Nick Fuentes Throws Down The Gauntlet To Israel-First GOP

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, deploys $100 million specifically to unseat left-wing progressive and right-wing nationalist Congressmen and women that are going to vote against foreign aid to Israel. The ADL, Anti-Defamation League, defamation of who? - the Jewish people - led by Jonathan Greenblatt, he's got a line at every social platform. In some sense he controls who has a platform and who doesn't. He leads the boycott against Ye (formerly Kanye West), against Mel Gibson, against other companies. 

Are you starting to see? This is how they operate. This is how they maintain control. They find the bottlenecks. They find the chokepoints in the elite institutions, and they focus their money, position, and resources to squash dissent, create chilling effects, so that other people are afraid to step out of line, and this is how they drag a country to war. This is how they get a bankrupt country to promise to give them $4 billion a year for twenty years. That's how they do it. That's how they've always done it. And that's all these people like Josh Hammer, and (Ben) Shapiro, and (Mark) Levin, and (Laura) Loomer, and the rest of them, that's all they care about. 

They don't want people to think these things; They don't want people to hear these things, say these things, organize on the basis of them. They don't want people that think these things in positions of power, because they know that the more that that happens, the less money Israel is going to get . . . . And Israel needs that money because they want to expand their borders, and they have a lot of enemies that they cannot fight by themselves. That's the grand irony. Shapiro says, "If you can't afford to live in the city you're born in, well, live somewhere else." If Israel can't afford to fight its own wars, (Shapiro says) "we have to send them $20 billion immediately!" Really? And this is where people are getting pissed off. Cause that's bullshit. 

Americans are being told - if you can't afford groceries, if you can't afford your house, get a 50-year mortgage, I don't know, get a debt contract with the bank for half of a century. You can't afford to live in a city your ancestors are buried in? I don't know - go work on an oil rig or something. Oh, Israel can't afford to fight its millions of enemies that they created to make their country bigger? Oh, well, send them the missiles they need - $20 billion immediately. Really?

You (Ben Shapiro) with your Israeli wife? Are you kidding me? And that's all they care about. This punk - Ben Shapiro - look at what a spiteful mutant he is. Look at what a spiteful little creature he is. He looks wicked. He looks in his face wicked. He's got his big giant hat on, and he sits there and he says, "You can never retire, Goyim, just get a 50-year mortgage. Go move somewhere else." 

Our country's broke. Our future was mortgaged. We're debt slaves to the government and BlackRock. If we can't afford it, get lost. Fuck off. If Israel can't afford the wars that they themselves start, Shapiro says what? We have to bail them out. We have to defend them. 

We have to give them our money? Why don't you (Shapiro) go and live there? You didn't even marry an American. You don't have American kids. You don't have an American wife. What's stopping you? What are you even doing here? Get lost. This country's for Americans. The tax dollars are for Americans. The government is for Americans. Everything you see here - this is for us. This is our country. And Trump is being used to thwart it. 

As long as Trump is America last, I'm not with Trump. And these guys like Shabbos Kestenbaum and Mark Levin and Randy Fine, they want to hide behind Trump and say,' "You're not MAGA." You're right. As long as MAGA puts America last, to hell with Trump. I don't want him. As long as Trump is with those guys, you can keep him. If Trump is with Randy Fine and Lindsey Graham and Ben Shapiro and fucking psycho (Laura) Loomer, and Mark Levin, you can have him. If that's what MAGA is, you can keep it. We want America First. We want America First. We want Tucker. We want Candace (Owens). We want Fuentes. We want Brett Cooper. We want Marjorie Green, Thomas Massie. We want America First. That's the new movement. You can have Trump. You can have Shapiro. You can keep all that shit. We're done with that.

And for people that say, "good riddance," I say, "See you in the mid-terms." For all those people that would say, "Who needs you?" "We don't need you in MAGA." Yeah, well, good luck in the mid-terms. Good luck with your majority, cause we're out. You put America last? You want us to vote for a Republican Congress, for what? So you can give our money to Israel? Fuck off. 

We won't show up. We won't be there in '26 and we'll be there in '28, but you're not gonna like it. We are coming in Iowa. We are coming for you in Iowa. We are coming for you in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. 

That's what they don't want to see. We are in the universities. We are in the think tanks, we are in the Congressional offices. We are in your fucking walls. And we will be there in every caucus in early primary state(s). We will be there in the GOP primary. And if you think you're going to pull this next time? Forget it. Trump says,' "I don't need your vote"? Well, let's see how that goes for your buddy J. D. Vance. Not going to go the way you think. You're not going to like it. So that's that."

                                            --------Nick Fuentes

Source:

"Nick Fuentes REVEALS the Only Way to Salvage the MAGA Coalition," Liberty Vault, You Tube, November 16, 2025

Heresy On The Right: Nick Fuentes Says Jewish Identity/Israel Incompatible with "America First"

  . . . as far as the Jews are concerned, I think that, like I said, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neo-cons and all of those things that you talk about. . .  ethnicity, religion, identity . . . .and let me give you like a perfect example . . so you say on your (Tucker Carlson) show that we have to treat Israel like any other country . . . and I sort of understand that in principle because Israel is another foreign country, but Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that, because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, there are [a] significant number of Jews in Europe but also in the United States, and because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they're a stateless people, they're unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years - and I think that's a good thing - and now they have this territory in Israel. 

