This new crop of candidates can and must do their best to stop him from becoming speaker or staying as leader. We’re trying to give them some of the ammo that they need to take that stand. Our polling, campaign advertising, social media, and press are all working to give space to be bold.

In 2026, Democrats have the wind at their backs, while Republicans have it in their faces. Which Democratic Party emerges in January of 2027 will determine if we keep those advantages. Will it be the transformative party of FDR, or whatever this do-nothing version is that Hakeem Jeffries represents?

I got an amazing response to last week’s email on Tuesday asking for support, and wanted to answer some of the great questions that came in, to explain exactly what we’ve been doing.

Since April, A Fight Worth Having has been working to bring desperately needed new Democratic leadership to Congress. Leaders strong enough to embrace solutions that work to not repair damage, but make our lives more liveable. We aren’t just talking about Medicare for All, but a government that builds the capacity to deliver healthcare as a right. Public ownership of AI. An end to forever wars, and human rights for Palestinians.

We do that by leaning in to the huge momentum for change we’re seeing in Democratic primary after primary, state after state. We’ve done a series of polls — in New York, Arizona, and Missouri — highlighting progressive challengers by showing their path to victory whenever possible.

In each poll, we asked voters if they want more of the same from Democrats in Washington — or should they replace failed leaders like Hakeem Jeffries? Our findings have helped change the conversation — in the press, where our findings on Jeffries were featured by The New Republic, and on social media, where we racked up hundreds of thousands of views and were praised for the high quality of our polling.

Polling isn’t our only campaign activity. In the congressional primary for California 11, we sent out direct mail and put the genocide in Gaza in front of tens of thousand of voters, making sure candidates supported by AIPAC would be held accountable.

And thanks to our team, I’ve been able to push back against corporate Democrats before big TV audiences across the political spectrum, from NewsMax and Fox on the right to The Young Turks on the left — and most recently, Jake Tapper’s Sunday morning roundtable on CNN.

Outsiders have made fantastic gains this year. We have more primaries and the November election to go, and we need to ride our momentum.

If you will support us, we’ll go back into the field and do more polling that shows establishment Democrats and the media how important it is to change leadership instead of repeating past failures. Because we’re lean and mean, we can get benchmark polls, mailers, and ads done for a fraction of what corporate consultants cost. (If those corporate pollsters were even willing to test the kind of messages that we do — they aren’t.) Every penny you donate will be spent efficiently.

We have some critical swing districts to poll — to show progressives can win in November and that voters want change. Can you throw in to keep us on the field?

The full goal is $2.2 million, which carries this operation past the midterm and into the next presidential cycle. But that’s the long game, and there’s no long game if we don’t get through November.

Please bear with me on this one. If we get the boost we need, I promise I’ll go back to sending you essays and polling instead of these asks.

Thank you. This thing runs on a few thousand people who decide it ought to exist.

Corbin Trent

A Fight Worth Having
Lenoir City, Tennessee

P.S. If you’re in a position to consider $5,000 or more, I built a page that shows you the entire operation, the budget line by line, the plan, where the money goes, and how to give by wire or ACH. It’s at afightworthhaving.com/donors-new, or just reply to this email and we’ll find twenty minutes to talk.

That’s right, folks.

The Cato Institute put out an analysis on Thursday, August the 13th intended to terrify America of the DSA agenda.

Unfortunately for them, math was not on their side.

Their own analysis suggests universal healthcare saves Americans between $40 trillion and $4 trillion over the next decade, depending on how well we implement it.

They reckon that universal health care would cost anywhere between 40 trillion and 75 trillion. What they what I failed to mention is that the current, albeit shitty, health care system we have now is projected to cost around $80 trillion over that same stretch.

Both of Cato’s estimates, their low one and their absolute worst case, save America money over the current system. The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.

So if we actually implemented it efficiently and did it well, if America did the thing where we’re the best country on the planet, then that would mean we save about $40 trillion over the next 10 years. Which would be more than enough money to ramp up the needed supply side of our health care system. It would be more than enough money, while still saving money, to build new hospitals and clinics, reopen rural hospitals and clinics, training a generation of medical professionals, revive the health care deserts in thousands of American counties, and have cash to spare.

This isn’t some former AOC/Bernie lefty fella saying this. It’s a Libertarian, right-wing institute think tank telling us that just moving to DSA’s big idea version of Medicare for all will free up enough money from the American economy to satisfy build a world class healthcare system.

It turns out, if you look under the hood just a little bit at the engines that drive our economy (whether it’s health care, education, child care, infrastructure, scientific research, or pharmaceutical production), you’ll see that there is massive waste, fraud, and abuse. The waste, fraud, and abuse happens after we write the checks. The problem is when the US becomes an ATM for corporations big and small.

When we go after the waste, fraud, and abuse at the level of the corporations that are scamming us, robbing us blind, then we find that there is a significant savings. We can have more for less. That’s the crazy thing here: more for less.

Just fixing the one element of our healthcare system of who pays for it, let alone restructuring the entire system itself. We turn an $80 trillion machine of denial, waiting, telephone calls, and endless questions of “Are they in my network or are they not?” into a 50% savings that takes much of that irritation.

I say we can do even better than that.

Healthcare as a utility. Doctors, nurses, dentists, all the folks who make up that system, as plentiful as electricity and water. As easy to reach as the tap and the light switch. There’d be nothing left to fight over.

What if our health care system was as trusted as the fire department? When your kitchen’s ablaze and you dial 911, you know a red truck and excited, ready-to-go people are coming to help you.

That can only be done by changing the way we do it. Not writing bigger checks to the same middlemen. Building it. Training the doctors. Pouring the concrete. Running it ourselves, like we’ve done before, like we can do again.

Cato wrote this report to scare us off, but if you just look at it, it’s the best news we could have gotten.

Corbin Trent

P.S. If you like what you're reading, please help support A Fight Worth Having. We are a super PAC working to win the hearts and minds of the American people, and we're trying to broaden and improve what we're fighting for.

And like clockwork, we’re already starting to hear the reasons why Medicare for All will not work. We’re starting to hear people say that we need to back off of Medicare for All. I want to be clear about something here: Medicare for All will not work. It’s a policy that’s akin to providing every American with a coupon for a free Ferrari.

The fact is, we don’t have enough Ferraris for every adult in America. At Ferrari’s current annual output of 14,000 units per year, it would take 20,000 years or so to produce enough. It wouldn’t matter if they had a coupon, because the supply of Ferraris and the capacity to build more simply don’t exist.

The same is true with the American healthcare system. Even though we’re projected to spend $72 trillion in the next ten years (between 2025 and 2034), we don’t have enough supply for everyone in this country. Nowhere close, in fact.

We don’t have enough doctors, dentists, nurses, phlebotomists, anesthesiologists, mental health professionals, hospitals, clinics… The supply simply does not exist. We have fewer doctors than the rest of the advanced world, 2.7 for every 1,000 people while our peers are at 3.7, and we have fewer hospital beds too. Doesn’t matter how many billionaires we tax. It doesn’t matter how many checks the government writes. Doesn’t matter how much we expand Medicare or Medicaid.

Supply isn’t there for three reasons. First, the goal of the system we have is to extract profit. It consolidates providers, makes ungodly profits for corporations and insurers, and leaves shuttered hospitals in its wake.

Second, private suppliers will always jack up costs. I’m basically paying $10,000 for a toilet seat every time I go to the doctor. Have a look at your bill, see what a Band-Aid costs, see what an aspirin costs, see how much they charged for those diapers they put on your newborn. The only way to keep these gougers in line is through competition.

Third, private organizations in the middle want low supply. Like the people at the American Medical Association who work feverishly to make sure there aren’t enough doctors in this country in order to charge higher prices. The current system is some horrific hybrid of publicly funded, privately owned monsters that are good at nothing but making money.

There is no solution that provides high-quality, highly accessible, affordable care to every American without a complete restructuring of the current system. A restructuring that ensures a production capacity high enough to meet the demand. Now, you might be thinking, “Well, that’s impossible. It’ll cost too much. We’d go bankrupt.” But that’s what is happening right now anyway. We’re on track, as I said, to spend $72 trillion over a 10-year period on healthcare alone.

And we’re already subsidizing more than half the healthcare system from our government coffers, without getting the benefits. Medical corporations reap their profits using medicines, equipment, and technology we develop with our tax dollars.

And these insane health care costs don’t just affect our access to health care. They affect our economy in so many ways. They make benefits expensive. They make retirement for workers expensive. They make companies less profitable. Most importantly, millions of us are sick because we have to choose between doctor visits or medicine and paying our bills.

I often hear people, especially conservatives, say that we should run America like a business. If any company spent 20% of its budget in such a pathetic way, they’d go bankrupt in short order.

Conservatives also like to say we’ve got the best healthcare in the world, and you’d think for our trillions we’d have a Ferrari-level system. Or at least Cadillac. But what we’ve got is a Pinto.

Sure, there are a few really high-dollar, high-value doctors, and there are a few really amazing clinics, but the overwhelming majority of us have zero access to it. None. The thing is, this disaster is so unnecessary. The healthcare system we have is not written in the Constitution. There is nothing that forces us to keep it this way other than political will and better ideas.

We can just decide to do better. We can look at every other country in the developed world and see an obvious solution: singlepayer healthcare. Prices are much more stable and affordable. Their citizens are dramatically healthier.

In Denmark and all these other places, the people also own massive portions of their healthcare delivery. Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom: these places don’t just have a single-payer healthcare system. The people own and employ the doctors and nurses. The NHS is the largest employer in Europe, and in Denmark 97% of the hospital beds belong to the public. That way they can guarantee they have enough supply to get their people care when it’s needed.

We can choose to spend our money far more wisely and ensure access to high-quality, highly trained, highly efficient healthcare. We get to make that choice, but we can’t make it if we get stuck arguing about how we pay for it. We’re already paying for it in so many ways.

What we need to focus on is how to train enough doctors and nurses and build enough hospitals, clinics, and rural clinics. How do we make sure people aren’t driving an hour to get dialysis or two hours to give birth?

The simple answer is we build those things and run them ourselves. We pour the concrete. We lay the brick. We put in the tile. We build medical schools, training facilities, hospitals, and clinics. Much of this country was built by massive public investment in public services that were owned and operated by the government. Not by writing checks to private middlemen and self-interested corporations. It wasn’t magic. We decided what was important to us and did it. We can take back control over our own lives, if we come together and demand it.

Medicare for all is the wrong solution, or only a partial solution, to the right problem. We’re going to end up with another failed attempt. We might get some compromise if we’re lucky, like a public option for health insurance, but it won’t get us a real healthcare system. Because there aren’t enough hospital beds or doctors, period.

So when you ask yourself, “What’s the solution for a better healthcare system?” understand that it’s producing the things that make that healthcare system better. The answer is good old-fashioned, “Roll up your sleeves and build it.” We have to build hospitals and train doctors ourselves.

The supply problem isn’t just limited to healthcare. It goes for housing, for childcare, for all the things we need: infrastructure, energy, transportation. If the market has failed to deliver it, our only option is to make it happen ourselves, like an Amish community raising a barn. We can raise hospitals, we can train doctors, we can build medical schools. It can be done, and you might say, “I don’t trust the government to do that. They’re too bureaucratic, they’re not fast enough or efficient enough.” But we trust the government with our foreign policy. We trust the government with nuclear weapons. We trust the government to ensure planes are safe. We trust the government to get to our house in time to put out a fire. We trust the government to protect us from being robbed. If we put our efforts into building a healthcare system that meets our needs, I assure you we can get it done.

Corbin Trent

If you like what you're reading, please help support A Fight Worth Having. We are a super PAC working to win the hearts and minds of the American people, and we're trying to broaden and improve what we're fighting for.

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Here’s where you can find us in the fray, covering elections, grabbing third rails, arguing for an affordable and democratic future.

Here’s where you can learn more about us and join the fight.

Head here if you want to help us meet the $100,000 goal over the next seven days.

I almost never send emails that ask for money but that’s what this is.

The PAC is out of runway. Since February we’ve raised a little over $400,000 and we’ve spent a little over $400,000. My salary is $60,000 a year, so this isn’t money flowing to me or to companies of mine. Every dollar of it is filed with the FEC where you can read it, salaries, donors, spending, all of it.

