“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.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Global problems are rarely solved by one person or invention — no matter how much they go viral. The Ocean Cleanup didn’t work, for the reasons experts said it wouldn’t. What can we learn from this?
In 2019 a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup conducted a major test of technology designed to remove plastic pollution from the water.
It appeared to work, and the nonprofit released photos proclaiming its success.
But some scientists noticed something else among the accumulated plastic in the Ocean Cleanup’s publicity photos.
“Earlier this year I warned that @TheOceanCleanup would catch and kill floating marine life,” marine ecologist Rebecca Helm wrote on the social media platform then known as Twitter. “This week they announced they’re collecting plastic, and their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.”
Social media post from Open Ocean Exploration. Photo credit: The Revelator
The Ocean Cleanup team appeared to be oblivious to this consequence of their test before this public criticism.
It’s not surprising that any attempt to remove plastic from the ocean would catch, and likely kill, many marine organisms, because the waters of this region aren’t a trash-filled biological desert. The area is full of neuston, marine life that lives right at the sea surface — species that may not be as charismatic as dolphins or sea turtles but are extremely ecologically important.
“This region in general has very high densities of several key species,” says Helm, now an affiliate faculty member at Georgetown University. “This ecosystem is ecologically important to species that we do care about. We can’t just go disrupting it in the name of conservation and imagine that everything is OK and that you’re doing a good thing.”
Other scientists agreed.
“Honestly, if that was me, I would have totally stopped,” Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer and founder of the oceanography equipment designer and supplier Tini Scientific, says of the incident. “Because the whole point is supposed to be about how you’re saving animals that live in the ocean.”
But while Ocean Cleanup adapted — the organization claims its latest designs have a “low adverse impact” on ocean wildlife (something its own data contradicts) — it hasn’t stopped. It continues to conduct plastic-removal operations at great financial cost, garner worldwide publicity and social media attention, and attract millions of dollars of donations.
All for an idea that, almost from the day it was announced, scientists have warned could do more harm than good.
A Meteoric Launch
It all began in 2012, when Boyan Slat, an 18-year-old Dutch aerospace engineering student, gave a TED talk announcing a bold scheme to scoop plastic trash out of the ocean. Slat envisioned building what would be the largest human-made structure ever deployed in the ocean (by far), a device that would collect plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and remove it, saving countless marine organisms.
This idea has since attracted a loyal social media following and become a nonprofit that generates millions of dollars in donations a year, a fundraising and media juggernaut in the ocean conservation space.
That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup, despite the fact that to date it hasn’t accomplished what it set out to do, for exactly the reasons that ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said it wouldn’t work.
After building and testing expensive prototypes that led to failed tests — which failed exactly the way ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said they would — the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015. Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website and generates praise-filled uncritical media coverage.
Experts say The Ocean Cleanup’s history and current reality represent a useful case study in the role of evidence and expertise in solving complex global environmental problems, and why we should be skeptical of “Only I can fix it” public figures and their self-proclaimed revolutionary inventions.
Misunderstanding of the Background Issues: Ocean Plastic Pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
There’s no doubt that ocean plastic pollution is a huge problem. Some organisms ingest smaller pieces of plastic, which will either choke them, poison them, or block their digestive tracts (essentially filling their stomachs with items they can’t digest so there’s no room for actual food). Larger pieces of plastic pose entanglement hazards, immobilizing and drowning marine life. This plastic has been found all over the world, and thanks to patterns of global ocean currents, it aggregates in regions called gyres.
A dead albatross at the Midway Atoll Refuge. The unaltered stomach contents of a dead albatross chick photographed on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific in September 2009 include plastic marine debris fed the chick by its parents. Photo credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters / Flickr ( CC BY 2.0)
But when most people think about the ocean plastic pollution problem and the famous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” they picture a huge and dense plastic island so thick that you can walk on it. That’s not the case — it’s more like a soup full of tiny bits of plastic, sometimes so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye.
“If you go to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, what you see is not a big collection of trash, but ocean, and it looks pretty normal,” says Miriam Goldstein, who did her Ph.D. on this region and is now the executive director of the National Ocean Protection Coalition. “When I was doing research out there, we were looking at many, many pieces of plastic — each about the size of a crumb.”
In any situation, if you don’t understand the problem, you’re unlikely to come up with a workable solution. For example, if you incorrectly believe that there are giant mountains of dense plastic floating in the ocean, it’s easier to wrongly believe that we can engineer a way to easily just scoop that plastic out of the ocean. It’s much harder to remove lots of tiny crumb-sized pieces of plastic … at least if your goal is avoiding killing everything else that’s swimming and living nearby.
“I was extremely skeptical of the whole idea, in part because the original TED talk was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Pacific Garbage Patch and gyres,” says Clark Richards, a physical oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “That’s the kind of picture that you get from introductory textbooks.”
It’s Hard to Build Things That Can Survive in the Ocean
A major reason why experts were skeptical of the Ocean Cleanup from the beginning was the team’s lack of experience with ocean engineering.
For one thing, the ocean is a rough environment, and it destroys human-made structures.
“You have a lot of concerns for any kind of instrumentation or large hardware that goes into the ocean,” says Martini. “Waves put a really large stress on anything mechanical. And you have issues with biofouling; anything you put in the ocean acts like a little raft and everything likes to grow on it, which makes it heavy and pulls it down.”
Richards also stressed the corrosive effect of seawater on anything metal and pointed out the complexity and expense of even getting a large structure in place.
“Equipment capable of being moored in the open ocean must be deployed from large capable offshore vessels, which typically cost about $100,000 per day,” he says.
In other words, there’s a reason why no one had built an object as large as the original vision for the Ocean Cleanup before, and it’s not because no one else had ever thought of it before.
“When I first saw the idea, I thought ‘This is very well-intentioned and heartfelt, but it won’t scale, it won’t work,’ ” Goldstein says.
“We were trying to do them the courtesy of taking them seriously,” Goldstein said. “And also, as ocean communication people, we thought it was our duty to talk about this, since it was getting so much attention.”
A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they were receptive to expert criticism they received and made substantive changes to the design based on that criticism. The experts I interviewed for this article disagree.
“Yeah, that’s what happens when you try and catch things in that part of the ocean,” she says. “This was wholly predictable from a basic knowledge of that ecosystem — predictable and predicted. Our concern was a lack of fundamental understanding of both the oceanography and the animals that live among the plastic.”
A representative for the Ocean Cleanup acknowledged via email that their efforts kill some marine life but asserted that their research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests plastic pollution kills more marine life than their cleanup attempts. They further claimed that “a majority of species caught as bycatch are invasive species.” The experts interviewed for this article did not agree with either claim.
