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.

I spoke to Graham Platner a while back. Here is a link to the full 20 minute discussion.

I’ve spent a week watching people line up to tell me Graham Platner is too compromised for the United States Senate. And I keep thinking about the people already in it.

While Israel was dropping white phosphorus on people in Lebanon, the New York Times called it a munition that “can be extremely harmful.” White phosphorus burns through skin to the bone. They called it harmful. Like cholesterol. Like skipping the gym.

This is the same paper that spent three or four months interviewing dozens of women who dated Graham Platner, hunting for anything to disqualify him. White phosphorus gets softened to “extremely harmful.” A man’s private life gets a microscope.

Because that’s what this is. They’ve taken a candidate’s personal struggles and made them the test of whether he’s fit to serve. Relationships that ended badly. Texts he regrets. The years he spent drinking, trying to outrun what he brought home from Ramadi and Fallujah. He’s a Marine who came back with PTSD and a drinking problem and did the work to come out the other side. That’s not a disqualification. In most of America that’s the story of a man growing up. But run for office as a working class guy and every private wound becomes a headline.

Sure, sexting with a woman while you’re married isn’t admirable. But that’s never been the test of whether someone can be trusted with power.

The test is how you conduct yourself when you have it. And by that test, the Senate we’ve got right now is morally bankrupt. Our media holds up those senators as moral and dignified while they sit in a hearing and debate the merits of making our military bunk mates with the military of a genocidal government. That gets called sober and serious. Just policy. Just pragmatism. Working hand in hand with people committing war crimes is just statesmanship.

Chuck Schumer voted for the war in Iraq and hundreds of thousands died. He didn’t lose his leadership or his reputation as a statesman because he didn’t personally drop the bomb. Now he leads the Senate Democrats, and he’s never been scrutinized like Platner. He was just part of the machine—he’s still part of the machine—and nobody in the machine is ever responsible.

Of course it isn’t just Schumer. Dozens of Senators, in both parties, voted for that war and fund all of our wars, and they’ve never answered for a single death. Platner, though. Platner pressed send. Platner was “unsettling.”

I don’t feel betrayed by Platner. I feel betrayed by the people sitting in judgment of him. John Yoo wrote the legal memos that authorized torture, and he teaches law at Berkeley. Perfectly acceptable stuff. But a man’s text messages have got the same people clutching at their pearls. If they want to talk about morality, let’s go. Let’s talk about yelling at a girlfriend, and then about funding the death of twenty thousand kids.

These are the Senators that Graham Platner isn’t fit to sit beside. They’re quiet or cheering, while we starve ordinary Cubans to force a regime change. They were quiet while we bombed Caracas and kidnapped a sitting head of state. They’re quiet while we blow boats out of the water in the Caribbean and kill everyone aboard because maybe there are drugs and maybe there aren’t. They were quiet when a school full of girls got hit in the opening hours of our war on Iran, 165 children dead, and the official position of the US government is that we’re still investigating whether it was us.

A few weeks ago Israel seized an aid flotilla in international waters, and its national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted video of himself taunting zip-tied activists forced to kneel on the ground. At least fifteen later reported being sexually assaulted, including accounts of rape and forcible penetration with a handgun. Italian prosecutors opened an investigation, but over here it barely made the news.

You can do anything, as long as you do it with decorum. In a good suit. Without raising your voice. Respectable means funding your war crimes with class. But if your human struggle is leaked, you’re finished.

He’s a Marine who came back with PTSD and a drinking problem and did the work to come out the other side. That’s not a disqualification. In most of America that’s the story of a man growing up. But run for office as a working class guy and every private wound becomes a headline.

Platner calls the genocide a genocide. He says out loud that tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford a doctor. He looks at our wars and our economy and names what they cost and who pays. That’s moral clarity, and it’s the one qualification many of our Senators can’t claim.

So spare me. Spare me the lecture about Graham Platner’s character.

He came home from a war these people voted for, faced down his own demons and came out clearer than the people judging him. He’s not the threat here.

The threat is a chamber full of millionaires with clean hands and bloody voting records. It’s the talking heads who treat a working class vet as a scandal and treat war criminals like colleagues.

Graham Platner is more likely than not to improve the morality of the United States Senate. That’s not a joke, and it’s not because the bar is low—though it is. It’s because he sees clearly what they’ve spent careers refusing to see. The US Senate could learn a thing or two.

Corbin Trent

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

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Yesterday the DNC released its autopsy of the 2024 election. DNC chair Ken Martin sat on it for months, assured us there was no smoking gun, promised he’d already been sharing the lessons, and then finally dropped the 48,000 words on a Thursday with a note on the front saying the findings don’t reflect the views of the DNC. He released the autopsy and disowned it simultaneously.

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I get why he’d disown it. It’s a big turd. But the whole time he buried it, Martin kept saying the lessons from this report were already being put to work. Lessons. We’re keeping the focus on the lessons, he’d say. We’ve been releasing the lessons. I read it, most of it. It’s not that there are no recommendations. There are plenty. Go heavier on digital and connected TV, lighter on broadcast. Organize earlier. Rebuild the state parties. Those are the lessons. If they’ve taken any of them, they’ve taken the wrong ones, and there’s a reason for that.

Every question in that report is a variation on the same question. How do we campaign better with what we’ve got. How do we market this thing more effectively to the people we’re trying to sell it to. Never once do they stop and ask whether the thing they’re selling is bullshit. Whether the product is any good. Whether a single promise in it would fix a single person’s life.

It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it. The DNC still isn’t looking for a mission of its own. It tells the campaigns to build their own contrast and definition and leaves the meaning to everyone else. The party is a machine with no idea what it’s for.

To the contrary, it’s pretty pleased with itself. The report never once treats the Biden record as a failure. Its gripe about Bidenomics isn’t that it failed people, it’s that the message leaned on big macro statistics instead of the daily reality people were actually living. When the party lost down the ballot, the report decided strong local candidates just needed to define themselves better. They’re certain Democrats are doing a great job, and that it’s just their inability to explain how awesome they are that keeps them out of power.

What I see in this report is the Biden administration in miniature. Biden was sold to us, by the press and by his own people, as proof of what Democrats could do if they got back to their FDR roots. We got the CHIPS Act. We got the IRA. We got the bipartisan infrastructure law. We were told it was the most historic spending in generations. But the rubber never hits the road. Lives weren’t transformed. Why? Because these people refuse to admit that the systems they are funding are no longer productive.

They refuse to look at the difference between an input and an output. Effort and results. You can pour trillions into a financialized housing market and a six-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, but if you never touch the monopolies and the middlemen and the rot underneath, nothing useful comes out the other side. It’s worse than that. Pour more money into an out-of-control healthcare industry and all you’ve built is a stronger monopoly, a more powerful opponent.

The net result of all that historic spending is a Democratic Party that seventy percent of voters can’t stand and that can’t get above water with its own base. A lot of money. A lot of effort. Nothing delivered. Same as the report.

If you doubt where the party’s head is, count the words. The report runs 48,000 of them. “Spend” shows up 350 times. “Data,” 226. “Organizing,” 211. “Fundraising,” 150. “Monopoly,” zero. “Cost of living,” zero. “Affordability,” four. “Healthcare,” twice. That’s not an analysis of a country in pain. That’s a sales team studying its own pipeline.

Then there’s the New York Times, coming to the rescue with much-needed polling and data. The paper of record put out a poll a few days ago, I assume in an effort to find out how Americans actually feel and what they want from their politics and government. Among people who plan to vote for Democrats, socialism runs favorable by twenty-seven points, 49 to 22. Those same people turn around and say, 52 to 25, that the party should move to the center to win. The Times wants you to read that as confused voters. They aren’t confused. The question is garbage. This is the paper that fancies itself the one asking the hard questions and uncovering the real America, and the hard question it managed to come up with was whether the party should move left, right, or not at all on healthcare.

What does that mean? What’s the policy? What changes in your life? They don’t say. You decide. They never asked whether you want a zero-copay, zero-cost national health plan. They never asked whether we should go back to a country where the states and the cities and the government own some of the hospitals and the clinics and the research labs. They asked left or right, defined nothing, and then acted stunned when people handed them a tangle.

They asked exactly one real policy question in the whole poll. Whether you’d rather have a candidate who lowers prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gougers, or one who lowers prices by deregulating and building more. Better than two to one, people said go after the ones with the power. The reason was sitting right there. The good sense was sitting right there. They just wouldn’t go looking for it anywhere else.

They keep us trapped in left and right because it’s the frame they know how to sell. But the world isn’t left and right, and I’m not sure it ever was. It’s something they lay over the top of us, the same way they sort us into black, white, Latino, Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Quaker, the way a zoologist sorts fish into types. It might be a fine theory for eking out a marginal election here and there. It’s a useless theory for fixing a broken system. And there’s overwhelming agreement out there that the system is broken.

Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them. The NYT poll proves it. Same disgust, same broken trust, same party underwater with its own people. Nothing got fixed because nothing got understood. And they’re going to win anyway. Not because they earned it. Because the other side is handing it to them.

We’re in a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East. Gas is climbing. The president is corrupt as hell and everyone can see it. The headwind is so strong that, as Pelosi once put it, you could run a glass of water with a D next to its name and win in half these districts. So they’ll win in November, call it proof the model works, and walk right back into the same wall in 2028 having learned nothing. Winning is the very thing that lets them skip getting better.

So no, I don’t think we live in a left-right world anymore. We live in a world of capacity, of competency, of outcomes. That’s the whole game now, and it’s exactly where the government and the corporations have failed us, over and over, while the political class argues about a spectrum that means nothing to a family trying to buy groceries. It is not baked in. I’ve spent ten years trying to build something that takes that seriously, and I’m going again, harder, with A Fight Worth Having.

How we do it, and why I think the people telling us to keep our hands clean have it exactly backwards, is next.

Corbin Trent
afightworthhaving.com

Monday the New York Times editorial board put out a piece saying America needs to build four million more houses. They opened with a graphic. In 1950, a median American household could buy a median house with two and a half years of income. Today it takes almost five years. The Times treated that ratio as the headline number.

They got it wrong - it’s four times as bad. They don’t get it, because they don’t live in reality. They live in bubbles protected from reality by their wealth and privileged networks.

In 1950, a household was almost always one person earning. Today’s household is almost always two. The median home is not twice as expensive as it was in 1950. On a per-worker basis, it takes four times as much human labor to buy the same house. We doubled the workforce inside the household and the cost still outran us.

That’s the actual story, and it isn’t unique to housing. It takes more of our lives to afford less of what we need across every major sector. Housing. Health care. Child care. Education. Infrastructure. The things that make a country strong and self-sufficient have been stripped away by the people who took the work, and sold back to us at a markup.

The Abundance crowd thinks the answer is faster permitting. YIMBYs think it’s upzoning. The Trump administration thinks it’s tariffs and handouts to the trillion-dollar firms that broke the supply chain in the first place. None of these solutions meet the moment. None of them even name real culprits. Decades ago our business and political leaders decided we no longer needed to build the things we and the world use. We’d farm it out to poorer countries and sit at the head of the table forever, just because we deserved it. They were wrong. We’re way behind. And the tools we have are old, sold off, or rusting.

This piece is about housing. I happen to be a licensed general contractor and have remodeled homes. That said, this worldview applies to a much bigger slice of our economy.

Here’s what it takes to build a house. Lumber. Copper wire. Romex. Breaker boxes and panels. Nails. Shingles. HVAC units. Windows. Pipes. Drywall. Somebody who knows how to wire it, plumb it, and swing a hammer. Roads. Water lines. Sewer capacity. A power grid that can carry the load. Schools for the kids who’ll live there.