Here’s what that $400,000 built.

A media operation that gets me booked on Fox, CNN, NewsNation, the Sunday shows, making our case to the the party that they need to be different. Clips from those appearances are pulling millions of views, and that’s organic, not paid.

Polling we write and field ourselves, and recently The New Republic published a series on the weakness of the Dems leadership. A benchmark poll runs $20,000 to $30,000 if you buy it from a consultant. We built the shop that does it in-house for a fraction, and we did the same with video, ads, mailers, and a voter file with 200 million records that vendors wanted to rent us for $500,000 a year.

We built all that for less than what campaigns pay consultants to rent it for one cycle. That’s the whole idea of this PAC. And it’s working. Which is exactly why I’m not willing to let it die over $100,000.

The next $100,000 keeps the team paid, keeps the systems running, and fields the next round of polling in the races where it can move real money and real coverage. That’s it. That’s what you’re funding.

If you can throw in to keep us on the field.

The full goal is $2.2 million, which carries this operation through February 2028, twenty polls, the finished voter file, the whole machine. But that’s the long game, and there’s no long game if we don’t get through this week.

You’ll hear from me again before the week’s out. No more than three of these, I promise, and then I’ll go back to sending you essays and polling instead of asks.

Thank you. This thing runs on a few thousand people who decided it ought to exist.

Corbin Trent

A Fight Worth Having
Lenoir City, Tennessee

P.S. If you’re in a position to consider $5,000 or more, I built a page that shows you the entire operation, the budget line by line, the staged plan, what each funding level unlocks, and how to give by wire or ACH. It’s at afightworthhaving.com/donors-new, or just reply to this email and we’ll find twenty minutes to talk. I’ll show you the systems running, not a slide deck.

Because a Muslim, Abdul El-Sayed, just became the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and because a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of New York City. Because Muslims are participating in our society and our democracy.

Fox will remind us to never forget. You will hear the name Hasan Piker over and over . You will hear that he said America deserved 9/11. I think it’s a good time to reflect. Did the people in the towers deserve to die? No. Obviously not.

But who shares the responsibility for those deaths? I think we’ve failed to accept that some of the blame belongs to America’s leaders. Leaders who, for decades, made choices that made us vulnerable to that attack. They made decisions knowing they were putting Americans in danger. Our security forces have a term for the costs of our violent foreign policy. Blowback.

The blowback has been part of the planning for decades. It came from the CIA’s own internal documents on the coup we ran in Iran in 1953. A six-year CIA consultant named Chalmers Johnson wrote a whole book called Blowback warning that our covert wars were coming home.

The CIA’s own bin Laden unit chief wrote that they attack us for what we do, not who we are, and listed bin Laden’s grievances straight from the man’s own writings. The Pentagon’s advisory board put it in writing three years after the attacks: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” The 9/11 Commission’s report tied Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s hatred to our foreign policy, and the commission’s own senior adviser admitted afterward that the report skirted the question. And just this week Robert Kagan, Brookings fellow, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, said 9/11 was “at least in part a response to the American presence in the Middle East.” He said that Pearl Harbor worked the same way. The real question, he said, is whether a country acts anyway, knowing the blowback’s coming. Our leaders know. They’ve always known.

One of the darkest ironies of 9/11 is that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. Bin Laden was a Saudi. Our investigations found at least low-level ties to the Saudi government. When FBI files were finally declassified, they showed a Saudi intelligence operative and a Saudi consular official giving the first hijackers significant logistical support.

Now, if you don’t know much about the Saudi government, I’ll tell you this. They chopped a journalist into pieces with a bone saw, dissolved him in acid, and poured him down a drain because they didn’t like what he wrote. The crown prince himself approved it according to our own intelligence. So I have a hard time believing a group of low level officials would go rogue and help plan the 9/11 attacks. I just have a suspicion that the fear of being chopped up and put in a vat of acid then poured down a drain might give a little pause.

Our response? Free pass for Saudi Arabia and war for Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by American forces. Thousands of dead American soldiers. All under the cover of NEVER FORGET!

Skip to 2026. America has just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that could let them produce enriched uranium and even a bomb. We’re allowing that to happen right now.

Now compare that to Iran. The Director of National Intelligence testified to Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump said, “I don’t care what she said,” he bombed ‘em anyway. We killed their supreme leader on day one. Trump’s own counterterrorism chief resigned over it, saying Iran posed no imminent threat. We’ve disrupted the entire global economy, killed and maimed thousands of people, risked a bigger regional war. For what?

I was going to say we didn’t do it for the reasons they claimed. But we did it for exactly the reasons they claimed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said what we were all thinking, we did it for Israel. We knew Israel was going to strike and that Iran would retaliate against our forces for it, so we hit first.

When the Iranian regime mentions assassinating an American official, we gasp. We assassinated one of their top and most respected generals with a drone. We killed their supreme leader. We bombed their scientists along with their children in their beds. We killed civilians. One of our strikes incinerated a hundred-some-odd girls at an elementary school. We went on a killing spree. Not only that, but we gave cover and keep giving cover to the Israeli regime that bombed six countries in 2025, that’s been committing a genocide in Gaza and killing thousands, burning farms, and stealing homes in the West Bank. This is not new. We’ve been covering ethnic cleansing in Palestine for a very long time.

We feel like we can do all this killing, this destruction, with impunity. We think we can leave carnage across the globe without it rearing its head back home. It will and it has and instead of taking responsibility, we say those are evil acts done by evil people who hate freedom. We blame an entire religion. At some point we have to answer this question: Are our own leaders and our own foreign policy doing evil things?

To ask that we have to wrestle with our own feelings. Admitting what our government has done doesn’t make America evil. If we acknowledge that our government made decisions that brought violence back to our shores, we aren’t saying 9/11 wasn’t terrorism. It was illegal and horrible and needed a response. No, instead what we’re saying is that we should learn from our mistakes. Security is possible without bombing, maiming and torturing our way through half the globe. In fact, those actions undermine our security.

What I find insidious is that our leaders in the military, our government, and our intelligence services know our policies bring blowback. They know aggression makes Americans less safe, and they do it anyway. For oil, or money, or power. The leaders who sat in those rooms, politicians, military leaders, the heads of the CIA and the NSA and the FBI, conducted foreign policy in a deadly, aggressive, villainous way for decades, knowing they were risking the lives of Americans at home, and not just abroad. They chose that instead of doing the hard work of securing our futures and our resources. Then they told us how dangerous the world is and convinced us to give up some freedoms for safety.

Not only have our leaders been spreading death and carnage across the globe for resources and power. They’ve brought it back home. So when they spend the next year waving 9/11 at a Muslim doctor in Michigan and a Muslim mayor in New York, remember who put us in that position. It wasn’t Abdul El-Sayed and it wasn’t Zohran Mamdani.

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Here’s where you can find us in the fray, covering elections, grabbing third rails, arguing for an affordable and democratic future.

A new kind of Democrat keeps winning primaries. So who’s gonna lead them?

At A Fight Worth Having, aside from building some systems and running ads, we’ve been doing polling. We polled Missouri 1, Cori Bush’s district. Arizona 4, where Kai Newkirk ran. New York 15, Ritchie Torres’s district. And we weren’t just polling for the horse race. Anytime we poll, we’re trying to understand the American people better, what they believe and what they think, and to go a little bit deeper.

So we asked Democratic primary voters about their party’s leadership. Favorability on Chuck Schumer. Favorability on Hakeem Jeffries. And then we dug deeper. Should Hakeem Jeffries continue as leader? If we win the House majority, should he be speaker?

The only district where a majority said yes was New York 15. His backyard. In Arizona 4 and Missouri 1 he was underwater, more voters saying pick someone else than keep him.

Then we told voters a little about who he is. What he’s been supporting, what he’s failed to fight for, how he’s done his job as leader. His connection to AIPAC and other big moneyed interests. His votes to keep funding ICE while Trump uses that funding to deport people. His failure to lead the fight for Medicare for All.

Hakeem’s support plummeted. It flipped. Even in New York, even in his backyard, voters now say no, we don’t want Hakeem Jeffries as speaker. Including Black voters, who Washington keeps insisting will stick with him no matter what. In Missouri 1, Black voters go two to one for replacing him once they learn how he’s done the job.

With Schumer it’s even more pronounced. His favorability is in the tank, and you don’t even have to tell voters anything about him. They know, and they don’t like it.

Now you might be saying, Corbin, why does it matter? It’s not a public election. You ain’t wrong. But what’s happening right now is a massive number of new Democrats going into the House. Claire Valdez. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who beat an incumbent. Melat Kiros, who’s pledged not to support anyone for leadership who takes corporate PAC money, and Jeffries takes it. Donovan McKinney. Brad Lander. Maybe Will Lawrence in that Michigan swing seat. There are more, a new kind of Democrat. Some of them have said yes, I’m going to support Hakeem. Many of them have not.

And the pressure on these new members has already started. Darializa Avila Chevalier is African American and wants to join the Congressional Black Caucus, and members of the CBC have said that if she doesn’t support Jeffries as speaker, she can’t join the caucus. That’s crazy, obviously. Standing up against power is tough, and it can be dangerous to your constituents. The establishment ain’t above holding a grudge, they’re willing to harm a member’s constituents out of spite.

Just as a little piece of insider info, as I was trying to find companies to do these polls for me, two of the top pollsters refused to do it. One of them said, “I won’t ask any questions that will bother Leader Jeffries when he’s having his morning coffee.” This is why we need a movement not only of new candidates and new ideas, but new systems, new support structures. That’s why our job at A Fight Worth Having is making sure these new members have the data. When they get told their voters demand they back the leadership, they can point at the numbers.

The New Republic covered our polling this week. The pushback in their piece amounts to this. Voters don’t pick the speaker, the caucus does, and Jeffries has the caucus. Comments are cheap talk, votes are costly signals. All true. But the caucus keeping a leader the voters have soured on is the same mistake this party keeps making, and the voters are the ones who have to show up in November.

The other thing about Jeffries is he just barely avoided a primary. Had it not been for AOC and Zohran Mamdani, I think he probably would have had a primary challenger this year. In 2022, 23,135 votes kept Hakeem Jeffries in Congress. There was a woman named Queen Johnson who filed the paperwork and, so far as I can tell from FEC documents, did not have a campaign. She got more than 12 percent as an unknown alternative to Hakeem Jeffries. So imagine if there was somebody running against him with vision.

I asked these questions because I wanted to know what voters thought. I don’t think that Hakeem Jeffries is the best leader for our party, but I wanted to know what the voters think.

We need somebody that can rally the American people. Not just the Democratic voting base, though that is important, but somebody that can speak to a vision about what America is. If you look through our polls, the things Hakeem Jeffries stands for, a Democratic Party of the 1980s, the more people find out about it, the less they like it. We’ve had too many candidates like that, especially at the top of the ticket, where the more they talk and the more they’re out there, the less people like them. We need to stop making that mistake.

Because fighting Trump isn’t just about policies and procedures and voting on this or not voting on that or investigations, though that’s certainly part of it. The other part of fighting Trump is making sure that we have better ideas and that the American people hear them and are excited about them. And I’m sorry, but they’re not excited about stuff we did ten years ago. It didn’t work. They’re still hurting.

What this polling is telling us is that support for the leadership we have right now, among the electorate, is soft, soft, and absent in some places. Go look at the data yourself. The full memo and the crosstabs are at afightworthhaving.com under polling, and if you’re a nerd and want to dig into the methodology, I hope you do.

Corbin Trent

p.s.

We could really use your help. We want to do more of everything that we’re doing, but to do that we need your financial support. If you’d like to see what we’re up to, check it out.

All three of these candidates are running as a new kind of Democrat. A Democrat committed to ideals that are more reminiscent of an older Democratic Party, one that was interested in outcomes for the overwhelming majority of the people in this country, one that earned the trust of voters so frequently that we had majorities in the House and the Senate for fifty or sixty years, cumulatively. That trust was earned.

Then our elected public servants sold it to the highest bidder, cycle after cycle.

