MICHAEL MEEROPOL / ECONOMICS / Are there signs of serious problems in the economy?

Posted on January 17, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer
Paul Krugman / Wikimedia Commons.

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2026

The following is a version of a commentary delivered over WAMC-FM by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University on January 9, 2026. This version is expanded and revised for The Rag Blog as of January 17, 2026. Meeropol, Rag Blog host Thorne Dreyer and co-host Alice Embree will discuss the commentary on the air on KOOP 91.7-FM and streamed on KOOP.org Friday, Jan. 23, from 2-3 p.m.

So which is it? Is the U.S. economy doing extremely well and we are about to have a “great” year in 2026? Or are there signs of serious problems in the economy, especially for middle – class and working-class people who are not in the top ten, five or one percent of the population in terms of income and wealth?

Well, it just so happens that the substack economist, Paul Krugman, came out a few days ago with a summary of the year with a full analysis of what Trump’s economics have meant to the U.S. economy. This has given me much more important data to share than I had when I recorded this commentary and submitted a version to the WAMC-FM website. Thus, we can actually say this is exclusive to The Rag Blog.

For the full Krugman presentation, one needs a subscription but here is the link:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/one-year-of-trumponomics

First, Krugman gives us the year-end jobs report which either was very weak or completely flat [meaning no job creation for the whole year!], depending on what kind of revisions there are to the data over the next few months. If it wasn’t flat, it was the weakest job growth in over a decade except for the year of the pandemic when there was a terrible loss of jobs.

Krugman then goes on to explain two things — why has unemployment risen so little AND why does it “feel” like the economy is in such bad shape? This probably has to do with the fact that there seems to be what Politico calls a “frozen” labor market: In this situation there are no mass layoffs and jumps in unemployment. Instead, businesses have cut back on hiring which means new entrants into the labor force (recent college graduates for example) as well as people looking to change jobs are facing few job opportunities.

[For details see “The US labor market ground to a halt in 2025. The risk in 2026 is that it “cracks.” It was a tough year to be looking for work — and the job market is not expected get much better,” available at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-us-labor-market-ground-to-a-halt-in-2025-the-risk-in-2026-is-that-it-cracks-140026614.html]

First of all, the reason measured unemployment hasn’t jumped is because all the deportations have reduced the number of people actively looking for work. Meanwhile, those who are looking for work are having a hard time finding jobs and the result is a serious decline in consumer confidence. Krugman’s evidence of this is the fact that long-term unemployment — the number of people who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more — has risen much more than total unemployment.  And the public understands this. “The Conference Board, which conducts a monthly survey of consumers, reports a measure called the “labor market differential” — the difference between the number of people saying that jobs are “plentiful” and those saying jobs are “hard to get.” While this measure turned upwards during the last quarter of 2024, it has turned sharply downward since then.” [Krugman]

And overall Consumer Confidence has declined for most of 2025: It reached a low point in early 2025, rose a bit through July, and has been falling ever since.

Now let’s check out the stock market. So far this year, the main index (the S and P 500) has produced a 16% rate of return. That means that if you owned $1 million worth of stock on January 1 of this year, you would have an extra $160,000 of wealth after December 31. Though lots of people own some stock (I owned some in my retirement account for most of my working life) very few people own enough stock for the proceeds to be a significant part of their income: 10% of Americans own 93% of all stocks, while the bottom half owns only about 1-2%. 

So, no matter how you slice it, claiming that a booming stock market means we are “all” doing well is garbage.

Krugman goes further and notes that the improvement in the stock market is based on about seven individual firms that are heavily invested in developing artificial intelligence — which may or may not turn out to be a dangerous bubble rather than evidence of real successful company growth.

In fact, the run-up in the stock market is part of what is being called a “K – shaped” economy. The top part of the letter “K” represents the tremendous successes of the billionaires and others who are heavily invested in the stock market (that top ten percent). The lower part represents the difficulty that the middle class and working class has keeping their heads above water. So, if you are claiming “the economy” is doing great because you are focused on the top ten percent, you are right. To understand what is happening for the rest of us, we need much more information about many different trends.

[For details on stock ownership see: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html]

Or consider this set of facts: On Christmas Eve, MSNBC’s Ron Asana pointed out that the top 20% of the households account for 63% of consumption spending; the bottom 80% for 37%. 

What about national statistics — Gross Domestic Product, Investment, Incomes of full-time workers? The growth rate in GDP was lower in 2025 than in 2024. Now it is true in moments of candor members of the Trump Administration refrain from asserting the blatant falsehood that the economy is the “hottest” it’s ever been, etc. etc. Some even spent most of 2025 assuring us that 2026 will be a “boom” year — which of course it might be — As Yogi Berra once said — “It’s difficult to make predictions, especiallyabout the future!”

But so far, there is no indication that the U.S. economy as a whole is booming. In the following diagram it is clear that the U.S. economy WAS “booming” — but that was 2024 when Joe Biden was president. In 2025, there has been a slowdown which is not surprising — the uncertainties created by Trump’s tariffs, the mass deportations which in some industries is reducing the labor force, the meat-axe approach to cutting government activities all have slowed growth. No recession — but a definite slowdown in growth

For the actual numbers in visual form, see

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

The behavior of investment during 2025 doesn’t give us any clues. It went up in the first quarter of 2025 only to fall in the next two quarters. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric about how rotten the economy was in 2024 is false and his rhetoric that 2025 was the “hottest” economy is also false.

[The following data is presented by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — abbreviated FRED. Folks can click on the link and then restrict the data to the last five years to see the trend. Investment did not “boom” in 2025.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A006RE1Q156NBEA]

But to move from “the economy” to the people living in it, I consider the real income of full-time workers a very important measure of well-being. (“Real” income takes the actually numbers in your paycheck and relates them to the ability of that paycheck to actually buy goods and services. “Median” is the best way to judge the wage of the TYPICAL worker. If you take an average, it can be tilted because of the very small number of super-rich individuals. If Bill Gates walked into a room of 99 people all making $50,000 a year, the “average” income would suddenly shoot up but $50,000 would still be the typical income. The numbers that follow relate to a base year which is why they seem rather low — the important thing is not the absolute number but whether we can see any trend.)

The weekly real median wage averaged $370 for 2024 (reaching a high point of $375 at the end of the year.) In the first quarter of 2025 it fell back to $373 and inched upwards to $376 in the second and third quarters — virtually no growth at all. For details see:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm

What’s going on?

First, the high-tech sector has invested heavily in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. Many businesses believe that increased use of AI will permit the replacement of many workers.

