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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We decided we were finished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now put inequality on top of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That money didn’t disappear. It moved up.

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

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

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

So we have to build it ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put it to work.

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what exactly are they calling communism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are trying to make us enemies of the state.

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

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

God damn these people.

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help A Fight Worth Having build the infrastructure to win.

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s exactly where your money goes.

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

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

Help fund the momentum.

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

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

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

Give whatever you can, any amount, no limit.

Corbin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin Trent

The Democratic Party is trying to get born again.

For forty years it didn’t want to be. Since Reagan, the Democrats stopped fighting the world he built and started managing it. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and sent the factories south. He signed the crime bill Joe Biden wrote and helped fill the prisons. He ended welfare and called it reform. He tore down the wall between the banks and your money, and a few years later the banks lost your money and got bailed out for it. Obama bailed them out, let the houses go, deported people by the millions, and kept the drone war and the surveillance state running without missing a step. On the things that decide who holds power, money and war and the police and the spying, our party and theirs were one party. That was never where they fought.

What they fought over was the rest of it, and even there they did the least they could get away with, because anything real would have cost their donors. They told us things were getting better and better. They told us they were on our side. They put out a statement for women and Black people and immigrants and Latinos every time one was due, and then they went back to managing the decline. And every couple of years they came back and told us this was the most important election of our lifetimes, so hold your nose and vote, and we did, and the rent went up anyway.

Then Trump stood up and said the whole thing was a fraud and the country was a wreck. Media talking heads were appalled. They laughed at him. But he connected, because it rang true. We’d been told for thirty years that we’d never had it so good while the ground gave out under us, and here was a man saying out loud that it was a lie. The trouble was where he pointed. Trump took the truth of our condition and aimed it straight down, at the immigrant and the poor and the weak and the despised, the people with the least power in the whole arrangement. He found the real anger and fed it to the worst part of us.

The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border. We’ve been unjust. We’ve been immoral, paying for a genocide in Gaza with our own tax money while we couldn’t house our own people. We are failing, and we need to be redeemed. Trump never offers that last part, because his whole act runs on it being someone else’s fault. The left says it plain. We did this, and we can undo it, and we can make this country great, the real kind, not the red hat version.

So this is a fight about which future we get. One is the future the war party keeps selling, a trillion-dollar arsenal standing guard over a pile of money while the killing goes on. The other one has to be built, and it starts by telling the truth about where we’re standing. The whole question is which one we choose.

On Tuesday we got our first real look in a while at people choosing the hard one. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and he spent his own standing to back primary challengers against sitting Democrats. Three of the House candidates he backed won, two of them democratic socialists. They ran against the party that signed the checks for Gaza, and they won anyway. Krystal Ball put it as plain as anybody, that the real radicals are the politicians who back the killing of children. Jaime Harrison, who used to run the party machine, told people like Mamdani that if they hate the Democratic Party they should stop using its name and go build their own. We’re not going anywhere. The party was never Harrison’s to hand out, and the people who actually built it just voted for the truth.

We’ve been here before, and the last time we got it right. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Democrats and socialists fought over the future and then they built one. They passed Social Security and the right to a union into law. They strung electric lines out to farms that had never seen a light bulb. They sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and gave the old and the poor a doctor with Medicare and Medicaid. They put us on the road to the moon. They built the biggest middle class the world had ever seen and pulled millions out of poverty doing it. They argued the whole way, and the country came out stronger for the fight.

But we forgot the other half of the job, which was the building. A roof you can afford. A doctor you can see. A job that holds a family together. We handed all of it to the market, and the market handed us back rent we can’t pay and care we can’t afford and kids who don’t believe they’ll ever own a home. The rights we won, for Black people and women and immigrants and gay and trans people, were real and worth every fight, but they don’t pay the rent, and the party that told us to clap never wanted to talk about the rent.

The Democratic Party needs a rebirth not a rebrand.

We’ve done it before, so we know it’s not a dream. We need a politics and an economy and a democracy and a country that works for all of us, and not for the shrinking few who bought up the last one. We can build that. And the thing they have left to stop us with is fear.

Jesse Watters went on television and said the New York socialists aren’t even socialists, they’re communists, and you can’t reason with them, you have to crush them. That’s the same move Trump makes, the powerful turning your fear on someone weaker than you. Be scared of your neighbor, and keep trusting the people who paid for a genocide and couldn’t fix a thing here at home. We’re done taking that.

So the party is trying to get born again. It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it. We tell the truth about how far we’ve fallen, and then we build our way back up. We make it great for real, or we don’t get it.

Corbin Trent

Mamdani is taking a bold stance. He’s pushing to make change. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t endorsed in any of these races, and that’s not her playing the odds. She doesn’t want to shit where she eats. She endorsed Tish James, who’s busy protecting incumbents. This isn’t about calculation. It’s about understanding what’s facing us right now.

The old guard is still there. The people who lost us a thousand seats through the Obama years, who passed us NAFTA and CAFTA, who drove the Democratic Party off a cliff. Still there, terrified of the ghost of Ronald Reagan, terrified of the hope of a functional economy, terrified of the rich, terrified of the military industrial complex, terrified of Israel and AIPAC. Terrified, terrified, terrified.

When Mamdani let Hakeem Jeffries slide by without a primary challenger, I figured he wasn’t going to stand up to the Democratic incumbents or the status quo. I was wrong. He is. I don’t like being wrong and I don’t like eating crow, but I’ve never been happier to be wrong, and I hope he does a lot more of it. When you get beaten in a primary, when you endorse and your candidate loses, you don’t quit endorsing. You don’t quit fighting. You keep pushing, and you keep firing incumbents until the party looks like you. That’s the way Trump rebuilt the Republican Party in his own image. That’s the way FDR did it too. I still hold out hope that AOC pops out and decides she wants to be part of the future instead of the past.

