.

To put it plainly, Trump and company long ago decided that Omar is guilty of whatever they're going to accuse her of and that she should be exiled from her country. This raid and whatever investigation comes of it is, to them, just a formality.

No administration in modern memory has targeted a congressperson like this, and certainly not with weeks to go before she's up for reelection — since a criminal investigation, which may not even result in charges, let alone any guilty verdict, has the obvious potential to be a politically damaging "October surprise" (even if it ends up being completely free of substance).

The fact that they're carrying out this unprecedented move is a major escalation of two separate Trump-Vance administration policies. One is its transformation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in particular, into a tool for intimidating the many swaths of the country that do not like the president or his sidekick. (The raid was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.) That approach has seen ICE kill at least three US citizens and many more noncitizens as well as illegally detain hundreds of citizens and deport around a dozen of them.

The less-well-known policy is the administration's push to turbocharge denaturalizations, which are now at unheard-of levels. The administration has eagerly publicized the cases where this has been aimed at violent criminals convicted for heinous crimes. But given that the investigation into Omar is being done with an eye to denaturalizing her, too, it raises the question of how many of these other denaturalization cases may be similarly politically driven.

It's worth remembering at this point that Vance gave his personal endorsement to a book that called for weaponizing the immigration system against the Right's political adversaries in exactly this way, with the Red Scares of last century as its model.

Ironically, as the Trump-Vance administration accelerates its preplanned crackdown on the Left, it's nakedly letting literally scores of right-wing criminals off the hook for their offenses.

A Reuters report earlier this week revealed how the White House has turned the presidential pardon into a system of personal patronage, trading clemency and a clean slate for past crimes for favors, which eighty-five mostly conservatives have benefited from so far — including a former Republican official who fundraised off of a dead police officer, then used the proceeds to buy herself plastic surgery and other goodies.

It also mirrors the Trump-Vance administration's policy toward Latin America. There it has freed a right-wing former president convicted of drug trafficking and otherwise politically gotten into bed with local alleged narcotraffickers while at the same time abducting a a left-wing leader on drug-trafficking charges, fueling a crackdown on other left-leaning officials in the region on similar grounds, and carrying out a campaign of indiscriminate murder in international waters on the basis of stopping the drug trade (which it has miserably failed at actually doing).

This is the Trump-Vance ethos in a nutshell: maximum pressure and punishment for political opponents spuriously accused of crimes and maximum leniency for actual criminals who happen to be the duo's political allies.

There is one more thing to say about this, which is that everything laid out here is, sadly, not the unique behavior of two particularly power-hungry right-wing officials in the United States. This is just arguably the most extreme instance of what has now become shamefully standard across Western democracies, whether governed by liberals or conservatives: of using the immigration system as a way to punish and silence individuals whose speech those in power disagree with, since immigration systems have a variety of legal loopholes and few to no real constitutional protections.

Look at what happened just this past week. Russian journalist and exiled Vladimir Putin critic Leonid Ragozin was officially notified that he was being expelled from Latvia, which he called home for more than a decade, by government decree — explicitly because of his critical reporting on the European role in the war in Ukraine, and likely also as belated political reprisal for years-old reporting that embarrassed the Latvian political elite. Meanwhile, former British diplomat Ian Proud was detained for hours at Heathrow airport and treated like a criminal — searched, fingerprints and DNA taken, electronics seized — under a recently passed (by the Labour government) anti-terrorism statute, all for the crime of having visited Russia to attend a conference.

Remember when Vance, at the beginning of his tenure, did a long, pompous speech tut-tutting European officials for being hostile to "the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion" and reminding them that "there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people"? And European officials responded with indignation that anyone would deign to dress them down on this subject?

Less than two years later, it's hard to know which of them was the bigger hypocrite — or even which of the two places Vance was describing in his speech.

