I’ve spent the last two weeks on calls with campaigns. A lot of them. Candidates running for Senate seats, House seats, in states you’d expect and some you wouldn’t. Most of them have good platforms. Some of them have great platforms. That was never the hard part to find.

Here’s what I’m actually looking for and what makes the bar so high.

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A candidate can be right about everything. Medicare for All, taxing the billionaire class, Gaza, the housing crisis, all of it. And still be useless once they win. Not because they’re dishonest. Because they walk in alone. And alone you don’t pass anything. Alone you wait your turn. Alone the machine absorbs you the same way it absorbs everyone else, and two years later you’re taking the small wins and calling it progress just to have something to say at the next fundraiser.

The theory of A Fight Worth Having is simple. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. Candidates who share a platform and a diagnosis need to commit to each other before they win. Campaign together now. Coordinate once they’re elected. Name the Democratic leadership that has failed us and fight to replace it. Back primary challengers against the incumbents inside their own party who are blocking the agenda they ran on. Say all of that out loud, on camera, in public, where it can’t be walked back quietly in a back room conversation.

That last part is the filter. Not the platform. The willingness to say it where it counts.

Most candidates won’t. Not because they disagree. Because they’re calculating. Because they think they need the very people they should be fighting. Because they believe they can negotiate their way to change from inside a structure that was specifically designed to make sure nothing changes.

Two weeks in and I’ve already had conversations with campaigns that give me real reason to believe this can work. Some of those conversations are about to become public. I’m not ready to name names yet. But I will be soon, and when I do I want you to already be part of this.

Here’s what we need right now. People.

We are building a list of folks willing to show up at town halls, candidate forums, and campaign events in their districts and ask simple questions on the record. Will you oppose the failed leadership of Schumer and Jeffries? Will you commit to coordinating with other candidates running on this agenda, before you win and after? Will you back challengers against the incumbents in your party blocking the results?

One person in one room with one camera changes the conversation.

Sign up at AFightWorthHaving.com. Tell us your district. Tell us if you can show up. If you have a platform, even a modest one, tell us that too. We will connect you with everything you need.

The candidates worth backing are out there. Some of them are already talking to us. What we’re building is the thing that makes them believe they won’t be walking in alone.

Get in before this gets loud.

Corbin Trent

I’ve spent a long time writing about what’s broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It’s a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don’t wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them.

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For every one of us that showed up today there were dozens that felt the same but stayed home convinced showing up wouldn’t matter. We have to make sure it does matter. That means action. That means change.

While we organized, they schemed. Drop Site News reported that Senate Democrats privately wanted Trump to prosecute this war. Let him weaken Iran. Let him take the political hit. Win-win. Except 76 percent of their own voters oppose this war. Nine percent support it. Nine percent. They left the war powers of the United States in the hands of a man they call a threat to democracy because it was politically convenient to do so. That is not opposition. That is complicity.

House Democrats had the votes. Three Republicans were ready to cross the aisle. They declined to bring the resolution to the floor. When Trump deployed military and federal authorities to DC, Hakeem Jeffries pointed to a letter from the DC Attorney General. “I thought that was a strongly worded letter,” he said. More than 1,900 people are dead. The war is a month old. Strongly worded letters.

Democratic leaders made a decision. Let Trump keep his war powers unchecked. Let the threat to our democracy run the table on Iran while they calculate the political upside. It is sickening. And there are better leaders available to us.

They stay comfortable doing this because nothing in their political lives forces them not to. That insulation is not an accident. It is a structure. Hakeem Jeffries won his last primary with 23,145 votes. His challenger got 3,402. Fewer than 27,000 total votes is what made him the unbeatable House Democratic leader. He is not invincible. He is a guy who won a low-turnout primary in a safe district and parlayed it into leading the opposition to the most aggressive consolidation of executive power in modern American history. With ongoing conversations.

Primary turnout in congressional races runs between two and five percent of eligible voters. The people making these decisions are not a majority. They are a small organized group. It does not have to stay that way.

On the Senate side, Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who has been in office since 2009, was asked this week whether he supports Chuck Schumer as minority leader. His answer: “Do I look stupid?” His best defense of Schumer was that nobody fundraises harder. Not that he’s winning fights. Not that he’s stopping anything. That he raises money. That’s not a defense. That’s a eulogy.

More than 80 Democratic House candidates across the country are either non-committal on backing Jeffries or outright opposed to him. Warner won’t defend his own leader. The press is asking the question. The candidates are hedging. The base is done.

The energy in the streets today, the frustration that has been building for two years, the growing list of candidates who won’t say Jeffries’ name with a straight face — that is an ember. It needs to become an inferno of demands. Every candidate running in a competitive district should have to answer one question before they get one dollar of grassroots money, one hour of volunteer time, one endorsement from anyone who was in the streets today. Will you fight to replace this leadership. Yes or no.

This is the path to defeating MAGA in 2026 and 2028. Trump is at 36 percent. The war is unpopular. The conditions for a wave election are forming right now. But waves require contrast. Voters do not turn out to replace one party that manages the decline with another party that manages the decline. They turn out when they believe something will actually change. That requires leaders who understand what is at stake. Jeffries and Schumer do not. Their answer to an illegal war, a cratered approval rating, and the biggest protests in American history is ongoing conversations and strongly worded letters.

That changes when the leadership changes. Not after 2026. Before it.

Both go to the same place. The goal is simple: find out, on the record, where every Democratic incumbent and candidate in key districts stand on leadership. Will they support new House and Senate leadership or will they defend what we have. Yes or no. No process concerns. No timing objections. Just the answer.

Show up. Town halls. Campaign events. Candidate forums. Anywhere a Democratic candidate is taking questions in a district that matters. You ask the question. You film the answer. You film the dodge. We will help you find the events. We will give you the questions. We will help you get the footage out. What we cannot supply is a constituent in the room who lives in that district and has every right to demand an answer. That is you.

Share everything. One video of a candidate saying yes becomes a template. One video of a candidate dodging becomes the story. The press is circling this. Warner proved it this week. What reporters need to write the bigger story is evidence that voters are asking it too. You showing up in that room and putting it online is that evidence. If you have a following, even a modest one, push the clips. This spreads through people, not algorithms.

Sign up at NotKeem.com. Tell us your district. Tell us if you have a platform. Tell us if you can show up. We will connect you with everything you need.

Donate at AFightWorthHaving.com. I’ve spent a long time writing about what’s broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It’s a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don’t wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them.

The millions of people in the streets today were not asking for a strongly worded letter. They were asking to be heard. The leaders we have now cannot hear them. They are too insulated, too funded, too comfortable.

We do not fix that by waiting. We fix it by replacing them.

Go to NotKeem.com. Sign up. Show up. The ember is lit. Let’s make it an inferno.

Corbin

I've spent a long time writing about what's broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It's a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don't wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them. AFightWorthHaving.com

Zohran Mamdani was on the brink of winning the New York City mayor’s race last November when he stepped off the campaign trail to handle something. He had gotten word that Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn councilman inspired by Mamdani’s own insurgent campaign, was building toward a primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries. Ossé might have expected support from the man whose movement he had been part of.

Instead Mamdani called him the night before Election Day and told him he could not win, that a high-profile fight would undermine the left, and that if he persisted, Mamdani would ice him out completely. He also told Ossé he could be a key figure in the new administration, but only if he dropped the bid. When the call ended, an email was waiting in Ossé’s inbox. His invitation to Mamdani’s victory party the next day had been rescinded.

That was November. In February, Mamdani spent hours on the phone leaning on Working Families Party members to stay neutral in the governor’s race and protect Kathy Hochul from a primary challenge. When he got what he wanted, he called Hochul to make sure she knew his role. In January, Jabari Brisport, his former roommate and a senator who had spent years fighting for child care expansion, got moved out of camera range at the child care rollout because Hochul’s team asked and Mamdani’s office complied. He burned Nydia Velazquez, the first major elected official to endorse his mayoral campaign, by backing a different candidate for her congressional seat after she asked him to stay neutral. He showed up personally to the DSA meeting to kill the Ossé challenge. Ossé dropped out in December.

Last August I wrote that the worst thing Mamdani could do after winning was stand his movement down and try to negotiate his way to change. I said you cannot get small enough to become acceptable to people whose entire operation depends on things staying as they are. I said the only leverage that works is making them afraid of what happens if they don’t change. He had 50,000 volunteers and a million doors knocked and a city that had just told him it was ready. I am not going to pretend I called this wrong.

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The New York Times framed what he did as the portrait of a cunning operator. Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman who opposed Mamdani’s campaign, offered the lesson the Times seemed to endorse. Every successful political person has to be a little ruthless from time to time, Jacobs said. Otherwise you don’t survive.

That is not the wrong lesson because ruthlessness is bad. It is the wrong lesson because Mamdani is being ruthless in exactly the right direction for the wrong goal. He has power. He is using it. He is just using it to protect the people who stand between us and the change he ran on. Protecting Hochul and Jeffries is a choice. That million-door machine could have been aimed somewhere else.

The trap is not charm and it is not strategy. Both are tools and you need them. The trap is believing they are enough on their own, that if you are careful enough about managing your relationships with the people who currently have power, you can eventually get them to share it. That is not how power works. Power does not get shared. It gets built or it gets taken. A real supermajority, the kind that actually passes something, has never been built through accommodation. It gets built through aggressive political infighting, through primarying the members of your own party who are blocking your agenda, through making it more dangerous for someone to oppose you than to support you.

Democratic Senator Max Baucus had taken $3.2 million from the health care industry by the time he was handed the pen to write the Affordable Care Act. Obama let him write it. He wanted a seat at the table with the people who had spent decades building the table to keep people like him out. What he got was a health care bill that left the insurance industry intact, a stimulus too small to do the job, and a financial reform that left Wall Street standing after Wall Street burned the economy to the ground. Each of those got called a win. Each left the machinery in place. Last year I watched Democrats travel the country warning that the ACA subsidies expiring would be a healthcare catastrophe. What they were describing was Obamacare. The law they spent fifteen years calling a triumph. They passed something they knew was not good enough, called it a win, and watched it become the floor that everything else fell through.

FDR understood something about change that Obama and Mamdani have not. In the summer of 1938, after conservative Democrats in his own party started blocking New Deal legislation, Roosevelt campaigned across the country against his own incumbents. Reporters called it a purge. He mostly lost. But he understood that the fight for his agenda ran straight through his own party, and he was willing to say so out loud and pay the price. Trump understood the same thing from the other direction. In 2022 he backed challengers against Republican incumbents who crossed him, knocked out four of the ten who voted to impeach him, and remade the party in his image. Their vision is a list of enemies to hate. But both men proved the same thing. A party is not a sacred institution. It is a vehicle. And the people inside it blocking your agenda are the first fight, not the last. The progressive movement today operates as if it believes the opposite, and it keeps producing leaders who win elections and then protect the people standing in the way of everything they ran on.

What I have come to believe, from watching this up close for years, is that the most important thing about a candidate is not their policy positions. Policies can change. You can pressure someone into supporting a good idea. What you cannot inject into someone is a willingness to fight. Not willingness to fight Republicans on television, which costs nothing. Willingness to walk into a room where someone you thought was on your side is selling you out, say it out loud, and make them pay for it. Willingness to primary the colleague blocking the agenda you ran on. Willingness to point the movement at the people inside your own party who are protecting the system, because those are always the harder fights. You used to think those people were on your side.

You feel the same? Throw in to help.

Either they have that core or they do not. And almost none of them do.

Once they have the office they decide they know better. They have a seat at the table. They think their job is to keep things running smoothly, not just for their constituents but for the movement. They worry that if they fail it will reflect badly on all of us. And that worry becomes the thing that makes them fail.

The people who knocked a million doors for Zohran Mamdani deserved to have that energy pointed at something after he won. They deserved to be the reason Jeffries had to think twice, not the force Mamdani used to make sure Jeffries never had to think at all. Chi Ossé deserved a mayor who understood that one more democratic socialist in Congress is worth more than a comfortable relationship with the House Democratic leader.

We have been living off the work of previous generations for a long time. The New Deal built the public infrastructure that made markets possible. The GI Bill built a middle class. NYCHA at its peak housed 600,000 people in dignity. Those generations understood that government had to build things, own things, make long bets. They sewed. We reaped. And somewhere along the way the Democratic Party forgot that you cannot keep harvesting from a field you stopped planting.

The leadership we have now does not have a vision for planting. When Trump froze two billion dollars in Harvard’s federal funding, Chuck Schumer announced that Democrats had sent a very strong letter asking eight very strong questions. When Trump deployed the military to Washington, Hakeem Jeffries praised a strongly worded letter from the DC Attorney General. Those are not opposition tactics. Those are the gestures of people who have made their peace with not having power.

Power is not winning. Winning is the beginning of the fight for power. The work does not stop on election night. It starts there.

I am not interested in being hard on Mamdani or Obama or any of the others. These are not bad people. They are people who believed that being in the room was the same thing as having power. It is not. Power is what determines what happens when you leave the room. And you build it before you sit down at the table, not by making yourself agreeable once you get there.

Corbin Trent

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment actually requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know what winning is for. We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter matters as much as the fuel.

• Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains

• Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?

• Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

When we find those candidates we go to work for them through independent expenditure campaigns. That is a legal term for us doing the work ourselves, separate from the candidate, without them having to ask. It means we can move fast, hit hard, and build the kind of infrastructure that the other side has been running for decades.

If you have been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.

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Now, I want to go deeper into what we’re building and why.

The problems stacking up on working people in this country are not mysteries. Housing costs are out of control. Groceries cost more than they did. Healthcare costs more than it did and covers less. We are dropping bombs sometimes on children. We are kidnapping foreign leaders. We are running up debt and have next to nothing to show for it. We continue to export carnage to maintain an American system that delivers less and less to the actual people who live here. The American dream is now something only the top twenty percent can afford. And AI is coming for them like the white-collar jobs in much the same way offshoring came for the factory worker, fast and with no serious plan from anyone in power to do a anything about it. We all saw how that went.

None of this happened by accident. And the Democratic Party, as it exists right now, is not ready to fix it. The voters are ready. The ideas are there. The leadership isn’t.

The only way to change that is to change who’s leading the Democratic Party and our nation. Changing who leads this party is harder than it sounds. It is not just money, though the money is real and the numbers from last week's piece make that plain. It is also social.

Most people drawn to politics are genuinely likable people who enjoy being liked. They want to connect, to build relationships, to find common ground. Those are not bad qualities. But what we need right now is something rarer. We need people who can sit across from colleagues they genuinely like, people they think are basically on their side, and tell them that what they are doing is not good enough and that they intend to do something about it. Most people will not do that. The ones who will are the people we are looking for.

I think about Zohran Mamdani a lot when I think about this. He won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City decisively. He has the right agenda and real mandate and 50,000 volunteers who knocked a million doors. He is also spending his political capital trying to get along with Kathy Hochul and protect Hakeem Jeffries from a primary challenge. I understand the instinct. I have watched it up close with AOC. You cannot make yourself small enough or reasonable enough to become acceptable to people whose entire operation depends on things staying basically as they are. The only leverage that works is making them afraid of what happens if they don’t change. Zohran had the people to do that. He took a different route. I wrote about this last August.

The questions we will be asking every candidate we consider supporting aim to answer one question, “Are you ready to take on power?”

A Fight Worth Having is a super PAC. We are going to raise money and spend it in congressional races on behalf of candidates who are ready to do the hard things. We are building what I think of as a filtration process to figure out who those people are.

Here is what we are looking for.

A willingness to challenge Democratic leadership. Not just Republican villains, which costs nothing, but the people inside their own party who are protecting the system. Enemies of change come in two varieties, foreign and domestic, and the domestic ones are harder to fight because you used to think they were on your side.

A willingness to unify. To treat their race as part of something bigger than their district. To stand alongside candidates from other states and other districts around a shared mission and mean it. We have never done this at scale on our side. We are going to try.

A willingness to endorse each other in primaries even when it costs them something personally. To put the agenda above their own political comfort. Most people will not do this either.

A commitment to taking back what has been sold off or stolen. Our hospitals. Our clinics. Our patents. The generational investments built with public money and handed to private interests by paid-off politicians. We want it back.

A serious reckoning with AI. The disruption is coming whether we are ready or not. The question is who owns the productivity on the other side of it. If it is a handful of tech oligarchs, you get a permanent underclass. If it belongs to the public, you get something closer to a country worth living in. We built roads and bridges and power grids as public infrastructure because some things are too important to leave in private hands. AI is that. Instead of stock buybacks for shareholders, we need nation buybacks. We need to buy back the productive capacity of this country and put the ownership where it belongs, with the people.