Almost none of that comes from here anymore. We import about a third of our softwood lumber, mostly from Canada. The U.S. imports around half of the refined copper it consumes, with roughly 65 percent coming from Chile alone. Much of the electrical supply chain — panels, breakers, transformers — now runs through Asia. The transformer story is the one to sit with: roughly 80 percent of large power transformers used in the U.S. are imported, and Wood Mackenzie’s Q2 2025 survey puts the average lead time at 128 weeks — nearly two and a half years — with some specialty orders stretching to four years. Before the pandemic those same transformers shipped in 7 to 14 months. Power transformer prices are up 77 percent since 2019. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of our construction workers are foreign-born, and the Associated Builders and Contractors estimate the industry needs to attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and another 456,000 in 2027, just to stay even.

These are not policy abstractions. These are the inputs. If you don’t have them, you cannot build the houses. The country has been hollowed out by people who profited from the hollowing, and the bill is coming due all at once.

The Times held up Austin as proof that supply works. Austin added 120,000 housing units from 2015 to 2024 and rents fell 16 to 22 percent from their 2022 peak. But Austin had cattle-ranch land at $5,000 an acre — San Francisco’s core runs $20 to $40 million an acre — a trades workforce that grew with the boom, and Municipal Utility Districts that bond-financed infrastructure onto future residents. Austin did not make growth cheap. It moved the cost off the developer’s books and onto the backs of future residents. Socialize the cost. Privatize the upside. I see a version of this firsthand in East Tennessee. Country roads that weren’t built for this many people. Schools that weren’t built for this many kids. Water systems under strain. You can call it affordability but what it really is are subsidies for the developers and inadequate infrastructure for the citizens.

Affordability is not a regulatory problem. It’s a production problem. The Abundance answer is that markets respond to scarcity by adding capacity. The COVID lumber spike showed they don’t. Prices ran from $400 per thousand board feet to over $1,500 by May 2021. The classical story says producers reopen mills, build new ones, expand supply. None of that happened at scale. Mills shuttered after the Great Recession did not reopen. The producers pocketed the margin, ran the buybacks, and went back to bed. Lumber came back down only because demand cooled, not because supply caught up. Capacity today is what it was twenty years ago.

You have to bring prices down, not wait for the market to add capacity at the price it likes. The way we have actually brought prices down on things that mattered has never once been through deregulation. It has always been a mission. The Arsenal of Democracy. The New Deal. The Space Race. Oak Ridge. The Manhattan Project. The TVA dam system. Rural electrification. During World War II, the Defense Plant Corporation financed over 2,300 industrial facilities worth $9.2 billion, roughly two-thirds of all new private industrial capacity added before and during the war. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation worked as a public bank, funding what private capital wouldn’t. We trained millions of nurses and welders and electricians as capacity build-outs, not funding rounds.

Then we killed it. Successive administrations sold it off and called it efficiency. CEOs offshored the factories and called it shareholder value. Wall Street bought the husks and called it growth. None of this happened by accident. It happened on purpose, by people we can name, in service of a class of beneficiaries who are still cashing the checks.

A handful of people are arguing for getting it back. Saikat Chakrabarti, running in California’s 11th, has published the cleanest version in a document called Mission for America. It calls for restoring the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public bank to finance the build-out we need. He’s also calling for public ownership of AI. Most of the Democratic field, including most of the progressive bench, is not yet there. One person winning a seat doesn’t change a party. A team of candidates does. That team doesn’t exist yet. It needs to.

Everything I’ve said so far would be true if AI didn’t exist. AI just sets the deadline.

The CEOs building these systems are now telling us, on the record, that AI will displace large fractions of the workforce, and the wave will not stop at the bottom. These are not critics. These are the people building the displacement machine, notifying us what they intend to do with it. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times this year that “most” white-collar tasks “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Jamie Dimon has spent 2026 publicly urging the government to prepare. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years. AI is coming for the top 20 percent of income earners on a two-to-five-year timeline.

A government that can’t build can’t respond to that. If we lose another massive fraction of the workforce to displacement and the only tool we have is checks, those checks will chase the same scarce housing, the same scarce health care, the same scarce energy. The prices that are already crushing people will go balistic.

You cannot subsidize your way out of scarcity. Pour more money into a market with constrained supply and you don’t get more supply. You get higher prices. Health care subsidies don’t make Americans healthier. They make UnitedHealthcare and Aetna and CVS more and more powerful. Housing subsidies don’t make homes cheaper. They get capitalized into the asset, and Blackstone and Invitation Homes and Pretium take the spread.

We have to make things. And we have to own the things that make the things. Otherwise Wall Street and the commodities markets bleed us dry, taking an exorbitant share for doing next to nothing. Public banking. Public capacity. Public ownership is the base everything else rests on.

What America has in abundance is zeros in the bank accounts of a tiny minority. The things we need are scarce. The richest nation in the history of the world has built its wealth on stock prices, asset prices, and home equity. None of that produces a transformer or trains a nurse or frames a house. The wealth is there on paper but it’s absent in the physical world.

We cannot solve the affordability crisis until we solve the scarcity crisis. Affordability and scarcity are incompatible.

Corbin Trent
AfightWorthHaving.com

This is the second time in my lifetime a president has declared “mission accomplished” in a Middle Eastern war. And it’s no more true today with Iran than it was then with Iraq. The war isn’t over. And we’re losing it.

But we’re not just losing a war. We’re revealing something about ourselves. The most powerful nation in the history of the world has decided that its only remaining utility to the rest of humanity is its ability to blow things up. We project power through bombs and sanctions because we’ve lost the ability to project power through production. We used to be the country that made the things the world needed. Now we’re the country that threatens the countries that make the things the world needs.

And we wonder why it isn’t working.

CNN just confirmed that we’ve been lying about the damage to our military assets across the Middle East. Iran damaged at least 16 American military sites across eight countries, the majority of US military positions in the region. Tens of billions of dollars in military assets have evaporated. The Pentagon’s comptroller told Congress the war has cost $25 billion so far, but internal estimates place the real figure closer to $40 to $50 billion, and that’s before reconstruction. A Boeing E-3 Sentry, our primary surveillance aircraft in the Gulf, was destroyed on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Our radar systems, the most expensive and limited assets we have in the region, were specifically targeted and hit. And our oldest Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, is now telling reporters out loud that the American alliance is no longer impregnable.

And for what?

This is a war we chose. We were not under threat. Our allies were not under threat. The American public was not under threat. The State Department’s own April legal opinion describes the operation as having been undertaken “at the request of” Israel. That’s their own paperwork. Rubio admitted on camera that the US “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” and went in alongside them. Netanyahu pitched Trump on a joint attack in the White House Situation Room. He hoodwinked the shit out of Donald Trump and got him to do it. There were people in this country who wanted it too. There always are. But this did not have to happen.

And to what end? To squeeze Iran, sure. But really to squeeze China. To try to slow them down, because slowing them down is something our elite class can imagine doing. Speeding ourselves up is not. Building more ourselves is not. So we settle for trying to hobble the people who are actually building. And we tell ourselves that’s strategy.

This is not what America has been good at anyway. We don’t fight wars we’re not all in on very well. From Vietnam to Korea to Syria to Iraq, once and then twice, to Iran now, we are not great at fighting wars where American citizens aren’t fully vested in fighting them. And nor should we be.

I don’t even like calling these wars endless, because they do end. They just end after we destroy populations, after we kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, after we starve people and destroy entire ecosystems, after we kill and maim scores of Americans and maim many more civilians in those countries. They end in disaster and massive amounts of loss. Human loss. Economic loss. Moral loss. For what? For nothing. For trying to prop up something that could have been propped up better through production and through beauty.

What is endless is our desire to be at war. What is endless is our desire to have a boogeyman, somebody we have to destroy and kill, somebody other than the ruling elite in this country who are actually responsible for our decline.

What we used to be great at was building things. We were also getting good at fixing the problems in our own society, at repairing centuries of distrust. We were working toward that. And we pivoted away.

Meanwhile, in the middle of losing this war, Iranian lawmakers just rolled out a 12-point plan that bars Israeli vessels from the Strait of Hormuz permanently and demands the US and its allies pay war reparations before any of their ships are allowed through. And China just did something it has never done before. China’s Ministry of Commerce activated its 2021 blocking statute for the first time, telling all Chinese firms it is illegal to comply with US sanctions targeting five of their independent oil refineries over Iranian oil. They are forcing people to choose. Deal with America, or deal with China. And a lot of people are not going to choose us.

What is the American answer to all of this? More military. More pressure. More sanctions. More war.

We’ve gotten to the point in this country where war and violence and pressure are the only answers we can see. Because we’ve let the rest of it die. And what we’re left with is everything looking like a nail, because all we have is a hammer.

Instead of competing with China by being good at what we do, by providing the world with an alternative to Chinese products and Chinese infrastructure and Chinese energy systems, we want to destroy them. Choke them out. Cut off their access to Iranian oil, Venezuelan oil, whatever else we can squeeze. We think we can starve them into respecting us, because we still think we’re indispensable to them.

We are not.

The US accounts for about 13 to 14 percent of China’s exports, and that share is falling. Their exports are roughly 20 percent of their GDP. So the US is maybe 2 or 3 percent of China’s economy as an export market. They produce the things their society needs. They import some stuff, sure, but a lot of what they need they already make. And they’re the CCP. If they decide to redirect production to keep their society running, they’ll do it. They have done it before.

Meanwhile, we no longer have an industrial base. The Nazis made this mistake. They thought their stuff was better. They thought their precision and their engineering and their reputation would carry them. And then America cranked up its industrial base and pumped out tanks and airplanes and bombs and boats that overwhelmed them just by sheer volume. We outproduced them by an order of magnitude. That’s how we won. Not with better stuff. With more stuff, made faster, by more people, in more factories.

We are now the Nazis in that story. We have the better-stuff swagger and none of the industrial base. And we are picking a fight with the country that has what we used to have.

And this is just the war part. We have way bigger problems as a nation than whether we can win one more conflict in the Middle East. We can’t make the things we need for our own supply chains. We can’t afford our housing. Healthcare is on track to bankrupt us. We have a massive debt. And unlike the 1940s, when our debt was equal to our GDP and we built the country we’re still living off of, we haven’t built much of anything with the debt we’ve taken on since. Financial services. Bubbles in stocks and crypto and other shit that doesn’t actually feed anybody, clothe anyone, cure a disease, fix a broken bone, or house anyone. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and nothing sustainable to show for it.

The utility we provide the world right now is weaponry. Not culture. Not democracy. Not renewable energy. Not machine tools. Not the things people need to consume daily. That’s largely done by China.

The American elite cannot wrap their heads around any of this. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the neoliberal turn we’ve taken over the last fifty years has been a failure. That we need to get back to the American system that’s being employed right now by the Chinese. The one where we build the things we need.

The only thing the New York Times and the rest of the elite, Democratic and Republican, can wrap their heads around is that we need to improve our military. Not a better society. A better military. The New York Times editorial board, theoretically the most forceful opinion page in one of the nation’s leading journals, spent eight days last December writing one piece a day about how we need a stronger military. “A Free World Needs a Strong America.” “America Can’t Make What the Military Needs.” And then they came back this April with another one. “The U.S. Military Was Losing Its Edge. After Iran, Everyone Knows It.”

How about a better manufacturing base? How about we figure out why we can’t produce infrastructure? We don’t have enough engineers. We don’t have enough scientists. We can’t provide healthcare because we don’t have enough doctors, dentists, mental health professionals. The reason we can sue the shit out of everybody is that we have lawyers coming out of the wazoo. That’s the part of the economy that works. We can litigate. We can financialize. We can extract. The actual building of things, the actual healing of people, the actual teaching of children, that part we can’t do anymore.