[This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture.]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:45:53 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF CHUCK BERRY. (b. October 18, 1926--d. March 18, 2017)

Today, October 20, 2026 we feature the life, art, and legacy of the iconic and legendary musician, composer, songwriter, arranger, poet, singer, teacher, producer, and activist Chuck Berry--The undisputed KING OF ROCK ‘N ROLL–Part 1

https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/07/chuck-berry-b-october-18-1926-legendary.html

PHOTO: CHUCK BERRY (1926-2017)

A CELEBRATION OF AND IN HOMAGE AND GRATITUDE TO THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHUCK BERRY (b. October 18, 1926--d. March 18, 2017)

All,

So dig yall. Check this out. Last night (March 17) my beloved wife and I were actually having a very spirited, intense, wide ranging, dynamic, and HEAVY discussion about the sheer beauty, wit, power, humor, intelligence, creative imagination and awe inspiring/mind boggling GENIUS of a man whose name at birth was Charles Edward Anderson Berry, later known to the entire spinning globe as CHUCK, one of the most important, influential, and enduring ARTISTS of the past century bar none. REMEMBER: This is the man who along with such brilliantly talented colleagues, comrades, and fellow straightup revolutionary black cultural subversives as Little Richard, Otis Blackwell, Bo Diddley, Wynonie Harris, Big Mama Thornton, Ruth Brown, Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Louis Jordan, The Trenier Brothers, etc. etc. who actually INVENTED, yes INVENTED what everyone now calls ROCK AND ROLL and we in the so-called "urban zones" called JUMP MUSIC (among many other things)...

THE POINT is this (and it should NEVER be forgotten or ignored or dismissed on any level whatsoever): WITHOUT the great CHUCK BERRY there is no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no Bob Dylan, no John Lennon, no Elvis, no Jimi Hendrix, no Bruce Springsteen, no major (or minor) rock or pop musician, composer, songwriter, singer, performer, poet, or philosopher. PERIOD. He was the premeire foundational artistic and social template of 20th/21st century popular music long before anyone knew or acknowledged there was any such thing...

So forget about the following typically cheesy bullshit phony baloney obit from the "mainstream" press (I mean, get real folks, it's only the NY Times, afterall). In any event it doesn't come anywhere close to informing the reader or justly "explaining" just exactly how and why CHUCK BERRY was and is and will always be so damn important to not only music but art making in general as we know it in what we all archly refer to as "the modern world." So stay tuned in the following blizzard of posts I will be making available in this social media space over the next 24 hours. And oh yeah LISTEN TO THE MUSIC and tell your friends and other loved ones or just mere acquaintances what the big noise is all about here. In the meantime THANK YOU BROTHER BERRY. Your music and your creative style changed the world and our understanding of it and ourselves which what we arrogantly call ART at its very damn best always does...RIP forever "brown eyed handsome man"...

Kofi

March 18, 2017
The New York Times
NYTimes.com »
Breaking News Alert

BREAKING NEWS

Chuck Berry, whose distinctive guitar licks, duckwalks and songs about girls and cars helped define rock 'n' roll, has died at 90

Saturday, March 18, 2017

6:25 PM EDT

Chuck Berry, who with his indelible guitar licks, brash self-confidence and memorable songs about cars, girls and wild dance parties did as much as anyone to define rock ’n’ roll’s potential and attitude in its early years, died on Saturday. He was 90.

The St. Charles County Police Department in Missouri confirmed his death on its Facebook page. The department said it responded to a medical emergency at a home and he was declared dead after lifesaving measures were unsuccessful.

While Elvis Presley was rock’s first pop star and teenage heartthrob, Mr. Berry was its master theorist and conceptual genius, the songwriter who understood what the kids wanted before they did themselves. With songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” he gave his listeners more than they knew they were getting from jukebox entertainment.

Read more »

https://www.nytimes.com/20…/…/18/arts/chuck-berry-dead.html…

Music

"If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."

--John Lennon

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/chuck-berry-wins-prestigious-polar-music-prize-20140508

Chuck Berry Wins Prestigious Polar Music Prize
Rock pioneer joins past winners Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen

by Kory Grow
May 8, 2014
Rolling Stone

Chuck Berry Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Chuck Berry will be honored with the Polar Music Prize this year at a ceremony in Stockholm in late August. The rock pioneer, whose hits "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybelline" and "Roll Over Beethoven," among others, defined guitar playing for a generation, will receive £100,000 (a little more than $169,600) at the ceremony, which Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf will attend, the U.K.'s Telegraph reports. The award was founded by late Abba manager, lyricist and publisher Stig Anderson, who wanted it to "break down musical boundaries by bringing together people from all the different worlds of music." As such, 2014's other Polar recipient is opera and theater director Peter Sellars.

