Politics – About Things That Matter

A Failure Already? Bill Maher Declares Zohran Mamdani “A Straight Up Communist”

How respectable liberalism helps defend systems it claims to oppose.

One of the earliest dynamics I imagined in my recent novella (Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever) was not triumph, but backlash. The story assumes that the moment entrenched systems are seriously challenged, the response will not be curiosity or patience, but immediate verdicts of failure — long before structural change has even had time to begin. That reflex is not accidental. It is part of how power protects itself.

Which is why the speed with which Zohran Mamdani has been declared a disappointment is not surprising at all. Three weeks into office and New York’s housing crisis remains. Imagine that — after three whole weeks!! Rents are still unaffordable. Shelters are still crowded. Families are still doubling up, and young people are still leaving the city they love because they cannot imagine building a stable future there.

But what has been just as revealing as the impatience is the source of much of the outrage. Some of the loudest denunciations of Mamdani have come not only from the right, but from television personalities who still market themselves as liberals — most notably Bill Maher — who appear genuinely appalled that a major American city might elect someone who does not instinctively genuflect before market solutions.

Forgetting about our nation’s history of racially segregated neighborhoods and ghettoes, ignoring real estate and banking redlining, gated communities, white flight, and the exclusionary practices of the Trump family itself, Maher ridicules the obvious fact that home ownership in the U.S. has been and remains racist and an instrument of white supremacy. Think about it. Think about the racial impact of using property taxes to determine the quality of public schools. Yes, Mr. Maher, home ownership in America is racist.

However, by the standards of contemporary political commentary, such amnesia and willful ignorance has apparently provided enough time to declare defeat.

What is more striking still however is how little these attacks have to do with actual housing policy. They are not debates about zoning law, construction finance, or tenant protections. They are ideological rituals. Mamdani is denounced not only as a “socialist,” but as (in Maher’s words) “a straight-up communist,” as if these were self-explanatory epithets rather than political terms with long and very specific histories.

Red-baiting, once a reliable weapon of the right, has now become comfortable entertainment for liberal audiences.

One might reasonably expect professional commentators to understand the vocabulary they deploy so confidently. However, they evidently do not. Instead, we are offered ideological pantomime: capitalism good, socialism bad; privatization efficient, public ownership corrupt; taxes theft, regardless of what they fund or whom they protect. These slogans are not arguments. They are incantations — repeated not to clarify reality, but to prevent serious discussion of alternatives that might threaten existing concentrations of wealth and power.

Yet after just a few dinner-table conversations, even my own middle school grandchildren could explain what Maher and others seem either not to know or not to care to acknowledge. My grandkids knew that socialism refers to public ownership of the means of production, the use of regulated markets, and limits on extreme wealth through progressive taxation. They knew that communism, in classical political theory, is not a description of any society that exists or has ever existed, but a hopeful vision of a future. It’s a North Star goal in which abundance is shared, class divisions disappear, and even the state itself — always a structure used to enforce class hierarchy — withers away.

My little grandchildren also knew what most economists acknowledge without controversy: that every functioning economy in the world today is a mixed economy. They all combine public and private ownership, regulated and freer markets, and redistribution through taxation. To repeat, they are “mixed economies” — every one of them. The question is however, in whose favor are they mixed — in favor of the rich or of the poor? In the U.S., it’s the rich. In China, it’s the working class.

Moreover, what Maher and others call “communism” has already proven to work in the United States. They called it the New Deal. They called it Keynesianism, and it gave us workers Social Security, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for injury on the job, and a 40 hour work week. It made unions legal and provided jobs, income, and socially valuable work for millions of impoverished Americans when the government stepped in as employer of last resort. Its creation of the national park system made the U.S. government the country’s biggest land owner — the master of the planet’s most important “means of production.”

None of this is radical. It is introductory political economy.

What is radical, apparently, is saying any of this out loud on American television without first wrapping it in nervous apologies.

Housing policy then becomes not a question of long-term public investment and institutional redesign, but a morality play in which reformers are expected to perform miracles on cue — and are mocked when they cannot.

Yet the truly unrealistic position is believing that deregulated housing markets will somehow, after decades of failure, suddenly begin producing widespread affordability. The evidence is overwhelming that they will not. Left to themselves, housing markets maximize return on investment, not human stability. Luxury construction thrives; low-income units stagnate. Rent rises faster than wages. Speculation accelerates displacement. Public housing deteriorates under chronic underfunding while private capital flows freely into high-yield developments.

To call this “natural” is to mistake policy choices for inevitability.

If anything, the realistic position is the one Mamdani actually represents: that reversing these dynamics will take sustained political will, public investment, and institutional rebuilding — none of which can be accomplished by executive decree or cable-news bravado.

This is why ideological labels matter less than practical institutional policies. Passing tenant protections may not make headlines, but it changes lives. Securing funding streams for public housing repair may not trend on social media, but it prevents future crises. Rewriting zoning laws to allow denser, community-controlled development may not satisfy the appetite for spectacle, but it reshapes what becomes possible over time.

In other words, housing reform requires democracy — not performance.

In Against All Odds, accountability is not about scapegoats. It is about public reckoning with systems that were allowed to persist because they benefited the powerful and numbed the rest of us into acceptance. That kind of reckoning, whether in fiction or in real cities, cannot happen instantly. It unfolds through institutions slowly being repurposed for the common good rather than private extraction.

What Mamdani’s first weeks in office really reveal is not failure, but the size of the inheritance: decades of bipartisan accommodation to a housing system that treats insecurity as an acceptable cost of growth.

If we are honest, the scandal is not that housing has not been fixed in three weeks. The scandal is that it was allowed to deteriorate for thirty years while political leadership congratulated itself on “vibrant markets” and “urban renewal.”

Progressive politics, if it is to mean anything beyond branding, must be judged not by speed alone but by direction: by whether public institutions are being rebuilt rather than hollowed out, by whether power is shifting toward those who have long been excluded from shaping their own living conditions, and by whether economic life is being reorganized around human needs rather than speculative return.

Those metrics take time to register.

The Arc of Justice Alliance grew out of this same realization: that without new public imagination — and new public institutions to match it — we will remain trapped in systems that treat structural injustice as unfortunate but inevitable. Stories, movements, and policies must reinforce one another if democratic repair is to be more than a slogan.

That is why I write fiction alongside essays like this one. Not because stories replace politics, but because they can help us picture futures that our current institutions make difficult to imagine — and therefore difficult to fight for.

Three weeks is not a verdict. It is barely the opening scene.

The real question is not whether Zohran Mamdani has solved housing yet, but whether liberal America is willing to stop mistaking ideological comfort for political realism — and to admit that serious reform will always look dangerous to those who have grown accustomed to a system that works, more or less, for them.

How Even the American Left Keeps Falling for Regime-Change Narratives

Just when public attention is turning—once again—to unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his powerful associates, and the long history of elite impunity in the United States, we are suddenly confronted with a new foreign-policy emergency. Once again, we are told that events abroad demand our immediate moral outrage, our emotional investment, and our political alignment with the very leaders who are most eager to change the subject at home.

This is not coincidence. It is political deflection.

The Trump administration has every incentive to flood the media with international crisis narratives that redirect attention away from institutional corruption, judicial failures, and the uncomfortable truth that powerful men rarely face consequences in this country. And nothing serves that purpose more reliably than the familiar spectacle of righteous outrage against a designated foreign villain.

So here we go again.

We are being told—urgently and with manufactured moral certainty—that we must side with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald Trump’s America in condemning alleged mass killings by Iranian security forces. We are invited to clutch our pearls over reports that “thousands” may have died in Iran in the past week alone, while the credibility of those numbers goes largely unquestioned and the geopolitical context goes mostly unmentioned.

The timing is convenient. The narrative is familiar. And the political utility is obvious.

It all ignores the fact that for more than two years, Israel, with full political and military backing from the United States, has devastated Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed. Hospitals, schools, and water systems have been systematically destroyed. Starvation has been used as a weapon. Yet U.S. officials have either remained silent or have actively shielded Israel from accountability in international forums.

Now those same officials present themselves as guardians of human rights, suddenly appalled by civilian deaths.

Fortunately however, moral authority is not something that can be turned on and off like that at political convenience. By enabling mass slaughter in Gaza, Israel and the United States have forfeited any claim to be neutral or trustworthy narrators of human rights abuses elsewhere. When they point the finger at Iran, they do so with blood soaked hands.

What is most troubling, however, is that much of what passes for the American “left” appears ready—once again—to follow their lead.

Even progressive outlets that have long criticized U.S. imperialism are amplifying claims about Iran with little scrutiny, as if we have learned nothing from Iraq, Libya, or Syria. The familiar script is rolled out: heroic protesters, savage security forces, and a population yearning for Western-style liberation.

But we have seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.

Consider a striking example from just this week. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. During the interview, Panahi acknowledged something crucial: because of internet shutdowns and information blackouts, he said, “I do not have any trustworthy news from inside Iran. I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know where my colleagues are, where my family is. It is only the bits and pieces that you hear.”

And yet moments later, he spoke confidently of thousands—perhaps 2,000, perhaps even 20,000—killed by Iranian security forces. The interviewer did not challenge the figures, ask for sourcing, or remind viewers that casualty estimates in politicized conflicts are often wildly inflated during the early stages of unrest.

This is not serious journalism. It is narrative reinforcement.

None of this is to deny that Iran represses dissent or that many Iranians have legitimate grievances. It is simply to insist that repression alone does not explain why certain countries suddenly dominate Western headlines, while others—such as Israel—are insulated from scrutiny even when their actions are far more destructive.

The difference is not morality. It’s the way imperialism works.

Recall that immediately after 9/11, General Wesley Clark publicly revealed that the Pentagon had drawn up plans for regime change in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Iran. While the timeline shifted, the strategic objective did not. Iran has remained a top target of U.S. and Israeli policy for decades, regardless of which party occupies the White House.

Political scientists such as John Mearsheimer have described how these operations tend to follow a consistent pattern:
First, economic sanctions that cripple daily life and undermine public confidence in the government;
Second, support for opposition movements, often including covert funding and the use of provocateurs to escalate unrest;
Third, aggressive information warfare, in which unverified or exaggerated claims are circulated internationally to delegitimize the targeted regime;
Fourth, threats of military intervention—or actual intervention—once instability has been sufficiently inflamed.

This is not speculation. It is documented policy history. Libya followed this script. Syria followed this script. Iraq followed this script with catastrophic results.

Sanctions, in particular, deserve far more attention than they receive in Western reporting. They are not “smart” tools that surgically target political elites. They are blunt-force attacks on entire populations, restricting access to medicine, banking systems, and basic imports. They produce precisely the social desperation that then gets cited as proof of governmental illegitimacy.

In effect, we help create the crisis, then point to the crisis as justification for further intervention.

And after Gaza, skepticism about Western moral posturing is not cynicism. It is responsibility.

What is perhaps most disheartening is how easily even progressive voices are drawn into amplifying the early stages of these campaigns. Figures who would never have accepted Pentagon talking points about Latin America or Vietnam routinely accept them uncritically when the target is Iran. Good intentions do not prevent anyone from becoming useful to empire.

True solidarity with the Iranian people would start by opposing both domestic repression and foreign destabilization. It would recognize that sanctions are not neutral policy tools but instruments of social punishment, designed to fracture societies and manufacture crisis. And it would reject the deadly illusion that U.S.-backed regime change delivers democracy rather than collapsed states and endless violence.

We know this because we have already seen it—in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. These were not humanitarian successes. They were geopolitical experiments whose costs were paid by ordinary people.

The lesson should be obvious by now: when governments that have just enabled mass civilian slaughter suddenly rediscover their concern for human rights, we should ask what strategic objective that concern is meant to serve.

After Gaza, Western outrage over Iran cannot be separated from Western impunity in Israel. One exposes the hypocrisy of the other. The crucial fact is simple: the U.S. does not fund uprisings, enforce sanctions, and manipulate media narratives out of compassion.

It does so to maintain empire. To keep its hegemony.

Those who truly care about the future of Iran should resist becoming foot soldiers in yet another regime-change campaign. They should demand diplomacy, economic normalization, and international accountability that applies to allies as well as adversaries.

Above all, they should remember that justice does not arrive on the wings of bombers or through the quiet work of covert operations.

It never has.

And if the past quarter-century has taught us anything, it is this: the loudest voices claiming to defend human rights are too often the ones preparing the ground for the next war.

Author’s Note

This essay connects to themes explored in the author’s recent ChatGPT-assisted political novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, which uses storytelling to examine how media narratives, economic coercion, and permanent war distort democracy at home and abroad. Both the novella and the Arc of Justice Alliance / Project 2029 project argue that real security comes not from regime change or military dominance, but from building a “Republic of Care” grounded in democratic accountability and human dignity.

How Zohran Mamdani Can Become President: (An Excerpt from My “Arc of Justice Alliance” Novella)

Most people do not read policy papers; they’d rather read stories That is not a failure of intelligence; it simply a description of how human beings learn, imagine, and change.

My novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever was written to complement the policy statements of the emerging Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA). The book is not a prediction, nor a legislative blueprint. It is a story — a civic fable — meant to explore how democratic renewal might feel, sound, and unfold if ordinary people followed the lead of politicians such as Zohran Mamdani.

The book grew out of decades of political reflection, organizing experience, and moral concern, and was developed in conversation with AI. That collaboration does not replace human judgment; it sharpens it, forcing questions of coherence, plausibility, and ethical consistency that policy language often evades.

What follows is the book’s opening chapter. It is offered here not as entertainment, but as an invitation: to introduce the book’s exploration of how power operates, how legitimacy erodes, and how moral imagination may be a prerequisite for democratic repair.

Excerpt from Against All Odds

Chapter One – The Bronx Spring

“Every revolution begins as a local rumor — until someone believes it might be true.”
— AJA Field Notes, 2025

The winter had been long in Queens. Gray salt crusted the curbs. Trains screamed overhead like mechanical prayers. And yet, beneath the cold concrete, some-thing was stirring — quiet, electric, alive.

They called it the Bronx Spring.

It began with a tenants’ strike in a decaying building off 31st Avenue — the kind of place where the rent doubled every two years while the heat failed every January. Young organizers — Somali, Bangladeshi, Dominican — went door to door with clipboards and conviction. And at the center of it all stood Zohran Mamdani, a man whose voice carried both the warmth of Queens and the cadence of Kampala, equal parts poetry and fire.

He wasn’t a mayor yet, or even thinking that far ahead. He was a state assembly-man still riding the E train to Albany twice a week, still sending midnight texts that began, “Comrades, one more thing…” But something in him — and around him — had shifted.

