💩LORD OF THE FLIES; BEEZLEBUB

Trump Golf Club calls fly infestation 'politically motivated' as pest problems plague locations

Nicole Charky-Chami
July 14, 2026 

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President Donald Trump's motorcade drives near Sterling en route to Trump National Golf Club, in Virginia, on June 27, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

Health officials uncovered a serious pest control problem at the Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C., where President Donald Trump was seen last weekend, according to reports on Tuesday.
The latest discovery of flies was among several reported health violations plaguing Trump properties, NOTUS reported.

"Observed a large quantity of small flies in the storage room near the employee restrooms," a Loudoun County health inspector wrote June 30 in a report published by NOTUS.

"In another part of Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C., the health inspector flagged the property for using and storing pest control products not designed for use in a food establishment, health records indicate," NOTUS reported.

Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C. denied any wrongdoing in a statement to the outlet.

“We operate our properties to the highest health and safety standards. These so-called ‘violations’ are fabricated, politically motivated and completely without merit. We stand firmly behind the integrity of our operations and reject these baseless claims,” the golf course statement said.

Other Trump properties have had various health code violations, including Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley in Hopewell Junction, New York, which was slapped with a "critical" violation.

Health officials, according to records obtained by NOTUS in November 2025, reported they found insects, rodents and dirty surfaces at Trump National Golf Club Westchester.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago also violated city health codes, according to NOTUS. Last December, Chicago health inspectors reported flies, faulty dishwashers, and wastewater flooding around three prep sinks in the main kitchen.

In a lawsuit filed in December 2025, a former employee who was fired from the Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club reported finding maggots and mold in the club's soft serve machine. Trump was even apparently revolted by the discoveries at the facility.

 

The super El Nino is here

The super El Nino is here and seas are heating up to bath temperature levels. / IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin July 13, 2026

The planet’s seas are on their way to being as warm as bath water as the predicted super El Niño arrives. It is already clear that this year’s oceanic heating event will be the most powerful on record.

Global sea temperatures have already climbed past their previous all-time high, smashing records on their way, and forecasters warn that this year's El Niño could bring devastating extreme weather events.

The seas are running a fever. June was the hottest on record for the world's oceans as well as the land, according to Copernicus. Nearly 40% of ocean area worldwide is in the midst of a marine heatwave, with intense hot patches in the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean more than 10°C hotter than usual. It's the latest in a wave of ocean warming that began in 2023.

Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse gases released when fossil fuels are burnt. Waters at the surface also exchange heat and moisture with the atmosphere, helping to drive hotter temperatures and more extreme weather. For every one degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture. It also holds onto the water for longer. That means more time between rainfall, and heavier, more dangerous deluges when rain does fall.

A recent study found that at least a fifth of heatwaves on land begin in the ocean. Last year, more people died from extreme heat than from road crashes in Europe, according to the World Resources Institute.

Scientists have been warning of a super charged El Niño that will go into full swing as the summer ends, but nine of ten forecast models are already describing a “strong-to-historic” event. The single most likely outcome by late 2026 is a "very strong" El Niño — the top tier of the scale, reserved for the handful of events since the 1950s in which the central Pacific warms by more than 2°C above normal.

El Niño is the warm phase of a natural climate cycle, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), driven by temperature swings in the central and eastern Pacific. It recurs roughly every two to seven years, typically emerges during the northern autumn, and can persist into the following year.

In general, El Niño years are associated with heavier rainfall in places like California and South America and drier conditions across Australia and Southeast Asia. And although El Niño tends to suppress hurricanes near the United States, other regions tend to see stronger cyclones with more rainfall.

This year the impact is expected to peak from late 2026 into 2027, as what scientists often call Earth's most important "control knob" for year-to-year climate variability is turned up to the maximum setting on record. On a scale of one to ten, it’s going to be an eleven.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, which moved to an El Niño Advisory on June 11, puts the probability of the event reaching "very strong" intensity by the November–January peak at around 63%, with a near-certain chance that some form of El Niño persists through the northern winter. Ocean temperatures are already at record levels, Europe has endured a record-breaking heatwave, and marine heatwaves have flared across the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard.