Those are the filters. We are not going to find many candidates who will clear all of them. That is the point.

The first push two efforts are launching very soon. First we will try to build candidate unity around a big idea. Second, we are getting into a congressional race where there is one clear visionary.

We are building out something bigger around the question of what Democratic leadership should actually look like and whether the people currently providing it are willing to do what is required. When it launches you will know exactly what we are asking and exactly how you can help.

Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and sign up. There are going to be a lot of ways to help, from replying to an email or sharing a post, to showing up at an event, making a donation, or making some noise. We will tell you what we need when we need it and why it matters. Reply to this one and tell me what you think.

Corbin

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Almost exactly one year ago I wrote one of my first pieces for this Substack. I called it The Right Builds Power and The Left Holds Rallies. I laid out what I saw coming. No coherent vision. No real plan. No financial infrastructure capable of backing candidates at the level they actually need. No super PACs. No capacity for the kind of independent expenditure campaigns that AIPAC runs, that the crypto lobby runs, that corporate PACs run in congressional districts all over this country. I said it was going to bear fruit in losses.

North Carolina. Illinois. Here we are.

Progressive, Nida Allam ran in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. She had Bernie Sanders. She had Justice Democrats. She had the Working Families Party. She had a ground game and a message and a story that connected with people in that district in a real way. Outside groups spent more than $4.4 million in that primary. The single biggest spender was Jobs and Democracy PAC, which dropped $1.6 million in ads for the incumbent Valerie Foushee in the final weeks of the race. Jobs and Democracy is the super PAC funded by Anthropic, the AI company. They backed Foushee because she co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI. They were buying a friendly regulator. An AIPAC-donor-tied group called Article One PAC threw in another $600,000 for Foushee. The biggest counter-AIPAC group in the country, American Priorities, spent more than $1 million for Allam. One million against two and a half. The two candidates combined raised and spent about $811,000 from actual people who believed in them. The outside groups outspent them by more than five to one. Allam lost by 1,200 votes. She said exactly what it was. “The AI lobby just bought its first seat in Congress.”

Now go to Illinois, where the numbers get worse.

AIPAC and its donors spent $13.7 million across the Illinois primaries, funneled through shadow PACs with names like Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership, so voters wouldn’t know where the money came from until after it was over. They put $3.9 million behind Melissa Bean in the 8th District, a former Blue Dog who hadn’t held office since 2011, pulled back out of retirement specifically to stop Junaid Ahmed, who was running on Medicare for All and working-class economics and refusing corporate PAC money. It worked. Robert Peters had Bernie Sanders. He had Elizabeth Warren. He’d been a DSA member, a community organizer, a state senator who spent years doing real work on criminal justice and labor rights. The progressive PACs backing him scraped together about $200,000. Affordable Chicago Now dropped nearly $4.4 million for Donna Miller. Peters didn’t crack the top two. You can’t fight $4.4 million with a fundraising email and a Sanders endorsement.

I helped build Justice Democrats. I was in that room. I recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress. I watched what happened after she won and I watched what didn’t get built around it. Individual candidates. No machine. The energy got absorbed into a system designed specifically to absorb it. Nine years later we’re watching the same thing happen to a new set of people who deserved better.

The organizations on our side are trying. The money they put into these races is real and it matters and the people running them are genuine. But the entire progressive funding ecosystem combined could not match what one lobby spent in one state on one day. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work. That’s a structural problem. And the structure doesn’t get fixed by writing bigger checks alone.

Nobody on our side is running a unified slate. Nobody is putting a group of candidates on a stage together around a mission bigger than any one of them. We campaign on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and a living wage and those are good things worth fighting for. But they’re policies. They’re not a vision. And a vision is what builds a movement big enough to actually scare the people writing those checks.

The groups spending that money against us are single issue. AIPAC needs compliant foreign policy votes. The crypto lobby needs light regulation. The AI companies need friendly committee chairs. That’s it. Their asks are narrow and their money is deep and they have decades of institutional momentum behind them. They’re not fighting against anything. They’re protecting something they already have.

Brand New Congress tried to build a united front. Justice Democrats tried. AOC and the Squad moved the conversation in ways that genuinely scared people with power, and the amount of money spent to destroy individual members of that group tells you everything about how seriously they were taken. So many people have tried, and tried hard, with real sacrifice.

But we have never been able to get candidates to fully understand that their race is only as important as the races around it. That a seat you win in isolation doesn’t shift power. That the person running in Memphis and the person running in Sacramento and the person running in a Chicago suburb are either winning together around a common purpose or they’re each losing alone. Mostly they’re losing. Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois was on everyone’s radar because the race got nationalized. People knew her name, knew what she stood for, knew the money being spent to stop her. Nida Allam almost nobody knew about. I was on Jake Tapper’s show the day of the North Carolina primary talking about Texas races and mentioned her by name and he had never heard of it. No polling was showing how close she was. No one was sounding an alarm. She nearly beat an incumbent with $4.4 million in outside money working against her and it barely registered as news until she’d already lost by 1,200 votes. A united slate of candidates talking about each other, lifting each other up, pointing to the same map and the same mission — Allam’s race gets nationalized. It gets resourced. It gets watched. Those 1,200 votes don’t disappear without a fight.

And when someone does eke through and win, they walk in alone anyway. No unified mission behind them. No machine capable of making the mission real. So they take the small wins and learn to call that progress. They compromise on the things they ran on because the things they ran on require a power they don’t have by themselves. The system doesn’t have to beat you in the primary. It can wait.

People keep telling us progressive policies can’t win. That the vision for a better country is fairy dust. And I keep coming back to one question. If it’s all fairy dust, why are they spending $13.7 million in a single state on a single primary day to stop it?

Either the people writing those checks are the dumbest political operatives in the history of American democracy, or they are terrified of what happens when candidates who actually give a damn about this country get their hands on power. I don’t think they’re dumb.

We don’t need to aim at a bigger version of the same small ideas. A national insurance program and a living wage are the floor, not the ceiling. We should be setting our sights on being the best country in the world at the things that actually matter to people who live here. Not the most expensive healthcare system. The healthiest people. The cleanest food. The cleanest air and water. The best schools. The most innovative and cleanest manufacturing. An economy that builds things the world needs and doesn’t poison the people who live next door to the plant in the process.

We have been choosing wrong for seventy years because we handed all of that to the private sector and told ourselves the market would work it out. What the market worked out is how to move all the money to the top and hire better consultants every decade to explain why that’s good for you. What they built is the most expensive healthcare system in the world that leaves tens of millions of people one diagnosis away from losing everything. Infrastructure that embarrasses us in front of every other wealthy country on earth. Schools falling apart. A manufacturing base that got shipped overseas the minute it was more profitable somewhere else.

It doesn’t bother them. They don’t care how hard it is to make rent. They don’t care how many people can’t afford to get sick. They don’t care who makes the products that keep this world running or what those people breathe while they’re making them. And the same apparatus that buys a committee chair buys a foreign policy. They don’t care about Gaza. They don’t care about Iran. We are at war with Iran right now and they are fine with it. They want control. Their appetite for what belongs to the rest of us is not going to shrink because we asked nicely or compromised in good faith or wrote a good op-ed about shared values.

All the money we keep pouring into bombs could be building schools. Here and in the countries we keep blowing up. We don’t have to spend the next five years watching the headlines and wondering when the shooting starts with China. We could be competing with them to see who builds a better life for their people. That’s a competition worth having. Dropping bombs and blowing up children is not a foreign policy. It’s a moral failure we keep funding and calling strategy.

Taking back what belongs to all of us is the only path forward. Not a progressive wing of a party still organized around the interests of the people writing those checks. A real fight. The kind where you know who you’re fighting, you say it out loud, and you build something big enough to win.

What I want to build is an organization funded well enough and loud enough and bold enough that candidates come to it. Running for Congress is not a job. It’s three jobs. The candidate and everyone around them are already running at full speed just trying to win. If we’re chasing them down to sell them on a bigger mission, we’ve already lost them. They don’t have time to be convinced. The only way this works is if we build something so compelling, so well funded, so full of possibility that they find us. We have to send up a bonfire big enough that they walk toward the light on their own.

And I think we can. Not because of messaging or branding or any of that consultant nonsense. Because the ideas are real and the need is urgent and people know it. Claiming our healthcare system back from the insurance companies and the hospital conglomerates. Shared ownership in our manufacturing base so that when this country builds things, the people of this country benefit from it. A serious reckoning with what artificial intelligence is about to do to every working person in this country and every democracy on this planet. AI has the potential to be as disruptive and as dangerous as nuclear weapons or the Industrial Revolution. It cannot be left in the hands of a handful of oligarchs racing to become the world’s first trillionaires. It has to be owned and governed by the people it is going to affect. That’s all of us.

A mission that big needs real support. It needs money and it needs people and it needs candidates who understand that their race in their district only matters if the person running three states over wins too. That we are building something together or we are losing alone. That has always been true. We just haven’t built the thing yet that makes candidates believe it enough to run that way.

That’s what I’m trying to build with A Fight Worth Having. The numbers in this piece are designed to make you feel small. They’re supposed to end the conversation before it starts. But they only do that if we stay separate.

Sign up. Share this piece. Forward it to someone who needs to see it. There will be candidates coming, people worth fighting for, running on the things you’ve been waiting to see someone run on. When they show up here you’ll know it, and there’ll be ways to help that go beyond reading and sharing. I will not use your email like an ATM. Every message will have something worth reading in it first. That’s a promise I intend to keep.

We will need money too. A lot of it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise after a piece that lays out exactly what we’re up against. But the machine gets built one person at a time, and it starts with you deciding this fight is worth having.

If you’re reading this and you feel what I feel when I look at these numbers and these results and this country, then you’re already part of it. Let’s build the machine.

Corbin Trent

Matthew Yglesias has a theory about why Democrats keep losing, and the New York Times editorial board is happy to amplify it. The party is too progressive, too ideologically rigid, and if candidates would just moderate on a handful of cultural issues, the working-class voters they’ve lost would come back. It sounds reasonable. It has charts. It cites academic survey experiments.

It is also dangerously wrong. And the people most harmed by that misdiagnosis are exactly the ones Yglesias and the Times claim to be trying to help.

Both pieces treat Donald Trump’s victories as evidence that moderation works, pointing to positions he walked back on Medicare cuts, the Iraq War, opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly. That reading fundamentally misunderstands what Trump did. He didn’t win by meeting working-class voters halfway on policy details. He won by going to war with the institutions those voters blamed for their decline. Both parties, the media, the donor class, the trade deals that gutted manufacturing, the consensus that had governed Washington for thirty years. None of that is moderation. That is a frontal assault on the status quo. What he quietly dropped were the positions that most obviously signaled he was working for the same donor class as everyone else.

The moderation crowd calls this “angry centrism.” I’d call it a con that worked, because it addressed a real grievance.

The deeper problem is the narrowness of their imagination. They talk constantly about supermajorities and winning back the center, but never look at what actually produced supermajorities. Yglesias has written that if AI advances on the current timeline, “America is cooked.” That fatalism is revealing. It means the moderation argument isn’t really about how to win. It’s about how to lose more slowly while keeping the existing economic architecture intact. And it explains why none of the positions they’re recommending are remotely big enough to address what’s actually wrong. Moderating on affirmative action while accepting permanently unaffordable healthcare and housing as facts of nature is not a governing vision. It is a smaller version of the same failure that created this crisis in the first place.

The New Deal built the Hoover Dam and the water projects that made California farmable. It strung electrical wire across the rural Midwest, bringing power to millions of farms private utilities had deemed unprofitable. The WPA hired 8.5 million Americans directly. The minimum wage and the 40-hour work week were established. These weren’t poll-tested adjustments to existing private systems. They were structural transformations that changed people’s lives, and the coalitions they built lasted for decades because people could feel the difference. That is what a supermajority looks like. The moderation crowd invokes those majorities without ever asking what built them.

The Times holds up Obama as a model of winning moderation. I can speak to that from personal experience. Al Gore was my first election. I was twenty years old. I didn’t vote again for eight years, until Obama ran. He didn’t just inspire me to vote. I drove to Asheville to see him speak. I raised money for him from family members. I had a watch party on election night. I was genuinely all in, because I believed he was ready to take down a system that had been crushing my region for decades, to rebuild a Democratic Party more like FDR’s or LBJ’s than Bill Clinton’s.

I didn’t vote again for seven years, until Bernie Sanders came along in 2015. And Bernie didn’t just inspire me to vote either. I sold my business and started volunteering for the campaign until I got enough attention that I was hired onto it.

In my life I have voted four times: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders twice. Every single one of those votes required someone to genuinely inspire me, to make me believe they were ready to actually fight the system rather than manage it. I told that to Michele Goldberg, a columnist at the New York Times, when I was in New York recently and she was mortified. Just mortified that I’d only voted four times. That reaction tells you everything about the gap this piece is trying to describe. The question she didn’t ask was why. The question she didn’t ask was what it would take. The question she didn’t ask was what kind of candidate or party could turn someone like me into the person who sold his business and gave everything he had to a political campaign.

That’s the voter the moderation crowd doesn’t have a theory of. They have a theory of the persuadable suburban moderate who needs to feel comfortable crossing over. They have no theory of the tens of millions of people who have checked out entirely, who will move mountains for the right candidate and stay home for everyone else. Those people aren’t waiting for a Democrat who’s tougher on the border. They’re waiting for someone who’s ready to actually fight.

Despite all the noise about Obama being a radical socialist, he barely underperformed Clinton in Tennessee. Democrats held five state legislative seats there right through his election. What caused the collapse, the wipeout of 2010 and everything after, wasn’t his presence on the ticket. It was his moderation once in office. A month before the 2008 election was even decided, a Citigroup executive had already emailed John Podesta a near-complete list of Obama’s future cabinet, and it came true almost entirely. Obama nominated people suggested by Citibank and listened to them.That a Citigroup executive could pre-select a cabinet before a single vote was cast tells you everything about how the system filters candidates before they ever reach voters. He passed Romneycare instead of a public option. He managed the existing system rather than challenging it. Working-class communities across Tennessee, West Virginia, and the Rust Belt noticed. Not because he was insufficiently tough on transgender issues. Because the help that was supposed to come never came.

The Working Class Project, 39 focus groups, 400 voters, 21 states, found that voters perceive Democrats as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day.” Yglesias reads that and concludes: less woke. Stop talking about trans people. Find a candidate who sounds more like a regular guy.

That is exactly the wrong lesson.

What those voters are describing is not an excess of cultural liberalism. They’re describing a party that spent thirty years presiding over the destruction of their economic lives and filled the void with culture war positioning because it had nothing real to offer on the things that actually determined whether their lives got better or worse. The frustration isn’t that Democrats cared too much about gay marriage. It’s that caring about gay marriage seemed to be all they had energy for, because actually challenging the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, the trade deals, the financial sector, the whole architecture of extraction would have cost them something. Culture is cheap. Structural economic change is not.

As a white working-class man from Appalachia, it was not wokeness that drove me away from the Democratic Party. It was not gay marriage. It was not the idea that trans people have a right to exist. What drove me away was watching a party that claimed to represent working people become indistinguishable, on the things that actually mattered to my region, from the Republicans they were supposed to be fighting. The uniparty of war and free markets and neoliberal consensus that shipped our jobs, let our towns rot, looked the other way while the Sacklers poisoned our communities, and then showed up every four years to tell us the market would eventually sort things out.

My neighbors who vote Trump talk about wokeness because that’s what they see on Fox News. But what drove them there is a feeling of being completely disposable. Of being abandoned by a party that viewed their economic suffering as a lifestyle choice rather than a structural condition. That’s what the Working Class Project is actually measuring. Not a cultural preference. A betrayal.

The multiracial numbers confirm it. Latino working-class men went from 22% Trump support in 2020 to 55% in 2024. Black working-class men went from 17% to 22%. If this were a story about wokeness driving people away, you would not see those numbers. You would not see a multiracial working-class coalition moving in the same direction at the same time. What you see is a class-based revolt against a party that stopped fighting for the people who needed it most.