We can actually hear that happening when we call doctors’ offices and a voice that identifies itself as a “virtual assistant” (clearly an AI system) asks how “she” can direct your call. A human being used to be the person who answered that phone call and then directed the call — now It’s a machine. With the “promise” of AI, many businesses are reluctant to increase their labor force when they might not need that many people in the not-so-distant future.

The following is from the New York Times from last October:

In one particular area that was supposed to improve as President Trump’s tariffs took hold, there is nothing good to report. If you are a voter who wanted more factory jobs, you must be disappointed. If you promised the voters that there would be many more factory positions, you failed. This year [2025] factory jobs are down by 58,000. Nothing new. In Trump’s first term they fell by about 200,000 between January of 2017 and January of 2021. Seems like there is a lesson in here somewhere.

And look at the long-term trends. Although the non-farm labor force has grown by more than 20,000,000 since January of 2014, the total number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has not moved much. In 143 months beginning in January of 2014, total jobs in the factory sector have always been between 12,000,000and 13,000,000 except for five months in the spring and summer of 2020 when they fell below 12,000,000 for a while. Overall, no long-term increases even though the economy is much bigger today. 

“Amazon Plans to Replace More Than a Half Million Jobs with Robots.”

(Karen Weise, New York Times, October 21, 2025)

[For more details see https://www.dollarsandsense.org/jobs-factories-and-inequalities/?ref=dollarsandsense-newsletter]

Thus, Trump’s tariffs have not created a surge in manufacturing jobs. Instead,they have created a great deal of uncertainty within the business sector. So far, American importers have been able to “eat” the tariffs because they built up significant inventories in anticipation that these tariffs will increase their costs. However, it is unlikely that they will be able to sustain this into 2026 and therefore, the tariffs will probably start to push prices up.

On top of all this, there is a very important intangible. As I mentioned above, the uncertainties created by those Trump tariffs and the failure of the Trump Administration to knock inflation down dramatically has dealt a blow to consumer confidence — and this is despite the fact that the average rate of inflation for 2025 has fallen from 2.9 percent in 2024 to 2.7 percent.

In other words, in answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this broadcast, there remains great uncertainty. The economy could start chugging along – it could remain in a kind of stasis with slow growth and slowly rising unemployment as inflation remains the same or slows further — or it could experience a surge in prices and an increase in unemployment.

Based on the analysis by Krugman of the 2025 statistics, I think the chance of a strong 2026 is very slim. In my oral presentation a few weeks ago I was more equivocal than I am now. I think the best the economy can hope for would be to muddle along but it might be much worse. The most important take-away from the experience of 2025 is that the economy has not done what Trump predicted and it is not doing what he claims it is. In other words, public opinion that believes the economy is in lousy shape is probably correct.

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CARL DAVIDSON / POLITICS / SUMMING UP THE YEAR 2025

Posted on January 16, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

A turning point for Trump and the Left

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2026

Carl Davidson is the editor of Carl’s Left Links Newsletter, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers. Carl is a former leader of the American New Left and a past Vice President and National Secretary of SDS (the Students for a Democratic Society). Carl was a guest on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer and Alice Embree on Jan. 16, 2026, discussing this article and its implications.

We opened the year 2025 with a stark assessment of the political terrain. Trump and the far-right clique around him were taking the Oval Office and key cabinet positions. We made a point, correctly, of defining this clique as fascist, but reminded everyone that taking high offices was not the same as consolidating fascist rule across all 50 states and 100 major cities.

We went further than simply using “fascism” as a nasty label. Our current fascism was not a carbon copy of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. It was something more important, a “fascism with American characteristics.” We followed that up with a summary of the counter-revolution of 1876, the Jim Crow years of lynching and terror in the South and Southwest, the hidden stories of plots to overthrow FDR, the sizable pro-Nazi “America First” campaign, and postwar McCarthyism. We described how a Second Reconstruction reversed much of that, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, followed up with a strong antiwar movement and Black Power election campaigns. Then the 1970s ended with violent repression, and the careful organization of the ‘New Right’ that led, step-by-step, to Trump’s MAGA bloc.

In brief, we took the first step in Sun Tzu’s Art of War: Know your enemy. The next step was to know ourselves. Again, we had a brief summary, we were a small left represented by AOC’s Justice Democrats, but operating within a wider anti-MAGA progressive trend. We also pointed out that progressives were still a large minority — but so was Trump’s MAGA bloc. In addition to the White House, Trump held the Supreme Court and both Houses of Congress, but with very thin margins.

We thus had a good assessment of the terrain. But the future is always open and full of surprises. Trump immediately had Elon Musk take center stage, with his DOGE unit slashing away at critical government programs. But on Feb. 5, 2025, Team Trump (and the rest of us, to be frank) faced a big surprise, the first “50501” elemental rising of anti-Trump millions emerged across the country. “50501” initially meant fifty anti-MAGA protest actions at fifty state capitols on one day. It turned out much larger than anyone had expected, including those who did much of the local organizing, Indivisible, Working Families Party, and Bernie’s “Our Revolution” people.

The second 50501 elemental rising arrived in June as “No Kings Day.” It drew even more millions and knocked the wind out of Trump’s ridiculous military parade for himself in D.C., which was sparsely attended. In this No Kings round, local progressive Democrats and some of the socialist left joined together to build turnout and shape sets of demands.

Trump was unfazed. At the beginning of July, Trump and his anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller announced a major upgrade of ICE, from a relatively small arm of the Department of Homeland Security with a $9 billion budget, to a paramilitary force with a $170 billion budget, larger than most standing armies in the developed world. Trump’s “Brown Shirts” proved to be an accurate label for the new ICE project.

A national opposition voice emerged within two weeks, the “Good Trouble” protests set for July 18 in memory of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) on his birthday. Mass rallies took place in 1200 cities, but with subdued media coverage. ICE ran rampant for months, and Trump tried to get the National Guard and the U.S. Army into the fray as well. But the second “No Kings Day” arrived on Oct 18, with even more millions turning up everywhere, aiming for a “Blue Wave” in whatever elections are taking place in November. Thus, Election Day saw the incredible victories of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle, both of them democratic socialists, as well as other regular Dems taking down MAGA people elsewhere.