Watch the results tonight. There’ll be some wins, and we’ll take some lumps. What matters most is that we don’t give up.

Today tells us a little bit about the strength of the Democratic Party that’s trying to be reborn. The one with FDR roots, the one with builder’s roots, the one with socialist roots. Can it be born?

Who are we going to be? The party that brings America back from the edge, from the precipice, that helps it defy the odds and come back from a failing state? Or not?

Corbin Trent

The New York Times ran a piece this morning about China and oil. While the rest of the world came out of the war with Iran low on oil, China’s tanks are full. For years it bought oil when the price was low and stored it. It built refining capacity until it passed us in 2024 and became the biggest refiner on earth. It put its spare money into stockpiles of real things, not just Treasury bonds, after it watched the West freeze Russia’s accounts. When the war came and the strait closed, China cut its imports by a third and barely felt it, because the tanks were already full and the refineries kept running on what it had set aside.

The whole piece is about how prepared China is. It never compares China to us. It reports the full tanks like a fact about the oil market. It never says the obvious thing, which is that one country kept building and the other coasted. That blind spot is sitting right there in the country’s paper of record, and it’s the same blind spot that runs through all of our politics.

China didn’t believe the myth America bought into. The myth is that you get rich once and then you’re rich, the work is over, and all that’s left is managing the money. America’s leaders believe it to their core. We’re told constantly that we’re the greatest, richest, most deserving nation in history. We believed it, and so we quit building and started dividing. Every fight in our politics now is a fight over how to split the inheritance. Nobody’s bothering to check how much is left.

MAGA wants to split it one way. The Democrats want to split it another. The DSA wants to split it a third way. They disagree about almost everything. The one thing they agree on is the one thing that’s wrong. All three assume there’s still something there to divide. That the economy still works. That the country still functions. That the real wealth is sitting in the ground and the fields and the factories where we left it. So the whole fight is about fairness. Fairness through the free market. Fairness through socialism. Fairness through the third way, the technocratic governance the restoration Democrats keep promising. Three formulas for dividing the same inheritance.

The socialists are having a moment. They earned part of it, because they’re the only ones who’ll say the word ownership and mean it. The rest is just how far we’ve fallen. Life’s gotten so unlivable and the economy so unfair and accountability so far gone that people are willing to look at socialism, an idea this country spent a hundred years teaching them to fear. The Democrats left the door wide open. Their whole offer is restoration. Get rid of Trump, hire back the competent people, fix some permitting, subsidize a few things, and ease the country back toward the nineties. People can tell that’s nothing. So they go looking, and the socialists are the only ones offering anything else.

So I read the DSA program. They are closer than the Democrats. They name class. They name ownership. There’s a plank that calls for public ownership of energy and transit and natural resources, and the Democrats won’t go near a sentence like that. Credit where it’s due.

But their ownership is ownership of things that already exist. Take over the grid. Own the resources in the ground. Put the big firms under public control. Even their housing plank is public money to build social housing, and it assumes the capacity to build it already exists. That capacity is the thing we don’t have. Read the verbs in the program. Guarantee. Establish. Cancel. Tax. Abolish. It’s a list of what working people are owed. There is almost nothing in it about making the things, about who pours the concrete and trains the electricians and builds the capacity to deliver a single item on the list.

We are short on almost everything but money. Short on the mills, the trades, the engineers. Short on the capacity to build the housing and the power and the care that all of these futures keep promising. Guarantee every American a home and fund it all the way, and if the capacity to build at scale isn’t there, the money does what it did after Covid. It goes into the houses that already exist and comes back out as price.

The most left program in the country has the same hole as the abundance crowd it hates and the Democrats it ran from. They all talk about building. MAGA wants steel and ships. The abundance people want transmission lines and nuclear. The DSA wants public power and industrial policy. But not one of them builds the whole politics around it. They treat the capacity to make things as one line to fund or deregulate, then go back to the real fight, which is who owns what already exists and who gets a share. We aren’t running out of money. We’re running out of the capacity to make the things that keep people alive, and we’re using it up faster than we build it back. Housing. The grid. The trades. Shipbuilding. The people who staff the hospitals. Not one of them will say so.

China has bubbles and debt of its own. So do we. The difference that matters is what the debt bought. China’s debt turned into rail and grid and factories. Ours largely turned into asset prices and inflation. Even China’s famous mess, the ghost cities and the empty towers, is too many houses. Our mess is too few.

China never stopped building the real things. The oil is one piece of it. Copper and aluminum and rare earths. The machines that make machines. Power plants and rail and transmission lines to move it all across the country. A country can survive bad finance if its production is real. It can’t survive good finance if its production is gone. We’re on the wrong side of that.

And China plays the money game too. It holds our Treasuries. It buys gold. It made itself necessary to us as both the factory that fills our shelves and the creditor that funds our debt, and it used our hunger for borrowing to pay for the real buildout at home. China ends up with the things and the paper. We end up with the paper. Money is just the accounting for all of it, and the accounts get settled eventually.

What China’s running isn’t even Chinese. It’s the American system. It’s the hand that built the interstates and turned Detroit into the arsenal that won the war. We wrote that playbook and we ran it through a democracy, an unequal and half-finished one, but a democracy, which is more than Beijing can say. The method is still ours. We could run it better than they ever will. We’ve just stopped trying.

The abundance crowd says deregulate so we can build. The socialists want the public to own whatever gets built. The question we’re not reckoning with is how to restart our capacity to build at all, the ability to do the things that must be done. That’s a fight worth having. Rebuilding that capacity and owning it go together. We do it so what gets built belongs to the people who need it instead of a billionaire or a trillionaire or Beijing. That’s the work, and too few in our politics are doing it. Instead, we’re fighting over how to divide an inheritance that’s been dwindling for half a century.