Yglesias has written that the affordability crisis is “basically just anger at inflation” and that there “isn’t really that much” to it beyond technocratic management of interest rates. He has argued that wanting prices to actually come down is promising something impossible, that the old price level is simply gone. In other words, affordability cannot be reclaimed and there is no structural solution. That is not political analysis. That is a surrender document dressed up as realism. And it is precisely why the moderate positions being recommended will make things worse, not better. Every election cycle that passes without a real answer to what healthcare costs, what housing costs, what it costs to raise a family, is another cycle where people conclude that no one in the existing political system is actually on their side. Moderation doesn’t cure that resentment. It confirms it.

The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, $15,474 per person, roughly double the OECD average, and ranks last among wealthy nations in outcomes. 79 million Americans carry medical debt, 80% of them insured. 146 rural hospitals have closed since 2005. Public healthcare ownership in this country peaked in 1983. Cities, towns, and the federal government once owned a substantial share of healthcare delivery, not just insurance coverage. That is nowhere in the Yglesias prescription. The answer is always more subsidy, more guardrails, more money poured into the same broken private system. If that approach could fix American healthcare, $5.3 trillion a year would have already done it.

The claim that bold structural policy is unpopular doesn’t survive contact with reality. Most Americans say government has a responsibility to ensure health care, 90% of Dems and 41% of Republicans. A wealth tax polls at 74%. There is no gap between voters and bold policy. There is a gap between voters and a political class unwilling to champion it.

The real risk here isn’t ideological. It’s strategic. If the Democratic Party absorbs the Yglesias prescription and shifts right on culture while leaving the economic architecture of extraction untouched, it will have done nothing to address the conditions that made Trump possible. It will have produced a cleaner-looking version of the same failure. And eventually that produces something worse than Trump: a better fascist. A more capable leader who can articulate a genuine structural vision without the chaos and the corruption. Someone who names the same enemies Trump named but actually means it, and has the discipline to follow through.

The Working Class Project asked voters in 21 states what they wanted. The answer was direct: “Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge we need big, bold, aggressive changes, across the board.” That is not a progressive slogan. That is the median working-class voter, speaking for themselves.

The question is whether anyone in the party is willing to listen, or whether they’ll keep taking their cues from people who have never once had to.

Corbin Trent

This president and too many in the Democratic Party just decided to go to war with Iran. They decided it was worth the risk of a regional war and American deaths because they cannot imagine any other way to remain relevant on the global stage. They can’t picture an America that competes through what it builds. They can only picture one that competes through what it destroys.

We didn’t go to war because we had to. We went to war because it’s the only thing we know how to do anymore.

And it’s not just me saying that. The Washington Times reported that China experts are calling the Iran strikes “an operational component of a grand strategy to contain China.” The Atlantic Council said any analysis of this war that ignores the great-power competition underlying it “is either incomplete or a deliberate red herring.” First Venezuela, now Iran. Both countries that sell oil to China. Both countries whose leaders we removed in the span of two months. The pattern is not subtle.

The Carnegie Endowment pointed out that China’s entire strategy for competing with the United States has been to lean into economics, technology, construction, and training. Not military alliances. Not bombs. They build roads, ports, rail networks, energy systems. They invest in other countries’ infrastructure. They compete by making things. We compete by breaking things. And we’ve spent decades proving it.

We can’t build a subway line in under twenty years. We can’t make insulin affordable. We can’t keep a hospital open in a rural county. We can’t build housing fast enough to keep families off the street. But we can flatten a city on the other side of the world in a weekend. We’re really good at that part. We’ve had a lot of practice.

The United States of America in 2026 is a country that has completely lost the ability to build, to produce, to create, to maintain the systems that keep a society alive. And because we can’t do any of that, because we’ve emptied ourselves out so completely that the only functional institution left is the military, war is the only card we have to play. We can’t compete economically so we compete with bombs. We can’t build our way to relevance so we bomb our competition or their allies. We can’t imagine a future where American power comes from what we make and what we offer the world so instead we make sure the world is afraid of us.

That’s what the Iran war is. It’s not about nuclear weapons. It’s not about defending Israel. It’s not about democracy or human rights or any of the words they use to dress it up. It’s about a country that has nothing left to offer except force. A country that has strip-mined its own middle class, gutted its own infrastructure, sold off its own public goods, and has only war left as a way to continued relevance. There are alternatives but thry require doing the hard work of actually rebuilding. And nobody in charge, in either party, can imagine doing that work.

I wrote Tuesday about why Democrats can’t oppose this war. The short version is they agree with it. But the deeper version is this. They can’t oppose the war because they can’t articulate what we’d do instead. They have no vision for an America that doesn’t need to project military force everywhere all the time to remain a global power. They have no plan for rebuilding the domestic economy in a way that would make the war machine unnecessary. They’re stuck in the same trap as the Republicans. The only difference is they feel bad about it.

For fifty years, both parties have agreed on the big things. Hand economic power to Wall Street. Let corporations run the show. Shrink the government until it can’t do anything except write checks to defense contractors and bail out banks. They told us markets would solve everything. That prosperity would trickle down. That if we just got out of the way, corporations would build the future for us.

That experiment failed. And we’re living in the wreckage.

Since 1970, median income has gone up about 911 percent. Sounds great until you look at what happened to everything you need to buy with it. Housing prices jumped nearly 1,700 percent. Rent went up more than 1,200 percent. A public college degree that used to cost around $1,500 now runs nearly $40,000. That’s a 2,400 percent increase. And healthcare exploded by more than 4,000 percent.

People aren’t mad about eggs. They’re mad because the entire economy has been reengineered to make them work harder and get less. A society that once promised stability and upward mobility now demands more and gives back less. And when people look around for someone to blame, the only answer they’re offered is immigrants, or China, or Iran. Never the people who actually did this to them. Never the system itself.

This is why Trump won twice. Not because he had better ideas. Not because of trans people or immigrants. Because he was willing to say the system is broken. Democrats still won’t say that. They still think the system is basically fine, it just needs better management. A few more guardrails. A tax credit here, a job training program there. They cannot bring themselves to admit that the thing they’ve been building for half a century doesn’t work. That it was never going to work. That handing the entire economy to the private sector was always going to end with a country that can’t do anything except make war.

Because that’s where we are. We can’t build. We’ve forgotten how.

We built the Hoover Dam in five years. The Interstate Highway System, 41,000 miles, in thirty five years. The TVA electrified an entire region of the country that the private sector had written off. We created public universities that cost a few weeks of wages. We built Medicare in eleven months. We sent people to the moon in less than a decade.

Now it takes fourteen years to rebuild a single rail tunnel under the Hudson River, at a cost of $16 billion. California’s been working on high speed rail for over fifteen years, it’s billions over budget, and it’s still not done. China built 22,000 miles of high speed rail in fifteen years. We can’t build a system because we no longer believe we should have one. And while we pour resources into flattening Iran, Chatham House reports that Beijing sees our overextension in the Gulf as serving their interests. Every dollar we spend managing a war in the Middle East is a dollar we don’t spend competing with China where it actually matters. They know this. They’re counting on it.

And that’s not an accident. That’s the result of decades of deliberate sabotage. We replaced civil servants with contractors. We cut training. We inserted layers of consultants who bill by the hour and have no incentive to ever finish anything. We deliberately broke the machine and then pointed at the wreckage and said: see, government doesn’t work. It was a setup. And both parties were in on it.

The fear of being called a communist for simply wanting government to compete with corporations has paralyzed the Democratic Party since McCarthy. They’d rather be ineffective than risk sounding like they’re challenging capitalism. But this fear cost them the very ideology that made them dominant for decades under FDR. The belief that government should be a builder. Not a regulator. Not a banker. A builder.

Corporations exist to maximize profit. That’s what they do. That’s all they do. They are not designed to address national challenges or secure a prosperous future for citizens. That’s what government is for. When we delegated those responsibilities to the private sector in the seventies and eighties, we guaranteed the decline we’re living through right now. And we guaranteed that when the decline got bad enough, the only response we’d have left is the one we’re watching play out in Iran.

Bombs instead of bridges. Missiles instead of medicine. A nearly $1 trillion defense budget and a country that can’t keep its own people alive.

The right is selling nostalgia. Make America Great Again. But they don’t want to build anything either. They want to strip what’s left and hand it to their friends. The left, or what passes for it, is selling fear. Save democracy. But if the democracy you’re saving doesn’t build housing, doesn’t provide healthcare, doesn’t educate kids without bankrupting their parents, doesn’t keep the lights on, then what are you actually saving?

I grew up in Appalachia. My grandfather went from sharecropping to owning a forty acre farm in a single generation. That wasn’t grit. That was an America that built things. That created systems that let working people rise. That believed the government had a role in making sure the economy worked for everyone, not just the people at the top. That America is gone. And it didn’t die of natural causes. It was killed. Exposed to a very slow acting poison administered by both parties over fifty years until the patient was too weak to do anything except reach for a gun.

That’s the war we’re not fighting. Not the one in Iran. The one here. The fight to rebuild the capacity of this country to actually do things. To build housing. To make medicine. To educate people. To maintain roads and bridges and rail and broadband. To compete on the global stage through what we create instead of what we destroy.

Every dollar we spend bombing Iran is a dollar we don’t spend rebuilding Ohio or West Virginia or the Bronx. Every young person we send to the Middle East is someone who could be building high speed rail or manufacturing solar panels or staffing a public hospital. Every year we spend managing a war is a year we don’t spend fixing the thing that made the war inevitable in the first place.

But we won’t get it from the people currently in charge. Not from Trump, who wants to own the wreckage. Not from Democratic leadership, who want to manage it.

There is no law of man or God that says we have to bomb our way to a better world. That death and destruction are the best paths to comfort and security. We can marshal our resources just as easily for peace as we can for war. We can build comfort and safety without missiles. And in fact I think the two paths are not compatible. Our search for security through destruction is misguided and it ends poorly, not just for us but for the billions of other humans with whom we share this planet. Every bomb we drop is a confession that we’ve run out of ideas.

But some people haven’t run out of ideas. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded Justice Democrats and helped launch the Green New Deal, is running for Congress right now on exactly this vision. His organization New Consensus built something called the Mission for America, a detailed plan to put this country back into building mode. Not a slogan. Not a talking point. An actual blueprint for how government rebuilds industries, creates jobs, and competes on the global stage through what we make instead of what we destroy. It’s modeled on what FDR did, not just during the New Deal but during the war mobilization that built the most productive economy the world had ever seen. Chakrabarti’s argument is simple. FDR didn’t defeat authoritarianism with slogans. He built a society that worked so well it made authoritarianism unnecessary. That’s the kind of leadership the Democratic Party needs. Yesterday. The sooner people like him are in power, the sooner we stop reaching for bombs when we should be reaching for blueprints.

That’s a fight worth having.

Corbin Trent

For years, Democrats have had one message. Trump is bad. He’s a criminal. He’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He’s breaking everything.

And yet he keeps winning. He keeps consolidating power. He keeps getting stronger. We are less than a year and a half into this administration and he has already started an illegal war with Iran, backed a genocide in Gaza that has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and called for regime change in a sovereign nation on live television. Death and destruction is our primary export right now and it’s a bipartisan product.

Every time Democrats lose another fight, they act confused about it. I’m not confused. I’m paying attention.

This is where the American people need resistance. War. Regime change. Bombing a country we were actively negotiating with. Killing a head of state and over a hundred school children in the same weekend. And Democratic leadership isn’t just failing to resist. They’re actively working to make sure nobody else does either.

When Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forward a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s war with Iran, Democratic leadership didn’t whip votes for it. Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rally the caucus. Instead, Democrats like Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz came out against it. Moskowitz called it the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” Gottheimer said it would “restrict the flexibility needed” to respond to threats. These are Democrats. Arguing that the president should have a free hand to bomb whoever he wants whenever he wants.

As I told Salon before the bombs even started falling, the Democratic Party that exists now in Congress is very much a party that’s aligned with the war machine, and has been for decades. The core, the corporate Democratic Party, which is the one that’s in charge right now, has been fully in lockstep with the Republican Party on this. That’s one of the places where these two parties have been merged for quite some time.

And it’s not just me saying it. A senior Democratic staffer told reporter Aída Chávez that “leadership rarely comes out and says they oppose these votes outright, because they know the underlying issue is popular with the base. Instead, you see process concerns, timing objections, and caucus-unity arguments used to slow things down or keep members off the record.” That’s the game. They support the war. They just don’t want their fingerprints on it. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded the Justice Democrats, pointed out that members learned from Iraq that it was better for their political futures to cede their constitutional power to the president than to take a vote on a war they support. The support for Iraq cost Hillary Clinton an election. It cost Jeb Bush an election. So now they’d rather make no choice at all.

Ro Khanna, one of the few Democrats actually trying to stop this, said the quiet part out loud. He said the Democrats trying to kill the bill are beholden to “powerful interests that are itching to have regime change in Iran.” He named AIPAC specifically. Chakrabarti pointed to the 149 Democrats who voted for the current defense budget as a proxy for the members of the party who likely support a war with Iran. One hundred and forty nine.

Capitol Hill sources went even further. They told Drop Site News that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But they also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump. Win-win for Democrats.

Dem insiders were rooting for a war that 76% of Democratic voters oppose because they like the policy and thought it would be good politics. Only 9% of Democrats support military force against Iran. Nine percent. And our leaders are sabotaging the effort to stop it.

And it’s not just a few rogues. As Adam Johnson reported, House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats were working behind the scenes to prevent a vote on the Khanna-Massie resolution even before the bombs started falling. And the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards, which have weighed in on every major military action in the past fifty years, stayed silent in the weeks leading up to the strikes. They mostly agree that attacking Iran is a good thing and they want Trump to do it, but they know saying that out loud would be toxic. So what we got was a consensus of silence.

Meanwhile John Fetterman goes on Fox News and calls the war powers resolution “an empty gesture” and says the strikes were “right and necessary” and asks God to bless the United States, our military, and Israel. And nobody in leadership kicks him out of the caucus because he’s not actually breaking with them. He’s just saying what a lot of them think.

Look at Jeffries’ actual words after the strikes. He said Iran “must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies.” His only problem is that Trump didn’t fill out the right paperwork first. That’s not opposition. That’s proofreading.

They aren’t interested in stopping the killing. They aren’t interested in the hard work of rebuilding our self sufficiency or our ability to make a living. They aren’t interested in the deep systemic change that propelled Trump to power in the first place. But they love his foreign policy. Some of them love it more than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu went on television and said this is what he has yearned to do for forty years.

And now Axios reports that Senate Democrats already expect to lose the war powers vote this week. They know it’s symbolic. They’re already pivoting to the “real” fight over war funding. Which means they’ve already accepted the war. They’ve moved on to managing it.

And it’s not just the war. That’s the thing. The war and the economics are the same disease.

Trump broke from the old playbook on economics in ways Democrats can’t. Not because he’s smarter. Because he doesn’t believe in the system the way they do. He looked at forty years of neoliberal economics, at globalization, at free trade, at the idea that the market knows best, and he said out loud what half the country was already thinking. This doesn’t work. It’s broken. The whole thing is rigged.

He was lying. He doesn’t want to fix it. He wants to own it. He wants to be the one doing the rigging. But he named the problem, and that’s more than Democrats have ever been willing to do.

Because Democrats still believe in this system. I laid this out a year ago and nothing has changed. They believe in free markets, globalization, and privatization the way you believe in a religion. Both parties pushed NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and every other trade deal that gutted American industry. Since Carter and Clinton, Democrats have been handing off the New Deal state to the private sector. They treat billionaires the way a parish priest treats the guy who donated the new wing of the church. You can’t really go after him. He paid for the building.

This is why they can’t resist Trump in any meaningful way. They don’t want to. They want to resist the chaos, the tweets, the ugliness. But the underlying project of handing this country over to the private sector? That’s not a Trump project. That’s a forty year bipartisan project. Democrats helped build every mile of that road. Their objection is never to the destination. It’s to the driving.

And why would they oppose any of it? This is the same party that built the case for Iraq, gave Bush carte blanche to spy on every American through the Patriot Act, expanded drone warfare under Obama, prosecuted more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined, and treats the Pentagon budget like sacred text. Democrats believe in the security state the same way they believe in the economic system. With the faith of true believers.

They believe in might makes right. They just want the might deployed with better PR.

And that’s the connection people miss. The economics and the war machine aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing. You believe the market should run everything, and when some country doesn’t want to play by your market rules, you bomb them. You believe corporations should control the global economy, and when someone threatens that control, you call it a threat to national security. You say the word evil as a precursor to doing evil. You’ve been doing it for a century. In Iran. In Iraq. In Libya. In Vietnam. In Guatemala. In Chile. Anywhere the local population decides they’d rather own their own resources than let American corporations extract them.