The city was tired of promises. And the Bronx, like the chorus of an old labor hymn, began to hum again. The night it truly began, the wind sliced through the corridors of the Queensbridge Houses.

Zohran was there, coat collar turned up, hands full of coffee and flyers. A woman named Amina opened her door just wide enough to see his face. Behind her, a child slept under a mural of the Virgin and Malcolm X.

“Another politician?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m your neighbor.”

It wasn’t a line; it was true. He lived two blocks away.

That night, fifty tenants gathered in the laundry room to write what they called The People’s Demands: rent rollbacks, energy audits, legal aid for evictions. No one expected much. Not in a city where real estate and police unions ran the show. But when Zohran spoke, he didn’t sound like a candidate. He sounded like a possibility.

“Power,” he said, “isn’t what they hold in City Hall. It’s what we hold when we stop believing we’re alone.”

Days later, things began to move. Heat returned to the buildings. Landlords called emergency meetings. A city inspector — one who’d ignored complaints for years — appeared, clipboard trembling.

Something had changed.

Zohran’s small Astoria office became a nerve center — whiteboards, coffee cups, volunteers working until dawn. They mapped block-by-block networks of resistance.

They called it Reclaim the City. But within the movement, a quieter name began to circulate — The Arc of Justice Alliance.

It meant different things to different people: a moral trajectory, a bridge to something better, a plan for what democracy might still become. Late at night, Zoran wrote in his notebook: “If we can build one just block, we can build one just city. If we can build one just city, we can build one just nation.”

Power, even moral power, never goes unnoticed. In City Hall, consultants scoffed. The Post ran a headline: “Socialist Slum Preacher.” Developers whispered to their lobbyists. And in Washington, analysts began filing quiet memos about a charismatic legislator organizing “urban solidarity experiments” in Queens.

The movement was becoming visible. And visibility, in America, is a dangerous form of faith.

Spring came late that year. The cherry trees bloomed unevenly along Roosevelt Avenue, the air thick with rain and ambition. At a rally in Bryant Park, Mamdani stood beside bus drivers, sanitation workers, and students. The crowd wasn’t large, but it was awake — eyes bright, faces lifted toward something unseen but undeniable.

“Every generation,” he said, “faces a choice between cynicism and renewal. We stand tonight at the threshold of both.”

The words landed like prophecy.

By summer, the rumor would become a movement, the movement a campaign, and the campaign a city reborn in defiance of empire. But for now — on that cold evening in Queens, with the wind off the East River and the trains moaning overhead — it was still only a whisper, shared among the hopeful.

The Bronx Spring had begun.

Yet, even then, before anyone could name it, an odd tremor ran beneath the surface of public life — small bureaucratic stumbles, missing records, a strange silence from federal monitors who normally hovered over tenant disputes. It was as if the machinery of the old republic were developing hairline fractures no one yet saw.

Reflection

Stories do not replace policy.
But they often make policy thinkable.

If this excerpt resonates, it may be because it names something many people already sense: that power rests in an awakened electorate and that politicians like Zohran Mamdani can represent the future of our nation as the “Republic of Care” proposed by the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

As noted above, Against All Odds is part of the broader work of the AJA, an effort dedicated to imagining and building democratic institutions rooted in care, accountability, and human dignity.

If you find value in this work, you are invited — never pressured — to support that effort. Purchasing the full book or donating helps sustain writing, organizing, and public education aimed at turning moral imagination into lived reality.

Why China Governs—and America Can’t

Democracy isn’t about elections every four years. It’s about serving the majority—and by that standard, the U.S. is failing while China succeeds.

The ongoing dismantling of the American state under the Trump regime and the Republican blueprint known as Project 2025 does not represent an aberration or a temporary descent into madness. It represents the logical fruition of a political system structurally incapable of governing itself for the long term.

Trump merely makes visible what has long been true: the United States lacks the institutional continuity, political discipline, and moral orientation required to compete with societies capable of sustained planning. In that sense, America is not “falling behind.” It is revealing its nature and vulnerabilities . And that identity increasingly resembles what we once condescendingly labeled the Third World.

To grasp why, we must abandon the illusion that the United States is governed by a coherent state. It is not. It is governed by a revolving door of factions, donors, ideologues, lobbyists, and media spectacles that swing wildly every four to eight years, undoing whatever fragile policy coherence preceded them. Distrust of government is elevated to a civic virtue; sabotage is rebranded as freedom; long-term planning is treated as a threat rather than a necessity.

China operates on the opposite principle. It is governed by a permanent coordinating institution—the Chinese Communist Party—that does not dissolve after elections or permit private plutocrats to hollow out the state when their profits are threatened. One may object to its ideology or criticize its methods, but one cannot deny its structural advantage: it governs continuously. It plans in ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-year increments. It treats infrastructure, education, energy, and industrial policy as matters of national survival, not ideological fashion.

That single fact—the presence or absence of a permanent governing authority capable of subordinating private wealth to public purpose—explains nearly everything that follows.

Project 2025 throws the American contrast into stark relief. Its animating impulse is not reform but eradication. Get rid of government. Gut regulatory agencies. Purge the civil service. Replace professional competence with ideological loyalty. Distrust science. Abandon climate research. Defund education and public health. Criminalize critical thought—especially Black, feminist, Indigenous, or Hispanic history—on the grounds that such inquiry undermines patriotism. Schools, in this vision, are meant to produce obedience, not understanding.

Energy policy under this regime borders on parody. Halt solar and wind development. Dismiss climate science as a hoax. Revive “beautiful clean coal,” as if atmospheric chemistry were a branding exercise. Withdraw from international climate agreements.

Meanwhile, China dominates global solar manufacturing, battery technology, rare-earth processing, and electric transportation—not because it is morally superior, but because it decided decades ago that energy transition was inevitable and acted accordingly.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Arms-control treaties painstakingly negotiated over generations are abandoned on impulse. Nuclear safeguards are weakened. Diplomacy gives way to bullying. Alliances are treated as protection rackets. Institutions created after World War II to stabilize a fragile global order are mocked, hollowed out, or discarded.

Then the pendulum swings. Democrats return to power and timidly attempt to repair the damage. Agencies are restaffed. Climate policy is resurrected. Treaties are reentered. Education funding is restored.

But everyone knows the clock is already ticking. In four or eight years, the reversal will be reversed again. Businesses hesitate. Allies hedge. Long-term investment stalls. Why plan for a future that may be ideologically illegal after the next election?

This is paralysis disguised as democracy.

The only policies that survive these oscillations are those serving the rich and powerful: permanent war, regime change abroad, an ever-expanding military budget, corporate bailouts, and surveillance systems untouched by austerity. On these matters there is bipartisan consensus, because these are the interests of the class that actually governs the United States.

China, meanwhile, continues to move forward—not because it is benevolent, but because it is coherent. High-speed rail networks span the country. Ports, airports, and logistics hubs are built in record time. Universities expand. Technical education is prioritized. Poverty is treated as a social problem to be solved, not a moral failing to be punished.

The results are not theoretical. China has earned repeated recognition from the United Nations for lifting roughly 800 million people out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s—an achievement without historical precedent. This figure appears consistently in UN Development Programme and World Bank assessments. No amount of ideological hostility can erase that record.

Equally striking is the question of legitimacy. Contrary to Western assumptions, governance in China does not rely solely on repression. Long-running surveys conducted by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance—tracking Chinese public opinion over more than a decade—show consistently high and rising levels of public satisfaction with the national government, often exceeding 90 percent approval.