100 Greatest Guitarists: David Fricke on Chuck Berry

Past recipients have included Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, BB King, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen and Quincy Jones, among others. Paul McCartney was the first Polar Music Prize recipient in 1992; the other recipient in its inaugural year was the Baltic States, in honor of the region's national music culture. "The difference with this one for me is that I've presumably been chosen from everyone in the world," McCartney said at the ceremony. "You can't knock that, that's a high honor. They could have chosen all sorts of other people, I can think of a few people who you could choose for a music honor like this."

Part of Berry's Polar Music Award citation reads, "Every riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and a million other groups began to learn their craft by playing Chuck Berry songs."

https://www.chuckberry.com/biography
Chuck Berry
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Chuck Berry’s music has transcended generations. He earns respect to this day because he is truly an entertainer. Berry, also known as “The Father of Rock & Roll," gained success by watching the audience’s reaction and playing accordingly, putting his listeners’ amusement above all else. For this reason, tunes like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene” and “Memphis” have become anthems to an integrated American youth and popular culture. Berry is a musical icon who established rock and roll as a musical form and brought the worlds of black and white together in song. Born in St. Louis on October 18, 1926 Berry had many influences on his life that shaped his musical style. He emulated the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, while playing blues songs from bands like Muddy Waters. For his first stage performance, Berry chose to sing a Jay McShann song called “Confessin’ the Blues.” It was at his high school’s student musical performance, when the blues was well-liked but not considered appropriate for such an event. He got a thunderous applause for his daring choice, and from then on, Berry had to be onstage.

GUITAR LESSONS

Berry took up the guitar after that, inspired by his partner in the school production. He found that if he learned rhythm changes and blues chords, he could play most of the popular songs on the radio at the time. His friend, Ira Harris, showed him techniques on the guitar that would become the foundation of Berry’s original sound. Then in 1952, he began playing guitar and singing in a club band whose song list ranged from blues to ballads to calypso to country. Berry was becoming an accomplished showman, incorporating gestures and facial expressions to go with the lyrics.

It was in 1953 that Chuck Berry joined the Sir John’s Trio (eventually renamed the Chuck Berry Combo), which played the popular Cosmopolitan Club in St. Louis. Country-western music was big at the time, so Berry decided to use some of the riffs and create his own unique hillbilly sound. The black audience thought he was crazy at first, but couldn’t resist trying to dance along with it. Since country was popular with white people, they began to come to the shows, and the audience was at some points almost 40 percent white. Berry’s stage show antics were getting attention, but the other band members did their parts as well. In his own words: “I would slur my strings to make a passage that Johnnie (Johnson) could not produce with piano keys but the answer would be so close that he would get a tremendous ovation. His answer would sound similar to some that Jerry Lee Lewis’s fingers later began to flay.”

SOME GOOD ADVICE

Later in 1955, Berry went on a road trip to Chicago, where he chanced upon a club where his idol, Muddy Waters, was performing. He arrived late and only heard the last song, but when it was over he got the attention of Waters and asked him who to see about making a record. Waters replied, “Yeah, Leonard Chess. Yeah, Chess Records over on Forty-seventh and Cottage.” Berry went there on Monday and discovered it was a blues label where greats like Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley recorded. He didn’t have any tapes to show, but Chess was willing to listen if he brought some back from St. Louis. So Berry went home and recorded some originals, including the would-be “Maybellene,” then called “Ida May,” and drove back to Chicago later that week to audition. Much to Berry’s surprise, it was that hillbilly number that caught Chess’ attention. Berry was signed to Chess Records and in the summer of 1955, “Maybellene” reached #5 on the Pop Charts and #1 on the R&B Charts. Through Chuck Berry, Chess Records moved from the R&B genre into the mainstream and Berry himself was on his way to stardom.

THE REST IS HISTORY

Berry continued his success with such hits as “Brown-Eyed Man,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Memphis,” “Roll Over, Beethoven!” and “Johnny B. Goode.” “Johnny B. Goode” is Berry’s masterpiece, as it brought together all the elements of Berry’s unique musical sound. It cemented his place in rock history and led to fame in the 1950s. His popularity garnered him television and movie appearances and he toured frequently.