We can thus fairly say that 2025 was a turning point year. Trump still has his MAGA bloc of about one-third of the electorate, but the luster has worn off. Even his MAGA base is troubled by what they are seeing with MAGA dragging teachers out of schools and seizing workers at Home Depots. They were expecting roundups of “the worst of the worst,” but saw Latino neighbors and friends in hiding or being mistreated. Reality didn’t match the political advertisements. Mass resistance in a wide common front, moreover, forced the military out of Los Angeles and has held them at bay elsewhere.

Trump now has power but not respect. Once a commanding force in both the Republican Party and the broader arena of American life, Trump’s grip loosened amid mounting legal challenges, rising scandals around the Epstein files, waning support from party leaders, and a shift in the electorate’s priorities. Rather than guiding the national conversation, Trump’s voice was increasingly sidelined. This has opened space for new debates and a realignment of party power. It also signals exhaustion from MAGA’s polarizations and spectacles.

Amidst this power shift, the intensification of ICE raids in 2025 cast a long shadow over communities nationwide. With stories of abrupt detainments and families torn apart, the raids underscored the enduring complexities of America’s immigration debate. Add on the debacle in Gaza and threats of war in Venezuela, and these actions reignited public discourse on civil rights and government accountability, galvanizing both criticism and calls for reform.

The unexpected emergence of the No Kings Risings, alongside the leadership of Mamdani, AOC, Bernie and other Justice Democrats, offers us a beacon for future progress in 2026. Mass action campaigns captured the imagination of a new generation seeking alternatives to entrenched power structures of either party. Mamdani’s articulate vision and DSA’s organizing prowess helped transform frustration into constructive activism, suggesting that real and lasting change is possible. Let’s work on building the organizational infrastructure for a Third Reconstruction, and let’s hope the new year holds new pleasant surprises to help us on our way.

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MICHAEL MEEROPOL / ECONOMICS / Inflation, unemployment, and President Trump’s speech

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / January 1, 2026

The following is an expanded version of a commentary delivered over WAMC-FM on , by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. It has been edited for The Rag Blog. Meeropol will be featured on Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Radio program on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed at KOOP.org, Friday, January 23, at 2 p.m. to discuss this article and larger issues it raises. They will be joined by Rag Blog associate editor Alice Embree.

Inflation and unemployment are considered the “twin problems” for the macro-economy in the United States. In 2024, the Democrats lost to Donald Trump because inflation had increased to close to 9 percent in 2022 (the rate for the entire year was 8 percent).

This was after a period of over 40 years when the inflation rate averaged less than 3 percent — and only topped 5 percent once in the late 1980s. Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, identified the years after 1980 as “the great moderation.” Thus, the big inflation increase of 2022, even though it was followed by a decline, came after over 40 years of very moderate inflation. This had a tremendous impact on the typical citizen, even though on average, wages rose more than prices in 2023 and 2024. (In other words, real wages — the amount of goods and services one could purchase with the money in your paycheck — continued to rise in both 2023 and 2024.)

[For details of the course of real wages earned by the median worker, see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

On December 18, Trump gave a virtually incoherent speech that was so full of lies it would take quite a long time to disentangle them. But the first and most deadly lie was that the economy in 2024 was “dead” and that he had inherited the highest inflation rate in 48 years. He then claimed he had revived the economy and brought inflation down dramatically. Now just ELEVEN MONTHS after he took office the “dead” US economy is the ”hottest” in the world — more – the “hottest” it had EVER been! Interestingly enough, he did not claim to have reduced prices across the board — which he had promised during the campaign. Such a reduction is quite different from reducing the rate of inflation.

(To clarify that difference — if prices in general come down that is deflation —a price reduction on average across the board. If the RATE of inflation comes down instead of prices going up 4 percent, they might go up, say, three percent — but they are continuing to rise not fall at all!)

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BRUCE MELTON / CLIMATE CHANGE / Climate Change Review 2025

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Occidental Chemicals CO2 air capture unit in the Permian Basin about to begin operations.

The Science of the Effects of Warming

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2025

The good news is real, but a bit less in quantity than the bad news unfortunately. Our climate continues to crash, and the current U.S. administration continues to dismantle climate pollution regulations. The bad news first, then the good.

2025 SUMMARY


The global temperature jump in 2023 and 2024 has not significantly dissipated…


The 2025 temperature globally will be the second or third warmest after 2023 and 2024 that exceeded the dangerous 1.5 degree C threshold. El Nino was partially responsible, and the new global cooling sulfur limits in shipping fuels and China too, but the 0.5 degree C jump cannot be explained by these two things alone. Some say the rest is from a peak in the 11-year solar cycle, but this is only a few percent of total warming forcing. The Hunga Tonga eruption in 2022 put a record amount of water vapor in the stratosphere causing warming, but the net effect considering cooling from volcanic sulfates is now considered to be neutral. Less cooling cloud formation from fewer sulfates is also in the mix but this warming is included in the cooling from sulfur regulations in shipping fuels, China and etc.

What is missing is warming from increased natural greenhouse gas emissions from degrading and collapsing Earth systems like tropical forests and permafrost, and from less snow cover and alpine and arctic greening via trees growing up in tundra, sticking up above the snow where they can absorb sunlight and create nine times more warming than snow. In total, the near tripling of the warming rate seen in the last several years is not expected to diminish, ever, until we reduce greenhouse gas concentrations back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our world’s systems.

Rhode et al., October 2025 Temperature Update, Berkeley Earth, November 19, 2025.
https://berkeleyearth.org/october-2025-temperature-update/
2025 on course to be joint-second warmest year, with November third-warmest on record, Copernicus Climate Service, December 9, 2025.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2025-course-be-joint-second-warmest-year-november-third-warmest-record
Hansen et al., Global Warming Has Accelerated Are the United Nations and the Public Well- Informed, Environment, Science an Policy for Sustainable Dev, February 3, 2025.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494?needAccess=true
Hausefather, Global Temperature Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures? Carbon Brief, October 12, 2025.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-what-are-the-causes-of-recent-record-high-global-temperatures/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Near-future warming…

Warming is expected to continue its significant acceleration that began in the mid 20-teens with 2027 seeing 1.7 degrees C warming above normal. Hansen et al., Global Temperature in 2025, 2026, 2027, Columbia Climate School, December 18, 2025.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2025/
GlobalTemperaturePrediction2025.12.18.pdf

Total Earth system sequestration has flipped from increasing to decreasing because of natural feedback emissions…


Natural sequestration of CO2 by our Earth systems has begun to decline. This marks a tipping point of extreme importance. Not only does it tell us that our natural systems are degraded, and that this degradation cannot be stopped unless we restore our climate’s temperature back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems so they can self-restore, it tells us that climate change will now accelerate faster, even if human-caused emissions do not increase, because fewer greenhouse gases are being absorbed by Earth systems, creating more warming than from the emissions alone. Forest degradation from insects and disease across the world, declining ocean and soils absorption, and increased permafrost thaw have flipped Earth’s natural greenhouse gas sequestration systems from an increasing to a decreasing rate.

