“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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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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.”
Love the World Cup but hate FIFA? Love professional sports but hate the billionaires, gambling companies, and authoritarians ruining them? You’re not alone.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino and U.S. President Donald Trump in conversation after the award ceremony during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Final match between Spain and Argentina at New York New Jersey Stadium on July 19, 2026 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Photo by Alex Pantling – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images
For many around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a welcome distraction from the dismal state of the world and the daily overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism, and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that, no matter how much we love sports and want them to be an escape from politics and the pain of living in a broken society, there is no way to truly escape those things, and the manufactured illusion that sports are an escape from political reality is just that: an illusion.
At a live event hosted on July 16, 2026, at Chilo’s bar in New York City, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez spoke with legendary sportswriters Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff about what it means to love sports in an age of authoritarians.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. The 2026 World Cup is now officially over after Spain defeated Argentina in the final match on Sunday. And for many of us around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a very welcome distraction from the ambient awfulness and doom and the daily delugion overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how much we love sports and the global spectacle of the World Cup, no matter how much we want them to be an escape from politics and the pain of living in a broken society, there’s just no way to truly escape those things. And the manufactured illusion that sports are somehow an escape from political reality is just that, an illusion. So what do we do with that? How do we square our love for sports and all the beautiful things and experiences that we get from sports with all these gross, exploitative and societally destructive facets of sports today?
Hat does it mean to love sports in a disenchanted age of authoritarians, war and climate catastrophe? These are the kinds of questions that I got to dig into with legendary sports writers, book authors and real news contributors, Dave Zyron and Jules Boykoff at a live event that we hosted at Chilo’s Bar in Brooklyn, New York, just days before the World Cup final. And what you’re about to listen to is the audio recording of our discussion for that live event.
The name of this event is Loving Sports in an Age of Authoritarians. And we’ll get to the authoritarians by way of this first question, but it’s so much bigger than just any one authoritarian. How do we continue to love sports and the other things that we love when everything that we know is burning around us literally? We had to move this event inside because the fires in Ontario that literally wiped a First Nation off the map are making the air toxic to breathe. So how do we continue loving sports in a time like that? Dave Zirin, softball to you.
Dave Zirin:
Well, first of all, I wasn’t told there would be science at this event. Second, very quick joke my grandfather once told me that tries to answer that very heavy question. Guy goes to visit a buddy. Buddy opens the door. His buddy is naked wearing a top hat. And he said, “Dude, why are you naked?” And he said, “Nobody visits me. ” And then he says, “Then why are you wearing a top hat?” And he said, “Someone might visit.” And that’s how I feel about sports and the environment.
Let me make that leap for a second. It’s because we are in trouble. Dude is naked. Everything is out in the open. We can’t breathe outside for goodness sakes. And yet sports presents this face like everything’s okay. Look at these incredibly fit young people running around the field, loving the fresh air on the greenfield and then off the field you have environmental catastrophe. And we need to be able to reckon with that because honestly, we’re not going to have outdoor sports. We’re not going to have winter sports unless we do something about this environment. And frankly, I think that’s a way to reach sports fans is to say to them, if you really care about sports, then you’re going to care about climate change. If you really care about sports, then you should care about fossil fuels. You should care about the World Cup and the kind of footprint it puts down on our world just by the wealthiest of the wealthy flying their private planes into these different cities.
So I think it’s really important that we have one eye in the environment of all time and not just to save humanity, but actually let’s talk to sports fans and say, if you really want to save sports, you’re going to be on this side of the question too. And so that’s the top hat, that’s the naked guy. I don’t think I made the connection, but we try.
Jules Boykoff:
Love it, love it, love it. So on the topic of climate change and this World Cup, a couple quick facts. This is the most polluting World Cup in the history of men’s World Cups or women’s World Cups. And that’s because FIFA decided to hold it in three countries and include 48 teams, which is more than ever up from 32. And also because one of the countries, the United States, just doesn’t have a good train system to get people around. So everybody, if you want to get from Kansas City to your next game in San Francisco, you basically have to fly. So the lower end estimates are like nine million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and that’s a low estimate. Meanwhile, we got Giannian Fontino out here on his private jet crisscrossing North America. Yeah, thank you. Big boo for Giannian Fontino. And he even went to Qatar for a funeral the other day and then zipped back.
So the leadership is very much not coming from the top. But to build off what Dave was saying, I’m really interested in this idea that we can be more politically effective sometimes by being less explicitly political. And we’re living in a moment where we sort of have two models of that happening simultaneously. In New York City, since we’re here, I’ll mention Zoran Mamdani. Where was he watching a football match, soccer match yesterday or the other day in a local prison? And opening up conversations about kind of what that means, what’s the life of an incarcerated person? How can we bring sports into their lives as a positive? Then you have on the other side, one of the big topics of my book, which is Donald Trump and how he is the president in the United States that has used sports to his political advantage more than any in the modern era.
So we have two models of using sports toward political aims while not necessarily being explicitly political. And the last thing I’ll just say on this question is I’m wearing a Bosnia shirt. I was in Bosnia recently. I spent more than a month in Sarajevo and it was an exciting time to be there because the team had just qualified for the World Cup for the first time in a long time. The energy was really good in the city. And when I was there, I went to the Genocide Museum. And what struck me about the place was that there were so many exhibits at the museum that talked about the importance of soccer. There was one that literally was titled Soccer Saved My Life. There was another that talked about people in Shrebanitza that were huddling around a black and white television during the 1994 World Cup watching Roberto Baggio and getting this glimmer of joy in an increasingly difficult time for them.