During El Niño, above-average water temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific shift the position and strength of the subtropical jet stream, with effects that reach into the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Because the phenomenon concentrates its deepest pool of warm water — and its lowest wind shear — across that basin, it turns the Pacific into a hyper-fuelled engine for major hurricanes and powerful typhoons. Tellingly, Taiwan, China and Vietnam are all already being battered this weekend by Typhoon Bavi, forecast to be among the most powerful storms to ever strike Asia.

The numbers are already extreme. As of early July, the Niño-region sea-surface temperature anomaly had crossed 1.8°C above the 1991–2020 average — more than three standard deviations above the mean. In statistical terms, anything beyond two standard deviations is treated as an extreme aberration; this is, quite literally, an off-the-chart event.

Desperate measures

El Niño Is not going to smash previous records, scientists say it will break them by a huge margin. Some are starting to suggest desperate measures. 

"With all the July model runs now in, it is very likely that 2026 will see the largest El Niño event since records began in the late 1800s – and potentially by a truly mind-blowing margin. The median estimate is now 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior record (2.75C)," climatologist Zeke Hausfather said in a newsletter post. 

 

The proposal involves spraying microscopic sea salt particles into low-lying clouds over the Pacific Ocean. The salt particles would make the clouds brighter, allowing them to reflect more sunlight back into space. By reducing the amount of solar energy reaching the ocean's surface, researchers believe the technique could cool Pacific waters enough to reduce the strength of a developing Super El Niño.

Computer simulations suggest that, under the right conditions, the approach could cut the intensity of a Super El Niño by as much as 40%.

However, scientists stress that the idea remains purely theoretical and is not being recommended for real-world deployment. The Earth's climate system is extraordinarily complex, and no one fully understands the long-term consequences of deliberately altering cloud cover over the Pacific.

Even relatively small changes could disrupt the natural El Niño-La Niña cycle, with potentially far-reaching effects on global agriculture, rainfall patterns, heatwaves, floods, droughts and ultimately food and commodity prices.

For now, researchers see marine cloud brightening as an area for further study rather than an immediate climate solution. Nevertheless, the fact that geoengineering proposals are increasingly being discussed illustrates the growing concern among scientists over the scale of future climate risks and the possibility that conventional emissions reductions alone may not be sufficient to limit their impact.

Seas heating up

The clearest sign that something unusual is under way lies not in the tropics alone but in the oceans around the world. In June, the average sea-surface temperature for the extra-polar ocean — the vast band between 60°S and 60°N that excludes the ice-affected poles — was the highest ever recorded for the month, edging past the previous June record set in 2024 by 0.01°C, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

That margin sounds trivial, but it matters for two reasons. First, it is a global average across an enormous area, so shifting it even a hundredth of a degree requires a colossal amount of additional heat spread across tens of millions of square kilometres of sea. Second, it comes on top of 2024's record, which was itself an outlier — meaning the ocean is not merely warm but setting fresh highs from an already elevated baseline, with little sign of the "cooling-off" that would normally follow a record year.

The heat is not evenly spread. It pools in hotspots where the numbers become genuinely startling: parts of the Mediterranean, the Gulf, and shallow tropical seas have pushed into the low 30s°C, temperatures at which coral bleaches, fish stocks flee or die, and the water gives up ever more moisture to feed storms. Marine heatwaves — prolonged spells of anomalously warm water — have become more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting worldwide, and this year's have struck close to home for Europe, scorching the western Mediterranean and reaching up the Atlantic coasts.

Those warm waters cause their own related damage. An unusually hot Mediterranean fuelled Storm Daniel in September 2023, a rare subtropical storm that ripped through Libya leaving more than 2,000 dead in its wake as a precursor to what this year’s super El Niño could cause.