There's a deep religious affection for the state. It's bound up in their identity. The story of the Exodus from Egypt, the promise of the land, all these things. Let's say in the United States, for example, somebody like a Sheldon Adelson. He's not Israeli. Is he an ideological neo-con? Does he believe in the promise of democratic globalism? I don't think necessarily. His heart is in Israel. And it's because he's a proud Jewish person. 

And I guess what I'm saying is that, if you are a Jewish person in America, you're sort of, and again, it's not because they're born, but it's sort of a rational self-interest politically, to say, "I'm a minority - I'm a religious ethnic minority. This is not really my 'home.' My ancestral home is in Israel." That's like a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel, and I would say, on top of that, for the international Jewish community.  They're extremely organized and many of them are critical of Israel, or Israel's current government, or the project of Israel, but I guess what they have in common, unlike let's say, like Singapore, for example, is that they have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interest of themselves before the interests of their home country. 

And there's like, there's no other country that has a similar arrangement like that. No other country has a strong identity like that, this religious blood and soil conviction, the history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted, and, in particular, the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple. That's why Eric Weinstein goes to the Arch of Titus and gives it the finger and takes a picture. We don't think like that as Americans and white people. We don't think about the Roman Empire and two thousand years ago. They do. 

And I guess that's really, and I don't think that's me saying the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. I don't think that's me being hateful. I don't think that's me being collectivist. I think that's understanding that identity politics, whether you love it or hate it, whatever you feel about it, it's a reality that we live in a world of Jews and Christians, of whites and blacks, these identities mean something to us and they mean things to each other. And we can't sort of wish them away. And it feels like white people and Christians are the only ones that do that. . . . .

A big challenge to (putting aside the tribal interest for the general interest*) is organized Jewry in America. I don't think Bill Ackman is capable of that. I don't think Sheldon Adelson is capable of that. I don't think Yoram Hazony is capable of that, for that matter. And many other(s) on the right and the left. And I see Jewishness as the common denominator. And you're right. It's not (that) all Jewish people feel the same way. No one would say that, but that does seem to be the common denominator. And I just feel like it needs to be called out explicitly. And I like what you said the other day. If you're serving in another country's military or have dual citizenship you really can't be a part of this (America First) project. . . . 

What I would like is for the United States government to not be influenced by these kinds of foreign allegiances. Not with money that comes from, you know, "American citizens" like Sheldon Adelson, not from foreign lobbyists. Like in terms of tangible things I don't think we disagree on any of it. Like registering AIPAC and FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), banning dual citizenship . . .. . 

We don't want to kill anybody, we don't want to harm anybody, we just want to put America First.

 

--------Nick Fuentes on the Tucker Carlson podcast, 10/27/25

*The specific phrase Tucker and Fuentes used for "general interest" was "corporate interest," which is, of course, the "tribalism" of Big Capital over the rest of us. 

 

Standing Up To The Bully: Moscow Rejects U.S. Attacks In the Caribbean

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again denounced U.S. actions taken against Venezuela yesterday, particularly the blowing up of nineteen small vessels that have claimed the lives of dozens of people not shown to have committed any crimes, let alone crimes deserving an instant death penalty without trial.

"On the pretext of fighting narco-trafficking it arbitrarily destroys boats without evidence that they are transporting drugs, as they claim," Lavrov said, adding that "that's not how countries that respect the law behave; it's how countries that believe themselves above it behave."

The top Russian diplomat, citing a recent article published in the British Daily Mail to the effect that corruption in the Belgian Embassy "is converting that country into a narco-state," recommended that Washington direct its drug war efforts there rather than to the global south. "Instead of fighting narco-trafficking in Nigeria or Venezuela, and while you're at it trying to keep their oil," he advised, "it would be better to dedicate your efforts to eradicating the rot in Belgium." 

Lavrov observed ironically that since the U.S. and other NATO member states already have troops stationed in Belgium, it's really unnecessary to attack Caribbean fishing boats with a handful of people on board. "I'm convinced the Trump administration's policy towards Venezuela isn't going to bring anything good nor will it increase U.S. prestige in international circles," he said.

The foreign minister denied that Venezuela had requested military aid from Russia in response to escalating U.S. threats against Caracas, as has been alleged by the international press based on anonymous sourcing, still less was the Kremlin going to install arms in the South American country. 

Deputies of the Russian Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, yesterday approved a declaration condemning the U.S. military presence off the coast of Venezuela, which includes the largest aircraft carrier in the world, guided missile destroyers, fighter planes, bombers (B-52 nuclear bombers regularly overfly Caracas to "terrorize" President Maduro, according to the Department of Homeland Security), elite helicopters, and at least ten thousand U.S. troops, a show of force that began in August. The legislators exhorted the international community "to firmly condemn the build-up of U.S. military force in the southern Caribbean, next to Venezuelan territorial waters, with the excuse of fighting narco-trafficking." The deputies "oppose Washington's aggressive and provocative actions" against Venezuela, "a sovereign state," which "contravenes universally accepted principles and norms of international law."

The document denounced the "attempts from outside to impose a puppet government" and maintained that the Venezuelan people "made their choice in favor of independence and defending their sovereignty."