So if they can do it in Bosnia and stick with sports and figure out how to use sports to their political advantage, and they’re definitely doing that in Bosnia, we can surely come together to attack the issue of climate change through sport with everyday people and talk about how it affects their everyday lives.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. Two quick thoughts or a thought and a question. Thought because I couldn’t agree with you more, Jules, about we can be more politically effective by being less obsessed with politics. And I really identify with what you said there because this is a question I get all the time as someone who goes around interviewing just regular working people across the political spectrum around this country every week. And people come up to me, they’re like, “How do you do it? How do you talk to people? ” I’m going to answer that question for all of you right now. Just be a person. Just don’t be weird. Just be chill. Just be interested in other people. I don’t know how to explain that. It’s just like you don’t got to beat people over the head with politics. Just talk to them as human beings, connect on what you connect on and go from there.
And for a lot of us, that is sports. I have some of the deepest political conversations with my buddies that I grew up with back home who live very different lives than I do or like the guys I worked in the warehouses and factories and restaurants with than I’ve had in academia. Because you start with sports and then you get into some real heavy shit real quick. So I couldn’t endorse that more. And to get spicy for a second, because again, this is a live bar debate. I want to push you both on the question of sports and climate because everything you said really resonated with me. But sports is also one of the most important cultural dream manufacturing or false dream manufacturing mechanisms that we have in society. And sports is where people are being trained to see that you can just build a dome and play in freezing weather or blazing heat.
So what do you say to someone who says, “Hey, we could have a World Cup in Qatar. It doesn’t matter how many brown people die to make it happen, but why don’t we just do that? “
Dave Zirin:
That’s a great question. I would say to the person, first of all, you think we’re having a sports conversation? We’re actually having a politics conversation Because you’re talking about a set of political priorities that are not in the best interest of the people in Qatar or on the world if you think that that’s the way sports is going to be sustainable. I would say to them that what you are promoting is an incredibly elitist view of sports where the only people who really get to play are the super professionals who are in this climate controlled atmosphere because they can produce profit while the rest of us just become watchers. And honestly, we have too much of that in this country right now.This is the statistic I hate the most. 60% of kids who play youth sports quit by the age of 12. And when they’re asked why they quit at the age of 12, it’s always because they’re told that they’re not good enough to keep playing when they’re 13, 14, 15.
And so then they become either the watchers or they become alienated from things like exercise, community, frankly, some of the things that make life worth living. And so sports should never be the province of experts. It should never be the province of the super skilled. Sports should be for everyone as a baseline for what we’re arguing for in this country. Sports for all. And so people who make the climate controlled argument are actually arguing sports for few. So I would be calling them out. You’re actually making a political argument that is actually not only dooming humanity, but it’s dooming our kids to a life of actually being alienated from what makes life worth living.
Jules Boykoff:
Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that the sports world needs to grapple with this idea of the mega. We’re now living in the era – Not the mega.
And that too, actually. Okay. But the mega, M-E-G-A. What I mean is we’re living in this moment of the VVIP, this new thing, the very, very important person. We’re also living in the era of the mega, mega sporting event. And the truth of the matter is this is not at all. It’s like an oxymoron to call it mega event sustainable. It’s just never going to be that. And so we need to have conversations about how do you reduce the size? Gianni and Fontino talked about making the next World Cup 64 teams instead of 48 teams, which will just make worse what we’re talking about right now. And they’ll come back at us when we say, “Oh, well, how about just going back to 32 or at least just keeping it at 48?” They’ll say, “Oh, but we’re trying to include more teams.” And of course that’s true, but right behind it is bubbling their cauldron of money and that’s all to their benefit to have more teams, more games, more $30 million per game went into FIFA coffers at each one of these games just from tickets alone.
So the truth of the matter is that they’re kind of actually giving an argument that’s both weak and somewhat trying to seem like they’re not racist, but actually are racist. And here’s what I mean. They’ll point to teams like Kate Vaird who was wonderful. If you didn’t watch the World Cup, they were one of the most exciting stories. And they’re like, “Oh, do you want to not include Cape Vaird at the World Cup now after these wonderful stories of all their triumphs?” Cape Vaird finished first in their group. They were coming to the tournament, whether there was 32 teams, maybe even 24 teams. So don’t tell me Cape Verde wasn’t qualifying. They’re a legit team. A lot of soccer people weren’t at all surprised. So thinking about how do we both make it more of a public good sports, but also shrinking it and moving some of the money from the shrinkage to what you’re talking about, addressing the fact that so many kids drop outs too early because that’s a tragedy.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s stick on that for a second. I love the sports for all in sports is a public good. So sticking with the bar debate theme, in the socialist utopia, what is the world of professional sports going to look like? Are sports teams going to be publicly owned utilities? What is the better version of this shit look like that can still retain the things that we love, but isn’t draped in all this awful shitty stuff that makes us hate the things we love?
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. I mean, for sports in a socialist utopia. I mean, first I’d be so happy in the socialist utopia. I’d be like, “Oh yeah, there’s sports on. Cool.” Which would be sort of like the opposite of my current life, which is, “Oh, there’s sports on. Good. The world is burning. Ah, sports is on. ” So I think it would take that and sort of stand it on its head, which would be nice, I must say. But I think more than anything, I mean, there are things that are wrong with the sports world now that I could say in even a democratic, socialist, capitalist country, we’re going to do away with the public funding of stadiums and saying like, “Look, you’re a billionaire, James Dolan. You want refurbishing a Madison Square Garden? Find the money between the cushions of your couch and take care of it.
Don’t ask the taxpayers to do it for you. ” So real demands like that. Second of all, if even $1 of public money goes into a sports team or a stadium, guess what? That team becomes $1 public. So it’s like the more public money that goes in, the more we own the teams. And if they want all the money for their stadiums, guess what? Your team has just become the most effective public utility in the city of New York. Congratulations, you’re making the city billions. Our schools are now funded. All is good. And I’m so sorry, James Dolan, you only get one yacht, but somehow I think you’ll survive. James Dolan’s son, by the way, 32 years old, is now in charge of the New York Rangers. I think that makes him the first grand Nepo baby in doing that. So horrible people. Just the worst.