What this means is that, if our Earth systems were sequestering greenhouse gases at the same rate they did in the 1960s, the annual atmospheric growth rate would have been 1.9 ppm CO2 per year. Instead, the annual growth rate is 2.5 ppm CO2, and this is the 2010 to 2020 average. This decline is quite meaningful already at 0.25 Gt per year of lost CO2 sequestration and the increase will only increase further, and nonlinearly, as current feedbacks grow and new ones begin to emit. It is also very important to note that the decline will very likely be steeper than the increasing sequestration rate before the tipping point in 2008. This is because of feedbacks increasing in number as we warm farther away from the evolutionary boundaries of our old climate at about 1 degree C warming above normal, and increased warming almost always means nonlinearly faster and more extensive feedbacks.

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JONAH RASKIN / BOOK REVIEW / Levitating the Pentagon

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer


Levitating the Pentagon, and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism By Nancy Kurshan; Three Rooms Press; 2025

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2025

Nancy Kurshan might have carved out and published a big chunk of her own story soon after the dramatic protests at the Pentagon in 1967, and in the wake of the 1969-1970 Chicago Conspiracy Trial. If she had done that, her book would have appeared in print at about the same time that those two Yippie classics became best sellers: Jerry Rubin’s Do It! and We Are Everywhere and Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of it and Woodstock Nation. 

Kurshan wisely waited decades to provide her account of the rambunctious Sixties and Seventies, a time when she was in the thick of the anti-war movement and a driving force in righteous causes against racism and injustice that afflicted Black, brown and Native American communities. She seemed to know intuitively which way political and cultural winds were blowing, how to ride ideological storms and keep her wits about her. 

The first hundred or so pages of her memoir, Levitating the Pentagon and other Uplifting Stories — which has just been published by Three Rooms Press — describe her membership in Yippie, her relationships with Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and their ilk, along with her exhilarating moments in Hanoi, Moscow, and Havana. Plus her birth in 1944 to parents who belonged to the American Communist Party and who helped to shape her world view from an early age. 

Three Rooms Press also published Judy Gumbo’s memoir Yippie Girl. The two books, Gumbo’s and Kurshan’s, complement one another.

Kurshan’s memoir might have stopped at the end of the 1970s. After all, as she writes near the end of her story, “Born a Red Diaper Baby who morphed into a Yippie, and joined the Weather Underground, I love the life I’ve lived.” She wisely doesn‘t stop with her membership in the Weather Underground and its offshoot — The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. With passion and clarity, Kurshan explores her participation in the 1990s in the movements that aided political prisoners and decried the inhumane conditions that existed behind bars. She also recounts her personal life: her romantic relationships with other radicals; marriage to fellow activist, Steve Whitman, their family life together and her children. Howie Emer, with whom she had a long, trusting relationship — and a largely unsung, longtime radical — is the father of her children.

In an interview with author Pat Thomas, who has written about Jerry Rubin, the Black Panthers, and Allen Ginsberg, Kurshan says, “I don’t think I was a natural Yippie.” (That interview with Thomas appears near the end of her memoir.) Granted, she didn’t appear before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) as dramatically and as effectively as Abbie and Jerry did when they were in costume. Abbie in a shirt made from an American flag. Jerry dressed as an American patriot circa 1776 and later as a member of the Viet Cong and later still as Santa Claus. 

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DANIEL ACOSTA, JR. / HIGHER EDUCATION / Ideological Warfare at the University of Texas

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Daniel Acosta, Jr.

Make UT Great Again (MUGA)

By Daniel Acosta, Jr. / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2025

The University of Texas is facing an existential crisis because of its decision to appease the Texas governor and legislature by providing a more ideologically diverse curriculum to UT’s current programs. According to UT’s Provost, “our university leadership is having constructive behind-the-scenes discussions with the White House on the Trump Compact.” He further says that UT “aligns with the principles of conduct that they (the White House) want” (see the October 28th Chronicle of Higher Education interview of Provost William Inboden).

Certain UT colleges have been targeted for restructuring to bring their curricula more in line with what the President and Provost want the colleges to offer the students (i.e., a more optimally structured academic mission). The Provost states that “we will in time be announcing reforms and restructurings in the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Natural Sciences and others.” His plea to everyone on campus is: “Wait until we have something announced, and then we have that discussion.”

And so it goes. Cryptic messages to the public and the faculty on how UT will become great again with limited debate with those people most involved in higher education on campus — the faculty and students. Of course, an ideologically diverse curriculum is not the same as promoting a faculty and student body that are culturally and racially diverse. That is not allowed in the great state of Texas.

I returned to Austin in 2019 to spend my retirement years with my family. Although UT has had three different presidents in the last six years, UT still remains one of the best public universities (see the 2026 U.S. News & World Report). so why do the UT president and provost proclaim that our great state university “has lost its way” and needs to regain the public’s trust? Is “Make UT Great Again” the new slogan for this new UT administration, instead of the current one — “What Starts Here Changes The World?

Fifty years ago I was the second Mexican-American PhD professor on the pharmacy faculty since the founding of the College in 1893. Today there is only one Chicano professor. The number of Black and Hispanic tenured faculty at UT is embarrassingly low, compared to the other top 10 public universities.

The Presidential leadership team of VPs and deputies consists of seven white men and six white women. Out of the 15 active deans of colleges (plus three interim deans who are not included) there are seven white men, four white women, two Hispanic men, one Hispanic woman, and one Asian woman. Diversity has never played a role in the leadership of the University of Texas for over 170 years. So why is everyone now complaining that DEI had lowered the quality of education and research at UT?

I left UT after 20 years as a tenured professor and director of the toxicology training program because I was told I wasn’t suited for a higher administration position. I finished my career as the dean of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and later as the Deputy Director for FDA’s major research center — The National Center for Toxicological Research.

My wife and I helped fund a graduate student endowment in pharmacology and toxicology at the College of Pharmacy to assist students attend scientific conferences. I reached out to the new dean of pharmacy to establish an endowment to attract more Hispanic faculty to the college. But my efforts to improve the diversity of faculty and students at the college have been blunted by state regulations which hamper attempts to add more diverse and well-qualified individuals to the faculty.

