“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
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One of the surveys released by the group, Median Strategies, claimed that Francesca Hong was leading the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor by more than 20 percentage points. Photo: LaShawnda Jones, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
An organization that released public election polling in recent weeks withdrew the results of two surveys, revealing that it had fabricated the polls as part of a “short-term social experiment” meant to expose how quickly false information could spread.
One of the surveys released by the group, Median Strategies, claimed that Francesca Hong was leading the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor by more than 20 percentage points. (She went on to lose by less than 1 percentage point.) Another, shared by Mayor Karen Bass on the social platform X in a since-deleted post, showed Bass leading Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff.
On Monday, Median Strategies withdrew those results, saying they “should not be treated as genuine polling data.”
In a statement posted to the organization’s website, Median Strategies said the fabricated results were intended to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
Median Strategies did not respond to a request for further comment on the incident.
The false polls, particularly the one from the California race, spread widely after being picked up by The California Post and various social media polling aggregators. The results, however, were not published by multiple major polling aggregators, and were not included in The New York Times’ poll trackers because the group did not respond to questions about its methodology.
The experiment came as the number of public pollsters has skyrocketed, with about 30 new pollsters cropping up so far this year. The large number of surveys coming from new, previously untested pollsters has made it increasingly difficult to judge survey quality. But while these new pollsters may be unproven, the vast majority appear to be real.
In Wisconsin, the Median Strategies results were largely in line with the other public polls, all of which greatly underestimated Hong’s opponent, David Crowley, igniting a wave of criticism of the value of primary polling.
What Median Strategies hoped to accomplish by adding false polls into a saturated marketplace was unclear, even to experts in the field.
SF claims for exemption from foreclosure-related transfer taxes hit $450 million in the past three fiscal years — more than claimed in the prior 15 years combined
This week, The City will preview San Francisco Opera’s upcoming season, host a stop on Herbie Hancock’s summer tour and throw a tea party at the zoo
“It doesn’t make sense as a social experiment; what are you measuring?” said Mia Costa, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “How do you know who was exposed and who wasn’t? This is just wreaking havoc in an election with real stakes and no real interest in understanding the effects of what you are doing.”
The revelation of such an experiment, and how easily the false results spread, exposed a challenge in a polling world where incentives are high to produce polls that attract attention, and the cost of a low-quality poll is relatively modest.
“The bar to doing a poll has gotten so low that it’s easy to get through without adhering to typical industry standards,” said Josh Pasek, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. “As a result, these bad actors can quickly manipulate our understanding of a race.”
The fake polls, which were first reported on by the Los Angeles Times, also drew attention to the increasing reliance on low-quality polls and betting markets to inform the public’s understanding in races where little information is otherwise available. Additionally, it calls into question how information of varying quality might move the needle in betting markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
“The ability to manipulate even a marginal amount of information can have a disproportionate impact on the markets,” Pasek said.
Bass’ election odds showed slight improvement in the betting markets after the Median Strategies poll was reported, while no changes were seen in Wisconsin. In its statement, Median Strategies claimed that no one involved received any compensation or financial benefit from the project, and that none of those involved held or traded any position in the various prediction or betting mechanisms.
Without further explanation, the statement about the experiment ended with a message that stood in contrast to the confused reaction that followed from people throughout the polling world: “Thank you for your understanding.”
Invited, undefended, unpunished, and rewarded: what independent researchers can still measure has doubled in a year, and the instruments that would measure the rest no longer exist.
Christopher Armitage Aug 19, Christopher Armitage from The Existentialist Republic
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Publisher’s note on sources and standards
This report covers February 2025 through August 2026. Every factual claim is cited where it appears. Sources consist of federal indictments, court filings, agency memoranda, Congressional Research Service publications, Senate correspondence, published threat intelligence from named firms and university research groups, and news reporting. Filings from advocacy organizations are flagged and checked against the underlying documents.
The 2026 midterms will be the first federal election since Russia’s 2016 attack in which none of the defenses built in response are still functioning, and enforcement under the older laws has stopped as well.