Democrats aren’t against this. They’re for it. They just want it done through institutions. Through the IMF, the World Bank, through trade agreements that look voluntary but aren’t. Through the kind of coercion that wears a suit and carries a briefcase instead of a rifle. When the suit doesn’t work, they reach for the rifle too. Ask Libya about that.

A few voices in the party actually get it. AOC called the Iran strikes unlawful, unnecessary, and catastrophic. Rashida Tlaib said warmongering politicians from both parties support this war. Zohran Mamdani connected it to what people actually care about. The cost of living, the demand for peace, the basic expectation that government should work for them instead of for Lockheed Martin. Ro Khanna is putting his neck on the line trying to force a vote that his own party’s leadership is working to undermine. Anti-war candidates are challenging incumbents in primaries this week, running ads about dead school children while AIPAC funnels money through PACs linked to Jeffries to protect the incumbents who won’t oppose the war.

But leadership? Leadership is talking about briefings and process and War Powers resolutions they know won’t survive a veto, when they’re not actively sabotaging the resolutions themselves. It’s 2003 all over again. Democrats who privately think this war is insane but won’t say it because they’re afraid of the attack ad. Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of AIPAC funding their primary opponent. Afraid of being called the “Ayatollah Protection Act” by members of their own caucus.

So they’ll do what they always do. Quibble about procedure. Demand oversight. Fund the war anyway.

And this is why “save democracy” never lands as a message. People already know democracy is broken. They live in a country where their government doesn’t reflect their will. When Democrats scream “Trump is destroying democracy” the honest response from most Americans is what democracy? The one where my town lost its hospital and its factory in the same decade and nobody in Washington noticed? You can’t save something people don’t believe they have.

American soldiers are dead in Kuwait right now. Iranian children are dead in their classrooms. Oil prices are spiking. Airports are closing. The entire global economy is teetering. All because a foreign leader who spent forty years lobbying for this moment finally found a president willing to give it to him. And the loyal opposition, the party that’s supposed to represent an alternative? Only 7% of their own voters support this war and they can’t even bring themselves to oppose it.

The consensus held through Bush. It held through Obama. It held through Trump’s first term. It held through Biden.

And it’s holding right now.

Corbin Trent

I hear the word evil thrown about a lot. It gets used like it settles an argument. It’s not new. We’ve been calling people and countries and ideas evil for quite some time. The Soviet Union was evil. Communism was evil. Saddam was evil. Gaddafi was evil. Castro was evil. The Ayatollahs are evil. And, of course, Iran is evil. That’s supposed to be the end of the conversation.

It seems to me that the word evil is really just a precursor, an excuse we use as justification for evil actions of our own. We name the evil out there so we don’t see it in ourselves. That’s exactly what is happening with this immoral and illegal war against Iran and the assassination of their leadership, which is also illegal. All this is justified because after all, they were evil.

Already hundreds of Iranians and 3 US servicemembers are dead. We killed the Supreme Leader. We killed his family. We killed his top military officials. We killed over 200 people, including 118 students at a girls’ school. Because Trump and Netanyahu chose to go to war with Iran. A sovereign nation. The pretense was nuclear weapons, but negotiations were actively happening. Iranian diplomats were in Switzerland agreeing to never stockpile enriched uranium. We did this without a vote in Congress. Without a declaration of war. Without an imminent threat.

I don’t want to go on a deep rant about the history of the Middle East and the West and the British Empire in that region. But we need to look at Iran because it tells you everything about the pattern.

Iran has been trying to become a democracy for over a hundred years. They had a Constitutional Revolution in 1906. They fought for self-governance through two World Wars. And in 1951 they elected a prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. Wildly popular. He moved that country forward. Created things like social security and other social safety nets. Expanded workers’ rights. And to fund it he nationalized their greatest resource, their oil. Oil that had been controlled by the British through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. We know them today as BP.

Same story you can hear in Venezuela. Same story in Saudi Arabia. Same story in Iraq, in Kuwait, across the Middle East really. Anywhere oil was found, that oil meant your people didn’t matter.

So MI6 and the CIA worked diligently to overturn this prime minister and install the Shah of Iran. Who was, you couldn’t have guessed it, a brutal dictator. He tortured. He maimed. He created a secret police force called SAVAK that went around silencing political dissidents. He suppressed religious identity and religious practices. He suppressed so many freedoms. And he did all of this with American weapons, American money, and American approval for 26 years.

When the revolution came in 1979 we acted shocked. We called them evil. But we made them. Not their theology. That’s theirs. But the rage and the resentment and the turn toward fundamentalism as an identity against Western domination? We helped build every brick of that.

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is. It’s the reality of America that Trump was describing in his campaigns. The reality that resonated so broadly and so deeply. The shithole America. The elites screwing you over. That’s what happened in Iran. It’s just a different country with a different religion. But it’s the same tool the ruling elite have been using for centuries. Same thing that happens in West Virginia. In the Coal Belt. In steel mill towns of yore. They install leadership. They extract your resources. They take your money. They take your things. They take your opportunity. And it leads to a real breakdown.

Think about drug addiction in Appalachia. The crime. The generational illness of opportunity. Then put that on the Middle East. Much like Appalachia, these folks turn to their religion for solace. For comfort. And often, like in the US with the right wing, they’re radicalized. The source of that rage comes from injustice. From a casual disregard for humanity. The mechanics are the same whether you’re in eastern Kentucky or Tehran. Install your people. Extract the resources. Discard the population. When they react, call them the problem.

So America. We recently decided the system isn’t working. That the cost of living had gotten too much. That the elites decided they could take too much. That they could be relatively open with their desire to take our resources, take our money, and even be relatively open pedophiles. Groceries are up 26% since the pandemic. Ground beef is up 17% in just the last year. Coffee up almost 19%. Daycare costs up nearly 40%. Seven out of ten Americans say raising a child is unaffordable. Credit card debt has hit $1.2 trillion. People are drowning. We decided this was too much.

That was the mandate. Fix this. Make life affordable. That’s what people voted for. And instead of fixing any of it, instead of lowering a single grocery bill or building a single thing, we went right back to murdering and killing and assassinating and warring. A war with Iran. A military seizure of Venezuela’s president. ICE agents shooting American citizens in Minneapolis. 73,000 people in immigration detention, the highest ever. A $170 billion enforcement machine being built across the country. None of which puts food on anyone’s table or lowers anyone’s rent. People voted to fix a broken system and got another war instead.

Donald Trump won twice telling Americans their country was broken. That was the whole pitch. America is on the wrong path. The system is rigged. The elites have taken everything. Your towns are hollowed out. Your jobs are gone. Your kids can’t afford to live. It worked because it was largely true.

But once the bombs drop, once wars start, you’re either on our side or the other. That honesty about your country isn’t allowed anymore. If you say the same things that got Trump elected, you’re not a patriot anymore. You’re a traitor. You have to support the mission now.

It’s very hard for people to understand that being on the side of America means being against these wars. Being against this way of behaving. Being for a new way of being America, both at home and abroad. I can say that this illegal war where we’re killing schoolchildren is something I absolutely oppose as an American and I think it’s patriotic as hell to say so. But if I say that, I’m the bad guy. Same people who ran on “America is a disaster” now need you to stand and cheer for the disaster they’re creating.

Either Americans have the right to demand better from their government or they don’t. That right doesn’t go away because somebody decided to start bombing another country.

I racked my brain to understand why we’d be doing this now. A lot of times you hear “it’s complicated.” I think that’s used to put a veil over things that aren’t particularly complicated. It’s only complicated because there are so many different groups that want to invade and destabilize Iran for their own reasons. But the big picture isn’t hard to see.

Follow the oil.

China gets half its crude imports through the Strait of Hormuz. China buys over 80% of Iran’s oil exports. Venezuela, whose president we helicoptered out and kidnapped in January, holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth and was another major supplier to China. We’ve put a boot on the throat of China’s energy supply right at the moment they’re trying to become the world’s dominant industrial power.

China isn’t just making cheap stuff anymore. They’re building fully automated factories that run with no workers and no lights. They call them dark factories. They installed more industrial robots in a single year than the rest of the world combined. Producing a smartphone every second in plants run by AI. Building the machine tools of the future. The robotics. The renewable energy. The advanced manufacturing. They’re embarking on a generational transformation.

They’re working to get off foreign oil entirely. Working to turn coal into liquid to make carbon fiber and other materials. Going all in on solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal. Not just because they want to save the planet, though it may have something to do with it. Because they know their future depends on energy independence. Their ability to grow crops and feed their people depends on it. They understand that to be strong, to be themselves, they must be independent.

That’s something America never seems to learn. That interdependency on the entire world, an interdependency on one chemical, say petroleum, creates a monster. It removes your ability to say “we won’t do that because it’s immoral.” Because the choices seem stark. Do the immoral thing and continue life as a nation as you know it. Or don’t, and make some adjustments. For whatever reason our leaders have never decided, nor have we, to do the hard work of transitioning from a dependent nation to one with more independence. More energy and manufacturing capacity. One that can stand on its own two feet and make moral decisions based on who we want to be as a nation. Not based on what we need to do to make sure the malls get open and have good prices.

I say all this because I think it’s important to understand where we are, how we got here, and why we keep falling down the same pits over and over and over. Why we keep making the same horrendous decisions, the same immoral decisions, again and again.

That’s why A Fight Worth Having exists. Why I did Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Why I worked for Bernie. Why I worked with AOC. I’ve been trying, like so many others in this country, to help us go down a different path. One built on community and creation instead of destruction and violence and war.

This country is in great disrepair. Structurally and emotionally. Our infrastructure. Our economy. Things need to be fixed. Things need to be built. Things need to be done. I know we want to go fishing on the weekends and hang out in the evenings and just go about life as normal. The problem is we’re in a moment where the generations before us didn’t do the work needed to sustain a good quality of life. They didn’t do the work necessary to keep this nation afloat. We’re the generation that has to do it now.

But we’ve got a great opportunity ahead of us. We can see the immorality of where we’re headed. We know there’s a need to improve our lot in life. And we have robotics and AI and advanced manufacturing. Scientific innovations and discoveries. What we need to do is harness those and deploy them for ourselves and the world. We need to think about how we can export opportunity and joy and comfort instead of bombs and trauma and death. We need to learn to do that here at home as well. Learn to lift ourselves and each other up instead of tearing down and stepping on people to do better. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a huge opportunity. I hope.

And that hope is what this is about. Making sure that we, the people, own some of what our society builds in the future. That’s the Mission for America. That’s American Equity. And that’s what we’re here to do.

Corbin Trent

An Open Letter to the Top 20%

I want to tell you a story about where AI is taking us. It might seem outlandish. But I’ve lived it, and that’s why you need to hear it from me.

If you’re in the top 20%, that means your household is bringing in somewhere around $130,000 a year or more. Maybe you’re a project manager making $95,000 married to a marketing coordinator making $45,000. Y’all are a $140,000 household. You’re taking vacations. You can afford healthcare. You can afford housing. Your kids are wearing whatever name brand kids are wearing these days. You feel fairly secure, but not totally secure. And both of your jobs are done on a screen.

Here’s what you may not realize. You’re living the life that factory workers lived in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. You’re living the life that auto workers in Detroit lived. That steel workers in Pittsburgh lived. That chemical workers across the Northeast and Appalachia lived. Back then a single income could buy a house, raise kids, take a vacation, and retire with a pension. A GM line worker in the early ‘90s was pulling the equivalent of about $43 an hour in today’s money. That life, the one you’re living right now, used to be the baseline for millions of Americans.

I can tell your future, because for me, it’s a rerun.

I grew up in Appalachia, living in the shadows of what had been. The old-timers talked about a time when the life you're living now wasn't reserved for the top 20%. It was just life. But over decades, fewer and fewer people could reach it. A normal life for most working Americans disappeared in a generation, then kept declining for decades after that, and nobody did a damn thing about it.

The top 10% of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in this country, the highest share ever recorded. For you few who still have a quality life, the future I lived is coming for you.

Don’t look out your window. Look at where my people are from.

Detroit went from 1.8 million people to roughly 630,000. The city lost more than a million people. Entire neighborhoods abandoned. The crack epidemic turned whole sections into a war zone. 80,000 buildings left empty. In St. Louis, where the factories closed and the mills went quiet, whole neighborhoods now resemble what the Alliance for American Manufacturing called “a bombed-out war zone, with few vestiges of their former glory.” In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. The birthplace of the American middle class went bankrupt.

There were no other jobs. What was left was Walmart. CVS. McDonald’s. Harder work for less money, and our towns decayed. Despair set in. People turned to drugs to numb the pain, Big Pharma got rich, and 800,000 of our neighbors died. Not in a war. Not in a natural disaster. From opioid overdoses, in the very places where the factories closed and the jobs disappeared. Overdose deaths shot up over 500% in a single generation. Violence spiked. Communities fell apart. We were lost.

Over and over, Americans looked for answers. They turned to the government, because after all it was the government that had pulled us out of the Depression, won World War II, took us to the moon. It was us working together through our federal, state, and local governments that built this nation. We looked for answers in Ronald Reagan. In Bill Clinton. In Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. And then, finally, Trump, hoping we could turn this shit around.

But instead of looking at the greed that caused this, instead of looking at the Wall Street barons, the bankers, and the handful of decision makers who sold us down the river, we turned our eyes toward immigrants. We split up our communities based on race and religion and sexual orientation and whether or not women have bodily autonomy. We did exactly what the people who profited from our decline needed us to do. We fought amongst ourselves while they cashed the checks.

Now the information and administration economy is next.

The economic devastation that happened over 40 years in labor is coming after white-collar workers in four. And it’s coming for the same reason. It makes no more sense to have humans doing work that can be done by machines or programs or robots. They are much, much less expensive. They don’t get sick. They don’t have drama. They don’t have needs.

I know how fast this is moving because I’m living it. I’m starting a PAC called A Fight Worth Having. I was quoted $65,000 a year by a company called Snapstream to record and monitor four TV stations at once. I decided to see if I could do it with AI and four cable accounts. Turns out I could. The same thing happened when I needed an email system, a research hub, a social media monitoring operation. AI is building things for hundreds of dollars that would have cost hundreds of thousands. That’s not a prediction. That was Tuesday.

Add to that, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said at an AI summit in India: “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me.” He said they may be only a couple of years away. This is the man running the most prominent AI company on Earth, built on technologies we developed as a society and invested in as a people. And he’s telling you his technology will do his job better than he can. Your job is not safer than his.

AI and robotics end in the Garden of Eden or Mad Max. Sadly there is little in-between.

We see where this path leads. An unimaginable life for a handful of people and scraps for the rest of us. If we leave this to the market, the 'owners' will keep the Star Trek economy for themselves simply because they were in the right seat at the right time. I can tell you by looking out my window that the rich don't reckon the poor deserve very much.

We have another path. I’m calling it American Equity.

What it requires is public ownership of the things that are going to replace our jobs. If we don’t own a share, if we don’t own a controlling interest in the entities and technologies that replace American workers, we’re screwed. Taxes and UBI will not solve this. Fighting trillionaires and centi-billionaires that control our means of production is not a fight we need to have.

You, the top 20%, needn’t join me and my fellows in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. We can join you. We can join you in access to a life of plenty through American Equity. That is us, we the people, owning what we produce, owning what our knowledge and generations of labor is leading to.

And to the crowd already warming up the “seizing the means of production” line, let me remind you of something. Over the past 50 years, Wall Street sold our means of production to China and to anybody else who would do it cheaper. They didn’t give a damn about keeping it. They gave it away. So this isn’t about seizing anything. This is about rebuilding what they sold out from under us and owning it this time. AI and robotics can do that. But we have to own it, because these same people have already proven they are too greedy to be trusted with it.

We cannot be conned by words like socialism or communism, because the only alternative to American Equity is American Feudalism.

I’ve seen your future. I grew up in it.

Corbin Trent

I was on the Meidas Touch Network this week and we covered a lot of ground. If you’d rather watch than read, the video’s is just blelow. But for those of you who prefer the written version, here’s what I had to say.

The host started by playing clips of the propaganda coming out of Fox and the administration, the usual stuff, the immigration fear machine, the four pieces of paper they managed to scrounge together to justify terrorizing immigrant communities. And look, we all know the data. Immigrants are far less likely than native born citizens to commit crimes. The people we actually need to protect ourselves from are the rich, the powerful, the oligarchs, the Epsteins and the Trumps of the world. That’s who’s actually doing the harm. But the courts are tied up and the administration is ignoring court orders anyway. So the only things standing between an out of control regime and where we’re headed are Congress and the American people. And Congress, the opposition party at least, is not exactly rising to the moment.