The military is no different. Obviously it’s corrupted. Obviously it’s dysfunctional. That’s the way our entire economy is. Healthcare. Education. Childcare. None of them are functioning properly. None of the cornerstones of our society are producing anywhere near what they should be producing for the kind of money that goes into them. And we think we can buy our way out of this shit. We can’t. We are going to have to work for what we have.

This is the symbiotic relationship between the media elite, the economic elite, and the elite in our government, all tied directly to the military-industrial complex. Not just as a source of spending and jobs. As the whole theory of how America continues to exist as a superpower. They literally cannot see that there are other ways to be powerful than bombs and military.

We can maintain superpower status by being super useful. By being super productive. By being super good at what we do. That is a superpower. Being the country the world cannot do without because we make the medicines, the machines, the energy, the things that move civilization forward.

Here is the part that should really get our attention. China is doing this with our system. Not the system we have now. The system we used to have. The Hamiltonian system. The Report on Manufactures, 1791. Tariffs on finished goods. Public investment in industry. Government supporting the building of a manufacturing base from scratch. Infrastructure investment. The system that, over a hundred years, took the United States from a colonial backwater to the world’s leading industrial power. We adopted nearly all of Hamilton’s recommendations. Industrial output grew at five percent a year for a century. We built this country with that system. And then we walked away from it.

China studied it. China adopted it. China is using our own ideas, our own playbook, against us. And our response is to whine about cheap labor and currency manipulation and stolen IP, like a kid who got a bad grade and doesn’t want to do the homework. The truth is they didn’t steal anything important. They picked up what we left on the floor.

We don’t need to copy China. We need to remember who we were.

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

We can build housing. We can build a grid. We can train doctors and nurses. We can manufacture our own pharmaceuticals. We can compete with private corporations and beat them, in every sector where we put public power in the field, the way we have always beaten them when we have bothered to try.

The market did not build this country. We built this country. And we can build it again.

If you want to see what the building plan actually looks like, my friend Zack Exley and the team at New Consensus have been working on exactly that. It's called Mission for America. It's worth your time.

Corbin Trent

Our failure of a governor called the session last Friday, the day after Trump posted that he’d spoken to him about a new map. The target is the 9th Congressional District, the only Tennessee seat held by a Democrat. (It was a 5-to-4 Dem majority until the 2010 gerrymandering.)

The plan they’ve floated would join parts of Memphis with rural counties two hours away in the middle of the state. The drive across that district would be over 200 miles. Politicians are drawing lines that decide outcomes.

The reason they can do this is that the Supreme Court spent the last year quietly killing the Voting Rights Act, and last week they finished the job. Louisiana v. Callais, 6-3, gutted Section 2, the part that for sixty years empowered Black voters in southern states to build electoral power.

The day after, Louisiana suspended its primary. They had already mailed ballots to overseas voters. Doesn’t matter. The day after that, Alabama filed an emergency motion and called a special session of its own. Today, Tennessee. By the end of summer it’ll be Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina. Southern Black congressional representation is getting wiped off the map in a couple of weeks.

It’s not just the South. Last year Texas redrew its map mid-decade because Trump told them to. California fought back. Then Missouri. Then North Carolina. Then Ohio and Utah. Then Virginia. Maybe Florida. Before this year, two states in the last 55 years had done mid-decade redistricting. In the last ten months, ten have done it or are doing it.

Democrats ran on saving democracy in 2024 and got whooped. Why?

Because, for too many of us, when we heard “save our democracy,” we thought, what democracy? Save what?

The elections flooded with unlimited corporate funds? The one where representatives pick their voters by drawing maps that make no logical sense? The thing where the only election that ever decides anything is a primary we didn’t know was happening? The thing where Congress is run by 80-year-olds because they’ve been there the longest? The thing where every politician I’ve ever heard of takes money from the same six industries?

That democracy?

The thing already broke. The Democrats could have run on rebuilding it. They didn’t, because the institutional class inside the Democratic Party benefits from the system as it is. They got their seats from it. They are not going to vote to take their own gavels away.

A lot of Democrats think 2024 was a turnout problem. If only more people had shown up, we would have been fine. That’s not what happened. People didn’t show up because the people asking them to show up were asking them to save a system that wasn’t working for them. The proof is sitting in our own caucus.

The Congressional Black Caucus is one of the most powerful blocs inside the Democratic Party. They run South Carolina. They run a chunk of Super Tuesday. They have chairs and ranking memberships and decades of seniority. And after all of that, Black Americans still earn less, hold less wealth, are policed harder, and are about to lose their congressional representation across the South in a single summer. A caucus that powerful, that long-tenured, that institutionally embedded, has not been able to materially reverse the extraction. That is not because the people in it don’t care. It’s because the caucus, as an institution, has attached itself to the system instead of going after it.

Same story with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Over a hundred members. The largest ideological bloc in the Democratic House. And when the moment came on Build Back Better, on Medicare for All, on Gaza, on every leverage point where they had the votes to actually move things, they folded. They got promises. They took the deal. The progressive caucus has spent the better part of a decade being the largest powerless caucus in Washington, because the people running it are still angling for the same gavels everyone else is angling for. The caucus title doesn’t change the incentive structure. The donors and the committee assignments and the leadership track do.

The trick works on every group. Black voters get told the caucus is the leverage. Progressives get told the caucus is the leverage. Every constituency the party can name and organize and hand a flag to gets told the same thing. The frame produces the feeling of power without any of the leverage. The system can absorb infinite caucus membership because caucus membership was never going to threaten it.

The white version of the same trick is more dangerous because more people fall for it. Poor whites are told that if they hold the line, if they push back on the minorities, if they wear the team colors, they’ll have power too. They won’t. I grew up one of them. I’d be one of them again if it weren’t for Substack subscribers. The team jersey is the trick. It keeps the poor white guy and the poor Black guy from noticing they’re getting taken by the same people.

The greatest irony of the maps being drawn this week is that they assume the working class will never come together. They assume Black and brown and white people sharing the same economic situation will never recognize themselves as a community of interest. The maps are a bet that the sort still holds.

Look at police violence. Black and Native Americans are killed by police at higher rates than anybody else. That’s true. Unarmed white people are killed by police too. The one thing almost every person killed by police has in common is that they were poor or powerless. We collect the data by race. We don’t collect it by class. That’s not an accident.

A real democracy is voters picking representatives. What we have is representatives picking voters.

The thing holding the institutional class together is a shared interest in the system that already paid them. Not ideology. Money. Relationships. Gavels. They came up under the same donors and the same arrangements and they are looking out for each other. It crosses party. It crosses race. It crosses wing.

David Scott of Georgia held the top Democratic spot on Agriculture for years on pharma money and bank money and almost nothing for his constituents. That’s the system. Maxine Waters, 87, openly told Punchbowl she doesn’t really think about term limits for chairs and wants to chair Financial Services again in 2027 if Democrats take the House. That’s the system. Henry Cuellar in Texas is under federal indictment for taking money from Azerbaijan, taking Big Oil money, voting against his own party on the basics. That’s the system. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina sits on a House AI commission while a $1.6 million super PAC funded by an AI company runs ads against her progressive primary challenger right now, after she took AIPAC money, after she took Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto money before he went to prison, taking pharmaceutical and defense contractor money the whole time she’s been in office. That’s the system.

Four Democrats have died in office during this Congress. Grijalva. Sylvester Turner. Gerry Connolly. David Scott, who cast his final vote the day before he died at 80, openly not up to the job at the end.

And we are seriously discussing whether the next chair of Financial Services in 2027 should be an 88-year-old who has been on the committee since George H.W. Bush was president. It’s not a strategy. It’s a courtesy. A deference to seniority and to relationships built in 1992. The cost of that courtesy is that we cannot turn the energy in the streets into anything legislative, because the people on our end of the phone came up in a different country and they don’t believe we need to go anywhere new.

This is why “save our democracy” didn’t work. The people delivering the message were the people the message was indicting.

Here is the door the Court opened. The same ruling that’s about to wipe out a generation of southern Black representation is also going to wipe out some of the most institutional, most corporate-friendly, most incumbency-protected members of the Democratic caucus. The new maps don’t care about seniority. They don’t care about gavels. They don’t care who’s owed what.

I’m not talking about the people who fight. Not Cori Bush before they took her out, not Summer Lee, not Ayanna Pressley, not Justin Pearson. Pearson is running against Steve Cohen in the Memphis primary right now. He’s a young Black state rep who got expelled from the Tennessee legislature for protesting gun violence on the House floor and got reseated by his constituents. The district he’s running in is the district about to be carved up today.

We can’t pick the maps. The Court took that. Eventually we fix the maps with math. No commissions. No bipartisan panels. No advisory bodies. No people. Any human lever you build into the process is a lever someone will pull. The procedure should know where people live and how to draw the shortest line that splits them in half. Population and geometry. Nothing else. You can write that into federal law.

But that takes power we don’t have yet. And we don’t get that power from the people who currently hold it.

We get it by picking who runs inside the lines they drew. We pick the candidates in the primaries, which are now, more than ever, the only elections that decide anything. We pick the people who refuse the AIPAC money and the AI super PAC money and the crypto money and the pharmaceutical money. We fund them ourselves, twenty bucks at a time. We show up on a primary Tuesday in March in numbers nobody’s seen for a midterm primary in fifty years. A coalition the mapmakers don’t think can exist is the one thing they can’t draw around.

They can move the lines. They can’t tell us who to put on the ballot inside them. And once we start sending people to Washington whose first loyalty is to the people who sent them, we can start fixing the rest. The maps. The money. The committees. The whole rotten machine.

We can start running, finally, on rebuilding a democracy instead of saving one that broke a long time ago.

That is a thing worth saving. A fight worth having. The thing we have right now is not.

You can check out more here at afightworthhaving.com. Our list of candidates will be posted very soon. Luckily, there’s already more than 40 of them that are on the right track.

Corbin Trent

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Even though the president has declared that it’s over, our war of choice and aggression with Iran may not be over. The Iranians have decided they will keep the Strait permanently closed for Israeli vessels and charge reparations for anyone flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Going through this, I keep coming back to the Iraq war. The same phrases that were used then are being used now. “Axis of evil.” “Weapons of mass destruction.” “Nuclear weapon.” “Number one state sponsor of global terror.” There’s a profound effort on behalf of the media and institutional Democrats and Republicans to convince us that Iran is the greatest threat to our safety and to our livelihoods. Most Americans don’t buy it. Very few Americans go to bed worrying about Iran.

The administration’s framing is that this is essentially just an escalation of 47 years of Americans being killed by Iranians. Here’s what’s interesting about that.

All of the folks Iran is backing, from Hezbollah to the Yemeni resistance fighters to Hamas to others, are not attacking people in the West. They’re not blowing anything up in the United Kingdom or Spain or Western Europe or Canada or Mexico or the United States. The only Americans they have killed were there in their region. Now, that doesn’t make those killings okay.

We are told about a long history of Iranian violence, that the Iranians have killed Americans for decades. So has Israel. In 1967, Israel killed many Americans in an attack on a boat. So have the Saudis. They were tied to the big one. 9/11. Where 3,000+ Americans were killed, all civilians, police officers, and firemen. Not one of the people who attack us on September 11th came from Iran. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia, one from Egypt, 2 from the UAE, and 1 from Lebanon.

