Jermaine Fowler: America Didn’t Reject Socialism. It Chose Whiteness Instead.

 Thank you, Jermaine Fowler. This is something 

important for us all to understand.

― Molly

From the Homestead Act to the New Deal, America built socialism for white families and called it free enterprise.

By Jermaine Fowler

Two days after the election, Bernie Sanders, eighty-five years old and still yelling, posted an ultimatum to his own party that opened in capital letters, DEMOCRATS MUST DELIVER, and closed with two words: “No excuses.”

In between came the list. Medicare for All, a $20 minimum wage, the PRO Act to make unions easier to form, and a wealth tax on billionaires to pay for universal childcare, free public college and “a massive housing program.”

He had reason to think the country was listening.

The old man from Brooklyn spent most of two decades as the Senate’s only socialist. Now he has company: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bartender turned congresswoman, and Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim immigrant born in Uganda and a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who now runs the largest city in the country.

Last week six more DSA-backed candidates won House seats, and socialists took city hall in Los Angeles and Washington.

For a word that was supposed to end careers, socialism was having quite a year. In August, Gallup found 43 percent of Americans viewing it positively, the most since it began asking.

You know the bills. You open the marketplace notice and the premium has jumped 26 percent, with another 13 percent coming next year. You price daycare for an infant and a four-year-old and the number comes back $28,190, more than median rent in every state that tracks both. Somewhere between those envelopes, the scariest word in American politics started to sound reasonable.

And in North Dakota, a week ago, voters decided whether every public school child in the state should eat breakfast and lunch for free.

Nearly eight in ten North Dakotans had backed the plan in polling. It lost by about 2,900 votes.

The Americans most open to socialism have kept their distance from the socialists. In 2019, Black adults were nearly twice as likely as white adults to look kindly on socialism. Yet only 21 percent of Black Democrats said this year that they liked politicians who call themselves democratic socialists, against 40 percent of white Democrats.

By its own count, the movement for the working class is more than three-quarters white. Its new members of Congress look a bit different, from an Ethiopian immigrant in Denver to an Afro-Latina daughter of Dominican immigrants in Harlem who plans to join the Congressional Black Caucus to a Philadelphian who spent years pushing a reparations bill in Pennsylvania. But diversity does not pay a debt, and this one was run up against the descendants of the people enslaved here.

In Florida, the party’s Senate committee had recruited a different candidate. Angie Nixon, a Black state legislator from Jacksonville and a DSA member, beat him anyway, by twelve points, with about a sixteenth of his money.

Then the committee and the party’s biggest Senate super PAC spent nothing on her race. The same super PAC put $87.4 million behind Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Nixon lost last week by about three points, in a state Trump carried by thirteen.

Black Americans are not wary of socialism; they are wary of being left out of it again.

Why?

Nearly every item on Sanders’s list, this country has already built once, and built for white people. What it has lacked is the nerve to give up the one thing whiteness ever reliably promised, which is that someone else would always be further back in line.

We Already Had It

Late on the morning of July 18, 1841, the USS Peacock tried to cross the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River and ran hard onto sand that had shifted since anyone last charted it. Heavy seas hammered her through the day. The crew went over the side in boats, clutching the ship’s papers and little else. That night the Peacock broke apart behind them, and the sandbar that sank her is still called Peacock Spit.

Among the men who reached the beach was a Black sailor named James Saules. He stayed. He married a Chinook woman, ran freight on the river and played the fiddle at settlers’ dances, and by the end of 1843 he had moved his family to a farm south of Oregon City.

In June 1844 Saules quarreled with a white settler, Charles Pickett, a Virginian who favored slavery. The sheriff who came for him was Joseph Meek, a former trapper, tall and broad in the shoulders, his black hair worn long, his head tilted when he talked, like he had a story for you.

A jury of white men convicted Saules of stirring up Native people against Pickett. As if one Black farmer were a threat to the territory, Oregon’s provisional government banned free Black people from it two months later.

Any who stayed would be whipped on the “bare back not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county,” and whipped again every six months until gone. The settlers called it the Lash Law.

Thirty-nine is the count from Scripture, forty stripes save one, the beating Paul says he took five times. Somebody in Oregon knew his Bible. (He seems to have skipped the part in Acts where the first Christians “had all things common,” and gave to every man “as he had need.”)

Every program in this history comes down to a line. The country has always been willing to serve it. The fight has been over who gets to stand in it.

Having driven Black settlers out, Congress gave the valley away six years later.

Under the Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850, every white man who staked a claim and broke the sod got 320 acres free, his wife another 320; Black settlers were shut out by name.