Two forces are stacking up this year. One is El Niño itself, a natural redistribution of heat that temporarily warms the surface Pacific and nudges up the global average. The other is the long-term, human-driven warming trend on which El Niño now rides. The oceans have absorbed the overwhelming majority of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases — well over 90% — and each El Niño therefore breaks records from a higher starting line than the last. The result is a temporary but significant boost to global mean surface temperature layered on top of a rising floor: El Niño supplies the spike, climate change supplies the staircase.

The practical upshot is that the coming twelve months are likely to be exceptionally bad. This year's disaster season is likely to be worse than last year’s with a new batch of global temperature records, heightened risks of drought, flooding, coral bleaching and intense tropical cyclones running into 2027.

 

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Heatwaves plague Europe

June 2026 was the hottest June recorded for western Europe and the second warmest globally, driven by the highest sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on record for the month, according to the monthly update from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Europe also saw widespread dryness that, together with extreme heat, contributed to wildfire activity, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula and southern France, and heightened drought risk in parts of eastern Europe. The June heatwave occurred against a backdrop of increasingly dry soils across western and central Europe, further exacerbating drought conditions that had begun to develop during May's heatwave.

Globally June 2026 was the second-warmest in the ERA5 dataset, with an average surface air temperature of 16.54°C, 0.56°C above the 1991-2020 average for the month, behind June 2024.

The average temperature over European land in June 2026 was the second-highest on record for the month. Western Europe, the region most affected by the heatwave, experienced its warmest June on record, with an average temperature of 20.74°C, 3.05°C above the 1991–2020 average for June, surpassing the previous record set in June 2025.

The heat in parts of Western Europe is continuing in July, fuelling devastating wildfires in France and the Iberian Peninsula. Last year saw wildfires in Europe pass 1mn hectares for the first time. This year is likely to be worse.

Spain’s Fabra Observatory in Barcelona - one of WMO’s long-term weather observing stations - recorded 40.5°C on July 8 - the highest temperature in more than one century of data. France had a widespread amber alert (the second highest level) for heat as well as a high fire danger level because of drought, high temperatures and low humidity, according to Meteo-France.

WMO, its members and partners are mobilizing with early warnings and coordinated heat-health action plans to try to save lives and inform decision-making on how to minimise economic and ecosystem damage and disruption to infrastructure and labour productivity. It is accompanied by localized violent storms and in some areas by worsening drought and the risk of wildfires.

Extreme heat is expected to occur at increasing frequency and intensity and duration, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  

“Heatwaves like this are what we expect to see in a changing climate,” said John Kennedy, head of climate information at WMO. “In the 50 years since the historic heatwave in 1976, Europe as a whole has warmed by around two degrees. It’s the fastest warming continent and extremes of temperature have increased too,” he said.

How big oil blocked a plastic pollution treaty

By Ian Angus

Published 11 July, 2026

[Editor’s note: Ian Angus will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at Climate & Capitalism.

When I started writing about the climate crisis in the 1980s, I was in my twenties, and I didn’t fully comprehend that there could be a force on this planet so steeped in greed and power that it would sacrifice the earth and its inhabitants for its own narrow interests. But there is, and it’s Big Oil. (Bill McKibben)1 

After years of watching UN climate change negotiations, I’m inclined to be cynical about the whole process. The norm is lots of talk, very little mention of fossil fuels, and no concrete action. When a deal as toothless as the 2015 Paris Accord is hailed as a major achievement, you know that the bar is much too low.

The negotiations for a plastic treaty have not reduced my cynicism. On August 15, 2025, three years after the United Nations called for a treaty to end plastic pollution, international negotiations collapsed. A handful of oil-producing countries and their corporate allies had successfully stalled and ultimately derailed the entire process.

The one encouraging feature of the negotiations was the presence of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (HAC), a group of 74 nations, co-chaired by Rwanda and Norway, that stood firm in demanding a comprehensive set of binding obligations — and refused to accept anything less.