But not these three. The are each running on a hopeful vision that we can build a country that works for the people who live in it. They are asking voters to trust that we can do big things again.

We’re hearing from all sorts of folks, whether it’s Dan Goldman, James Carville, or numerous other Democratic talking heads, that the socialist are going to ruin the party and our nation.

These “Democrats” are aligning themselves with Trump and his administration in their efforts to vilify socialists and socialism, to vilify political ideas.

It’s not socialism that scares these folks. What they’re most terrified of is losing power over a party that they’ve had a stranglehold on for the last thirty or forty years.

The year I was born, 1980, was the beginning of what was called the Reagan revolution. For most of my life, I’ve lived under the results of that revolution. Since 2015, I’ve been hoping for a new kind of political revolution, one that could restore balance to our government, to our society, to our economy. I was first inspired by Bernie into this revolution, then joined with AOC. We’ve watched it grow. We watched it in New York. We watched it in Colorado. Like you, I’ll be watching tonight, hoping that a new Democratic Party continues to be born in Michigan. I’m hoping to see a continuation of this movement.

Abdul El-Sayed’s race is one that will show that regardless of how much money is spent against you trying to vilify you, demonize you as a socialist or a communist or a scary Muslim, voters will make decisions based on what they think, and they can filter through all sorts of noise to get there. It looks like they’re doing it.

Donavan McKinney is a state rep from Detroit taking on Shri Thanedar, a multimillionaire congressman who spent his own fortune getting to Washington. If McKinney wins tonight, it won’t be because of the money. It’ll be because of the people.

Will Lawrence helped start the Sunrise Movement, the young people who forced the Green New Deal into our national politics. Now he’s running in a swing district we have to win if we’re going to take back the House.

The centrists keep telling us progressives can’t win seats like that. Tonight the voters of Michigan’s 7th get to answer them.

Tonight may well be filled with hope. But it’s the beginning of the work to build and wield power. The power to change our country into one that adds rather than extracts. One that uplifts the working class rather than exploits them. The power to rebuild the trust that our elected public servants won’t sell themselves out. Tonight is just another step in a lot of work that is yet to come.

A big part of how I’m doing that work is A Fight Worth Having, the super PAC I started. We’re ramping up for November and for the 2028 primaries, so we can keep promoting these candidates, these causes, these ideas.

If you want to help, please do.

So tune in tonight with me all over the internet. I’ll be on Substack, YouTube, and maybe a handful of other places, and we can watch these elections together and talk about what comes next.

Corbin Trent

It was nine days before they were found. Until then nobody knew if they were alive or dead. Divers found all thirteen sitting on a ledge in the dark, and then came the harder problem, which was getting them out. Now, it may sound simple. You just give the boys scuba equipment, and they swim out, but that simply wasn’t possible. Of all the things that people debated when it came to solutions, there was 100% certainty that they were going to be incapable of swimming out.

The dive, in or out, was hours long through pitch black passages so tight the rescue divers had to pull their tanks off to fit, and these were kids who’d never worn a scuba mask. Zero diving experience. To give you an idea of how dangerous this dive was, ultimately two Thai Navy SEALs died: one while they were diving and the other from complications.

The water didn’t care. It was rising and the air on that ledge was running out.

The governor running that operation and the government of Thailand made a decision to do something that was considered extremely controversial, unethical, even illegal. They sedated those boys, strapped each one to a diver, and swam them out unconscious through the flooded dark, for maybe a fifty percent chance of saving them.

In retrospect it seems obvious that was the decision to make. It’s not controversial after the fact. All thirteen boys came out alive. Good call.

The outcome makes it seem noncontroversial. But the decision itself was brutal. You’re flipping a coin. A thirty to fifty percent chance some or all the boys die trying to save them, versus a hundred percent chance they all die if you do nothing.

I know it seems like an obvious choice. The problem is it’s not. Taking risks is never, ever easy, even when the math is that clear. And too often, people, families, alcoholics, and entire societies wait until they’re near a hundred percent chance of failure before they’ll take the steps necessary for recovery.

I tell this story because it reminds of where we are as a country. You can see it damn near everywhere. Our health care system. Our industrial capacity, our democracy. Our ability to generate power, to have control over our own lives and bodies, to participate in our economy on fair terms. Our ability to provide safe communities without death and carnage.

I zoom in on health care a lot because it so emblematic of the other crises. The system is obviously dysfunctional. It’s massively unaffordable, and it’s clearly unsustainable. There is a cliff, a point at which it will no longer be possible to even pretend that we have a functional healthcare system, and yet we persisted

Anytime somebody brings up Medicare for All or a national health system, you know what you’ll hear. How are we gonna pay for it? How can we afford this? Everybody with their hair on fucking fire, all over TV, all over radio, because that becomes the narrative. How in the hell are we gonna pay for it????

The system we have right now, the one that doesn’t cover everyone. The one that leaves eighty percent of our counties in health care deserts and delivers some of the worst life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality numbers in the developed world. Is the most expensive on the planet projected to cost us more than $72T-trillion dollars over the next ten years. Seventy-two trillion. And nobody’s hair is on fire. Nobody is on TV demanding to know how we’re gonna pay for that.

So that tells you something. The fear was never about the money. The fear is about the change. The fear is the risk of doing something different, something bold enough to have a chance of saving us. If we put the government back in the business of owning hospitals, if we get rid of the insurance companies, then what happens to the insurance workers? How will it work? We know the system is fundamentally broken. We know it doesn’t work for us. But the fear of doing something else is so strong that we’re stuck in place.

And it’s not just health care. You hear everybody freak out when the DSA folks say defund the police or abolish ICE or abolish prisons. I think those are stupid slogans, just from a communication standpoint. But look at what we’re doing instead.

I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee, a little bitty town in the Appalachian foothills, and this fucking place has a police force armed with AR-15s and an armored personnel carrier and all kinds of shit, like we’re getting ready for a ground invasion from the Chinese. What we don’t have is well funded schools, ones where kids can play sports. It costs thousands of dollars for a kid to play in a sporting club here. Thousands of dollars. We don’t have ways to make sure people are housed and healthy.

And we know there are ways to reduce crime and make communities safer, and it turns out it’s not more policing and more armaments and more violence from our state. It’s more joy. More opportunity. More happiness, more pleasure. Kids with something to do and families that are okay.

But that idea is scary, because we think we have to approach fear with fear. We believe the only way to keep the thing we’re afraid of at bay is to make it more afraid of us than we are of it.

That’s the hundred percent option. That’s sitting in the cave while the water comes up because the swim out is risky. In Thailand they had the nerve to flip the coin, and every one of those boys is alive today, and now the whole world calls it obvious. It’ll be obvious what we should’ve done, too. It always is, after.

Corbin Trent

Biden told voters in 2019 to stay Republican and vote for him anyway. Obama said in 2016 that a serious opposition would challenge the blind spots and dogmas in the Democratic Party. Cuomo went past saying it and helped Republicans hold the New York Senate to wall off the progressives in his own party.

They wanted a strong opposition. But only to their right. Not one of them ever said this country needs a strong socialist party keeping us honest.

A party gets pulled toward whatever it’s competing with. FDR’s Democrats were competing with communists and socialists, so they got pulled left. Social Security. The Wagner Act. Rural electrification. Public power. A minimum wage. The socialists weren’t the threat to the New Deal. They were the reason for it.

Communism’s been tried plenty. It’s never been achieved, no more than the free market has. The Soviets and the Chinese never got past authoritarian socialism, a handful of men owning everything through the state. But it was never the reality doing the pulling. It was the hope. The idea of working people owning their share put over nine hundred thousand votes behind Eugene Debs while he sat in a federal prison for a speech, and it scared FDR’s Democrats into delivering.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the moneyed interests quit having to pretend, and the pressure from the left dried up. Everything still tugging on a politician tugged the same way. Wall Street, the lobbyists, the military industrial complex. Fifty years of appeasing all of that instead of the people who vote for them.

So ask me which one I’d rather have across the room. A strong MAGA Republican Party or a strong Communist Party. By God I’d take the communists every time, because it’d give me a Democratic Party worth fighting for.

They always start with the communists. Nobody stands up for a communist. That’s the reason they start there, and it’s never where they stop.

The State Department proved it this week. A report naming forty-three people and organizations as fellow travelers of Cuban communism. Ben Cohen. Amy Goodman. Hasan Piker. The Democratic Socialists of America, a sitting congresswoman, and George Floyd, who’s been dead since 2020. It talks about the McCarthy blacklists like they were a job well done. On top of that, a presidential directive turning every law enforcement and intelligence agency on political networks. Stephen Miller laid out the verbs. Disrupt. Identify. Defund. De-bank. Arrest. Prosecute. And the Speaker of the House wants three hundred and fifty billion extra Pentagon dollars, some of it for fighting communism on our own shores.

All of that is a confession. When you have to make an idea illegal, you’ve admitted you can’t out-argue it and you sure can’t out-deliver it.

Any concentrated ownership goes the same direction. A state that owns everything ends up authoritarian. A handful of oligarchs that own everything ends up an oligarchy. Whoever’s name goes on the deed, you get the same country. What keeps power honest is a check on it, and in an economy the only real check is competition. You can’t compete with an outfit big enough to buy every competitor it meets, so the competition has to come from somewhere that can’t be bought. Public options. Public ownership. Public competition. Health care, housing, infrastructure all the way up the chain.

Call it socialism if you want. The TVA lit up my part of the country when the private utilities wouldn’t. If that’s socialism, people seem to like it every time they get some.

So I want the socialists organizing, loud, running candidates, winning seats, because that pressure is the only thing I’ve ever seen move a party like mine. Everything I love about this government got won by people the respectable folks called communists at the time.

You shouldn’t have to jail an idea, track it, or debank it. You should just have a better one. And if you can’t come up with one, get out of the way of the people who can.

Corbin Trent

How does Hakeem Jeffries respond to the targeting of Americans for their political ideas? He gets up in Pennsylvania and cries out about the dignity and the value of work, like work is the most sacred thing we own. He’s not ready for what’s here now nor what’s coming.

What’s coming? Well, you’ve got the richest man in the world and his AI buddies telling us that THEIR companies and THEIR machines and THEIR robots are about to take all that dignified work. But worry not. They swear the genie’s going to grant our wishes. We’ll get a check.

A couple days ago Sam Altman said we’re already in the singularity, that his machines can do a third to near half of what people do for a living, and that the ones built for physical work land in 2027.

He’s selling utopia. But entire industries and trades will vanish if he’s right. Again, the guy who owns the machines tells us not to worry. Uncle Sam Altman will make sure the people are well taken care of.

Musk’s vision goes further, saying work will become optional and money disappears as a concept, and then he, richest dude on the planet again, assures us we’re gonna be ok. His suggestion is universal high income, where the robots make everything and we all get a monthly deposit.

I don’t trust these guys as far as I could throw them. Power concedes nothing. If we don’t own it as a nation, as states, and as communities, the offerings aren’t likely to be generous.

The wild part is the disconnect between the leaders of industry and the leaders in our politics.

Will work be the sacred thing Jeffries thinks it is, or the obsolete thing Musk says it is. They can’t both be right.

It would seem like a conversation we’d be having. When the dust settles somebody will own these machines, and right now that somebody is a handful of private companies and a former trillionaire.

That’d lead to what can only be called a corporate handout, and we don’t need that any more than we need a government handout. A check is a check. Whoever’s writing it can shrink it, change the terms, or stop it cold, and we have no say, because we have no ownership. Without ownership there’s no power. There’s no dignity. There’s no real quality of life. We’re just standing there with our hands out, waiting to hear what Musk and Altman are gonna give us.

Ownership of our economy is the fight we need to be having. That and the restoration of our democracy and the Constitution.

The political and economic power, the production, the software, the tools, the means of survival itself, all of it about to be concentrated in even fewer hands.

No king, no emperor, no railroad baron ever owned that much of what people need just to stay alive, because there was always work they still needed us for, and that work was our leverage. When and if our work is replaced, the leverage goes away.

There’s another way. If a few companies are gonna run the whole economy, then the people need to own them. Not the public owning every last thing, but the public holding a real stake in the machines and the tools and what they make, a stake that answers to a vote instead of a CEO.