Corbin Trent

Washington imagines the economy as a box. You put money in one side and houses come out the other. The “market” is the box. Nobody’s quite sure what happens inside it, and nobody in charge thinks it’s their business to ask. The government stands to the side with only two possible moves to make, it can add a rule or take one away.

That’s the whole debate over housing. One side says take the rules away. Knock down the zoning, kill the reviews, let people build. The other side says put more money in. Subsidize the buyer, fund the voucher, finance the project. They sound like enemies, but they’re running the same machine. Both of them believe the box is full. Both believe that somewhere inside it sits all the lumber and steel and labor we could ever need, idling, waiting for the right signal.

They’re happy to think outside the box. They’ll think around it. They’ll spend whole careers twiddling the dials bolted to the front of it. The one thing they won’t do is open the lid and look inside, because the answer lives inside, and the answer frightens them.

The box is mostly empty. The steel mill that was supposed to fire up with rising prices was closed and scrapped forty years ago. The men who knew how to frame and wire and plumb a house, came up through an apprenticeship system we stopped paying for. The sawmills can’t add a shift fast enough to matter. We send the price signal in, loud as it’ll go, and the box has almost nothing to hand back. So the only thing that moves is the price.

The US just ran this experiment. From 2020 to 2022 we poured more money into housing than at any time in living memory. Stimulus, savings, mortgage rates near zero. If the box were full of productive capacity, those investments would have turned into housing inventory. But that’s not what happened.

Prices roughly doubled in the hot markets. Sales spiked. 2021 was the strongest year for home sales since 2006, but almost none of the growth turned into new houses. It was the same inventory changing hands for more money. We’ve been building roughly the same number of houses every year for forty years. When we poured money in during those two years, slightly more homes were started but fewer were finished, and per person we built less than half what we built in 1972.

The money didn’t become houses. It became profit. Then the Fed raised rates and the music stopped. Sales fell off a cliff to the lowest level since 1995, so the same houses aren’t changing hands at all.

The steel mill that was supposed to fire up with rising prices was closed and scrapped forty years ago. The men who knew how to frame and wire and plumb a house, came up through an apprenticeship system we stopped paying for. The sawmills can’t add a shift fast enough to matter. We send the price signal in, loud as it’ll go, and the box has almost nothing to hand back.

Ask where the money went and the honest answer is mostly nowhere. People sold high and bought high, they handed their gain right back across the closing table. It was musical chairs and when the music stopped, almost nobody got to keep their new price. Look at the Federal Reserve’s own books. Household home equity grew by something like fourteen trillion dollars over those years, and nearly all of it was paper, just prices rising on houses that already existed. Underneath the paper, families were losing real money through debt every single year. The wealth was a number on a statement, frozen in place, borrowed against, and houses never actually got built.

When the prices got too high, we used our only tool. The Fed raised interest rates. That move can’t lay a foundation. It can’t train a welder. It has no power to bring a single house into the world. All it can do is make borrowing hurt until people stop trying to buy. The problem was too little supply, and the one big lever we own can only destroy demand. They call it price stability. What it really is, is making people poorer until they stop wanting the thing we failed to build. That’s bringing a weedeater to trim a bonsai. The tool isn’t weak. It’s the wrong tool, swung at something that needed a careful hand, and the careful tools got thrown out years ago.

The New York Times ran a recent guest opinion piece about a development in Vancouver called Senakw. The Squamish Nation got its land back, land that sits outside the city’s rules, and they’re building eleven towers and six thousand homes at a density the city would never have allowed. The Times held it up as the lesson: the only thing preventing us from building, it says, is us. Cut the rules, beat the neighbors, and the housing comes. It’s a good story, and the piece is half right, though it quietly concedes its own punchline, calling Senakw a “modest dent” in a city that needs eighty-three thousand homes by 2033.

The modest dent is the tell. The one building freed from every rule is a rounding error against the need, and it still had to be built out of the same lumber and steel and labor everybody else is fighting over. The rule was never the only thing in the way. The piece even reaches for the right yardstick, sizing the crisis in years of a worker’s pay, the oldest honest measure there is, and then lays the whole thing at the feet of the zoning board.

There are places who’ve already tried the rule-cutters’ theory, and they tell the rest of the story. Tennessee doesn’t strangle builders with reviews. Neither does Texas. They’re loose, they’re cheap by coastal standards, and they are still not building their way back to 1950 levels. But their prices are climbing anyway. If rules were the only problem, the light-regulation states would be outpacing everyone else. They aren’t. Even the Times piece admits that without quite meaning to: home-building in the loose Sun Belt all but shut down after 2008 and never came back. By 2025, the number of homes started reached barely three-quarters of the pre-crash pace. They had the permission but they didn’t have the capacity. The rules are a wall, but not the wall that stops you.

When the prices got too high, we used our only tool. The Fed raised interest rates. That move can’t lay a foundation. It can’t train a welder. It has no power to bring a single house into the world. All it can do is make borrowing hurt until people stop trying to buy.

You hit that wall the moment you get serious about building ten million homes. You run out of people who know how to build, because the trades are a finite pool and you can’t conjure a framing crew out of a press release. You run out of the materials houses are made of. The lumber, the steel, the concrete, the wiring, the breakers, the transformers. If you try to build everything at once, the commodity markets take a cut and the cost of every input climbs, the same way it did during Covid when you couldn’t get a sheet of plywood at any price. This stuff has to come from a physical place. It’s not sitting in unlimited supply at the back of a Home Depot.

We import a big share of our housing materials, including roughly a third of our lumber, which mostly comes from from Canada. China pours about twenty times the cement we do. A transformer can take a year to show up. After thirty years of buying the world’s stuff instead of making our own, because it’s cheaper, that’s what’s left of our production base.