Finding 3: Republicans have opened a working channel to the Kremlin and plan to continue using it through the election
When we look at the totality of the circumstances as we approach the midterm elections, we can see that the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have invited foreign interference in their favor, removed the guardrails built to stop it, and rewarded those who provide it. What that means for November is that the operations documented here will be at full operational scale from America’s enemies, and hyper-targeted to convince people to vote MAGA or not show up.
Suppressing turnout remains among the most effective tools these operations have, which is why researchers estimate 4.7 million Americans stayed home in 2016 because of ads aimed at them, and it is the tool that fails when people show up anyway.
Beyond November, the work is electing representatives at the city and state level who are prepared to fight back from a serious oppositional posture. The states retain authority over their own elections, and they can ban what the federal government now permits, fund what it has defunded, and prosecute what it declines to. That is achievable and within reach, so long as we arm ourselves with the knowledge and organize well enough to use it.
Let’s get after it.
Your state can stand up its own single payer healthcare system, arrest ICE agents who break the law, and even create New Deal style jobs programs. There are tremendous options available to us at the state level that are largely untapped.
Want to make that all reality and start winning some ground? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need to have a plan.
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Mayor Daniel Lurie may well be undermining his own affordable housing bill by attacking another affordable housing measure—one that doesn’t conflict with his proposal.
The mayor has teamed up with Sup. Myrna Melgar to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that will ultimately set aside as much as $125 million a year for non-market units.
That measure, Prop. C, has widespread support at City Hall.
Lurie’s attack on Prop. I may backfire on his own housing measure
But the mayor is attacking another measure, Prop. I, which would mandate that the existing tax on high-end property sales go where the voters intended—for social housing.
Since that measure, also called Prop. I, passed in 2020, the city has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer taxes on the sale of properties worth more than $10 million. But former Mayor London Breed, who opposed the measure in part because she disliked its sponsor, Sup. Dean Preston, who defeated her hand-picked candidate for supe in D5, refused to allocate the money the way the voters intended. Lurie has continued that pattern.
The 2026 Prop. I would simply say: The voters wanted that tax money to go for social housing, so that’s what the mayor and the supes have to do.
Lurie’s message, released last week: If we set aside money for affordable housing, we won’t have as much money to pay the cops. The SF Standard headline says it all: “Affordable housing measure would deprive cops of funding, Lurie says.”
In his statement, Lurie said Prop. I would
carve a massive, permanent hole in the city’s general fund — the same fund that pays the firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who respond when San Franciscans call 911.
(He also called Prop. I, the social housing measure, a “slush fund” with no accountability. As Joe Eskenazi points out in Mission Local, that’s really odd—since the Mayor’s Office would control and allocate the money. Is Lurie saying his own office lacks accountability?)
The problem here is that two affordable housing measures are on the ballot. They don’t conflict; if both pass, the mayor will have his trust fund, and he will also have to allocate the high-end transfer tax money to housing, as the voters intended.
That would add up to about $250 million a year for non-market housing, enough over ten years to make a huge dent in the city’s affordability gap. After Trump is gone, if a Democrat who cares about housing is in the White House to add federal matching funds, we could be talking about as many as 20,000 or more social housing units by 2036, enough to bring down prices across the city.
But the voters aren’t going to be paying that close attention to the differences between Prop. C (the trust fund) and Prop. I (the transfer tax for affordable housing). They’re just going to see “affordable housing.” And if the mayor is out there saying affordable housing money takes resources from the cops, he may be killing his own measure.
There’s a more important point here: The $125 million in revenue that comes into the city from Prop. I would not exist if the voters hadn’t believed it would fund affordable housing. A proposal for a “cop tax” went down in flames.
That’s the priority of the current mayor—at a time when rents have never been higher and the need for non-market housing has never been greater. And it may backfire on him.