Then the offer went national. The Homestead Act took effect on New Year’s Day, 1863. The story goes that a Union scout named Daniel Freeman talked a land-office clerk he met at a New Year’s Eve party in Brownville, Nebraska, into opening the doors a few minutes after midnight so he could file the first claim. Later that same day, in Washington, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. One New Year’s Day — one man walked out with 160 acres, and millions of enslaved people were declared free with nothing to stand on.

All told, the law handed some 246 million acres to about 1.5 million families, nearly all of them white, and roughly a quarter of American adults now descend from one of them.

Ask a conservative to name the great American story of self-reliance and the homesteader is a safe bet, the family alone on the prairie, owing nobody. Every one of those families filed for free land from the federal government, under a law Abraham Lincoln signed. The story leaves that part out.

Nobody called it socialism, and it was socialism in full, land seized largely from Native nations and given away in a single transfer of wealth that has paid out for generations. Then the homesteaders sold their wheat at market, and their grandchildren learned to call the whole thing free enterprise. That has always been the deal for white families, a socialist start and a free market that forgets it.

Capitalism’s defenders say it has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in history, and by Washington’s own count they are right. That count puts the poverty line for a family of four at $33,000 this year. Earn a dollar more and the family has been lifted out of poverty. There is no county in America where that family can cover rent, child care, food and a car for less than about $60,000. The homesteaders never had to start from that line. Washington handed them 160 acres first.

Sanders wants a massive housing program, and his critics call it a fantasy. Well. The country has already built one, the biggest it ever tried, and built it for white people.

When four million freed people needed the same help, the answer came in writing. Vetoing the Freedmen’s Bureau bill in February 1866, Andrew Johnson declared that Congress “has never deemed itself authorized to expend the public money for the rent or purchase of homes for . . . the white race who are honestly toiling from day to day for their subsistence.”

This was the same Andrew Johnson who, as a young congressman from Tennessee, had introduced a homestead bill in 1846. He was a man of real conviction. For sixteen years he fought to give the West to poor men, so long as they were white. What changed between 1846 and 1866? Only the color of those asking.

Communism in Miniature

Sanders wants a $20 minimum wage. The first federal one, in 1938, was written around the workers Southern congressmen meant to keep cheap.

In 1937, on the floor of the House, a Florida congressman named J. Mark Wilcox explained what worried him about a federal minimum wage. Washington, he warned, knew no color line. “You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.”

The wage law that passed the next year left out farmhands and maids, the work most Black Southerners did. Southern congressmen exacted that exclusion as the price of their votes. Nobody had to write the word Negro into the law. Wilcox had already said it out loud.

Washington’s next experiment was a whole town. Greenbelt, Maryland, took its first families in the fall of 1937, a federal town raised on worn-out tobacco fields eight miles north of Washington and designed under Rexford Tugwell. Black and white men built Greenbelt.

More than 5,700 families applied for its 885 homes, and only white families were allowed in the line.

Interviewers inspected applicants in their own homes, and planners balanced the town by faith, 63 percent Protestant, 30 percent Catholic, 7 percent Jewish. Race needed no balancing. (That had been settled before anyone filled out a form.)

Residents bought shares in a cooperative that ran the grocery, the gas station and the movie theater. Businessmen pilloried it as communist, and legislators took to calling Tugwell “Rex the Red.” Zohran Mamdani heard the same word when he proposed city-owned grocery stores for New York. You had to be white to get a lease.

The early plans had set aside about 800 acres for Black homesteads, modeled on Rossville, an old Black settlement nearby. Local residents objected, and so did a Maryland state senator named Lansdale Sasscer, and the Black homesteads died on the drafting table.

Government houses, a government landlord and a grocery owned by its shoppers add up to communism in miniature. So long as the commune was white, Washington built it and sent the president to admire it, and he said it “exceeds my every dream.”

Black families got Aberdeen Gardens in Virginia instead, 158 homes to Greenbelt’s 885. Not until February 12, 1966, did a Black family, Angie and Rivers Williams, move into Greenbelt’s cooperative.

The Lunch Line

Nobody has to label themselves a socialist to see this.

When white Americans got free land, a house, a pension, or a town with a store they owned, they called it opportunity. When Black Americans asked for the same things, it was called socialism. The things never changed. Only the people asking changed, and the name changed with them.

Once, the country was made to share. On March 4, 1966, the surgeon general mailed a letter to every hospital in the country. Any hospital that wanted Medicare money, it said, had to stop sorting patients by race. More than a thousand hospitals integrated their wards, waiting rooms and staffs. It took them four months.