Compare this with the United States. Pew Research Center and Gallup polling over the past two decades reveal historic lows in trust toward the federal government, with confidence often hovering below 25 percent. Majorities of Americans report believing that elected officials do not care what people like them think, that government serves special interests, and that the political system is fundamentally broken. Decreasing numbers of Americans vote regularly, yet feel powerless. Chinese citizens vote for local officials and report that the permanent national system works.

This forces an uncomfortable question: what do we actually mean by democracy?

If democracy is reduced to the ritual of elections every two to four years—elections dominated by money, media manipulation, and structural exclusion—then the United States qualifies. But if democracy is understood more substantively, as governance that serves the material needs and long-term well-being of the majority, then the American claim collapses. By the testimony of citizens themselves—the people most closely involved—the United States fails at this task. China, by the same measure, succeeds.

This does not mean China is socialist in any classical sense. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” might more accurately be described as capitalism with Chinese characteristics: a hybrid system that tolerates markets while refusing to surrender political authority to them. The crucial word is authority. The Chinese state asserts the right to govern. The American state apologizes for its existence.

Ironically, the United States would need something like its own version of “socialism with American characteristics” to survive: a system that subordinates finance to production, treats health care and education as public goods, plans energy transitions over decades, and insulates core institutions from electoral whiplash. But such a transformation would require exactly what the American system cannot produce: permanent and irreversible investments in national health care, education, climate measures, nuclear disarmament, rent control, day care, labor unions, and wages that keep up with inflation.

Project 2025 is not the cause of American decline. It is the confession. It openly declares that the American right no longer believes in governing—only in dismantling. And because the system permits such nihilism to recur endlessly, because it contains no mechanism for enforcing continuity in the public interest, decline is not merely possible. It is inevitable.

The tragedy is not that China may surpass the United States. Civilizations rise and fall. That is history. The tragedy is that America is choosing decline in the name of freedom while hollowing out the very capacities that make freedom meaningful. A society that cannot plan, cannot remember, and cannot serve its people is not free.

It is merely ungoverned.

And ungoverned societies, no matter how wealthy they once were, eventually come to resemble the Third World they once presumed to lecture.

What Yet Another U.S. Surrender Looks Like — This Time in Ukraine

Since February 2022, Americans have been fed a fairy tale about the war in Ukraine — a story so uniform across NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, CNN, MSNBC, and even Democracy Now that it reveals less about Russian aggression and more about the collapse of critical journalism in the United States.

In that fairy tale, Russia “unprovoked” invaded an innocent neighbor. Ukraine, noble and outgunned, somehow fought the Russian behemoth to a heroic standstill while inflicting catastrophic losses on Moscow. The United States, we are told, has been the grown-up in the room — always seeking peace — while a stubborn, irrational Vladimir Putin refuses compromise.

None of that matches what has actually happened.

I don’t come to that conclusion lightly. Since the start of Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” I’ve written more than a dozen articles on Ukraine — most of them here and for OpEdNews. (See below.) Across those pieces, I’ve argued five things:

By long-established U.S. standards and precedents, Russia had ample cause to defend itself against NATO’s relentless march to its borders.
The war has never been simply Russia vs. Ukraine; it has always been a proxy war between Moscow and the United States/NATO.
Despite the vast imbalance in money, weaponry, and propaganda, Russia has prevailed militarily and strategically at nearly every turn.
Moscow has largely refrained from U.S.-style “Shock and Awe” tactics that deliberately terrorize civilian populations.
Whether one admires him or not, Putin has been the most restrained and predictable major leader in this war.

Those are strong claims. So let me explain how I arrived at them — and what they mean now that Washington and NATO are quietly negotiating terms of capitulation they once declared impossible.

Rejecting Scripted Narratives

From day one, I made a conscious decision to eschew mainstream narratives about Ukraine. I’ve watched this movie too many times: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. In each case, official “experts” and prestige media gave us a clean story of good intentions and necessary wars — until reality, corpses, and classified documents told another story.

Instead of relying on that machinery, I turned to analysts with actual experience and memory:

Realist scholars like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs,
Former intelligence and security professionals like Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter,
Military strategists like Col. Douglas MacGregor,
Independent geopolitical commentators like Alexander Mercouris, Alex Christoforou, Brian Berletic, Garland Nixon, Jimmy Dore, and Robert Barnes.

These aren’t saints. They disagree with one another. But they share three qualities utterly missing from mainstream coverage:

They know how wars actually work.
They remember U.S. foreign-policy history.
They are willing to analyze “designated enemies” rather than demonize them.

In particular, I’ve followed Alexander Mercouris’ daily 90-minute briefings, where he methodically tracks changes along the 1,000-kilometer line of contact. Through that lens I watched:

The slow, grinding fall of key Ukrainian strongholds,
The complete failure of Ukraine’s much-hyped 2023 “summer offensive,”
The steady Russian advance westward in an attrition campaign the mainstream never honestly described.

On paper, NATO’s side had nearly everything: money, high-tech weapons, satellites, intelligence, media power. Russia had geography, industrial capacity, and patience. Patience won.

NATO Expansion: The Forgotten Red Line

To understand why this war happened and why Russia was prepared to fight it, we have to step back.

For decades, Russian leaders of every stripe — including those favored in the West — warned that NATO expansion to Russia’s border was a red line. This wasn’t just Putin’s obsession. It was echoed by George Kennan (the architect of containment), Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow), and even CIA Director William Burns.

From the 1990s onward, successive U.S. administrations broke informal and formal assurances, pushed NATO eastward, armed and trained Ukrainian forces, and treated Russia as a defeated colony rather than a major power. The 2014 Maidan coup, the subsequent civil war in the Donbass, and eight years of Ukrainian shelling of Russian-speaking regions only deepened the crisis.

By the time Moscow launched its operation in 2022, Russia believed — rightly or wrongly — that it was fighting not for “land,” but for survival as a sovereign state.

That doesn’t make everything Russia has done morally pure. But it does make the word “unprovoked” dishonest.

De-Nazification: Propaganda or Inconvenient Fact?

One of Moscow’s stated objectives was “de-Nazification.” Western commentators mocked this as propaganda. Yet the facts are not really in dispute.

Units like the Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, and Right Sector have been documented — by Western journalists, Israeli media, and human rights organizations — as harboring neo-Nazi symbols, ideologies, and networks. After 2014, these formations were incorporated into Ukraine’s security structures and presented to the West as heroic defenders.

To acknowledge this is not to demonize all Ukrainians or deny their suffering. It is simply to say that Russia’s reference to Nazi influence was not conjured from thin air. It was rooted in something Western media chose to minimize or forget.

What Surrender Looks Like in a Suit

Today, the battlefield reality is grim for Kyiv:

Ukraine’s pre-war army has been largely destroyed.
Manpower is so depleted that men well into their 50s and 60s are being conscripted.
Western arsenals are drained.
Russia controls key logistical hubs and enjoys overwhelming artillery superiority.

In such a context, the word “stalemate” is a euphemism. Ukraine is no longer capable of decisive offensive action. NATO has no credible conventional path to “defeating” Russia in Ukraine.

So we hear whispers of “peace plans,” “ceasefires,” and “negotiations” — often framed as Donald Trump inexplicably “giving in” to Putin, as though Putin “has something on him.” That story continues the tired Russiagate myth and saves face for a Washington establishment that promised victory.

The truth is less dramatic and more humiliating: Washington and NATO lost their proxy war. The winner, as always, sets conditions.