Berry’s incredible success is due to his ability to articulate the concerns and attitudes of his audience in his music. At the height of his success, Berry was a 30-year-old black man singing to a mostly white, teenage audience. Dubbed the “Eternal Teenager,” Chuck Berry’s knowledge of the pop market made it possible for him to break color barriers and play to an integrated audience.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Berry’s music was the inspiration for such groups as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Berry had a number of comeback recordings and in 1972 had the first and only #1 Pop Chart hit of his career with “My Ding-A-Ling. 1986 fittingly saw him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the very first inductee in history. As a tribute to his pervasiveness in the realm of rock, a clip of “Johnny B. Goode” was chosen played in the Voyager I spacecraft, proving Chuck Berry and his rock legacy are truly out of this world.

https://rockhall.com/inductees/chuck-berry

From 1986 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Essay

“Berry’s repertoire is required learning for all serious rockers, and essential listening for anyone who wants to know what rock and roll is all about.”

—Michael Hill

Chuck Berry’s fusion of blues, R&B, and country created an enduring template for rock & roll instrumentation, breaking down boundaries of both genre and race. He vastly expanded the vocabulary of the electric guitar, his technical prowess and showmanship inspiring the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and countless more. Lyrically, Berry’s rhythmic, vivid storytelling elevated the language of rock, enshrining American teenage life in song.

Inducted:
1986

Category:
Performer

Inducted By:
Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones)

Induction
Impact
Influence

Induction (Videos)

"Johnny B. Goode"
"Wang Dang Doodle"
"Roll Over Beethoven"

Influence and Influences

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Charlie Christian

Chuck Berry Influenced

Jimi Hendrix Experience

Bruce Springsteen

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

BIOGRAPHY

Chuck Berry’s music has transcended generations. He earns respect to this day because he was truly an entertainer. Berry, also known as “The Father of Rock & Roll," gained success by watching the audience’s reaction and playing accordingly, putting his listeners’ amusement above all else. For this reason, tunes like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene” and “Memphis” have become anthems to an integrated American youth and popular culture. Berry is a musical icon who established rock and roll as a musical form and brought the worlds of black and white together in song. Born in St. Louis on October 18, 1926 Berry had many influences on his life that shaped his musical style. He emulated the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, while playing blues songs from bands like Muddy Waters. For his first stage performance, Berry chose to sing a Jay McShann song called “Confessin’ the Blues.” It was at his high school’s student musical performance, when the blues was well-liked but not considered appropriate for such an event. He got a thunderous applause for his daring choice, and from then on, Berry had to be onstage.

FILMS

1995 History of Rock 'n' Roll - Rock 'n' Roll Explodes
1993 History of Rock 'n' Roll - Guitar Heroes
1993 Bluesland: A Portrait in American Music
1987 Chuck Berry: Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll
1985 Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley's Rock 'n' Roll All-Star Jam
1982 National Lampoon's Class Reunion
1978 American Hot Wax
1973 London Rock and Roll Show of 1973
1973 Let the Good Times Roll
1969 Little Richard: Keep on Rockin'
1969 Chuck Berry: Rock 'n' Roll Music
1965 Chuck Berry Hosts: BORN TO ROCK - The T.A.M.I. - T.N.T. Show
1959 Jazz on a Summer's Day
1959 Go Johnny Go (PAL only)
1957 Mister Rock and Roll
1956 Rock, Rock, Rock
NA Chuck Berry: Live at the Roxy with Tina Turner
NA Joined on Stage By Tina Turner

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

June 9th, 2017 The long awaited final studio album CHUCK, is released to critical acclaim.

August 26, 2014 Chuck honored with the prestigious Polar Music Prize.

December 2, 2000 Honoree at the 23rd Kennedy Center Honors.

September 2, 1995 Performs "Johnny B. Goode" alongside Bruce Springsteen at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

October 8, 1987 The film " Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll" is released. It is a live tribute to Berry, and is directed by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

1987 Publishes his honest and insightful autobiography.

January 23, 1986 Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York City.

February 26, 1985 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards.

June 1, 1979 Performs for President Jimmy Carter.

March 1, 1978 Appears as himself in the film "American Hot Wax," a biography about deejay Alan Freed.

October 21, 1972 The song "My Ding-a-Ling" (originally "My Tambourine") reaches No. 1, the only Berry recording to top the charts.