You’re gonna imagine the USSR or Communist China. Those countries, unlike ours, had something in common before their revolution ever came, and it wasn’t public ownership. It was that the people were never free to start with. Tsarist Russia was an autocracy, no vote, no real courts, no free press or free speech. China went from emperors to warlords to civil war and never touched democracy along the way. So when the state in those places swallowed the individual and their freedoms, there was nothing in place to stop it.

It wasn’t public ownership behind the stories we were told about communism. It was authoritarians. The real disease is concentrated power with nothing to answer to, and that’s the same disease we’d get out of a future where a couple monopolies own the economy. It’s the oligarchs Bernie has been preaching about.

We aren’t an autocracy yet. We’ve got the remnants of a democracy, semi-functional courts, the Constitution. We still have a shot at turning the tide. But it will take hard conversations. Uncomfortable realities and changing the way we revere “capitalism.”

If we can remake these institutions, public ownership is our best path to freedom. If we can’t salvage them, then I don’t see the path.

Over the next few years we will be making the decisions that decide our future. When we vote, or donate, or march, we will be taking steps in one direction or another.

We cannot fear each other. We can’t have a government that we fear. We’ve owned massive portions of our economy before and not only stayed free but gained more.

Britain walked out of the war and put the railroads and the coal and the steel and the Bank of England under public ownership, and it built the National Health Service, and it stayed a democracy every day of it.

Norway owns its oil company and runs the biggest public savings fund on the planet and it’s about as free a country as there is.

This isn’t about defunding the police or abolishing prisons. It’s about one thing, whether regular people get to keep any control over their own lives while the economy changes in front of our eyes.

To protect and nurture our freedom, we’re going to need both kinds of power, the economic and the political.

If we own the future that’s on its way, together, in the open, with every check and balance our grandparents left us, we are gonna be better than ok.

Corbin Trent

I was born in a Tennessee hospital that the city and the county owned. Morristown-Hamblen. That’s not just a clever name. It’s a symbol of the town and county bolted together, because they built it together and, for a while, held onto it. Folks in Hamblen County put up the money, put up the building, staffed it, and it was ours.

It’s not ours anymore. Some conglomerate owns it now, same as near every community hospital left.

If we had the time I’d tell you a hundred stories just like that one.

Born where and when I was, means I grew up around the evidence that we built things and owned them. TVA dams and the lakes behind them. Power lines running out to cities, towns, and farms that had been dark since God made dirt. Oak Ridge, a city built for the Manhattan Project, was just down the road, and the work it offered helped transform this whole area. I got here late, too late to see the massive effort that built my region, but I always saw the evidence that it was possible.

My granddaddy grew up in the hills, became a chaplain colonel in the Air Force, and put his body on the line in the Civil Rights Movement. He also built a factory in Bean Station that hired people and made goods. Nobody in my family thought those were two different jobs. My papaw came up one of thirteen kids in a sharecropping family and got himself forty acres. I helped in the tobacco fields and put up hay with him. My great granddaddy Clay walked around Morristown trading pocket knives and watches, bought tobacco cheap one year and did all right for himself.

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My whole family, aunts, uncles, mom, dad, all agreed on a few things. They all loved this country. They loved the land and the rivers and they loved the people. But they also knew exactly what it had cost to get here, and they said it out loud at the table in front of the kids. Not a single one of them acted like loving this place and telling the truth about it were at odds.

Somewhere we lost the ability to do both at once, and I reckon I know why.

We decided we were finished.

There’s a word for it. Developed. We say “developing countries” when we mean the ones still coming along, and “developed” when we’re talking about us. But developed is a myth. When we stopped trying to get better we started getting worse.

A country that’s still getting built can fail and push forward at any stage. It can get something badly wrong, own it, and keep moving. A finished country can only be defended or attacked. So once we told ourselves the job was done, we had two moves left. Pretend everything’s fine, or decide there was never a thing here worth saving. Both moves let you avoid the work.

They also knew exactly what it had cost to get here, and they said it out loud at the table in front of the kids. Not a single one of them acted like loving this place and telling the truth about it were at odds.

We quit moving, and what we’ve got now is atrophy. When you watch it happen in a body or watch it happen in a country, it looks about the same. The muscle’s still technically there. It just won’t do anything.

We stopped building and improving and instead started extracting and declining. We let the wealthiest among us sell off the country we’d built. When the results got bad enough, we let them blame the most vulnerable people inside and outside our borders.

For more than a generation we’ve been reaping without sowing, and anybody who’s ever farmed can tell you how that ends, and about how fast.

Somewhere along the way we made a religion out of the market. We stopped looking at our own resources and accepted unbridled, uncompetitive, uncaring capitalism as our only option. We didn’t plan. We didn’t deliberate. We didn’t sit down and project what this country would need in thirty years, partly because we were afraid to pick wrong. So we did nothing and let the market decide, and the market always picks whatever pays out the quickest.

That gospel got into all of us. Including folks who are fighting for the right things. Including me. I want universal health care. I want universal child care. I want K through 16 for anybody who needs it. But I catch myself and near everybody around me arguing about every bit of these necessities like they’re a money problem. They’re not.

The real question is whether this country still knows how to do anything at all. Whether we could still build the hospital.

Our development didn’t just stop economically, it stopped morally. We got here on the backs of people who had no choice. The Native people we killed and ran off their land. The slaves we kidnapped and worked, their children and their grandchildren who stayed poor and stayed hunted long after a piece of paper said they were free. The Chinese men we wore out laying rail across the West. Poor white folks like mine, who we sent down in the mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and Pennsylvania. A good many of them got left down there. That’s the ground under this country. I’m standing on it and so are you.

We just stack new floors on top of failures we never named, and that’s how you get a house that won’t hold.

Tennessee’s where the Ku Klux Klan was born. Tennessee’s also where the Highlander Folk School trained organizers and civil rights workers who went out and cracked the South open. Rosa Parks sat in a workshop here in the summer of 1955. That December she wouldn’t get up out of her seat. Same state, same decades, same dirt. That’s what an unfinished country looks like. It looks like the worst of us and unsuspecting heroes coming up out of the same field in the same season. It happens when a country is still alive, still becoming.

Tennessee’s where the Ku Klux Klan was born. Tennessee’s also where the Highlander Folk School trained organizers and civil rights workers who went out and cracked the South open.

We’ve had good runs. The Progressive Era. The New Deal. The Arsenal of Democracy, when we repurposed factories to war against fascism and proved this country could still do hard things on purpose. Stretches of the fifties and the sixties when it looked like we might finally become the country we said we were. But every time we slid back, it was for the same reaons. Hatred. Fear. Resentment. Racism. The oldest tools around for splitting up folks who ought to be on the same side. We never dealt with with the real issues, so they festered. We’d start making progress, somebody’d reach for old tools, and we’d quit early.

I’ve got a visceral loathing for the Democratic Party and some of that’s earned. For fifty years they’ve managed a decline and called it governing. But some of it isn’t earned and I know it, because a lot of those folks are holding onto a hope they can’t put down. They still think this thing’ll deliver if we wait a little longer and tune it a little better. They’re grieving something and can’t admit that it died.

Now the ground’s coming unsettled under us. People are reaching outside the norm, voters and nonvoters both. The apathy and resignation paralizing this country for thirty years has made people so desperate they’ll listen to near anything. That kind of unrest is rife with potential and it’s rife with catastrophe. Which future we get comes down to whether somebody shows up with something real to build.

Which is where leadership comes in, or where it’s supposed to. The reason most of our leaders can’t put a better future in front of you is that they won’t say the plain thing first. We didn’t become who we were supposed to be. There’s real work left and it’s big work, not tweaks around the edges.

You can’t set a vision for where we need to go and insist we already arrived at the same time. That’s why every speech you hear sounds the same. Defend. Protect. Restore. Nobody’s describing a better version of America. Describing it would mean admitting we’re not standing in it yet.

Our leaders have to say what we’re doing isn’t working. That we’re not done building. If you say those hard things, the rest opens up.

They’ve got to say where we failed, too. Name the demons out loud and name what they cost us, because the effects ripple on. A great many still profit from our sins and a great many still suffer.

The reason most of our leaders can’t put a better future in front of you is that they won’t say the plain thing first. We didn’t become who we were supposed to be. There’s real work left and it’s big work, not tweaks around the edges.

The truth is that the problem’s us. We don’t want it to be, so it’s convenient when our leaders point at somebody else. Iran. China. We’d rather think the problem is someone else, across an ocean, coming for what’s ours. When that distraction wears out, they point us closer to home, and tell us the it’s the socialist. The communists. The folks who want the rich to pay their share. The folks who reckon they ought to be able to afford a doctor or a house. We’ve reached a point where wanting your kids to see a doctor puts you on a list.

The problem is us. It’s the people and the apathy we keep choosing, year after year. That might hurt for a second. But then you realize it’s the best news there is. Because if the problem’s us then the solution’s us, and we can start Monday. Cities. Counties. States. Regions. The whole country.

We’re not finished. We never were, and we shouldn’t quit trying.

My people knew that. They loved this country enough to keep their hands on it.

Corbin Trent

We’re trying to get this argument in front of people who’ve never heard it before, and we’re backing candidates who know the country isn’t finished. That means making videos, running ads, and being heard by folks who aren’t already in the room.

Help us spread it.

Sunday, I was on CNN’s State of the Union talking with Scott Jennings about how this country actually got built. Public money. Public works. Things we paid for together because no private market was ever going to build them.

He bought into the lie we’ve all be told for the past fifty years. Our government can’t build anything and socialism is a foreign disease. Yet, people are listening to socialists anyway. Not because somebody handed them a DSA pamphlet. Because the math of a normal life stopped working and we want our lives back. People want solutions.

I find myself frustrated with the sole obsession with taxing the rich. The trillionaire, the billionaires and the centi-millionaires. Not because we shouldn’t do it. We should.

The gap between the ultra rich and the rest of us is insane. A lot of what they’re holding is ours, earned by the people who keep this thing running. But taxing the top is the easy part. What we do with the revenue is what matters.

It frustrates me because wealth taxes are treated like the whole solution. They aren’t.

The sectors that carry your life have broken. Health care. Housing. Child care. Education. Energy. They don’t work like markets anymore.

A working market takes money and makes more of the thing. Capital goes in, supply comes out. That’s the deal. That’s the only reason anybody ever defended markets in the first place.

These don’t do that. Put money into health care and you don’t get more doctors, you get more consolidation. Put money into housing and you don’t get more houses, you get a higher price on the same house. Send more money to college and lo and behold, the university gives an administrator a raise. The cash never turns into supply.

We’ve run that test in every one of these sectors since the ‘50s and it comes back the same way every time. Money goes in, supply sits still, price goes up, and somebody at the top takes the difference.

It’s not that our market is being unfair. It’s stopped functioning as a market. Our economy has gotten terrible at producing and amazing at extracting.

Now put inequality on top of that.

Inequality is what keeps the whole thing from being obvious. We’re broke, so we get sorted out early and never find out that the thing we couldn’t afford also doesn’t exist in anything close to the numbers we need. The price does the rationing before anybody gets in line. No line ever forms. No shortage ever shows up on the news. And we all walk away thinking the problem was money, because money is what we ran out of first.

So the whole country argues about distribution. Tax the top. Raise the wage. Grow the credit. I want the money to move and I’ve said that plain. But hand it over tomorrow with these sectors in the shape they’re in and we’d watch it get eaten in real time. Not because we did anything wrong. Because we fed money to something that turns money into price instead of into supply.

That’s what the inequality is hiding from us. We don’t have a fairness problem. We have a production problem.

That money needs to go into building. Public building. Things we build, things we own, things we get to set the price of. Not into helping us pay whatever a broken sector decides to charge.

When a country pools this much cash at the top, you get inflation in two places at once.

You get it in assets. Stocks. Private companies valued at numbers that make no sense. Luxury homes, art, handbags, yachts, whatever the very rich buy to keep score.

And you get it in the short list of things we can’t opt out of buying. Housing. Health care. Child care. Power and water. College.