And one other thing I would say is I think this idea of sports for all, we can be very specific for people right now of what that means. It’s not just about ability. It’s an anti-racist argument. It’s an anti-sexist argument. It’s an anti-anti-poor people argument who are denied sports, denied physical education in so many public schools. We would have full funding for physical education throughout the country. And I think this is very vital. We would never in any sort of just society tell our transgender family that they have no place on the playing field, which is the official position, by the way, of this government and the International Olympic Committee. So there’s so much we can do. And this could be the sort of thing where we have on a whiteboard behind me with a pen, with a dry erase, be like, “What actually do you hate about sports?
Hat makes it hard for you to love sports? And what about the corporate control do you hate? What about the bigotry do you hate? Native American mascotry, let us know. ” And those are actually the things we can begin to check off and say, “Let’s have a better sports world, sports for all, sports in the name of justice and sports in the name of fun.”
Absolutely.
Jules Boykoff:
Absolutely. And now is a perfectly opportune time to try some of these things where you have owners of football clubs, soccer clubs in places like Vancouver, Canada that it’s rare that you see an owner advertising their own lack of skills saying, “I can’t possibly run this club unless I get a huge infusion of public money.” At a time when you’ve got people like Avi Lewis in Canada, political leader talking about re-nationalizing some industries, this is a perfect moment for doing that with a football club. Why not experiment? We tried to do this in Portland, Oregon where I usually live. When the owners of the team, a guy named Henry Paulson, former treasury secretary under George W. Bush and his son, Dave loves this, his name is Merritt Paulson.
Dave Zirin:
He’s like, “That’s made up. Come on. Son of a billionaire is named Merritt. Come on now.” Yeah,
Jules Boykoff:
It’s –
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just like meritocracy’s made up.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, that’s a great point.
Jules Boykoff:
So many years ago when Portland got a major league soccer team, they were asking for $85 million in public money to refurbish the stadium. $85 million. That was going to come out of the budget where we fill our potholes. Some of it was going to schools, homeless services, you name it. And a lot of people fought back. Actually, Dave Zyron came to town and fought back next to us. And we didn’t totally win the struggle. They didn’t get $85 million. Instead, they got $12.9 million from a special tax from the Portland Trailblazers. So it was like sport to sport. But we did have a good conversation about what a publicly owned team could look like. And I just cannot wait to get fully behind the city that decides to go for it. I think Vancouver’s a possibility, but anywhere that happens, I want to be there trying to do what we can to help.
Hell
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Hell yeah. I love this. And we’re doing good on time so far, but I did want to give everyone their mandatory. FIFA is requiring that I let you know that this is your hydration break. So please go to the bar, stay hydrated, stay safe.
We’re going to get to and zero in on the World Cup, the authoritarians and the stink of Trump on the Knicks NBA finals victory. But by way of getting there, I want to focus in on again, another aspect of the sports for all discussion that really doesn’t get talked enough about, especially in leftist spaces, but I don’t think at all. Because the only time we’re talking about youth sports these days is when a bunch of weirdos obsess over the genitals of some of our children who are playing them. And that’s not what youth sports was to me. It was my life. It was like the place where I found my motivation, where I learned to work on a team where my dad coached my brothers and then he coached me. It was like youth sports so much a part of me and will always be a part of me.
And the older I’ve gotten and especially after I blew out my knee playing basketball and I lost basketball, the thing that I had played three to four times a week every week for my whole life, like countless hours in the driveway with my dad and my brothers was gone. And I’ve realized since that a huge chunk of my life was gone after that. Where else in my life do I walk up to strangers and say, “Hey, you got next? Can I play with you? ” And then you play with people that you don’t know. You have to learn in a finite space with rules quickly what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are accomplishing a shared goal or not. It’s such a rarefied space and experience that I think so many of us need, whether it’s in organized sports or just more play. And so I wanted to throw this to you guys because I don’t think I get to hear you talk enough about the human good of sport beyond just the professional sports world and capitalist shit show that most people see on their TVs.
Dave Zirin:
Oh man. So what I love about sports, I mean, oh man, I had to give a toast for my dad on his 80th birthday. And I was trying to think of what do I possibly say about this 80-year-old guy who’s had such an impact on my life? And the first thing that came to my head is like, when did my dad ever mean the most to me in my entire life? And it was like, when was this moment? Because my parents were divorced. I saw my dad like four days a month growing up. So it’s like where was that real spot for us? And it was game six, 1986 World Series, Mookie Wilson, Ground Ball, Bill Buckner’s legs. You’d say to a baseball fan, game six, that’s all you have to say. And they know what you’re talking about. My dad took me there and I still have the ticket stub.
It says $15 to go to the best World Series game. And he got that ticket not by getting on his phone because back then phones were these mammoth contraptions attached to walls, but he got it by waiting online at Shea Stadium. And we got to go to this game and then we got the game of all games. And when that ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs, I went from being happier than I could ever remember being to being terrified because that stadium got so loud and grownups got so crazy. And that was before they stopped selling beer after the seventh inning. And we’re in extra innings at this point. And my dad just put his arm around me and held me close. And it was a moment where I never felt both more imperiled and then more safe in a moment. And I feel like there’s something about…
And that kind of hooked me for life on sports. Playing basketball for the New York City fighting Quakers in high school is also an experience unto itself. You didn’t want to mess with the fight in Quakers. And me being a five foot 10 inch center for that team.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They called you white chocolate thunder?
Dave Zirin:
They called me, why the hell is he here? The one story I’ll tell is I was playing one game against a freshman for Rice named Felipe Lopez who went on to become the number one recruited player in the country. He was in ninth grade. I was in 11th grade. That was their JV. They were playing our varsity. And I shot the ball and Felipe blocked it to half court, literally to half court. And the whole crowd goes. And I hung my head. I was so embarrassed. And he put his arm around me and walked me to half court and was just like, “It’s okay, man. I do that to everybody. Do not take it personal.”