The supplementary materials of their Scientific Reports paper, meanwhile, catalogued thousands of marine animals killed during Ocean Cleanup operations, including threatened species of sharks, bony fish, and sea turtles — none of whom are invasive. It found that 84 percent of animals identified as “incidental catch” in their cleanup efforts were fish, including three species of sharks. The paper also detailed how “Species classified as Vulnerable or Endangered, such as sea turtles (e.g., loggerhead, green and olive ridley), have also been encountered as incidental catch during cleanup.”
Pivots
Later designs of the Ocean Cleanup moved on from the free-floating boom and net design and transitioned into what it called System 002 and System 03 — essentially a large net towed behind a pair of boats. Ocean plastic pollution experts, once again, were not impressed. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, this new design was just slightly modified fishing gear.
“This organization was so focused on ‘technology development’ that they would adopt whatever they found and claim that they invented it, such as rebranding trawl fishing as trash removal technology,” Richards says.
In 2019 the Ocean Cleanup team also added a new element to their portfolio: trying to stop plastic from entering the ocean by intercepting it at river mouths.
“The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions” like Mr. Trash Wheel, Richards says. “Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators.”
A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that their river interceptors are custom-designed for each river.
Other Solutions
So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?
One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.
“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”
As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.
Meanwhile Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)
One of the most important lessons from this is that it shows the public understands the problems that plastic pollution poses to marine life — and that they’re willing to support solutions.
Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.” (Note that this was being said to people who devoted their lives and careers to evidence-based solutions to cleaning up the ocean).
Another recurring theme was “You’re just jealous that someone solved a problem you didn’t.” (Of course, this was being said to people pointing out that the Ocean Cleanup had not solved the problem).
Ironically the criticism seemed to cause defenders to double-down on Ocean Cleanup.
“We were cast as the haters who just didn’t want to believe, and there’s a certain personality that sees criticism itself as validation that the idea is a good one,” Goldstein said.
Of course, sometimes when experts say something doesn’t work, it’s because it doesn’t work — not because critics are jealous of an idea.
Helm, who worked on the United Nations High Seas treaty as a scientific advisor, knows how complicated effective solutions to complex issues really are. There are no shortcuts to putting in the work.
“There was this spirit at the time that a few well-meaning young people with a lot of passion would find solutions, but for complex problems like this one, the teenage geniuses and their billionaire backers aren’t going to save us, and they’re going to take us on a wild and expensive ride along the way,” Helm says.
Indeed, very few complex global problems will be solved by “imported magic,” a silver bullet technological solution that requires no one to make any sacrifices or changes.
Fixing these problems will require hard work, cooperation, expertise, and evidence. It may not make for snappy social media posts, but in the end, it’s the only thing that will help.
This story by David Shiffmanwas originally published by The Revelator and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. WhoWhatWhy has been a partner in Covering Climate Now since its inception in 2019.
“The majority of Democrats out there are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt: out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want.”
Still image of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (left), a Democrat running to represent Michigan in the US Senate, speaking with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez (right) at the Mexican-American Council in Saginaw, Michigan, on Dec. 5, 2025. Credit: Maximillian Alvarez/TRNN.
The outcome of Michigan’s Senate race will have major implications for the balance of power in Washington, DC, and for the future of the Democratic Party itself. With primaries taking place on August 4, all eyes are on the battle between progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and establishment candidate Haley Stephens to see who will represent Democrats in the general election. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with El-Sayed to talk about his campaign, the civil war within the Democratic party, and about fighting corporate oligarchy and MAGA fascism at the same time.
Credits:
Videography: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Speaker 1:
Michigan is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched Senate races of this entire cycle.
Speaker 2:
Democrats will choose between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, Wayne County, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
We pay more for the stuff we got to buy, get paid less for the work that we do and watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids instead of to invest in our own kids and their schools and their healthcare.
Speaker 4:
We’re done. Business as usual politics is over.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Most people don’t walk around thinking, where do I stand on the left right spectrum? Most people walk around thinking, how am I going to afford my groceries? How am I going to pay for my rent? Can I ever afford a home? What am I going to do if I get sick? The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want.
Speaker 5:
Obviously politics are a very tumultuous time right now and the Democratic Party’s kind of in disarray. So I’m coming out to support Abdul.
Maximillian Alvarez:
He really knew and understood the people, that he was for the people.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
So we’re running a campaign to do three very simple things. Number one, we’ve got to get money out of politics. We’ve got to take on the system that tells us that corporations are people and that their money is speech. So we’ve got to get money out of politics. Number two, we’ve got to put money back in people’s pockets. So what does that mean? It means empowering people to join or form a union in every sector of our lives. It means standing with small businesses like this one that really do create the backbone of our economy. And it means finally taxing billionaires some wealth.
Speaker 7:
And that is precisely why we need people like Abdul in the US Senate.
Speaker 8:
I worked third shift and I made sure to get my butt out here in support before I have to go into work because the message has always been amazing. Watch out. There’s a car right there. But yeah, the way he just speaks to the working class I feel like is really what we need. And also when I shook his hand, he dabbed me up like a homie.He felt like somebody I knew already and that’s somebody I want fighting for us in the Senate. So I’m really glad I came tonight.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
The question for us is bigger than this seat. It is about what we want out of our democracy in the first place. So if everything is working just fine for you, I’m not your guy. Do not vote for me. But if you believe that you deserve healthcare, if you believe that your tax dollars ought to be spent on you, if you believe that corporations should not have a bigger say in our politics than you do, then maybe I am.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We first met when you were running for governor here in Michigan in 2018. The question was how are Democrats going to respond to Trump? But also who’s going to inherit the Bernie Sanders mantle? AOC just won. And so you were part of that progressive cohort. And now we kind of have a similar situation. How are Democrats going to respond to Trump winning again? Zorn Mamdani just won in New York. Who’s going to inherit the progressive movement? But these are two very different moments and you’re a very different person than you were back then. I wanted to ask to start how you would characterize the differences between that campaign and this one.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Let me break it down two ways. There’s where we are as a country and then there’s the growth that you do as a person. I think where we are as a country, this is a moment where I think to be honest, we had failed to learn the central lesson of Trumpism. I think a lot of folks felt like the record had skipped, that there was this mistake and they didn’t see the fact that Donald Trump was exploiting a foundational pain in people. And I said this thing at the time, I think that was just, it was premature. Most folks didn’t see it. Donald Trump himself is not the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. And the disease is the system that allows corporations and billionaires and would be oligarchs to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding.