And here is the irony: those “outrageous” conditions widely described as Putin’s “maximalist demands” are essentially the same objectives Russia articulated before the war began:

Ukrainian neutrality — no NATO membership.
Demilitarization — no NATO missile systems on Russia’s border.
De-Nazification — removal of Nazi-linked formations from state structures.
Recognition of Crimea and breakaway regions as Russian.
Security guarantees that NATO expansion stops.

In April 2022, at Istanbul, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators initialed a draft agreement along those lines. The war could have ended then. Instead, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed to Kyiv and reportedly urged Zelensky to abandon the deal and “fight on” with Western backing.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives were sacrificed on the altar of that decision.

Now, after two and a half years of bloodshed, we are back to those same basic terms — except Russia controls more territory, Ukraine is weaker, and NATO is more divided.

This is what surrender looks like in a suit: euphemisms in press conferences, face-saving language in communiqués, and the quiet acceptance of terms from a side the West swore it would defeat.

The fairy tale said Russia was isolated, collapsing, and on the brink of defeat.
Reality shows something else: NATO marched to Russia’s border, lit a proxy war in Ukraine, and lost.

The Pattern: Who’s Been Right All Along?

Ukraine is not a one-off mistake. It is part of a pattern.

Time and again, the voices that proved right were not the Pentagon spokespersons or network generals. They were the dissidents, the whistleblowers, the realists, the people willing to challenge the mythology of American innocence:

On Vietnam, they were right.
On Iraq’s non-existent WMD, they were right.
On Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, they were right.
On Libya and Syria, they were right.
On Gaza today, they are right again.

And on Ukraine, the “alternative” analysts I’ve followed — Sachs, Mearsheimer, McGovern, Ritter, MacGregor, Mercouris, and others — have been consistently correct where mainstream pundits have repeatedly failed.

That doesn’t make them infallible. It does mean that those who analyze “designated enemies” instead of demonizing them gain access to reality sooner.

Conclusion: A Chance for Humility

The war in Ukraine is ending as sober observers said it would: not with a triumphant Ukrainian flag over Crimea, but with Washington and Brussels quietly negotiating limits they once called unimaginable.

Ukraine did not “stand up” to Russia and win.
NATO did not “stop Putin.”
The West lost its proxy war and is searching for a way to disguise capitulation as diplomacy.

The deeper question now is not whether Russia learns humility, but whether we do. Will we continue to wage unwinnable wars, believe narratives nobody questions, and call that “defending democracy”? Or will we finally listen to the voices who have been right all along — not because they are smarter, but because they refused to confuse propaganda with truth?

For my part, I know where I stand. I stand with those who insist on seeing clearly, even — especially — when it’s our own leaders and our own narratives that must be questioned.

My Previous OpEdNews Articles on Ukraine (Chronological Order)

(2/26/22)
“20 Reasons Why The United States and Europe Bear Ultimate Responsibility for the Ukrainian Crisis”

(3/4/22)
“12 Potentially Good Outcomes of the Ukraine War”

(3/7/22)
“20 Principles for Making Sense of the Ukraine War”

(3/26/22)
“In Ukraine the ‘Gangsters of Capitalism’ Have Gone to the Matrasses Again”

(5/8/22)
“O.K. I’m A Putin Apologist: Here’s Why”

(7/15/22)
“Russia in Ukraine: Champion and Proxy for the World’s Oppressed”

(2/26/23)
“About Ukraine Even Marianne Williamson Has Sold Out to Imperialism and Conventional Thinking”

(4/23/23)
“Are We Meeting the Risen Christ in Russia and China?”

(8/24/23)
“Putin’s a Killer Who’s Guilty Until (Impossibly) Proven Innocent”

(3/26/24)
“Even for ‘Democracy Now,’ Putin’s to Blame for the Rock Concert Massacre”

(12/5/24)
“Neocons Quake as Trump Threatens Peace in Ukraine”

The Mamdani Lesson: Break Completely with the Billionaire Model

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself sitting at a rather surprising table — the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) planning committee. We’re charged with two enormous tasks: first, to craft a meaningful progressive response to the Right’s authoritarian blueprint, Project 2025. Second we’re to draft a counter-vision called Project 2029. It’s to be a path toward a People’s Republic grounded not in domination, but in justice, compassion, and democratic renewal.

For months now, we’ve been wrestling with the same dilemma: If the Republican establishment built a sprawling ecosystem of think tanks, media outlets, university programs, and religious platforms—funded by billionaires and designed to engineer public consciousness—shouldn’t we build a progressive version of the same? At one meeting after another, we even floated ideas about recruiting famous people to our cause and even of courting “friendly” billionaires like George Soros to bankroll a left-liberal infrastructure capable of matching the Right blow-for-blow.

But then something happened that, for me at least, broke the spell: Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race.

Let me underline what his victory represents. Here was a young candidate with 1% name recognition only a year ago. He faced opponents backed by unlimited money — super PACs, corporate donors, real-estate tycoons, the whole constellation of elite power determined to smother anything resembling a genuine democracy. And yet, he didn’t just challenge them; he defeated them. How? By mobilizing more than 100,000 volunteers, by conducting leadership trainings in living rooms and union halls, by knocking on one million doors, and by rallying ordinary New Yorkers around the elemental theme of affordability — the right of human beings to live with dignity in the communities they love.

Nothing flashy. Nothing overly intellectualized. No backroom deals.
Just democracy in its most radical, ancient sense: people talking to people.

His victory provided me with a moral awakening of sorts.

Because suddenly the entire strategy we’ve been discussing — building our own version of the Powell Memo machine — began to look not simply inadequate but morally compromised. If the way forward is through people, why would we imitate a model designed to sideline them? Why mimic the very structure that has delivered us a national government increasingly controlled by ignorant, degenerate, mafia types whose only qualifications seem to be cruelty, ignorance, and a willingness to auction off the country to the highest bidder?

If the fruit of the Right’s model is authoritarianism, why would we plant the same tree?

No. The Mamdani movement reveals the deeper truth:
Power does not flow down from billionaires or elites. It flows up from human beings who discover their own agency. As OpEdNews editor Rob Kall would say, “It’s Bottom-up.”

And so, I find myself convinced that Project 2029 cannot — must not — follow anything resembling the Republican strategy. We cannot organize a progressive future by begging for crumbs from oligarchs. Even “friendly” billionaires are not our allies; their worldview is too shaped by wealth to understand the soul of a democratic movement. Instead, what we need is a politics that speaks directly to the pain and hope of ordinary people:

Affordability
Green New Deal
Free college
Downsizing the military
Nuclear disarmament
Closing foreign military bases
High-speed rail
Universal healthcare

And this, not as technocratic bullet points, but as expressions of a moral vision rooted in the human right to live, learn, breathe, rest, and dream.

But this raises a practical question, the one our committee keeps circling back to: How do we build a movement capable of achieving such sweeping change without billionaire patrons? Here’s the blueprint that for me emerges when we take Mamdani’s victory seriously:

1. The Movement Must Be Member-Funded — Not Billionaire-Funded

If our goal is democratic empowerment, then our funding must come from the demos.
We need a dues-paying membership, millions strong, each giving what they can — $3, $5, $27. This is not naïve idealism. It is what built the civil rights movement, what sustained labor unions at their peak, and what fueled Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. Money raised from below transforms supporters into co-owners of the movement.

2. Build Leadership Schools, Not Think Tanks

The Right built think tanks to create obedient foot soldiers for oligarchy.
We need leadership academies to create authors of democracy.

Neighborhood leadership circles, online organizing schools, campus institutes for justice work, training hubs in churches and mosques — if Mamdani could train 100,000 volunteers in a single city, imagine what a nationwide network could accomplish.

3. Replace Media Propaganda with Relational Organizing

Fox News and right-wing radio work by isolating individuals and filling the void with fear.
Mamdani’s movement worked by connecting individuals — neighbor to neighbor.

Project 2029 should build a national relational organizing platform that links:

congregations,
tenant unions,
mutual aid groups,
environmental coalitions,
arts collectives,
campuses,
worker centers.

Democracy spreads best not through algorithms but through relationships.

4. Tell One Simple, Moral Story

Republicans have mastered messaging not because they are clever but because they are consistent. Mamdani was consistent too. His message didn’t wander through policy white papers; it hit the heart: “Everyone deserves to live here.”

Our message must be equally direct:
A nation where every person can live, learn, heal, and thrive without fear or exploitation.
Every program — healthcare, demilitarization, free college — reinforces that story.

5. The Ten-Thousand-Door Strategy, Scaled Nationally

If the Mamdani campaign knocked on a million doors in one city, Project 2029 should commit to knocking on fifty million nationwide. But these should not be transactional campaign knocks; they should be ongoing democratic conversations about housing, work, health, and climate.

Block by block, precinct by precinct, the country’s political imagination changes one kitchen-table talk at a time.

6. Activate the Spiritual and Artistic Imagination

As a theologian, teacher and former priest, I’ve spent my whole life insisting that politics has a spiritual dimension. The Right weaponized faith to defend hierarchy. We must reclaim it to defend justice. And we must bring artists into the center of our movement. The imagination is political terrain.

If we want new possibilities, we need new parables, new hymns, new murals, new metaphors of liberation.

7. Build Institutions That Answer to the Grassroots

To accomplish all this, we’ll need training centers, media platforms, and policy shops — but they must be governed by the movement itself, not by plutocratic trustees. Our institutions must function like worker cooperatives: democratic, transparent, and accountable to the base.

Conclusion: The Republic Is Waiting for Us

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is not an isolated event. It is a sign — a living reminder that ordinary people, organized, can defeat moneyed power. In that sense, his mayoral race is more than a political upset. It is a prophetic warning: if we cling to billionaire strategies, we will lose not only elections but our moral compass. But if we follow the path of radical democracy, we may yet redeem the American experiment.

Project 2029 must not be a mirror of Project 2025; it must be its antidote.

The future will not be built by oligarchs. It will be built by us — the many — knocking on doors, telling the truth, and refusing to surrender the idea that another world is possible. If 100,000 volunteers can change New York City, then millions can surely change America. And that is the real beginning of Project 2029.

A Day in the Life of Americans Observing the UN Declaration of Human Rights

Recently, at our Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) meeting, the Planning Committee discussed what daily life in the U.S. would look like if the AJA vision were implemented and the United States actually lived up to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)? Here’s an answer provided by ChatGPT.

Morning Light

The sun rises over Dayton, Ohio, and the Thompson family’s house wakes up with it — lights brightening automatically, powered by rooftop solar panels. The air is fresh, the street is quiet, and not a single car rumbles by. Most people bike or hop the community tram these days.

Maria Thompson rolls out of bed around seven. She’s a nurse practitioner at a neighborhood health co-op. Her hours are flexible; her paycheck is guaranteed. No side hustles, no “gig economy,” no hustling just to survive.

She remembers her mom, back in the 2020s, juggling three part-time jobs with no health insurance and no savings. That world — the world of burnout and precarity — is gone. Work now comes with dignity, fair pay, and time to rest.

“No one should have to earn the right to live with dignity.”

Downstairs, her husband Daniel sips coffee and scrolls through the Public Knowledge Network. It’s news without ads or algorithms — funded by the community, not corporations. Since media reform followed Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, journalism stopped being a ratings game and started being a public service.

At the table, their kids, Lila (16) and Jordan (11), eat fruit and cereal from their weekly co-op basket. There are no food deserts anymore — local farms supply every community with fresh produce. Healthy food is a right, not a luxury.

Midday Work, Human Style

Maria bikes to the clinic along quiet, tree-lined streets. Fossil fuels are long gone; the city runs on clean energy owned by its residents. The air smells like rain and lilacs, not gasoline.

At work, Maria greets patients by name. No billing forms, no deductibles, no endless phone calls with insurance companies. Health care isn’t a privilege anymore — it’s a right.

She spends real time with people. One of her patients, an older man with diabetes, used to ration his meds before universal care took hold. Now he’s thriving. He thanks her — but it’s not the thank-you of desperation. It’s gratitude born of mutual respect.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s high school history class is buzzing. The topic today: Why did it take so long for America to treat human rights as real?

A student asks, “If the Declaration was written in 1948, why didn’t people just do it?”
Daniel smiles. “Because first,” he says, “we had to believe we deserved it.”

“The biggest revolution wasn’t political — it was psychological.”

Afternoon: The Culture of Care

At lunch, Daniel joins other teachers in the school garden, munching on sandwiches and talking about the next community project. Teachers work six-hour days now, and every job comes with paid time for family, creativity, or civic engagement.

Across town, Lila is at her art studio internship, painting a mural about climate recovery. Her school believes in learning through doing — part of Article 27’s promise that everyone has the right to participate in cultural life.

At the community center, Jordan and his friends build solar robots in the after-school program. When the seniors arrive for tea, the kids pause their project to help set up tables. It’s normal now — generations sharing space, stories, and laughter. Loneliness has dropped, community ties have grown, and life feels… connected.

Evening: Democracy in Real Life

Dinner at the Thompson home is simple but joyful: vegetable paella, salad, fresh bread. No one eats in a rush. They talk, laugh, argue a little — about the next Community Assembly.

The Assemblies happen every month. People from every neighborhood vote on local issues through secure digital platforms. It’s democracy that actually feels like participation, not just voting every four years.

“Democracy isn’t an event. It’s a daily habit.”

After dinner, they stream a short documentary about how the world came together to rebuild after the climate crisis. The voiceover reminds them: “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was always a blueprint. It just took humanity seventy-five years to start building.”

Maria looks over at her family — fed, healthy, safe — and smiles. The dream didn’t die; it just took time to grow up.

Night: A Quiet Confidence

Later, Maria steps outside. The neighborhood glows softly under solar lamps. From the park, she hears music and laughter. She breathes deeply. The air is clean, the stars visible again.

Upstairs, Lila writes in her journal about becoming an environmental architect. She knows college will be free and open to everyone. Jordan’s reading a bedtime story about the first moon colony signing the Earth Charter.

Maria crawls into bed beside Daniel.
“Can you believe our grandparents lived without all this?” she whispers.
He grins. “They didn’t give up,” he says. “That’s why we have it.”

Outside, the world hums — steady, hopeful, human.

“When every person matters, everything changes.”

A New Normal

This isn’t a perfect world. Storms still come, people still disagree, and life still surprises. But the old fear — of losing your home, your job, your health, your future — is gone.

Now, human rights aren’t slogans. They’re the structure of everyday life.

Housing is guaranteed.
Healthcare is free.
Education is also free and lifts everyone.
Work supports, not consumes.
News informs, not divides.
Democracy belongs to all.

In this America, the extraordinary has become ordinary: breakfast with family, work with meaning, art without debt, democracy without despair.

The Thompsons aren’t special. They’re just people living in a country that finally remembered what the Declaration promised back in 1948:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

And this time, we meant it.

The U.S. & Israel: Cancers on the Planet

Let’s face it squarely: the United States and Zionist Israel function today as cancers on the body of our planet. Like malignant growths, they spread violence, exploitation, and environmental destruction far beyond their borders. If the earth is to heal, these cancers must be confronted, contained, and ultimately transformed— perhaps not in some apocalyptic purge, but healed through justice, repentance, and the dismantling of imperial systems that have long held humanity hostage.

That may sound harsh. But look at the evidence. Both nations operate as neo-colonial powers whose survival depends on domination—economic, military, and ideological. They perpetuate a global apartheid that privileges a small minority of largely white elites while oppressing and dispossessing the majority of the world’s people. Their leaders speak the language of democracy and freedom while practicing the politics of theft and genocide.

Israel has become a settler-colonial project rooted in dispossession and sustained by U.S. complicity. It violates international law with impunity, massacres civilians under the guise of “self-defense,” and treats the Palestinian people as less than human. The result is genocide—a twenty-first-century repetition of the very atrocities the world once swore “never again” to allow.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson recently observed that Israel’s behavior could easily provoke a war with Iran, a conflict that might finally expose the illegitimacy of Israel’s apartheid state. Though one might pray for peace, it is difficult not to hope for Israel’s utter defeat in its conflict with Iran. The world would be far better off if the Zionist state of Israel did not exist at all.

The same holds true for the United States—Israel’s patron and enabler. The U.S. is guilty of the same imperial arrogance. As economist Jeffrey Sachs reminds us, there is scarcely a conflict anywhere on the globe that cannot be traced back to Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels—the old colonial capitals still trying to govern a postcolonial world. Together, they represent barely twelve percent of humanity, yet they presume to dictate the fate of the remaining eighty-eight percent.

Instead of acknowledging their centuries of plunder and offering reparations to the Global South, these powers double down on their arrogance. When formerly colonized nations begin to cooperate for mutual development through alliances such as BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the West responds not with support but with sanctions, propaganda, and threats. The message is clear: independence will not be tolerated; self-determination will be punished. The Global South’s neocolonial status and resulting poverty must continue for the benefit of “the developed world.”

Consider the behavior of U.S. presidents—Republican and Democrat alike—who behave less like diplomats than emperors. Donald Trump exemplified this imperial mentality, issuing demands and threats as if the world were his personal fiefdom. He ordered the execution of alleged drug traffickers in Caribbean waters without trial or evidence. He commanded Vladimir Putin to agree to an unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine, as though Russia were a vassal state. He even demanded that Brazilian President Lula da Silva drop charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right politician accused of attempting a coup.

This is not diplomacy; it is imperial arrogance in its purest form. As Sachs notes, such behavior stems from a toxic blend of stupidity, historical amnesia, and contempt for international law. The U.S., with only 4.2% of the world’s population, continues to imagine it has the divine right to rule the remaining 95.8%. Its military planners openly speak of “full spectrum dominance”—the ambition to control every domain of warfare, from land and sea to air, space, and cyberspace. No other nation on earth — not Russia, not China, not Iran — articulates such a strategy. It is a uniquely American pathology.

Yet history has moved on. The world of 2025 is not the world of 1945. The United States no longer holds uncontested military or economic supremacy. The unipolar moment is over, and multipolar reality has arrived. China has surpassed the U.S. economically and possesses a formidable military that no Western coalition could hope to subdue. Numerous countries now possess nuclear weapons, making large-scale invasions suicidal. Pentagon war games repeatedly reach the same conclusion: in any conventional conflict with China, the United States would lose.

Nor can the U.S. claim superiority in Europe’s proxy war against Russia. The conflict in Ukraine has revealed that the combined military might of NATO—supposedly the greatest alliance in history—cannot defeat Russia on its own borders. Despite unprecedented aid and intelligence sharing, Western powers have been humbled by a nation they long dismissed as backward and fragile. Like David against Goliath, Russia has exposed the limits of Western militarism and the hollowness of its propaganda.

Meanwhile, the rise of digital communication has shattered the West’s monopoly over information. Once, Washington and London could script the global narrative through newspapers, Hollywood, and network television. Today, social media and independent journalism allow the world’s majority to challenge those narratives in real time. The lies that once justified wars and coups are now exposed within hours. The empire’s ideological armor is cracking.

And yet, the rulers of the old order refuse to accept this new reality. They continue to act as though history has not moved on, as though the colonial empires of yesterday still command obedience. They’ve not gotten the memo that humanity has entered a new era—one in which power is shifting toward the Global South, and the earth itself demands a politics rooted in balance rather than domination.

What is at stake is nothing less than planetary survival. The cancers of imperialism and Zionism threaten not only justice but the ecological stability of the planet. Endless war, fossil-fueled militarism, and corporate greed are devouring the biosphere. The U.S. Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of oil on earth. Israel’s occupation of Palestine includes the theft of scarce water resources. Together, these systems of domination represent metastasizing tumors that drain the life force of our shared home.

But cancers, as any doctor will tell you, can be treated. The cure begins with truth-telling—with naming the disease for what it is. It continues with radical surgery: dismantling military bases, ending illegal occupations, canceling debts, and redistributing resources to repair centuries of exploitation. And finally, healing requires transformation: the emergence of a new consciousness that recognizes the oneness of humanity and the sacredness of the earth.

These are the issues voters should insist be addressed. These are the issues both Republicans and Democrats avoid.

The era of empire is ending, whether Washington and Tel Aviv acknowledge it or not. The world is awakening to a different vision of civilization—one based on cooperation rather than conquest, on justice rather than greed. If the United States and Israel wish to survive, they must abandon their imperial pretensions and join the human community as equal members, not self-appointed masters.

For the good of the planet—for the sake of life itself—it’s time to stop pretending that the cancers of empire can coexist with the health of the earth. Healing requires courage, repentance, and a willingness to imagine another way of being in the world. The future belongs not to the empires of the past, but to those who choose life, solidarity, and planetary wholeness.

Spare me the Crocodile Tears: Assassination Is the American Way

Please spare me the handwringing over the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. Like you, I’ve heard our politicians say there’s no place for political violence in America. Others have said such atrocities are the province of the right or alternatively of the left

All of that is false. It’s complete B.S. Face it, America itself and its CIA (often in cooperation with organized crime) are assassination experts. It’s not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. It’s not a question of “left” (as if there were a real “left” in America) or “right.”

No, it’s the American way. It’s what “we” do in the world. And to stop domestic assassinations, that’s what must change.

As Martin Luther King told us long ago, the U.S. (along with Israel, and NATO I would add) is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. (Vijay Prashad calls NATO “the machine that destroys humanity.”) Our government and those allies commit targeted and random assassinations all the time.

Think of the extrajudicial bombing of that Venezuelan fishing boat just last week. Without advancing any evidence whatsoever, those in the boat were blown up because of “suspicions” that they were drug dealers. No proof, no arrests, no trial. No handwringing or tears. Just killed remorselessly “on suspicion.” All the victims had (now severely traumatized) families.