And I met him as a sports writer. I met him 20 years later and I said, “Yo man, you blocked my shot to half court and then you put your arm around me. It’s a memory I’ll never forget.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I don’t remember that at all. ” And I was like, “Oh.” And he said, “You got to understand, I just blocked a lot of people. ” That was kind of my move. And I was like, “Okay, all good still.” So that’s why I love sports. I chose to show rather than tell. I love it. I love it. But you give me a good moment in a rocky relationship with my dad or a great moment and you give me Felipe Lopez blocking my shot, couldn’t be happier. That’s amazing.
Jules Boykoff:
So I’m really interested in when creative people who don’t necessarily consider themselves athletes engage the space of sports, bringing their creativity to it. And one of my favorite places for this is roller derby in Portland, Oregon where I live, where from the names that people adopt that are freighted with beautiful politics and fight back in them to the very format of the event and to the very nature of its inclusion, because trans folks are always included on the skating rink in Portland, Oregon. It’s a really big part of the culture. Not only that, it’s also a great chance for fundraising for those kind of causes at the local level. So I’m always about how can we use creative people’s minds to come up with new ways of doing things? How can we have the soccer fields open in New York City all night long, which has been happening recently during the World Cup?
Maybe the World Cup is just an entry into having that be something that we do more often. We’ve heard about midnight basketball. I love this idea of midnight soccer as well. So I just think that to build off what you’re saying, this is a really fruitful area where we can all come together and think collectively and make some really magical things happen for sure.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. Jules, how do you not say that you played pro soccer? I was
Maximillian Alvarez:
Going to say you’re bearing the lead, bro.
Dave Zirin:
Just give everybody your resume. I said I played basketball for the fight in Quakers. I’m not saying you can total that, but you should try.
Jules Boykoff:
No, it’s true. I did play soccer for a big part of my life. And honestly, that is one of the many reasons why I think it’s worth fighting for. I had a nice professional soccer career and I also played for the US under 23 men’s national soccer team. Although before you get too excited about that, the last international match that I played for the US national soccer team at the U23 level was literally against the Soviet Union. But yeah, I mean, I’m not proud necessarily of who I was back then because I was an absolute maniac in ways that weren’t always good for me and the people around me, but it is definitely part of my life.
Dave Zirin:
But you stuck it to Khrushchev. And for that, America, thanks you, sir.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you for your service. Well, I really appreciate you guys going with me and sharing that because I thought that was so powerful and again, made me feel closer to you in a way that our discussions about politics haven’t. And I think that’s kind of the point of why we’re all here. But I think it’s also really important to share with others out there, even those in our lives who don’t get why we love sports. And it’s not because we just are okay with ignoring all of the military jets flying over or Donald Trump’s bulletproof bullshit, a booth at the Knicks game. It’s that this thing we’ve loved for so long and have carried into our love for watching it and others do it. We’re holding onto that while it’s getting shrouded in so much crap. And that just makes it complicated for I think a lot of us.
But let’s sort of take that into the vibe and time that we’re in now where a lot of us are struggling with that, be it this great city during a game that was so special to it that Donald Trump put his stink on or folks around the world who loved the World Cup and have now know what that stink smells like and so much else. So let’s talk about the big title of the event here.First, how do we carry that love into sports today, especially the World Cup in a time like the one that we’re living in now?
Dave Zirin:
Wow. It’s a great question. I mean, the number one thing I say is like, look, the Knicks were ours long before they were the property of the Dawn family. That’s our team, not theirs. At best, they are renting it. It’s our team, not the team of somebody who got married at Mar-a-Lago, whose kid got married at Mar-a-Lago, who’s trying to change the name of Penn Station to Trump Penn Station and who’s given Trump millions of dollars throughout his political career. And even the worst indictment of all counts Donald Trump as a close personal friend. So these are all reasons to say, wait a minute, you’re not part of what we just want. And something you didn’t really get on TV during the parade, which I was at, I mean for the Knicks, by the way, Knicks in five, just throwing that out there, is that it was so raucous.
People were so incredibly pumped and enthused. And Mayor Mamdani, he gets up there and he does a sports speech that rivals like the Al Pacino speech in any given Sunday where he’s like, “Your claw for that inch.” The Pacino, your fingers plead for that inch. And here’s Mamdani up there. He’s saying like, “They gave us a 0.4% chance of winning when we were down 29. That’s what the statistician said. Well, guess what? You tell New Yorkers they have a 0.4% 10% chance they say, “Why are you giving me a head start?” I mean, I’m hearing this and I’m like, “Yeah, let me bash my head through the TV screen right now.” And then James Dolan gets up there and it was the only time of the whole day they cut this at people booed when he got up there. Here’s the Knicks winning the championship and people booed the owner.
And he gets up there and he says something completely snarky about Mamdani and it just didn’t fly. But that’s just to say it shows his alienation from the vibe and mood of the city. And if he wasn’t alienated from how this city was really feeling, he would never have invited Donald Trump to be there at game three when we finally had a home game in a finals at MSG in 27 years. That’s when you invite Donald Trump so it can be all about him and not the people themselves. Give me a break. And of course that’s the one game they lose in the last three rounds of the playoffs. But what’s so amazing about it is that people sort of get that. And then when he doubled up with the US Men’s World Cup team and tried to rig things for them, it’s that stink that he brings to the table.