You watch as they use their power to suppress our wages for the work that we have to do and to raise our prices for the things we have to buy. And I think this time around people are recognizing that actually we dealt with the symptom, but we didn’t deal with the disease. And as a doctor, I’ll tell you, if you only deal with the symptom and you don’t deal with the disease, it comes back roaring worse. And that’s exactly what’s happened now. So I think folks are a lot more interested in authentic engagement with the structures of our system. Even now though, you got a lot of corporate folks out there who just want to deal with the symptoms. They’re like, “Oh, affordability? Okay, I’ll make one thing more affordable for you. It’d be great.” And they’re like, “No, there’s a structure underneath affordability. There’s a reason why everything accelerates in the wrong direction always.
And if you don’t deal with the foundational infrastructure, you’re not going to deal with the outcome.” One of the frustrations I think I have with some folks in our movement sometimes is that we want people to agree on the critique and we always break apart on the critique. It’s not about the critique, it’s about the outcome.
And I think the more you could focus on how you want the world to be like and get people to agree to that, even if they come at it with different perspectives, I think the better off we are. And I think that’s probably what I’ve learned over time.
Speaker 4:
There’s a big battle brewing. A battle brewing against not only the corrupt fascist forces of the Republican Party, but also against do – nothing Democrats that would rather sit there and collect paycheck after paycheck and fundraise from corporate donors that put your interests second to the interests of those very same corporations.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The 2024 election was less of a referendum on how much people love Donald Trump than it was a referendum on how much people hate the Democrats.
Speaker 2:
Agree.
Maximillian Alvarez:
People’s faith in the Democratic Party is in the basement right now, especially on top of a year of doing what feels like virtually nothing to stop Trump, caving on the longest government shutdown in our history while people are watching their SNAP benefits, their healthcare disappear before their eyes. So the question there is like, is why run as a Democrat? And how are you going to address that lack of faith and prove that this isn’t just the right message that you’re going to meet people’s needs?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Yeah. I know what I’m about. And Democratic Party hasn’t always met my needs. I think a lot of people out there feel like they’re Democrats by hostage situation. You look at the other guys and you’re like, “That’s crazy.” And then you look at the Democrats and you’re like, “I don’t know what’s worse.” Being cruel and crazy or being feckless in the face of being cruel and crazy. Now the party is so far away from its voters. The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them out at Democratic clubs or indivisible or you name the organization that I’m out, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt. Out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want. And I’ve said this for a very long time.
The problem with Democrats is too often they’re taking money from the very same people who created the problem. So now you’re in this weird position of trying to articulate a solution to the problem that includes the people who created the problem. That makes sense. I don’t take over money. I never have. I never will. And I understood from the day I started in politics that that wasn’t the big issue. And so when folks look at me, they say like, “At least I know what he believes because he’s not bought. And I think the party could do the same thing. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He’s got a coherent narrative. You out of a job. Immigrant took your job. Out of a home. Immigrant took your home. Out of healthcare. Immigrant took your healthcare. That’s his narrative. Simple, easy to understand, dead wrong. We could have a narrative too.
Out of a job, corporation offshore automated your job. Out of healthcare, corporation squeezed you out of healthcare. Out of a home, corporation speculated that you can’t afford a home. But when you’re taking money from corporations, guess what you’re not going to
Speaker 2:
Say?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
So you come with your little list of 10 point policy plans that’s going to deliver something for maybe somebody 10 years from now. It’s bullshit. So I think the party could be better and I’m ready to make it better. So I’m a Democrat with lowercase D, and I hope someday we can win the fight for what the Democratic Party can be. And I’m not willing to let go of all that infrastructure because a few folks who can’t let go of power say that it’s theirs.
Speaker 7:
So what the hell is going on? Why are we living in a society where workers are producing more and more and virtually all of that income and wealth is going to the top 1%?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
It’s the system that allows the richest, most powerful people, corporations, billionaires to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us. Corporations get bigger, more powerful. Our lives get harder.
Speaker 2:
I feel like I don’t ever see hardly any campaigning politicians come to Saginaw and it’s so underrepresented given how much we’ve been through. I mean, we’re very similar to Flint in a lot of ways and how we had a booming industry and then laws were passed that just discriminated against every single person one way or another that pushed us out of different areas for companies and contractors to come in and exploit us. And I think he touched on that in a way I haven’t seen a lot of politicians really focus on, at least for again, Saginaw.
Speaker 1:
I absolutely think Abdul is right on track of having the billionaires stop having power in politics and allowing us to have a voice and making sure that everybody is treated fairly. I do a lot of the organizing of the Latino community here in Saginaw, Michigan. So I’m trying to get them a voice because for too long there are too many Republicans and Democrats that have been voting to cause harm to the Latino population.
Speaker 5:
I think an unapologetic progressive populism that’s centered on delivering for working class people is how we win in the future. And that’s exactly what Abdul’s message is.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
I mean, democracy was broken the day corporations started to buy elections. That didn’t just happen. We’re at death’s door now, but we’ve been here. We’ve been sick. And so why don’t you talk about it in ways that are actually fully complete? Hey, every time a corporation comes in and buys off a politician, that kills your democracy a little bit. But most of these folks who want us to talk about democracy now didn’t feel it when that happened. And I think we got to talk about it completely. I
Maximillian Alvarez:
Want to talk about what that means for where we are sitting right now in Saginaw, Michigan. And I have a special attachment to this place. My wife grew up here. I have a lot of in – laws who live around here. My wife’s family had generations of men work in the old GM plant up the road. It is a cold, hard, but beautiful place with a lot of families with a lot of deep roots. A lot of igrant families going from back to Poland, Germany, Mexican and other Latino immigrants, a lot of black folks who came up during the Great Depression. People don’t give towns like Saginaw credit for how complex and beautiful they actually are. But in many ways, this is the archetypal rust belt
Speaker 2:
Town.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean there is a lot of pride. There’s a lot of joy. There’s a lot of family here. There’s also a lot of boarded up windows. There’s a lot of blight. There’s a lot of pain. There’s a lot of poverty and economic devastation. So why is it important for you to come to a place like Saginaw? And again, moving past the sort of democratic messaging, I guess my question is not how do you hope to reach people who live in places like Saginaw, but what can you and other politicians do for places like Saginaw?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Yeah. The simple question, how do you reach? You come. We’re here. You know what I mean? This is not my first time in Saginaw. It’s not going to be my last time in Saginaw. For me, I’ve trained as a doctor and that training’s been really useful for me because both doctors and politicians have to be really good at being able to sit with other people’s pain and to speak truth to pain. It’s truth to power, but also truth to pain. And then I think the way you reach folks is to be vulnerable with them. I can’t solve all the problems, but I can’t tell you why the problems exist. And I can tell you I’m going to try like hell to take it on. And then I think you need to go back to that point that I was making to be a really good listener to people’s pain and to try to forge that pain into purpose.