Then think of Israeli threats to “take out” (decapitation, they call it) the elected leaders of Iran – or of their attempts a week ago to kill Hamas leaders as they participated in peace talks in Qatar. Think of the way Israel recently killed Yemen’s prime minister Ahmed al Rahawi and other Yemeni political leaders. And need we say the names Allende, Lumumba, Kaddafi, Guevara, or of a whole host of other political leaders routinely offed by the United States? Or all those attempts to murder Fidel Castro. Now they’re talking about taking out Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela

But Kirk was different you might say. Though liberals don’t agree with most of his positions, he was a journalist, a debater, an organizer. His assassination was an attack on free speech, on the first amendment. Killing him threatens the very concept of press freedom.

And the way he was killed was especially brutal. On “Breaking Points,” Krystal Ball even urged her viewers not to watch the video. “It will haunt you for the rest of your life,” she warned.

But all of that is B.S. too. “Our” assassins don’t care about free speech, free press, the first amendment or the assassinations’ brutality. For instance, “we” and Israel kill famous journalists virtually every day. And it’s all done in the most horrendous ways imaginable. More journalists (many of them award-winning) have been killed by U.S.-supported Zionists than all those killed in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined.

AND IT HAPPENS VIRTUALLY EVERY DAY!!

Those routine atrocities occur in Palestine, where many of the victims have their heads blown completely off. And it’s not just the journalists and other public figures. In many cases it’s their families too – wives, children, infants, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents — who are killed along with them.

So, again, please spare me the crocodile tears! You can’t routinely assassinate innocents, political leaders, and journalists across the planet and not expect it to come home.

Yes, with the political murder of Charlie Kirk assassination’s homecoming is undeniable and horrific. The chickens have indeed come here to roost.

And it’s not something that can be cured by stricter gun laws or by left and right singing Kumbaya together.

What must change is U.S. policy. “We” and Israel and NATO must stop being the world’s foremost political assassins!

The Epstein Case May Bring the Entire System Down: AJA Take Note!

When I tell friends about my involvement with OpEdNews’ Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA), their response often borders on disbelief. They’ll say, “Sure, sounds noble—but for something like that to succeed, the entire U.S. and NATO system would have to collapse first.”

Sometimes I’ve found myself agreeing with them. After all, AJA’s vision is sweeping. It aims to build on the left, the kind of powerful infrastructure that MAGA Republicans have laid out for themselves in their Project 2025 manifesto. Its goal is nothing less than reinventing government to serve ordinary people rather than the rich and powerful.

But here’s the problem: the existing system is so entrenched that genuine change often feels impossible. Unless some catastrophic rupture occurs, the machinery of empire and corporate control looks immovable.

Then came Jeffrey Epstein.

The Epstein affair, I have come to realize, contains the explosive potential to unravel the entire Western system.

Why? Because the case points toward something almost unspeakable: the governments of the United States and Israel are implicated not only in covering up sexual violence against children, but in actively organizing and sponsoring it as a tool of blackmail. If that is true—and the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests it is—then we are not just confronting corruption or incompetence. We are confronting a system so depraved that it has turned pedophilia into a weapon of statecraft.

And once ordinary people grasp that truth, no amount of partisan spin will save the system from collapse.

The Weight of Circumstantial Evidence

To understand the gravity of this possibility, it is important to stress the role of circumstantial evidence in criminal justice.

As I’ve recently pointed out, and contrary to popular belief, most convictions—especially in white-collar cases—do not rely on “smoking gun” documents or direct eyewitnesses. They rely on inference: the accumulation of facts that, taken together, point beyond reasonable doubt. Motive, means, opportunity, DNA traces, fingerprints, destruction of evidence, false statements, suspicious associations—all these can convict without a single direct witness to the act.

That is exactly the kind of evidence accumulating around Epstein. Consider the essentials of what has emerged:

The systematic rape of underage girls.
Apparently orchestrated by intelligence agencies—the CIA and Mossad—through assets like Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their associates.
Carried out for the purpose of collecting compromising material (kompromat) on powerful men.
Deployed to ensure that the world’s elites could be controlled and manipulated to serve U.S. and Israeli interests.

This is not conspiracy fantasy. It is where the trail of evidence leads.

Signs of Cover-Up

The circumstantial evidence is damning:

Official deception: U.S. authorities initially promised to release Epstein files in full, later claimed no such files existed, and finally released a mere 33,000 pages—less than 1% of what the FBI possesses.
The prison “suicide”: Epstein himself, the most important witness, died under conditions so suspicious that even Ghislaine Maxwell believes he was murdered. Surveillance cameras malfunctioned, guards fell asleep, and evidence was tampered with.
Censored names: The FBI redacted Donald Trump’s name, along with those of other high-profile figures, from the released documents. Redaction of such relevance is indistinguishable from destruction of evidence.
Intelligence ties: Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, had well-documented Mossad connections. Based on such ties, respected figures—including economist Jeffrey Sachs and congressman Thomas Massie—have concluded that Epstein was indeed a Mossad asset.
The sweetheart deal: Despite overwhelming evidence of sex crimes against minors, Epstein secured an astonishingly lenient plea bargain in 2008. The prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, later testified that he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and that the case was “above his pay grade.”
Suspicious leniency for Maxwell: After discussions with Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell was quietly moved from a maximum-security facility to a minimum-security prison whose policy specifically excludes sex offenders.
Unusual bargaining power: Maxwell now conditions any congressional testimony on immunity, advance questions, and testimony outside prison walls. Few convicted felons enjoy that kind of leverage.

Taken together, these facts paint a chilling picture of deliberate obstruction and protection.

Questions of Character

Equally troubling is the character of those who have denied Epstein’s intelligence connections.

Donald Trump insists he barely knew Epstein, despite ample photographic and testimonial evidence to the contrary. Trump’s record of habitual lying is a matter of public record.

Ghislaine Maxwell has twice been indicted for perjury. Her status as a jailhouse informer who stands to personally benefit from exonerating the rich and powerful connected with the case hardly qualifies her as a trustworthy source.

And as for the CIA—its former director Mike Pompeo openly admitted that agency operatives are trained to “lie, cheat, and steal.” To accept denials from such sources at face value is to accept testimony from admitted professional liars.

Neither President Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, nor any CIA operative is a credible witness. All of them are compromised actors whose interest lies in suppressing the truth.

A Crisis That Could Change Everything

As the Epstein revelations continue to unfold, the implications are staggering.

This is not about partisan politics. It is not about Republicans versus Democrats, or about conservatives versus liberals. It is about a system in which the ruling class of the United States and its closest ally, Israel, have apparently used the rape of children as a tool of blackmail to maintain global dominance.

No matter where ordinary people stand politically—whether left, right, or center—this is a line too far. Few Americans or Europeans will tolerate their governments being complicit in the systematic violation of schoolgirls.

That is why the Epstein case has revolutionary potential. It exposes rot so deep, depravity so shocking, that once the public fully grasps it, the legitimacy of the system itself could collapse.

The Arc of Justice and the Opportunity Ahead

Here lies the paradox: while many dismiss projects like the Arc of Justice Alliance as quixotic, the Epstein case may provide exactly the systemic rupture that movements for justice have been waiting for.

If the truth about Epstein, the CIA, and Mossad becomes undeniable, a massive crisis of legitimacy will follow. That crisis could open the door to fundamental change—change that AJA and allied movements are preparing to advance.

Far from tilting at windmills, we may soon find ourselves at the forefront of a historic turning point.

The Epstein scandal is not just another corruption story. It may well be the crack in the dam, the event that triggers the collapse of a system too evil to sustain itself.

And if that collapse comes, the task will be to ensure that what rises from the rubble is a system finally dedicated to justice—for the many, not the few