The measures HAC called for included:

• Reducing production of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels;
• Phasing out the most harmful plastic products and chemicals, particularly single-use plastics;
• Regulating chemical additives, including mandatory full disclosure of the chemical composition of plastics and plastic products;
• Reducing the chemical complexity of plastic products, ensuring product design that enables reuse and recycling;
• Making plastic producers financially and legally responsible for the recovery, recycling, or proper disposal of the materials they produce and sell;
• Financing for waste management infrastructure, technology transfer, and capacity building;
• Changing treaty negotiation procedures, eliminating the requirement for unanimous agreement;
• Making protection of human health, not merely environmental protection. a central objective of the treaty.

Underpinning the specific measures was the fundamental demand that the treaty address the entire lifecycle of plastics — from extraction of fossil fuel feedstocks through production, design, use, and end-of-life — not merely downstream waste management.

Each of these points would require considerable elaboration to go from “good ideas” to an effective and enforceable treaty. Nevertheless, the High Ambition Group’s proposals provided a solid framework for a serious attack on the global plastic crisis.

Not surprisingly, petrostates and the petrochemical industry did not like that. The “Like-minded Group” (LMG) headed by Saudi Arabia and Russia and informally supported by the United States, opposed any plan that would limit or control plastic production in any way. The only purpose of a treaty, they argued, was to improve waste collection and recycling—and the treaty should be voluntary, not legally binding.

The pro-plastic claim is that in order to reduce energy use, “the world will need to rely on plastic more, not less.”2

The LMG was reinforced by the presence of 234 fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists, and another 60 representatives of packaging manufacturers and consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé. Major corporate presences included Dow and the American Chemistry Council, each sending seven lobbyists, and ExxonMobil with six. Most critically, some of the fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists attended as members of the official delegations from half a dozen countries: this allowed them to participate in closed sessions that excluded independent scientists, indigenous activists, and other observers.3

Unable to win, the lobbyists used their numbers and resources to delay and disrupt proceedings, blocking every attempt to reach agreement on the smallest points. Procedural rules that require unanimous agreement, coupled with the intensive backroom pressure mobilized by the US, ensured that the meeting couldn’t draft, let alone pass, even a marginally effective treaty.4 As a participant from the Environmental Investigation Agency reported:

“Our post-mortem examination reveals the precise cause of death—a small but powerful bloc of petrochemical-producing countries plus a small army of Big Oil lobbyists deliberately hampered progress. Their tactics included procedural stalling, diluting ambitions and vetoing consensus, ensuring that negotiations ended without an outcome. Left untreated, the treaty’s vital organs — production caps, chemical control and trade rules — were weakened beyond repair.”5

Industry lobbyists also harassed and threatened scientists who supported a strong treaty. Professor Bethanie Carney Almroth, who represented the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, told The Guardian that plastics researchers faced “the tobacco playbook: challenge the science, challenge the messenger, try to silence people, try to undermine people’s credibility.”6

After nearly two weeks of pointless debate, the Chair introduced a draft text that he apparently thought reflected the consensus to date. It included nothing on the full life cycle approach, nothing on health, nothing on banning toxic additives, nothing on single-use plastics, nothing on reduced production, nothing on mandatory reporting, nothing on changes to voting procedures. As a Panamanian delegate said, the HAC’s red lines had not just been crossed but “stomped, spat on, and burned.”7

To their credit, the High Ambition Coalition refused to back down. In the words of an NRDC representative, “No treaty is better than a weak treaty that creates an illusion of progress and could discourage stronger action.”8

Even though a large majority of the participating countries supported ambitious measures, the meeting ended without even a preliminary draft as a basis for further discussion.

Negotiations are supposed to restart some time in 2027, but it’s hard to think of any reason why they might be more successful.

Hedging?

It is tempting to view the industry’s coordinated assault on the negotiations as gratuitous bullying and overkill. After all, UN treaties are notoriously weak and hard to enforce, and in any case the petrostates could have refused to sign any agreement they disliked. Why intervene so viciously just to protect plastic?