One of the things that makes this so hard to respond to is that life goes on. The cars are still going down the street. People still go to work. The bills still have to be paid. Kids still go to school. Our electoral infrastructure and our social infrastructure are collapsing and it feels normal because for the overwhelming majority of Americans daily life still feels normal. That’s not the case for a lot of our immigrant brothers and sisters. But for most people it’s hard to get yourself steeled for something that doesn’t look like a crisis from your kitchen window. And that’s by design.

We talked about the polling showing Trump underwater with non-college educated voters, which is significant because those are the people he’s supposed to own. And I brought up something I think about a lot, which is what happened in my home region.

In the 1930s, Europe went one direction and America went another. We were in a very similar spot then. Republicans had a slim majority in both chambers and the presidency. Sound familiar? And then in just a few cycles, Democrats had a supermajority in the House and the Senate and held the presidency for four terms. How? They delivered. They had a grand vision for the country called the New Deal and it transformed people’s lives in a deep and significant way. That coalition held together for 40 or 50 years.

In East Tennessee, my region, the New Deal built TVA dams, dozens of them. The Manhattan Project built Oak Ridge. The Interstate Highway System. Rural electrification put electricity in places that didn’t have it. This area was transformed by bold public investment and public ownership. And it could be again.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. When I look at Tennessee’s voting history, Bill Clinton won this state twice. Obama only underperformed Clinton by about three points. Tennessee voters didn’t really turn their back on the Democratic Party until Obama’s second term, and then they moved hard toward Trump. And the thing about Trump originally was that he gave people a vision. It was a dark vision, immigrants taking your jobs, corporations and politicians stealing your livelihood. But embedded in there was the hope that something better could be rebuilt. People fell for it and they got duped. But the level of understanding Trump had about where Americans’ minds were is something the Democratic Party mostly doesn’t have.

Gavin Newsom is a good example. He’s positioning himself as the anti-RFK. Fine, RFK deserves plenty of that. But he’s not saying hey, actually, big pharma does have too much control over our healthcare system. Hey, actually, our healthcare system is screwed up. We’re eating stuff that’s illegal in other countries. The Democratic Party is too reactive. They want to be anti-Trump, anti-RFK, anti-this, anti-that, instead of having a strong vision of their own that can win hearts and minds.

We talked about how you cut through the propaganda, and I said two things. One, Democrats self-censor constantly. They try to analyze what voters are going to think and then calibrate what they say based on polls instead of just saying what they believe. I’ve had so many politicians ask me how do I sound more genuine. The answer is be genuine. If you believe we need a public option not just in insurance but in the actual delivery of care, say it. If you believe we need a better system for generating energy, say it. You can change what people believe. Donald Trump bought 10 to 15 percent stakes in a dozen companies and that would be called socialism in any normal circumstances, but he just did it. Stop overthinking and start saying what you actually think.

And two, take the message everywhere. Go on Fox, go on the new independent media, go where the audiences are. But don’t water down your message for the audience. Take your message to the audience. It gets through more easily that way.

The last thing I talked about, and the thing I think matters most, is the piece that’s missing from progressive politics right now. The Democratic Party and progressives think what we need to do is tax billionaires and corporations and then use that revenue to invest in the existing healthcare system or the existing education system. And what that misses is that if you put money into an already broken healthcare system that’s not creating more doctors, more nurses, more hospitals, that’s not creating the supply we need, then all you get is more of the same. Consolidation. Very rich corporations. The money goes in and it doesn’t come back out as care. It comes back out as profit.

We used to own about 50% of our healthcare delivery in this country. The hospitals, the clinics, all of it owned by counties, municipalities, states, and the federal government. Same thing with TVA here in Tennessee. We own the electrical production capacity. And I think that’s the only way you actually compete with the oligarchs and the monopolies. You create your own massive, vertically integrated, publicly owned systems that are competitive. That restores competition. That restores access. That’s the vision.

Saikat Chakrabarti and New Consensus are building the framework for this through something called Mission for America. It’s the most important work happening in progressive politics right now and almost nobody is talking about it. Go look at it.

More Sunday.

Coribn

The Right Had a Plan. We Need One Too.

This mornin’ the New York Times published a story that should make every progressive in America sick to their stomach. Not because of what it said about climate change. Because of what it said about how power actually works in this country.

Four people. That’s what it took. Four conservative operatives spent the Biden years, the years we were supposedly winning, quietly building the legal and regulatory and political infrastructure to kill the federal government’s ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They drafted executive orders. They got scientists to write white papers for them. They got Heritage Foundation money. They built the whole thing in secret so nobody could stop them before it was done. And now they’re about to revoke the endangerment finding, which is the scientific determination that has been the foundation of every federal climate regulation since 2009. Myron Ebell, a guy who’s been attacking climate science for damn near three decades, told the Times they were “pretty close to total victory.”

Total victory. His words. And he’s not wrong.

This isn’t the normal back-and-forth when administrations change hands. They didn’t tweak the rules. They didn’t roll back a regulation or two. They removed the foundation the rules were built on. Any future administration that wants to regulate greenhouse gases now has to start from scratch. From nothing.

And while these four were carefully engineering that demolition over the course of years, China was engineering the future. China is producing the world’s solar panels. China is building the world’s green energy infrastructure. China is deploying the machinery and technology and knowledge that will power the next century and make them very, very wealthy and very, very powerful doing it. Now I’m not suggesting the Chinese don’t deserve this or haven’t earned it. But I am suggesting that the United States has a lot to offer. The people of this nation have a lot to offer in our hearts and in our minds and even in our backs. And the most depressing, most frustrating element of what Trump and his people are doing is that they are kneecapping America’s future.

People love to talk about generational harm when it comes to the national debt. And the debt is bad, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the generational harm that we’re doing right now isn’t just the debt. It’s what we’re building with the debt. We’re building more oil wells. We’re building more drilling. We’re building more financialization. We’re building more bankers. We’re not building more doctors. We’re not building more factories that produce the tools and the components of the future. We are borrowing from our grandchildren to build yesterday.

I don’t want to spend this whole piece talking about what the right is doing. You already know what the right is doing. I want to talk about what we’re not doing. What progressives are missing. Because I think the left has a problem, and I think until we name it honestly we’re going to keep losing to people like Vought and Clark who actually have a plan.

I love Bernie Sanders. Let me just say that. He is the reason I got into politics. My first political job was on the Sanders campaign. I co-founded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats because of what he started. I am a Bernie Sanders stan and I will be until the day I die.

But.

When I hear Bernie say we need to overturn Citizens United, I need him to finish the plan. Because what does that actually require? Think about it. A constitutional amendment. That means two-thirds of both chambers of Congress. Or a convention of states. That means taking the House and the Senate with supermajorities. That means dealing with a Supreme Court that is openly hostile to everything we believe in, through impeachment or court expansion or just waiting decades for the bench to turn over. These are massive, generational undertakings. And nobody, nobody on our side is building the infrastructure to accomplish any of them.

When Bernie says we need a wealth tax, or Medicare for All, I believe him. I want those things. But saying them at a rally is not a plan. The crowd cheers because the ideas are right. Then everybody goes home and nothing gets built. And I think the honest reason is that Bernie believes the path runs through a mass movement. Something like the civil rights era. Millions of people in the streets forcing the system to change. And maybe that’s part of it, I’m not dismissing that. But it can’t be the only theory of change, because it hasn’t materialized at the scale we need, and the clock is ticking hard.

Now look at what the right just did. Four people. A plan. Some Heritage Foundation money. They built their demolition infrastructure during the years they were out of power so it was ready on day one when they got back in. No mass movement. No millions in the streets. Just a specific goal, a specific mechanism, and the discipline to execute over sixteen years.

Build a wall. Kill the endangerment finding. Cut regulations. Round up Black and brown folks. Drill, baby, drill. These are terrible ideas. But they share something in common. They are simple. The mechanism is obvious. You can see how you get from A to B.

Overturn Citizens United is not that. Tax the rich is not that. They’re bumper stickers with no engine under the hood. And the people saying them, people I love and respect, have to know that.

Even if we solved the mechanism problem. Even if we got the supermajority and passed the amendment and taxed every billionaire in America. The progressive framework still has a massive hole in it.

Take healthcare. The progressive answer is Medicare for All. Tax the rich, take that money, pump it into the healthcare system so everybody’s covered. And I support Medicare for All, let me be clear about that. But the healthcare system we’d be pumping that money into already gets $6 trillion a year. Six trillion dollars. And what are we getting for it? We have fewer hospitals per capita than we did in the 1970s. We pay the highest drug prices on earth for medicines that our own tax dollars helped develop. Insurance companies deny 30% of claims as routine business practice, just as a matter of course, just Tuesday for them. This is not a spending problem. The system is corrupted and inefficient and producing god-awful results for what it costs. You know what happens when you pump more money into a broken machine? The machine’s owners get richer. That’s it. You don’t fix a rigged system by feeding it more cash. You just make the rig more profitable.

That’s true across the entire economy. Education. Housing. Energy. Broadband. All of it. The progressive instinct is always the same. Tax the bad guys, then spend more on the broken system. But the systems are broken because they’ve been captured by the people extracting wealth from them. More spending without structural change is just giving the arsonist a nicer fire truck.

So the right wants to tear everything down. The mainstream left wants to pump more money into the wreckage. And almost nobody is proposing to build something that actually works.

But there’s another path. And it’s not some fantasy I cooked up. We’ve walked it before.

America should build things again, and we the people should own what we build.

Not regulate the monopolies. Not break them into little pieces and hope the little pieces behave better. Not tax their profits and funnel the revenue back through the same captured institutions that got us here. Build the public competitor. At scale. A public energy company that competes with the fossil fuel giants by producing and selling clean energy. A public AI lab so the most transformative technology in human history isn’t owned by three billionaires in Silicon Valley. Public pharmaceutical manufacturing so we stop paying the highest prices in the world for drugs our tax dollars developed. Public broadband. Public hospitals that actually serve their communities instead of extracting from them.

Now some people hear public competition and think I mean co-ops and farmer’s markets going up against Amazon. I don’t. I mean the full weight and scale of the United States government entering markets where private monopolies have failed the public. There is utility in scale. There is utility in having massive, vertically integrated operations. The question isn’t whether those things should exist. The question is who owns them. We don’t let Elon Musk own a nuclear weapon. We treat water as a public utility. But Musk is shooting rockets into space and becoming the richest human being in the history of the species doing it, all on government contracts and government subsidies and government IP and government infrastructure. Why isn’t NASA doing that and keeping the upside for the American people? Why are we subsidizing this man’s empire and getting nothing in return except the privilege of watching him buy the government with our money?

And some people ask me, how, Corbin, how do we do it ourselves? Well, we’ve done it before. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation created companies during and after World War II. Government-owned and government-operated. Government-owned and contractor-operated. GoCo and GoGo. We had a Manhattan Project. We had an Arsenal of Democracy. We built those things because we had something to overcome. And we have something to overcome right now. What we have to overcome is our collapse. Our relegation to uselessness for the world. Our slide into a country whose only utility to the planet is that we haven’t bombed them yet.

There are progressives running for office right now who I believe in. Fighters. Dan Osborn in Nebraska, a union leader and Navy vet running as an independent against a billionaire senator. He led the Kellogg’s strike. He came within seven points in a state Trump won by twenty. Graham Platner in Maine, a Marine combat vet and oyster farmer taking on Susan Collins, endorsed by Bernie, leading in the polls. James Talarico in Texas, a former teacher running for Senate, $13 million raised, 98% small donors, zero corporate PAC money. Justin Pearson in Tennessee, one of the Tennessee Three, expelled from the state house for protesting gun violence, put right back by his community, now running for Congress at 30 years old. I want every one of them to win.

But I’m going to be honest with you, and I think you deserve that. Most of them are still running the traditional progressive playbook. Tax the billionaires. Fight corporate greed. Expand the safety net. Oppose the bad guys. And all of that matters, all of it is necessary, I’m not knocking any of it. But taxing the billionaires and pumping that money back through broken, captured systems doesn’t build a country that works. It makes the extraction slightly less brutal for a while, until the next administration comes in and reverses everything.

What’s missing is the construction plan. The vision that says we don’t just fight the monopolies, we build the public alternative that makes them irrelevant. We don’t just tax Elon Musk, we build something that competes his market power away. We don’t just regulate the drug companies, we manufacture the drugs ourselves and sell them at cost. We can decide to leap towards the Jetsons instead of the Flintstones. We don’t have to choose the Thanos model where we burn the thing to the ground and let the survivors fight over the destroyed spoils.

The person who most clearly understands this right now is my friend and former colleague Saikat Chakrabarti. Saikat helped me recruit AOC. He was her chief of staff. He was the architect of the Green New Deal. And now he’s building something called Mission for America, which is a framework for exactly the kind of public-scale construction I’ve been talking about. Of all the people I know in progressive politics, Saikat is the one who gets it. Who understands that the progressive movement doesn’t just need better candidates or louder messaging. It needs a fundamentally different theory of how you build economic power for the public. Not how you redistribute crumbs from the billionaire’s table. How you build your own damn table.

But Saikat can’t do this alone. AOC and Bernie can’t do it alone. I sure as hell can’t do it alone. What we need is for the fighters already in the ring, the Osborns and the Platners and the Talaricos and the Pearsons, to connect their fight to this bigger vision. To go beyond tax the rich and start saying build the alternative. To understand that the answer to a $6 trillion healthcare system that doesn’t deliver isn’t more money, it’s a public competitor that actually delivers care. If that sounds like the Green New Deal, good. Because it is. It always was. We just need more people willing to say it and then do the work to make it real.

The right built their demolition plan during the Biden years. While Democrats were celebrating the biggest climate law in history, four operatives in a rowhouse near the Capitol were drafting the executive orders to destroy it all. They were building while we were taking victory laps.

We have to do the same thing in reverse. Right now. The Trump years are our building years. Not just protests, though protest has its place. Building the actual policy infrastructure and candidate pipeline and public enterprise models that are ready to go when the window opens.

The right had a construction plan for demolition. We need a construction plan for construction. Simple enough to explain. Big enough to matter. And ready when the moment comes.

You either built the thing already or you didn’t. It’s time to build ours.

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We are rocketing our way into a new Gilded Age.

This corrupted economy of ours is about to create the world’s first trillionaire. Elon Musk is worth 850 billion dollars now. Eight hundred and fifty billion. Make no mistake, he is no genius. He’s a welfare king. Every dime of this insane fortune built on what’s yours and mine. Government loans. Government subsidies. Government contracts. Government IP. Government facilities. Government infrastructure. Guvment, guvment, guvment.

And this guy has the audacity to walk into our government and start cutting it up, looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, when he is the waste, fraud, and abuse. He is the line item. He is the bloat.

Not that it’s just an Elon Musk problem. What we have is a billionaire problem. A private monopoly problem. A corporate power problem. Those few have too much and we many have too little.

Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Nvidia. Apple. A handful of companies and the men who run them now hold a share of this country’s wealth and power that is hard to even put into words. They are taking over power once reserved for “We the People” through the state and giving us shittier subscription based versions. Amazon got tax breaks and priority status with the United States Postal Service and now they are building their own shipping fleet to replace it. SpaceX launches our satellites. Meta wants to be our communication infrastructure. We’ve been outsourcing not just our jobs but our government. Our power. We’ve been handing it over to corporations and oligarchs piece by piece, and we act surprised when they start behaving like the people who own the place. They do own the place. We and our elected leaders let them.

So where is the elected opposition that’s supposed to be fighting this?

The Democrats don’t want to go through the trouble. They don’t seem to have a vision for a true alternative. At least not one that is worth the disruption true opposition would require. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are negotiating with terrorists. They are doing their absolute best to pretend that things are normal enough that we can just go back to the way things were and be OK. There is zero acknowledgment from Democratic leadership that our institutions, our elections, and our economy must fundamentally change or we are going to keep marching towards authoritarianism. Zero willingness to accept how much work there is to do. Political work. Economic work. Social work. Physical work. Restoring our capacity to make things. Restoring people’s ability to make a living. Restoring our towns and our bridges and the whole rotting skeleton of this country.