[Acosta is retired and lives in Austin. He’s Dean Emeritus of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and former Deputy Director of FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research.]

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LARRY PILTZ / VERSE / Save The Futures

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Save The Futures

By Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2025

To save our futures
we’ll need supplies of sutures
to stitch tightly up with courage
the scourges
violent urges
to bind the wounds and spare the dirges
caused by those who sow reckless harm
they’ve chosen their dharma karma and smarm
We’ve been intentionally riven
by people driven
to bring suffering
we’ll need lots of wound closure
lots of buffering
and infinitely less exposure
to those cruel inhumane
and savage false savants
and their callous affronts
those bloody dilettantes
who are truly the insane
Tyrannical persecutors lust
with the imagination of rust
fascists prizing precious hates above all else
these false idols and false gods
those proud zealous clods
obsessed with their fearful inadequate selves
to them it’s oppression or bust
They are the retread undead
grievances are what they’re gladly fed
and it’s our bodies they’d snatch
if they could would kill our souls
these unmitigated assholes
those sons of hitlerites
these daughters of spite
these generations of vipers
fascinated by obvious lies
dazzled by windshield wipers
and painfully frazzled by truth
it doesn’t take a sleuth
to think them down to size
look them in the eyes
and try not to laugh
at those whose dumb wrath
seek a bloodbath
If only it were only graft
and venal corruption
and not a fully unhinged
fascist disruption
to drag our nation
from its fragile stable station
down to their level of infantilization
with its primitive rage
in permanent end-stage
all or nothing demented rampage
and who act the sage
reciting warped tragic history
while pretending innocence intrigue and mystery
these schemers nightmare dreamers
harebrained screamers
with apologies to hares
the comparison’s unfair
Hares wouldn’t claim victimization
and brag about a sadistic vindication
while reducing civilization
to its violent bare essential
the brutal quintessential
their illness chronic and acutely mental
they who deny political asylum
to those tortured and hounded
their bodies minds pounded
by those in their fellow fascist phylum
these ogres of the species
their minds full of feces
they consider inspiration
as the corpses high they pile them
Why their desperation
for total desensitization
are they jealous of a nation
who can feel emotion sensation
that doesn’t promote annihilation
and can compete on a fair playing field
of honesty, intelligence, and kindness
without sword and shield
do they know they can’t be healed
by their sociopathic blindness
about only themselves can they care
while they brazenly malign us
Among leaves of grass they are weeds
dispensing poison’s seeds
their life a coward’s dare
their threat an existential bet
now we must do our share
their brutal quintessential not quite here yet
be wild and free like the hare
with its survivor’s clever stare
and accept their coward’s dare
Larry Piltz

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MARTIN J. MURRAY / REMEMBRANCE / Larry Caroline disarmed critics without demeaning them

Posted on December 4, 2025 by Alice Embree
Larry Caroline and Friend. Art by Trudy Minkoff, The Rag, May 11, 1968.

By Martin J. Murray / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2025

I knew Larry Caroline for only a few short years in Austin. It was a memorable experience. My first recollection of Larry was at the Capitol Building around October 10, 1967. This tall, lanky guy with a big beard got up to speak. He put into words what I knew but could not articulate clearly. The guy — Larry — went through a long list of “wrongs” in America, persistent racial injustice, continued segregation in the South, corporate greed, political indifference.  He said “you can’t change things one at a time. The whole bloody mess (using a British phrase) has to go. Then more.

Wow. He put into words what I was thinking but was unable to articulate.

Soon after, I started going to SDS meetings. I saw Larry in action. He could formulate an argument so quickly. What I remember in watching him in dialogue with young people who did not share his views that he was never demeaning, dismissive, or arrogant. He showed with rational rigor the “wrongness” of their ideas defending capitalism and the war.  I have never forgotten his style of debate and have tried to emulate it ever since. Disarm your critics but never demean them as persons.

Larry was part of the “big three”: slightly older men whom I admired. Martin Wiginton was the ultimate tactician — focusing on what to do in building demonstrations. Greg Calvert was the strategist, thinking beyond the antiwar movement about how to build coalitions to challenge capitalism and its war fever. Larry was the great thinker, using rational thought and logic to work through big problems.

In Larry’s last term in the Philosophy Department (I believe Spring term 1969), I was his teaching assistant.  What a joy. I got to hear his lectures the whole semester. He was so smart

Frank Erwin was, of course, the Grand Inquisitor. But John Silber was his handyman.  Greg Calvert once likened Silber to the famous quote about Talleyrand –“he’s nothing but shit in silk stockings.”

Larry was done such a great disservice by Erwin, Silber, and the leadership of the Philosophy department.  Through it all, Larry maintained a high public profile.

In the time I spent with Larry before he started working at the alternative school Greenbriar, I learned how to think. I read his dissertation chapter named “Why be Moral?” It was so informed and erudite.

His legacy for me is straightforward: he got me to think and to be kind to others, even when we disagree with them.

Martin J. Murray is the author of Insurgent Politics in the Lone Star State: Remembering the Antiwar Movement in Austin, Texas, 1967-1973.

Rag Blog Afterword

Larry Caroline passed away on November 7, 2025. He was 85. An obituary shared by Larry Caroline’s family recounts his early life:

Born in upstate New York, Yisrael (Larry) grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home that valued Jewish identity but was not observant. The experience of facing discrimination as a Jewish child awakened in him a lifelong drive to stand up for those who were mistreated.

While studying philosophy at the University of Rochester, he became president of the NAACP chapter and a leader in the campus movement for civil rights. He organized protests against racist fraternities and became an outspoken advocate for equality and peace. His early ideals, deeply rooted in justice and moral clarity, shaped his work as a professor and public speaker.

After earning a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, he taught at Kentucky State College during the civil rights struggle. Later, as a professor at the University of Texas, he became known for his passionate opposition to the Vietnam War. His remarks at a protest rally, calling for “a revolution” to end the war, made front-page news across Texas and ultimately led to his dismissal from the university.

Barbara Hines, who was featured along with Judy Smith in the documentary Lone Star Three, shared this memory with The Rag Blog: “Larry’s philosophy course in the spring of 1969 made such an impact in my life.  Introducing me to Herbert Marcuse and Judy Smith.”

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ALLEN YOUNG / BOOK REVIEW / The Trees are Speaking

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

By Allen Young / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2025

“The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forest,” by Lynda Mapes, University of Washington Press, 2024.