And here’s the part that should stop both sides cold: the workers we still have build less than they used to. Construction is the one corner of the American economy that went backwards. Almost every other field got more productive (farming, manufacturing, shipping), but a construction worker today puts up less than a worker did in 1970. Value added per worker is down something like forty percent over fifty years.

Sit with how strange that is. The tools got better (nail guns, prefab trusses, tower cranes, a full model of the house before a shovel hits dirt) and we got slower anyway. It didn’t happen by accident. We cut the apprenticeships that used to turn a kid into a journeyman. The share of construction workers in a union fell, from around forty percent in the seventies, to about one in nine today. We chopped the contractor, who could carry a bench of skilled crews between booms, into a chain of subcontractors racing each other to the bottom. The knowledge of how to build well, fast, and at scale is not a file you can download. It lives in people. It passes hand to hand, and we spent forty years letting it walk out the door.

We used to keep other tools in the shed. The TVA was the government building dams and power plants and stringing line and electrifying a poor region the market had skipped. The Defense Plant Corporation was the government building factories, hundreds of them, owning them, running war production at a tempo no private firm would have risked. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation put public money and public ownership to work building real things. We did this. It wasn’t a theory. We won a war with it and lit up the South with it.

We built houses with it, too. After the war, using government mortgages and the materials those same war plants left behind, the country put up homes at a pace we have never matched since. A new home finished every sixteen minutes. And then we forgot that option was ever on the table.

That’s what public ownership is for. Not a slogan, a tool. A national capacity to mine and mill and build that can be told what to do, not a market that’s coaxed into maybe building if the quarter looks good. A public builder can keep crews and a transformer line ready for a mission and stand them down when the mission’s done, and it won’t go bankrupt for adjusting, because it doesn’t answer to quarterly returns. The private builder can’t carry that idle capacity. It would be malpractice for him to try. So the surge capacity this country needs to house its people will not come out of the box no matter how we set the dials, because nobody inside the box is paid to hold it.

We just crowned the world’s first trillionaire off the back of public research and public contracts, and the same week we were told the public can’t build a thing. The capacity that floated Musk’s fortune is the capacity we’re not allowed to use for ourselves, to house a nurse or wire a town or lay a mile of rail. We have it backwards. The state to is allowed to be used as ground for a private fortune to grow on, and forbidden from growing necessities for the rest of us.

That’s where housing isn’t just about housing. A country that can float private fortunes bigger than most countries, and in the same breath can’t build affordable homes for working peole, has broken the link between what the public puts in and what the public gets back. The people pay in, and a few private hands take out. The accounting runs upside down. We feel it even when we can’t name it, and when people feel the deal is rigged, they stop believing that the system answers to them. So there’s a democracy problem when there’s a housing problem. They’re same problem in different coats.

We’ve accepted the housing market’s black box and dials like they’re laws of nature, the way things are meant to be. We’ve forgotten we can work to change how destiny unfolds for ourselves and for our nation and for the planet. We’re not just leaves in the wind. We’re people with agency and choices. We can choose to build a better country and a better planet, or we can choose to keep putting faith in the market like it’s God and just hoping it will be a righteous God.

The moral arc of history doesn’t bend on its own. It’s bent through will and effort. We don’t need faith, we need lumber. And apprenticeships and a public builder. We lost those things but we can build them back. Let’s open the machine and see what’s actually inside, because that’s the only way houses will ever come out the other end.

Sources

• Existing-home sales: 2021 high, 2023-24 low (NAR)

• Homes built per person, housing starts (FRED)

• Household home equity, Financial Accounts (Federal Reserve Z.1)

• Senakw and Vancouver’s 83,000-home need (NYT, Appelbaum, June 2026)

• Lumber tripled, added about $36K to a new home (NAHB)

• Cement, China vs. United States (USGS)

• Construction productivity down about 40 percent since 1970 (Goolsbee and Syverson, University of Chicago)

• Construction union membership (BLS)

• Postwar boom, a new home every 16 minutes

This week they crowned the first trillionaire. As Corbin recently laid out, the story we’re being sold about how he got there is a con. So I want to put something in your hands.

In anticipation of the SpaceX IPO, and the massive con job that Silicon Valley and Wall Street are running on the American people and the world, I wrote a short book about the truth of Elon Musk’s career, including how much of it was funded by the US government, and how much was just dumb luck.

I think it matters that Americans understand this: The billionaires and oligarchs who own our economy do not deserve to be treated like gods. In most cases they don’t even deserve to be treated like good managers, inventors, or engineers. That is most definitely true in the case of Elon Musk.

I know that’s hard to believe about someone who has met with so much success. That’s exactly why I wrote this book. Short, sweet, and to the point in 65 pages, the book lays out the specifics of just how much of Musk’s companies and his fortune were funded directly by the US government. The government often dragged him kicking and screaming to success. It is one of the greatest self-owns by any government in history.

I think it’s a pretty good read too, but you can tell me — and point out any problems in this preview review copy.

So please check it out. It’s the first in a series we’re calling Lucky Bastards. Musk is book one. Many more lucky bastards to come!

https://www.newconsensus.com/projects/new-consensus-press

You can download it for free and put it on your Kindle, read it on your phone, or print it out and flip through it with your actual hands. We’re going to start printing paper copies too, so maybe Corbin will let

you know when those are ready.

Thanks for reading,

Zack Exley

Executive Director

New Consensus

The consensus is that this is the year for the Democrats. They have the political winds at their backs. Even with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and everything Republicans have thrown at the wall, smart money says Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate. And anything that limits the power of this president is good. I’ll grant all of it. Net positive.

But what happens after a good cycle or two, if the winners don’t understand what they won? If they don’t see the pain that powered their victories?

We don’t have to guess because it already happened in Britain.