May 1, 1972 The London Chuck Berry Sessions is released; it becomes Berry's top-selling album, hitting No. 8 on the charts.

1965 Appears in concert film featuring the TAMI (Teen-Age Music International) Show, along with The Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and more.

May 31, 1961 Opens own amusement park, called Berryland, outside St. Louis.

March 17, 1958 "Sweet Little Sixteen" grabs No. 1 spot on R&B chart and No. 2 on pop chart, while rock & roll classic"Johnny B. Goode" gets No. 2 on R&B and No. 8 on pop.

September-November 1957 Goes on tour with the "Biggest Show of Stars for '57," which also included Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, etc.

June 30, 1956 Berry's song "Roll Over Beethoven" takes the second spot on the R&B chart, and gets to No. 29 on the pop chart.

September 1955 "Maybellene" hits No. 5 on Billboard's Rock and Roll Singles chart.

May 21, 1955 Records first songs, "Maybellene" and "Wee Wee Hours."

May 1955 Takes a roadtrip to Chicago; talks briefly to Muddy Waters, who refers him to Chess Records. There he lands a recording contract.

December 30, 1952 Receives a call from pianist Johnnie Johnson asking Berry to join the Sir John's Trio, a band that played at the very popular Cosmopolitan Club.

June 13, 1952 Joins Tommy Stevens in a house band that played Huff's Garden every Saturday.

1941 Performs at his school's musical stage performance, singing "Confessin' The Blues" while accompanied by his friend, Tommy Stevens, on guitar. Stevens' powerful performance inspires him to learn how to play the instrument himself.

AWARDS

2014 Polar Music Prize

2012 PEN Literary Award Winner

2002 BMI ICON award winner; other winners were Little Richard and Bo Diddley

1987 Receives a star on Hollywood Boulevard in California

1989 Honored with a star on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri

1985 Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

1985 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards

1982 Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association International Hall of Fame

ACHIEVEMENTS

First singer/songwriter of 1955

First guitarist/singer to get on Billboard charts

Directly inspired great rock icons The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley

United blacks and whites by producing music that appealed to everyone

His single "Johnny B. Goode" made the top 10 in 1958

Had the number one single in 1972 with "My Ding-a-ling"

Performed for President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1975

Was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986

Released his autobiography in 1987

"Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" made its debut in 1987

Berry performed "Johnny B. Goode" with Bruce Springsteen at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995

1977 Johnny Be Goode included content on Voyager 1 spacecraft

GENERAL INFORMATION

Birth Name: Charles Edward Anderson Berry

Nicknames: Father of Rock ‘N’ Roll, The Prime Minister of Rock ‘N’ Roll

Occupation: Musician

Born: October 18, 1926

Birth place: St. Louis, Mo.

Parents: Henry and Martha Berry

Wife: Themetta Suggs-Berry

Children: Darlin Ingrid Berry-Clay, Melody Exes Berry-Eskridge, Aloha Isa Lei Berry, Charles Edward Berry Jr.

Siblings: Henry, Thelma, Lucy, Paul, Martha

Weight: 180 lbs

Musically influenced by: Nat "King" Cole, Muddy Waters

Trademark: Duckwalk
FAVORITES

Food: Enjoyed beef and seafood, peaches, home fries, candied yams, chili, grape soda, orange juice, Snickers bars and Dutch apple pie. Despised liver, okra, gumbo, celery, carrots, cooked onions, grapefruit, salami and liquor.

Hobbies: Playing music, softball, twenty questions, chess, croquet, highway driving

Comedians: Lucille Ball

Music & Publishing Licensing:
aruiz@drivepublishing.com

Business Affairs:
chuckberry@isaleemusic.com

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2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

Influence and Influences

Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff

“I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job!” Trump said.

Donald Trump
Susie Wiles
Stephen Miller
White House
Chiefs Of Staff

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: STREAM TONIGHT Mehdi and Prem Are Going Live From Michigan Tune in at 9pm ET for Zeteo’s packed results-night coverage from Abdul El-Sayed HQ in Detroit. And Remember to VOTE FOR ANGIE NIXON in Florida. Whether you believe it or not Fascism is ALSO on the ballot,,,,

🔴
RALLY: Boricuas for Angie Nixon - w/ AOC, Nydia Velázquez & Maxwell Frost

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYXdUjPDMOs