[I’m planning to pin this post to the top of the page for at least a few days, so scroll down for newer posts.]
I’ve turned on the new comments system and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ve already tested it out in various ways and it appears to be operating pretty well, as far as I can tell. But if you have any problems with it, please let me know in an email. You can find my email address underneath the photo at the top of the blog (the apple, books, and pointe shoes on the table). Click where it says “Email.”
If you’ve been commenting here already you shouldn’t experience any changes when you try to comment. As long as you use the username you’ve been using right along, and the email address you’ve been using right along (even if it’s not a real one), your comments should post without any problems and you wouldn’t even notice anything new if I hadn’t posted this announcement.
However, new commenters – that is, people with new usernames and/or new email addresses – will find that their first comment goes into moderation. It will not appear until I approve it. When I see it – which would be the next time I check the moderated comments, so there might be a time lag of a few hours – I will either approve it or disapprove it. If I approve it, you become a regular commenter and your future comments should post smoothly without going into moderation again.
So, in summary: old commenters no problem. New commenters, the first comment is moderated and after that no problem.
You might be surprised by the fact that, at least measured by official membership, the Democratic Socialists of America is a small group: 95,000 members. And yet in recent years they’ve certainly had a much greater influence on American politics than that would suggest.
The DSA has been around for close to fifty years, however, and before that elements existed that merged in 1982 to become the DSA. Socialists are famous for splitting and splintering, but these groups were able to merge.
By the way, a little digression here for levity’s sake:
Back to the DSA and its history. Note the later prominence of Bernie Sanders, whose leadership around 2015 marked a turning point for the organization:
Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president … DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.
Michael Harrington was a well-known professor, author, and leftist activist, and I recall his book on poverty in the US, The Other America, quite well. I was required to read it either in high school or college. No mention whatsoever was made at the time of the fact that he was a socialist. As Democratic Socialists go today, though, he was more mild and old-fashioned. Harrington hated Communism and really did think socialism could be accomplished without all the totalitarianism – or at least, had that hope. He supported Israel, too; how quaint!
But Harrington was responsible for promoting one idea that turns out to have been quite inspired: not to run as socialist (or Socialists), but to run as Democrats:
Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.”
That seed came from the failure of Socialists like Norman Thomas to achieve much at all in elections. Running as Democrats despite actually being socialists was the idea behind the name of the group, with the word “Democratic” coming first. The DSA also did not call itself a party even though it could have done so. It was not going to make Thomas’ mistake; it was going to back candidates but they would not be running as DSA members for the most part, and certainly not as Socialist Party members:
Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s. He considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign. He later endorsed Kennedy and said, “if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left”.
Some examples of early DSA members who got elected were the following:
Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins.
Dinkins was the NYC mayor who ran NY into the ground during the early 1990s. Who knew he was a DSA member? Not I. And, going to this Wiki page that purports to list prominent DSA members just from New York, I find – in addition to the obvious, like AOC and Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier – people such as Jerry Nadler, Jamaal Bowman, Linda Sarsour, and actor Wallace Shawn.
During the 1980s, the DSA backed Israel and Zionists. As you might expect, that is certainly no longer the case. They also supported leftist groups in Latin America, such as the Sandinistas.
The 1990s were difficult years for the DSA, due to Harrington’s death in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A younger group kept the movement alive, but barely – and of course leftism worked its way through academia, preparing the ground. It was during the Obama administration that the DSA had its resurgence (my guess is that there was an influx of money at that point, as well):
This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.
The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.
Those were the years when the modern DSA was coming of age. Then, with Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy in 2015-2016, it burst forth from its semi-cocoon. According to the way the DSA tells the story (at least, according to the DSA member writing the piece I’m quoting), it was the DSA pushing Sanders rather than the other way around:
In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd. …
That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.
As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.
I assume you know much of the rest of the story – for example, the election of the Squad, and recent victories such as that of Mamdani (some of that is in Part I). Nearly all these people ran as Democrats, with AOC’s defeat of an entrenched and powerful Democrat incumbent being an especially important turning point moment that showed the DSA the sort of victory that was now possible.
If you want to read the type of propaganda the DSA puts out at its website to woo prospective supporters, see this:
Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.
We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.
We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.
Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.
Some of the subject matter of Trump’s speech last night had already been leaked, so for those who had read the advance news, there weren’t too many surprises. Perhaps the scope of the Chinese hacking was a surprise, and the extent of the coverup of the evidence to hide it from the Trump administration – although anyone who has followed Russiagate and COVID and Hunter’s laptop couldn’t be all that shocked.
We have become used to these things, and that’s not good.
What will be the effect of what Trump revealed, and the documents that have been put on the White House website? I obviously don’t know, but if previous experience is any guide, not all that much. It’s incredibly difficult to prosecute these things and in particular to get convictions in DC courts, if DC ends up being the venue for any trials.
For people already inclined to hate Trump – and that’s about half of the country – none of this will convince them in the least. Trump could say that two plus two equals four, and they would say he’s wrong and/or lying. Already the MSM is proclaiming that this is all the same old stuff that Trump’s been peddling since November of 2020, and in a way they’re correct (except for some of the details). But just because he’s been saying it all that time doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
And what have I been saying for those years? Pretty much the following:
– Whatever really happened in 2020 or any other election, it is exceptionally difficult to prove fraud once it has occurred. Therefore election security must be tighter than it has been, in order to prevent fraud or the perception of the strong possibility of fraud. Trust in elections must be restored. That is extremely basic, and yet difficult to do. Not only is the SAVE Act meeting significant opposition in the Senate from a few Republicans in addition to all Democrats, but even if the SAVE Act were to pass and be successfully implemented, half of America would say it excluded many Democrat voters who are qualified to vote but couldn’t prove it by the new rules. Whether or not that is the case, it would be the argument.
– Universal automatic mail-in voting has to end, because it’s too susceptible to fraud. We need to go back to the old system in which absentee voting is only available for good reason, and require that a voter wanting an absentee ballot make a special request ahead of time. Filled-in ballots must arrive back by Election Day, because late-arriving ballots are the reason for long drawn-out vote-counting.
– Voting should all occur on the same day, or at the most a very short number of days such as a week.
– To register to vote, a person must prove citizenship. There are many ways to do that, and there needs to be special consideration for people who lack birth certificates for bona fide reasons. After that initial proof of citizenship, regular ID would do.
– Computer voting needs to end. Paper ballots are preferable although not perfect.
– Ballot harvesting needs to be more limited as well.
Over the next few weeks, I’m fairly certain that much will be written about the evidence on the White House website. For now, I’ll just add that Trump looked understandably tired during his speech. It’s astounding to me how much work he does at the age of eighty, and how much stress he carries.
When people think of South Africa – at least, people over fifty – they tend to think of its apartheid history. But in the decades since apartheid ended, South Africa’s efforts to undo those wrongs have caused extremely serious problems of their own [emphasis mine]:
It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. …
After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.
South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.
Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. …
Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.
I don’t pretend it’s not a dilemma to figure out how to proceed when one portion of a country has been severely discriminated against for that long and some sort of corrective is necessary. But I’m convinced that reverse racial preferences are not the answer.
The authors of that piece, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, claim that California is in danger of following in South Africa’s footsteps (without South Africa’s apartheid history):
[California’s] leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. …
This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.
During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.
The rest of the article goes into the particulars.
The term “fascist” is thrown around so much – and so inaccurately – these days that it’s come to mean “anyone with whom I disagree and think is doing bad things.” Most people haven’t a clue what it means except for that. I’m one of those people who has bothered to research it and understands the basics. But the following video taught me a lot that I hadn’t known, and I think it’s a valuable listen.
It’s been clear for quite some time that Vance has been flirting with the Tucker Carlson wing of the anti-Israel right. He’s refused to separate himself from Carlson by criticizing him, no matter how egregiously anti-Israel Tucker becomes; how many lies he tells or liars he platforms; or how friendly he is towards Putin, Qatar, and towards Islam as a religion of supposed tolerance of Christianity. This has been worrisome and caused people to wonder just how far Vance’s alliance with Carlson goes. Has he just been trying to keep the Carlson wing under the shelter of the big tent, or is he in agreement with Tucker?