One hospital administrator told a Black physician to go to hell, that his hospital would never integrate. The physician answered that the hospital had just lost $5 million in federal money. Three days later the chair of the board called him. The administrator had been fired.

Social Security was for American workers, except maids and farmhands, which left out about 65 percent of Black workers and 27 percent of white ones. Medicare covered every American over sixty-five. The difference was that Washington told every hospital it would lose the money if it kept Black patients out, and the hospitals opened their doors. Medicare for All will need the same two things, a rule that names who cannot be left out and money that walks away when they are. Without them, it will be Social Security all over again.

On November 2, a school worker from Mandan named Miranda Jochim served lunch at Roosevelt Elementary in Bismarck. The next day North Dakota voted to keep charging for it.

Ask anyone who voted no and they will tell you it was about the constitution and a price tag of up to $134 million every two years. “Today it’s school meals,” one state senator warned. This country has had a reason ready for two hundred years, every time the help might reach Black families. Now the same reasons keep lunch from its own children.

This country can give away 246 million acres. It can raise a town out of worn-out tobacco fields in two years. It can integrate a thousand hospitals in four months. What would this country have to stop believing about itself to let everyone in the line eat?

It would have to stop believing it is white.

Please go here for the original post: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/america-didnt-reject-socialism-it

Please go here for more posts from Jermaine Fowler's Humanity Archive: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/

EXELLENT ― Dr Stacey Patton: The Bigots Demonized Abdul El-Sayed For Months and Now They’re Weaponizing “Healing” and “Unity”

Such an excellent, spot on, and deeply important piece by Dr. Stacey Patton. Deepest gratitude for her voice of truth and wisdom and clarity about what must happen to empower us to break free from the toxic legacies of racist, imperialist, patriarchal patterns which have haunted and plagued us since the earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and genocide of the Indigenous Peoples. It is not moderate or minimum but radical changes in our minds and hearts, our policies and politics, our norms and values that are so long overdue and must occur now through the support of the vast numbers of us coming together in solidarity to birth a new world, one which protects, honors, and cares for all of life everywhere. ― Molly

Democratic Senator Abdul El-Sayed reacts after his victory in the US midterm elections, in Detroit, Michigan, United States [File: Brian Snyder/Reuters]

By Dr Stacey Patton

Y’all . . .

For more than 18 months we listened to MAGATs like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville, Mike Rogers, Laura Loomer, Nancy Mace, Natalie Baldassarre, Ron DeSantis and others unleash a nasty barrage of Islamophobic attacks against against Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed.

They called him “very, very evil,” a “terrible evil,” “terrorist,” “radical Islamist,” “jihadist leprechaun,” a “Muslim Brotherhood member,” “on the side of the terrorists,” someone who would spread Sharia law, and would need to pass through a metal detector to enter the Senate. One Republican spokesperson said he belonged in Guantanamo Bay rather than Congress. They ran attack ads linking him to Hamas militants, and said that he and every other Muslim holding public office is a “trojan horse” and national security threat.

They spent months portraying this American-born Muslim as an existential threat to the republic while cheering on an evil authoritarian regime that’s been busy ripping families apart, terrorizing communities, killing people, destroying millions of livelihoods, stealing money, gutting civil rights protections, weaponizing the federal government, trampling constitutional protections, and treating cruelty like a governing philosophy.

But now that El-Sayed has beaten their asses at the ballot box, these same racists wanna talk about some damn unity and reaching across the aisle to heal divisions.

Look at that front page cover of that The New York Post edition published the day after the midterms. The headline reads: “Abdul El-Sayed used victory speech to taunt ‘enemies’ rather than heal divisions after ugly campaign.”

Heal what and with who exactly?

The nerve of these people. After an openly Islamophobic campaign, the headline complains about El-Sayed deliciously celebrating his victory over “the bad guys” who demonized the hell out of him instead of tending to their fragile white feelings.

Why the hell should El-Sayed or any of the rest of us targeted by this regime be expected to extend an olive branch or sympathy or healing or some forgiveness to people who spent months attacking him? And don’t tell me that the Republicans would be delivering these same fraudulent sermons about unity and reconciliation if they had won. There was zero concern about healing when El-Sayed was being smeared as a terrorist and there were calls to do violence against him.

I’m so damn sick of this obsessive ritual of demanding handholding and placing the burden of civility and reconciliation on people who are constantly targeted while letting powerful people escape the consequences of what they’ve done.

This country has a pathological relationship with reconciliation and keeps treating unity as a virtue independent of justice. Calls for “unity” and “healing” and “reconciliation” are central mechanisms through which white supremacy has historically and continues to reproduce and preserve itself. This is a country that has been very astute at restoring social peace without doing the work of dismantling the racial hierarchies that made violence possible in the first place. One only need to study the Civil War and how in its aftermath, reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners came at the expense of Black freedom, citizenship and safety from racial terror.