Sources:

Juan Pablo Duch, "Moscow Rejects Washington's Harassment of Caracas and the Arbitrary Destruction of Boats," La Jornada (Spanish), November 12, 2025

Angel Gonzalez, "Venezuela Activates Massive Military Deployment In The Face of Possible U.S. Aggression," La Jornada (Spanish), November 12, 2025

"The United States Destroys Another Boat in the Caribbean With a Total of Three Dead," La Jornada (Spanish), November 7, 2025

Who Was Eugene Debs?

 Zohran Mamdani's quoting of Eugene Debs in his recent victory speech (for mayor of New York City) should awaken interest in the man who gained a name for himself as "Mr. Socialism."

For seventeen years Debs was the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, starving himself of sleep to bone up on politics, economics, and history. With painstaking effort he made himself into a manager's worst nightmare: an educated union man who could unravel the knots of capitalist contradiction, making the need for revolution plain for all to see. 

Unable to ignore workers' constant pleas for help, he went everywhere he was called, never managing to get his suitcase unpacked. In bad years he donated up to $900 of his $1500 salary to keeping the union and its magazine afloat, steering the workers through strikes, depression, and looming bankruptcy. 

Night after night he went tramping through railroad yards, where his constant agitation got him thrown out of the roundhouse (a circular building used for servicing and storing trains) and ejected from trains.

He became a magnificent popular speaker, eventually making socialism as American as the Liberty Bell.  He praised the fighting spirit of the workers and heaped scorn on the mining companies and "cockroach" small shop capitalists who exploited them.  Even those who had heard it all before couldn't resist his spell. When he rehearsed his speeches at home his neighbors came out onto their porches to eavesdrop.

By the time he ran for president in 1904 (the second of five attempts, the last one from a prison cell), socialism had elbowed its way onto the national political scene. Schoolteachers warned of its growing menace; workers jammed meeting halls to hear of its glowing promise.

Debs was the unanimous choice to represent the Socialist Party that year. In the wake of a dizzying spate of corporate mergers, three hundred firms controlled more than forty percent of the industrial capital of the country and monopoly quickly emerged as the dominant issue of the campaign. Selling out auditoriums with paid admissions, Debs ridiculed Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting schemes for their failure to realign class power, and scoffed at the notion that a state dominated by gigantic private corporations could ever alleviate the workers' distress: "Government ownership of public utilities means nothing for labor under capitalist ownership of government," he thundered. 

With muckraking journalists continuing to expose the profit system's massive fraud, waste, and abuse, more and more people inclined to the belief that capitalism was doomed.

The socialist Appeal to Reason boasted a readership of half a million, educating a huge mass of farmers, factory-workers, and railwaymen in the Mid-West alone. Its December anti-trust issue that year piled up three million advance orders, the largest edition of any newspaper in American history. In New York City, The Call was a staple of every working-class neighborhood while red-covered pamphlets of Marx and socialist brochures circulated in the millions throughout the country. Teddy Roosevelt warned that socialism was "far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past." Radicals and reactionaries alike saw the Socialist Party as the future opposition party of the United States. 

An army of Debs volunteers solicited contributions, rang doorbells, sold newspapers, talked up strangers, and shouted the political heresy of justice for workers from soapboxes and courthouse stairs, delivering four hundred twenty thousand votes for Debs, quadrupling his support of four years before. 

Conceding that charity had a claim on private conscience but strenuously rejecting any worker entitlement to monopoly profits, Teddy Roosevelt rode a tsunami of corporate cash to victory at the polls.

Refusing to be stopped by rheumatism, lumbago, or chronic headaches, Debs ran for president again in 1908.

Touring the country by train in his "Red Special," he drew huge crowds yearning to see the burning eyes of a prophet and feel the glow of solidarity from a real man of the people. For sixty-five consecutive days he addressed five to twenty rallies a day all across the country. The New York Times called his sold-out appearance in New York's Hippodrome the greatest political meeting ever held in that city. 

As vulgar smears and incendiary slanders failed to stop the rising socialist tide, a note of desperation crept into the voices of Democratic and Republican officials scheming to "Stop Debs."

Republican William Howard Taft spoke for free at the Music Hall in his hometown of Cincinnati and could barely fill the seats; Debs charged a dime admission at the same hall to poor workers and had to turn many away.

In a spirit of fair competition the socialists proposed that Taft address their rally for twenty minutes in exchange for Debs speaking to the Republican audience for the same length of time. The Taft campaign quickly rejected the offer. 

Known among workers as the "father of injunctions" for his success in quashing strikes by court order, Taft won the White House on the strength of vast corporate campaign donations via the National Association of Manufacturers.

Unable to crack the capitalist monopoly of political power, labor's influence continued to grow in subsequent years through popular organizing and education. Finally, in 1917 it was dealt a decisive blow by Woodrow Wilson, who drafted workers into the industrial slaughter of modern warfare and sent them into Europe's killing fields (WWI). Rejecting appeals to "patriotism," Debs refused to go along, and was jailed for obstructing the draft. His speech at sentencing was a masterful appeal for socialism.*

Given ten years in an Atlanta penitentiary, he befriended all his fellow inmates, in the end winning over even his jailers with his unfailing kindness and sincerity. 