But wait there’s more, the commission that investigated 9/11, found that the hijackers had connections to the Saudi government. Look through various attacks on American troops and you see many are connected to Saudi Arabia and their Wahhabist Sunni extremists. Iran fights against those folks. Iran directly fights against ISIS and Al-Qaeda too. Why bring it up? Because we are being lied into a war yet again. We are being told to hate and kill yet again.

What does it mean when we hear that Iran is the “#1 global sponsor of terror?” Ironically, it doesn’t mean that their attacks are global. They are overwhelmingly regional and often targeting ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Sunni extremists. The thing that makes them especially intolerable to us, however, are their attacks on Israel. My point is that it’s not exactly a global terror operation.

The definition of terrorism requires that you be stateless. You can’t be a terrorist and a state. Which is why they say the Iranians are sponsors of terrorism rather than terrorists themselves. Can’t break that rule, because then of course we would be terrorists. America’s killed hundreds of thousands of civilians across the planet. We have helped the Israelis in a genocide. We have helped the Israelis in their war of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, where land is being seized and civilians massacred.

I took my time but here’s what I really want to get to.

Who is actually threatening Americans’ way of life? Who is affecting our ability to afford our day-to-day lives? Not the Iranians. Who is impacting our future, our children’s future, our grandchildren’s future? Not the Iranians. Not even the Saudis. Not terrorists. Not jihadis. Not Islam.

It’s the elite in this country. Political elite, economic elite, media elite, who have lost the capacity to understand that they can’t just continuously squeeze us for more and more. It’s corporations. It’s greed. That’s who’s actually doing it.

The Iranians aren’t the reason we can’t afford housing. The Iranians aren’t the reason healthcare is on track to bankrupt us. The Iranians aren’t the reason our kids are going to inherit a country that can’t make the things it needs to function. The people doing that to us are us. Or some of us. They live here. They work in our newsrooms and our boardrooms and our halls of government. And every time they get us to look at Iran, or Iraq, or whoever is next, it’s another year we don’t look at them.

If you include the damage that was done to American bases in the Middle East, we’ve already dumped at least $65 billion into this war. More than a billion a day for a 62-day war. And what do we have to show for it? Moral high ground? A safer world? More solid alliances? More productive capacity? None of the above.

It’s time for a new crop of folks to start taking leadership in this country. People that see a different path towards prosperity, a different path towards American power and the responsibility of that for its own people and for the globe. That’s why I started a fight worth having, a super PAC dedicated to finding and supporting candidates across this country that are running for Congress and have interest in a renewed vision for this country.

You can check out more here at afightworthhaving.com. Our list of candidates will be posted very soon. Luckily, there’s already more than 40 of them that are on the right track.

Corbin Trent

The problem is that it puts so many solutions out of reach and out of our imagination.

If we look around at the things that make our society work and our lives better, we can see we’ve been duped from the start. This didn’t all come from some pure, untouched version of the free market. Our roads, our bridges, libraries, fire departments, the internet, Social Security. All of these things happened because we came together as people and decided we wanted them.

These weren’t accidents. They weren’t side effects of private competition. They came out of a period when ordinary people had power. Real power. Power to demand that the systems they paid for actually delivered. The government was the instrument of that power. Not a side player. Not a check writer. Not a referee. A doer. A builder of things, on behalf of the people who built it.

That’s the idea we don’t name anymore. The idea that the public has the right to organize, to own, and to demand. That’s the competing idea. And without it, the system has no counterweight.

That tension mattered. It forced decisions. It forced investment. It forced the country to build.

Now that pressure is gone. Not completely, but enough that it doesn’t function anymore. There’s no real counterweight shaping outcomes. And what you’re left with is a system that just expands in the direction of profit. Profit over efficiency. Profit over outcomes. Profit over people.

You can see it most clearly in healthcare. We spend nearly six trillion dollars a year on it. Six trillion. And we are not the healthiest country on earth. We are not even close. We are paying the most and getting the least. That’s not an efficiency problem. That’s a power problem.

We’ve run this experiment for decades now. Consolidation, extraction, pricing that has no relationship to reality. It’s not competitive in any meaningful sense. It’s a closed loop. The product isn’t working. People feel it every day. They don’t need a study to tell them.

And here’s the thing nobody remembers. We used to own a lot of this. In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals. States ran academic medical centers. The federal government ran the VA, military hospitals, the Indian Health Service. We the people owned the means of caring for ourselves.

That’s what made the whole system function. Not the charity of it. The leverage of it. We knew what it cost to set a bone. We knew what it cost to do a bypass. We knew what it cost to deliver a baby. Because we ran the hospitals where it happened. We paid the salaries. We bought the supplies. The numbers were public and the numbers were real.

You can’t lie to someone about the price of something they already produce. Public ownership wasn’t an alternative to the market. It was the thing that kept the market honest. It was the public’s seat at the table. It was the public’s power over the price. Strip it out and the private side stops competing and starts extracting. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened. We sold the seat. We lost the power. The bills came due.

Today that public share is closer to 15%. Most of the rest has been sold off, shut down, or absorbed into chains. What’s left is doing the hardest work the private system refuses to do. Public hospitals still handle most of the trauma care and most of the burn care in this country’s cities. They are the safety net. They are also the proof that we know how to do this. We just decided to stop.

Same thing starting to happen with AI. Something as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, arguably bigger, is being built and controlled by a handful of private actors. Massive margins. Massive control. No real public stake. No real competition in the way we used to understand it. No seat at the table for the rest of us.

There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons. We didn’t let them build private armies with that kind of power. We understood the scale of the risk. The consequence of getting it wrong.

AI sits in that category. Healthcare sits in that category. These are not normal sectors. They shape everything else. And the question of who owns them is the question of who has power in the country that comes next.

It’s not about fairness. Fuck fairness. This is about power. About whether ordinary people have any leverage left in a system that has spent forty years stripping it from them. About whether the country we live in is something we shape or something that happens to us.

Here are the numbers. The top 20% of earners in this country now account for nearly 60% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is about two-thirds of GDP. So a small slice of households is propping up the entire economy. And the jobs most exposed to AI displacement, finance, law, software, analysis, corporate work, are concentrated in exactly that slice.

The same people whose spending holds the economy up are the ones whose work is about to be automated.

That’s not a labor problem. That’s a structural problem. You can’t retrain your way out of it. You can’t UBI your way out of it at the scale required. The CEOs warning you about 20-30% unemployment are running companies with 40% margins. They’re not wrong about the disruption. They’re wrong about it being something the private sector can absorb.

The market is facing a situation it cannot handle.

The market is the thing that brought us here.

Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.

Health. Wellness. Safety. Time. Travel. Freedom. Education. Meaning. Food. Clothing. Shelter. All high quality and abundant. Enough for everyone.

Most people want that. You can feel it when you talk to them. But they don’t say it plainly because it sounds naive. It sounds like something you’re supposed to grow out of. Like if you take it seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.

It reminds me a little of The Matrix. The idea that a version of the world that actually worked for people would be rejected because it didn’t match what they believed was real or possible. So instead, we settle into something worse and call it reality.

I grew up in East Tennessee, in the Bible Belt. And one of the things that always stuck with me was how religion was used. Not as a mission to improve people’s lives through effort and sacrifice, but as a way to sort people. To rank them. To separate. To justify who had what and why.

That same instinct shows up here. The idea that wanting a system that delivers for everyone is childish. That building something better is unrealistic. That you’re supposed to accept what exists and work within it, even if it’s clearly failing.

Here’s what gets forgotten. This country has done it before. Not once. Many times.

The New York City subway was built and is owned by the public. The interstate highway system is public. The Hoover Dam, the TVA, every river dam that powers the South and the West, public. The arsenal that won the Second World War was organized and largely paid for by the federal government. Rural electrification was a public project because no private company would run wire to a farmhouse for a price the farmer could pay. The internet started as a public research program. Public universities trained the engineers and doctors and scientists who built the modern American economy. Medicare is a public health insurance program that works better and costs less than what the private market offers people under 65.

Every one of those is a story about power. The public looked at a sector that mattered too much to leave to private capital, and the public took it. Owned it. Ran it. Set the terms. Made it deliver.

This is not foreign. This is not theoretical. This is the history of our country.

What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.

If we want a different future, we have to build it.

That’s not a metaphor.

We need hospitals, clinics, wellness centers. That means training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists, physical trainers. Not hoping the market decides to produce them. Deciding to produce them. Owning them. Running them. Setting the price by knowing the cost.

We need millions of homes. New cities. New towns. That means builders, electricians, plumbers, framers, engineers. It means supply chains based in America that can deliver materials at scale. It means breaking the leverage that landlords and developers have spent decades accumulating.

We need to transition energy. Renewable generation. Storage. Transmission. A modern grid that can handle it. High-speed rail. A competitive EV industry that isn’t just a handful of companies protected by scale and capital. Independence from utilities that have spent a century turning a public good into a private toll booth.

Every one of these is a sector where the public used to have power and gave it up. Every one is a sector where the public can take that power back, if it decides to.

There is more to build in this country than we currently have people trained to build it. The bottleneck is not technology. It is not money. It is the decision to organize the effort. Those decisions will never be made by the market.

Solutions are going to take public action and competition. A new way of thinking.

Real work. Coordination. Training. Time. Effort. Change.

It’s a shame but nobody is coming to do this for us.

Corbin Trent

The author, Zack Exley, is a good friend and long-time collaborator. Zack is the reason I was able to get involved in politics. He took a chance on me way back in 2015, giving me my first job on the Sanders presidential campaign.

Zack is one of the most brilliant strategists I know, and he’s been the quiet inspiration behind many of the progressive movements and victories you’ve heard of. I came away from this piece with more hope and determination than I’ve had in a while, and I hope it does the same for you. Please comment and reply we want to hear from you.

This is the most terrifying and exciting time to be alive in human history. In the next decade or two, we could build the utopia that humanity has dreamed of for millennia, or we could have World War III and the AI apocalypse. I’ve been talking like this for decades, and this is the first time people aren’t automatically calling me crazy. The sci-fi future is becoming our present reality. It’s time to choose: Star Trek or Mad Max. I’m optimistic, but this is going to be a tough fight.

I run the think tank New Consensus. Years ago, we put out the Green New Deal. Most people don’t remember this, but the original ask was for a congressional committee to make a plan for a 10 year national mobilization to build a clean economy productive enough for all Americans to make a great living. The plan was intended for the president who would be elected in 2020, so they could hit the ground running and succeed. Wouldn’t that have been handy? But Speaker Pelosi said no.

We didn’t give up. We went to work on our own plan. We call it the Mission for America. It’s the plan for the president who will take office in 2029. Our “Project 2025.” The Republican Project 2025 was just a long list of programs to cut. It’s easy to destroy. But we need to build. Planning for that is much more difficult, exactly why we need to do it now and not wait for the president to take office.

With mass AI layoffs coming soon, a plan to get Americans working with a purpose becomes both more necessary and more realistic. We’re systematically going through each sector of the economy and working out the detailed and comprehensive steps that a presidential administration will need to take, and the laws that congress will need to pass, to really turn things around for working Americans.

We’re not talking about slowing the collapse of working class wages or slowing the closing of American industry. We’re talking about literally building a whole new economy, one in which all workers, for the first time in U.S. history, can live a truly prosperous life. In a time when we’re building the most productive technology the world has ever seen, that shouldn’t sound like an impossible task.

If you’re curious about how it actually works, check out this high level summary of the Mission for America. We’re hiring a director for this project, and researchers. If you know anyone with expertise who’d be interested in joining our team, please forward this email to them.

But I have a much more urgent ask. Part of what has made Trump’s second term so destructive is that the MAGA movement recruited and vetted tens of thousands of true believers. Mostly young and inexperienced, these recruits have been succeeding in their mission (to destroy the government, terrorize immigrants, and erode all of our rights) thanks to their single minded devotion to their goals.