Well, we all know that trees cannot talk. But we also know how important trees are. Just about everyone, no matter where they live, has admired a beautiful tree. It’s hard to imagine a landscape painting that doesn’t have at least one picturesque tree in it. We also know that trees give us wood for many uses, yield pulp for paper, and provide homes for wildlife. In addition, we’ve learned that trees can grow old and attain amazing height, can die from disease, can burn in forest fires – and more.

So when journalist Lynda Mapes entitled her book The Trees Are Speaking, she was using figurative vocabulary, filling 250 pages with good writing to educate us about these amazing living things that share the planet with us.

If you love nature, and especially if you are interested in environmental politics, this is a book for you.

The subtitle, “Dispatches from the Salmon Forest,” may seem a little strange, but we learn that there actually is a biological connection between the forest and the salmon that swim up fresh-water rivers (from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans) to spawn and serve as food for wildlife.

Mapes is based in Seattle and recently retired from her reporter’s position at the Seattle Times, where her beat was both the environment and Native American affairs. She has won several awards, including the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award for Orca: Shared Water, Shared Home.

Author Lynda Mapes at the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Mary Catharine Martin.

She continues her work as an articulate, creative journalist sponsored by foundations and other media outlets, recently exploring the enormous Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

Full disclosure: I established a friendship with Mapes a few years ago when she came to the Harvest Forest in Petersham, Mass., near my home, where she got to know professional foresters and ecology academics and authored a book entitled “Witness Tree.”

To accomplish her goal of understanding the message the trees have for us humans, Mapes spent considerable time in the Pacific Northwest (primarily British Columbia, Canada) as well as in the northeastern state of Maine.

With narratives in both of these locations, she introduces the reader to experienced foresters and forest ecologists as well as to Native Americans, all of whom share their knowledge, hopes and dreams. One of the writers she quotes is Henry David Thoreau, whose book on the north woods of Maine was previously unfamiliar to me, even though I was aware of other works by Thoreau.

Mapes is not reserved in her approach to the people, the trees and the rivers. This might be called participatory journalism. She climbed one of the ancient Douglas fir trees, for example, just as she slept one night in the oak that was the subject of her earlier “Witness Tree” brook.

Mapes plays with language, adding to our enjoyment.

For example, she juggles and alters nouns and verbs and adjectives, using them in unexpected ways to help the reader experience what she experienced.

Here’s a sample:

“Over their lifetimes these grand old trees self-prune, dropping their branches from the bottom up, resulting in long, straight, branch free trunks towering to a short crown with a wind-blasted top. The bark, as the tree ages, becomes more than a foot thick and deeply grooved and takes on a dark, rich, reddish-brown color. Its twigs are densely quilled with needles and the cones, two to four inches long, are perfectly symmetrical. They make fine food for animals, including chipmunks, mice, shrews, red squirrels, and songbirds that poach seeds right out of the cone.”

 In the Pacific side, Mapes paid special attention to the Douglas fir, writing this:

“As a living tree, it is the anchor species of the moist forests westof the Cascades. So this was royalty that I was about to encounter,a Douglas fir soaring more than twenty stories. Armored with thickplates of bark, the Discovery Tree glowered with gravitas. It has stoodfor some four centuries. And here stood I, hoping not to show that Iwas nervous. No. It was way worse than that. I was hoping to survive this encounter that loomed large as this tree in my tiny, short little marshmallow-soft mammalian life.”

 I felt a sense of relief when Mapes’ climb up this big tree came to a safe ending, whereupon she wrote: “With a thump, my feet were back on the ground. I unclipped from the rope and harness, bewildered at the abrupt change of worlds. The tree’s motion stayed with me, the same way being at sea stays in the legs. I was still feeling the sky river of wind.”

While calling upon academic research as needed, there is playful delight at times, as in this paragraph:

“A calypso orchid lights the gloaming beneath a gnarled cedar, its magenta and white blossom a vision of tiny perfection, from its striped throat to the delicate pink spray of its bloom. This orchid’s common name isfairy slipper. If there are fairies here, I am pretty sure this is wherethey live, donning fairy slipper blossoms for midnight ballets amidqueen’s cup lilies and lady ferns on full-moon nights.”

 And her choice of words creates a mood and a sensation, as in this excerpt:

“It was a perfect August day, the sea wind tangy, the water green glass.Rocky islets were hatted with forests and porpoises knifed the water.Trees along the shoreline were sculpted to the blow of the wind. The mountaintops were quilled with old-growth trees, their silvered andbroken tops spearing the forest canopy and giving the land a porcupine back.”

The messaging in the book is mildly anti-capitalist as she describes how paper mills in Maine led to so much damage in the woods and, upon closing, caused havoc and despair in the mill towns. We learn about the infestation of insects, past and present, crossing oceans via international commerce. These are the bugs that killed and are still killing millions of trees – Dutch elm disease in the early 20th century and the emerald ash borer and wooly adelgid of today (killing ash and hemlock, respectively).

The reader rides a roller coaster of sadness and joy. In early chapters, the focus is on old growth forests – how much has been cut down, and the struggles to preserve those that remain. Later in the book, there is progress to celebrate, as society benefits from the awareness of climate change and the pride of both Native American tribes and  tree-hugging environmentalists.

[Allen Young has lived in rural North Central Massachusetts since 1973 and is an active member of several local environmental organizations. Young worked for Liberation News Service in Washington, D.C., and New York City, from 1967 to 1970. He has been an activist-writer in the New Left and gay liberation movements, including numerous items published at The Rag Blog. He is author or editor of 15 books, including his 2018 autobiography, Left, Gay & Green; A Writer’s Life.]

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THORNE DREYER / JOURNALISM / Central to the new Rag’s voice is to retain the levity of the original

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2025

Since editors Ava Hosseini and Kira Small — with the help of managing editor Grant Lindberg — started their seemingly modest endeavor to resurrect the underground newspaper, The Rag, that we published from 1966 to 1977 in Austin — ancient history, to most of you — their new zine, also tagged “The Rag,” has taken off like few could have imagined. 

This week I’ve seen front page feature stories and meaty thought pieces about the importance of this new journalistic upstart. “Disillusioned UT seniors choose satire as a salve,” headlined the Austin American Statesman. With the subhead: “Pair revives 1960s publication forged in a similar fraught era.” “Counterculture magazine revived after nearly 50 years,” added The Daily Texan.

The head on an article in the San Antonio Express-News reads: “Disillusioned by UT, seniors choose humor over outrage — and revive 1960s-era newspaper.” “Why UT Students Are Reviving an Underground 1960s Newspaper,” headlined Texas Monthly in a substantive feature article — then, as a subhead, added, tongue firmly in cheek: “Instead of stalking our ex-boyfriends online, we started a newspaper.”