My buddy calls what Trump does, he calls it athletic fracking environment. He doesn’t like sports at all. He wants to drill into it, destroy it, destroy everything around it if he can just get a drop of political benefit. So athletic fracking would not exist in a socialist utopia of a society. And frankly, in any sort of utopia, whatever you want to brand it, Donald Trump and the Trump family wouldn’t exist either. Or at the very least they’d be, shall we say, put in their place. But just one thing before I pass this to Jules, I got to tell a story about a very quick conversation I had with Lev in the back in the orange shirt, just to give you an idea about what sports could mean. If I could, he’s in the orang shirt.
And I’ll be real quick. I’ve been having a difficult year, if you will, or a decade, whatever you want to call it. And I was sitting with Lev the other day and I said to Lev, I said, “The last couple of months have actually been a lot better. I’m feeling really good. I don’t know why that is, but I’m just really doing better.” And Lev’s silent for a second and he just looks at me and he says, “The Knicks.” And I realized he was fucking right that having this run had this animating effect on so many other things in my life. And that’s, I guess in some ways that makes me just a weirdo, a diehard fan, somebody off the beam, whatever you want to call it. But I think it also kind of made me feel human for a second because it’s like I felt connected with the city in a way that I hadn’t, honestly, since nine eleven, but instead of it being this moment of abject tragedy, it was a moment of joy.
Jules Boykoff:
Wow. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Jules, if I may, just to throw a little extra bit of sauce before you hop in, it’s not just Trump, right? It’s Kash Patel jumping around like an idiot with the men’s hockey team. As someone who you wore that jersey, does that piss you off? I mean, we don’t ever get to hear from your side of that.
Jules Boykoff:
Yeah. We often don’t get to hear from the athlete side of things despite the fact that they’ve got social media at their fingertips. There’s often a hesitancy to push back at things like ash Patel. And I think you make a good point, although the Trump curse is very real. I mean, talk to Harry Kane about it. He went golfing 18 months ago.
Dave Zirin:
And people were blaming Trump for them
Jules Boykoff:
Losing. Well, then he didn’t score after it was about the golf. I’m saying the Trump curse has many, many forms there. But yes –
Maximillian Alvarez:
Dave calls it the reverse Midas Touch. Absolutely. And that it is.
Dave Zirin:
I tried calling it the Trump Taint, but for a lot of reasons, not just… My editor at the nation was like, “No. We’re not doing that. “
Jules Boykoff:
Yeah. Very good call. Very good call. By the way. But you do make the really important point that it’s not just Trump himself and the Trump curse. It’s the Trump administration that is really doing this sort of athletic fracking that you’re talking about. The Cash Patel’s a really good example from the recent Olympics and the hockey team and sort of attaching themselves like a barnacle on the side of the ship that won that gold medal. But I mean, you’ve even seen during this World Cup a number of instances that maybe aren’t as high profile. Everyone knows about the Fuller and Balagun red card that President Trump made some phone calls to his BFF over at FIFA, Gianni and Fontino. And lo and behold, the thing gets overturned first time during a World Cup since 1962. The predecessor using that rule was Christiano Ronaldo a few months ago so that he could play in the World Cup because they wanted him even though he has credible allegations of rape in the United States against him.
So it was a horrible thing there all around. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just Trump, it’s also the administration. Think about the Department of Homeland Security during this very event. After the United States beat Australia, they went on Twitter, DHS did, and they posted two really interesting and terrifying tweets. One of them had three of the players on the tweet, a picture of them. And then behind them it said one homeland. It was basically short of just saying blood and soil. And it was like total pure fascism. And experts in fascism jumped up and said, “Wow, that sounds like a lot like a phrase that Nazis would’ve said.” And then they actually traced it out and it was very similar to a phrase used during World War II by Nazis. And I think it’s really interesting for a number of reasons and obviously disturbing for a number of reasons.
But if you’re going to talk about sportswashing, and I do talk about sportswashing in the book and more widely, and so maybe I should just define my term really quickly before I go into it for a sec. But sportswashing for me is when political leaders use sports to try to deflect attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes at home, to try to look important or legitimate on the world stage and to set themselves up for political, economic, sometimes diplomatic advancement. And a lot of people don’t like the term because of the way it’s been used in the past, which quite frankly has been done in an ethnocentric, if not xenophobic fashion where they say it’s those countries over there, Russia, China, Qatar that engages in sportswashing, but we are a democracy so it couldn’t possibly happen here. So part of the argument in the book is that even places that consider themselves democracies can very much engage in sportswashing.
But what is Trump doing here in terms of is he trying to… Does sportswashing work? When people talk about does sportswashing work, a lot of times they mean does it work on an international audience? And the truth is Trump has very little interest in having sportswashing work on an international audience. He makes it clear with his actions. He doesn’t care what Europe thinks, Africa thinks, Asia, Latin America. He doesn’t care what they all think. But that sometimes misses the key audience of people in this country who I think are the prime audience for Trumpian sportswashing and for the DHS tweets. And when Trump keeps the Somali referee, Omar Abdul-Kadir Artan out of the country, he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks and they very much didn’t like it. But he likes the fact that the MAGA base sees a guy sticking it to a Somali person who, as you’ll know, he talked as trash and garbage in the past.
So when all these things are happening, if you look at it through the lens of Trump trying to cater to people here in this country ahead of a key election, everything starts to make a lot more sense through the lens of sportswashing. And so I think it also gives us this incredible opportunity to see things with clarity and to also kind of figure out how we’re going to push back against these things.
Dave Zirin:
Very nicely said.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Beautifully, powerfully put. And as we sort of make the final turn here, I want to end with looking ahead to Sunday. But by way of getting there, let’s look back on the path to this Sunday with the World Cup finals. There’s been a whole lot of… Again, the theme of the night is how do you hold onto the thing that you love when the stink is all around you and everything is corrupting it? The whole world has been asking itself that question over the past month as they’ve been dealing with the Ronaldo stuff, the bracket like stuff, and the very fact that the two teams in the finals now were like sort of, it was impossible for them to face each other until now. And that feels in retrospect like kind of shady, the Egypt game.