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
Credit: Andrew Rush/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP
Harold Meyerson’s piece “Why Have Less Than One Percent of American Socialists Joined DSA?” tackles a question that those from supporters to opponents of socialism have pondered. If socialism now has millions of stated adherents, why have very few of them opted to join the most prominent socialist organization? Alternatively, how can groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mobilize and activate the millions sympathetic to their broad views?
One barrier, for Meyerson, is a “cocoon culture” where activists—DSA or not—begin to believe ideas in their immediate world are more popular than they truly are. Specifically, he fears the advocacy of policies such as defunding the police is alienating potential voters for DSA candidates. He notes, accurately, that many of the most successful democratic socialist politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, support police reform but have publicly distanced themselves from the defund movement. While Meyerson doesn’t explicitly say it, one can conclude such a “cocoon culture” may be an explanation for why nearly all socialists have not joined DSA.
For Meyerson, should DSA and leftists aligned with it shed this cocoon culture, they could make bigger inroads in places outside the heavily blue districts where they’re winning. His argument gained some support with Francesca Hong’s defeat in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. The DSAer and state assemblymember, despite being ahead in the polls for some time, eventually lost as the Democratic establishment coalesced around one candidate, much like how Joe Biden defeated Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. Sure enough, Hong’s past comments rejecting Thanksgiving got more attention than her popular stance against AI data centers.
In my view, Meyerson is putting too much explanatory weight onto one candidate and her past tweets. At the very least, there is an overemphasis on democratic socialists’ unique takes explaining electoral defeats and seemingly low membership numbers.
It is more plausible that DSA’s membership numbers reflect the death of civic society in the United States much more than the group’s limitations. Perhaps Hong might have eked out a win if she had not been burdened by a history of inflammatory positions, but even if every DSA candidate were moderate-coded with a squeaky-clean social media history, it is highly unlikely that would cause a flood of sign-ups. If that were possible, more moderate social democratic membership organizations that reject DSA’s radicalism would be growing explosively, and they aren’t. On the contrary, the fact that DSA is full of outspoken radicals might be the reason it is as large as it is.
As Meyerson notes, DSA just hit 120,000 members. That makes it the largest socialist group in U.S. history, though without adjusting for population. Indeed, that figure is more impressive than it sounds, because DSA—almost uniquely among the current crop of nonprofit membership organizations, as well as the Democratic Party—requires members to pay dues, unless you apply for a waiver.
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Many other peer activist organizations allow people merely to sign up with an email and get a de facto lifetime membership. Unlike the member-funded DSA, many of those groups rely on big donors and foundations to sustain the financial health of the group. DSA, for obvious reasons, can have no truck with such funding tactics targeting the wealthy.
DSA almost certainly could have a million or more “members” even without rich backers if it just asked people to sign up with emails and never worry about renewal. But that’s not what DSA is building. It is attempting something much more difficult and ambitious: It is building a democratic model of political self-organization, for good and ill.
Danish sociologist Fabian Holt chronicled this energy rebuilding civic society in his new book, Organize or Burn (which I discussed on a recent Left Anchor podcast), which covers New York City DSA’s successful effort to pass environmental legislation at the state level in 2023. Holt studied the New York political scene and observed that young DSA activists were simply reviving the social function that party machines and other political actors have abandoned. This is a tremendous challenge in the age of smartphones and social media, but conversely, precisely because of our rotted civic society, organizations that can really build punch far above their weight. DSA is making the old new again—with policy and election wins to show for it.
While Holt is sympathetic to DSA, CNN commentator and erstwhile leftist Van Jones is not. But he agreed with Holt inasmuch as DSA’s strength is its social culture that builds community. Last June, he posted:
The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) can beat moderates in a growing number of blue strongholds. Why? Because the DSA has patiently built an army of on-the-ground organizers—who go to meetings, help each other, study together and THEN work to turn out voters on Election Day. That army grows every day—election or no election. Their investment in real people grows (and compounds) with each election cycle. The DSA has a bigger army, every time, win or lose.
This culture change, Jones notes, cannot happen overnight.