And I think part of the reason is that these people live in a separate world. Things just come to them because there’s enough money around them to make that happen. They don’t feel the rot the way the rest of us do. The boldest thing they’re calling for right now is breaking up monopolies and fighting Big Tech. Maybe a better minimum wage. Maybe Medicare for All. Those aren’t bad ideas. But they don’t go nearly far enough. They don’t begin to acknowledge what most people who actually vote already realize, which is that this system is broken at a level that tinkering won’t fix.

Look at Gavin Newsom and how he’s handling the Make America Healthy Again stuff. His whole approach is to vilify RFK Jr. And fine, RFK Jr. deserves plenty of that. But where is the vilification of the pharmaceutical companies? Where is the vilification of organizations like the AMA that have turned our healthcare system into a financial extraction machine? You can’t just oppose the other side’s guy. You have to oppose the forces that created the problem in the first place. And Democratic leadership will not do that because those forces write checks.

Woody Guthrie once wrote that this land is your land, this land is my land. He meant it. He wrote that song because he thought “God Bless America” was a bunch of complacent bullshit that ignored who actually built the country and who was getting screwed. He was right then and he’s more right now.

Because if it can’t be our land, if these can’t be our assets, if we can’t have our healthcare system, if this country can’t be for me and for you and for trans people and queer people and Black people and immigrants, if we’re going to fight to the death over the last cup of water left on the table after the billionaires have drained every aqueduct and aquifer we’ve got, then we’re going to be left with nothing.

Nothing.

Because we will have been fighting each other while they took everything. Every last piece of our inheritance. Everything our grandfathers and great-grandfathers and the ones who came before them worked and died to build. Were enslaved to build. Were held in indentured servitude to build.

And I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t think it’s a good trade. I don’t think it makes a lick of sense to hand Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg everything that has been built in this country, to let it all just fall apart, because what? What if some Black dude gets something he wasn’t the absolute most qualified human being on earth for?

You know how many people aren’t qualified for the good jobs they’ve got? A lot. And for that matter, here comes AI gunning for every one of our jobs anyway. Every human’s job. There will come a time, and it’s not far off, when you can’t even make a case for a human getting a mid-level job at all. Unless we build some kind of affirmative action program that says you’ve got to have humans on your staff. And lo and behold, you might see a whole lot more people suddenly thinking that affirmative action is pretty damn important after all.

But that’s the rearguard action. The path forward is through us.

The real solution is shared ownership. American production. American capacity. Every single one of us as shareholders in this economy. The answer is not to tax Elon Musk. It’s not to pressure him into being a better person. The answer is to compete his market share away. Stop giving him breaks and incentives and getting nothing in return. Start building publicly owned alternatives that work for the people who fund them, which is all of us. You don’t beg a welfare king to share. You build something that makes him irrelevant.

This is not the time for institutionalists. It’s not the time for people who want to manage the decline and call it governing. It’s the time for dreamers. For visionaries. For revolutionaries. For people who understand that there is so much work to do in this country that we could put every person in America to work tomorrow if we had the will and the honesty to say what needs to be built.

That’s what we’re building toward. Our SuperPAC, A Fight Worth Having, is nearly ready to launch. It’s going to lift up voices that are fighting for the kind of alternative vision we’re talking about here. People who want to build. Keep watching this space. And when the time comes, help us get this thing off the ground and make some noise.

Because if it can’t be ours, it’s gonna be theirs. There’s no middle.

ICYMI: I’ve been making the rounds on Fox News lately, trying to talk to my southern brethren. I sat down with Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle and I’ve been on Fox News Live a few times. You can find clips on my Instagram @bcorbintrent.

@bcorbintrent

B Corbin Trent on Instagram: "Follow for more."

The New York Times just announced they’re expanding their Supreme Court coverage. Four reporters now dedicated to piercing the secrecy of America’s most secretive institution.

Too little. Too late.

The Times is treating this like a transparency problem. Like if they just shine enough light on the justices, embarrass them a little, maybe they’ll self-correct. Maybe Roberts will finally care about his legacy. Maybe voluntary ethics reforms will kick in.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

The Supreme Court has been waging war on working people for decades. Spoiler alert, we’ve been losing.

In 2010, the Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have First Amendment rights. That spending money is speech. So a hedge fund can spend unlimited money electing politicians who cut its taxes. You can donate a few hundred bucks. Guess whose calls get returned.

In 2013, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. States with histories of racial discrimination used to need federal approval before changing voting rules. The Court said that was old news. Within 24 hours, Texas announced voter ID restrictions. Now if you’re Black, Latino, young, or poor, your state can make it harder for you to vote and there’s nothing the feds can do until after the damage is done.

In 2018, the Court ruled in Janus that public sector unions can’t collect fees from workers they’re legally required to represent. Forty years of precedent, gone. Teachers, firefighters, any public employee. The union negotiating your wages just lost most of its funding. Weaker unions mean lower pay. That was the point.

To expose the clearest hypocrisy, we’ll contrast how the Court treats corporate shareholders versus working-class retirees. This highlights that the Court isn’t following a consistent legal rule; it’s choosing who gets to have a day in court based on their tax bracket.

In 2020, the Court ruled in Thole v. U.S. Bank that retirees couldn’t sue their pension manager for losing $750 million through reckless investments. The logic: since they were still receiving monthly checks, they hadn’t been “injured” yet.

Compare that to how SCOTUS treats the “Investor Class.” For decades, the Court has upheld the right of corporate shareholders to file “derivative suits.” In those cases, if a CEO mismanages a company’s cash, a shareholder can sue the managers immediately to force them to put the money back. They don’t have to wait for the company to go bankrupt or for their dividend checks to bounce. The Court recognizes that if the “pot” is smaller, the investment is worth less.

So SCOTUS uses one set of logic for retired workers and another for investors. This exposes a massive, illogical double standard: If you are a shareholder, a loss in the vault is an “injury” you can stop today. If you are a retiree, a $750 million loss is a “no harm, no foul” non-event. By the time the checks actually stop, the money is gone and there is nothing left to recover. It’s a rigged game.

This isn’t just about who can sue; it’s about who actually runs the country. In 2024, the Court overturned Chevron deference. For forty years, courts deferred to agencies on technical questions. The EPA interpreted clean air rules. OSHA interpreted workplace safety. Now judges with no expertise override the experts. Every regulation protecting your air, water, workplace, and food is vulnerable to corporate lawyers shopping for friendly judges.

And then came Trump v. United States.

The Court ruled 6-3 that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for official acts. Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent that this means a president could order the assassination of a political rival and face no consequences. So long as he calls it official.

The Constitution says no one is above the law. Six justices said otherwise.

Look at who wins and who loses. That’s how you understand what’s happening.

Corporations win. Workers lose. Billionaires win. Voters lose. Police win. Presidents win. Democracy loses.

And it’s accelerating. In the first twenty weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, the DOJ filed 19 emergency applications to the Supreme Court. That equals the total number Biden’s DOJ filed in four years. The Court granted most of them. No oral arguments. No full briefing. No public reasoning. Just rubber stamps in the dark.

One of those shadow docket rulings was Wilcox v. Trump. The Court let Trump fire members of the National Labor Relations Board despite laws protecting them from removal. Ninety years of precedent overturned without a hearing. The NLRB lost its quorum. The agency that protects your right to organize can’t function. That was the point.

Right now, today, ICE agents are in American streets detaining people without warrants. ProPublica documented over 170 U.S. citizens wrongfully detained in 2025. In January, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American woman in Minneapolis. We all saw it. More people died in ICE detention last year than in the previous four years combined.

The Court made sure you can’t stop it. In Trump v. CASA, they ruled that lower courts can no longer block unconstitutional policies nationwide. Legal protection now only extends to the specific people who file the lawsuit.

Think about what that means for our history. If this rule existed during the Civil Rights Movement, Brown v. Board wouldn’t have opened every school door in America. Little Rock Central High would have stayed segregated until every single Black family in Arkansas filed their own separate, expensive lawsuit. A victory for one same-sex couple wouldn’t have brought marriage equality to the nation. It would have just been a lucky break for two people.

One meaningful court case used to be able to change the nation. Now a victory is just a private win. It says rights only matter if you can afford the lawyers to fight for them. By killing the nationwide injunction, the Court ensured that even when a policy is clearly unconstitutional, the administration can keep doing it to everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be a plaintiff.

Now the Court has agreed to hear arguments on birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment says anyone born here is a citizen. One sentence. Not ambiguous. Written to overturn Dred Scott. Settled law for 127 years. Every lower court ruled against Trump’s executive order trying to end it.

The Supreme Court didn’t have to take this case. They chose to.

The Times has written about Thomas’s trips on billionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet. About Alito’s flags. About the Chief Justice making employees sign NDAs. Good work.

But they treat this like an ethics problem. Like better disclosure rules would fix it.

The Court is an instrument of class warfare in robes. Six people are dismantling the legal framework that protects you from concentrated power. They have lifetime appointments. No elections. No term limits. No enforceable ethics code. They decide which rules apply to themselves.

Reform won’t fix this. The answer is replacement.

Article III of the Constitution says judges hold office “during good Behaviour.” That’s different from the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for presidents. It’s a higher bar, not a lower one. The Framers understood that unelected lifetime appointees needed stricter standards.

Judges have been impeached and removed for conduct that wasn’t criminal. In 1913, Judge Robert Archbald was removed for improper relationships with litigants. Exposed now: luxury travel, private jets, undisclosed gifts from billionaires with business before the Court. The parallel writes itself.

Justices who accept millions from parties who appear before them are not exhibiting good behavior. Justices who overturn ninety years of precedent on the shadow docket are not exhibiting good behavior. Justices who tell Congress they respect settled law and then gut it are not exhibiting good behavior.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to remove them. It’s right there.

The Times wants the Court to reform itself. To respond to shame. To protect its legitimacy through moderation.

That ship sailed. The justices serve for life. They answer to no one. They’ve decided they don’t have to.

So we replace them.

The justices serve us. Not the other way around.

It’s time they were reminded.

Corbin Trent

A Super Bowl Without Immigrants

English, Español, 中文, Tagalog below, abajo, 以下, sa ibaba

Tiếng Việt, العربية, Français, 한국어, Русский, Português, Kreyòl Ayisyen, or हिन्दी.

America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on people. And tens of millions of those people are immigrants. Many of them undocumented.

Here’s what I understand about life. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Ten days from today, America will celebrate one of its holiest days. The Super Bowl. What if America didn’t have any immigrants on that blessed Sunday?

I think for a lot of Americans, especially the ones cheering for 40 million people to be rounded up and deported as violently as that requires, there’s a disconnect. A failure to realize just how much immigrants matter to their daily lives. To their ability to enjoy their days at all.

So maybe we should help them understand.

Maybe we should give them a Super Bowl without immigrants.

No undocumented immigrants. No documented immigrants. Just a Super Bowl in the future that Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA say they want. No immigrants around. None. Let’s see what that looks like on America’s favorite Sunday.

Now, if you’re an immigrant, especially undocumented, you’re probably not sitting on a pile of money that lets you skip work. I know that. And I know it’s a lot to ask you to help open the eyes of a country that’s treating you like this right now.

But I’m asking anyway.

I’d appreciate it. I’d appreciate you showing my fellow Americans what they refuse to see. Let them witness the utility, since they can’t seem to recognize the humanity.

It would be a big deal. A Super Bowl without immigrants.

If you are an immigrant, documented or undocumented, and you are able, I’m asking you not to show up to work on Super Bowl Sunday.

Not to cause chaos. Not to hurt anyone. But to tell the truth.

Let America see what a Super Bowl without immigrants actually looks like.

Share this. Make a video. Tell your friends and family. Pass it on.

A Super Bowl without immigrants might wake America up.

Un Super Bowl Sin Inmigrantes

Spanish / Español

Estados Unidos no funciona con Dunkin. Funciona con gente. Y decenas de millones de esas personas son inmigrantes. Muchos de ellos indocumentados.

Esto es lo que entiendo de la vida. No sabes lo que tienes hasta que lo pierdes.

En diez días, Estados Unidos celebrará uno de sus días más sagrados. El Super Bowl. ¿Qué pasaría si Estados Unidos no tuviera inmigrantes en ese bendito domingo?

Creo que para muchos estadounidenses, especialmente los que aplauden que 40 millones de personas sean arrestadas y deportadas con toda la violencia que eso requiere, hay una desconexión. Una incapacidad de darse cuenta de cuánto importan los inmigrantes en su vida diaria. En su capacidad de disfrutar sus días.

Entonces tal vez deberíamos ayudarlos a entender.

Tal vez deberíamos darles un Super Bowl sin inmigrantes.

Sin inmigrantes indocumentados. Sin inmigrantes documentados. Solo un Super Bowl en el futuro que Trump, Stephen Miller, y MAGA dicen que quieren. Sin inmigrantes alrededor. Ninguno. Veamos cómo se ve eso en el domingo favorito de Estados Unidos.

Ahora, si eres inmigrante, especialmente indocumentado, probablemente no tienes un montón de dinero que te permita faltar al trabajo. Lo sé. Y sé que es mucho pedirte que ayudes a abrir los ojos de un país que te está tratando así en este momento.

Pero te lo pido de todas formas.

Te lo agradecería. Agradecería que les mostraras a mis compatriotas estadounidenses lo que se niegan a ver. Que sean testigos de la utilidad, ya que parece que no pueden reconocer la humanidad.

Sería algo muy importante. Un Super Bowl sin inmigrantes.

Si eres inmigrante, documentado o indocumentado, y puedes hacerlo, te pido que no vayas a trabajar el domingo del Super Bowl.

No para causar caos. No para lastimar a nadie. Sino para decir la verdad.

Deja que Estados Unidos vea cómo es realmente un Super Bowl sin inmigrantes.

Comparte esto. Haz un video. Díselo a tus amigos y familia. Pásalo.

Un Super Bowl sin inmigrantes podría despertar a Estados Unidos.

一个没有移民的超级碗

Chinese / 中文

美国不是靠唐恩都乐运转的。它靠人运转。而这些人中有数千万是移民。其中很多没有身份证件。

这是我对生活的理解。你不会知道自己拥有什么，直到失去它。

十天后，美国将庆祝它最重要的日子之一。超级碗。如果在那个重要的星期天美国没有任何移民会怎样？

我认为对于很多美国人来说，特别是那些为4000万人被围捕和暴力驱逐而欢呼的人，存在一种脱节。他们没有意识到移民对他们日常生活有多重要。对他们能够享受生活有多重要。

所以也许我们应该帮助他们理解。

也许我们应该给他们一个没有移民的超级碗。

没有无证移民。没有有证移民。只是一个特朗普、斯蒂芬·米勒和MAGA说他们想要的未来的超级碗。周围没有移民。一个都没有。让我们看看在美国最受欢迎的星期天会是什么样子。

现在，如果你是移民，特别是无证移民，你可能没有足够的钱让你可以不去工作。我知道。我也知道让你帮助一个正在这样对待你的国家睁开眼睛是一个很大的请求。

但我还是要请求你。

我会感激的。我会感激你向我的美国同胞展示他们拒绝看到的东西。让他们见证这种实用价值，既然他们似乎无法认识到人性。

这将是一件大事。一个没有移民的超级碗。

如果你是移民，有证件或无证件，如果你能够做到，我请求你在超级碗星期天不要去上班。

不是为了制造混乱。不是为了伤害任何人。而是为了说出真相。

让美国看看一个没有移民的超级碗到底是什么样子。

分享这个。制作一个视频。告诉你的朋友和家人。传递下去。

一个没有移民的超级碗可能会唤醒美国。

Isang Super Bowl na Walang mga Imigrante

Tagalog / Filipino

Ang Amerika ay hindi tumatakbo sa Dunkin. Tumatakbo ito sa mga tao. At sampu-sampung milyon sa mga taong iyon ay mga imigrante. Marami sa kanila ay walang dokumento.

Ito ang naiintindihan ko tungkol sa buhay. Hindi mo alam kung ano ang mayroon ka hanggang sa mawala ito.

Sampung araw mula ngayon, ipagdiriwang ng Amerika ang isa sa pinakamahahalagang araw nito. Ang Super Bowl. Paano kung walang mga imigrante ang Amerika sa espesyal na Linggo na iyon?

Sa tingin ko para sa maraming Amerikano, lalo na sa mga nagbibigay ng palakpakan para sa 40 milyong tao na huhulihin at ipadedeport nang marahas, may kakulangan sa pag-unawa. Isang kabiguan na maunawaan kung gaano kahalaga ang mga imigrante sa kanilang pang-araw-araw na buhay. Sa kanilang kakayahang tamasahin ang kanilang mga araw.