A year and a half ago, Labour won in a landslide. Imagine our centrist Democrats, the Newsom and Buttigieg wing, sweeping into power with the biggest majority in a generation. The Tories were finished, the same way a lot of folks think Republicans are about to be finished. But Labour walked in and decided the mission was better management. Be the adults in the room. Trim the spending. Talk tough on the border. The ship was fine, just needed a steady hand.

Now look at them. Reform is Nigel Farage’s party, which is their MAGA more or less. Reform is leading the polls and Labour’s a distant second. Their MAGA has led just about every poll since late last year. Starmer, the head of Labour, is one of the least popular leaders in the Western world. A year and a half ago centrists won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.

When a party wins on the promise of change and then delivers management, the people who abandon ship don’t all come back. The ones who move, move right. The angry ones, the ones who feel lied to, don’t drift off to some nicer party on the left. They turn to the man burning it all down, which is always how the right takes power. Afterward, centrists throws up their hands, convinced the country is turning right, when in reality they’re turning desperate. If you promise change and deliver the status quo, things don’t get better, for a lot of people they get worse.

Britain at least has a buffer. They build coalitions, so no single party runs the whole thing alone usually. The damage is scattered and slower. But the US doesn’t have that. We’ve got winner-takes-all, with gerrymandering stacked on top. Here, a centrist party that wins big and then governs scared doesn’t lose gracefully. It delivers the whole country to MAGA. The House, the Senate, the gavels, all of it.

A year and a half ago the left won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.

Our centrists, the Newsoms, the Buttigiegs, the Slotkins, are on the rise right now. They aren’t leaders. They aren’t fierce advocates for structural change. In fact this is exactly the kind of compromise-driven, go-along-to-get-along Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and helped usher in MAGA. Hell, Newsom can’t even bring himself to tax billionaires. These are folks who don’t get the depth of pain across our the country. And they certainly don’t get the ferocity behind the criminal administration wrecking our democracy. The Democratic Party and its faux-leaders don’t see what’s coming, or they see it and don’t care. In the end it won’t matter which.

The cost of living is so far out of reach for young people that you can’t fix it with a tweak. There’s no tax credit, no rebate, no clever little program that closes that gap. It will take transformation. It will take building things again. The same is true for jobs. AI and robotics are about to come for human labor in a way this country has never seen, and Democrats have no plan for it. None. They’re not ready for the losses. They’re not ready for what happens to a person, to a town, to a whole generation, when the work goes away.

And they’re sure as hell not ready for what’s happening at the very top. This week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wrote on Thursday about how we built him, how public money and public research and public contracts carried him up the hill while we kept no ownership. Our tax dollars built SpaceX and then we handed over the deed. The pretenders in the Democratic Party, the ones about to take the reins, have no answer for that. They have no intention of stopping the next massive giveaway. Why? Because they don’t want to upset the interests who fund their campaigns.

Lack of accountability for guys at the top is the clearest indicator that we need systemic change. Forget for a second the question of genocide in Gaza. Forget the West Bank. You don’t have to know the answer for those to agree we should honestly investigate war crimes. The International Criminal Court already issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister for using starvation as a weapon of war. Our government’s response? To go after the court. To sanction its officials, and defend the war criminals.

A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.

Here at home, we’ve got a Justice Department unit whose entire job is crimes against humanity. Did it ever investigate Joe Biden’s cabinet, the men who signed off on the bombs? It didn’t. It won’t. They go after small men in faraway places, and give a pass to the policy masterminds here. The impunity of the powerful doesn’t start with Epstein or end with him. It runs straight through the war machine, the financial machine, the whole arrangement. A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.

We’ve got from now until the end of primary season to pick the right people. The candidates who understand our fight is structural. The ones who are ready for what’s actually coming. The ones not owned, willing to take a real risk.

The winners were supposed to be an alternative to rightwing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their MAGA because a real alternative takes work.

If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain. The winners were supposed to be an alternative to rightwing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.

That’s the thing about the so-called adults in the room. The centrists, the moderates, the corporatists, they won’t do the hard work. In part because they’re bankrolled by entrenched interests who will use every weapon in the arsenal to maintain status quo. And in part because of fear. They’re terrified of blame, so they’d rather keep walking toward disaster than take a chance on something better. Real reform means changing the whole structure, the democracy, the social fabric, the economy itself, and that’s going to take fight.

People are desperate for a life that works but it’s easier for Dems to keep their heads down, push gently for incremental change, and hope things will get better on their own.

They won’t.

Corbin Trent
https://afightworthhaving.com/

SpaceX goes public today at around $1.7 trillion. Elon Musk owns enough SpaceX stock that, on top of everything else he holds, Musk becomes the first person in human history to cross the trillion-dollar line. The coverage will be all hype. Unprecedented. A genius. Where’s he going next? What does the future hold?

It wasn’t like Elon Musk invented some amazing capacity. He didn’t do something transformational for the world. He didn’t harness electricity. He didn’t invent the transistor. He didn’t invent rocket flight. He didn’t invent satellite technology. He didn’t even make them much better.

What he did was learn how to game the system. He took what America built through generations of investment and generations of hard work and turned it into a profit center for himself. He took American loans, American intellectual property, American space, American airwaves, and turned them into a wealth engine for one man.

In a purely capitalist system, SpaceX wouldn’t exist. It would’ve died in 2008. The company was broke, three rockets had failed, and Musk was burning the last of his money. Then NASA wrote a $1.6 billion contract.

Tesla exists because of a half-billion-dollar loan from the American government, handed over in 2010 when the banks wouldn’t touch him. The deal gave the government the right to buy three million shares of Tesla stock at a locked-in cheap price. That was our cut if the company took off. The company took off, and Musk rushed to pay the loan back nine years early, because under the deal, early repayment canceled the government’s shares. They were worth about $270 million the week he wired the money, and Tesla’s stock has multiplied many times over since. The press called the repayment a triumph. We got our money back with a little interest, and he kept the stock the American people were due.