Again, it’s much more difficult for us. We want to build, improve, and strengthen our economy, institutions, and government. We’ll need plenty of young people just starting out, but we’ll also need people with serious experience across every area of our economy and society. But like MAGA, we need people who will be united in their determination to achieve a goal.

To that end, we’re running a Personnel Project to recruit and start preparing builders to serve in 2029. You can sign up here. Or please forward this to someone you know who would be interested and able to serve.

Like I said, some new developments are making me more and more optimistic that this plan, or at least something inspired by it, will be used in 2029. First, are all the great new leaders who are going to Congress in 2026 to challenge the old, do-nothing, Democratic Party leadership. Our friend Saikat Chakrabarti is one, but several others with him will form a new bloc of fighters. Following their example, more will run in 2028. The new president we get in 2028 will be supported by a congress with new leadership ready to go big.

The other thing that’s making me optimistic is AI. Not because of the good it will do, but because of the changes that it will force. I know AI is being hyped like crazy. But beyond the hype, something huge is happening that we ignore at our peril: After decades of science fiction imagining that someday machines would become truly intelligent, they finally are. This changes everything.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI will ever be able to take over whole jobs. If that’s where you’re at, please bear with me for a minute, because this is important.

AI is already replacing humans in certain fields such as software and customer service. And it’s accelerating. There were more AI layoffs in Q1 of 2026 than in all of 2025. Soon, it will be wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world: a huge share of jobs that are done on computers plus many others.

But this isn’t like past waves of automation that got people off the farm and into factories, or out of factories and into offices. This is like when the engine replaced the horse. This time, we’re the horse. This is because while AI will create new kinds of work, that work will be done by AI, not humans.

Soon, AI coworkers and managers will appear at your company on Zoom and in Slack. They will present as fully capable humans — just 10,000 times faster, and able to work with thousands of people and tasks simultaneously.

For software developers and a few other kinds of workers, this is already a reality. I used to work in software, managing big teams of developers. Now I’m building systems with one AI agent in days that would have taken a whole team of humans months and millions of dollars.

Once AI is better than us at knowledge and management tasks in general, then, just like horses in the last century, there will be no new roles for us. We will be valuable as humans still, but not as workers. Many writers and thinkers have been anticipating the “end of work” for centuries. It’s here.

The irony is that, for decades to come, there will still be physical labor for humans to do. Yes, we can already theoretically make robots to replace people in every job once capable AI is controlling them. But unlike inviting AI to your Slack and Zoom, building physical robots, and rearranging factories and farms to suit them, is not free or instant. Automation will make physical labor gradually more and more scarce for people too, but it will take some time, and we can choose to save whatever kind of physical work we want for people.

Why does all this make me optimistic? This is a huge and complex topic, but let me try to spell it out clearly and concisely. (If you want the full treatment, please check out the series I recently published on the New Consensus blog.)

Building a new, clean economy that can provide prosperity for everyone is a gargantuan task. The biggest knock on the Green New Deal was that there aren’t workers available. Everyone is too busy making or marketing things that no one asked for, or driving the top 20% around in Ubers and delivering their DoorDash orders. Economists said there wasn’t the slack in our labor market to allow us to upgrade our homes and buildings or build new clean power generation, let alone build an entirely new economy from the ground up.

The bottom line is that as long as the stock market is on the rise and the incomes of the top 20% are skyrocketing (which they are), things aren’t going to change.

I’m not one of those people who wishes for collapse so that we can have the revolution. But the collapse is coming. The question is, what will we do when it happens? We know what the current Democratic leadership would do: Nothing. Paralysis. They’ll be frantically looking for corporations to bail out, but it’s not going to be that kind of crisis. It’s going to be so much deeper than a few banks and AI companies going bankrupt. Most of our population will be sitting at home permanently without income. Without customers, virtually every industry will face insolvency, not just banks. Everything will grind to a halt.

That’s where the Mission for America comes in. It’s a plan for getting America to work. Not repaving roads, but building all the industries and infrastructure and institutions that we have been needing to build (or build back) for decades.

All the technology we’ve been developing for the past decades, centuries and millennia has now evolved to the point where, if we choose to, we can build a world economy that truly provides prosperity, security and freedom for everyone on earth. The Mission for America is the plan for America to do its part toward that end. We need to build an economy that can provide prosperity for our own people, but we also have a responsibility and an interest in sharing the technology and capital that all nations will need in order to build prosperity for themselves too.

The reason I’m excited to be writing to Corbin’s readers about all this is that I know you’ve been engaged in working to support a new generation of candidates for Congress. In another year, we’re going to be looking at a busload of presidential candidates vying to succeed Trump. These upcoming elections will be the most important in American history up till now, and the most important for the rest of our lifetimes.

But even if we send the absolute best people in America for these jobs, they won’t be able to succeed unless we also send them with the playbook to guide them. There won’t be time once they’re serving. We learned that with Biden. And with Obama. Trump learned that in his first term, and he came back the next time with a plan. It was a plan for destruction, and they’ve been destroying everything in sight.

So please forward this to someone you think might like to serve in a Mission for America administration or sign up yourself. Please check out Mission for America at New Consensus. And please let Corbin know if you’d like to learn more about it in future emails, and if you’d like to hear more about what to expect from the AI crisis that we believe is coming.

Zack Exley
New Consensus

The author, Zack Exley, is a good friend and long-time collaborator. Zack is the reason I was able to get involved in politics. He took a chance on me way back in 2015, giving me my first job on the Sanders presidential campaign.

Zack is one of the most brilliant strategists I know, and he’s been the quiet inspiration behind many of the progressive movements and victories you’ve heard of. I came away from this piece with more hope and determination than I’ve had in a while, and I hope it does the same for you. Please comment and reply we want to hear from you.

This is the most terrifying and exciting time to be alive in human history. In the next decade or two, we could build the utopia that humanity has dreamed of for millennia, or we could have World War III and the AI apocalypse. I’ve been talking like this for decades, and this is the first time people aren’t automatically calling me crazy. The sci-fi future is becoming our present reality. It’s time to choose: Star Trek or Mad Max. I’m optimistic, but this is going to be a tough fight.

I run the think tank New Consensus. Years ago, we put out the Green New Deal. Most people don’t remember this, but the original ask was for a congressional committee to make a plan for a 10 year national mobilization to build a clean economy productive enough for all Americans to make a great living. The plan was intended for the president who would be elected in 2020, so they could hit the ground running and succeed. Wouldn’t that have been handy? But Speaker Pelosi said no.

We didn’t give up. We went to work on our own plan. We call it the Mission for America. It’s the plan for the president who will take office in 2029. Our “Project 2025.” The Republican Project 2025 was just a long list of programs to cut. It’s easy to destroy. But we need to build. Planning for that is much more difficult, exactly why we need to do it now and not wait for the president to take office.

With mass AI layoffs coming soon, a plan to get Americans working with a purpose becomes both more necessary and more realistic. We’re systematically going through each sector of the economy and working out the detailed and comprehensive steps that a presidential administration will need to take, and the laws that congress will need to pass, to really turn things around for working Americans.

We’re not talking about slowing the collapse of working class wages or slowing the closing of American industry. We’re talking about literally building a whole new economy, one in which all workers, for the first time in U.S. history, can live a truly prosperous life. In a time when we’re building the most productive technology the world has ever seen, that shouldn’t sound like an impossible task.

If you’re curious about how it actually works, check out this high level summary of the Mission for America. We’re hiring a director for this project, and researchers. If you know anyone with expertise who’d be interested in joining our team, please forward this email to them.

But I have a much more urgent ask. Part of what has made Trump’s second term so destructive is that the MAGA movement recruited and vetted tens of thousands of true believers. Mostly young and inexperienced, these recruits have been succeeding in their mission (to destroy the government, terrorize immigrants, and erode all of our rights) thanks to their single minded devotion to their goals.

Again, it’s much more difficult for us. We want to build, improve, and strengthen our economy, institutions, and government. We’ll need plenty of young people just starting out, but we’ll also need people with serious experience across every area of our economy and society. But like MAGA, we need people who will be united in their determination to achieve a goal.

To that end, we’re running a Personnel Project to recruit and start preparing builders to serve in 2029. You can sign up here. Or please forward this to someone you know who would be interested and able to serve.

Like I said, some new developments are making me more and more optimistic that this plan, or at least something inspired by it, will be used in 2029. First, are all the great new leaders who are going to Congress in 2026 to challenge the old, do-nothing, Democratic Party leadership. Our friend Saikat Chakrabarti is one, but several others with him will form a new bloc of fighters. Following their example, more will run in 2028. The new president we get in 2028 will be supported by a congress with new leadership ready to go big.

The other thing that’s making me optimistic is AI. Not because of the good it will do, but because of the changes that it will force. I know AI is being hyped like crazy. But beyond the hype, something huge is happening that we ignore at our peril: After decades of science fiction imagining that someday machines would become truly intelligent, they finally are. This changes everything.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI will ever be able to take over whole jobs. If that’s where you’re at, please bear with me for a minute, because this is important.

AI is already replacing humans in certain fields such as software and customer service. And it’s accelerating. There were more AI layoffs in Q1 of 2026 than in all of 2025. Soon, it will be wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world: a huge share of jobs that are done on computers plus many others.

But this isn’t like past waves of automation that got people off the farm and into factories, or out of factories and into offices. This is like when the engine replaced the horse. This time, we’re the horse. This is because while AI will create new kinds of work, that work will be done by AI, not humans.

Soon, AI coworkers and managers will appear at your company on Zoom and in Slack. They will present as fully capable humans — just 10,000 times faster, and able to work with thousands of people and tasks simultaneously.

For software developers and a few other kinds of workers, this is already a reality. I used to work in software, managing big teams of developers. Now I’m building systems with one AI agent in days that would have taken a whole team of humans months and millions of dollars.

Once AI is better than us at knowledge and management tasks in general, then, just like horses in the last century, there will be no new roles for us. We will be valuable as humans still, but not as workers. Many writers and thinkers have been anticipating the “end of work” for centuries. It’s here.

The irony is that, for decades to come, there will still be physical labor for humans to do. Yes, we can already theoretically make robots to replace people in every job once capable AI is controlling them. But unlike inviting AI to your Slack and Zoom, building physical robots, and rearranging factories and farms to suit them, is not free or instant. Automation will make physical labor gradually more and more scarce for people too, but it will take some time, and we can choose to save whatever kind of physical work we want for people.

Why does all this make me optimistic? This is a huge and complex topic, but let me try to spell it out clearly and concisely. (If you want the full treatment, please check out the series I recently published on the New Consensus blog.)

Building a new, clean economy that can provide prosperity for everyone is a gargantuan task. The biggest knock on the Green New Deal was that there aren’t workers available. Everyone is too busy making or marketing things that no one asked for, or driving the top 20% around in Ubers and delivering their DoorDash orders. Economists said there wasn’t the slack in our labor market to allow us to upgrade our homes and buildings or build new clean power generation, let alone build an entirely new economy from the ground up.

The bottom line is that as long as the stock market is on the rise and the incomes of the top 20% are skyrocketing (which they are), things aren’t going to change.

I’m not one of those people who wishes for collapse so that we can have the revolution. But the collapse is coming. The question is, what will we do when it happens? We know what the current Democratic leadership would do: Nothing. Paralysis. They’ll be frantically looking for corporations to bail out, but it’s not going to be that kind of crisis. It’s going to be so much deeper than a few banks and AI companies going bankrupt. Most of our population will be sitting at home permanently without income. Without customers, virtually every industry will face insolvency, not just banks. Everything will grind to a halt.