I can’t solve it. Anybody walks in here is like, “I’m going to fix your problems.” No, you’re not. We can solve it. And if I can be a vessel that helps to create something that can organize us and can impose what it is that we’ve been asking for, for a very long time into power, then I think we can solve it. We can’t solve it tomorrow, but we can solve it in due time. And I’ll tell you that the analogy here to medicine is clear. Somebody gets a cancer diagnosis. You want to tell them you’re going to be fine. It’s bullshit. And if I tell you you’re going to be fine, it’s a lie. But what I can tell you is I’m really sorry that this happened to you. And I can tell you what we know and I can tell you what we can do.
And I can tell you I’m going to sit here and listen for as long as you need me to listen to you and that I’m going to be your advocate for helping get the best outcome you want. In this case, it’s not terminal. Places like Saginaw can heal, but not doing the same shit that we’ve been doing. And so in some respects there is an honesty that you have to tell people. It’s not just always going to be okay or I’m going to solve all your problems. I’m not. I’m going to do my best to help you, to be honest with you about what the problem is, to sit down and think about what our approach moving forward can be and to fight like hell for you against people who’ve created this problem. And if we can do that and you can trust me to do that, we can build things over time, but it starts there.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mayor Zohran Mamdani raise their hands during a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) rally at Kings Theater on June 18, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday explained to Fox Business reporter Chase Williams why candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in Democratic primaries throughout the US.
While walking the halls of the US Capitol building, Williams asked Sanders (I-Vt.) if he believed DSA-backed candidates would hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of retaking Congress from Republicans this fall.
Sanders said he didn’t think so and then offered his opinion on why many voters are attracted to democratic socialism.
“The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society,” Sanders said. “They’re tired of a situation where 60% of our people live paycheck-to-paycheck… they are tired of a corrupt political system in which billionaires buy elections.”
NEW: I asked Sen. Bernie Sanders whether the rise of Democratic Socialist candidates could hurt Democrats politically in November.
"No," Sanders replied. "The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top – Elon Musk – owns more wealth than the… pic.twitter.com/eYb41K3o3h
Williams attempted to interject, but Sanders kept speaking.
“They want change,” he continued. “They want candidates and members of Congress with the guts to stand up for working families and not simply take big checks and not simply have super PACs elect… the next senators and members of Congress.”
Williams again pressed Sanders if he thought democratic socialists were a liability for the Democratic Party.
“No,” Sanders replied. “I think that if you have candidates who are standing up for the working class, and explaining that there is something wrong when the billionaire class is getting richer and richer, while so many Americans can’t afford groceries, they can’t afford housing, they can’t afford healthcare. That’s not the kind of economy the American people want.”
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US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minnesota on May 30, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
“We stand firmly against this report and other efforts by the Trump administration to weaponize the federal government against dissent, which is a patriotic tradition.”
President Donald Trump’s escalating claims that Cuba and its supporters poses a threat to US security have been denounced as “laughable” and “crazy,” but progressive lawmakers are warning that the State Department’s report alleging that the country of roughly 10 million people aims to “conquer” the United States and is backing “left-wing terrorism on American soil” represents a genuine attack on Trump’s perceived political enemies.
“Trump appears hell-bent on taking America back 70 years to the height of Cold War McCarthyism, when hawkish foreign policy was paired with unsubstantiated accusations of communist subversion and political repression against dissidents at home,” said a group of Democrats led by progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Taskforce. “We condemn this report’s attack on Americans’ constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.”
Omar on Thursday was joined by 10 other lawmakers, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), in speaking out days after the State Department released its report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”
The report, said the lawmakers, was a “McCarthyite attack on Americans’ free speech rights.”
The 100-page document claims that Cuba’s communist government “has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” and recruited “generations” of activists in the US, listing by name people who have participated in solidarity campaigns in support of Cuban people as the Trump administration has imposed a destructive oil blockade on the island nation.
“Trump appears hell-bent on taking America back 70 years to the height of Cold War McCarthyism.”
In January, Trump issued an executive order declaring that Cuba posed an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and threatened countries with tariffs should they provide oil to the Cuban government. The administration had already cut off Cuba’s top source of energy by taking control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. The blockade has left the Cuban healthcare and education systems and other daily public services struggling to operate.
US groups and citizens named in the report as having spoken out against the administration’s blockade and its threats of military action against Cuba include commentator Hasan Piker, Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls, the National Lawyers Guild, and campus activist Isra Hirsi—Omar’s daughter.
“We denounce this administration’s irresponsible attacks against civil society organizations, activists, journalists, labor leaders, members of Congress, elected officials, and private individuals based on their advocacy for peaceful foreign policy and social justice at home,” said Omar and the Democrats who joined her in the statement.
The lawmakers said they would use their “full oversight power as members of Congress and elected officials to stop the persecution of Trump’s perceived political enemies,” including those who speak out publicly against the president’s policies in Cuba—activity that is protected by the First Amendment.
“We stand firmly against this report and other efforts by the Trump administration to weaponize the federal government against dissent, which is a patriotic tradition,” they said.
The report is the administration’s latest attack on the free speech rights that are integral to the US Constitution and American history. The White House has pushed to deport foreign students who protested the US-backed Israel war on Gaza, designated anti-fascist organizers as “terrorists,” and, nearly a year after issuing a presidential memo demanding a strategy to “disrupt” left-wing networks, recently convened a summit to launch a “global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism.”
Meanwhile, said Omar on Thursday, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants and a long-time proponent of regime change on the island—“are intensifying decades of economic war” against the people of Cuba and deliberately depriving “the entire island’s population of adequate food, fuel, and medicine.”
Along with ending his attacks on those who oppose his policies, said Omar, “it is past time for Trump to obey the Constitution and end the dangerous, cruel, and illegal naval blockade causing collective punishment against Cuba.”
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More than a third of the 148,000 rejected mail-in ballots from California’s June primary were discarded because they were postmarked late, which experts largely attribute to a recent change in the US Postal Service’s postmarking policy.
As the Associated Press reports, nearly 150,000 California mail-in ballots were rejected in the June primary, with many arriving with postmarks that made them ineligible to be counted. Voting experts say the increase appears to be tied in part to recent US Postal Service changes that can delay when a mailpiece receives its postmark.
California allows mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days afterward, but experts say the issue is that some ballots are now receiving a postmark date based on when they are processed rather than when they were handed over to the Postal Service.