Only one heart was too hard for him to reach - Woodrow Wilson's. In his waning days in the presidency the Great Idealist refused a customary Christmas pardon for Debs, whose conduct actually lived up to Wilson's high-minded rhetoric, which merely rang hollow in the president's mouth.

Finally released by Republican Warren Harding on Christmas Day 2021, Debs enjoyed the rare privilege of being able to say farewell to his fellow prisoners when the warden waived regulations for the occasion.

As Debs proceeded down the walkway leading away from the jail, a huge roar went up behind him from two thousand of society's forgotten and despised. Turning to say goodbye, Prisoner 9563, who always refused special privileges and treated them as the men they were, took in the ovation, tears streaming down his face.

*"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

"I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions . . . Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change - but if possible by peaceable and orderly means. . . 

"I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men. 

"In this country - the most favored beneath the bending skies - we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child - and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity . . . .

"I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned - that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all . . . 

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

"This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth. . . . 

"Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice." 

                                                               --------Eugene Debs, 1918

 

Sources:

Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 3 -The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor 1900-1909, (International Publishers, 1964) pps. 306, 349, 356-7

Joseph Freeman, An American Testament - a narrative of rebels and romantics, (Farrar & Rinehart, 1936) p. 36)

Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross - A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, (Rutgers, 1949) pps. 226, 230-3, 281-2

Mathew Josephson, The President Makers - The Culture of Politics and Leadership in an Age of Enlightenment 1896-1919 (Harcourt, 1940) pps. 168-9

Louis Adamic, Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America,  (Chelsea House, 1958) pps. 128-33

Howard Zinn, Eugene Debs and the Idea of Socialism, August 8, 2022, www.rethinkingschools.org

Debs speech at sentencing quoted from Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour, pps. 107-9

 

 

Workers Triumph in New York: Mamdani Wins

Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Zionist Muslim socialist of South Asian descent, has won the New York City mayor's race, triumphing over billionaires and powerful Zionists to take the reins of city government in the heart of U.S. capitalism, where the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel resides.

President Donald Trump, who has called Mamdani a "Communist lunatic" and threatened to deport him (and cut federal funding to New York) should he become mayor, denied that his victory at the polls had anything to do with him, though it was clearly a repudiation of the MAGA (Make America Grotesque Again) agenda, while also much more than that.

Voter participation in New York was the highest it has been since 1969, exceeding two million, while Mamdani's campaign enlisted a diverse volunteer force of 100,000, including South Asians, Latinos, Africans, and indigenous peoples, an ethnic and cultural kaleidoscope of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

The popular outpouring of support for Mamdani was expressed in New York City's two hundred different languages, a Tower of Babel whose champion - an immigrant, Muslim, and socialist - appears to be the antithesis of the vulgar degenerate in the White House. Upon news of victory, large crowds of supporters that had gathered in bars, nightclubs, and Mamdani campaign headquarters joyfully broke into song, and dance, and cheers.

In a powerfully lyrical victory speech before a packed crowd at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, Mamdani cited the great socialist leader Eugene Debs saying, "I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity." Again and again he called his victory a triumph of the working people of New York and assured them that the future "is in our hands." He gave thanks to Yemeni bodega owners, Trinidadian line cooks, Mexican grandmothers, Senegalese taxi drivers, Ethiopian aunties, and Uzbek nurses.

Excellent message discipline around vital economic issues (rent, transportation, child care) spurred the campaign to victory. On other topics, however, Mamdani has shown ideological vulnerability, such as when he called the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela "dictators" while downplaying the ruinous sanctions imposed on those countries by the dictatorship of capital. He also maintained that Israel has a right to exist "as a state with equal rights," without noting that it is precisely this that Jewish apartheid can never become. Finally, on the second anniversary of the October 7 attacks he denounced Hamas for having committed "a horrific war crime," without mentioning that Palestinians have both a legal and moral right to forcefully resist Israeli occupation, and that they were breaking out of a concentration camp full of children at the time.

But if we cannot yet pronounce this a new dawn for New York City, we can and should at least acknowledge that it's an expression of real democracy, as well as a timely reminder that tomorrow doesn't have to mean a repetition of today.

Sources:

"A New Progressive Generation in The U.S. Bursts Forth With Election Victories," La Jornada (Spanish), November 5, 2024 

"Zohram Mamdani and a Small Victory for the People," Black Agenda Report, November 5, 2025

 

 

Muslim "Extremist" Threatens To Bring Cost-of-Living Relief to New York

We Can Win Freedom for All

By Zohran MamdaniOctober 28, 2025

Source: Jacobin

 

Image from Oneindia News Youtube channel

Looking out at more than 13,000 of you here in Forest Hills Stadium, it is tempting to believe that this moment was always destined. Yet when we launched this campaign on October 23, one year and three days ago, there was not a single television camera there to cover it.

When we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, my name was a statistical anomaly in every poll. Four months later, as recently as this February, our support had reached the eye-watering heights of 1 percent. We were tied with noted candidate “someone else.” I always knew we could beat him.

When we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, the political world did not pay it much attention, because we were looking to build a movement that reflected the city as it actually is, not just the one that political consultants think exists on a spreadsheet.