Kaya siguro dapat natin silang tulungang maintindihan.

Siguro dapat nating bigyan sila ng Super Bowl na walang mga imigrante.

Walang mga imigrante na walang dokumento. Walang mga imigrante na may dokumento. Isang Super Bowl lamang sa kinabukasan na sinasabi nina Trump, Stephen Miller, at MAGA na gusto nila. Walang mga imigrante sa paligid. Wala. Tingnan natin kung ano ang hitsura nito sa paboritong Linggo ng Amerika.

Ngayon, kung ikaw ay isang imigrante, lalo na walang dokumento, malamang na wala kang sapat na pera para lumiban sa trabaho. Alam ko iyon. At alam ko na malaking hiling na tulungan mo akong buksan ang mga mata ng isang bansa na ganito ang pagtrato sa iyo ngayon.

Pero hinihiling ko pa rin.

Pinasasalamatan ko. Pinasasalamatan ko na ipakita mo sa aking mga kapwa Amerikano ang ayaw nilang makita. Hayaan silang masaksi ang pagiging kapaki-pakinabang, dahil tila hindi nila makita ang pagkatao.

Magiging malaking bagay ito. Isang Super Bowl na walang mga imigrante.

Kung ikaw ay isang imigrante, may dokumento o wala, at kaya mo, hinihiling ko sa iyo na huwag pumasok sa trabaho sa Super Bowl Sunday.

Hindi para magdulot ng kaguluhan. Hindi para saktan ang sinuman. Kundi para sabihin ang katotohanan.

Hayaang makita ng Amerika kung ano talaga ang hitsura ng Super Bowl na walang mga imigrante.

Ibahagi ito. Gumawa ng video. Sabihin sa iyong mga kaibigan at pamilya. Ipasa ito.

Ang Super Bowl na walang mga imigrante ay maaaring gisingin ang Amerika.

Corbin Trent

Vietnamese / Tiếng Việt

Nước Mỹ không chạy bằng Dunkin. Nó chạy bằng con người. Và hàng chục triệu người trong số đó là người nhập cư. Nhiều người trong số họ không có giấy tờ.

Đây là điều tôi hiểu về cuộc sống. Bạn không biết mình có gì cho đến khi mất nó.

Mười ngày nữa, nước Mỹ sẽ kỷ niệm một trong những ngày quan trọng nhất của mình. Super Bowl. Điều gì sẽ xảy ra nếu nước Mỹ không có người nhập cư nào vào ngày Chủ Nhật đặc biệt đó?

Tôi nghĩ đối với nhiều người Mỹ, đặc biệt là những người hò reo việc 40 triệu người bị vây bắt và trục xuất một cách bạo lực, có một sự mất kết nối. Một sự thất bại trong việc nhận ra người nhập cư quan trọng như thế nào đối với cuộc sống hàng ngày của họ. Đối với khả năng tận hưởng cuộc sống của họ.

Vậy có lẽ chúng ta nên giúp họ hiểu.

Có lẽ chúng ta nên cho họ một Super Bowl không có người nhập cư.

Không có người nhập cư không giấy tờ. Không có người nhập cư có giấy tờ. Chỉ là một Super Bowl trong tương lai mà Trump, Stephen Miller, và MAGA nói họ muốn. Không có người nhập cư xung quanh. Không một ai. Hãy xem điều đó trông như thế nào vào Chủ Nhật yêu thích của nước Mỹ.

Bây giờ, nếu bạn là người nhập cư, đặc biệt là không có giấy tờ, bạn có lẽ không có đống tiền cho phép bạn nghỉ làm. Tôi biết điều đó. Và tôi biết đây là một yêu cầu lớn khi nhờ bạn giúp mở mắt một đất nước đang đối xử với bạn như thế này.

Nhưng tôi vẫn xin.

Tôi sẽ biết ơn. Tôi sẽ biết ơn nếu bạn cho những người Mỹ đồng bào của tôi thấy điều họ từ chối nhìn thấy. Hãy để họ chứng kiến sự hữu ích, vì họ dường như không thể nhận ra nhân tính.

Đây sẽ là một việc lớn. Một Super Bowl không có người nhập cư.

Nếu bạn là người nhập cư, có giấy tờ hay không có giấy tờ, và bạn có thể, tôi xin bạn đừng đi làm vào Chủ Nhật Super Bowl.

Không phải để gây hỗn loạn. Không phải để làm tổn thương ai. Mà là để nói sự thật.

Hãy để nước Mỹ thấy một Super Bowl không có người nhập cư thực sự trông như thế nào.

Chia sẻ điều này. Làm một video. Nói với bạn bè và gia đình bạn. Truyền đi.

Một Super Bowl không có người nhập cư có thể đánh thức nước Mỹ.

سوبر بول بدون مهاجرين

Arabic / العربية

أمريكا لا تعمل بدانكن. إنها تعمل بالناس. وعشرات الملايين من هؤلاء الناس مهاجرون. كثير منهم بدون وثائق.

هذا ما أفهمه عن الحياة. لا تعرف ما لديك حتى يضيع منك.

بعد عشرة أيام من اليوم، ستحتفل أمريكا بأحد أهم أيامها. السوبر بول. ماذا لو لم يكن في أمريكا أي مهاجرين في ذلك الأحد المميز؟

أعتقد أن كثيراً من الأمريكيين، خاصة أولئك الذين يهللون لاعتقال وترحيل 40 مليون شخص بكل ما يتطلبه ذلك من عنف، لديهم انفصال عن الواقع. فشل في إدراك مدى أهمية المهاجرين في حياتهم اليومية. في قدرتهم على الاستمتاع بأيامهم.

لذا ربما يجب أن نساعدهم على الفهم.

ربما يجب أن نعطيهم سوبر بول بدون مهاجرين.

بدون مهاجرين غير موثقين. بدون مهاجرين موثقين. فقط سوبر بول في المستقبل الذي يقول ترامب وستيفن ميلر وماغا أنهم يريدونه. بدون مهاجرين حولهم. لا أحد. دعونا نرى كيف سيبدو ذلك في يوم الأحد المفضل لأمريكا.

الآن، إذا كنت مهاجراً، خاصة بدون وثائق، فأنت على الأرجح لا تملك كومة من المال تسمح لك بالتغيب عن العمل. أعرف ذلك. وأعرف أنه طلب كبير أن أطلب منك المساعدة في فتح عيون بلد يعاملك هكذا الآن.

لكنني أطلب على أي حال.

سأكون ممتناً. سأكون ممتناً لو أريت مواطنيّ الأمريكيين ما يرفضون رؤيته. دعهم يشهدون الفائدة، بما أنهم لا يستطيعون على ما يبدو رؤية الإنسانية.

سيكون أمراً كبيراً. سوبر بول بدون مهاجرين.

إذا كنت مهاجراً، بوثائق أو بدون وثائق، وكنت قادراً، أطلب منك ألا تذهب إلى العمل يوم أحد السوبر بول.

ليس لإحداث فوضى. ليس لإيذاء أي شخص. بل لقول الحقيقة.

دع أمريكا ترى كيف يبدو سوبر بول بدون مهاجرين حقاً.

شارك هذا. اصنع فيديو. أخبر أصدقاءك وعائلتك. مرره.

سوبر بول بدون مهاجرين قد يوقظ أمريكا.

Un Super Bowl Sans Immigrants

French / Français

L’Amérique ne tourne pas grâce à Dunkin. Elle tourne grâce aux gens. Et des dizaines de millions de ces gens sont des immigrants. Beaucoup d’entre eux sont sans papiers.

Voici ce que je comprends de la vie. On ne sait pas ce qu’on a jusqu’à ce qu’on le perde.

Dans dix jours, l’Amérique célébrera l’un de ses jours les plus sacrés. Le Super Bowl. Et si l’Amérique n’avait aucun immigrant en ce dimanche béni?

Je pense que pour beaucoup d’Américains, surtout ceux qui applaudissent l’idée que 40 millions de personnes soient raflées et déportées avec toute la violence que cela implique, il y a une déconnexion. Une incapacité à réaliser à quel point les immigrants comptent dans leur vie quotidienne. Dans leur capacité à profiter de leurs journées.

Alors peut-être devrions-nous les aider à comprendre.

Peut-être devrions-nous leur donner un Super Bowl sans immigrants.

Pas d’immigrants sans papiers. Pas d’immigrants avec papiers. Juste un Super Bowl dans le futur que Trump, Stephen Miller, et MAGA disent vouloir. Aucun immigrant autour. Aucun. Voyons à quoi ça ressemble le dimanche préféré de l’Amérique.

Maintenant, si vous êtes immigrant, surtout sans papiers, vous n’avez probablement pas un tas d’argent qui vous permet de manquer le travail. Je le sais. Et je sais que c’est beaucoup vous demander d’aider à ouvrir les yeux d’un pays qui vous traite comme ça en ce moment.

Mais je vous le demande quand même.

Je vous en serais reconnaissant. Je vous serais reconnaissant de montrer à mes compatriotes américains ce qu’ils refusent de voir. Laissez-les constater l’utilité, puisqu’ils ne semblent pas pouvoir reconnaître l’humanité.

Ce serait quelque chose d’important. Un Super Bowl sans immigrants.

Si vous êtes immigrant, avec ou sans papiers, et que vous le pouvez, je vous demande de ne pas aller travailler le dimanche du Super Bowl.

Pas pour causer le chaos. Pas pour blesser qui que ce soit. Mais pour dire la vérité.

Laissez l’Amérique voir à quoi ressemble vraiment un Super Bowl sans immigrants.

Partagez ceci. Faites une vidéo. Dites-le à vos amis et à votre famille. Faites passer le message.

Un Super Bowl sans immigrants pourrait réveiller l’Amérique.

이민자 없는 슈퍼볼

Korean / 한국어

미국은 던킨으로 돌아가지 않습니다. 사람들로 돌아갑니다. 그리고 그 사람들 중 수천만 명이 이민자입니다. 많은 이들이 서류 미비자입니다.

제가 인생에서 이해한 것이 있습니다. 잃기 전까지는 가진 것의 소중함을 모릅니다.

열흘 후, 미국은 가장 중요한 날 중 하나를 기념할 것입니다. 슈퍼볼. 만약 그 특별한 일요일에 미국에 이민자가 한 명도 없다면 어떨까요?

저는 많은 미국인들, 특히 4천만 명이 체포되어 폭력적으로 추방되는 것을 환호하는 사람들에게 단절이 있다고 생각합니다. 이민자들이 그들의 일상생활에 얼마나 중요한지 깨닫지 못하는 것입니다. 그들이 하루를 즐길 수 있는 능력에 얼마나 중요한지 말입니다.

그러니 어쩌면 우리가 그들이 이해하도록 도와야 할 것입니다.

어쩌면 우리가 그들에게 이민자 없는 슈퍼볼을 보여줘야 할 것입니다.

서류 미비 이민자 없이. 서류 있는 이민자 없이. 트럼프, 스티븐 밀러, 그리고 MAGA가 원한다고 말하는 미래의 슈퍼볼. 주변에 이민자가 없는. 아무도 없는. 미국이 가장 좋아하는 일요일에 그것이 어떤 모습인지 봅시다.

지금, 당신이 이민자라면, 특히 서류가 없다면, 아마 일을 쉴 수 있게 해주는 돈 더미 위에 앉아 있지 않을 것입니다. 저도 압니다. 그리고 지금 당신을 이렇게 대하는 나라의 눈을 뜨게 도와달라고 부탁하는 것이 큰 부탁이라는 것도 압니다.

하지만 그래도 부탁드립니다.

감사드리겠습니다. 제 미국 동포들에게 그들이 보기를 거부하는 것을 보여주신다면 감사드리겠습니다. 그들이 인간성을 인식하지 못하는 것 같으니, 실용성이라도 목격하게 해주십시오.

큰 일이 될 것입니다. 이민자 없는 슈퍼볼.

당신이 이민자라면, 서류가 있든 없든, 가능하다면, 슈퍼볼 일요일에 출근하지 말아 주시기를 부탁드립니다.

혼란을 일으키려는 것이 아닙니다. 누군가를 해치려는 것이 아닙니다. 진실을 말하기 위해서입니다.

이민자 없는 슈퍼볼이 실제로 어떤 모습인지 미국이 보게 해주십시오.

이것을 공유하세요. 영상을 만드세요. 친구와 가족에게 알려주세요. 전달해 주세요.

이민자 없는 슈퍼볼이 미국을 깨울 수 있습니다.

Супербоул без иммигрантов

Russian / Русский

Америка работает не на Данкин. Она работает на людях. И десятки миллионов этих людей — иммигранты. Многие из них без документов.

Вот что я понимаю о жизни. Ты не знаешь, что имеешь, пока не потеряешь.

Через десять дней Америка отпразднует один из своих самых священных дней. Супербоул. Что, если бы в Америке не было ни одного иммигранта в это благословенное воскресенье?

Я думаю, что для многих американцев, особенно тех, кто аплодирует тому, чтобы 40 миллионов человек были схвачены и депортированы со всей жестокостью, которую это требует, существует разрыв с реальностью. Неспособность осознать, насколько иммигранты важны для их повседневной жизни. Для их возможности наслаждаться своими днями.

Так что, может быть, нам стоит помочь им понять.

Может быть, нам стоит показать им Супербоул без иммигрантов.

Без нелегальных иммигрантов. Без легальных иммигрантов. Просто Супербоул в том будущем, которое Трамп, Стивен Миллер и MAGA говорят, что хотят. Без иммигрантов вокруг. Никого. Давайте посмотрим, как это будет выглядеть в любимое воскресенье Америки.

Если вы иммигрант, особенно без документов, у вас, вероятно, нет кучи денег, которая позволяет пропустить работу. Я это знаю. И я знаю, что это большая просьба — помочь открыть глаза стране, которая так обращается с вами прямо сейчас.

Но я всё равно прошу.

Я буду благодарен. Я буду благодарен, если вы покажете моим соотечественникам-американцам то, что они отказываются видеть. Пусть они увидят полезность, раз уж они, похоже, не могут признать человечность.

Это было бы большим делом. Супербоул без иммигрантов.

Если вы иммигрант, с документами или без, и у вас есть такая возможность, я прошу вас не выходить на работу в воскресенье Супербоула.

Не для того, чтобы создать хаос. Не для того, чтобы кому-то навредить. А чтобы сказать правду.

Пусть Америка увидит, как на самом деле выглядит Супербоул без иммигрантов.

Поделитесь этим. Снимите видео. Расскажите друзьям и семье. Передайте дальше.

Супербоул без иммигрантов может разбудить Америку.

Um Super Bowl Sem Imigrantes

Portuguese / Português

A América não funciona com Dunkin. Funciona com pessoas. E dezenas de milhões dessas pessoas são imigrantes. Muitos deles indocumentados.

Isso é o que eu entendo sobre a vida. Você não sabe o que tem até perder.

Daqui a dez dias, a América vai celebrar um dos seus dias mais sagrados. O Super Bowl. E se a América não tivesse nenhum imigrante naquele domingo abençoado?

Eu acho que para muitos americanos, especialmente aqueles que aplaudem 40 milhões de pessoas sendo presas e deportadas com toda a violência que isso exige, existe uma desconexão. Uma falha em perceber o quanto os imigrantes importam para suas vidas diárias. Para sua capacidade de aproveitar seus dias.

Então talvez devêssemos ajudá-los a entender.

Talvez devêssemos dar a eles um Super Bowl sem imigrantes.

Sem imigrantes indocumentados. Sem imigrantes documentados. Apenas um Super Bowl no futuro que Trump, Stephen Miller e MAGA dizem que querem. Sem imigrantes por perto. Nenhum. Vamos ver como isso se parece no domingo favorito da América.

Agora, se você é imigrante, especialmente indocumentado, você provavelmente não está sentado em uma pilha de dinheiro que permite faltar ao trabalho. Eu sei disso. E sei que é muito pedir que você ajude a abrir os olhos de um país que está te tratando assim agora.

Mas estou pedindo mesmo assim.

Eu agradeceria. Agradeceria se você mostrasse aos meus compatriotas americanos o que eles se recusam a ver. Deixe-os testemunhar a utilidade, já que parecem não conseguir reconhecer a humanidade.

Seria algo grande. Um Super Bowl sem imigrantes.

Se você é imigrante, documentado ou indocumentado, e puder, peço que não vá trabalhar no domingo do Super Bowl.