White supremacy is so fucking devious. In political moments like this, it likes to play tricks by redefining justice as divisiveness, accountability as revenge, and the refusal to forgive as a greater moral offense than the original violence. When you hear these demands for healing, please know that it is a weapon that is requiring those injured to demonstrate moral generosity and prove their humanity through forgiveness. In this kind of arrangement, unity is not the achievement of justice, but rather the restoration of an unequal social order that never gets dismantled.

Many folks genuinely believe that white supremacy reproduces itself across generations primarily through hateful ideologies and virulent brutality. But it also gets sustained through the ritual absolution of those who wield power and through the systematic delegitimization of freedom fighters who demand that power be held accountable.

Now, I’m no psychologist but I do believe there’s also some deeply sinister psychology behind these ritualistic demands for unity and healing. The folk making these calls aren’t at all invested in repairing the harm done to marginalized groups. No, they need to relieve themselves of psychological discomfort, whether they inflicted it, enabled it, or stood by and did nothing while it happened. These kind of people want reconciliation and healing because accountability threatens their image of themselves as decent people. They truly believe that their country is fundamentally good, and that whatever evil atrocities went down were just unfortunate exceptions rather than expressions of the very systems they defend.

So they demand forgiveness because they need to escape all that guilt. They say we gotta unify so there are no consequences and they can restore their innocence without having to earn it from us. And when the injured refuse to participate in this emotional laundering, then our anger and bitterness becomes the problematic division. When you think about it, I mean really think about it, this is a psychological sleight of hand where the people who caused the injuries demand to be comforted by those who are still enduring the pain and trying their best to survive.

I have long argued that in racist America, forgiveness and reconciliation are politically dangerous because neither ever comes with repentance, restitution, reparations, or radical structural change. Instead, forgiveness and reconciliation are instruments of social control. And marginalized groups too often become complicit by allowing forgiveness to substitute for justice. We can’t keep helping to launder the reputations of serial perpetrators, or trying to reform the institutions that protect them.

We’ve been at this unholy experiment for centuries, which means we should know good and well by now that all the hatred and historical atrocities we’ve endured are not unfortunate misunderstandings that everyone is expected to move beyond. We have to break this obsessive ritual of reconciliation or we’re gonna keep participating in the very process through which oppression renews itself and leave the machinery of domination intact for the next generation.

What I love about El-Sayed’s victory speech is that it offers us a different model of political leadership. When he said quite plainly that “the bad guys lost,” he was showing us how to reject the familiar expectation that the targets of bigotry must immediately become ambassadors of reconciliation. He named the hate mongers instead of standing on that victory stage pretending that for 18 months he was having some kind of misunderstanding between equally aggrieved parties. He showed us that you can revel in your victories, that you ain’t got to soften your language, you can tell the truth, call out evil, and you don’t have to extend grace to the political opponents who tried to destroy him, and still want to btw.

“The bad guys lost.” That’s right Senator El-Sayed. You said that with your whole chest!

And come January 3, the Democrats need to remember those words not as a victory-night taunt to Donald Trump and the MAGATs, but as a mandate for accountability and purging the chambers of power of its cruel policies and people.

The Democrats need to bring El-Sayed’s energy and clarity to the work of come January. They need to investigate all the corruption and abuses, and restore protections. And they need to make damn sure that losing an election isn’t the only consequence for officials who violated the public trust. Because if they don’t, then “the bad guys” will have lost an election, but the machinery that empowered them will, once again, survive for another generation.

Please go here for the original article: https://drstaceypatton1865.substack.com/p/the-bigots-demonized-abdul-el-sayed

EXCELLENT ― Henry Giroux: When Fascism Loses an Election But Gangster Capitalism Survives

 An excellent piece by Henry Giroux!

― Molly

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

By Henry Giroux

With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The old fascist ideas, the politics of racial hatred, and the relentless assault on human dignity have encountered a moment of resistance. Too much suffering, too much misery, too much authoritarian violence. Too much blood in the streets, too many deaths, screams, and a deafening silence. Enough is enough, at least for the moment. 

The Trump regime has exposed some of the darkest impulses of political life, resurrecting the ghosts of a past that should have taught us where the glorification of state violence, racial cleansing, the crushing of dissent, and organized cruelty inevitably leads. Its legacy is written in the expansion of the carceral state, the staggering investment in prisons and punishment, the unleashing of masked agents of repression across the country, and the unapologetic embrace of a language of racial cleansing that strips entire populations of their humanity and destroys lives and civil liberties.

Yet the celebrations now dominating liberal and mainstream media risk turning this electoral victory into an exercise in historical amnesia. Trump’s defeat is being hailed as a crushing repudiation of the far right, as though the political conditions that made his rise possible have suddenly disappeared. Missing from this triumphalist narrative is any serious reckoning with the Democratic Party’s own complicity in creating those conditions. 

From Clinton to Obama, Democratic administrations embraced neoliberal policies that deepened economic inequality, strengthened corporate power, weakened working-class institutions, and helped create the social and political landscape in which authoritarianism could flourish. Nor can the party’s leadership escape responsibility for its support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, its exporting of horrendous military weapons, and its broader allegiance to a colonizing authoritarian order, sustained through violence and dispossession. A party so deeply implicated in the machinery of neoliberal capitalism cannot be entrusted with dismantling the very structures of power it has helped legitimate and preserve.

For a fleeting moment, democracy may be able to breathe again. But breathing is not liberation, and an electoral victory is no substitute for dismantling the gangster capitalist order that breeds authoritarianism, feeds on human suffering, commodifies every aspect of life, and makes fascism an enduring possibility. The forces that produced Trump did not emerge overnight, nor will they disappear with an election. They are embedded in institutions that concentrate wealth, manufacture fear, normalize inequality, and transform human misery into a source of profit and political power. 

Trump may be defeated at the ballot box, but Trumpism cannot be defeated without confronting the economic, political, and cultural foundations of a system that turns greed into virtue, cruelty into policy, racism into a badge of honor, and human disposability into a governing principle.

Unless those foundations are dismantled, the nightmare will return, perhaps wearing a different mask. The serpent’s egg, to invoke the haunting metaphor associated with Ingmar Bergman, is a warning that fascism does not simply disappear when its political representatives are defeated. It lies beneath the surface of seemingly democratic societies, nourished by the dark and volatile forces of a capitalist order that breeds inequality, authoritarianism, and organized cruelty. 

Brecht understood that fascism could not be confronted without exposing the capitalist relations of power that give rise to it. Its poisonous seeds remain embedded in the political, economic, and cultural machinery of gangster capitalism, waiting for the conditions under which it can hatch again. Fascism may suffer an electoral defeat, but the serpent survives, sustained by the very system that gave it life.

There is another historical lesson that cannot be buried beneath the celebrations of an electoral victory: the need to recover the spirit of the Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg established a principle that must never be forgotten: those who organize, authorize, and carry out state crimes cannot hide behind the authority of government or the excuse of following orders. The Trump regime has left behind a record of actions demanding criminal investigation, from the killing of people aboard boats in international waters, including attacks that legal experts have warned may constitute war crimes, to the abduction, imprisonment, and deportation of people in violation of fundamental rights and due process.

The Democratic Party has a responsibility to ensure that these abuses are investigated and that those responsible, from Pete Hegseth to Stephen Miller and others who directed or enabled such policies, are held accountable wherever the evidence establishes criminal responsibility. There can be no reconciliation purchased at the expense of justice, no national healing built on organized forgetting, and no democratic renewal that grants impunity to those who turned the machinery of the state into an instrument of terror. 

The lesson of Nuremberg is not that history repeats itself in identical forms, but that crimes committed under the cover of state power must be exposed, judged, and punished through the rule of law. Without accountability, the promise of  an electoral victory in the spirit of reviving democratic values and policies becomes another empty slogan, and the forces of authoritarian violence are given permission to return.

I do not want to underestimate the magnitude of what amounts to a historic political rebuke. As Ryan Bort observes, Democrats swept the House and Senate, captured governorships once considered beyond their reach, and delivered a crushing defeat to Trump and the Republican Party. As Jeffrey St. Clair rightly reminds me in an email, there is no shame in celebrating, even for a moment, “the crushing defeat of some of the most venal people on the planet.” 

Nor should we minimize the repudiation of Elon Musk’s obscene efforts to purchase political power, the ability of voters to overcome the assault on voting rights and “the extreme gerrymandering enabled by the Supreme Court, or the triumph of El Sayed running a pro-Palestinian campaign over AIPAC and the Islamophobes?” Taken together, these victories mark a powerful rejection of the machinery of racial hatred, billionaire domination, and authoritarian rule. Yet celebration must not become a substitute for political reckoning. The defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box, however historic, does not mean that the economic, political, and cultural forces that produced it have been dismantled.