SpaceX is the same story just bigger. In a purely capitalist system, SpaceX wouldn’t exist. It would’ve died in 2008. The company was broke, three rockets had failed, and Musk was burning the last of his money. Then NASA wrote a $1.6 billion contract for cargo runs to the space station, and that money built the Falcon 9. The people who study this industry say it plainly. NASA is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy.

And NASA by then was an agency we’d been squeezing since the 1980s. We decided, instead of doing things ourselves as a nation, instead of demanding the lion’s share of what we’d developed over sixty years of rocketry and satellites and spaceflight, that we’d hand it off to billionaires and let them compete for the contracts. SpaceX now holds around $22 billion in federal contracts. Across the whole Musk empire the public money runs closer to $38 billion. The launch pads, the airwaves, the satellites overhead, the early customers, the technology our space program spent two generations developing. He built on all of it, and we kept no share of it.

I’m not saying SpaceX is bad at rockets. The rockets work. But outbidding Boeing and Lockheed, the most bloated contractors in America, is a low bar, and he cleared it with technology our space program developed, on contracts we paid for. And China is proving right now that none of it was one man’s miracle. They’re behind on reusable rockets and behind on launch rates, sure. They’re also closing fast, as a national project, with state companies and state-backed startups and satellite constellations in the tens of thousands. Getting to space is something a country can decide to build and own. We decided to hand it to one man instead.

SpaceX now holds around $22 billion in federal contracts. Across the whole Musk empire the public money runs closer to $38 billion. The launch pads, the airwaves, the satellites overhead, the early customers, the technology our space program spent two generations developing. He built on all of it, and we kept no share of it.

The rest of his fortune sits in Tesla, and that deal is even worse. Tesla is worth more than every other major carmaker on the planet combined. Toyota, BYD, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, all of them together, still short of Tesla. Plenty of those companies earn more actual profit than Tesla does. Toyota alone makes several times Tesla’s money. The valuation isn’t a measure of the business. It’s an obvious bubble, one of those bubbles people will look back on like the tulip bubble and ask how anybody ever believed it.

Meanwhile the tariffs are the only reason Chinese carmakers aren’t whipping us in our own market. BYD passed Tesla as the biggest seller of electric cars in the world, and it makes a good one for around ten thousand dollars. Musk has admitted himself that without trade barriers, Chinese automakers would demolish most of their rivals. The tariff wall protects the whole American industry, and Tesla is its single biggest beneficiary. We’re babying these companies instead of pushing them to get better, and we’re not taking a dime of ownership while we do it.

They’ll tell you the wall is national security. It isn’t. We haven’t kept our means of production. We don’t make enough steel even for ourselves, and that’s while we’re barely building anything. Start building at scale again and we’d be importing even more of it. We can’t build transmission lines or move energy around this country. We’ve lost the machine tools. We shipped the means of production to China and other countries, and now we’re handing what’s left to a handful of billionaires. National security would be making these companies better. It would be forcing them to share the patents we paid to develop. It would be forcing a universal charger. It would be making them earn their money through quality production that competes on the open market, not through bubble valuations.

Then they handed him our retirement accounts. When a company joins a major stock index, every fund tracking that index has to buy it. Nobody decides the company is worth the money. The rule says buy. So every two weeks tens of millions in paychecks pour in on autopilot. SpaceX wanted that money sooner than the rules allow, because Elon Musk is special, apparently. His advisers pushed the index providers to change the rules, and two of the three folded. Nasdaq rewrote its policy so a company like SpaceX can join in fifteen trading days instead of three months. Russell cut its wait to five. Somewhere around $22 to $27 billion in automatic buying will hit a stock with almost no shares actually trading. The S&P 500, the biggest index of them all, refused. It said earn your way in, a company that loses money doesn’t qualify. One gatekeeper said no. Two said yes. The rules got bent for him, and that’s not speculation. It happened. One more handout, except this time the money is yours, pulled out of your paycheck and pointed at his stock whether the price makes sense or not.

We’ve watched this movie before. Amazon went a decade without real profits and the market funded it anyway, because everyone could see the government handing it advantage after advantage. Bezos planted the company in Washington State to dodge sales tax, and for twenty years Amazon skirted sales taxes across most of the country, a built-in discount on every order that local stores couldn’t match, because they had to charge the tax. It crushed them. Then cities lined up to hand the richest man alive billions more in breaks for a headquarters. We supported these guys, who then took everything and ran.

Now we’ve created a class of men who hold more wealth than many states. Musk holds more than many countries. That concentration gives one human incomprehensible power, and we will hand him more of it every year. We outsourced our production to China. Now we’re outsourcing our state itself to a few men, who just sub it back out to us.

Tax the oligarchy and the money flows back as rent to the same oligarchs, the medical ones, the housing ones, the tech ones, and we get nothing for it. No power, no stability, no better income. We get a company town as a national economy.

The answer is not a wealth tax. Tax Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg, pull the money into the government, push it back into broken systems, and you haven’t restructured a thing. Pull wealth from Musk and pour it into a healthcare system that already swallows a huge percentage of dollars before they reach a patient, and you don’t get better health or longer lives. You get more valuable healthcare companies. Pull it into housing allowances and down payment assistance, and you don’t get cheaper homes. You push the prices up, hand the gain to private equity firms that already own the housing, and make it harder for the next family that wants to own a home. A wealth tax spreads a little money around the top and leaves the same people owning the same things. It doesn’t move power. Tax the oligarchy and the money flows back as rent to the same oligarchs, the medical ones, the housing ones, the tech ones, and we get nothing for it. No power, no stability, no better income. We get a company town as a national economy.