Some of The Rag’s founders, now nudging their 80s (don’t tell them I told you), offered encouragement and nuts and bolts advice, especially my colleague Alice Embree. We had a gathering of old and new at the editors’ home/office, which I attended. Alice was quoted in Texas Monthly, after watching Small speak to a group on the UT campus, “I was amazed at her courage to speak out, her energy.” Then she approached Small to offer help.

“Central to The Rag’s voice is its commitment to retaining the levity of the original — something that seems to come naturally to Hosseini and Small, “wrote Texas Monthly’s Sasha von Oldershausen. “Anger burns really quickly,” Small told her, “Humor is more sustainable.”

The San Antonio Express-News, in a photo cutline, said that “The Rag co-editors-in-chief Kira Small and Ava Hosseini run the revived University of Texas underground magazine out of their apartment in Austin. Started in the 1960s to combat censorship on campus, the revived left-leaning magazine describes current events with humor, quality reporting and witty drawings.”

From left: The original Rag‘s Richard Croxdale, The Rag‘s managing editor Grant Lindberg, The Rag’s co-editors Kira Small and Ava Hosseini. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Lily Kepner, who writes for Hearst papers the Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio Express-News, and the Houston Chronicle wrote a feature piece that appeared in all three papers. In Kepner’s article, which covers the better part of two pages in the Statesman, she wrote: “The Rag — a countercultural, progressive magazine — first published Oct. 10, 1966 as part of a national underground syndicate of progressive magazines, seeking to counter the pro-Vietnam perspective. The inaugural issue, opposing the new conservative editor at The Daily Texan, combined advocacy, facts and humor in an attempt to rally the campus during an increasingly grave political moment.”

In 1972, Laurence Leamer, author of The Paper Revolutionaries, called the original Rag “one of the few legendary undergrounds” and historian John McMillian tagged The Rag a “spirited, quirky and humorous paper whose founders pushed the New Left’s political agenda even as they embraced the counterculture’s zeal for rock music, psychedelics, and personal liberation.” There would be hundreds of underground newspapers and Austin’s Rag, the first in the South, was among the most influential.

The Rag’s contemporary version could do worse than emulate such efforts in its own unique voice.

[Thorne Dreyer was the original editor of The Rag in 1966, soon joined by co-editor Carol Neiman. He has since edited the digital rebirth of The Rag —  The Rag Blog — and the Rag Radio show which he hosts and produces on KOOP-FM in Austin. His latest books are Making Waves, published by the Briscoe Center for American History, and Notes From the Underground, published by the New Journalism Project.]

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SUSAN VAN HAITSMA / HISTORY / CodePink: Austin’s history is alive at the Austin History Center

Posted on November 27, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

CodePink Austin at “I Miss America” pageant in Million Musicans March, March 17, 2007. Photo by Jim Turpin.

By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / November 27, 2025

AUSTIN — With the current U.S. administration trying to excise and falsify U.S. history, we, the people who make history are more determined than ever to write, preserve, and make known our individual and collective experience as peace and social justice activists.  

I’ve been inspired by Rag Blog writers and publishers, Alice Embree and Thorne Dreyer, who have been carefully and persistently documenting through their writings and presentations the social justice movements they’ve been part of in Austin and beyond.  I was especially interested in Alice’s excellent memoir, “Voice Lessons,” since she is an Austin native and has been active in many intersecting movements here, including CodePink Austin, in which I also was involved.  

Her conscientious work in helping to establish and support the GI Rights Coffee House, Under the Hood (2009 – 2015) in Killeen was an important element of CodePink Austin’s activism.  Alice’s Substack writing continues to inspire me, and her archiving projects  — her own, The Rag’s, and now her late friend, Glenn Scott’s — have been part of the impetus to collect our CodePink Austin files into an archive.  

Alice’s archive is housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at UT, which has a Civil Rights and Political Activism section.  While considering that institution, I also thought about the Austin History Center (AHC) as a fitting archive for the CodePink Austin materials because I had seen an AHC display of local photographs called “Taking it to the Streets” at the Bullock Museum in 2020, shown in conjunction with the exhibit, “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement.”  

Because our CodePink Austin actions had been all about “taking it to the streets,” I contacted the AHC to describe what CodePink Austin had done in our years of activity (2004-2014), and the AHC Collections Manager responded with interest right away.

At the time, the AHC was beginning its move from the older, smaller building on Guadalupe Street into the larger, former Faulk Central Library right next door, and they could not accept physical archival materials until the move was complete.  That gave me time to get together the folks who had been most active with CodePink Austin to share the files we had saved about our antiwar actions during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and compile the papers into a cohesive archive.  We met several times with the staff at the AHC, who were very helpful at every stage, and I am glad to report that the archive is now catalogued, partially digitized, and ready for anyone to research!

Most of the materials, such as fliers, meeting notes, news clippings, articles and physical photos taken before the use of digital cameras are organized in folders that one can only see by going to the AHC in person.  We also included artifacts, such as a “Pink Police” uniform, several banners, buttons, stickers, etc. as part of the physical archive. However, a number of PDFs and scanned photographs are available to see online as “born digital” descriptions of our CodePink actions, and one can see these by navigating the archive online.  For example, a descriptive PDF synopsis of CodePink Austin’s group history can be seen at this link: 

https://ahc.access.preservica.com/archive/sdb%3AdeliverableUnit%7Ce89ab6c4-a031-4a25-b78c-f7e1145c1b76/?view=render

International Womens Day March in San Antonio, March 2014, Jim Turpin, Marilyn White, Fran Clark, Heidi Turpin.

The Austin History Center held a well-attended open house for the public on September 7 as a “soft opening” of the Faulk Center space, and the reading room opened for limited hours, Thursdays through Saturdays from noon to five, with expanded hours expected soon.  I have been twice to the AHC since their reopening and have found it a welcoming, light-filled space. The first floor features displays of artifacts with plaques in English and Spanish explaining the archiving process.  The knowledgeable, friendly AHC staff in the reading room on the second floor help folks determine what they are looking for and retrieve the materials from the shelves of files in the upper floors.

For the past 20 years, the AHC has placed a special emphasis on Community Archiving, helping to preserve Austin’s Black, Latinx and Asian-American histories.  AHC staff have produced a number of excellent exhibits for our libraries and several outdoor venues helping to illuminate the local civil rights movements that have shaped Austin.  I am pleased that our Austin CodePink archive joins those collections. 