That asset run-up gets called appreciation. It isn’t. When a price runs away from what the thing actually produces, it isn’t value. It’s a bubble. No productivity behind it. No profits, no market share, nothing underneath. It’s a tulip bulb market. And that’s where fifty years of this country’s money went.

The Federal Reserve’s own distributional financial accounts show it. In 1989 the top 1 percent held about 23 percent of net worth. By the end of 2025, about 31 percent. The bottom half went from 3.5 percent to 2.5 percent.

So yes, we’ve had inflation. Enormous inflation.

And we’ve felt it. I’m not here to tell you that you haven’t. We’ve seen more of it than anybody. Housing, health care, child care, college, the power bill creeping up every year. We get told it’s under control, because the damage doesn’t show up in the index they measure. Hidden in debt. Hidden in extra labor. Hidden in subsidies. Hidden in parents helping grown children. Hidden in people not having kids. Hidden in people giving up on a home. Hidden in all the small ways we quietly give things up.

The same thing happened up top, just running the other direction. Money poured into stocks and land and AI. So the people already holding it got richer for holding. Not for building. For holding.

We all watched this happen fast a few years ago. A pandemic broke the supply of damn near everything and prices went straight up. Eggs and gas and rent all at once. Supply drops, price climbs, and it doesn’t matter what’s in anybody’s pocket. That’s the same engine that’s been running slow on housing and health care and child care for fifty years. The slow version doesn’t get called an emergency, because it landed on us and not on them. But it’s the same engine. The steady story isn’t the price of eggs. It’s the price of a house, a degree, a hospital stay, a month of day care, climbing decade after decade while our wages sat still.

Homes are where it breaks into regular life. A median new home cost about 6.3 years of median personal income in 1963. By 2024 it was about 9.3 years. A house used to cost a little over six years of your life. Now it costs more than nine. And we’re still told to keep up.

Health care did the same thing. Spending per person ran about 5.5 percent of median personal income in 1960. By 2024 it was about 34 percent.

The price of a normal life went up faster than the pay.

We already know this. We know it when we look at a house listing. We know it when the hospital bill comes. We know it when a decent life takes two incomes, a credit card, student loans, a car note, and no room for anything to go wrong.

We covered the gap for a while. The one-earner household became the two-earner household. That was liberation in a lot of ways and I wouldn’t trade it away, but it also became a financial necessity, and everybody acted like the family got richer without asking why it took twice the labor to stand in the same place. Then we covered it with debt. Then with subsidies. Medicaid, housing vouchers, student aid. I’m glad they exist and a lot of us would be drowning without them. But look at what they did to the price. We poured federal money into college tuition for forty years and tuition ate every dollar of it. We hand out housing vouchers in cities that won’t permit housing and the rent absorbs them. A subsidy that isn’t paired with supply doesn’t bring the price down. It becomes the price.

We already ran that experiment. Five decades of sending money at these sectors and it kept getting swallowed, because we never built the thing the money was trying to buy.

I bring this number up a lot. RAND put the gap at about $79 trillion through 2023. That’s the difference between what the bottom 90 percent actually earned since 1975 and what we’d have earned if growth had been shared the way it was after World War II.

That money didn’t disappear. It moved up.

And while it moved up, we let the real economy rot underneath it. We stopped building homes. We stopped building infrastructure. We stopped building cities. We offshored the factories and let financial engineering pay better than production. Manufacturing employment peaked around 19.5 million workers in 1979. In 2024 it was about 12.8 million.

We got very good at making money and a lot worse at making the things money is supposed to buy.

If Democrats only talk about redistribution, they’re telling half the story. If Republicans only talk about production, they’re lying, because the actual program is tax cuts, deregulation, and letting monopolies keep bleeding us dry.

So we have to build it ourselves.

Public building. Public ownership. Public competition in the markets nobody can opt out of. Health care. Housing. Child care. Education. Energy and utilities. The infrastructure itself.

Not a subsidy for a private developer. Not a credit that helps a family pay a price somebody else set. We build the thing, we own the thing, and where a private market has learned to make scarcity profitable, we get in that market and compete.

The competing part is what really scares them. A public builder putting up housing at cost drags the price down on every unit around it. A public option sets a ceiling nobody can charge above. We’ve known this a long time. Where I live, TVA and the rural electric co-ops proved it before most of the people arguing about socialism today were born.

And none of it will work until we can actually do it. Fifty years of contracting everything out hollowed out our government’s ability to build and hollowed out the workforce that used to know how. You can’t build what you can’t staff. Getting the competence back into public agencies and the skills back into working hands isn’t a side project. It’s the project.

Anything less just helps us afford a broken system. This changes who owns it and what it makes.

Inequality didn’t just make this country unfair. It hid the fact that we stopped building the things we need to live.

And all that money sitting up top isn’t doing anything. It isn’t building a house or training a doctor or opening a clinic. It’s parked in a bubble, waiting to be worth more.

Put it to work.

Corbin Trent

This message doesn't spread on its own. We're running ads, making videos, and publishing this thing so it lands in front of people who've never heard it once. Help us reach them. afightworthhaving.com

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, is on it. Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. Three sitting members of Congress. Amy Goodman, who has hosted the War and Peace Report on Democracy Now for thirty years and who spent those years putting war crimes on the air and exposing the lies that walked this country into Iraq. Ben Cohen, who started Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And the Amazon Labor Union, which won an election at a warehouse.

And this ain’t no leak. Nobody blew a whistle here. This is what they’re proud of, this is what they put out themselves, and Rubio posted it under his own name. They’re bringing the fight.

They’re not hiding what it’s for either, because right there in the report they bring up the blacklists of the fifties, the McCarthy hearings, the prosecutions, and they bring all that up as a thing that worked.

And none of this came out of nowhere. They already told the FBI to treat anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity and the wrong opinions on migration and race and gender and family as warning signs of a domestic terrorist. They’re subpoenaing the phone records of reporters and then the records of those reporters’ wives and mothers. They sent letters to election officials in all fifty states warning them of criminal prosecution and gave them five days to answer. They put forty-five billion dollars into new immigration detention, enough beds to rival the whole federal prison system. And the Supreme Court told them they can stop a man on the street based on how he looks and what language he’s speaking.

Now put that next to what the Speaker of the House said last week. He’s asking for three hundred and fifty billion dollars for the Pentagon, and the first reason out of his mouth is fighting communism on our own shores. Our shores. Four days later his Secretary of State publishes the names.

You’re looking at a budget and a target list, and they were built to go together.

Three hundred and fifty billion dollars to surveil and to spy and to wiretap, aimed at Ben Cohen who makes ice cream, at Amy Goodman who reports the news, at the mayor of New York, at a union that won an election at a warehouse. And we already know what this government does with the authority it’s already got. It searched a reporter’s home and took her devices. So once you’ve named a man an enemy of the state and appropriated the money to go after him, those tools are going to get used on him, and the only thing left to find out is which ones.

If communism is so awful, and it is, if it’s such a terrible horrible thing, then why not let it compete? That’s what we do with everything else in this country. Apple against Android. We turn the thing loose and let it get beat on its merits, and we have never once needed the Secretary of State to write down names to settle it.Unless you’re worried it might win something.

Because if a fella could afford a house and a doctor and a decent life working one job, nobody would be sitting around getting inspired by an idea like comunisim. The only way an idea like that gets any traction at all is if the thing we’re living under has quit working for nearly everyone. So all that worry over there is them telling on themselves. They know.

And I’ll tell you something else about authoritarianism. The kind that kills people, that imprisons people, that suppresses freedom. It doesn’t actually require communism or socialism or any other ism for that matter. All it requires is a government that’s hell-bent on suppressing people’s ability to think freely. And if you look through history you’ll see the first ones they come for are always the idealists, the folks telling you this doesn’t have to be the way our society works. Then comes the immigrants, the disabled, the homeless, the poor. They go after the ones without power first.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that poem that starts off with first they came for the communists. I’m telling you that’s what’s happening here.

So what exactly are they calling communism?

Franklin Roosevelt was not a communist. He was a rich man from New York who looked out at a country on its knees and decided the government was going to do something about it. So he hired engineers and surveyors and welders and concrete men, people who couldn’t find work anywhere else in America, and he sent them into the valleys of Tennessee and Alabama and Kentucky and they built dams. Norris and Fontana. They built something magnificent and it powered this nation for decades and it’s powering it today. It put lights in hollers where no private company would run a line at any price, because there was no profit in it and they said so right out loud.

And when this country needed uranium enriched to end a war, we did it at Oak Ridge, forty miles from where I’m sitting, running on power a government agency generated with a dam that government employees built.

That’s socialism by their definition. The state hired people, those people built something, and the state and the people own it. That’s the whole crime they’re describing. The cooperative keeping my neighbors’ lights on is owned by the members themselves, and that would land you on a list today.

Now you can be against all of it. You can think public power was a mistake and public hospitals are a mistake and public housing is a mistake, and you can go argue that out with me anytime you like. That’s a fight I’m happy to have and I have it on television every chance I get.

What you cannot do in a free country is take a man’s opinion about who ought to own the power company and turn it into evidence that he’s a terrorist. That’s the line. And they have already stepped over it and put it in writing.

And too much of the Democratic leadership is helping them do it. Instead of standing up for the right of an American to argue for public ownership or public health care or a stronger union, they’re out there repeating the same Cold War language and hoping this machinery never gets pointed at them. Nobody’s screaming about this. Nobody’s writing scathing letters. We’re not even getting strongly worded emails out of our leadership in the House or the Senate, let alone a hard push toward defending freedom of thought and freedom of expression. They sit there cowed and terrified, not understanding the history of this nation and not understanding the history of their own party.

So we ought to be concerned about the results. About the use of the power. About the lack of freedom. Not about the ism we apply to it. Because this government, while the Democratic leadership sits idly by or worse, is attacking American democracy and American freedom under the guise of working to preserve it.

They are coming after us. The people saying health care shouldn’t bankrupt you. The people saying everybody ought to have a home. The people saying public money ought to build public things instead of disappearing into somebody’s pocket. The people who look around at all of it and say out loud that this shit ain’t working. That’s who’s on that list, and that’s who the three hundred and fifty billion dollars is for.

They are trying to make us enemies of the state.

And by God, that ain’t American. It ain’t Appalachian. And it ain’t a goddamn thing I agree with and it never will be.

These are people who want masked ICE agents on our streets who can shoot a man in the face and walk away without a single repercussion. No name, no badge, no accountability, nothing.

God damn these people.

Corbin Trent

If you can give, give. A Fight Worth Having is in this fight and we’re yelling as loud as we know how. That costs money, and we don’t take it from anybody who’d ask us to soften it.

I grew up in East Tennessee so naturally, I was surrounded by conservative Republicans. A lot of them are closer to me ideologically than it might seem. They’re anti-monopoly. They’re against corporate power and government power both. They like the idea of an enemy small enough that a regular person could take it on. That’s a big part of why they love the Second Amendment. It feels like a break-in-case-of-emergency option, a rifle in the closet for the day an authoritarian state finally comes for them.

I’ve never believed in that line of defense. I love shooting guns, and I like blowing things up on the farm with Tannerite. But I have never once believed that the gun in my closet would protect me from the police or the government. A shootout with the military ain’t gonna end well for a citizen, and Ruby Ridge and Waco are the proof.

And losing the shootout isn’t even the worst of it. We can’t sustain ourselves anymore. We can’t produce our own food, our own power, our own medicine. This ain’t the country it was even in 1900, when a household could feed itself and heat itself and patch itself up off what it had on hand. We buy all of it now, from somewhere else, made by somebody else. And yet we hold onto the fantasy that we could mount a revolt with small arms.

We’ve all heard the phrase “opiate of the masses.” Here in the South we have a few. One of them, the literal kind, is the opiates the Sacklers poured into our towns. But the Second Amendment is another. Guns sell us the false hope that there’s a last stand waiting somewhere down the road, a day we’ll take on the government and whip ‘em. The truth is that one person, or hundreds with guns aren’t gonna stand against a modern state.

The foundations of the tyranny these guns are supposed to stave off are being laid and improved every day. Built by Democrats and Republicans, by the very men we elected to stop it. Peter Thiel and Palantir and so much of the tech world are creating an Orwellian nightmare of tracked phones, Flock cameras, drones, scanners, and the like all powered by AI.