Oil industry researcher Alice Mah argues convincingly that the fossil fuel giants see investment in petrochemicals as a way of “hedging against climate risk” — not hedging against climate change itself, but against the risk that policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will reduce fossil fuel sales and profits.9

They see hope in the fact that, as the International Energy Agency reports, plastics are already “the fastest-growing source of oil consumption,” and will “account for more than a third of the growth in oil demand to 2030, and nearly half to 2050, ahead of trucks, aviation and shipping.”10 That prospect justifies extreme measures to prevent limits on plastic growth.

Many independent observers and NGOs have concluded that UN-sponsored negotiations are a dead-end, that the countries that want a treaty should negotiate separately. That could indeed result to what’s been called a “treaty of the willing”—but how effective could it be if the biggest petroleum and plastic producers stand aside?

The fact that dozens of capitalist governments opposed the fossil fuel industry’s drive for unlimited growth shows how profound and dangerous the plastic crisis is. But the failure of the treaty negotiations shows how very powerful that industry is, and how determined it is to protect its continued growth, no matter how much pollution results.

Unless and until we break the power of fossil capital, the plastic plague will continue to spread.

This is a draft chapter from a book Ian Angus is writing for Monthly Review Press, Social Murder: Capitalism’s Assault on Our Health and Survival. 

• 1

  Bill McKibben, “Big Oil Breaks Everything,” The Crucial Years (Substack), April 19, 2026

• 2

  American Chemistry Council, “ACC Statement on U.S. Position Change on UN Plastics Agreement,” News Release, August 14, 2024.

• 3

  CIEL, “Fossil Fuel and Petrochemical Lobbyists Overrun Plastics Treaty Negotiations.”

• 4

  Gabriel Enrique De-la-Torre and Tony R. Walker, “Deadlock at INC-5.2: Understanding the blocked progress of the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations,” Cambridge Prisms: Plastics, March 2, 2026.

• 5

  Hannah Hughes, “Global Plastics Treaty post-mortem – INC-5.2, petrostate obstruction and the way ahead,” Environmental Investigation Agency, September 5, 2025.

• 6

  Damian Carrington, “‘Total infiltration’: How plastics industry swamped vital global treaty talks,” The Guardian, July 23, 2025.

• 7

  Felix Nütz, “Why the Global Plastics Treaty Negotiations in Geneva Failed,” Twin Politics, August 20, 2025.

• 8

  NRDC, “Global Plastics Treaty Collapse: .No Treaty Is Better than a Weak Treaty’”, News Release, August 15, 2025.

• 9

  Alice Mah, Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fueling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It (Polity Books, 2022 ), 72.

• 10

  IEA Secretariat, The Future of Petrochemicals: Towards more sustainable plastics and fertilizers, International Energy Agency, 2018, 11.

When Trump Sounds the Alarm Against Mamdani’s “communists” and Their Electoral Triumphs!

Democratic Primaries Reveal What the DNC Autopsy Buried

Jamal Kanj

 July 3, 2026

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Photo by Colin Lloyd

The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled “Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable whether the interviews were of local party leaders or general democratic voters. Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.

There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by the plan. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans’ vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer, exposing the DNC autopsy’s failure. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned; it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that findings are edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure; it smothered it. Fifty thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voter they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.

Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024 and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-Israel democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.

If over 80% of Democratic voters hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel, and candidates running on that sentiment keep winning primaries, the data is not ambiguous. The base has moved. The party leadership has not.

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications.

Victims of Communism?

Nick Estes

July 3, 2026

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Photograph Source: cspirtos – Public Domain

The ruling class appears shaken, their brains rattled, and their nightmare once thought vanquished—the Red Menace—appears reborn. Following the recent sweep of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York and Colorado elections, there has been a torrent of backlash and public meltdowns from President Trump claiming, “I’d be the greatest communist in history,” to humanity’s first billionaire posting the usual anti-communist nonsensical blather that communism has the “[h]ighest death count of any philosophy.” Elon Musk unabashedly cites inflated, unserious death counts that include in their tally of so-called “victims of communism” the Red Army’s liquidation of Nazis and fascists during the World War II.