Jules Boykoff:
There’s
Maximillian Alvarez:
So much that people have had to sort of work through with that stink, including the Donald Trump, the infamous Donald Trump call. So let’s take a look back at that really quick. And I wanted to ask you guys your hottest takes on the hottest controversies of this World Cup that have sort of brought that stink that we’re dealing with here in the US to a full-blown international scale.
Dave Zirin:
The hottest World Cuptake that I’ll have, first of all, is rooting for Argentina because of Diego Maridona, which was 40 years ago. It’s like, come on. That can’t be your reason for rooting for Argentina, is Diego Maridona. I think I want Argentina to lose. There are rumors that Jewels is pro Argentina.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You got to save it. That’s the
Dave Zirin:
Final
Maximillian Alvarez:
Question. That’s
Dave Zirin:
The final statement. I won’t go there. Then I won’t go there. I’m just going to say I love doing that to you. I’ve known Jewels a long time. But my number one hottest take from this World Cup is anybody who says that if the US’s best athletes just played soccer, like if LeBron James played goalie, then the US would win every World Cup I think is incredibly insulting to people who actually play soccer. The reason why the US doesn’t do better straight up is that the pipeline is a country club and it costs so much money to play youth sports. In this country does it different than every other country? The reason why a country of 300 million people that has a large imigrant population that is sports obsessed can’t field a halfway decent World Cup team. It’s because the way we do it in this country is pay to play.
You want to be trained at the top clubs? You better have minimum 10 grand on the table for your kid. And Lord knows how much under the table to make sure your kid gets those positions. As long as that’s the case, this country will always suck at soccer. So the next time someone says to you, “Why doesn’t the US do better at soccer?” Y’all would just look at him and be like, “Because of the way this country practices capitalism.” And if you’re not practicing soccer as a democratic socialist exercise, your team is going to suck. And that’s why the US sucks.
Jules Boykoff:
Do you want to argue for Argentina or for Spain though? Do you want to give your argument? No, go.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No,
Jules Boykoff:
That’s
Maximillian Alvarez:
The last
Jules Boykoff:
Question. Oh, that’s the last question. So I recently had the good fortune of interviewing this man named Timu Furulhom. Timu Furlholm played for the Finnish national men’s soccer team. And the thing that’s interesting about him is that after his career, he’s now become a member of the National Parliament in Finland as a leftist. He’s part of the Left Alliance. Now you’ll know that soccer has a pretty notorious history of soccer players turned politicians that are right wingers, including your buddy Romario from Brazil who started as a socialist on the left and kind of eked his way over and finally endorsed Bolsonaro at one point.
Dave Zirin:
My dear friend.
Jules Boykoff:
Your dear friend Romario. And so I was talking to him and we were talking about sort of the system in Finland and how the soccer system there was so different and how it was bricked into society in a way that’s not the country club soccer circuit that Dave so nicely described. And I was asking him about Finland is the happiest country in the world year after year. And instantly I could tell it was a bad question. He’s like, “Oh God, I’m so sick of hearing about that. ” And he said, he goes, “The thing about Finland is that we don’t try to take the moon from the skies. We want everybody to be able to play sports at whatever level they want. We want people to be able to go to music concerts and experience culture for free and easily.” And he also added, “We also want people to be able to take a one week trip to the Canary Islands every year,” which I thought, “Okay.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Throw that in
Jules Boykoff:
There. That’s fine. Yeah. But I’m just saying there are models out there. I mean, Finland is not at the other end of the universe. And I do think that they provide some ideas for how we could move forward and how we could just have a whole different way of thinking about life and how soccer and culture and soccer’s a big part of culture, how it all kind of fits into one bigger hole. And by the way, before I have to defend Argentina, I just want to say I’ve been backed into a corner, but I’m going to do my damnedest here in a second. Thank
Maximillian Alvarez:
You. Jewels drew the short straw because we were like, “We got to debate. You can’t both root for the same team. So yeah, give it up to Jules for defending the Argentina side of our final celebrity death match here. But we’ve all been watching the World Cup. We got the final coming up on Sunday. None of us are all that excited. It’s Spain versus Argentina. Okay, but let’s make the most of it. So in our final round, which is going to be a genuine debate and the crowd is going to decide who won.
Dave Zirin:
Oh my God.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But again, we’re recognizing that Dave’s got a 0.4 second head start. So as principled leftists or people of conscience, who is the right team to root for this Sunday?
Dave Zirin:
Well, Nixon five, of course. That’s what you say in New York. Get a good response. Look, here’s the thing. I get asked sometimes, why are you always trying to make sports political? This is our escape. This is our fun. Why are you trying to make sports political? And the answer is you can say you don’t believe in gravity when you fall out of an airplane. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe in gravity or not. You’re falling out of an airplane. Whether I say sports are political or not does not change the fact that they are political. It’s just whether we’re going to be quiet about it or not. It’s just if you’re pointing at a building and saying it’s on fire, that doesn’t make you an arsonist. And so to take it to this particular thing, and Jules is going to win this debate because this is soccer.
I’m a visitor on his field here. But to take it this, it’s like the World Cup is political whether we want it to be or not, not just because it’s like nation against nation or whatnot, but this is the last thing that we have that the whole world watches. And that gives it a tremendous amount of power if that can be steered in one direction politically or another. And every single World Cup, at least since the 34 World Cup hosted by Mussolini in Italy, has attempted to use this particular event to steer people politically in one direction or the next. And we have a particularly fraught political battle coming this Sunday because think about it like this, whether Spain wins or whether Argentina wins, the leader of that country will get a boost in the rarest commodity in all of politics in 2026. And that’s hope.