And when we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, we were dismissed as a punchline in the halls of power. The idea of fundamentally changing who government serves in this city was unimaginable. Even if we gained momentum, they asked, how would we ever overcome the tens of millions of dollars in attacks that would follow?

Yet we knew then what we know now. New York is not for sale.

As young people showed up in record numbers, as immigrants saw themselves in the politics of their city, as seniors once skeptical dared to dream again, we spoke with one voice: New York is not for sale.

And now, as we stand on the precipice of taking this city back from corrupt politicians and the billionaires that fund them, let our words ring out so loud tonight that Andrew Cuomo can hear them in his $8,000-a-month apartment. Let them ring so loud so that he could hear us even if he’s in Westchester this evening. Let them ring so loud that his puppet master in the White House hears us: “New York is not for sale.”

Thirteen days after we announced our candidacy, Donald Trump won the presidency once again. The Bronx and Queens saw some of the largest shifts to the Right of any counties in our country. No matter what article you read or channel you turned to, the story seemed to be the same: our city was headed to the Right.

Obituaries were written about Democrats’ abilities to reach Asian voters, young voters, male voters. Again and again, we were told that if we had any hope of beating the Republican Party, it would only be by becoming the Republican Party.

Andrew Cuomo himself said that we had lost not because we had failed to speak to the needs of working-class Americans, but because we had spent too much time talking about bathrooms and sports teams.

This was a moment where it seemed our political horizon was narrowing. And in this moment, New York, you had a choice. A choice to retreat or to fight. And the choice that we made was to stop listening to those experts and to start listening to you.

We went to two of the places that saw the biggest swings to the Right: Fordham Road and Hillside Avenue. These New Yorkers were far from the caricature of Trump voters.

They told us they supported Donald Trump because they felt disconnected from a Democratic Party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions. They told us that they felt abandoned by a party beholden to corporations which asked them for their votes after telling them only what it was against rather than presenting a vision of what it was for.

They told us they didn’t believe in a system anymore that did not even pretend to offer solutions to the defining challenge of their lives, the cost-of-living crisis. Rent was too expensive. So were groceries. So was childcare. So was taking the bus. And working two or three jobs still wasn’t enough.

Trump, for all his many flaws, had promised them an agenda that would put more money in their pockets and lower the cost of living. Donald Trump lied. It was up to us to deliver for the working people he left behind.

Over the eight months of the primary, we told New Yorkers how we intended to address that very same affordability crisis. We did not do it alone.

This was a movement powered by tens of thousands of everyday New Yorkers who knocked doors between twelve-hour shifts at work and phonebanked until their fingers were numb. People who had never voted before became diehard canvassers. Community formed. Our city got to know each other and itself. This, my friends, was your movement, and it always will be.

As the snow melted and the frost thawed, this campaign began to grow faster than anyone ever imagined possible. So many small donors chipped in that we had to ask you to stop donating. Please stop.

We climbed the polls faster than Andrew Cuomo could dial Donald Trump’s number. People started to learn how to pronounce my name.

And the billionaires got scared. Or, as the New York Times would describe it, the Hamptons was basically in group therapy about the mayoral race.

Andrew Cuomo and his corporate cronies did everything they could to make this campaign one of fear and one of smallness. They pumped millions into this race, artificially lengthened my beard to make me seem menacing, painted our city as a dystopian hell hole, and worked night and day to divide the people of New York.

They failed.

When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me. And when we strode into Time Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed Cuomo’s chances of winning at nearly 80 percent. We knew that the so-called experts were set to get it wrong yet again.

Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable. And then on June 24, we shattered that inevitability.

We won by 13 percent, with the most votes in any citywide primary in New York City history. Some of those New Yorkers had voted for Trump. Many others had never voted before. And when Andrew Cuomo called me to concede at 10:15 that night, he said over the phone that we had created a tremendous force.

When you insist on building a coalition with room for every New Yorker, that is exactly what you create: a tremendous force. That force has only grown over these past four months. We now have more than 90,000 volunteers.

And we have spoken to millions more New Yorkers. We have put forth new plans in these last few months for how we will govern, hiring thousands more teachers for our schools, taking on the consultants and the contracts in city government, and tackling the final boss of New York City infrastructure: scaffolding.

But over the past few weeks, as this race has entered its final days, we have witnessed displays of Islamophobia that shock the conscience.

Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Curtis Sliwa do not have an agenda for the future. All they possess is the playbook of the past. They have sought to make this election a referendum, not on the affordability crisis that consumes New Yorkers’ lives, but on the faith I belong to and the hatred they seek to normalize.

We spent months working to convince the world that New Yorkers have a right to afford this city that we all love. Now we are being forced to defend the idea that a Muslim is even allowed to lead it.

These same big money donors and disgraced politicians have sought to rob us of our ambition, because they do not think that you deserve the beauty of a dignified life. And time and again they have encouraged you to imagine less because they know that a reimagined New York hurts their bottom line. I believe that this city is like the universe, constantly expanding.

We deserve a city government as ambitious as the working New Yorkers who make it the greatest city in the world. We cannot wait for someone else to deliver it. We are not afforded the luxury of waiting, because too often to wait is to trust those who delivered us to this point. On November 4, we will set the course of our city back in the direction it belongs.

And in doing so, we will answer a question that our nation has wrestled with from the dawn of our founding: Who is allowed to be free?