The state’s rejection rate in June was reportedly 1.73%, with 148,241 ballots rejected out of all returned mail ballots. That was higher than recent primary elections, including 2024, when 108,982 ballots were rejected, or about 1.56%. According to the AP, late arrival was by far the most common reason ballots were discarded — more than 93,000, followed by nearly 44,000 ballots where the voter’s signature did not match county records and more than 8,300 returned without a signature altogether.
Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said the problem is largely related to postmark timing rather than ballots simply arriving too late.
“Ballots rejected due to lateness are caused primarily to being postmarked too late to count, not because they arrived too late to count,” Alexander told the AP in an email.
Per the Postal Service’s new policy, customers can request a postmark on the same day it is mailed by dropping it off a Postal Service retail counter. The service is free, but many voters are unaware that they must specifically request one.
Without a manual postmark, the date applied to a ballot’s envelope may reflect when the mail is processed at a sorting facility rather than the day it was accepted by the Postal Service. Recent Postal Service consolidations have also reportedly moved some processing centers farther from communities, potentially adding delays before a postmark is applied.
California election officials warned voters earlier this year to mail ballots early or drop them off at polling stations because of concerns that Postal Service changes could affect delivery times.
The rejected ballots became fuel for a broader political fight after late-counted ballots shifted some election results weeks after Election Day.
President Donald Trump reportedly criticized California’s counting process, while state officials said the extended counting period is required under state law to allow counties to verify and count eligible ballots.
The site Rolling Out recommends that voters utilize the state’s free BallotTrax tracking system to make sure their votes were counted. Researchers reportedly found that voters who do not sign up are more likely to have ballots rejected, largely because they may not learn about signature issues in time to correct them.
Image: In this photo illustration, the envelope holding an official ballot, mailed to a Southern California resident, ahead of a state primary election, photographed May 5, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Every registered voter in California will receive a ballot by mail. (Photo Illustration by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images)
At the Progressive Caucus, we believe that government must be the great equalizer of opportunity for everyone. We are committed to passing legislation that advances justice, dignity, and peace for all people.
Realizing the goal of a universal, high-quality, Medicare For All health care system for all.
Advancing the right of every American to retire with security and dignity.
Ending poverty and income inequality and securing a living wage for all people.
Protecting the fundamental right to organize.
Ending mass incarceration and advancing equal justice under the law.
Taking urgent, inclusive, and transformative action on climate change.
Upholding the fundamental reproductive rights of all people.
Ending our forever wars, cutting the bloated Pentagon budget, and prioritizing diplomacy.
Advancing humane, fair and just immigration laws.
Advancing racial justice and equity.
Tackling systems of oppression and dismantling structural racism and discrimination.
Embedded in our nation’s history is a painful legacy of oppression, racism, and genocide. At the Progressive Caucus, we believe that elected leaders have an obligation to confront this legacy and dismantle the systems of oppression and discrimination that allow racism to persist in this nation. In order for any legislation to be truly inclusive and transformative, it must advance the goal of racial justice.
Advancing racial justice and equity in every policy.
Supporting a truth commission and reparations to address and repair the continued effects of slavery and discrimination.
Transforming our budgets and priorities to reinvest in Black, Brown, and indigenous communities and reimagine the role of institutions that exacerbate injustice and inequality.
Challenging harmful stereotypes and efforts that demonize immigrant, Black, Brown, indigenous, and LGBGTQ communities and actively opposing any legislation or policy that marginalizes those communities.
3. Taking on systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful to demand a government and economy that works for the people.
We believe elected officials should be beholden to the people, not to wealthy donors and powerful CEOs. At the Progressive Caucus, we reject pay-to-play and revolving door politics and fight for a democracy where the power is in the hands of the people, not concentrated among the rich and well-connected. We reject the failed politics of the past that prioritized the deregulation of financial industries and big polluters and tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations over the well-being of the public. And we support bold policies to close the gap between the rich and everyday Americans and ensure our government delivers essential services to every person in this country.
Ensuring regulation of industry with strong consumer protections.
Strengthening oversight of financial institutions.
Democratizing our society by getting money out of politics, eliminating political corruption, and protecting and expanding access to the ballot box.
Ensuring that all of our economic and tax policies address or decrease income inequality.
Protecting the federal government’s role in delivering essential goods, taking on monopolies, and disciplining markets.
4. A commitment to sweeping, transformative change.
Recognizing that the problems facing this country are enormous, we are committed to delivering solutions that meet the scale of the crisis. Faced with decades of disinvestment in working class communities, unprecedented income inequality, and a federal budget that fails to meet the needs of millions, we believe that Congress must take sweeping action to deliver the bold policies that this moment demands. The challenges facing this nation are structural — and Congress must be deliberate and explicit in dismantling these institutional barriers to prosperity, peace, and justice.
Demanding bold and visionary legislation to address the needs in every community and rejecting incrementalist approaches that fail to deliver urgent transformative change.
Opposing counterproductive and false narratives on government deficits that have led to decades-long disinvestment in low-income communities, communities of color, families, and working people.
Reversing decades-long disinvestment in low-income communities, communities of color, families, and working people.
Delivering structural change that unrigs the rules for working people and forces the wealthy to contribute to our shared prosperity.
Troy Jackson speaks to reporters at a campaign event on June 5, 2026, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Credit: Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Troy Jackson, the North Woods legislator-logger, has snatched up Graham Platner’s mantle of Maine authenticity and anti-establishment populist cred, a dazzling profile that blinded almost an entire state to Platner’s catalog of personal defects. Backed by Platner’s enthused volunteers, Jackson harnessed those grassroots organizers to his union supporters and crushed the statewide caucus game. Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state; Nirav Shah, the former state public health leader; and other Senate contenders gracefully stepped aside.
Fact: Jackson can’t match Platner’s charisma. Reality: That may be a good thing. Charisma can mask competence. Voters have a fatal attraction to tapping outsized personalities to tackle subpar health care, abysmal schools, inadequate middle-income housing, and other complexities. Talking a good game about eradicating long-standing social and economic inequities doesn’t necessarily translate into an FDR-level skill set.
Jackson is a known political quantity, 20 years in the making. And in this tortured political environment, the last thing a deeply betrayed Maine needs is Platner 2.0. It’s still an open question, however, if all this energy powers Jackson past Susan Collins.
A University of New Hampshire Survey Center/Pine Tree State poll released on Tuesday found the two candidates in a statistical tie: 49 percent of likely voters say they would go for Jackson; 46 percent would vote for Collins; 3 percent are undecided. Jackson’s unfavorables are high: 37 percent have favorable opinion; 32 percent have an unfavorable one. But Collins’s unfavorables are higher: 35 percent have a favorable view; 53 percent do not. Among independents, Collins is unpopular; they’re split over Jackson.
