“Vote blue, no matter who.” Unless they’re incredibly popular, representing the will of a majority of voters, then we must self-immolate. It’s unclear why the Democratic party is so allergic to winning. Or at least it would be, if they weren’t completely ineffective both as an opposition party and as a majority. If candidates promising big things win, then the party might actually have to do something when they come to power. In many ways it’s easier to just be out of power. Writing your strongly worded letters and refusing to take a stance on anything that your corporate overlords might disapprove of.

The idea that electing Democratic Socialists to some of the bluest Congressional Districts in the country, in a city with a self-proclaimed Socialist Mayor, would cause Jamie Harrison and James Carville to not recognize their own party is an indictment of them, not of us. People are tired of politicians claiming this is the most important election of our lifetimes and then doing… nothing, when elected. For the Democratic Establishment, there’s nothing more dangerous that enthusiastic voters with a chance to elect someone who actually cares about the issues they think are important.

Establishment Dems who win their Primaries are unquestionable deities, all knowing, all seeing, perfect in every way, owed the seat for the next 70 years. But when a candidate challenges the status quo, even for a seat with no incumbent, they become dangerous, toxic in the general, something to be minimized, excised, or destroyed. Save us the feigned panic and the pearl clutching over tweets or protest attendance. It demonizes the future of your party, and undermines the decision of the very voters that you claim to be trying to represent.

What the alarmist “leaders” of the party understand, but don’t want to admit, is Socialism isn’t scary, it’s liberating. What if you didn’t have to worry about food, housing, childcare, healthcare? What if everyone had inalienable human rights? Not just white men, not just the racial or religious majority, not just the rich, not everyone except … just EVERYONE.

The humanity of everyone, and the rights of everyone to the necessary elements not just to survive, but thrive, forms the core of the insurgent political forces that are surging across the US. Because as vilified and isolated as the socialist candidates are, what they value is simply providing basic human needs. But in doing so they refuse the false zero-sum competition that our capitalist society, and government, has forced on us.

If we have billions of dollars per day to bomb school girls, or women playing volleyball in Iran, why don’t we have money to ensure mothers and babies have all of the food and support they need in the US? If we have billions of dollars free to slosh around in stock and oil futures, week after week as the President escalates on Friday afternoon, and pledges restraint on Sunday afternoon, why can’t we ensure that schools and libraries have adequate funding to not just stay open, but to be key pillars of their communities?

In some ways the Republicans have an excuse. They’re against humanity, against human rights, pro-suffering. They’re behaving in alignment with their stated priorities and values. There’s not buyer’s remorse, they act as they promise, deliver as they campaigned. But the dirty secret of the Democratic party is, despite their claims to want these things, and the money being there to accomplish them, they never actually do it. That disconnect of rhetoric and actions, and the lack of distance between the two parties, explains both the recent electoral outcomes, and the disruptive candidate cycle we’re currently experiencing.

It is precisely this crop of up and coming DEMOCRATIC Socialists who are succeeding electorially because they are credible in their promises to actually try. Mamdani has been successful in New York City because he actually strove to do things. Whether filling potholes, raising taxes on second homes, or freezing the rent, he didn’t spend 2 years arguing about if he could do it, or how he would do it. He simply did. And now that the rent is frozen, you see the former naysayers supporting it. Landlords saying, actually turn over caused by raising the rent hurt their bottom lines. So having more residents in their units for the next 2 years while rents stay fixed is to their benefit.

Imagine that, doing the right thing, it proves popular and, likely, pays off electorally.

Acting

Fix It, FedEx: Help Undo the Harm Your Money Helped Cause - Action Network

FedEx bought the politicians. The politicians drew the Jim Crow map. In eight months, Tennessee dismantled four institutions of Memphis self-governance: federal agents deployed in September, the Memphis-Shelby County Schools takeover in April, the HB 483 attack on the Shelby County DA, and the May 7 congressional map that carves Memphis into three districts. FedEx Corporate PAC has given approximately $1.9 million to Tennessee state lawmakers since 2009. FedEx, headquartered in Memphis, ha...

Listening

The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover

How democratic socialists, boosted by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, swept the Democratic establishment in Tuesday’s primaries.

Reading

The DNC Autopsy Is a Confession by Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson

I want to be clear about what we are looking at. This isn’t a failed analysis. This is a confession.

It is a confession because of what it doesn’t include.