There are some who hear that question, and they know the answer without hesitation. They are the oligarchs who have accumulated vast wealth off those who labor from before the light breaks on the horizon until long after color has drained from the sky. These are the robber barons of America, and they believe their money affords them a larger say than the rest of us.

I am not just talking about the Bill Ackmans and Ken Langones of the world. I speak of people whose names you are not familiar with, who have no qualms about contributing more to super PACs than we would ever tax them, and who celebrate when those PACs flood our airwaves with commercials that plaster the words “global jihad” over my face.

Their freedom doesn’t just come at the expense of dignity and truth. It comes at the expense of the freedoms of others too. They are the authoritarians who seek to keep us pressed beneath their thumbs, because they know that once we shake ourselves loose, we will never be held down again.

Each and every one of these people think New York is for sale. For too long, my friends, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. The oligarchs of New York are the wealthiest people in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest nation, in the history of the world. They do not want the equation to change. They will do everything they can to prevent their grip from weakening.

The truth is as simple as it is nonnegotiable. We are all allowed freedom.

Each one of us, the working people of this city, the taxi drivers, the line cooks, the nurses, all those seeking lives of grace, not greed — we all get to be free.

And on November 4, thanks to the hard work of more than 90,000 volunteers across every corner of this city, that is exactly what we will tell the world. Because while Donald Trump’s billionaire donors think that they have the money to buy this election, we have a movement of the masses. And we are a movement that is not afraid of what we believe. And we’ve believed it for quite some time.

Those who worry about what this movement may look like on January 1 are the ones who worried on October 23 what it may look like tonight. But our purpose has not changed and neither have our promises.

As I said on the evening I announced, the job of government is to actually make our lives better. And in the exact words I said on October 23, here is what we stand for, my friends.

We are going to freeze the rent for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants and use every resource at our disposal to build housing for everyone who needs it.

We are going to eliminate the fare on every single bus line and make what are currently the slowest buses in the nation move around this city with ease.

And we are going to create universal childcare at no cost to parents, so New Yorkers can raise their family in the city they love.

Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the [crowd yells “rent!”]

Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and [crowd yells “free!”]

Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal [crowd yells “childcare!”]

We will make our city one where every person who calls it home can live a dignified life. No New Yorker should ever be priced out of anything they need to survive.

And we believed then, we believe today, we will believe tomorrow that it is government’s job to deliver that dignity.

Dignity, my friends, is another way of saying freedom.

Standing before you this evening, I take great strength from those who have labored mightily for the cause of freedom in America, who refused to accept that government could not meet what moments of crisis demanded from it. When the power of the people overwhelms the influence of the powerful, there is no crisis that government cannot meet.

It was government that enacted a New Deal to lift a generation out of poverty, to create beautiful public goods, and establish the right to unionize and collectively bargain.

My friends, the era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end. Because we need a government that is every bit as ambitious as our adversaries. A government strong enough to refuse the realities we will not accept and forge the future we know we deserve.

A government that refuses to accept one in four New Yorkers living in poverty, that refuses to accept more than 150,000 public school students being homeless, that refuses to accept that two union salaries are not enough to put down a mortgage in this city, and a government that refuses to accept you being priced out of the very city you help to build every single day.

Time and again, our nation has teetered on the precipice of hopelessness. Now is one of those times. But in each of these moments, working people have reached into the darkness and reshaped our democracy.

No longer will we allow the Republican Party to be the one of ambition.

No longer will we have to open a history book to read about Democrats leading with big ideas.

My friends, the world is changing. It’s not a question of whether that change will come. It’s a question of who will change it.

We have an opportunity before us that few have ever received and even fewer have seized. It’s the opportunity to show the world what it means to win freedom. It is the opportunity to live up to the legacy left by those who came before.

We do not get to determine the scale of a crisis. Our choice is how we respond.

Let us win a city hall that works for those straining to buy groceries, not those straining to buy our democracy. And let us look forward to January 1, when the hard work of governing will begin.

Those in power would like to describe our policy commitments as if they are illusions that will evaporate as soon as we approach city hall. Let us show them instead that they are invocations of the future that we will win.

And let us prove to each and every New Yorker that a politics of expansion does not just mean imagination. It insists upon fulfillment. We can make city hall a place where New Yorkers come to expect the future, not just failure.

But we are not there yet. Just as Andrew Cuomo’s victory in the primary was thought to be inevitable, the same narrative has started to form around us today. When you read the articles that tell a postelection story of triumph while we are amidst early voting, when you see the odds that have our chances of victory in the nineties, know this: you are reading the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he went to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory was promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.

So over these nine final days, I ask for only one thing from each of you: more.

I know you are tired, and for that I recommend some Adeni Chai. And still, I ask for more.

I know the attacks have intensified, that a warm bed is more inviting than a six-floor walk-up. That another evening spent knocking doors after a long workday feels daunting. And still, I ask for more. I ask for more because that is the only way that we win a future of more.

So if you are able, I urge you, my friends: stand up. If you have knocked a door, turn your flashlight on. [crowd begins turning phone flashlights on] If you will knock a door, turn your flashlight on. If you have more to give, turn your flashlight on. Together, let us make a light bright enough to banish any darkness.