That’s where the Mission for America comes in. It’s a plan for getting America to work. Not repaving roads, but building all the industries and infrastructure and institutions that we have been needing to build (or build back) for decades.

All the technology we’ve been developing for the past decades, centuries and millennia has now evolved to the point where, if we choose to, we can build a world economy that truly provides prosperity, security and freedom for everyone on earth. The Mission for America is the plan for America to do its part toward that end. We need to build an economy that can provide prosperity for our own people, but we also have a responsibility and an interest in sharing the technology and capital that all nations will need in order to build prosperity for themselves too.

The reason I’m excited to be writing to Corbin’s readers about all this is that I know you’ve been engaged in working to support a new generation of candidates for Congress. In another year, we’re going to be looking at a busload of presidential candidates vying to succeed Trump. These upcoming elections will be the most important in American history up till now, and the most important for the rest of our lifetimes.

But even if we send the absolute best people in America for these jobs, they won’t be able to succeed unless we also send them with the playbook to guide them. There won’t be time once they’re serving. We learned that with Biden. And with Obama. Trump learned that in his first term, and he came back the next time with a plan. It was a plan for destruction, and they’ve been destroying everything in sight.

So please forward this to someone you think might like to serve in a Mission for America administration or sign up yourself. Please check out Mission for America at New Consensus. And please let Corbin know if you’d like to learn more about it in future emails, and if you’d like to hear more about what to expect from the AI crisis that we believe is coming.

Zack Exley
New Consensus

There are two prices of oil right now, and between them is an unprecedented gap. One is the paper price, the Brent futures you hear about on TV, sitting around 100 dollars as I’m writing this. The other is the physical price, what a refinery actually pays for a real barrel on a real tanker. Dated Brent has hit 144 dollars. The spread is the widest it has ever been. Forty dollars. Before the war it was less than a dollar.

The paper price is the market telling us a calming story. The physical is describing reality. When those two come back together, and they always do, it’s paper that moves to meet physical reality. America is experiencing a similar gap. We are telling ourselves a story about our position in the world that is about forty dollars above what’s actually arriving at the dock.

The war is the clearest picture of what we’ve chosen. It’s not about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a resource war aimed at China, routed through Iran, and the administration’s own advisors have said so on the record. Look at the pattern. Venezuela first. We seized their oil, kidnapped their leaders, routed half a billion dollars through a Qatari bank account. Then Iran. Airstrikes, a blockade, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Then Netanyahu’s pitch to pipeline Gulf oil overland to Europe and away from Asian buyers. Then pressure on Denmark over Greenland. Then Lebanon, where Israel is now openly planning to occupy eight to fifteen percent of the country with our weapons and our political cover, on top of everything we are still arming in Gaza. Then secondary sanctions threats against any bank anywhere that dares touch an Iranian barrel.

The theory is this. Break the world’s energy flows before China’s navy can project force. Keep oil priced in dollars. Strangle Chinese growth before they catch all the way up. It is coherent. That is the problem. The coherence is the indictment. We think we are going to get back to our status as a respected world power through bullying and through being wannabe gangsters, and the strategy is so openly cynical that even the foreign policy establishment is now celebrating it in public as Trump’s best hand against China.

This is not just a Trump problem.

The House has forced four war powers votes and they have all failed, partly because Democrats themselves keep defecting on their own resolutions. Four Democrats voted against the first one in March. And when Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership actually had a shot to force another vote in late March during a pro forma session, they kept it off the floor. They waited until mid-April, after the troops had been rallied, by which point the war was well underway and the vote was mostly symbolic.

That is a failure of leadership on something as basic as stripping war powers from a madman. Jeffries has not called any of the defecting Democrats out. Not publicly. Not privately as far as we can tell. No pressure, no cost, no consequence.

Remember when Democrats did a sit-in on the House floor over gun violence? Cameras on, refusing to leave, forcing the country to look. That is what resistance would look like. This ain’t that. Both parties see our path to prosperity and relevance through war. That is why the response has been letters and press conferences and votes they knew would fail. Neither party wants to actually close the barn door on executive war-making because both parties want to use it when their turn comes.

And this pattern is older than Iran. In 2011 we went into a sovereign country with drones and jets, killed the leader’s protective guards, and set up his murder by local opposition forces. Call it whatever you want. That’s what happened. What was Gaddafi working on at the time? A pan-African gold-backed currency meant to price African oil in something other than dollars. The project died with him. When the dollar gets challenged, we break the challenger. Both parties have done it. The rules-based order we like to lecture other countries about has a pretty big asterisk on it, and the asterisk reads “except when it touches the dollar.”

The strategy is already backfiring, and everyone who can count can see it. China’s clean tech exports hit 21.9 billion dollars in March of 2026 alone, up 70 percent year over year in a single month. The oil shock we engineered to hurt them solved their solar overproduction problem for them. Iranian oil has been priced in yuan since April of last year. Tankers paying tolls to cross Hormuz are reportedly paying in yuan too. Deutsche Bank is now openly naming this war as a potential catalyst for the erosion of the petrodollar.

Gallup’s global leadership approval poll from April 3 has China at 36 percent and the United States at 31. Widest gap in China’s favor in twenty years. U.S. net approval at negative 15, the worst in the history of the poll. That data was collected in 2025, before the January withdrawal from 66 international organizations, before the Iran war. The real number right now is almost certainly worse. Pew and the European Council on Foreign Relations say the same thing in different words. In most of Europe and Latin America more people now name the United States than China as the greatest threat to their country. ECFR put it cleanest. If there is a race for global popularity, America is currently losing to its Indo-Pacific rival. We are forcing the world to make choices, and we are not going to like the outcome.

We should be forcing ourselves to make choices instead. When we look at China, we are not looking at an enemy. We are looking at a reflection of our former selves, and we do not want to see it.

Sam Walton had a rule. Until you’re number one, you copy number one. He used to get arrested for crawling around competitors’ stores with a tape recorder, because the point of walking into a Kmart wasn’t to find what they were doing wrong. It was to walk out with an idea you didn’t have when you went in.

That’s what China is doing to us. And what they are copying is our playbook, the one that created the largest middle class in the history of the world. Hamiltonian industrial policy. State banks. State-directed investment in strategic industries. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures from 1791. The American System. Lincoln’s land grant universities, the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act. The Arsenal of Democracy, where FDR forced competing firms to share their intellectual property because winning the war mattered more than winning the quarter. Apollo. DARPA. The NIH. The internet itself. Every single one was public capital, public purpose, public coordination, with private firms executing. We invented it. We ran it for 150 years. China picked it up off the floor where we dropped it in the 1980s, and is running it now.

Their space program is decades younger than ours and they have a space station, they are landing reusable rockets, they are scaling rapidly, and they are sharing their information. They are not competing for every single thing. They are working in unison to do better. The systems they are using are our own. We are being beaten by ourselves.

And we didn’t just invent the playbook. We invented the tempo. The Arsenal of Democracy built a wartime industrial economy from scratch in about four years. Ford was rolling a B-24 off the line at Willow Run every hour by 1944. Apollo went from Kennedy’s speech to a boot on the Moon in eight years. Rural electrification, the interstate system, the Manhattan Project. None of it took generations. China gets the tempo part too. They built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in about fifteen years from zero. EVs from nobody to global dominance in a decade. Solar in under a decade. Shipbuilding, drones, batteries, the whole deck, faster than we ever went, using our methods, while we tell ourselves a twenty or thirty year timeline is realistic.

When I was a kid we couldn’t compete with China because their labor was too cheap and they didn’t care about pollution. Then we were overregulated and our workers wanted too much. Then it was currency manipulation. Now it’s that they are too far ahead on robotics and we will never catch up. The excuse changes every decade. The underlying move never does. We explain why we can’t, instead of doing the thing.

This is the part that matters most, because it is bigger than this administration. The entire American establishment, both parties, both sets of think tanks, the Pentagon, the corporate class, the press, has quietly agreed that American renewal is a generational project. Twenty years to reshore semiconductors. Ten years for permitting reform. Slow and steady. Patient. Serious. That timeline is a lie. Nothing we have ever actually built in this country got built on it. Generational change isn’t about being pragmatic, it’s about putting off the work. It lets everyone currently in power keep their arrangement running while the country erodes underneath them. It assumes our place on earth is god-given or immutable. It’s neither. And it’s crumbling quickly unless we do something about it.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. This is a choice between destruction and construction. Between valuing death and valuing life. Between taking responsibility for our future and hoping it all works out.

Destruction is what we are doing right now. Destruction is the blockade. Destruction is hobbling the Chinese by working through proxies, cutting off oil, kidnapping Venezuelan leadership, pressuring Denmark over Greenland. Destruction is arming a genocide. Break other people’s things because we have forgotten how to build our own.

Construction is the other path. Construction is Hamilton’s playbook, at speed. Reindustrialize. Repatriate the supply chains we offshored. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, rare earths, shipbuilding. Repatriate health care from extractive finance back to something that serves the people paying for it. Rebuild public research. Rebuild the grid. Build rail. Build housing. Do it fast, because fast is the only tempo that has ever actually worked for this country.

Construction is also how you become useful to the world again. China is going to electrify the global south whether we like it or not. We can help build the world into a future like the Jetsons or we can try and bomb it into a future like the Flintstones. If we choose the Flintstones the world may turn their collective backs on us. A rules-based order means following rules, including the ones against wars of aggression and the ones against arming genocides. A democracy means practicing it. You get your respect back by being the thing you claim to be, not by bullying the people who have noticed you aren’t.

And this is where the responsibility piece lands, because I mean the word we. The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest. Trusted that the serious people would handle it while the serious people were handling themselves. There is no version of this that gets fixed by waiting. Not for the other party, not for the next election, not for someone else to show up. We is the job description. It has to be, because hoping it all works out is how we got here.

The world is already choosing. Gallup, Pew, ECFR, they are telling us in every language they have that they have seen enough. The question is whether we will choose too. To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong. The next question is what we build instead. And that one is still open.

Corbin Trent
A Fight Worth Having

Every candidate on this list is working hard, raising money, and doing it without selling themselves out to the people who broke this country. None of them is backed by AIPAC or taking corporate PAC money. That was a filter. A lot of them have earned endorsements from Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, Working Families Party, and Bernie Sanders. Some are challenging incumbents. Some are running in open seats. Some are trying to flip Republican districts. All of them are running on a similar agenda.

What is the point of this list?

Individually, I want every one of them to win. But individually there is much less chance that they will transform our system into one that we’re proud to be a part of. If 10 or 15 or even 30 of these folks win but haven’t developed relationships with one another they will go in significantly less powerful than if they were already a bloc. One truism of Nancy Pelosi’s that I believe in my heart are “power isn’t given it’s taken.” and “when you have power you must use it.” Political power grows rather than depletes when it is used for good.

So I am going to be asking candidates to do the hard thing. Work together. Don’t resign yourself in victory to the small offices, committee assignments, and the drumbeat of “big change is impossible”. United they can more easily resist the institutions designed to water down their mandate for change. absorb them.

So I’m trying to figure out how we get there.

What if five of these candidates decided right now, before the end of the month, to do something odd and cross-endorse each other. To commit to a few things together. Demand new leadership for the Democratic Party. Force votes on stripping war powers from this president and Medicare for All. That would be enough to get some attention.

Five people saying that out loud together is news. Ten is a movement. Twenty is a bloc. Thirty or forty candidates going into November having already built relationships, already endorsing each other, already knowing who they’re walking in alongside. That’s something leadership would have to reckon with. You can’t absorb thirty people who show up knowing each other and knowing what they came to do.