We even have an example of moderation failing to attract a mass membership in DSA’s own history. As Meyerson notes: “DSA, which had just 6,000 or so members when [Sanders’s first presidential] campaign began, didn’t yet exist as a political force; it was his campaign that effectively rebirthed the organization.” That old DSA was much closer to the politics of Sanders today. But now a more radical version is 20 times larger.
One might respond that conditions are more favorable for socialism today. That’s true. But we have not seen groups like Our Revolution, founded in Sanders’s image along traditional nonprofit lines, outorganize DSA, not by a long shot. It isn’t getting as much press, or achieving mass membership either—certainly not by the dues-only standards.
People are joining DSA and voting for its candidates because they see it winning, an honest force for change, and standing up to a Democratic establishment that has failed to defeat Donald Trump twice. Electing radicals like Hong with a history of saying what they really think, even if that might be unpopular or unworkable, is a key part of its credibility, for good and ill. A movement whose leaders are perfectly airbrushed and poll-tested will sound phony to a cynical voting public and struggle to attract attention in a cacophonous media environment.
And on balance, it’s working. Hong’s loss aside, DSA looks to be sending nearly half a dozen comrades to Congress next year—many more than the Socialist Party or older versions of DSA ever did. That demonstrates mass support, dues-paying or not, from the millions of voters in this country who identify with democratic socialism.
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David Duhalde is a democratic socialist organizer who has held positions in both the Democratic Socialists of America and its sister nonprofit, the DSA Fund. More by David Duhalde
Nithya Raman speaks at an election night party in June 2022. Credit: John McCoy/AP Photo
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spent last week touting a poll released on Thursday from an unknown company called Median Strategies showing her leading challenger Nithya Raman in her re-election campaign by double digits and winning 85 percent of third-place finisher Spencer Pratt’s voters. The poll was a rare bit of good news for Bass after a tough summer that featured a statistical rise in homelessness and an adviser going to work for a reviled logistics firm responsible for a disastrous warehouse fire in Boyle Heights.
The only problem with the poll is that it was fake.
Persistent Los Angeles Times reporter Noah Goldberg got Median Strategies to admit that the Bass-Raman poll was bogus and “should not be treated as genuine polling data.” Indeed, all three Median Strategies polls, including one showing Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong up in her primary by 23 points (she lost) and another showing Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo up in his general-election campaign by five, were not backed up by any numbers.
On its website, Median Strategies would only say that it was engaged in a “short-term social experiment” to see how polling data could “spread through the political information ecosystem.” But the financial disclosure that Median added was much more interesting. It insisted that nobody involved with the project received any “financial benefit” from the scheme, and it explicitly cited prediction markets.
“No individual involved held or traded any position in an election prediction market, betting market, or other financial instrument tied to the races covered by Median Strategies. The project was not undertaken for financial gain or to influence the value of any financial or prediction-market position,” the note reads. Median Strategies could not be reached for comment.
Of course, there’s no reason to believe an entity whose only public action involves lying. Because there is literally no other motivation to introduce fake polling into the political bloodstream other than to game a prediction market. And while this one may not have made any money, the point may simply have been to offer a road map to any political actor using invented information to make money from elections.
In fact, the strategy was not even particularly innovative. It has been used for decades, primarily in thinly traded “penny stock” markets, where information of any kind is highly sought. The term of art is a “pump-and-dump” scheme.
Here’s the short version: A promoter touts some inside information about the stock, either by directly cold-calling prospective investors, sending voluminous email spam, dropping it into internet forums or social media, or publishing a fake press release or misleading “investment research.” The information isn’t true, but if it works it generates enough interest to get movement on the stock, which the promoter has already purchased. Having bought low, the promoter sells high and makes off with the profits, and as the scheme collapses when the truth is revealed, all the investors who piled in lose their shirts.