Yesterday Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some things that indicate agreement with Carlson. Here’s a report:
JD Vance has claimed he is the target of an Israeli-funded propaganda campaign over his Iran peace push, and that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the ‘highest levels’ of Mossad.
The vice president made the explosive allegations during a nearly three-hour sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan.
Vance pointed to a Time magazine report he said proved American influencers were being paid to attack the Iran deal. The report notes that money has flowed through a former Trump campaign operative and is bankrolled by elements of the Israeli government.
‘My response to that is, well, go to hell,’ Vance said of those taking the cash to smear him. The vice president, who complained he has been branded an anti-Semite, declared that Israel is losing the public opinion battle in America.
He also said that ‘figures’ inside the Israeli government are manipulating American public opinion to keep the war going ‘indefinitely.’
Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’
These are claims that have been aired by the Tucker wing for quite some time, and the evidence for them is extremely poor and mostly rumor and innuendo. The following is about Vance’s allegation about Israel sabotaging the peace negotiations, which he says he based on an article in Time:
… [T]here is apparently a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to derail negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, according to Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan’s show last night. Why is the Vice President perpetuating this dubious claim? The reason is simple: it benefits him too.
Much like other theories that find a home on Rogan’s podcast, this one is thinly sourced and vastly misinterpreted. The article Vance cites for this conspiracy does indeed point to an Israeli-funded influence operation—a FARA-registered, Israeli-government-funded campaign, run through political consultant Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X, pushing pro-Israel content into the MAGA ecosystem, including through paid influencers who reportedly received suggested language via private group chats and compensation tied to engagement.
Where the article cuts against him is on the one point his whole story depends on: that this was a deliberate campaign built “to derail the negotiations” and keep the war going indefinitely. The Time magazine reporting establishes no such intent. Per the article, the contracted goal was preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel—a reputation campaign, not an anti-ceasefire operation. The sabotage motive is Vance’s attribution, not the reporting’s finding.
And the two people best positioned to know deny his version.
So, whatever you think of Vance’s using a Time story as support for his allegations, he’s not even citing it properly.
Vance was heavily involved in the negotiations with Iran. Now he’s indicating that he didn’t fail; Israel stabbed him in the back. I wonder if this sort of statement on Vance’s part represents a rift between Vance and Trump on this or whether Vance is doing this with Trump’s permission, to keep the Tuckeresque right in the GOP camp for the midterms.
Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’
When Rogan noted that most people believe Epstein was working for Mossad, the vice president did not dispute it. Vance noted that it was Mossad ‘or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country or both.’
Vance, who described himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on Epstein, said that anything tying the pedophile to spy agencies was likely destroyed after 2006 – when the financier was first arrested.
Get it? Epstein was a Mossad agent but he conveniently destroyed the evidence, so we can never know.
Actually, Epstein had “connections” to a lot of people who had nothing to do with his pedophilia; he was a famous guy with a lot of money and influence. I would have hoped this sort of insinuation would be beneath Vance, but apparently not:
On Epstein, the vice president agreed with Rogan that the financier was running an operation to pressure or compromise powerful people.
‘I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there,’ Vance said, though he admitted he cannot prove it.
‘And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.’
There, Vance sounds like Candace Owens, who likes to say she doesn’t know-know but she knows.
Asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, Vance pointed to social media posts and leaks to reporters.
“They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely,” he said.
Vance said critics had accused him of being influenced by Qatar and other foreign governments and of taking “marching orders from Tucker Carlson.” …
“When I open up the pages of Time Magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell,” Vance said.
Boo hoo, those Israeli-funded meanies were attacking him and that’s why Iran didn’t just give in to his brilliant negotiations.
It’s also of relevance that Vance chose the Joe Rogan podcast to air these grievances against Israel and these excuses for himself. Rogan is not Israel-friendly, nor is his main audience. I doubt Vance would go on Tucker’s show – Vance is smart, and he knows better than that. But Rogan’s show is the next best thing without being especially controversial.
For quite some time I’ve hoped that Rubio is the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. I’m certainly open to other possibilities, but so far Vance is not one of them.