Adding to the frenzy, one New York City council member even invoked the halcyon days of the FBI and the CIA, bragging that they would have “made sure unabashed revolutionaries” like the DSA National Political Community “were neutralized one way or another. In fact, that was basically the entire point of having them.” Vicki Paladino made a candid admission that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies were never designed to defend “democracy.” Rather, they were engineered as clandestine political police forces operating with lethal, counter-revolutionary violence.

And decades of disclosures and investigations reveal this. From the Church Committee convened five decades ago that investigated illegal intelligence operations to Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s recent hearing on the CIA’s mind control program called MK-ULTRA, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have been mired in deeply nefarious practices, from illegal surveillance and counterintelligence operations to outright assassination. Put bluntly, the CIA and FBI, during the glory days of Cold War Red Scare politics, acted in service of capital, alleviating real or imagined threats to the profits of an increasingly paranoid ruling class, and building their own pile of bodies along the way as they waged a protracted and often secret war against those seeking to build power for the many rather than the few.

Indian Country itself paid a heavy price. And only recently have we begun to come to terms with the consequences, with the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s two consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during the federal reign of terror waged against the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge reservation. While Peltier walked out of a federal prison, many more never went home and still more await justice. While we have yet to heal from the wounds of the past, this generation faces a different battle.

Putting aside whether the recent DSA electoral wins pose an existential threat to the capitalist class, the underlying fear has a material basis. As the billionaire class, and now, grotesquely, the trillionaire class, reap record profits, the quality of life in the heart of global capitalism and imperialism appears to be in rapid decline. Among the top leading causes of death for young people in the United States are drug overdoses, death by suicide, and gun deaths. Life expectancy has cratered across the board. For American Indian people, the decline in life expectancy is particularly acute, falling in recent years from an already abysmal of 71 years down to 65—with South Dakota reporting a median age of death for American Indian people of death at a staggering 58 years. Despite more than a million COVID deaths in the United States, the drop in life expectancy is caused by more than the pandemic; it includes massive inequalities and social and economic factors.

It should be no surprise this generation has little hope in the system that robbed them of a future, to say nothing of a bleak present. A poll last year by the rightwing think tank the Cato Institute found that more than a third of people under the age of 30 in the United States had a favorable view of communism. Still more, nearly two-thirds, looked kindly on socialism. While the turn towards anti-capitalism may be partially a natural reaction to the death drive of capitalism, it doesn’t mean the embrace of left wing and liberatory politics translates directly into socialist and communist movements or just societies. In fact, revolutions are quite rare events, and when they succeed or fail, they can be quite deadly, with much of the violence often stemming from the forces of counter-revolution. What is often misunderstood is that this counter-revolutionary violence doesn’t necessarily happen in the context of, or in reaction to full-blown revolution. It instead should be understood a structural phenomenon, something that is expressed in policing and intelligence agencies ready to crush even the most benign forms of resistance, such as the most recent sentencing a Prairieland defendant to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of antifascist zines.

As historian Gerald Horne has pointed out in his aptly titled book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, the founding of the United States was borne of a counter-revolution against the abolition of slavery. Most African people sided with the British against the colonists, viewing the British empire as a more favorable ally in the ending the tyranny of chattel slavery. One might add that this counter-revolution also included the genocidal assault on Native people, whom Thomas Jefferson described as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Indigenous wars against the United States often entailed allying with the competing empires such as Britain against the American colonists, whom Indigenous nations viewed as a greater threat. This was in an effort to stave off the white invasion of Indigenous homelands. While counterfactual history has its limits, it is a worthy pursuit to examine the freedom dreams of Black and Indigenous people—and to understand exactly how U.S. imperialism has suppressed those aspirations. Those aspirations have sometimes coalesced with socialist movements and often not, but the general ignorance of their liberatory impulses is a symptom of the larger miseducation project.