My father-in-law worries about the “fifteen-minute” city, and he’s not wrong to worry about being watched and penned in, but the people doing the watching are Trump and Musk and Thiel, the ones my father-in-law was told loved freedom and free speech and the right to assemble. They don’t. They never did.

We can’t shoot our way out of any of it. Not out of ICE and its detention centers, not out of the Flock cameras, not out of an AI-backed surveillance state that watches everybody all the time. The gun in the closet is of no use.

And the rifle is one of the weakest checks we’ve got on power, and it’s pointed at the wrong enemy anyway, because the power squeezing us now is as much corporate as it is government.

So if the gun won’t save us, what will? Each other. A people united. A press that tells the truth about who’s doing what to whom. Neighbors who show up. A real stake in the economy we live in, owning some of it together instead of renting our whole lives from the people at the top.

That will give us more freedom than any gun ever could, because a rifle is something we hold alone, and alone is exactly how the powerful want us to stay. We have to build power the only way it has ever been built, by uniting a lot of people around the same demand.

The other side already showed us how it’s done. Neoliberals didn’t win the last fifty years because they were right, they won because they united. They came from every corner and pulled in the same direction.

They had their economists, Hayek and Milton Friedman, making the case that anything public was a step toward tyranny. They had Ayn Rand taking that cold theory and making it feel like plain common sense. Making greed sound like a virtue. Making the man at the top sound like he’d earned every dime and owed you nothing. They had James Buchanan handing them the argument that the government itself was the enemy.

And they had Lewis Powell. A corporate lawyer who in 1971 wrote a memo laying out how business ought to organize, to guarantee corporate interests never take a back seat to what people need or want. Then that same year they put Powell on the Supreme Court, and justice started working for business, not people.

Economists and writers and lawyers and donors and judges. All of them agreeing on one program. Sell it off, run it cheap, get the public out of anything public. And they ran that one play everywhere, for fifty years, until it was just the air we breathed that wasn’t corporate owned.

And what about us? Well, something big is happening. New ideas are finally winning. Mamdani in New York. Melat Kiros in Colorado. Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez are taking their seats. Good people, all over the map, knocking off the folks who said it couldn’t be done.

But winning the seat is not the same as agreeing on what we’re building. Neoliberals had one program and ran it for fifty years. We’ve got a hundred good candidates and a hundred good ideas and no single demand. We’re set up to win races and still lose the country.

If we finally do agree on what we’re building, conservatives will have two words ready for it. Socialism or Communism. They’ll point at Venezuela and the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward that starved millions, and I’ll give them every bit of it. That was an authoritarian command rule, run badly, by ruthless men who answered to no one. It has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the country we once were.

Alexander Hamilton built this nation’s economy on public credit and public purpose. At our peak the public owned close to forty percent of the hospitals in America outright, ours, run for us. We built the dams and the power lines and a middle class bigger than any nation had ever put together. We didn’t import a bit of that from anywhere. We did it here, and then we sold it off. What they call socialism now is mostly just the way we used to live.

They’ll tell us the government wants to take our house and our truck and our farm. But that fear only works if we picture the government as some separate power up above us, something we don’t control and can’t touch. If that’s what government is, then sure, all we can do is hope it stays kind, or hope it stays too weak to hurt us. That’s a miserable way to live, hoping whoever’s in charge has a good heart. Don’t fear the thing and don’t try to starve it. Own it. Make the government ours again, and use it to own the things we all depend on, together.

Because right now the government isn’t ours, and the proof lies in who it protects. We’ve built a country where the powerful are beyond the reach of our own institutions. The Attorney General, the FBI, the SEC, the FEC, none of them ever lay a hand on the people at the top. Jeffrey Epstein moved through this country for years confident the law was something for other people, not folks in his elite network. Wall Street’s finest burned the economy down and got bailed out for the trouble. There’s no accountability for torture, none for war crimes, none for the financial crimes that wiped out a generation’s savings, and none at all for the Sacklers, who got rich addicting and killing whole communities and walked never did a day in jail. That’s who our government protects right now, and it isn’t us. The only way that changes is if we make it ours again and run it ourselves.

And the vast majority of us, Americans who play by the rules, are not protected. The basic stuff of a decent life keeps drifting out of reach. Housing. Health care. Education. Child care. Gas. Electricity. Food. The foundation a person needs to build a life on has gotten more expensive every year, faster than wages, for decades on end. And the whole time, the corporate Democrats and the comfortable Republicans keep telling us the system is basically fine. It works. It just needs a tweak or two.

History says otherwise. When we look back, it’s clear we almost never made big changes because we sat down and decided to. We made them when a catastrophe left us no other choice. The crash of 1929. Pearl Harbor. The Civil War that finally ended slavery after we refused to end it any other way. The building has to be on fire before we’ll agree to fix the wiring. But this time the catastrophe is already here. It didn’t arrive in one terrible morning, so it doesn’t look like 1929 or Pearl Harbor, but here we are, a country where the powerful answer to no one and working people can’t afford to live decently. We are a country in the middle of a disaster. We’ve gotten used to things getting worse and worse, slowly but surely.

We don’t have to wait for the next catastrophic event. We can build the economy on purpose, restore accountability on purpose, earn back people’s faith on purpose. But we cannot do any of it scattered, one good candidate and one good idea at a time, each of us sitting alone with our own rifle in our own closet. We have to do it the way it’s always been done. Frederick Douglass told us how a long time ago. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. So let’s decide what our demand is, together, and let’s make it before our dismal state gets even worse.

Corbin Trent

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and his administration is a threat to people the world over. But you don’t solve that threat by standing up to him, or legislating around him, or writing some new law that says he can’t do the thing he’s already doing. Because we’ve watched a Supreme Court bless this behavior. We’ve watched laws get ignored. Judgments ignored. Courts ignored. So it isn’t a question of who sits in the chair. It’s a question of power, and a question of accountability, and almost nobody with any standing is asking for accountability.

Our enemy isn’t the man. Our enemy is the system in which he’s operating, and that system runs on one thing, a lack of accountability.

Let’s start with what should be the clearest. We have been funding and arming a genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out by a rogue regime in Israel, in plain sight, and none of us can do a thing to stop it. You might think that has nothing to do with your life in Des Moines or Knoxville or wherever you’re reading this. It has everything to do with it. Because a system that lets war crimes happen in broad daylight with no consequence is the same system you live under, and if genocide can’t be stopped then what can? The powerlessness we feel isn’t just a side effect, it’s the point. An inspiration to quit.

Unlike money powerlessness does trickle down. It’s the Epstein operation, where the names are known, and not one person who mattered has answered for any of it. It’s Ken Paxton in Texas, whose office took over the case of a man who admitted to years-long sexual abuse of a young boy, a first-degree felony that carried up to life in prison, and after a mistrial cut him a deal down to two misdemeanors, thirty days in jail, and no spot on the sex-offender registry, and that same Ken Paxton is now his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. It’s an economy that minted its first trillionaire off the backs of American workers, American innovation, and resources we all paid to build. Different stories, same disease. Nobody pays.

The centrists have a ready answer for all of this. They’ll say, “That’s your problem, you’d rather go after the Democratic Party than fight Trump.” The “centrists” are wrong. Working to transform and restore the Democratic Party is one of the few solutions that might work.

There’s not really a center for them to occupy. There’s no neutral ground when the government is actively working to dismantle democracy and we have an economy failing the overwhelming majority of the people inside it. There is no center on genocide. To stand in the middle is to work with the people who currently hold the power, and the people who hold the power are Trump, and Palantir, and private equity, and the billionaires, the ones doing the extracting and the oppressing, here and across the planet.

So when a Democrat says I’m not willing to take on the system itself, the economic system, the justice system, the whole machine, what that Democrat is saying is that the machine gets to stay. And the machine is what empowers Trump. Going after Trump the man instead of the system isn’t a step toward fixing anything. It’s the false option, the move that lets you feel like a fighter while you don’t solve anything. You cannot be a centrist in this moment, because in this moment the center is just a way of siding with Trump.

I don’t see how a centrist can honestly think of themselves as “a fighter.” You can’t both fight for people and not fight to take power away from the institutions and companies that hold it and use it to harm people. You can’t fight against Trump by attacking socialists.

There’s a poem most of us know, written about what Germany allowed to happen. I won’t paraphrase it. It does its work whole.

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me

We are doing it again, right now, in the open. Both Trump and centrist Democrats are coming for the socialists, by which they mean anybody standing to the left of a tax cut. They are coming for the immigrants. They are coming for the unhoused and the disabled and the people with the least power to stop them. And, just like in Weimar Germany, the people who should be blocking authoritarianism are instead siding with it to attack the left. Josh Gottheimer. James Carville. The whole Promise to America crowd, the centrists on every channel, lining up with an administration they swear they want to fight, against an ideology whose only crime is refusing to say that things are fine the way they are.

And I don’t mean any of that as a figure of speech. I mean, there’s already a system built and running. ICE has opened more than 150 new detention facilities since this administration came in, the daily detention population has passed a record seventy thousand people, and the plan on paper is to spend thirty-eight billion dollars building toward a hundred thousand beds, in mega-camps run by the same for-profit prison companies that make money off everybody they hold.

In the Florida Everglades, they built a camp they nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz, where the conditions are so bad detainees went on hunger strike and Amnesty International called what was happening there torture. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the most in two decades, and this year is worse.

Think you’re safe? It isn’t only immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents have shot multiple U.S. citizens and killed several of them, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both gunned down in Minneapolis this January. Good’s death was ruled a homicide, and the Justice Department declined to investigate the agent who shot her and opened an investigation into her widow instead. That’s what no accountability looks like.

And the same machine runs at home. In March of last year, they stood up a federal task force to flood Washington with police, sweep the unhoused out of public space, and run immigration enforcement through the middle of the city. In July came an executive order to make it easier to round up homeless people and commit them to institutions against their will, on the claim that most of them are addicts or mentally ill. In August, they declared a crime emergency and pulled DC’s own police force under federal command, and over the past year, we’ve watched National Guard troops and even Marines pushed into American cities against protesters.

And this June, the Justice Department put out a legal memo arguing that disabled Americans have no right to live in their own communities at all, tearing up twenty-five years of settled law and quietly reopening the door to warehousing disabled people in institutions, right as the Medicaid cuts pull the funding from the services that keep them out. That isn’t a slope we might slide down someday. It’s a machine, already built, made to remove the people the state has decided are a problem.

And the billionaires aren’t standing off to the side, they’re cheering it on. Two weeks ago, the richest man alive, Elon Musk, used his platform to give away for free a film that German censors had refused to certify because, by the director’s own account, they found it incited violence against migrants. Then Musk posted that the sequel will be even better. That’s where we are. The man with more money than most nations is out promoting vigilante violence against immigrants and calling it a movie.

And all of it sits on top of a surveillance system we’ve been building since 9/11, more and more of it run by private companies and now being supercharged with AI, the cameras and the license plate readers and the face scans, pointed at us. People will tell you the lesson is that we let the government get too big. That’s not the lesson. The problem was never the size of the government. The problem is that we let unchecked power pool in the hands of a few, the few who own the system, run the camps, write the memos, and answer to no one.

So no, I’m not interested in fighting Donald Trump. I’m interested in fighting the thing that made him and will outlast him, the system that lets a genocide run, lets the Epstein names stay buried, lets a child’s abuser walk and then promotes the man who walked him, mints fortunes off our work, and rounds up the weakest people we’ve got while calling it order. That’s the enemy. Not a man. A system.

And the first thing we can do is quit pretending there’s a safe place to stand while it runs. There isn’t. Knowing the enemy doesn’t fix anything by itself, it just tells you where to put your shoulder, and the work after that is bigger and longer than anything a single election can fix. But it starts with saying the plain thing the center exists to avoid. You cannot be a centrist in this moment. Pick a side.

Help A Fight Worth Having build the infrastructure to win.