An election prediction market has the same character as a stock. The markets are too new and too numerous to be heavily traded, and in head-to-head matchups, new developments can cause the market to tilt in favor of one candidate. The poll takes the place of the inside information, though you could imagine other things, like fake news about fundraising data or outside spending, erroneous reports about a misstep on the campaign trail, or whatever, can move numbers.
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The Bass poll worked perfectly for this purpose. The California Post, Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to penetrate the Golden State with right-leaning news, enthusiastically ran with the poll because of the inference that Pratt voters were kingmakers. (That web URL is still live on the California Post website, but it’s been gutted and replaced with a story about Bass demanding legal action.)
In a classic pump-and-dump, one story like that is all it takes for a market to move. The perpetrators already have their investment and can sit back, watch it rise, and sell when they want. There are resemblances between that and what happened in L.A. mayoral markets around the time of the poll release.
The Post story was published on August 13 at 10:53 p.m. Eastern time. On prediction market Kalshi, a contract on Bass to win the mayor’s race was trading at 64.3 cents on the dollar before the poll drop and 65.9 cents shortly thereafter, peaking at 67.2 cents before falling once the polling fiasco was revealed. The equivalent contract on Polymarket, a Kalshi competitor, was even more pronounced. The market was hovering at 61 cents the day before the poll release. You can see some action around that time, including one $6,000 bet on Bass. The market for Bass peaked on August 17 at 5:30 a.m., before the L.A. Times exposure, at 70 cents.
The Associated Press cited 20 separate Bass trades on Polymarket within 15 minutes of Median Strategies releasing their fake poll. These can be viewed at the market site.
A smoking gun of a whale trade on Bass followed by a sell-off is hard to discern, but on prediction markets, where everything is anonymous and unlimited new traders can be conjured up, that can be hard to uncover. If nothing else, Median Strategies proved the concept that a pump-and-dump scheme is easily transferrable to election prediction markets, which have the same mix of thin trading, high emotion, and easily led traders as penny stocks. That’s valuable information for would-be scam artists.
“I think this falls into the category of hard to prove but very hard to think it’s anything else,” said Corey Frayer, a former financial regulatory staffer in Congress now with the Consumer Federation of America.
Pump-and-dump schemes, incidentally, are securities fraud, and those caught setting them up can get prison time. Jordan Belfort, the famed Wolf of Wall Street, was convicted for running pump-and-dump schemes. But those cases, rooted in investor protection, are typically enforced out of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Prediction markets have been adopted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has a market integrity mandate.
Certainly, manipulating markets represents a threat to market integrity. But that slight change in focus, the generally outgunned nature of the CFTC, and its current role as an evangelist and indeed the rescuer of prediction markets from state regulation put it in a bad position to uncover and refer fraud of this nature for prosecution. Nearly all the prediction market manipulation we have heard about is a result of self-regulation from the companies, which could be selective.
What the Median Strategies saga reveals is the ease with which pump-and-dump schemes can be carried out in election markets. That is supposed to be an acceptable price to pay for learning the future. But it’s becoming very clear that, as applied to elections, prediction markets don’t know a damn thing and are of no utility. Last night’s Florida Senate race is a good example; Democrat Angie Nixon never rose above 11 cents on Kalshi until she won and paid out $1. One reason? There weren’t any polls.
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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen
Candidates from the left’s Democratic Socialists of America party have been gaining momentum around the country in primaries leading up to the midterms. The Onion examines the common myths and facts surrounding the DSA.
MYTH: Socialist ideas have never worked in the real world.
FACT: No political theory has ever worked in real life.
MYTH: The Soviet Union had democratic socialism.
FACT: The Soviet Union had a dog who went to space.
MYTH: The government will take away your money and give it to the poor.
FACT: You are the poor.
MYTH: The workers of the world must unite and seize the means of production from the ruling class by force if necessary.
FACT: The workers of the world should politely ask if they can have Labor Day off this year.
MYTH: DSA policies like universal healthcare would help millions of Americans.
The audience cheers for a speaker before U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) takes the stage at Mumford High School on May 3, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan. Sanders is visiting the midwest on his Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here tour.
(Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
It’s time for the political establishment to stop telling the American people what they should believe and start listening to what they actually want.
The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated.
Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.
Poll after poll shows the same thing. The American people know that the current economic system is rigged. The very rich get richer, while working families struggle. Today, while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has never ever had it so good.
Let me take this opportunity to share with you some of the major proposals that most progressives support. And you tell me how “extreme” they are.
We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in American history. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 50% of US households.
Not surprisingly, working families are tired of status quo politics and the same old, same old establishment policies that have failed them for years. They want change, real change – and are supporting progressive candidates who are fighting for that change.
In the richest country in the history of the world, Americans do not want to have to struggle every single day just to pay the bills. Working-class people do not want to die years younger than they should because of illnesses caused by the never-ending stress they experience just to survive. And, like past generations, they do not want their kids to have a lower standard of living than they do.
Establishment politicians and the establishment media have described the agenda that progressive candidates are winning elections on as “radical,” “far left,” “extremist” or, in the words of Donald Trump, “communist.” All that is nonsense. On major issue after major issue, the progressive agenda is reflecting exactly what a strong majority of the American people need and want.
Let me take this opportunity to share with you some of the major proposals that most progressives support. And you tell me how “extreme” they are.
Campaign finance reform
Progressives believe that our current campaign finance system is corrupt and is undermining democracy. It is absurd that one man, Mr Musk, can spend $290m to help elect Donald Trump as president and that billionaires in both parties can spend unlimited amounts of money in campaigns through their Super PACs.
We believe that we must end the disastrous US supreme court decision on Citizens United, ban Super Pacs and move to the public funding of elections. We believe that democracy means one person one vote, not billionaires buying elections.
Healthcare
Progressives believe that our current healthcare system is broken, dysfunctional and wildly expensive. We believe that it is immoral and fiscally irresponsible for us to spend roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as do the people of other major countries, while 85 million Americans remain uninsured or underinsured.
At the same time, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Progressives believe that healthcare is a human right and that we should do what all other major countries on Earth do, guarantee healthcare to all people. We agree with the 64% of Americans who want a Medicare for all single payer system.
Protecting American workers
Progressives believe that all Americans are entitled to a decent standard of living. We regard it as outrageous that in the year 2026 millions of workers continue to earn starvation wages and that the federal minimum wage remains at a disgraceful $7.25 an hour. We believe that the federal minimum wage should be raised to a living wage of at least $20 per hour.
We also believe that employers should no longer be able to deny workers their constitutional right to join unions through illegal actions. Progressives support the passage of the Pro Act which will make it easier for workers to join unions and negotiate contracts that will provide them with better wages, benefits and working conditions.
Tax the rich
Progressives believe that, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, the wealthiest people in this country must start paying their fair share of taxes. At a time when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth and when one-third of our senior citizens are struggling economically, it is absurd that billionaires have an effective tax rate lower than truck drivers or nurses.
The wealthiest people in this country and large profitable corporations must start paying their fair share of taxes so that we can adequately fund the needs of working families, the children and the elderly.
Regulation of AI
Progressives believe that AI and robotics, developed and pushed by the wealthiest people on Earth, are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity and that they will impact every man, woman and child in our country.
At a time when AI is threatening to displace millions of workers, eviscerate our privacy, harm our environment, undermine our democracy and negatively impact the mental health of our children, we believe that the government must play a decisive role in making sure that these revolutionary technologies are used to benefit all Americans, and not just make the big tech oligarchs even richer.
Climate change
Progressives believe that Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax” is not only extraordinarily ignorant, but is a real danger to the planet. The last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years on record and the last three years have been the hottest three years on record.
This past year the United States and countries throughout the world have seen major heatwaves, flash floods, increased drought and horrific forest fires – and scientists tell us the worst is yet to come.
Progressives believe that we must forcefully take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry. The truth is that we can create millions of good-paying union jobs by transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. For the sake of our kids, future generations and the habitability of the planet that is what we must do.