On the stump, no one is going to confuse Troy Jackson with Graham Platner. There’s been an intense focus on the former state Senate president’s Allagash accent and his tepid debate performances during his race for governor. In a new ad, he takes on the class-tinged negativity: “Movements are not built on debate stages,” he says. “They’re built in union halls, at kitchen tables, on picket lines, and in conversations with neighbors.” His critics also would do well to pull up a chair and acknowledge that Jackson has won the votes of some of the most conservative people in Maine, ones who also voted for President Trump.
But so has Collins. She grew up in Caribou, Maine, a town near the Canadian border not far from Allagash, Jackson’s hometown. She isn’t known for her mic-dropping either. Maine’s senior senator so often expresses “concern” about one issue or another, but she doesn’t respond in ways that demonstrate she actually understands that what her constituents want is action. This failing is so egregious that her comments about “concern” appear in memes and on T-shirts. She has been faulted for failing to hold town meetings. Her constituents must show up to ribbon cuttings to get her attention. And she isn’t exactly wading into ICE protests to explain what she plans to do about the agency.
On Wednesday, NBC News asked Collins about her new opponent. She had this to say about him: “He’s had quite a transformation over the years in his political views, but now seems to be firmly aligned with the democratic socialists.”
Troy Jackson’s response: “Very concerned.”
ONCE A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC REPUBLICAN, Jackson has evolved into a Democratic progressive working man’s politico. Prior to his election to the state legislature in 2008, the crusading labor leader helped organize a 1998 blockade of the U.S.- Canada Canadian to protest lumber companies’ illegal hiring of Canadian loggers. Once in Augusta, he went on to pursue collective bargaining rights for workers in the Maine woods. He’s tempered his views about abortion and now supports reproductive rights. After taking a tour of a Planned Parenthood facility in Portland in 2016, Jackson said that he was “really shocked at all services they provide there that have nothing at all to do with abortion… there was so much more that I didn’t even understand.”
His origins in Aroostook County (known as simply “the County”), the most rural area of Maine, gives him an understanding of the white working class that a conference room full of K Street consultants can only guess at. Maine’s Second Congressional District helped deliver one of the state’s four electoral votes to Donald Trump ten years ago. Trump’s rhetoric matched their belief systems—even though Trump had never really professed any interest in the problems facing working-class white people.
Jackson’s perspective on the president was prophetic. “Donald Trump understood that so many people feel like they are losing what they have in life because of bad trade deals and things like that,” he told me in 2016. “I flat-out don’t believe that he will do anything to help in that regard.”
Trump proved Jackson right: The lumber tariffs, for example, have had mixed effects. Hardwood exports to Canada have been subject to punishing tariffs throwing that market out of kilter, while potentially offsetting stateside demand never materialized. Softwood products haven’t been as severely affected, but the turmoil isn’t helping that sector either.
This year’s race will turn on affordability, and one issue Jackson championed during his campaign for governor was prescription drug reform. During the Democratic primary debate season, Jackson saluted Mills’s work on expanding Medicaid in 2019, while faulting her for failing to support his efforts to limit huge prince increases on certain prescription drugs. Jackson has noted his constituents are well-aware that their Canadian neighbors don’t have to make the choice between paying for rent or medications.
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He’s been outspoken about the challenges facing public K-12 education in a state where 74 percent of children still cannot read proficiently by fourth grade. He points out that Maine’s minimum starting salary for teachers—a little more than $44,000, one of the lowest in the country—is “a joke.” And he doesn’t have much time either for a new state law that finally raises that minimum to $50,000 three years from now. Teachers, he said in the gubernatorial debate, need a pay raise immediately to improve their quality of life and to improve the state’s ability to recruit educators. He’d like to see a minimum starting salary of $60,000. Jackson finished third in the gubernatorial primary.
Coming on the heels of Platner, it’s no surprise that long-held concerns about Jackson’s temperament have exploded on the national scene, and right now, policy debates have been shunted aside. During one televised gubernatorial debate Jackson complained that Gov. Janet Mills (D) “vetoed 40” of his bills and that they “disagreed a lot.” The grumblings in Augusta about his volatile temper were bound to catch up with him—and they have. The Washington Post reported on the infamous Jackson plastic water bottle throwing episode (a five-year-old story) and other tirades, producing a veritable pile-on of confessions and observations from Maine pols and others.
Jackson and Maine’s far-right Republican former Gov. Paul LePage also tangled frequently. In the middle of a state budget dispute in 2013, LePage went on an off-the-rails attack. “Sen. Jackson claims to be for the people but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” LePage said. Jackson took the high road, at least publicly: “Stamping his feet and making these type of comments doesn’t do anything to help the people of the state of Maine … I understand that that’s not the way that you do things if you’re going to be an elected official.” LePage is now on a comeback trail, running for the Second Congressional District seat against Democrat Matt Dunlap, the state auditor.
The irony is that Congress has become its own fight club. But facing off against the preternaturally calm and concerned Collins means that anger management is an issue Jackson must take seriously. His political passion has been offered up as a tepid explainer, but there comes a point when the candidate must show how he plans to navigate the ongoing temperament questions in this nationalized race.
Jackson also isn’t anywhere near matching Collins’s $11 million in cash on hand (as of June 30), so reassuring jittery potential donors will consume much time—especially since Senate Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer is slow-rolling his endorsement. (A spokeswoman has said that he’ll support the party’s nominee. Maine Democratic Party delegates meet and vote next week on Jackson.)
THE BENEFITS OF INCUMBENCY, HOWEVER, are only going to get Collins so far in her sixth run for office. This contest marks the first time that Collins faces voters after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, aided by her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice. November 3 is effectively a referendum on her Kavanaugh vote and its consequences, as is her ongoing acquiescence to Trump’s decision making.
Collins’s Trump mollification strategy won’t help either. The University of New Hampshire poll found 53 percent of voters ranked her “good or very good” for steering federal dollars to Maine. But the Senate Appropriations Committee chair has a mixed record of confronting Trump’s impoundment reflexes. She’s clawed back funding for the state university system but has been thwarted in other areas. Smaller majorities of voters rated her “poor or very poor” for her voting records on key legislation, Cabinet nominations, and Supreme Court justices.
She’s also being called to account for the administration’s heinous immigration policies and the killing of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the young father killed in Biddeford, a Portland suburb, by an ICE agent. His death has completely upended the Senate race. Mainers have turned up to protest at the senator’s state offices. Collins resisted calls to defund ICE and called on the Department of Homeland Security to end “non-urgent vehicle stops.” But Trump quickly countermanded that move. Jackson expressed support for the family and vowed “to do something to get rid of ICE [and] the people that support them.”