Here is a list of upcoming Democratic Primaries. In this list are some great candidates. Kai Newkirk (AZ-04), Donavan McKinney (MI-13), Will Lawrance (MI-07), Abdul El-Sayed (MI-SN), Cori Bush (MO-01), Justin Pearson (TN-09), Francesca Hong (WI-Gov)

Our Super PAC will provide support as fundraising allows for these candidates.

We just released a poll on the AZ-04 race. We want to do more. If you want to donate to the efforts, you can do so here.

Corbin Trent

A vision is forming and we have the momentum. A new Democratic Party is being born, a bloc of people with big ideas and a cause very worth fighting for. One that rallies Democrats, independents, and Americans alike. Medicare for All. Accountability for the powerful. Wealth taxes. Rebuilding our roads, bridges, and infrastructure. Ownership stakes in transformative technology like AI. Tangible results in people’s lives.

Twelve days from now, in Phoenix, we can boost that momentum by replacing another bad incumbent. This is the next opportunity. Not the last.

A Fight Worth Having is getting in on this race. Help make sure voters know Kai Newkirk.

His name is Greg Stanton. He sits in the leadership of the New Democrat Coalition and chairs its campaign arm this cycle, raising money to send more Democrats just like him to Washington. He represents the party that lost to Donald Trump twice, the one hovering around 36 percent, some weeks below Trump himself.

His challenger, Kai Newkirk, is a long-time organizer who takes no corporate PAC money, no billionaire super PAC money, and not a dime from AIPAC. He’ll fight for Medicare for All and an economy that works for regular people.

This race got written off as a long shot. Our new poll tells a different story. It’s close, and we can win it.

Here’s exactly where your money goes.

$25 puts Kai in front of 1,000 voters on digital.
$70 drops a mailer in 100 mailboxes, right next to the ballot.
$700 helps us reach people on their drives to and from work.
$15,000 puts Kai on TV across the district for a day.
$35,000 funds a full run of mail to every Democratic home in the district.
$500,000 funds the whole plan, start to finish.

Almost everyone here votes by mail, and the ballots are landing right now. Every dollar today buys a voter contact we can’t buy back next week.

Help fund the momentum.

If you can write a serious check (ActBlue takes wire transfers now, for $20 flat), this is the moment. $100,000 puts Kai on every screen in the district through election day. $250,000 gets us halfway. $500,000 funds all of it. There’s no limit, and it goes further today than it will tomorrow.

I’ve spent the last year and a half building the infrastructure to move this fast. Now I need to fund it. We’re a super PAC, so there’s no limit. Five dollars or five hundred thousand. If you can afford it, put it in.

The new Democratic Party being born is what we need to beat Trumpisim and MAGAisim.

Give whatever you can, any amount, no limit.

Corbin

P.S. Every day a voter doesn’t hear about Kai and Stanton is a day wasted. Our poll says this is winnable if we reach them in the next 12 days, and that comes down to what we put in mailboxes and on screens today. For a super PAC, no amount is too small or too large

Yesterday was America’s 250th birthday. The president spent the weekend telling us who the enemy is. He stood in front of Mount Rushmore and called communism the greatest threat this country has ever faced. Worse than two world wars, worse than Pearl Harbor, worse than 9/11. He pointed all of it at a handful of democratic socialists who just won primaries, people most Americans hadn’t heard of a year ago.

But these candidates aren’t communists. They just believe a government and its people can build big things together. Trump and all the other sky-is-falling politicians aren’t fighting communism, they’re fighting the way this country actually got built.

We tell ourselves a story on these birthdays; that America was always a free market and nothing else. It was never true. Alexander Hamilton wanted our government smack in the middle of the industry we were building. He set up a national bank to do it and argued to Congress that the markets wouldn’t build American manufacturing on their own. He said the public purse had to make up the difference.

That happened in our founding years. A hundred years later, in the Progressive Era, cities took back public ownership of water and gas and streetcars, because private owners were bleeding the public. Our federal government went out West and built dams and irrigation that turned desert into farmland, and made Los Angeles and Phoenix grow where nothing was supposed to grow. Government money, government workers, people doing more together than they could alone—right from the start.

We’ve been sold the story that pure, free market capitalism is the real America for forty years. We bought it and it’s been hurting us ever since.

We ran our biggest socialist experiment from the 1930s to the middle 1960s. We wanted to find out what government workers and engineers and scientists and laborers could do when they worked hand in glove with contractors who were good at the job and accountable for it. We got our answer. We could build things that made America the awe and wonder of the world. We built subways. We ran electricity out to the country through the TVA and public power. We laid down more than 46,000 miles of interstate highway, with the bridges and the tunnels to carry it, coast to coast and border to border. We built the aqueducts that turned California into a Garden of Eden. In 1950 alone we built around 1.9 million homes, a pace we haven’t matched since. Capitalism didn’t create the era of Leave it to Beaver and Madmen and The Right Stuff, socialism did.

The American dream wasn’t just growing, it was widening, to Black folks and Latinos and immigrants and Asians and women. That’s how we built the biggest middle class the world has ever seen.

But then it stopped. And then we did something stranger than stopping. We started selling the American dream off. People at the top had gotten scared somewhere along the way, scared we’d realize we didn’t need them the way we’d been told we did, so the things we used to own together,—our shares in the road and the water and the power and the care—we handed to private companies who promised to run them cheaper.

Only they didn’t run them cheaper. They ran them for profit and let the rest go to hell. Every time we sold off something we used to hold in common, we lost more ability to give people a decent life at a price they could afford. The decay wasn’t an accident, we chose it and we keep choosing it.

We knew better, after building all we built. We learned that a city could build its own subway, with its own engineers and its own crews, instead of offloading it. We learned a state could build its own infrastructure, and with federal help, run wire out to the farms. We not only learned we could build housing, health care, child care and schools for ourselves, but that we had to.

Capitalism, with its profit-oriented DNA, was never going to do it for us. Capitalism works best as an engine sitting on top of a public foundation, something more democratic and more shared and more owned in common.

Companies were never going to build the interstate system on their own. There’s no money in it, or the money doesn’t show up for a hundred years, and companies by nature don’t think long term. Even railroads, which private money did build, got their land handed to them by the public and their losses covered by the public. Roads and wires and water systems, which are the foundation of daily life (not to mention commerce), are either built by the public, or they don’t get built.

There’s a bridge in the news right now, up in Michigan. The Ambassador Bridge connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, and it’s the busiest commercial crossing on the border, about a quarter of all the truck trade between the United States and Canada. One family owns it, the Morouns, and they take a toll on nearly everything that crosses, somewhere north of sixty million dollars a year. One family, standing at the border of two nations, taking a cut of the trade between them.

They did it on purpose. Back in 1927, the mayor of Detroit wanted a public bridge, owned by the cities. Private money fought back, and it went to a public vote. The private version won eight to one, so the mayor gave up and said he’d bow to the will of the people. Henry Ford, who backed the private bridge, said private business is the only way anything gets done anymore. The bridge opened in November of 1929, about three weeks after the stock market crashed.

Tolls couldn’t cover the costs. Within a year the company had defaulted on the interest it owed, and by early 1931 it had defaulted on the bonds too. It spent the rest of the decade sliding toward bankruptcy. The great private enterprise, after stomping out the public bridge plan, couldn’t pay its own bills.

In a totally free market, the kind these people say they worship, that’s the end of the story. You fail, you fail. Your creditors take the thing and sell it on the courthouse steps for pennies on the dollar, and you walk away with nothing but the lesson. That’s the discipline they tell us makes the market holy.

But that’s not what happened, and it’s never what happens to them. The private company was allowed to reorganize. They wiped out the people they owed by turning their bonds into stock. The owners kept their bridge and to this day it’s still owned by the same family, the Morouns. The law that let them shuffle their finances barely existed then. The corporate reorganization rules arrived in 1934 and 1938, in the middle of the New Deal. The bridge was reorganized in 1939. Henry Ford, who said governments can’t do anything anymore, wrote the bankruptcy law that saved Henry Ford’s bridge.

That’s the tell, and once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. There’s no such thing as a free market that also has bankruptcy protection. Failure is supposed to be total. The corporation, limited liability, the reorganization that lets you fail and keep your thing, those didn’t fall out of the sky. Private interests created government loopholes, and we the public are there to cushion the blow every time a private companies fails. The same men who say we the people can’t do anything are the same men we the people keep bailing out.

Ford said only private business could build, but the dams and the wire and the interstate said otherwise, and kept saying otherwise for thirty years. Meanwhile, Ford’s was proven wrong within three years and stayed wrong for a generation.

The kind of socialism that empowered us to build wasn’t just for the left. Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York, was a Republican, and he brought the subways under public ownership and set up the first public housing authority in the country. He tried to build a city-owned power company too, until the private utility company ran to court and killed his plan. Nobody called that Republican communist for trying to build a public power company.

Socialism only became a scary word through decades of propaganda. It became so lethal it could take down any political campaign, and in the McCarthy years, any career.

Skip ahead to 2026. Canada and the state of Michigan just built the public crossing that should have been built in 1927. It’s called the Gordie Howe. Six lanes, about six and a half billion dollars, and it’s finished. The toll booths work and the customs plazas are done. But it’s sitting there closed. The ribbon-cutting was set for June and got called off the day before. Now the opening’s been pushed with no new date, and Canada’s prime minister says the delay came at the request of the United States. Trump says he won’t open it until America gets compensated. He floated that we ought to own half of it. And here’s the twist. The man who owns the old private bridge, who stands to lose money when the public bridge opens, donated a million dollars to Trump.

Anywhere you look you see the same story. Last year the IRS built a tool so you can do your taxes online, government approved, for free, and around three hundred thousand people used it. Nine out of ten loved it. It worked. So Intuit, the maker of TurboTax whose entire revenue is based on taxes being a miserable, expensive chore, spent millions fighting the new tool. They also donated a million dollars to the president’s inauguration, just like the bridge family did, and by the end of the year the government killed the tool. The head or Treasury explained, surprise, surprise, that the private sector can do a better job. Henry Ford’s line almost word for word, a hundred years later.

We the people build a thing that’s cheaper, that works and belongs to everybody. That’s socialism. Those who profit from the expensive, broken version buy a politician and shut it down. Then they turn around and tell us the government can’t do anything. They pocket the cash and clap for capitalism.

That’s the story, start to finish. The Henry Fords of this country are good at what they do, some of them, but they aren’t the lone geniuses they think they are. They build on a foundation the rest of us laid, the franchise the government granted them and the courts that enforced their contracts and the roads their cars needed and the bankruptcy code that caught them when they fell and the interstate that made their business possible.

They didn’t do it alone. They are the most subsidized people in the country, and they’ve spent a hundred years telling us that we’re the moochers and they’re the makers. It’s the other way around. It always was.

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Trump is calling these elected officials the greatest threat to America, more of a threat than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and 9-11. What he’s calling for is violence. Violence from the state. After all, they have NSPM-7 at their disposal, the directive he signed last September that turns the FBI’s terrorism task forces and the IRS loose on anyone whose politics the White House decides to call extremism, the organizers, the nonprofits, and the people who fund them. What are the Weimar Democrats like Josh Gottheimer doing? Cheering him on and rejecting the idea that we need fundamental change.

How they answer that pressure is going to decide what their wins were worth. Because the pull is going to be toward falling in line, with the old leadership and with the old way of doing things. Kiros showed us what refusing looks like. One of the first things she did with her win was say she won’t vote for anyone for a leadership position who takes corporate PAC money, and that includes Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker.

That’s different from what Lander did. Lander beat Dan Goldman, an incumbent the establishment lined up behind, and he ran as the fighter. Two days later, on June 27th, he put up a post that said “Thank you Hakeem Jeffries. Looking forward to electing you Speaker in January.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she’ll back Jeffries to stay in charge. Voters have to believe in this new crop of candidates if they’re going to show up in 2026 and again in 2028. That won’t happen if the newest, loudest voices of our movement line up behind failed leadership because it’s the way things are done.

Conventional wisdom says if Democrats take back the House this November, Hakeem Jeffries is the next Speaker, and the left is handing him the gavel. I think that’s a mistake, and whether it’s a mistake comes down entirely to what you think the job is.

A lot of people are worn out from watching Democrats lose the fights they say they care about. They want fighters. They want somebody standing up for them and sticking up for them. They want leaders who’ll help them afford their lives, force some accountability, go in and improve the system.