I know what you’re thinking. That sounds like the Progressive Caucus.

It isn’t. The Progressive Caucus defends incumbents. It defends leadership. What I’m describing would be different from day one. People who believe they can change and must help build a better Democratic Party. One that more than 30% of Americans want to be part of. If that many people stood together and lifted the voices of so many of us so many Democrats and would-be-Ddemocrats, they’d have some power.

Why those three demands?

New leadership because 74% of Americans, including 55% of Democrats, think congressional Democrats have the wrong priorities.

Stripping war powers because Congress gave that authority away decades ago and no president should have it alone. Least of all this one.

A floor vote on Medicare for All because 65% of likely voters support it as do , 78% of Democrats. Iit would be great to see who stands with Democratic voters once they make it to Congress. Make everyone go on record. Either healthcare is a right or it isn’t.

This is a hard thing to ask these candidates to do. They’re running their own races, working long days, trying to win. Their staff and consultants will tell them it’s a bad idea and a distraction. Asking them to coordinate, to cross-endorse, to take a stand against their own party’s leadership while they’re still trying to get elected, that’s a real ask.

But if people can’t do something different - a bit edgy - now when our very system is threatened, later will be too late, others are hungry for exactly this. They know that the traditional ways aren’t working. That sending even the most talented communicators and hopeful people into a system designed to maintain the status quo won’t work.

A candidate who stands up with four others and says “we’re going in together and we’re going to fight for this together” is going to generate more excitement, more coverage, and more small dollar donations than they would alone. I think it’s an asset, not a liability.

But I can’t just tell them that. I have to show them. I want to run polling in these districts to see if voters there respond to this idea. I want to see if big ideas resonate in these states and districts. That polling, and your support getting it done can help us to build this bloc.

That polling costs money and I’m asking you to help fund it.

This is the first time I’ve made a direct ask. I’m making it because I think this can work and I think we can move fast. Give five dollars. Give fifty. If you’ve got a $100,000 to spare and you believe in this, we’re a super PAC, so we can put it to work. We move independently, without the candidate having to ask, which means we can hit hard and fast.

So please, head to AFightWorthHaving.com. check it out. Sign up. Donate what you can. And share this piece with someone who’s been asking what we do.

Here’s the list. Sorted by primary date. I didn’t link the websites, if I had this email would go straight to spam.

Frederick Haynes, TX-30. Already won his primary. He’s the nominee.

May 2026 Primary

Zachary Shrewsbury, WV-Senate, challenging Republican Shelley Moore Capito.

Denise Powell, NE-02, Open seat.

John Cavanaugh, NE-02, Open seat.

Chris Rabb, PA-03, Open seat. Endorsed by Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, Our Revolution.

Everton Blair, GA-13, primary against 13-term incumbent David Scott

Bob Brooks, PA-07, running to flip an R+1 district.

Carol Obando-Derstine, PA-07, also running to flip PA-07.

Erin Petrey, KY-06, Open seat in R+7 territory.

June 2026 Primary

Saikat Chakrabarti, CA-11, Open seat. Co-founder of Justice Democrats, architect of the Green New Deal. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Analilia Mejia, NJ-11, Open seat. Endorsed by Our Revolution and Working Families Party.

Heidi Hall, CA-03, primary against Ami Bera.

Audrey Denney, CA-01, Open seat in R+12 territory.

Angela Gonzales-Torres, CA-34, primary against Jimmy Gomez. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Jake Levine, CA-32, primary against Brad Sherman.

Russell Tyler Cleveland, MT-01, Open seat in R+5 territory.

Jay Vaingankar, NJ-12, Open seat.

Randy Villegas, CA-22, running to flip an R+1 district. Endorsed by Our Revolution and Working Families Party.

Rebecca Bennett, NJ-07, running to flip an EVEN district against Thomas Kean Jr.

Sarah Trone Garriott, IA-03, running to flip an R+2 district.

Graham Platner, ME-Senate, challenging Susan Collins. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

Ata-Ul-Salaam Bhatti, VA-01, running to flip an R+3 district.

James Lally, NV-03, primary against Susie Lee.

Mo Seifeldein, VA-08, primary against Don Beyer.

Mike Sacks, NY-17, running to flip a D+1 district against Michael Lawler.

Antonio Reynoso, NY-07, Open seat.

Alexander Bores, NY-12, Open seat.

Charles Park, NY-06, primary against Grace Meng.

Dylan Hewitt, NY-21, Open seat in R+10 territory.

Effie Phillips-Staley, NY-17, also running to flip NY-17. Endorsed by Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman.

James Felton Keith, NY-13, primary against Adriano Espaillat.

Michael Blake, NY-15, Open seat.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, NY-13, also running in NY-13. Endorsed by Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America.

Manny Rutinel, CO-08, running to flip an EVEN district. Up eight points in polling.

Melat Kiros, CO-01, primary against Diana DeGette. Beat DeGette 63 to 35 at the Denver county assembly in March. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Joseph Reagan, CO-05, running to flip an R+5 district.

Julie Gonzales, CO-Senate, primary against John Hickenlooper.

Mai Vang, CA-07, primary against Mark DeSaulnier. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

August 2026 Primary

Kshama Sawant, WA-09, primary against Adam Smith.

Cori Bush, MO-01, primary against Wesley Bell. AIPAC spent nine million dollars to beat her in 2024. She’s back.

Donavan McKinney, MI-13, primary against Shri Thanedar. Endorsed by Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, and Working Families Party.

William Lawrence, MI-07, running to flip an EVEN district.

Abdul El-Sayed, MI-Senate, Open seat. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Polling at 25% in a three-way race within striking distance.

Justin Pearson, TN-09, primary against Steve Cohen. One point behind in the most recent poll.

Emily Berge, WI-03, running to flip an R+3 district.

Luke Bronin, CT-01, primary against John Larson.

Elijah Manley, FL-20, primary against Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Up three points in polling, with 70% of district voters saying his opponent should resign.

Oliver Adams Larkin, FL-23, primary against Jared Moskowitz.

Christian Urrutia, NH-01, Open seat.

September 2026 Primary

Patrick Roath, MA-08, primary against Stephen Lynch.

Jeromie Whalen, MA-01, primary against Richard Neal.

Beth Andres-Beck, MA-06, Open seat.

That’s 53 people across 20 states. None of them taking AIPAC money. None of them taking corporate PAC money.

I’m not asking you to pick a favorite. I’m asking whether you think they could be more powerful together than any of them are alone. Help me prove it.

This could be a beginning.

Corbin Trent

Happy Sunday,

Let’s talk about what real solutions actually cost. Not in dollars. In seats and votes.

Most Americans agree on the basics. The economy. Jobs. Healthcare. The influence of money on politics. Education. Immigration. People want these things fixed. They just don’t hear anybody being honest about what fixing them requires.

Just like you can’t take half a round of antibiotics and wonder why you’re still sick, half measures on a broken system make things worse. So here’s the full prescription.

We’ve confused health insurance with healthcare. Having coverage doesn’t mean there’s a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor. We sold off public healthcare delivery over decades, and the nonprofits that replaced it act like for-profits. You can fix who pays the bill and still have towns of two thousand people with nowhere to go at two in the morning. Same with the economy. People don’t want talking points about GDP. They want to afford a house, a doctor, childcare, school. Those things keep getting further out of reach. And we can’t seem to build anything anymore either. Not rail. Not energy infrastructure. Not housing. We have a hard time doing it, period.

So what does changing that actually cost?

Medicare for All has 65% support among likely voters, including nearly half of Republicans. To pass it you need 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster and 218 in the House. And even then you haven’t built a single new hospital or trained a single new doctor. So if you’re going to 60 anyway, go all the way. Restore public ownership of healthcare delivery. A hospital in a town of a thousand people is never going to exist for profit. It never did.

Break up monopolies in healthcare, food, housing. 60 votes. A House majority willing to take on the industries writing their campaign checks.

Tuition-free state owned universities and trade schools. Universal locally owned childcare. A minimum wage a person can live on. 60 votes.

Getting big money out of politics is a different category. The Supreme Court decided corporations have free speech and money is speech. You can’t limit what they spend. To undo that you either remove the justices who made those calls, which takes two-thirds of the Senate to convict, 67 votes, or you pass a constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of the House. Two-thirds of the Senate. Ratification by 38 state legislatures.

That’s the most expensive thing on the menu. And it’s been done before.

In the late twenties Republicans had a trifecta. Then everything collapsed. In 1930 Democrats started picking up seats. By 1932 they broke through. By 1934 they had 69 Senate seats. A supermajority. By 1936 they had 77. The largest in modern American history, built in six years from a minority, by offering something worth voting for while the other side presided over a disaster.

That’s the model. Build the majority. Then use it.

Which is why we have to be straight about where we are right now.

A recent CNN poll found 74% of Americans think congressional Democrats have the wrong priorities. That includes 55% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. CNN’s own data analyst called those numbers atrociously awful and said they scream primary challenges across the map. Democratic voters hold a net negative 4% view of their own congressional leaders. In 2006 that was positive 28. In 2018 it was positive 19. Both of those were midterm years with a Republican in the White House, just like now. Chuck Schumer’s hold on his leadership role is a coin toss according to the prediction markets.

The base isn’t confused. They’re not apathetic. They’re telling you something true, and the people currently in charge aren’t listening.

So we’re going to try something. I’ve put together a list of candidates who support the right policies and are willing to fight for them. They’re either primarying incumbent Democrats or running in open seats, and they’ve all raised at least a hundred thousand dollars, meaning they’re real. Over the next few weeks we’re going to try to talk to as many of them as we can, and get them on board with something simple: work together now, while you’re still campaigning. Build your power as a bloc before you get to Congress. Then actually use that power when you get there.

That’s the whole idea. We know how to do this. We’ve done it before.

But we can’t do it without you. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us get these candidates working together.

Corbin Trent

PS

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

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

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains? Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission? Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

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

Next week we’re releasing a list of 46 candidates we think could actually change the math if they’d run together, fight together, and refuse to let leadership off the hook. People we’ve found across the country who are primarying incumbents or running in open seats and have already shown they’re serious. We think this list matters. We’ll show you why next week.

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

In 2015 I sold my food trucks to volunteer for Bernie Sanders. That turned into co-founding Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, then helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I worked as her strategist and communications director for a few years after that. I’ve spent the better part of a decade pretty close to the center of the progressive movement. The following is what I learned.

Support the work

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton said Bernie Sanders’ policies were “fairy dust and rainbows.” The point wasn’t just that big things were hard. The point was that big things weren’t needed. The system was basically working. America was great. If you thought otherwise you weren’t serious, or you weren’t paying attention, or you were the kind of person who gets dismissed at Brookings as insufficiently realistic.

That was the consensus. Serious people. Credentialed people. Times columnists and think tank fellows and television regulars, all reading from the same hymnal. Don’t rock the boat. Take what the system offers. Be grateful.

That consensus didn’t protect us from Donald Trump. It elected him. Twice.

Because when someone came along and said the system is rigged and I’ll burn it down, 80 million people said finally. They were wrong about the messenger. They were completely right about the problem. The “things are actually pretty good” position was the most destabilizing thing anyone could have said. That realism was actually radicalism. And we’re living in the results.

The market doesn’t work for the things people actually need to live. Not anymore. Maybe it once did. It doesn’t now and the evidence is everywhere.

We spend $6 trillion a year on healthcare. More than any country on earth, by a lot, and we rank last among wealthy nations in outcomes. Last. Tens of millions of people are one diagnosis away from financial ruin. Rural hospitals are closing. The market has had decades to fix this. It hasn’t fixed it. It has extracted wealth from it while delivering less.