People feel better in a very difficult time. People feel hopeful in a difficult time. Ask Mamdani what it meant to him to have the Knicks win. It actually does make a difference if you have that collective sense of we’re really doing something here. The direction we’re going really matters. So if you agree with me up to that point, then let’s take a quick look at what we’re dealing with. In Spain, the leader is a guy by the name of, I believe, Pedro Sanchez. Pedro Sanchez is a social Democrat. He’s the leader of an organization called the Socialist Workers Party there. They believe in a much progressive stance on immigration. They believe in mass social spending and having a social safety net. And most importantly, they have earned the undying hatred of Donald Trump because they refuse to let their bases be used in the war on Iran.
And the leader of that country, Pedro Sanchez, has called out Israel’s genocide in Gaza and he has refused aid and fuel and military aid that were preexisting contracts to Israel. He pulled because of what was happening in Gaza. So you have to think… Oh, and also he’s in a very polarizing situation where the country loves him, the country hates him. There’s all this going on there. And so you think, okay, what will it mean to this individual if Spain wins? Then you go to Argentina who’s running that place. Good Lord. Good Lord. Someone who genuinely looks like a Muppet named… And I love the Muppet. So that’s the nicest thing I’m going to say about him. Named Javier Miley and Omilei here. If you don’t know him, he’s a good friend of Trump, billionaire. And Israel loves him so much that when Benjamin Netanyahu was asked who he was rooting for in the World Cup, he said Argentina.
And they asked him because of Messi. And he said, not because of Messi, Milei. He’s the superstar. And he is also somebody who’s in a huge corruption scandal. His popularity is plummeting. The country is very polarized. And so then you think what it would mean to Miley if Argentina wins the World Cup. If nothing else, I think if Argentina wins, you’re going to see Miley on the field with Donald Trump holding up the trophy. If Spain wins, Donald Trump will find him. It’ll be probably swimming at the bottom of that algae belching reflecting people in Washington. Have a better time there than at the World Cup if Spain wins. So I say root for Spain because I want to see a world as far away from the vision that Javier Milay has for this world as humanly possible.
Jules Boykoff:
That’s good. That’s good. Really good. Really, really convincing argument. But it could be even more convincing because I have a few other things I want to add to that. No,
Dave Zirin:
You can’t. Get him.
Jules Boykoff:
Well, for starters, there’s a guy on Spain by the name of Lamin Yamal. Magical left foot, beautiful player, and by all appearances a beautiful human being. 19 years
Dave Zirin:
Old.
Jules Boykoff:
19 years old. And his dad’s family’s from Morocco. His mom’s family’s from Equatorial Guinea. And he’s sure to represent every part of his heritage and background in creative and beautiful ways. He also recently, he’s on Barcelona Football Club as well, which recently won La Liga. And at the celebration afterwards on the team bus, he was on the top and he was waving a Palestinian flag. He’s a Muslim man who’s been very outspoken for Palestinian rights. So how do you not like Lamit Yamal? He’s just a lovely human being. On the flip side, over on the Argentina side, there’s a guy named Enzo Fernandez. You might remember him most recently for scoring the first goal against England to equalize 1-1 off an assist from Leonel Messi. That was about the best thing he’s probably done in his life. He’s done some terrible things after the Copa America Tournament recently after they beat Columbia for the title.
He was caught on the bus singing racist songs and singing anti-trans songs right there on the bus.
Dave Zirin:
This is the best debate I’ve ever had. I’m
Jules Boykoff:
Killing it right now. Sorry, go ahead. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. I’m just trying to help you. I’m just trying to help you. Keep cooking. Keep cooking. Because you need a lot of help over there. Keep cooking. Keep coking. So there are so many reasons if you start going down the roster, but there is one reason why you might want to slow down or two reasons why you might want to slow down and have a little bit of sympathy for Argentina. One is the one that Dave just preemptively nixed going after the Meridana factor. I don’t think we can just skim over the surface of that that easy. I mean, this is one of the all time legends of athlete activism in the history of football. Dave, you yourself have written wonderful work, columns about this man. So I don’t think we should just get rid of him into history.
I actually like, unlike some people, I like having history present in a contemporary moment. Diego Meridana. And the other thing is I do have some sympathy for Leo Messi. 39 years old. He’s going to set a record for the most steps walked on the field in a World Cup. He does not run that much. They do not make this man play any defense whatsoever. It’s fun to watch in a sense because he’s just like kind of walking. Then they feed him the ball. It’s not a very complex offensive structure that Argentina’s working with here, especially for a World Cup final. But he’s 39 years old and in some ways an inspiration in that regard. I know he took a bunch of Saudi Arabia money for their tourism. I’ve wrote about that plenty. But I got put in this difficult position of trying to make Argentina look good and I just can’t do it.
Okay? Fine. Those things.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Jules Boycott and Dave Zauer and everybody.
Dave Zirin:
Yo, give it up for Max Alvarez and the Real News Network. Kayla Rivera
Maximillian Alvarez:
Too. Where’s Kayla? I don’t even see her. And last, give it up for Chelos Bar again for hosting us. Thank you so much Chelos for having us. Hell yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. Thank you to everyone who came out in person for this incredible event. Thank you to the good folks at Chilos Bar for hosting us. And thank you to Dave Zyran and Jules Boycot for this incredible and incredibly fun and meaningful conversation. We are absolutely going to be doing more in – person events like this in Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York and more. So make sure that you are following us on social media and that you’re subscribed to our newsletter so you don’t miss the next one. And if you want to hear and be part of more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now.
Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and go to therenews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it makes all the difference. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
Editor-in-Chief Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
Dave Zirin is the sports editor of the Nation Magazine. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including most recently, The Kaepernick Effect Taking A Knee, Saving the World. He’s appeared on ESPN, NBC News, CNN, Democracy Now, and numerous other outlets. Follow him at @EdgeofSports.More by Dave Zirin
Jules Boykoff is a professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Oregon. He is the author of Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London and Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games. His writing on politics and sports has appeared in places like the Guardian, the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, and Dissent Magazine. He is a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic Soccer Team in international competition.More by Jules Boykoff
US House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) conducts a hearing on June 4, 2026, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
“BreakThrough News is not the first, nor will it be the last, to come under official attack,” said one press freedom advocate.