Foreign policy
Progressives believe that we need to fundamentally reform our foreign and military policies. 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. We do not need to spend $1.5tn a year on the Pentagon fighting endless wars and propping up dictatorships around the world.
We certainly do not have to invest tens of billions supporting the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel, which has killed 73,000 Palestinians and wounded over 173,000 more – the vast majority of them women, children and the elderly.
Despite what the media will have you believe, progressives are winning across this country for a simple reason: the ideas they are running on are extremely popular. It’s time for the political establishment to stop telling the American people what they should believe and start listening to what they actually want.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. Sanders ran to become the Democratic Party presidential nominee in both 2016 and 2020 and remains the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
Species extinction. Billionaire capture of governments. Inequality so extreme it’s destabilizing democracies. A return to large-scale war. Such events have combined to create an everything-all-at-once situation in the world that is no coincidence, according to a new book, “Ecocivilization,” by Berkeley resident Jeremy Lent.
“There are deeper, underlying causes to these things that are making them happen at the same time,” said Lent, who has spent the past two decades building the framework that explores why civilization is fracturing — and what could replace it.
The book’s title is shorthand for “ecological civilization,” the notion that we need to change not just one part of our civilization, but create an entirely different kind of civilization, Lent said, one that allows humans to live in harmony with the natural world and each other.
Lent, the co-founder of Ecocivilization Coalition, with members from around the globe, and founder of Deep Transformation Network, is considered a leading authority on the subject. The Guardian’s George Monbiot described Lent as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.”
Jeremy Lent. Courtesy of the author
Right now, “our whole global system is all about growing the economy as fast as possible, having markets determine everything, having the wealth go to whoever is able to come up with the most successful product and using technology that we have no control over,” Lent said.
He aims to show readers how bad things actually are right now but also provide hope. He proposes the idea of a life-affirming society, “a civilization that is simply based on setting the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerating earth,” he said.
In the book, Lent highlights five necessary changes for humanity’s flourishing:
A universal basic income framed not as welfare but as a citizen’s share of wealth built from generations of shared knowledge, infrastructure and natural resources.
Meaningful corporate charter reform with renewal tied to proven social and environmental accountability.
The expression of deliberative democracy — with citizens’ assemblies and sortition-based governing bodies making binding decisions, from local planning to national climate policy.
Legal rights for nature: giving oceans, land and their inhabitants standing as entities, not just property for human use.
Replacing GDP as the main measure of success with models like Doughnut Economics, which tracks whether people’s needs are met without exceeding planetary limits.
“These ideas are not in the utopian world but actually being done,” Lent said. “It will take a huge amount of effort and work, but a different kind of future is available to us if we all pull together to actually make it happen.”
Jon Ossoff Aug 17, 2026 Jon Ossoff is the only Democratic U.S. Senator up for reelection in a state Trump won. This is the most important Senate race in the country. He needs our support, join at ElectJon.com
Jason Watson, the US service member who was arrested on the steps of the US Capitol last month after calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, has been detained once again — just days after he criticized the president in an exclusive CNN interview.
The US Air Force major was “ordered into pretrial confinement” Tuesday, a US Air Force spokesperson told CNN. As of Wednesday evening, he has not been formally charged, but the spokesperson said the case is still under investigation. Watson is currently being detained at a county facility in Maryland and is on a military hold, according to the public information officer for that detention center.
It is unclear what charges Watson might be facing.
Watson’s attorney Chris Mutimer said the airman was arrested while on duty the day after his interview on CNN earlier in the week. Mutimer said Watson was refusing to wear his uniform.
“While he was at work he, through counsel, informed his chain of command that he would no longer be wearing his uniform,” Mutimer said. “Shortly after that, he was told he needed to put his uniform on. Within about 20 minutes, and my understanding is around 330, he was then arrested and he was brought to a county jail.”
Mutimer said on CNN Wednesday evening they are “expecting charges related to Article 88, which is contempt towards an officer or Article 92, which is failure to obey, which would be related potentially to him not putting his uniform back on.”