Like it or not, televised debates will be key. Questions have begun to percolate about Collins’s health challenges. Reservations about her age, 73, continue. Though there’s much handwringing about Jackson’s ability to face down a sitting senator on the debate stage, Maine Republicans had counted on having Platner’s womanizing as a foil. A 58-year-old’s anger issues may or may not prove to be as potent in an era when a cabinet member (DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin) once invited a union leader to step outside a Capitol Hill hearing room.
But one tactic, using “democratic socialist” as a pejorative in 2026—when nearly 10,000 Mainers have been compelled by Trump’s budget cuts to give up their health insurance and another 33,000 will lose Medicaid—isn’t going to have the fright factor that labeling someone a communist did 70 years ago. In the past 18 months, Americans have faced a perfect storm of unparalleled economic, social, and international cataclysms, courtesy of Republicans in Washington.
It’s déjà vu all over again for Troy Jackson. “The only thing that I know damn well is that Donald Trump played a game,” Jackson told me in 2016. “I said that from the beginning the difference between Trump and LePage was I thought Trump was saying things he believed he had to say, as opposed to LePage, who actually believes them. I am concerned about so many things now that it is not even funny.”
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Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis. More by Gabrielle Gurley
The president, who isn’t known for his embrace of new ideas, might see anti-communism as an easy path to victory. Shown: Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954. Photo: United Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
President Donald Trump knows that he is unpopular.
This is why he has become even more obsessed with election fraud; why he fumed and rambled about the 2020 election for a primetime audience last week; and why he wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that — in his mind — would make it impossible for Democrats to win the midterm elections.
This is why both he and his Republican allies are throwing everything they have at Democrats in an attempt to find a message that sticks with the public, a message that could help them hold Congress for another two years. And what Trump and the Republican Party have settled on to spearhead their campaign against the Democratic Party is the threat of communism.
That’s right: communism. It is unclear exactly what Trump has in mind when he says “communism,” although there is no reason to think that the president could distinguish Marxism-Leninism from Maoism or Trotskyism or some other more boutique formulation. Whatever his meaning, the important point is that communism is, to the president, the single greatest threat to the safety, prosperity and integrity of the United States.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said at a semiquincentennial event at Mount Rushmore on July 3. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”
The next day, in his Independence Day speech on the National Mall, Trump was even more emphatic about the threat communism poses. “The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked,” he said. “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”
Following the president’s direction, Republican leaders in Congress have also pledged to fight the Red menace, tying it explicitly to the Democratic Party. “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November,” Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said. One imagines that we’ll soon see Republicans quoting Alexander Kolchak and waving the banner of the White Army.
It is clear that all of this is a response to the recent success of insurgent left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries, especially those with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America. These candidates, who won Democratic primaries — most recently Melat Kiros of Colorado — are not communists. DSA’s origins, in fact, lie in part with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, whose leadership came from the anti-communist left. But it is perhaps too much to expect American conservatives to distinguish between the many flavors of left-wing politics in the United States.
In any case, Republicans hope to wield the public’s long-standing hostility to socialism as a weapon against Democratic Party politicians, whether or not they fall on the left or call themselves democratic socialists. (And if the recent activities of Marco Rubio and the State Department are any indication, the administration also wants to wield the specter of communism as it makes its plans for Cuba.)
But Americans are neither as hostile to socialism as they once were nor as positive toward capitalism as they have been in the past. More important than polling, however, is the fact that for many Americans the “communist threat” is a total abstraction. There are tens of millions of voters (this columnist included) who were young children when the Soviet Union fell. There are millions more who weren’t yet born. For these Americans, communism is as much a concern as the missile gap or the Contras. It is completely unresponsive to the circumstances of their lives — to their struggles with housing, healthcare and the overall cost of living. As a message, “communism” is out of touch with reality; more likely to drive voters away from Trump and the Republican Party than push them into their arms.
Artificial-intelligence security startup C1 recently leased a new headquarters space in SoMa — and it’s just one of many companies in the sector that are expanding in The City
It is fitting that Trump, a student of Roy Cohn, would turn to Red-baiting as he fights for political survival. Cohn was a prosecutor in the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, where he played a major role in McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. The president, who isn’t known for his embrace of new ideas, might see anti-communism as an easy path to victory.
What’s more, Trump’s turn to Cold War-era rhetoric, and specifically that of the Second Red Scare, is of a piece with the overall dynamic of his administration.
You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and reenact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshipped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.
The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.
The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber-rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years. Its use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s. Of course he and his administration would want to resurrect the fear, bitterness and paranoia that marked the hunt for alleged subversives.
Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.
The president’s attempt to drum up a third Red Scare is certain to fail. If it matters — if it is interesting — it is only because it gives us a glimpse into the stunted imagination of a man who seems to value only the worst this country has to offer.
Connie Chan, candidate for U.S. Congress, with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco on May 29, 2026. Photo: Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s preferred successor for her San Francisco congressional seat has gained the endorsement of the political arm of the pro-Palestine and anti-genocide advocacy group TrackAIPAC after pledging to back an arms embargo on Israel if elected to Congress.
Connie Chan, a progressive member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, already has the backing of establishment Democratic figures such as Pelosi and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., along with influential local labor groups. But the endorsement from Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, the political advocacy offshoot of TrackAIPAC, is a notable move to further differentiate Chan from her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener. Wiener came out 11 percentage points ahead of Chan in California’s June primary election, sending the two to a general election runoff that excluded Saikat Chakrabarti, then TrackAIPAC’s preferred candidate.
“In Congress, we will oppose any aid to Israel and do everything in our power to stop their government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people,” Chan said in a statement to The Intercept. “We are proud to stand with groups like End Citizens United and Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption to fight to fix our democracy.”
Israel and Palestine have featured heavily in the race to replace Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of the current congressional term. Days after Chakrabarti’s defeat, he dedicated his remaining campaign funds to form a PAC to support Chan, citing her position on sending U.S. weapons to Israel and her vow to “vote to end all military aid to Israel – offensive and defensive.”
“We will oppose any aid to Israel and do everything in our power to stop their government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people.”
To earn TrackAIPAC’s endorsement, Chan filled out the group’s questionnaire, in which politicians seeking the group’s backing swear off money from pro-Israel lobby groups like the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, agree that Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to a genocide, and promise to oppose all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, consistent with positions Chan had taken earlier in the race.