Press freedom groups are issuing dire warnings on Thursday that House Republicans’ efforts to subpoena the nonprofit left-wing news organization BreakThrough News represent a dangerous new step in a McCarthyite war on political dissent.
On Wednesday, Fox News reported that BreakThrough, a New York-based outlet, was one of three nonprofits that had been issued subpoenas by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee as part of an investigation into $39 million worth of donations from tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, a self-described socialist who has used his wealth to fund left-wing nonprofits.
In letters sent Tuesday, the committee, led by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), said that BreakThrough, as well as two other organizations—the People’s Forum Inc., a New York-based activist hub, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—had not turned over any documents that had been requested as part of an investigation into whether rules around tax exempt status for nonprofits should be tightened to protect against foreign influence.
The committee has accused Singham, an American who now lives in Shanghai, of exploiting the tax code and using shell companies and donor-advised funds to hide foreign money that has been used to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. It does not, however, make any specific accusation of legal wrongdoing.
The subpoena requires BreakThrough News to turn over records about its finances, foreign donors and grant recipients, fiscal-sponsorship arrangements, and communications with Singham and any foreign entities.
In a statement on Wednesday, BreakThrough News said it was “under attack.”
“For years, Republican lawmakers have painted a target on our backs, falsely claiming that our political views and reporting are part of some foreign plot,” the outlet said. “Now, the MAGA-dominated House Ways and Means Committee has issued us a subpoena—demanding internal communications, financial records and more. Make no mistake, this is a flagrant abuse of power, and a direct attack on our work as journalists and on the First Amendment generally.”
BreakThrough said it does not receive any funding from foreign governments or institutions and that it already complies with all the tax and public reporting requirements that nonprofits have to follow.
“We are not charged with any crime, because our only ‘crime’ has been to tell the truth–by covering the activities of the Palestinesolidarity movement, unmasking the truth of ICE’s terror in our streets, and exposing Washington’s crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo,” the outlet said. “That’s the journalism they want to shut down. Their goal is to saddle us with legal proceedings and hostile media to drain our resources and stop this important work.”
While the committee stated that they are investigating BreakThrough over its financing rather than its politics, letters sent to the organization have treated the content of its reporting as circumstantial evidence of malign foreign influence, referring to it as “anti-American” and claiming that its negative coverage of Israel was “sowing division within the United States.”
Chip Gibbons, the policy director of the free speech advocacy group Defending Rights & Dissent, told Common Dreams that the subpoena of BreakThrough was a “deeply chilling assault on the First Amendment.”
“Such tactics are, quite literally, a throwback to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which today is mostly viewed as a disgrace,” Gibbons said. “I say mostly, because just three days ago [Secretary Marco] Rubio’s State Department released a report preposterously attacking the US left, including some of these groups, as Cuban fronts that cited old HUAC reports.”
He further emphasized in a press release that there was “no plausible need” for a news organization to provide documents as part of a broad congressional inquiry.
“The only thing these groups are accused of is essentially receiving donations from a US citizen who has been the subject of an intensive campaign of demonization,” Gibbons said. “It is lawful for Americans to donate to activist causes and media projects while holding views disfavored by Congress. This is clearly not a valid legislative inquiry at all, but an attempt to intimidate and chill dissenting opinions.”
Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, agreed that “Congress shouldn’t be using a tax investigation as a pretext to dig through a newsroom’s internal communications or financial records.
“Freedom of the press,” he said, “applies to all journalists, regardless of whether politicians like their editorial slant or their politics.”
In what it has portrayed as a fight against “left-wing terrorism,” the Trump administration has increasingly blurred the lines between violent activity and protected political speech that they claim “incites” violence.
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed by Trump in September, designates large swathes of left-wing viewpoints on race, gender, immigration, and other topics as “indicators” of domestic terrorism that have been used to link entire groups of people to violent acts they themselves did not commit.
Rubio said last week that the administration would soon be designating more left-wing organizations as terrorist groups, while senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said that the full force of the state would be used to “disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute” those deemed to “foment” political violence, not just those who actually commit it.
He has previously pledged to use the law to “dismantle” organizations that use heated rhetoric to refer to their right-wing opponents, including calling them “fascist” or “authoritarian.”
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, described the subpoena of BreakThrough as an extension of a “retaliatory ethos” Trump has taken towards critical journalists “with the goal of shutting down criticism and dissent.”
She told Common Dreams, “BreakThrough News is not the first, nor will it be the last, to come under official attack for bringing people alternative and useful news coverage about ICE abuses, foreign policy, Palestinian rights, and other topics.”
“Allowing a congressional committee to harass an independent newsroom with a broad subpoena sets an awful precedent,” Stern said. “If lawmakers can abuse tax oversight to single out outlets whose reporting offends them today, no newsroom in America is safe from government intimidation tomorrow.”
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“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.–President Eisenhower
(Image from Wikipedia.org)
January 17, 1961 (archives.gov)
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
******
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
******
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
******
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
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Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
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Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war-as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years-I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
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So-in this my last good night to you as your President-I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find somethings worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I-my fellow citizens-need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation’s great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing inspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
You may also notice there are vigils scheduled before Saturday. We encourage you to gather as events are planned, either on the day of action or before. Don’t see an event near you? Sign up to host your own.
NOTE: This call will take place at the same time as the training for vigil hosts. If you’ve signed up to host a vigil, please do not miss that training! The Immigrant Justice Summer call will be recorded and available here.
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