And the reason a lot of people are excited about Hakeem Jeffries is that he’s been in the process a long time. He knows the House. He knows the committees. He knows the caucus. People figure he can wrangle the members and keep everybody unified. The argument’s already being made that it’s his turn, that he’s put in the time. But it doesn’t matter how much time he’s put in, and it doesn’t matter whose turn it is. What matters is who’s the best person for the job. And picking him for his tenure assumes the most useful thing we can do as a party for the next two years is more strongly worded letters, more investigations, more committees, more subpoenas, more information. And it assumes we’d do something better with all of that than we did last time, when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker and Donald Trump got impeached twice and was never convicted, never removed, never even curtailed, and came back a little bit stronger after the whole thing was over.

Jeffries has already shown us his brand of fighting. He’s tried legislative tactics, he’s tried committee tactics, he’s tried all sorts of different ways to rein Trump in, and he’s proven time and again that he can’t do it. It doesn’t work in the moment we find ourselves in.

Because the job isn’t just a legislative job anymore. It’s a talking job. It’s an inspiring job. What we’re in a battle for right now is the minds of the voters, the minds of America, the question of its future. And that battle won’t be won with interesting legislative maneuvers. It’ll be won by somebody who can capture the American attention, who can win hearts and minds and make the case for what’s happened. Not with mountains and mountains of paperwork and investigations, but with things so obvious they don’t need much investigating, with ideas so basic and so understandable they feel like common sense. We need that fight happening out in the media, out on the playing field of the people. And the playing field of the people isn’t legislative. That’s not how you stop MAGA, and it’s not how you win over its voters. You do that with inspiration and trust. And the way you earn trust is you go out there and talk about the problems people are already seeing with their own eyes, and you tell them the real solutions for fixing them.

The problem with the Democratic Party’s leadership right now is that it thinks with enough clever research and enough appeasement of the various interest groups, it can cobble together solutions that work for everybody. There aren’t solutions that work for everybody if some people want to be trillionaires and centibillionaires.

Health care. Housing. Child care. And we have to be able to say plainly that we’ve been funding a genocide, and that there’s going to have to be accountability for it, here at home and in Israel. That’s how you show people we’re a party that’s ready to change a broken system.

If we went into the House and pushed reforms to keep politicians from cashing out as lobbyists the minute they’re out of office, to stop them getting bankrolled by giant money and trading on inside knowledge, to ban members from trading stocks at all, people would start to feel different about our leadership. If we were out there calling corruption what it is, including the corruption and the constitutional violations at the Supreme Court, and saying clearly that some of those people need to be impeached, people would feel different. And it would steady a lot of folks if we just told them the truth about the Federal Reserve. That it isn’t independent. That it’s been swallowed whole by Wall Street. That there’s a revolving door between the financial sector and the people setting our policy, and that it’s been using American pain to fight inflation, using American inequality to fight inflation.

People may not know every acronym. They know the shape of the thing. They know the system’s rigged. They know the pain always rolls downhill and the rescue always flows up. The next Speaker has to be able to say that.

That’s why I don’t think Hakeem Jeffries is the one. He doesn’t believe these things. He doesn’t believe this country needs a radical transformation. He doesn’t believe our health care system needs to be rebuilt from the studs, that we need to make more doctors and nurses and medical schools, more mental health professionals and dentists and eye doctors, at the rate we’d build them if we were fighting off the Nazis. If he believes we need to break the power of the corporate landlords and the bankers and the monopolists and the lobbyists and the captured courts, he sure hasn’t made it the center of his leadership.

Jeffries would be the first Black Speaker of the House, and in a country with our history that carries real weight, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But the gavel’s a job, and the job right now is to move a country that’s stopped believing us. The finest political communicator of my lifetime was Barack Obama, a Black man who could walk into any room in America and make people believe again. So this was never about race. It’s about that gift, and we’re starving for it. If the person who has it would also make history, good. But making history can’t be the only reason we hand over the gavel, not with this much riding on it.

And the same goes for the Senate. Whoever leads the Senate Democrats, majority or minority, can’t be picked because we think they’ll be best at the rules of the Senate. Donald Trump has shown us that the rules don’t mean shit to the people we’re up against. Picking leaders for their command of procedure misunderstands the battle. It misunderstands the mission. The Senate leader has the same talking job the Speaker has, the same battle for the same minds.

People will ask me who instead. I don’t have a name in my back pocket, and I don’t think the answer is to crown somebody new today. The members pick the leader, which means this is ours to decide, if we don’t give it away before the fight even starts. Everybody we send to Washington this fall should do what Kiros just did. Don’t walk in and pledge your vote to the same leadership that lost us the country. Make them earn it. Ask whoever wants the gavel to stand in front of the country and make the case, for rebuilding health care and housing, for ending our part in a genocide, for breaking the power of the landlords and the bankers and the captured courts. If the person who can do that is already in the caucus, good. If not, we find them and we lift them up. What we don’t do is decide the audition is over before it started.

This country is being crushed. Crushed by debt that doesn’t build anything. Medical debt. Student debt. Credit card debt. Rent debt. Public debt spent on contractors and bailouts and war and tax breaks instead of things people can see and use. And crushed by a lack of hope. Unless we reignite the American can-do spirit, the old belief that we can still build things and that things can get done on purpose, the next several years are going to be a long, hard slog.

Newt Gingrich understood the House could be a stage and a school and a weapon and a megaphone, and he used it to tear things down. We don’t have to copy his cruelty to learn from how clearly he saw it. The House can teach the country who holds the power and who abuses it and who pays the price. It can show people the line between their hospital bill and private equity, between their rent and Wall Street landlords, between their grocery bill and corporate concentration, between their hopelessness and the leaders and consultants who keep telling them nothing big can be done.

MAGA won’t be stopped by procedure. It won’t be beaten by another round of hearings that prove what half the country already knows and the other half’s been trained to dismiss. It won’t be beaten by leaders who sound like they’re trying to preserve a system people already think failed them. It’ll be beaten when Democrats become more trustworthy than the people lying to them.

That takes leaders who can talk to the country like they understand what it costs to live here. The next Speaker needs to be able to walk into a union hall, a church basement, a small-town diner, a college campus, a farm county, a Black neighborhood, a Latino neighborhood, a veterans’ hall and a local news interview and say the same thing in plain English. Here’s who’s hurting you. Here’s what we’re going to build. Here’s who’s standing in the way. Here’s the power we need to beat them.

If we don’t have a Speaker of the House and a leader in the Senate who can hit the airwaves with excitement and energy, who can get the American people excited about the American project again, we’re at a disadvantage we don’t have to be at. So yes, the next Speaker should know the House. But knowing the House isn’t enough. The next Speaker needs to know the country. The next Speaker needs to be more than the agent of the caucus. The next Speaker needs to be an agent of the public. And if Democrats are serious about meeting this moment, our next Speaker needs to be a real good talker.

Corbin Trent

My daddy used to tell me that when you get in a fist fight, you hit them first, and you keep hitting them until they can’t hit you back. It doesn’t go over well these days, in a world that likes its ideologies non-violent, and I’m not telling you to go hit anybody. But it was a good lesson, and it turns out to be good for a lot more than fist fights. It’s how you win in politics, and the Republican Party has understood that for most of my life.

Donald Trump embodies it, violence and all, and it bought him plenty. A trifecta that moves in lockstep behind him. A Supreme Court handing down rulings that anybody who’s read the Constitution can see run against the words and ideas in it. A House and a Senate run by cowards and opportunists unwilling to challenge Trump even on something as clear as who gets to take this country to war. Trump built real power, and he built it by hitting first and never stopping.

I’m not writing this with admiration for what he’s done with the power he accumulated. I’m writing these words because too many of us in this movement balk at building and using power. The fact is that to build a country that works for everyone in it, a country that’s more just and more moral, one that’s actually worth being proud of, we need power. We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world. To the contrary, that’s a reason to describe them better, to plan them better, to build a bigger coalition of people who can carry them. There’s never a reason to fold in a righteous fight.

But folding is exactly what we keep doing. Last Tuesday, three candidates Zohran Mamdani backed won their House primaries in New York, an earthquake by any measure. And the same week Lander won big, he pledged his support for Hakeem Jeffries. Friday, AOC followed suit. She’s pledged her loyalty to Hakeem. Why? Jeffries is the establishment. He’s the status quo. He’s the leader that has presided over a party that’s failed to beat Trump. He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump. When you are trying to transform a party you can’t back down.

We can’t be scared that our ideas won’t be popular. We can’t be scared our shared vision will be twisted and lied about. They will be. That isn’t a reason to quit pushing for a better country and a better world.

Lander didn’t ask for a single thing. He could at least have borrowed Jeffries’ own lines, the ones Jeffries used when reporters asked whether he’d back Mamdani. “We’re going to have to have a conversation.” “We’ve had productive conversations.” Jeffries promised him nothing and meant to promise nothing, and Lander handed over his support for free anyway. That’s the saddest habit in our movement. Our people give up before the fight even starts.

Whoever wins the House and Senate will decide on the chamber’s leadership. If the Democrats win them both in November, there needs to be a fight over who leads us. If new progressives from around the country are elected they’ve gotta demand leadership that can meet the moment. This is a transformational moment. They can’t just roll over. We need more than strongly worded letters. We need a vision. A leadership that wants a Democratic supermajority not a “strong Republican Party”. When Platner, Kiros, Larkin, Vang, El-Sayed, and the rest win in November, neither they nor we can celebrate and sit back down. That is the precise time we stand up demanding new and competent leadership for this party of ours.

And we ought to be clear about what we’re demanding, not just that we’re done folding. A floor under our votes, in writing. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and shut the door between Congress and the lobbying shops that hire them the day they leave. Say out loud that justices who threw out the plain words of the Constitution should be impeached. Stop arming the IDF and stop paying for a genocide. Build the housing and the energy and the health care at a scale that brings the prices down to where people can actually afford to live. That’s the price of our support for the next leader. Not a letter. Not a hashtag. A list, and the spine to hold to it.

He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump.

People are calling this the Democrats’ Tea Party, and they mean it as an insult. They say the DSA is going to be the Tea Party of the left. Fine. Look at what the Tea Party ultimately created. It led straight to Donald Trump and MAGA, and built the power to take institutions apart, and put questions back on the table that the establishment thought were closed. It did all of that on sheer force of will, carried by a movement that started as the Tea Party and grew into MAGA. We can build that kind of power. The difference is what we use it for.

The Tea Party/MAGA folks are obsessed with tearing things down. Ours is focused on building and investing in the infrastructure that will raise us all up. The new breed of Democrats winning today are talking about creating enough energy and housing and electricity that we can actually afford them. We’re talking about opportunity, and fairness and accountability in the courts, here at home and out in the world. The socialists are talking about a country that stops taking part in genocides, stops arming the IDF, stops being a nation that ships bombs around the world. It’s a movement hell bent on building the future, not destroying the present.

But don’t mistake restorative for gentle. Some institutions are going to have to be rebuilt, and some are going to have to be torn down. The reason DOGE sounded reasonable to so many people is that the MAGA/Tea Party folks were willing to state the truth, that the SEC and the FDA and the FBI had all been captured and need to be transformed. They watched OxyContin pour into their towns. They watched Jeffrey Epstein glide through this country for years like the law didn’t apply to him, because it didn’t. They watched greedy Wall Streeters cheat and loot and destroy the wealth of millions and millions of Americans, and saw that the SEC and Department of Justice didn’t prosecute a single one of these criminals. They knew elections get bought and the FEC did nothing. So when the Democratic leadership tells us that these institutions are sacred and mustn’t be touched it doesn’t resonate. Voters assume you’re either a corrupted liar or a moron. Neither option inspires confidence.

When you start winning, you push harder. You don’t sit down and you don’t say thank you. You hit first, and you keep hitting, and you don’t stop until the people who broke this country can’t break it anymore.

Corbin Trent

The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.

We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the forty-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.

You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.

Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.

Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.

We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.

But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.

And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next thirty car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.

So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.

But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.

The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.

We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.

Corbin Trent