Over these final nine days and the months and years that follow, the powers that be will throw everything in their arsenal against us. They will spend millions more dollars. They will attack us from every conceivable angle. But we will not bend. We will not flinch. We will triumph over the oligarchs, and we will return dignity to our lives.

Nearly eighty-nine years ago to the day, FDR spoke before a crowd of thousands at Madison Square Garden. He said, “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it, these forces met their master.”

My friends, I should like to have it said of our campaign that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. And I should like to have it said of our city hall that in it these forces met their master.

New York, our work has only just begun. On November 4, we set ourselves free.

---

No Kings, Fascism, and Democracy

"The disease gets worse and worse every year, and the only remedy that will have permanent effect is to abolish private ownership of industry and production for profit, and substitute public ownership with production for use."

                                                              -----Upton Sinclair, 1933 

Donald Trump, after talking with the San Francisco mayor and wealthy business leaders in the Bay Area, has at least temporarily backed off from unleashing a Chicago-style ICE spectacle there.

This is but the latest un-fascist display by the Orange "Hitler," who couldn't even bring down Jimmy Kimmel, much less conquer and subdue a string of countries on multiple continents.

In reality, the fascist thesis as applied to Trump doesn't really hold together well, especially if it is seen as a repetition of Nazism. Unlike Hitler, who was probably the most popular political leader in German history before WWII, Trump struggles to maintain approval in the low-forties and has yet to find a single issue that can forge a robust national unity behind the Dear Leader.

More importantly, he does not seek to establish a new system of representation beyond parliaments and traditional parties to replace the liberal model, as the Nazis did, but to enhance his own fame and fortune by picking the carcass of a collapsing U.S. empire while promising an impossible return to its "glorious" past. He's a con-man, not a conqueror.

Do we really think that blowing up fishing boats and trying to finish wars in a single weekend to avoid stock market losses (Trump's strategy in bombing Iran last June) represent the martial glory fascists live for?

Even if Trump wanted to be a Nazi cult leader, he wouldn't be able to, as mass culture doesn't exist today like it did in the 1930s. Cultural space these days is highly fragmented due to neo-liberal stratification and anti-social media, which make mass mobilization much more difficult than it was for the Nazis. So while Trump can give us more January 6s, he can't deliver anything like Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, and his capacity to transform U.S. culture as a whole is nil. 

His talent is for division, not unity, and his erratic policies look more like a staccato sequence of lunatic reality TV episodes than they do the unfolding of a fascist ideological program. Programmatic change requires order, after all, whereas Trump is an agent of chaos, which by definition can't be normalized.

As a response to Trump's admittedly harrowing second term, repeatedly declaring, "This is fascism!" in a rising tone of righteous indignation really does not constitute opposition, nor does it achieve anything more than a demonstration of the highly agitated state of the outraged person, which only delights the MAGA base, as such reactions are proof of their "owning the libs." 

Government of the triggered, by the triggered, and for the triggered will not win the day.

Realistically, we are in for an extended period of trench warfare, not a violent subjugation by "fascists." The contending parties are Trump, who aspires to personal dictatorship based on his victories at the polls, and the dictatorship of money, which has never been elected by anyone. In the middle are we-the-people, who must quickly find a way to create real democracy or else be crushed by polarized elites who agree on nothing more than that the people must shut up and obey.

The beginning of this process may be the fact that Trump has stirred up a broad, uneasy "resistance" movement in the nine months since he returned to the White House. Although still too superficial in its approach, it's definitely a plus that some seven million people in more than 2700 demonstrations throughout the fifty states of the fragmenting American union recently came together to reject the anti-democratic regression propelled by his administration. Under the slogan "No Kings," political activists, celebrities, and concerned citizens from all parts of the country denounced the magnate's ploys to dismantle institutional checks on executive power in an effort to amass boundless personal power unto himself, warning that he has set himself on a path that may soon convert the American republic into a monarchy or worse.

Unfortunately, the "King" thesis appears to be poorly thought through. If Trump is King, then Netanyahu must be the King of Kings, able to reduce the U.S. monarch to his personal lackey at the snap of his fingers. This has to be a major concern for any authentic resistance movement, but at the "No Kings" march in New York City, there was (1) an approved list of chants (!) and (2) "Free Palestine!" wasn't on it (!)

Hopefully, the movement's paternalism will disappear and its priorities improve.

In any event, the "King" problem is hardly restricted to the Republican side of the aisle. We got Trump in the first place because Democrats rigged the 2016 elections against the most popular politician in the country - Bernie Sanders - then pumped up Trump as the opponent they could most easily beat, but then couldn't do so. They barely defeated him in 2020 only thanks to Covid, but then refused to hold primaries in 2024 and put up the vegetable Biden, replacing him late in the campaign with Kamala Harris, who never won a single delegate when she ran for president in 2020. Meanwhile, "King" Trump has taken on and defeated a wide field of candidates running against him over the course of the decade he has dominated American politics.

If Trump is a King, then what are James Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi? They are as entrenched in their positions as any King could be, tolerating no primaries or debates, ruling apparently until death with no possible successful challenge from within the Democratic Party.