The answer is ownership. Take back a stake in what was built with our money, our research, our protection. And before anyone says it can’t be done, Donald Trump has shown us it’s possible. His administration has taken a 10 percent stake in Intel, stakes in lithium and rare earth companies, and a golden share in US Steel. The taboo is broken. The government demanding equity for its support is now just a thing that happens.

But the golden share in US Steel is veto power with no money in it, a say with no stake. The Intel shares are also money with no say. None of it comes with the part that matters, which is input on where these companies go and what they do with the resources we let them use. We protect their intellectual property, most of which we developed. We protect their markets. We give them our military, our courts, our FBI, a stable country to get rich in. And what we’re getting back is poorer and sicker, with a shrinking share of the things that are ours.

Real public ownership means both. The profits and the say-so, together, the demands any investor would make. When the public builds the thing, the public owns a piece of the thing. Call it American Equity. We knew how to do this. The New Deal did it. The Arsenal of Democracy did it. The country that built the Transcontinental Railroad and the New York City subway did it. That system, the one Hamilton started with public credit behind American manufacturing, is the system China runs today. They took our playbook. We traded it for stock market rackets.

We can raise hospitals. We can send rockets into space. We can launch satellites, and we can do it for ourselves. There’s nothing particularly amazing about Elon Musk except his willingness to fleece the American people out of what’s theirs. So stop. Stop handing him the contracts. Strip the special treatment. Claw back the intellectual property and the advantages we built for him, and go to the moon ourselves again.

They stop existing because they fail to come together and remove the rot, the corruption, the inequality, and demand accountability from the people who’ve dodged it the longest. We’re at the part of the cycle where we take our stuff back, or we fail.

There’s a cycle to this. Countries in the spot we’re in generally stop existing. Not because they lack potential. Not because they have nothing worth producing. They stop existing because they fail to come together and remove the rot, the corruption, the inequality, and demand accountability from the people who’ve dodged it the longest. We’re at the part of the cycle where we take our stuff back, or we fail.

Today they crown the first trillionaire. They’ll say he earned it. The truth is simpler and uglier. He’s a welfare trillionaire. Half a billion in government loans, tens of billions in government contracts, sixty years of our research. We made him.

And a wealth tax won’t unmake him, because taxing the mega oligarch just funds the baby oligarchs. The only way to reclaim the power they’ve taken from us is to take back some of what’s ours, some of our capacity, some of our infrastructure, our share of the things we paid to build. Bernie Sanders said it this week, the public should own half of the big AI companies. We need to be thinking a lot more along those lines. If we want homes people can afford, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt us, and work that pays, it starts with owning things again.

Earlier this week, the Guardian ran a piece by Eduardo Porter. A financial crisis is coming, he says, and what should scare us is that our broken politics will guarantee we botch the response. Debt at 120% of GDP. A government with no plan but to lean on the Fed and pour money into the military. He's right that we'll botch it. He's wrong about almost everything else.

Read the whole thing and the frame never changes. Fiscal discipline. Get our house in order. Brace for impact. Like the economy is weather, a storm coming and our only option is to board up the windows and ride it out. In his view, the economy is something that happens to us.

It doesn't happen to us. We build it. We rebuild it every day. And we could build it differently.

Here's the one thing sitting under all of it. We've had brutal inflation in this country for fifty years, and we never called it inflation. It wasn’t the kind that spikes at the gas pump for a year and fades. It was the slow kind, at the price of a whole life. The house. The doctor. The degree. The tank of gas and the cart of groceries. The things you can't opt out of.

Those prices have climbed since the seventies, and the official number has barely moved because it measures the price of a thing, not the hours of your life it takes to afford it. That's the trick. Inflation isn’t just a price tag. It's how much of your life the price tag consumes.

None of the backlash of the last ten years was random. MAGA. Bernie. Occupy Wall Street before them. Eight million people in the street this spring. The rage that elected Trump twice and almost nominated a democratic socialist twice.

People keep treating it as a personality problem, disinformation, or a flaw in voters. It's a bill coming due. The anger is the interest on a choice we made fifty years ago, and we still won't say what the choice was.

Start with what the chart-wavers wave. Real wages up. The economy's fine, they say. You're emotional. Of course the numbers aren't fake, “real” wages did rise. But a “real” wage isn't a life. Those charts are adjusting workers’ pay in several ways. They don't measure a household's economic condition. And they measure it against 2019, the fortieth year of neoliberalism, the disease I’ve been describing. If you tell someone they're better off today than in 2019, it’s like telling some one with a fever of 104 vs 105 that they’re healthy. It ain’t great news.

The question isn't whether life has gotten slightly better or worse since 2019. It's why we’ve been in decline since the late 1970s.

Look where the money goes. The bottom 80% of households now spend around 82 cents of every after-tax dollar on six basics: housing, food, healthcare, transportation, clothing, and a little on education. Total it up, and they spend more than 100% of what they bring home. The gap gets covered by transfers and borrowing, around eighteen trillion dollars of household debt and still climbing. Eighty percent of the country runs a deficit to cover the basics, and we call that a strong economy.

Here's a number that needs no inflation adjustment, because it's measured in the only thing nobody can argue with, the hours of your life. In the postwar decades, a median home cost about two and a half years of a median household's entire income. Today it's about five. It was four as recently as 2019, and the people who say the economy is fine concede that jump.

And five is the household number, the one that already swallowed a second earner. We held it that low by sending a second adult to work, and once two incomes became normal, the price rose to meet them, because you win a house by outbidding the family beside you, and now they had two incomes too. The extra earner got competed straight into the price of the same house.

Measure it against one person's income, the way you could in 1970 when a single paycheck bought a home, and a median home went from about four years of work to about ten. That gap between one earner and two is the story of the American family since 1970, and no wage chart shows it. And don't take the dodge that the house got bigger. Most people buy existing homes, not the big new builds, and priced by the foot it still ran away. A diploma bought a house and a family on one income in 1970, and that life is gone at that price.