“He expected this,” the attorney said. “He expected to be arrested.”
The Air Force spokesperson said in a statement, “Military members are required to comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and all applicable regulations.” The spokesperson added, “Based on probable cause to support allegations of continued misconduct, Maj. Watson was ordered into pretrial confinement on Aug. 18, 2026. Maj. Watson is presumed innocent and will be afforded all rights under Rule for Courts-Martial 305 as his pretrial confinement is reviewed.”
CNN has asked the Air Force for further details.
On Monday, Watson spoke with CNN’s Erin Burnett and criticized Trump, whose impeachment and removal he continues to call for.
“What is happening with President Trump is not normal. He has failed us,” Watson said. “And not only is he a failure as president, he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption and is killing Americans. And that is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to all of us.”
Airman arrested after protesting Trump in uniform speaks out: Trump ‘has failed us’
Public dissent within active-duty military ranks is rare as service members are required to follow orders in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which criminalizes contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress and other top officials under Article 88.
“Maj. Watson’s personal statements do not reflect the views or policies of the Department of the Air Force,” the agency spokesperson said in the statement Wednesday.
Watson was previously arrested on July 1 on the US Capitol steps after he gave a speech calling for the impeachment and removal of Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
US Capitol Police told CNN at the time that members of the public are not allowed to demonstrate on the steps of the House unless they are accompanied by a member of Congress. Watson was “escorted” to the steps by a member, who then “left the area,” according to police.
Watson was wearing his uniform during the demonstration. Military regulation bans wearing a uniform while participating in political activities, though to date Watson had not been charged with an infraction tied to the demonstration.
Watson told CNN earlier this week that he is willing to pay the price of speaking out against the administration.
“We just have to be willing to accept that we can change what is happening in our country if we’re just willing to pay a price for it,” Watson said. “So all that I could do was ask myself what’s the highest price that I’m willing to pay. And this is what I ultimately came up with.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
Davis Winkie and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this story.
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Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
HBD Marsha- An All-Trans Drag Show Celebrating Marsha P. Johnson’s Birthday and Trans History Month Date: Saturday, August 22 Time: 4PM Location: Jane Warner Plaza, F-Line Castro Stop Come through to Jane Warner Plaza this Saturday at 4 PM for an All-Trans Drag Extravaganza hosted by Lady Adjacent. Featuring the best talent in the... Continue reading →
Meeting Agenda August 22, 2026 The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee’s Endorsements Committee and Issues and Resolutions Committee will hold a joint meeting on August 22nd, 2026 at 4:00 pm via Zoom to interview candidates for local elected office and ballot measure proponents and opponents for the November 3,... Continue reading →
This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
Who’s ready for another election? Read on to find out how to get involved with the League of Pissed Off Voters. Save the Date: August 23rd Endorsement Meeting OMFG this ballot is so long (25 propositions!). We will host our endorsement meeting on Sunday, August 23rd, and we’d love for... Continue reading →
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
Milk Club Trans Caucus Meeting Date: Tuesday, August 25 Time: 5-7 PM Join: Meeting info available to members of the Milk Club Trans Caucus. Please reach out to trans@milkclub.org if you would like to join the Milk Club Trans Caucus.
Milk Club AAPI Caucus Meeting Date: Tuesday, August 25 Time: 6-7PM Video Join Link: Click here We’re here to recruit you! https://tinyurl.com/milkclubaapi
Milk Club BIPOC Caucus Meeting Date: Tuesday, August 25 Time: 7-8:30PM Video Join Link: Meeting info here! Open to Black, Indigenous, People of Color with room for allies to lift up BIPOC voices and discuss BIPOC democratic issues. Please reach out to BIPOC@milkclub.org if you would like to join us or get invited to our signal... Continue reading →
Invited, undefended, unpunished, and rewarded: what independent researchers can still measure has doubled in a year, and the instruments that would measure the rest no longer exist.
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