Or consider the mRNA vaccines. The federal government funded the foundational research for 35 years. When COVID hit, the government paid Moderna and Pfizer billions more to finish the job and purchase the doses. Moderna and Pfizer then walked away with over $100 billion in combined revenue. The public got the bill twice, once as taxpayers funding the research, once as patients paying the prices, and the companies kept the patents.

The same pattern shows up in housing. We have been short on housing for decades. The market hasn’t built our way out of it. Cities that people actually want to live in are unaffordable. But so are the rural areas. I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee. Population about 11,000. Here a studio apartment runs you a thousand dollars a month.

And what did our nominee offer? Kamala Harris proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time home buyers. I understand the instinct. But the issue is supply. You pump $25,000 into a market that isn’t building enough homes then prices go up. The money flows straight through the buyer and into the seller or the landlord and the developer, and nothing new gets built. It’s the same story as healthcare. We keep pouring money into broken systems I assume because it seems like a logical solution. But it only makes the problem worse. .

Too many people think of American problems as spending problems. But if I walked into my local grocery store and wanted 15,000 pounds of beef, it wouldn’t matter how much money I had. You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. We don’t have enough housing. We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough childcare slots. Pumping money into markets that aren’t producing those things doesn’t produce them. It inflates the price of whatever scraps are left. You fix a capacity problem by building and training, not injecting more cash.

We built our way out of the Depression not just by writing checks but by doing it ourselves. The government built water and irrigation infrastructure that turned the Central Valley into the food supply for half the country. It strung electrical wire to farms and small towns across the rural South and Midwest that private utilities had written off as unprofitable. We built the industrial capacity that became the Arsenal of Democracy. That was public investment. That was us deciding some things are too important to leave to the market.

We don’t believe that anymore. Or rather, our leaders don’t. Those few that do get stopped before they can do anything about it.

AOC won. She scared people badly enough that they spent millions trying to destroy her. She had the right diagnosis. She had the right policies. She had the courage. The things she ran on didn’t happen. Not because she wasn’t good enough. Because she walked in alone. A seat won in isolation gets absorbed. The machinery of this system is designed to absorb individual attacks.

Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in power, and we can’t fix that one seat at a time any more than we can fix the housing crisis one subsidy at a time.

Which brings me to where we are. An American president is suggesting on a Tuesday night that Iran should cease to exist. Not metaphorically. And the people who are supposed to be the opposition are writing letters. That is where we end up when the people in charge have no affirmative vision, no plan to build anything, and no team capable of fighting for it even if they did.

So when people ask me about candidates, I’m not asking whether they have the right positions. Most of the good ones do. I’m asking whether they understand what those positions are actually up against. Whether they’re ready to fight it.

I’m looking for bold, specific, public policy positions. Not values. Policies. Medicare for All. Public ownership of AI infrastructure. A housing program that builds and owns, not just subsidizes. Drug pricing reform that takes back the patents on publicly-funded research so the public owns what the public paid for. You would be amazed how many candidates won’t put this out publicly.

A willingness to say out loud that the Democratic Party as currently led is the problem. The people running it have failed. They have names. Saying so isn’t radical. It’s honest.

An understanding that our institutions have been captured. The FEC. The FDA. The SEC. The DOJ. The Supreme Court. Not neutral referees. A coordinated fifty-year project to make progressive governance legally impossible. A candidate who won’t say that isn’t ready for what’s coming.

A willingness to take risks inside the party. Not fighting Republicans on television, which costs nothing. Backing primary challengers against Democratic incumbents who are blocking the agenda. Making it more dangerous to oppose you than to support you. Almost nobody will do this.

All of those are necessary. None of them are enough.

A commitment to building a team before they win. Not after. Campaigning alongside candidates in other states and districts. Endorsing across geographies. Treating their race as part of something bigger than their district. This has never been done at scale on our side. It’s the thing that would change everything.

People resist this one the most, so let me explain why it matters.

A candidate’s victory, whether it’s a House seat or a Senate seat, can only accomplish things within the framework of how big and powerful their team is, how aligned that team is, and whether they built it before they walked into the building. It has to happen before, not after, for two reasons. First, because building it before is what proves you’re willing to put skin in the game and take real risks. Anyone can talk about solidarity after they’ve won. Doing it before, when it costs you something, is what makes it mean anything. Second, because you cannot change who’s sitting at the table from inside the table. You have to build the power to change it from outside. That means committing to each other before any of you have a seat, when the only thing binding you together is the mission itself.

And it matters to voters. Candidates running on these ideas as individuals are just putting policies on a page. They’re giving speeches. When they show up with a team, when they’ve committed to each other before they’ve won anything, they’re showing voters they understand what’s standing in their way and they have a plan for taking it head on.

Underneath all of it, public ownership as the mechanism. Not regulation. Not subsidy. Ownership. We did it before. We can do it again. When a technology has the power to transform society, it’s unwise to leave it in the hands of a tiny group of self-absorbed billionaires whose only goal is to maximize profit, who consistently show contempt for the rights and interests of their fellow Americans, and who aren’t accountable to anyone, especially with a federal government this weak. We don’t let private companies build nuclear weapons. We don’t let them decide when or how to use them. We don’t let them raise armies. We understand some things are too powerful to leave in private hands. AI is one of those things. It’s built off of thousands of years of human data and thought. It’s built off of major public investment. It’s built by us. It should be working for us. The only thing that’s got a single chance of ensuring that is if we own it. Just like Alaska gets dividends from its oil reserves, the American people should be getting dividends from their data and their investments.

Nobody is coming to do this for us. It takes a team. People who said all of this out loud before they won. Who committed to each other before they walked into Washington. Who understand that their victory only matters if the person running three states over wins too.

That team is what I’m building with A Fight Worth Having. Not candidates with good vibes. Candidates who’ve passed this filter. Who know what they’re up against. Who are ready to fight the right people, including the ones in their own party.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do.

Go to AFightWorthHaving.com

Corbin Trent

American bombs, American military, no real goal, no real purpose. Just destruction. Just power. And the dumbest kind of power.

The pundits at the NYT and on CNN are losing their minds. Not about the killing or carnage. About the tone.

The New York Times is beside itself because Donald Trump went on social media and promised to blow up Iran’s water supply. He celebrated the destruction of a bridge near Tehran like he’d won a fantasy football matchup. The White House is running propaganda reels, real footage of airstrikes cut with video game clips and movie scenes, set to guitar riffs. Michelle Goldberg is writing about the lost veneer of American morality. Other columnists are lamenting that we’ve lost our standing, our credibility, our ability to lead.

I think the veneer was harmful. It prevented us from being confronted with our actions. The veneer didn’t protect the 7,000 American soldiers who came home in flag-draped coffins or the 60,000 who came home missing pieces of themselves. It didn’t protect the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died after we invaded a country that had nothing to do with September 11th. It didn’t protect the Libyans after we helped turn their country into a failed state. It didn’t protect the Yemenis. It didn’t protect the Iranians whose scientists we’ve been assassinating for years. The veneer didn’t protect anyone other than American elites, our own arrogance, our own sense of moral superiority.

I’m 45 years old. In my lifetime this country has gone to war in Afghanistan after 20 hijackers, most of them Saudi, attacked us. We invaded Iraq. We bombed Libya. We ran illegal drone programs that killed civilians in countries we weren’t even at war with. We’ve overthrown legitimately elected governments. We’ve blockaded Cuba for decades because apparently a small island nation 90 miles off our coast is an existential threat to the most powerful military in human history. We have now bombed Iran for 38 straight days.

None of that is new. What’s new is that Donald Trump won’t dress it up. He says he wants the oil. He says he wants to blow up the infrastructure. He says his own morality is the only thing that can stop him. And the people who spent their careers providing the intellectual justification for all of it are horrified. Not because of the killing. Because he won’t pretend.

The argument from the establishment isn’t that the wars were wrong. The argument is that the wrong wars should have been conducted with more tact. We should have issued a polite press release about spreading democracy before we took the oil. We should have couched the civilian casualties in the language of precision targeting and collateral damage and the difficult choices made by serious people in positions of grave responsibility. We should have maintained the fiction.

Because that’s what it was. A fiction. One that protected the conscience and prestige of the empire, not the people living under it.

When the International Criminal Court moved to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza, in a Senate hearing Lindsey Graham said “if they do this to Israel, we are next.” He didn’t say they were innocent. He said we’re next. Chuck Schumer called the warrants reprehensible, profoundly unfair, and outrageous. Not the genocide in Gaza. Not the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. The warrants charging the people doing it.

The veneer wasn't protecting America's reputation. It was protecting theirs. Biden and Gaza, Obama's drone program, Bush and Cheney and Iraq, Clinton and Serbia. The list is long and every one of them knows exactly how long it is. That's why the ICC never gets real power over Americans. Not because they believe in sovereignty or international norms. Because they'd be on the list.

Last week, I was walking to the coffee shop when a convoy rolled past me. A massive police van, multiple cop cars, and one of those military vehicles, 15 feet long, 10 feet tall, the kind you’d expect to see rolling through Fallujah. I followed them. Drug bust.

A house full of meth heads in my town, hit with a dozen guys in full desert tactical gear, silenced weapons, flash bang grenades. I know it was an overreach because those people were back home later that same day. If you need to blow through a door with that kind of force to arrest someone, that person probably shouldn’t be sitting on their porch six hours later.

We don’t know how to reach for anything except the gun anymore. Not here, not abroad. It’s the only tool we’ve kept sharp.

I don’t fear Iran. The people who have more direct control over the daily conditions of my life and my kids’ lives than the Iranian government ever has or ever will are not in Tehran. They’re here.

Trump is a clarifying force.

He didn’t create our system. He just makes lying about it harder. His selfishness, corruption, cruelty, and vulgarity strip away the rituals of denial. He is not a departure from American history. He is a caricature of it. America without the niceties. America without the pretense. America without the patience for the stories that help us feel righteous.

We have always known how to speak the language of liberty while practicing domination. The founders talked about freedom while enslaving human beings. We talk now about justice and righteousness while arming genocide and threatening to bomb whole societies into ruin.

We cannot become something different by pretending Trump is something other than America. He is America. Just the version that has lost respect for the system of denial.

We can be different and we can do it quickly. In 1932 Republicans had a trifecta. The economy collapsed. The country nearly fell apart. In two cycles Democrats built a supermajority that lasted a generation. Not because they had better consultants. Because they had a vision big enough that people believed in it and showed up for it.

Can we look honestly at what we are and decide to be something different? Not redeemed. Different.

The people who need the veneer are counting on our cynicism. They’re counting on us to look at that chart and find a reason it can’t happen again.

It can.

Corbin Trent

PS

If you’re wondering what we can do about it, A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know winning is the beginning.

We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter determines the fuel.

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

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

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

I’ve was on calls all last week. Here’s who’s passed so far.

• Oliver Larkin in FL-23

• Melat Kiros in CO-1

• Graham Platner, US Senate Maine

• Saikat Chakrabarti, CA-11

With many more to come.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us help them.

2026 and 2028 can and should be the beginnings of something transformational.

We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.

The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.

But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…

Thirsty fo more?

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.

Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.

So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.

Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.

Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.

But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.

But you’ve got to understand how we got here.

Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.

It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.

We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.

And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.

If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.

That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.

We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.

Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.

But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.

Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.

These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.

But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.

We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.

So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.

This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.

Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.

Let’s back the fighters.

Corbin Trent

PS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help keep it going?

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what we need right now. People.

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

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

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

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

Get in before this gets loud.

Corbin Trent

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

Contribute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbin

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