The possibility of genuine transformation will not emerge from the exhausted leadership of a Democratic Party unwilling to break with the capitalist order it serves. It will emerge from the streets, from organized workers, from young people refusing to be written out of history, and from collective struggles that reject the politics of fear, austerity, racial hatred, and disposability. Elections may interrupt the march toward authoritarianism—a crucial pedagogical function– but they cannot abolish the conditions-the myriad economic, political, and cultural forces-that make fascism possible. 

The task now is to turn this moment of resistance into a sustained struggle against the structures of power that have made democracy increasingly subordinate to wealth, militarism, and corporate domination. The future cannot be entrusted to political elites in suits, who promise to rescue democracy while preserving the economic order that is destroying it. The struggle is not simply to defeat one authoritarian leader, but to dismantle a system that makes authoritarianism possible and to build a world in which justice, equality, collective freedom, and human dignity become the foundations of democratic life.

____________

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/11/06/when-fascism-loses-an-election-but-gangster-capitalism-survives/

The Humanitarian Crisis and Moral Urgency to Abolish ICE, Close the Concentration Camps, End and Hold Those Responsible For the Reign of Terror

This is an excellent piece written by an immigrant friend of mine who will remain anonymous here. He has long been an amazing activist of the highest integrity, courage, wisdom, and fierce love. His heartfelt writing is so incredibly moving, heartbreaking, horrifying, infuriating. And tragically spot on. I am so freaking mad!

And I join my friend and countless others in the indescribable grief of the profound terror and injustice and brutality being endlessly perpetrated on our immigrant sisters and brothers and people of color across the country.

And the "centrist" neoliberal democrats sicken me, which goes back to when I was protesting Obama, the “Deporter in Chief” of his time. The inhumanity of it all is beyond disturbing, disgusting, and cruel….

I will continue to expose and fight these atrocities in every way possible. And bless my friend and all who are suffering these extreme and criminal injustices, terror, dehumanization, and violence. ― Molly

The Apocalypse Has Already Happened

I don’t talk about this much because of issues of privacy and safety but I have watched quite a few immigrant friends leave the country the past 2 years. It is sad to say but MAGA’s reign of Terror has largely worked.

Many of these friends were legal or were 10 plus years into the legalization process. Some of them had DACA, so technically they were safe from deportation. But everyone knows the score. “Legality” means nothing in the face of a fascist administration that is intent on boosting its deportation numbers as a primary motivation.

I just spoke to a friend with DACA who told me she doesn’t leave the house unless it’s necessary. That is typical in many areas. And once again, DACA folks are “legal.” They shouldn’t have to fear this. But here we are.

For folks who are undocumented, it’s open season and due process is a distant memory. Fully dehumanized.

And now Stephen Miller is in charge. As a long time immigrants rights organizer friend posted yesterday: “They have been taking the gloves off the past 2 years. Now they’re going to be coming at us with brass knuckles.”

So no, I don’t want to hear from incoming Dem politicians that they are “strong on border security and willing to work with Trump.” Some even praised Trump for his “work on the border.”

Praised him.

If you’ve seen the constant brutality, the kidnappings, the family separations, the long languishing in prison of countless folks because of civil law violations, the renditions to countries people don’t belong to (the subsequent torture), etc….and your first move is to talk about his “Democrats now take border security more seriously”, I don’t think there is an organizing strategy that will help you see the rolling humanitarian crisis under way.

This is why we can’t afford the leadership we’ve had: the Schumers, the Jeffries, etc….These centrists are happy to nominally complain about this stuff but the scope of their imagination is better recording of these atrocities.

I’m not someone who believes there is “no difference” between the Parties. Republicans ARE worse; fully co-signing the fascism. But centrist Dems have shown no serious moral urgency, and you can see it in the way they bat away calls to abolish ICE as “silly.”

Honestly, given everything going on, I am not certain I will be able to remain in the country long term. And one of the reasons I have to think about leaving is that it is hard to see a path where the Democratic Party takes this seriously enough to protect our communities in time.

In fact, as I have said before, it is already “too late” for too many who have been disappeared by this regime. The apocalypse has already happened. The intergenerational trauma has been stamped.

I’m going to continue to fight and strategize while I’m here and, as the saying goes, “I believe that we will win.”

But I’m not sure the Dems understand that they are already late to the Fight.

To be clear, some individual Dems have been admirable, heroic even. But they have not gotten the support of the Party in their efforts.

And with Miller with even more power, we are going to need people who are unapologetic in their fight against ICE, not poll watchers afraid of the electorate.

At one of countless protests that I have participated in.