The words “Israel” and “Gaza” do not appear once in 192 pages, despite Rivera privately telling the IMEU Policy Project in July 2025 that the war hurt Democrats in 2024. The decision to keep Joe Biden on the ticket until July is glossed over. The decision to truncate Kamala Harris’s campaign to 107 days is not interrogated. The Uncommitted movement, which warned the party for a year that the party’s position on Palestine was demobilizing the base, is not mentioned. The structural reality of voter suppression, which has accelerated since Shelby County in 2013 and was reinforced when the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, is not engaged with as a strategic variable. The tech broligarchy that delivered young men to Trump through Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Pool, and the rest of the podcast pipeline is not named. None of the actual reasons the Democrats lost are in this autopsy.

What is in it is the same diagnosis the party has been writing about itself since Bill Clinton: too much attention to people of color, too much attention to women, too much attention to queer people, too much “identity politics,” and not enough attention to a particular imagined “Middle America” and “the South.”

…

Here’s the contradiction at the heart of the document. On one page, it frames “identity politics” as something the party needs to abandon. On another, it tells Democrats who want to win male voters to “deploy male messengers” and not to “assume identity politics will hold male voters of color.” This is not analysis. This is a posture. Identity politics, in this autopsy, means attention to Black people, women, queer people, immigrants. Attention to white men is not called identity politics. Attention to white men is called strategy.

I am not interested in arguing with the autopsy on its own terms. I am interested in naming what its terms are. They are the terms of a party that has not done the work of reckoning with patriarchy and anti-Black racism as the twin systems they are. You cannot beat the Republican coalition by mimicking its gender politics. You cannot out-misogyny the misogynists. The recommendation to deploy “male messengers” is itself a capitulation to the broligarchy: the tech-billionaire-podcast-bro infrastructure that delivered young men to Trump by selling them a vision of masculinity premised on the diminishment of women and the erasure of Black political power. The Democratic Party’s official 2024 post-mortem proposes to compete for those men by adopting the gendered logic that organizes against the rest of us.

…

The hardest part of reading this document is that the party already has the receipts for what works, and the autopsy ignores them. Down-ballot Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket in 2024. In states like North Carolina, Democratic candidates running statewide ran ahead of Kamala Harris. The autopsy itself notes this. What it refuses to draw the conclusion from is that base voters, Black women in particular, did the work the party did not pay us to do, and saved the seats the party could not save itself. Black women voted Democratic at over 90 percent in 2024, as we have in every election since 2008. We were not the problem. We were the proof.

…

Take New York. Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on both the Democratic and Working Families Party ballot lines in 2025. He won. The WFP line alone delivered roughly as many votes to Mamdani as the entire Republican ticket received. That is not a third party. That is a second party. In New York, the meaningful electoral competition to the Democratic Party is the Working Families Party, on the same ballot, with the same voters, fighting for a different politics.

A new narrative for progressive Jewish New Yorkers by Marisa Kabas

I posted to Threads myself Tuesday night, writing that I was proud of the message the Jewish voters of NY-10 had sent by choosing Lander over Goldman. I reference ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent bogus claim that 85% of Jews support Israel, and how it was disproven by the primary results. And I made clear that Lander supporters are not “self-hating Jews” or antisemitic; we display our profound love of Judaism by holding firm to the idea that we will not perpetuate violence in our name.

…

These sentiments are representative of a political reality that has become deeply unpopular. As Israel continues to prevent the US making peace with Iran by relentlessly attacking Southern Lebanon and killing more than 4,100 people, as the price tag for our country’s military and monetary support for Netanyahu’s vengeance continues to increase, and as the ties that bind the improbable alliance between far-right Jews and white nationalist evangelical Christians continue to weaken, progressive American Jews are done being told that our safety can only be ensured by a politics of fear. 

The accusations of us being self-hating Jews will no doubt persist, but it was easier to wake up this morning and not believe them.

Corporate Democrats Are Mobilizing to Counter the Rise of Democratic Socialists by Brad Reed

To push back against recent victories by democratic socialists, 15 centrist Democrats on Thursday announced their support for the “Promise to America” manifesto in which they emphasize their support for capitalism, law enforcement, and “fiscal discipline.”

…

Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the New York Health Campaign, accused the centrist Democrats of offering a substance-free platform that would not improve Americans’ lives.

“’Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology,” D’Arrigo wrote. “It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”

‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday by Adria R Walker

I make a claim that America suffers from a kind of double consciousness, that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction or depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country. Freedom is seen as the possession of a particular group of folk who can give it and take it away. And so when we find ourselves in these moments where we want to live up to our ideals and address racial injustice, we typically do so in a sentimentalized way: “What can we do for you?”