Every group and every movement for creative, nonviolent social change will develop their own methods of activism in response to the circumstances of their time.  Knowing what kinds of actions have been done in the past can inform and inspire in all kinds of ways.  Let’s keep these important People’s Histories alive.

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MICHAEL MEEROPOL / COMMENTARY / Sleeping Giant: Thoughts on the results of the November 4 elections

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from  Pix4Free.org.

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2025

The following is an expanded version of a commentary delivered over WAMC-FM on November 7, 2025, by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. It has been edited for The Rag Blog. Meeropol and Alice Embree will be featured on Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Radio program on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed at KOOP.org, Friday, Nov. 21, at 2 p.m. to discuss this article and larger issues it raises.

I stayed up to watch the election results and was rewarded with evidence that the “sleeping giant” — the American people — had finally awakened to the danger that Trump and Trumpism poses to our society.   Yes, I saw the exit polls.  Most people claimed to be voting in favor of the candidate they voted for, not “against” anyone.  Yes, in two of the three major elections, the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey were won by so-called “moderates” — two “national security women.”   (Governor–elect Spanberger of Virginia served in the CIA before getting into politics.   Governor-elect Sherrill of New Jersey is a former Navy helicopter pilot who had graduated from the US Naval Academy.)

But I believe despite what voters told pollsters, there was an underlying goal for many of the people who came out to vote — and that was to “vote against Trump.”  The candidates running did not have to say it — the people answering pollsters did not want to say it.  But I believe that, for example, the people standing in line for hours in California to pass a ballot measure that they were very confident would pass without their votes — when there was no one on the ballot! — were there to make a statement against Trump and as one person told a reporter, voted “in defense of my freedom.” 

Meanwhile, the election of a Democratic socialist in New York City who brought out a hundred thousand young people who had never voted and probably wouldn’t have voted if he hadn’t been in the race has been considered an anomaly.  And this attempt to dismiss his victory as something totally impossible to replicate anywhere else has occurred despite the fact that he had to battle unbelievably strong headwinds. Once he won the primary, literally millions of dollars were spent by billionaires attempting to smear him as badly as any red baiters did in the McCarthy era.

The fact that Trump routinely called him a communist means almost nothing.  But the attempts to smear him as a radical Muslim – even hinting he would have celebrated 9-11 — did produce a fear in too many Jewish New Yorkers that the city would no longer be safe for them should he win. And this, of course, was despite the fact that he won the vote of young Jews.  Meanwhile, his campaign was focused like a laser on economic issues — which also had pride of place in the two gubernatorial campaigns.

And to return to the Virginia campaign, the Republican candidate for governor spent a tremendous amount of money running ads attacking trans kids in sports and bathrooms.  According to a Substack entitled Erin in the Morning [Check out “A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics”—Dems Win Elections Nationwide Despite Anti-Trans Ads.]

“According to MSNBC, more than 57 percent of Republican ad spending in the Virginia governor’s race went toward anti-transgender messaging, an effort to revive what the party saw as a winning wedge issue in 2024. But a year later, with prices still high and anti-trans rhetoric solving none of voters’ real problems, the strategy appeared to backfire. Voters seemed tired of the culture wars and frustrated that Republicans remained fixated on scapegoating instead of governing.”

Both Democratic candidates for governor stressed economic issues in their campaigns — just as did Mamdani. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, three judges on the State Supreme Court were up for their 10-year “re-election” where the vote was Yes (keep them for another 10 years) or No (send them off the bench).  A very clever set of ads made it seem that voting “no” was a way of protecting the integrity of voting in Pennsylvania. In fact, knocking off these three judges would have created a right-wing majority which would have been ready to rule in favor of whatever ridiculous challenge Republicans would mount to steal the 2026 and/or 2028 elections. All three campaigns went down to ignominious defeat.

 And in California as I already mentioned, people waited in line for over an hour to vote for an idea, Proposition 50, which changed the State Constitution giving the Governor and State Legislature the power to increase the number of Democratic majority districts in California by five — matching exactly what the state of Texas did at Trump’s bidding — adding five Republican seats.

What does this mean? I saw one poll out of hundreds that tells it all.  Thirty percent of the population told pollsters they identified as MAGA — that is the Trumpified Republican Party — the people who waved signs at the Republican Convention calling for mass deportation — the people who have rushed to join the newly militarized ICE so they can snatch people with brown skin off the streets without warrants or accountability].

Guess what?  The same poll asked how many people identified with the No Kings protests.  That number was 43 percent.   Given that the No Kings movement has no national leadership — no nationally known face of the leadership — no agreed upon principles beyond defending American democracy against Donald Trump and his fascists and has gotten very slight coverage from lots of the national media — that number is remarkable.   

[For details see https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/poll-shows-no-kings-protest-movement-topping-maga-public-support-rcna241803

It is particularly remarkable because the Speaker of the House was all over national television calling the No Kings rallies “hate America” events and attacking the participants as Hamas supporters, terrorists, supporters of political violence and communists. (Not sure I got all his epithets but people can look it up!). The attack lines of Trump and his Trumpists did not work for that 43 percent and I consider that remarkable as well.

I am convinced that the reason the elections were blowouts is because the energy generated by the giant crowds at the No Kings Day protests carried over to election day. So many people at these rallies asked each other and the speakers what can we do? It is easy to give money. It is (relatively) easy to write a letter to an editor. It is harder to take a drive and stand in a crowd for a few hours with a sign. It is much harder to knock on doors for your preferred candidate. Yet thousands of people — in New York thousands of young people — did just that for the New York Mayoral candidate who Trump called a communist as well as for the two Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey.  And in California, people waited in line for over an hour for an idea — proposition 50 — in California.

America is back.  But — now is not the time to rest on our laurels.  These blowout elections are validation of all the work that’s been done exposing the atrocities of the Trump Administration and making sure at least the majority of the public sees through the administration’s lies.  But it is almost a full year to the 2026 midterms.  A lot can happen in that time.  It is essential that the people keep coming out to demonstrations and rallying around support for our immigrant neighbors targeted by ICE.

More importantly, lawyers, officials, etc., have to prepare to fight Trump’s and the Republicans’ attempts to steal the 2026 election.  We know they are planning to do that — only massive voter turnouts and massive vote margins will stop them — as will courts like the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.   

The people have demonstrated they understand the threats to our democracy posed by Trump and his enablers — we just have to keep it up for at least the next year.

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