Thoughts On the Great Hope and the Potential Peril in the Wake of the Blue Tsunami

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

A Time for Celebration

A Time for Grief

November 3rd, 2026 is a day that many of us will not forget. And we are reeling with the enormity of this "blue tsunami" and the potential for the urgently radical changes that it holds. WOW!!

For millions of us there is a profound sense of relief, of jubilation and joy, of hope and solidarity, and of visions of a nation whose government will actually finally begin to serve the all the people and the planet rather than further enrich the most powerful among us ― and to the detriment of us all. We celebrate what appears to be a death blow to the inhumane, immoral, criminal, and brutal policies and narratives and ideologies that have dominated the MAGA era. We can breathe again! But not all of us...

Millions of our immigrant sisters and brothers continue to be terrorized, imprisoned, injured and killed, deported to countries different from their own, and living under conditions of extreme trauma, dehumanization, and violence. And now Trump has designated and empowered Stephen Miller to be his Chief of Staff. Which is horrifying!

That said, it is also true that millions of conservative Americans are swept up in horror and grief, hopelessness and fear, and a certainty that America is now doomed. These sisters and brothers also need to be held with compassion and caring and the recognition of a deeper truth ― that, on a continuum, we have all been impacted by the propaganda that is endlessly thrown at us by the powerful. 

This is not the time for judgment, name calling, or condemnation of those who have absorbed continuous toxic narratives that if MAGA doesn't prevail...

• The communists and socialists will overtake our government
• We will become a third world country
• Our economy will be devastated and huge numbers of us will be thrown into poverty
• America will no longer be recognized as a Christian nation
• Muslim jihadists will be elected into positions of power
• Democratic rule will be done by those who hate our country 
• Our borders will be over run by criminals and rapists and drug cartels
• The blood of our country will be poisoned
• Children will undergo sex change operations in their schools and without parental permission
• Abortion for any reason right up until and even after birth will be legal
• Our guns will be taken away
• DEI will become the law of the land (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
• Christian values will be destroyed and it will be denied that there is only one religion ― Christianity ― which guarantees salvation
• America will be destroyed from within and will become unrecognizable from the visions of our Founding Fathers

While many of us were not immersed day after day, year after year in these beliefs, many of us were. And all of us need to be held with compassion. The impulse to return dehumanization with more of the same only serves to perpetuate the cycles of harm and hatred, separation and division, heartlessness and violence and delusion.

There Is an Imperative To

Understand a Larger Picture

There is an imperative, I believe, to understand that this overwhelming election which favored the Democratic Party is but a beginning. To understand both the hope and the peril of where we are at right now, we who are celebrating the crushing defeat for Trump and his brutal policies must not stop there. We must also understand the larger picture of the circumstances and conditions long embraced by the neoliberal corporatists, the "centrists", within the Democratic Party that have played a major role in bringing us Trump and ushering us into the horrifying fascist era we've been experiencing. 

And this is not new. For a long time, we have not been okay.

To enable and empower vast powerful positive solutions and radical change to evolve and unfold, we must hold in conscious awareness a deep understanding of the problem. Any politician who is beholding to powerful interests is inevitably compromised in their integrity, their authenticity, and their commitment to actually serve We The People and the planet. Too many Republicans and Democrats are in bed with Wall Street and the Big Banks, the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial and animal agricultural industries, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee; please go to AIPAC Tracker: https://www.trackaipac.com/) and the funders of genocide, brutal immigration policies and the terrorism of ICE, and other wealthy individual and corporate interests. 

Since the death of Citizens United in 2010 (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained) wealthy interests have been able to buy our politicians. The horrors that have come in the wake of this decision have only grown with Elon Musk able to pour $474 million into the 2026 midterm elections alone. This is the evil that true democracy has come up against in America. And few in positions of power have been able to resist selling their souls to the highest bidder.

Which brings us back again to the peril of this moment. Henry Giroux describes it best, making it so clear why must not rest on our laurels:

With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The fascist politics of racial hatred, organized cruelty, and contempt for human dignity have encountered a moment of resistance. Too much suffering, too much misery, too much authoritarian violence. Enough is enough, at least for the moment. The Trump regime has exposed some of the darkest impulses of political life, resurrecting the ghosts of a past that should have taught us where the glorification of state violence, racial supremacy, and the crushing of dissent inevitably lead. Its legacy is written in the expansion of the carceral state, the staggering investment in prisons and punishment, the unleashing of masked agents of repression across the country, and the unapologetic embrace of a language of racial cleansing that strips entire populations of their humanity.