[NOTE: When Carlson decided to split from the Republican Party, I wondered who he’d be supporting for the presidency in 2028. For a while I considered that Tucker himself might want to run. But now it occurs to me that it’s possible that he’d be supporting Vance for the head of a third party. This would be disastrous, IMHO, and could easily cause a Democrat to win if enough people ended up supporting Vance.
I’m not saying this will happen. I still think Vance wants to be the GOP nominee. But if he doesn’t get the nomination, I can easily imagine a situation in which he goes third-party to ally with Tucker and Tucker’s followers.]
A lot of rumors are swirling around about the talk Trump is scheduled to give to the nation tomorrow night at 9 PM Eastern Time. They all seem to involve some sort of statement about fraud – or at least “rigging” in terms of foreign influence – in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
In a way it’s old news, but Trump promises something new. You can see some of the rumors at Ace’s (see this), but what Trump has actually said so far is this:
Speaking in the Oval Office two days ahead of the planned address, Trump affirmed the speech would focus on elections and a “couple of other things.” …
… Trump framed the elections portion of his Thursday speech as the centerpiece. Two sources said he is expected to focus on voting machine security and alleged efforts by foreign nations to influence elections.
“It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up,” Trump said during a meeting with Iraq’s prime minister.
“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” the president added. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”
It could be about the SAVE Act. It could be about nearly anything related to elections. But I am convinced that, whatever he says – for example, if he produced what ordinarily would be considered ironclad evidence of fraud in previous elections – at least half the nation would not believe it. They don’t believe anything he says or anything his confederates say. They believe that everything and anything that comes from the GOP is fabricated, fake, false.
NOTE: Speaking of which, Chuck Grassley writes on X that he has evidence about prosecutor Jack Smith:
I received records frm DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Im 1 of the 44
Im alerting my colleagues who were impacted and will release the records w Sen Johnson so American ppl can see the evidence.
Most of the responses on X are from angry people saying they’re tired of this sort of thing without any prosecutions of high-up perpetrators such as Smith.
Congress may be about to make Daylight Savings Time the permanent time in the US, rather than shifting back and forth seasonally between Standard and DST. The seasonal shifting is annoying to many people, but the change would pit the Morning People against the Night People.
Summer isn’t the problem; it’s winter that creates the issue. Do you want you or your children to get up in the dark to go to work or school – something you may be doing already anyway if your start time is early? Or do you want the depressing experience of night falling long before the afternoon is finished? Your answer matters not only on whether you favor Night or Morning, plus how early work or school starts, but on your latitude and your east-west location in your time zone. The more north you live and the more to the east in your zone, the more extreme your winter/summer sunrise and sunset times.
I live in the north, and I live in the east of a time zone, and let’s just say I’ve never been a Morning Person. Even as a little child – and I mean aged 2 or 3 – I would balk at going to bed for the evening in what I considered the daytime. Luckily, though, because I lived in NYC, school began at 9 AM and I never had to get up for school in the dark until I started junior high.
I’d like to see school begin at 9 AM for everyone. There’s evidence that children, especially teenagers, have trouble with the early start times because they need a lot of sleep. My junior high and high school were overcrowded and we had split sessions at times, and I still remember what it felt like when school began at 7:30 AM. And no one cared that we were going to school in the dark, either.
I’m not at all sure this bill will pass the Senate, so it could all be moot.
Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned in the Open Thread that today is the Ides of July.
When I was about to start writing, the blog went down. Nor was it the usual “too many requests” problem. This time the glitch was at the level of the host’s server, and it affected quite a few sites. I don’t know how many, but when I phoned the server the agent told me that a whole tranche of their hosted sites were down, and that it would probably take “a few hours” to fix the issue. It seems to have taken close to three hours.
This sort of thing is frustrating. But it happens now and then with all hosts, as far as I can tell. A while back I looked into changing hosts, and there seemed to be many problems reported for all of them. So I’ve stuck with mine, for better or for worse.
Apologies to everyone who was trying to access the site this afternoon. But at least it wasn’t that something was wrong with this particular blog.
Meanwhile, I used part of the down time to work on a document in Word, and discovered that a recent update there had generated a bunch of automatic things that I don’t want. For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of “help.” But to figure out how to turn it off was not the easiest thing, although I finally accomplished it.