To start, most people in the United States are ill-equipped to discuss the actual social policies of past or present communist societies. Decades of anti-communist indoctrination have effectively blunted the public’s ability to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism. This mass ignorance is no accident; it is the result of a deliberate miseducation that reduces socialism to a caricature of authoritarian misery, while sanitizing capitalism as a beacon of personal liberty and market choice. Consequently, history is viewed through a double standard: the structural failures of socialist states are deemed unforgivable atrocities, while the global body count of capitalism is dismissed as the unavoidable friction of an imperfect but necessary system.

These myths are supposedly backed up by the numbers, which attribute 100 million deaths to communist societies, numbers that far exceed the Nazi and fascist body counts and do not begin to offer up comparable studies of colonial and capitalist societies. It is worth noting that these overblown statistics come from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by a unanimous act of Congress in 1993 and opened a museum in 2022. The foundation even counts deaths from COVID-19 as victims of communism. This asymmetric accounting leaves the capitalist empire entirely off the hook. If we apply the exact same rigorous, unforgiving metrics of state responsibility to U.S. capitalism alone, the narrative of Western benevolence completely collapses into an endless ledger of mass murder.

Factoring the true cost of U.S. capitalism and imperialism requires mapping what historian David Michael Smith terms the “endless holocausts” of U.S. empire. This global empire was built on the theft of a continent through Indigenous genocide and the theft of tens of millions of Black lives via the transatlantic slave trade. Smith places the total body count of the U.S. empire at close to 300 million dead. If we scrutinized global capitalism’s daily, preventable toll—from structural poverty and enforced starvation to imperialist wars and corporate healthcare monopolies—with the same metrics applied to communist societies, the free market might register 100 million deaths every few decades. Ultimately, the ruling class does not fear the Red Menace because they value human life; they fear it because they know their empire of accumulation by dispossession is fundamentally fragile, driving them to unleash the counter-revolutionary violence they have always weaponized to survive.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

When Trump Sounds the Alarm Against Mamdani’s “communists” and Their Electoral Triumphs!

By Giorgos Mitralias

June 30, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by NYC Mayor's Office/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

“Communism is the greatest threat to our country since its founding 250 years ago”! Undoubtedly, this thunderous statement by U.S. President Donald Trump, issued in writing on June 26, is intended to sound the alarm and rally behind him all the conservatives, reactionaries, and anti-communists in the United States ahead of the midterm elections this coming November. Nevertheless, with this statement, Trump is, for once, spot on. And this is much to the embarrassment of the liberal—or even “moderate” left-wing—media around the world, which persist in labeling Mamdani a… “Democrat” and pretend not to understand whom or what the U.S. president is referring to when they claim he is talking about the leaders of the… Democratic Party!

And yet, Trump is not only referring specifically to Zohran Mamdani and his fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—who just made a huge splash in last week’s Democratic Party primaries—but he is also fiercely attacking the Democratic Party leadership with these words because they are not fighting back and are letting “the communists do whatever they want”: “ In many ways, they’re allowing them to go their own way. They’re afraid they will lose their Election, they’re afraid of conflict. They’re not smart enough or tough enough to fight this plague. If they fought them the way they fight Republicans, or me, they’d be victorious, but they don’t have the courage to do so. ”. And to leave no room for doubt, Trump describes his assertions as “a statement on the recent election of communists in our country”, while clarifying that these newly elected officials ”are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists“. Moreover, according to accounts from Republican senators who met with Trump in the wake of the Democratic Socialists’ electoral successes, he “at times let his emotions get the better of him, explaining in essence that communism was gaining the upper hand”…(1)