Não para causar caos. Não para machucar ninguém. Mas para dizer a verdade.

Deixe a América ver como realmente é um Super Bowl sem imigrantes.

Compartilhe isso. Faça um vídeo. Conte para seus amigos e família. Passe adiante.

Um Super Bowl sem imigrantes pode acordar a América.

Yon Super Bowl San Imigran

Haitian Creole / Kreyòl Ayisyen

Amerik pa mache ak Dunkin. Li mache ak moun. E plizyè dizèn milyon nan moun sa yo se imigran. Anpil nan yo san papye.

Men sa m konprann sou lavi. Ou pa konnen sa w genyen jiskaske li ale.

Dis jou apati jodi a, Amerik pral selebre youn nan jou ki pi enpòtan li yo. Super Bowl la. E si Amerik pa t gen okenn imigran nan dimanch espesyal sa a?

Mwen panse pou anpil Ameriken, sitou sa yo ki ap bat bravo pou 40 milyon moun pou yo arete epi depòte avèk tout vyolans sa mande, gen yon dekonneksyon. Yon echèk pou reyalize kijan imigran enpòtan pou lavi kotidyen yo. Pou kapasite yo pou jwi jounen yo.

Donk petèt nou ta dwe ede yo konprann.

Petèt nou ta dwe ba yo yon Super Bowl san imigran.

San imigran ki san papye. San imigran ki gen papye. Jis yon Super Bowl nan lavni Trump, Stephen Miller, ak MAGA di yo vle a. San imigran bò kote yo. Okenn. Ann wè kisa sa sanble nan dimanch prefere Amerik la.

Kounye a, si ou se yon imigran, sitou san papye, ou pwobableman pa chita sou yon pil lajan ki pèmèt ou pa ale travay. Mwen konnen sa. E mwen konnen se anpil mwen mande w pou ede ouvri je yon peyi ki ap trete w konsa kounye a.

Men mwen mande kanmenm.

Mwen ta apresye sa. Mwen ta apresye si ou montre Ameriken parèy mwen yo sa yo refize wè. Kite yo wè itilite a, paske yo sanble pa ka rekonèt imanite a.

Li ta yon gwo bagay. Yon Super Bowl san imigran.

Si ou se yon imigran, avèk papye oswa san papye, e ou kapab, mwen mande w pou pa ale travay dimanch Super Bowl la.

Pa pou kreye kaos. Pa pou blese pèsonn. Men pou di verite a.

Kite Amerik wè kisa yon Super Bowl san imigran vrèman sanble.

Pataje sa. Fè yon videyo. Di zanmi w ak fanmi w. Pase l bay lòt moun.

Yon Super Bowl san imigran ta ka reveye Amerik.

प्रवासियों के बिना एक सुपर बाउल

Hindi / हिन्दी

अमेरिका डंकिन पर नहीं चलता। यह लोगों पर चलता है। और उन लोगों में से करोड़ों प्रवासी हैं। उनमें से कई बिना दस्तावेज़ों के हैं।

जीवन के बारे में मैं यह समझता हूं। जब तक कुछ खो न जाए, आप नहीं जानते कि आपके पास क्या है।

आज से दस दिन बाद, अमेरिका अपने सबसे महत्वपूर्ण दिनों में से एक मनाएगा। सुपर बाउल। क्या होगा अगर उस विशेष रविवार को अमेरिका में कोई प्रवासी न हो?

मुझे लगता है कि बहुत से अमेरिकियों के लिए, विशेष रूप से जो 4 करोड़ लोगों को पकड़कर हिंसक तरीके से निर्वासित करने का समर्थन कर रहे हैं, एक विच्छेद है। यह समझने में विफलता कि प्रवासी उनके दैनिक जीवन में कितने महत्वपूर्ण हैं। उनके दिनों का आनंद लेने की क्षमता में।

तो शायद हमें उन्हें समझने में मदद करनी चाहिए।

शायद हमें उन्हें प्रवासियों के बिना एक सुपर बाउल देना चाहिए।

बिना दस्तावेज़ वाले प्रवासी नहीं। दस्तावेज़ वाले प्रवासी नहीं। बस एक सुपर बाउल उस भविष्य में जो ट्रम्प, स्टीफन मिलर और MAGA कहते हैं कि वे चाहते हैं। आसपास कोई प्रवासी नहीं। कोई नहीं। देखते हैं कि अमेरिका के पसंदीदा रविवार को यह कैसा दिखता है।

अब, अगर आप एक प्रवासी हैं, विशेष रूप से बिना दस्तावेज़ के, तो शायद आपके पास इतना पैसा नहीं है कि काम छोड़ सकें। मैं यह जानता हूं। और मैं जानता हूं कि एक ऐसे देश की आंखें खोलने में मदद करने के लिए कहना बहुत बड़ी बात है जो अभी आपके साथ ऐसा व्यवहार कर रहा है।

लेकिन मैं फिर भी कह रहा हूं।

मैं आभारी रहूंगा। मैं आभारी रहूंगा अगर आप मेरे साथी अमेरिकियों को वह दिखाएं जो वे देखने से इनकार करते हैं। उन्हें उपयोगिता का गवाह बनने दें, क्योंकि वे मानवता को पहचानने में असमर्थ लगते हैं।

यह एक बड़ी बात होगी। प्रवासियों के बिना एक सुपर बाउल।

अगर आप प्रवासी हैं, दस्तावेज़ों के साथ या बिना, और आप सक्षम हैं, तो मैं आपसे अनुरोध करता हूं कि सुपर बाउल रविवार को काम पर न जाएं।

अराजकता फैलाने के लिए नहीं। किसी को नुकसान पहुंचाने के लिए नहीं। बल्कि सच बोलने के लिए।

अमेरिका को देखने दें कि प्रवासियों के बिना सुपर बाउल वास्तव में कैसा दिखता है।

इसे साझा करें। एक वीडियो बनाएं। अपने दोस्तों और परिवार को बताएं। इसे आगे बढ़ाएं।

प्रवासियों के बिना एक सुपर बाउल अमेरिका को जगा सकता है।

TL;DR Skip to the action at the end.

Trust and faith are hard to restore once they’re lost.

One of the major challenges we face in the US is a complete loss of faith and trust. Trust in each other, our institutions, our government, and our own capacity to change anything. As a society we can’t legislate or paperwork our way back to legitimacy and trust. We likely won’t be able to count on the courts to defend us from our current calamity.

Gavin Newsom flew to Davos to tell European leaders to “buck up.” He was upset the White House quashed his appearance. Meanwhile, back home, he leads no protests. He calls for no shutdown. Running his mouth in Davos but refusing to put his ass on the line in America.

Robert Reich had a similar message for Europe, writing from Berkeley that world leaders need to speak out. That their collective repudiation of Trump could be a tipping point. That they have means to oppose him and we don’t.

What I can’t, for the life of me, understand is why we’ve decided we’re powerless. Why we need Europe to stand up to our bully. It defies reason.

We can’t wait for Europe to stop our president. We can’t wait for Europe to impeach our Supreme Court justices that have declared the president above the law. We can’t wait for other countries to fix the brokenness that is American institutions. They can’t fix Congress. They can’t fix Wall Street greed. And they sure as shit cannot fix an American authoritarian system.

This is our job. Our responsibility. Trump is a dark mirror of all we’ve let rot in this nation of ours. We need to set things right our damn selves. We need to step up for ourselves and for the rest of humanity. Giving people like Trump and those he’s surrounded himself with in this administration this kind of unchecked power cannot be something we do not loudly and vigorously oppose.

It’s up to us.

This week a five-year-old boy was detained and used as bait by ICE in Minnesota. Grabbed in his driveway after preschool. Made to knock on his own front door. His family has an active asylum case. No deportation order. He’s in Texas now.

Yesterday the El Paso medical examiner ruled a death in ICE custody a homicide. Geraldo Lunas Campos. 55 years old. Someone pressed on his neck and chest until he couldn’t breathe. A witness heard him cry out “No puedo respirar.” Six people have died in detention in the first three weeks of this year.

Protesters in Minneapolis shot point blank with less-lethal rounds. Two blinded. A man shot in the leg. Renee Good shot in the face and killed. She was a legal observer. American citizens detained and asked for their papers like it’s Nazi fucking Germany. A woman tackled to the sidewalk for asking “Are you ICE?” A citizen put in a headlock during his lunch break shouting “I’m a citizen” while they dragged him away.

ICE agents ate lunch at a family restaurant then came back after closing and arrested the workers who served them. Schools circled. Buses followed. Maine just got “Operation Catch of the Day.” Tennessee about to require local cops to work with ICE. This is what the White House wants every state to become.

Yesterday the Guardian published a piece about civil war simulations run at the University of Pennsylvania. Senior former military and government officials. The scenario they gamed out in 2024 looks like Minnesota right now. Courts probably can’t or won’t intervene fast enough. Service members may face orders to use force against civilians and state national guard units. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits still hold.

We are not in a drill. This is not a warning about what might happen someday. This is happening.

One of the most troubling aspects of this moment is the assumption that we will have more leverage and power as an opposition sometime in the future. Generally that’s not how these things unfold. The Iranian protests have largely died down. Rebellions don’t get more powerful as authoritarians take control. We get less so.

Federal agents are killing and shooting Americans. They are rounding up children and using them as bait. People are being murdered in custody. If not now, when?

Eight days from now, on January 30, funding runs out for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the State Department, and others.

All of them weaponized. Defense used to threaten Greenland, threaten Venezuela, bomb Caracas, kidnap their president. They’re talking about American troops in American cities. Already done it with the National Guard and the Marines. State Department wielded to intimidate our allies. DHS using paramilitary forces against American citizens, against children, against anyone in their way.

We cannot fund any of this and pretend we’re opposing this administration.

Shut it down. All of it.

Democrats say they’ll vote against the Homeland Security bill. The Progressive Caucus says they’ll oppose immigration enforcement funding without reforms.

Not enough.

Shut down DHS. Shut down Defense. Shut down State. Shut it the fuck down. And ask the American people to stand with you.

Ask us to stand with each other. Ask us to get into the streets, to get involved in our communities, to support one another, to make sure people can weather the storm. Because we have to put the brakes on this train.

A lot of things are already funded through the end of the year. Food stamps. Veterans benefits. Much of the government’s basic operations. This isn’t about destroying the country. This is about drawing a line. This is about leaders doing something unprecedented and disruptive and dangerous because the moment demands it.

We need our leaders to put up a fight that looks like it matches the stakes.

If their efforts are just lawsuits and whining and bemoaning the lack of normalcy, it’s hard for Americans to stand strong. To be bold. To be brave. We’ve seen what this administration is willing to do. Tear gas. Grave bodily harm. Shooting us point blank in the face. Killing American citizens. Ripping families apart.

We can’t respond to that with thoughts and prayers any more than we can respond to school shootings that way.

We have to say enough is enough. We have to make our voices heard. The only way to do that is to yell together, loudly.

The only way our leaders can lead is if they show us the stakes are high enough that they’re gonna do something unprecedented and disruptive and dangerous. Shut the government down as long as it’s being led by people willing to disregard the Constitution and basic human rights.

Stand up now. Together. Before it’s too late and gets so much harder to do.

In 2013 we stopped a war with our voices. Obama ready to bomb Syria. Ships in the Mediterranean. Bipartisan consensus. Then the American people flooded Congress with phone calls, letters, and visits. The count flipped to 248 No versus 50 Yes in the House. MoveOn’s 8 million members mobilized tens of thousands of calls. Antiwar vigils in 224 cities. On the right, libertarians threatened primary challenges. The yes votes vanished. We did that.

The stakes are bigger now. The rot isn’t overseas. It’s in our driveways.

Eight days. Make the phones ring. Tell them to shut it down. All of it. Tell them we’ll have their backs if they have ours. Leave messages. Be loud.

Call Hakeem Jeffries at (202) 225-5936

Call John Fetterman at (202) 224-4254

Call Catherine Cortez Masto at (202) 224-3542

Call Ilhan Omar, Progressive Caucus Whip at (202) 225-4755 Tell her to hold the line. No bipartisan cover.

Call Henry Cuellar at (202) 225-1640 Tell him to walk away from the table. He represents the Rio Grande Valley He got his Trump pardon, time to nut up.

Last but not least Call Chi Ossé at (212) 788-7354 Tell him history is calling. Tell him to run. Tell him he has our support. He can run and beat Jeffries. Petitions start in 5 weeks

We beat fascism before. Here at home and worldwide. We can do it again.

But not by waiting. Not by funding the machine while we wring our hands. And not by asking Europe to save us from ourselves.

Eight days.

Corbin Trent

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Today is January 20, 2026. One year since Donald Trump took the oath again. We’re 25% of the way through. Three years left.

Gavin Newsom says he doesn’t know if there will be elections in 2028. Chuck Schumer calls this an existential threat to democracy. Nancy Pelosi warns that the republic is at stake. The talking heads on MSNBC nod gravely and tell us this is unprecedented, dangerous, a crisis.

And then they tell us to stay calm. Vote in the midterms. It’s going to be okay.

Both of these cannot be true.

If democracy is actually at stake, if we’re actually watching the construction of an authoritarian state, then “vote in the midterms and it’ll be okay” is not a real response. It’s what you say when you’re too scared to do anything that might cost you something.

The Democratic Party’s rhetoric and actions don’t match. They scream about existential threats and tell us to remain calm. They’re calculating and cowardly, so afraid that any real opinion might lose them an election that they try not to have one.

Hakeem Jeffries says he’s “not ruling out” impeaching Kristi Noem. Not ruling it out. They treat justice like a card to be played in a negotiation, not a duty to be upheld.

Look at what’s happened in just one year.

Trump signed a national security memorandum that builds a target list based on ideology—anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, “extremism” on migration, race, and gender, hostility toward traditional views on family and morality. That’s not crime. That’s belief. That’s who you are. Then it ties that framing to machinery: Joint Terrorism Task Forces, Treasury tools, IRS scrutiny, investigations into “networks” and “funders” and their employees.

They built a recruitment portal so Americans with law enforcement backgrounds can sign up to join federal operations. A specialized unit in the D.C. National Guard. A quick reaction force. Language about Guard forces being “available” for rapid mobilization to assist in “quelling civil disturbances.”

Greenland—Trump says we need it, “whether they like it or not.” Venezuela—we bombed Caracas, killed 80 people, kidnapped their president. When asked what limits exist on his power, Trump said: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

ICE agents shot an American woman in the face in Minneapolis. She wasn’t the target of any investigation. She was a legal observer. Her name was Renee Good. After she was killed, a man’s voice on the video said “fucking bitch.” The Vice President demanded absolute immunity for the shooters. Kristi Noem called her a domestic terrorist.

This is one year. This is 25%.

Here’s the thing people don’t want to face: there is no line Trump will cross that will finally give us the courage and wisdom to act. There is no moment when everyone suddenly agrees it’s time to fight. That’s not how this works. It happens slowly, and then all at once.

But we are not powerless. And we are not waiting.

Primaries start in March. That’s eight months of action before a single general election vote is cast. Eight months to decide who leads the opposition. Eight months to replace cowardice with courage.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are not the future. They are the past. We have to make them the past.

The good news is we don’t have to imagine what brave leadership looks like. It already exists.

Saikat Chakrabarti helped build the movement that elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and launched the Green New Deal. Abdul El-Sayed has been organizing and fighting in Michigan, building real coalitions. Graham Platner is running in Maine on exactly the kind of bold economic vision we need. These are people who understand the moment. People who will actually fight.

There are more. We’re going to find them. We’re going to support them. We’re going to make sure that when voters go to the polls in the primaries, they have a real choice—not between two flavors of managed decline, but between the past and a future worth fighting for.

This is about being brave.

Brave in your home. Brave in your community. Brave in the voting booth.

If ICE comes to your town, hit the streets. We are all Renee Good. Protect your neighbors. Stand together.

And in the primaries, vote for people who inspire you. Not the candidates you think the “moderates” will vote for. Not the safe picks. Not the people who tell us to stay calm while democracy burns.

We need a Democratic Party that can win back the hearts and minds and imagination of the American people. A party that matches its actions to its words. A party that believes we can build highways and rail, that we can have an economy that works for everyone, that we can create a future that is just and comfortable and kind.

We beat fascism in the 1930s here at home. We beat it worldwide. By God, we can do it again.

But not by waiting. Not by pretending. And not by being led by cowards.

The next eight months are the fight. And then we do it again.

Corbin​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Trent

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.