Last week, the majority of House Democrats voted in favor of cutting military aid to Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act legislation, which sets the budget for Pentagon spending. The measure failed, but the vote marked a dramatic shift in a Congress that has long granted military aid to Israel with scant opposition. With the recent endorsement and arms embargo pledge, Chan signaled her position among the changing tides in the party. She also is against U.S. involvement in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and said on her website that she would have voted in favor of the failed House resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. support for the war.
“We heard from many of Connie’s constituents in San Francisco, as well as supporters around the country, who wanted a clear statement of her positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and America’s role in both,” a TrackAIPAC spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement. “We were proud and pleased to offer her that opportunity through our endorsement questionnaire, an opportunity her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener, has not taken.”
For his part, Wiener makes a distinction between offensive and so-called defensive weapons to Israel. He says that he would vote in favor of the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which seeks to halt arms transfers of certain munitions to Israel, but that he backs providing U.S. support for Israel’s missile interceptor systems Iron Dome and David’s Sling. Earlier in the race, Chan had taken a similar position, telling Mission Local in January that offensive weapons should be banned while U.S. support for defensive weapons should be paired with humanitarian aid to Gaza. In recent months, she has shifted toward an arms embargo on all U.S. weapons to Israel.
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Positions Wiener held earlier in his political career, such as opposing local resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and supporting state legislation that free speech advocates have said censors pro-Palestine expression in schools, continued to follow him on the campaign trail. Wiener has remained an opponent of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, while Chan’s platform calls for sanctions on Israel over the genocide in Gaza and its expansion of West Bank settlements and asserts the free speech right to boycott. The TrackAIPAC endorsement pledge also opposes efforts to pass laws that punish people who participate in the BDS movement.
Last month, Wiener was chased out of the San Francisco Trans March by attendees who called out his record on Palestine, with one attendee yelling, “I think your policy on genocide in Gaza is terrible — you do not belong here anymore.” Days earlier, another person filmed his confrontation with Wiener at a bar during a World Cup match, calling him out on his support for Israel and his housing policy.
Wiener decried the incidents as harassment, a line that both Chan and Pelosi also held, condemning both confrontations. Chan said she understood the role of public disagreements, but added, “As someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence I stand firm and threats of violence and hate speech.”
Chan also came under fire just days from the primary election for supposed connections with the pro-Israel lobby. Reporting from Drop Site News revealed that Chan had received support from Pro-Choice Majority Action, a PAC with funding ties to AIPAC’s super PAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, formed as an alternative to AIPAC amid Democratic disillusionment with the flagship pro-Israel group. At the time, Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights. Chan rejected the claims and said she encouraged any groups supporting her to reject funds tied to AIPAC.
Now, with support from both Chakrabarti and TrackAIPAC, which made a name for itself by running fierce social media campaigns against lawmakers who received money from the pro-Israel lobby, Chan is trying to put allegations of coordination with the pro-Israel giant to rest.
“Big corporations, billionaires and special interest groups are using their money to try and buy our elections,” Chan said. “But we know San Francisco is not for sale. We have never taken money from AIPAC or their affiliates, because we serve San Francisco and no one else.”
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“We have to do what we can to ensure that the country makes it through the challenges that we’re dealing with here, and that is the message that we’re going to be taking to colleges and universities.”
(Image credit: Space.com/Chelsea Gohd)
LOS ANGELES — Standing in the shadow of the space shuttle Endeavour, a group of retired NASA astronauts announced their plan to travel the country visiting colleges to try to inspire younger generations to get out and vote. This campaign comes as we lead up to the November midterm election.
This past year, a group of retired NASA astronauts teamed up for a single cause: to defend the U.S. constitution. They banded together as part of a non-profit, non-partisan activist organization called Astronauts for America. So far, they have been speaking out, using their astronaut expertise, platforms, cultural relevance and role model status to speak out in support of “science, evidence-based decision-making, public service and the rule of law,” their website reads. Now, as the group announced at an event at the California Science Center’s new air and space center — home to the shuttle Endeavour — they’re hitting the road on a campaign tour of colleges called “Vote for Freedom.”
“We have to do what we can to ensure that the country makes it through the challenges that we’re dealing with here, and that is the message that we’re going to be taking to colleges and universities,” Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart told Space.com. “And the agency that we have, the immediate agency, is to vote.”
This tour will send astronauts from the group on a four-month jaunt across the country. Astronauts from the group’s more than 100 members will visit state and community colleges, county fairs and even town halls, aiming to reach first-time voters and young people who might be new to voting.
“I’m really excited to look a bunch of younger Americans in the eye and make sure that they know that someone that they can trust said: ;Listen, you matter, because our country matters, and our country needs you,'” former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman told Space.com.You may like
“It’s with a uniquely American kind of freedom that we were able to go to the moon, and that same freedom launched the spaceship behind us 25 times into space. Now we see those freedoms under heavy threat,” former NASA astronaut Steve Smith said during the event. “We’re seeing chaos instead of community, violence instead of votes, lies instead of laws, and fear instead of fate. That’s how democracy and freedom die.”
“The mission is all that matters. Now, our country is the mission, and our message is simple: going to the polls is one small step for you, and one giant leap for our country,” Smith added.
Former NASA astronaut Steve Smith speaks alongside other former astronauts in front of the space shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center on July 20, 2026. (Image credit: Space.com/Chelsea Gohd)
This campaign leads up to the U.S. midterm elections this November. Midterm elections happen halfway through every four-year presidency. This election allows voters to decide what Congress looks like, and which political party controls Congress. This can ultimately have a major impact on what laws and decisions are passed moving forward, and whether Congress will reject or change actions by the president moving forward. And this group of astronauts is serious about the importance of getting people out to exercise their right to vote.
“I’m a child of the segregated South; I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina,” former astronaut and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who also serves as a steering committee member for Astronauts for America, said at the event. “I graduated in 1964. Anybody know what happened in 1964? The Voting Rights Act. So, as a person growing up in my hometown, it wasn’t a guarantee that my mom and dad were going to be able to go out and vote. I look at what’s going on today about people trying to restrict the ability of people to cast their ballot. That’s not who we are. That’s not America.”
The group of astronauts recently spoke out about voting access after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting the right to absentee voting, in response to attempts by the Trump administration to place restrictions on the current voting process. Especially leading up to the November midterms, each vote carries significant weight. And while this nonpartisan group isn’t telling you who to vote for, they do think that everyone who can should vote.
“As astronauts, we signed an oath to our nation, and we are mission-oriented people. And our nation is now the mission,” Coleman added. “We need to recognize that everyone’s voice is important, and one of the voices that we don’t hear very much is the young people. And we want them to understand that, even though sometimes change can seem daunting, their perspective is really important, and, you know, their voice is important.”
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