That said, it must be acknowledged that Trump is largely correct in dramatizing the situation. On the one hand, victories by DSA activists in the Democratic Party primaries are now becoming the norm, with or even without the overt support of Mamdani—whom the American media currently describe as a “kingmaker”—while there are already DSA mayors in New York, Seattle, soon in Washington, D.C., and in a few months likely in Los Angeles. On the other hand, the Democratic Party leadership is terribly unpopular, demoralized, completely discredited among its base, lacking in ideas, without a platform, without figures capable of rivaling Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and above all, devoid of any will to stand up to Trump. The result is that little-known or virtually unknown young women, as well as young men from the DSA, have recently managed to defeat—and often even crush—incumbent representatives and senators who are part of the Democratic establishment, supported and financed by the wealthy and other billionaires, and above all by AIPAC, the Israeli lobby that until recently was all-powerful.

At this point, it is worth digressing to highlight the decisive role of the “Mamdani phenomenon” in what amounts to the historic failure of Netanyahu and his Israel in the war in the Persian Gulf. By conquering New York, “the world’s largest Jewish city”—thanks in part to the active support of tens of thousands of young New York Jews, whom he himself had mobilized and organized—Mamdani accelerated and deepened what was already the “divorce” of American Jews from the Zionist state, as well as the historic shift in American public opinion in favor of the Palestinians. Given Israel’s extreme and long-standing dependence on financial, military, and diplomatic support from the United States—as well as from the Jewish community in that country— there is no doubt that the aforementioned events have greatly contributed to Israel’s weakening, to Trump and his administration distancing themselves from Israel, and ultimately to what has made the Jewish state, according to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, “the most hated in the world”. And all this at a time when Israel is facing its moment of truth and is plunged into a terminal crisis—a crisis from which there is likely no turning back!

But let’s return to Trump’s United States, which is also plunged into a historic crisis. Trump is right to be concerned and to sound the alarm, for he and his regime are in crisis, to the point of appearing almost incapable of standing up to Zohran Mamdani and his “communists.” For example, there is no Republican leader—Trump included—who can rival the leaders of the “communist” camp in popularity. In fact, all polls show Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders to be far more popular than any leaders of either the Democratic or Republican parties! As a result, a potential presidential run by Ocasio-Cortez in 2028 is gaining credibility and popular support…

All these events—which might have seemed impossible and pure political fiction just a few years ago—are now possible because they reflect the very real, unprecedented, and increasingly profound and rapid transformation that North American society has undergone over the past two tumultuous decades. As a result, the percentage of American citizens who believe it would be “a good thing” for their country to transition from capitalism to socialism now exceeds one-third (38%) of the population, up from just 18% in 2010. And in a very telling detail, it is now the vast majority of Democrats (72%) and Independents (60%) who believe that the capitalist system is not working well or is not working at all! (2)

In short, the recent avalanche of electoral successes by Democratic Socialist activists, the immense popularity of Zohran Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and above all Bernie Sanders—or even the radical shift in public opinion in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel—did not come out of nowhere and are not fleeting products of some passing protest movement by American citizens. In reality, they are deeply rooted in the historic (multi)crisis facing the United States and its society, a crisis that has been greatly accelerated and deepened by the rise to power of that Nazified Caligula, Donald Trump. Not to mention, of course, the most popular American of all, that old independent senator Bernie Sanders, whose two presidential campaigns have radicalized and politicized an entire generation of young Americans—who now find themselves at the forefront of what Trump somewhat blithely calls the “communist threat” looming over the American superpower. And finally, we can be sure of only one thing: the course of events promises to be incredibly exciting…

Notes

1. See also our article: Towards the inevitable clash to the death between Trump and Mamdani!: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/towards-the-inevitable-clash-to-the-death-between-trump-and-mamdani/

2. How open are Americans to socialism, after all?: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/25/politics/democratic-socialism-primary-electionsEmail

Giorgos Mitralias

Giorgos (Yorgos) Mitralias is a journalist, one of the founders and leaders of the Greek Committee Against the Debt, and a member of the international CADTM network.