This month, consumer sentiment hit its lowest reading in the survey's 74-year history. Lower than 2008. During the same stretch, the stock market sat at an all-time high. They're both right. They're measuring two different countries. One scoreboard counts the people who own the assets. The other counts the people who live here. We've been running the country off the first one for fifty years and calling it the economy.

So how did the cost of living come unglued from pay? In the 1970s we hit a real crisis. Stagflation, oil shocks, the whole postwar machine grinding down. We came to a fork in the road.

One path was to keep doing what had built America, public money aimed at production, the thing that gave us the Arsenal of Democracy and the TVA and the interstate highways. We took another road. We decided we didn't need to make things anymore. Let the poorer countries make them. We'd keep the financing, the design, and the branding, and sit at the head of the table because we figured we deserved it. We sold the means of production and called it efficiency.

You can watch that choice land in a single number. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, when the country got more productive, the worker's paycheck climbed right with it. Then around 1979 they came apart and never got back in line. We've gotten about 85 percent more productive while the pay of a typical worker has gone up maybe 13. The money it threw off stopped going to the people doing the work and was siphoned off to the people who already owned things. The economy didn't run out of money to pay people. It got richer the whole time, and decided the workers weren't the ones who'd see it.

We're a debtor nation now, renting our productivity from China, a competitor we built ourselves. We still tell ourselves we're a manufacturing powerhouse. Strip out computers and electronics and American manufacturing output has been flat for twenty-five years. We gave up the tangible stuff for financial paper. We don't make the transformers anymore. We don't make the copper. We import the lumber and the breaker panels and half the inputs you'd need to put up a single house.

We don't have a spending problem. We have a spending-on problem. We pour trillions into these systems and get almost nothing back because the money lands in financial services, healthcare middlemen, and asset prices instead of anything that produces. Healthcare subsidies don't make us healthier; they make UnitedHealthcare bigger. Housing subsidies don't make homes cheaper; they get baked into the price, and Blackstone takes the spread. You can't carry water in a colander. Pour in more, and you get more leakage.

So we've had fifty years of inflation in the things that matter most, and we've never aimed a single policy at it. We aimed at the other inflation instead. When prices move, the country has one reflex. The Fed raises rates to choke off demand and waits for the market to sort out supply. That cools a hot economy. It does nothing to a rigged one. In housing and healthcare, nobody's standing on the supply side, and higher rates make it cost more to build a home or a hospital, not less. The one lever we pull shoves the disease the wrong way. We've spent half a century treating a supply famine with a demand diet and calling it responsible.

And you can't save your way out from here. We owe more than 39 trillion dollars, and you can't run surpluses big enough to pay it down without crushing the economy. Do that, and the ratio gets worse, because the bottom drops faster than the debt. Greece tried it, and the debt grew because its economy shrank beneath it. Debt this size never gets paid back. It gets outgrown, inflated down, or rolled forever. There's nothing responsible about attempting the impossible.

There's another way, and it isn't theoretical. Japan and Germany ate the same oil shocks and took the road we threw away, protecting their factories and their skills and eating flat asset prices to do it. China's doing it at scale now. What builds an economy is patient capital willing to lose money on purpose, for a decade, toward a goal. Private capital can't; the market punishes it every quarter. The state can absorb the losses to build solar, batteries, and steel until the competition is gone. We did it ourselves in the war and the Cold War. The microchip. The internet. Then we decided losing money on purpose was inefficient and quit.

So the answer isn't to spend less, but it ain’t more of the same spending either. Nor can we just tax the rich to write bigger welfare checks. It's spending to get things built—public competition in the cornerstone sectors. Public banking. Public housing at scale. Public hospitals to discipline private prices. That way the public owns them. A real stake in the things we use to live, not a 401(k) crumb in a market the billionaires still own.

We need the state to build capacity that the market won't, because the market makes more money from extracting than producing. Once the public begins to compete in the market, the extractors have to drop prices or get out. The economy can be muscled. It is not the weather. Every time someone tells you the market decided, they are lying. The corporate politicians, dancing to the tune of their benefactors, created a system to enrich the already wealthy and let the rest of us take it on the chin.

There’s no free market - there’s a rigged game. Unfortunately, knowing the economy can be steered isn't the same as having the hands to steer it. We spent fifty years stripping the state for parts, capturing the agencies and gutted any capacity for a building mission to succeed. A captured, incompetent state can’t drive a mission, it’s just a fresh trough for the same wealthy people to drink from. We've won the argument that building works. We haven't settled whether we can rebuild a state worth trusting with it, or a politics durable enough to protect it for more than one cycle. That's the real fight.

Porter's right that the next crisis is coming. Milton Friedman said it cleanest. Only a crisis produces real change, and the change depends on the ideas lying around when it hits. The free-market crowd had theirs ready in 1980 and won forty years. The question is whether our ideas are ready. Not a plan we run today, but a readiness, so when the muddle breaks, it breaks toward building.

I could end on a line about rising to the moment, but I'd rather not, and you'd see through it. What I want is an argument. A real one, out in the open, with the brain trust the Democratic center still runs on. and and the whole fiscal-discipline crowd. Hunter at StatisticUrban and the chart-wavers are telling us the mood is wrong, but I think they're all measuring the wrong thing. And I'd love to be shown, on the record, where I've got it wrong.

Because this isn't a seminar. If Democrats take back the House and the Senate in 2026, and if we get lucky enough to put someone in the White House in 2028, somebody has to decide what this party believes an economy is for. Whether it's a machine we keep tuned-up and humming for the wealthy, or it’s something that makes ordinary life work for ordinary people. That decision should be fought out in public first.

So come fight it out with me. That's the invitation: show up, and we’ll find out what’s real and what’s not. 

Corbin Trent

423-839-6107