If we are serious about transforming U.S. politics we must not only remove Donald Trump from office, but also what the late economist Edward Herman called the un-elected dictatorship of money, the massive centers of private wealth that dominate the state and fund both political parties, precisely in order to prevent any possibility of citizen-led democracy. It is these conglomerations of capital and their fatuous dream of limitless profit (at public expense) that are at the root of our most pressing political problems today.

We have an "immigration problem" because Big Capital holds down living standards abroad then welcomes fleeing workers as "cheap labor" when they reach the U.S., flouting the law and passing on the social costs to others.

We have a "homeless problem" because there is more private profit in dislodging the poor from their homes and "gentrifying" them, than in guaranteeing housing to all as a matter of right. 

We have a "healthcare crisis" because capitalism defines medical care as a commodity and rations it according to ability to pay, not medical need. The poorest and sickest people get the worst care and die the youngest; the wealthiest and healthiest people get the best care and live the longest. Got a problem with that? Fuck you.

There is no solution to these and many other problems without challenging the right of capital to transform societies into collections of profitable commodities to be bought and sold by the highest bidder.

American society must be de-commodified by a popular democratic movement aiming to reconstitute the state in order to establish the dignity of labor and broad social equality. This admittedly ambitious goal will necessarily take us far beyond the Democrat-Republican ideological fight into the realm of establishing a culture of social justice, which is what Dr. King gave his life for.

A state dedicated to social justice cannot content itself with being a neutral arbitrator between rival criminal organizations (the DNC and the GOP), but must strive to meet the demands of justice for all. It must cease looking for guidance from financial markets and begin to look to the needs and talents of the people it is supposed to serve. It must dismantle the vast networks of private wealth fastened like barnacles to the state and build democratic legitimacy through policies in the interest of and articulated by an organized majority. Those policies must reverse neo-liberal austerity and return to national development, this time under the aegis of public profit. Private profit can and should continue to exist, but released from subordination to monopoly interests, which will help small business and the entire culture to flourish.

Wages must be substantially raised, employment and medical care guaranteed to all (the latter free at the point of service), and a sovereign financial system capable of channeling savings to innovation and the productive sector established. A public banking system must be created to free the economy from the shackles of usury and convert production into an engine of national development rather than an intermediary of parasitic capital. Without democratic control over credit there can be no real political economy; without political economy there is no real sovereignty. 

As things stand right now, we are a nation of dependent paycheck nomads, not independent citizens. We might reasonably call ourselves the United Corporations of America, but not the United States of America, and certainly not a democracy. There can be no democracy under plutocracy.

This is not a call to hand over the economic steering wheel to pointy-headed  government bureaucrats, but to subordinate capital to the national interest. Massive concentrations of private wealth can be of no general benefit unless brought under democratic citizen control. Capital should propel a broad network of small and medium-sized productive units to fulfill the economic needs of the American people, not shower the Elon Musks of the world with public money so they can create a trillionaire class. Who needs a trillionaire class?

A citizen-directed state can and should direct, regulate, and guard against private interests re-capturing public decisions and distorting national priorities. Private capital can be an ally of democracy, but never its boss, for it ceases to be democracy at that point. We must create a strong government grounded in democratic legitimacy and technical capacity, capable of disciplining private economic power and putting it at the service of the common good. Only in that way can the state and productive sector be instruments of national sovereignty, rather than a doorway through which an un-elected dictatorship of profiteers enters to restore private domination of public policy. 

Our economic goal should not be to administer stagnation and decline, as the neo-liberals have done, nor to surrender to delusions of restoring the robber baron era of U.S. capitalism, which is neither desirable nor achievable. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting a national economic policy that articulates the needs and goals of science, energy, and business, to be carried out by an efficient state planning body capable of coordinating public and private investment in fulfillment of a chosen democratic purpose. Without state direction, the best-laid plans will fizzle out; without broad democratic legitimacy, the economy will fragment and popular sovereignty melt away. 

Economic transformation will require educational transformation. We should not have to rely on brain-draining talent from other countries. Our own schools should produce the talent we need. This means an education system oriented towards national production, innovation, and work. Treating workers as mindless atoms of production and lazy maximizers of consumption is an abysmal failure. There is no justification for divorcing production from learning and consumption from creativity - except to perpetuate a professional servant class and highly undemocratic elite governing a failing society. We have had enough of that already.

Of course such an agenda will be dismissed as "Bolshevism" and worse, but we should not let disingenuous calls for "consensus" and "pragmatism" lead to capital subordinating public interest to private gain all over again. Public functions should be plainly in public hands, animated by a program of public profit, democratically determined. 

Real transformation does not come from conciliation and deference to private power. It comes from confrontation, breaking with dependence, bureaucratic mediocrity, and parasitic elites. This is a historic necessity, not a misguided indulgence of the non-existent "radical left." Every real gain, from the abolition of slavery to legal labor unions to universal suffrage of the adult population, was a battle against fear, complacency, and bureaucratic inertia.

Let's abandon the rearguard struggle to hold on to the remnants of past gains without challenging the legitimacy of private interests dominating the state and leading us to ever greater disaster. We shouldn't want to perpetuate power, but transform it. 

Sources:

"Trump, 'Fascism,' and Other Erroneous Ideas," Maciek Wisniewski, La Jornada (Spanish), October 18, 2025 

"The Second Floor and the Pending Mission," Jose Romero, La Jornada (Spanish), October 22, 2025