For a fleeting moment, democracy may be able to breathe again. But breathing is not liberation, and an electoral victory is no substitute for dismantling the gangster capitalist order that breeds authoritarianism, commodifies every aspect of life, abandons conscience, and makes fascism an enduring possibility. The forces that produced Trump did not emerge overnight, nor will they disappear with an election. They are embedded in institutions that concentrate wealth and power, manufacture fear, and turn human suffering into a source of profit and political domination. Unless these structures are dismantled, the nightmare will return, perhaps wearing a different mask. Elections may interrupt the march toward authoritarianism, but they cannot abolish the conditions that make fascism possible. The task now is not to celebrate a temporary reprieve from political barbarism, but to turn this moment into a collective struggle to overthrow the machinery of capitalist oppression and build a democratic socialist society in which justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity are no longer empty promises betrayed by those in power, but the foundations of a radically different world.

― Henry Giroux 

https://www.counterpunch.org/author/giroux-henry/

We Are Here to Awaken From Our 

Illusion of Separateness

―Thích Nhất Hạnh 

Again and again we Americans are told to distrust, to dehumanize, to divide us up into categories of judgment and ignorance, to abhor and fear difference and diversity, and to not recognize the holy and the sacred within each other. Whether by race or religion, ethnicity or immigration status, gender or sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or political beliefs, and on and on, any time that the narratives we embody within our hearts and minds hold other human beings with judgment and distain we are simply feeding and fueling all the separates rather than connects us. And that causes great harm to us all.

Coming out of a great deal of ancestral and cultural trauma, I was deeply disassociated, instinct injured, judgmental of myself and others, and disconnected from the wisdom of my heart and my holy essence. I felt largely separate from everything and everyone. As a child I had needed to disassociate to survive the violence within my childhood home. 

Gratefully, I have now been on a profoundly healing and transformative path of awakening from my delusions for many years now. And today I can hold us all, at least most of the time, with compassion because I humbly know what it is like to be asleep and completely blind to all the illusions I was swimming in and believing were true and normal. At the same time, this does not mean that I will turn away or enable those who perpetrate so much harm and suffering onto other humans, nonhumans, and our planet.

Much of what is "normal" in America is not healthy, whole, or grounded in the awareness of the sacred and how it is that we are all interrelated, interconnected, and woven together as holy beings who matter. We all matter.

There is this continuum that I believe we humans are all are on with fear and separation and illusion on the one end and compassion, wisdom, and love on the other. And wherever we fall on this continuum is often impacted by how much we have absorbed and been impacted by what the amazing and wise author, poet, activist bell hooks refers to as imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

As more and more of us are committed to the individual and collective work of awakening and alleviating the suffering in our country, other nations, and across our Earth Mother, it is my deepest hope that we will be brave enough to role up our sleeves even higher as we pursue lifting the veils of our illusions in an ongoing way. May we stand with all those who embody integrity, authenticity, courage, compassion, wisdom, and consciousness of and commitment to a highest good for all of life everywhere. And may we work together to dismantle those systems and ideologies of separation, greed, hatred, and the many faces of violence and delusion.

A Politics of Love

I am moved to end by quoting part of James Talarico's acceptance speech on election night:

There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.

My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. 

 Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.

Because despite our differences, we all want the same things: a safe neighborhood; a good job; a high quality, well-funded public school; and the ability to see a doctor when we need one.

But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.

The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided, because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad.

The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. That they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves.

It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer.

But tonight we sent a crystal-clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered. I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other.

It has been 10 years of this kind of politics, politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling.

It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.

My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak. Love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink. That kind of love has always been a threat to the powers that be. That kind of love is revolutionary. That kind of love is creative.

Hate is predictable. Hate is boring. Hate can’t lower our energy bills. Hate can’t teach a child to read. Hate can’t build a future. But what hate can’t do, love can.

Love can turn a student into a scholar. Love can turn a closet into a nursery. Love can turn an enemy into a friend. Love can turn a campaign into a movement. Love, love can heal what’s broken in America. We can’t defeat the politics of division with more division. We can’t win that game. We have to change the game.

In my experience, when you extend an open hand rather than a closed fist, you’ll be surprised by who takes that hand. We didn’t win this race by alienating our neighbors, or shaming our neighbors, or ridiculing our neighbors. We embodied a new kind of politics, a politics rooted in a deep love for our state, for our country, and most importantly, for all of our neighbors...

We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%. We must pass universal healthcare, so no one goes bankrupt just because they get sick. We must invest in our teachers and our students, so every underdog has a fighting chance. We must end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices and killing our great men and women in uniform.

And we must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us. We forged a new kind of politics here in the Lone Star State, an answer to this decade of division.

 ― James Talarico

Another world is trying to birth herself.

May it be so.

Bless us all,

Molly