But that charity runs dry, such as at the end of Reconstruction, where people said: “We are done with the issue of slavery, but we don’t want Black folk to have full citizenship rights.” Folks who were anti-slavery suddenly were deeply suspicious about extending the franchise to Black people. Or we have these other moments where folks are asking the question, “What else do you want? We’ve given you so much. Show some gratitude.” We find ourselves in these cycles of sentimentality and white rage, as Carol Anderson talks about. So we find ourselves, over and over again, in these moments of backlash and then a desire for absolution.

‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday | History books | The Guardian

Glaude’s new book shows political turmoil historically reaching its boiling point around Fourth of July celebrations

In the heart of the Miccosukee, the Native American tribe that shut down Alligator Alcatraz by Abel Fernández

It goes back, naturally, to the origins of the country they are now part of. Before and after the independence of the 13 original colonies, which would eventually expand and become the 50 stars on the U.S. flag, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans died as a result of the consolidation of the American nation. The survivors were displaced to reservations and forced to assimilate into another culture.

For much of the 19th century, Florida’s Indigenous people fought to avoid relocation. “All Native people southeast of the Mississippi had to be deported and removed from their homes to Indian Territory, which was Oklahoma. This included the Miccosukee and Seminoles. Abiaka, a very old Miccosukee chief, knew we weren’t going to win this war against the Americans. He took 100 of his people, Miccosukee and Seminoles, and disappeared into the Everglades,” Sanders says.

The swamps were their salvation. “It was very difficult for the U.S. army to work logistically in the Everglades, moving their men, artillery, and supplies. That’s why we’re still here, because otherwise, we would have been taken to Fort Brooke, which today is called Tampa, put on a boat, taken over the Gulf to New Orleans, and made to catch up with the rest of the Native Americans on the so-called Trail of Tears, where they were herded like cattle to Oklahoma,” Sanders explains.

In the heart of the Miccosukee, the Native American tribe that shut down Alligator Alcatraz | U.S. | EL PAÍS English

The community found refuge from white persecution deep in the Everglades swamps centuries ago. Together with environmental groups, they succeeded in forcing the closure of the immigration detention center built on their ancestral lands

Resistance Company: Evolutions in Opposition at Delaney Hall by Isaac Jimenez

On any given day close to 1,000 detainees in Newark’s toxic corridor await court proceedings, transfers, or a chance at voluntary departure from a “hulking fortress.” On the outside, however, “sustained community opposition” is how groups like the ACLU, describe the organized effort to resist the occupation of the corporate jailor, GEO Group, the private detention company running Delaney Hall.

Resistance has manifested in different ways throughout the past year, from legal and legislative efforts to direct confrontation blurring the lines of nonviolent action, to finally harm reduction for the detainees inside (this was written before the hunger and labor strike called by detainees in late May 2026 led to violent ICE and police response). A patchwork of resisters from clergy, politicians, activists, organizers, labor unions, and ordinary neighbors make up the everyday struggle outside the gates of Delaney.

How to Rebuild a Justice System by Zeb Larson

Remaking the American judiciary is a tall order. The recent decision in Virginia to shut down voter-approved partisan gerrymandering makes it clear how important it is that judicial reform happen at the state level, too. It means rethinking the whole ecosystem of state and federal courts, and thinking creatively about how to minimize partisan influence over them. It means learning from the successes of South Africa as well as its failures, and thinking about constitutional review not just as a strictly technical process but as one that in Colin Eglin’s words weighs environmental and social factors. A constitution has to be a real and vital document for people living in the moment. An inorganic document is one that simply becomes a straitjacket.

How to Rebuild a Justice System

The transformation of South Africa's judicial system after apartheid ranks among the most successful of the 20th century.

New Jersey Lawmakers Move To End $250M AI Data Center Tax Credit by Devon Williams

But in the face of growing public opposition to data centers, Assembly Member Andrew Macurdy, a Democrat from Summit, said his proposal reflects a reevaluation of corporate tax incentives. 

“These corporate tax credits are no longer the best use of our taxpayer resources,” Macurdy said, arguing that energy demands from highly profitable data centers ultimately raise costs for residents.

Macurdy said tax incentives are “the equivalent of paying AI data centers $250 million in state funds simply to locate their facilities within the state’s borders. … Data centers need us, our resources, our land, more than we need them.”

Assembly Member Balvir Singh, a Democrat from Burlington Township, said that AI data centers backed by wealthy corporations “do not need additional subsidies on the backs of New Jersey taxpayers.”

New Jersey Lawmakers Move To End $250M AI Data Center Tax Credit – NJ Urban News

NJ lawmakers advanced a bill ending $250 million in tax credits for AI data centers amid concerns over energy costs and taxpayer subsidies.