Israeli Occupation Forces Continue To Attack Palestinian Journalists in West Bank

Israeli soldier shares a dehumanizing photo of the arrest of Palestinian journalist Marah Awad

Andy Worthington*

Nov 2 2026

An Israeli soldier has shared a dehumanizing photo of the Palestinian journalist Marah Awad, blindfolded and handcuffed, after soldiers raided her family home in Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, on October 26.

 

According to her brother Hamouda, Israeli soldiers broke into the home in the early hours of the morning, violently ransacked it, and, after confirming Marah’s identity, asked her, “What do you write about Israel?”, accused her of incitement against the occupying regime, seized her phone and computer, and then tied her hands, blindfolded her, and took her to an unknown location. She is one of around 40 Palestinian journalists, mostly from the West Bank, who are currently held in Israel’s grotesque torture prisons for Palestinians.

 

Marah’s arrest took place during ten days of Israeli aggression in Hebron (Al-Khalil) and the surrounding area, which came to an end today. Over 3,300 people were displaced, schools were closed, homes were destroyed, and the entire area was placed under military lockdown, following an attack on a military checkpoint on October 23 in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. 

 

Over the course of its brutal ten-day occupation, approximately 540 homes were appropriated and used as military barracks by Israeli forces, while at least 115 Palestinians were arrested.

 

*Andy Worthington is a Journalist, activist, photographer, singer & songwriter, based in London UK. He is recognized as an authority on Guantánamo.  His website is here.

Capitalism and the State. Is it Really All Trump's Fault?

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
5-17-26

The System Is the Problem

Every political crisis produces its villains. Today, the dominant figure in that story is Donald Trump without doubt a distasteful, degenerate human being. The anger directed at him is understandable. But there is a danger in making any single individual the center of our analysis. When we do, we lose sight of something more important: the system that produced him, that accommodates him, and that will outlast him.

This is not an accident. In the political struggles between different factions of the ruling class, the focus on individuals is actively welcomed because it is a useful distraction from the root cause of the crises we face. That root cause is not a person. It is the system of production we call capitalism.

What capitalism actually is

In a capitalist system, the means of producing the necessities of life — factories, land, technology, financial institutions — are owned by a small group of private individuals. What sets those forces of production in motion is not the needs of society, but profit. The machine turns on when there is money to be made. It turns off when there isn't — regardless of what people need.

Marx explained it beautifully: "A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." *

The point is simple: under capitalism, what matters is not what is produced or who benefits — it is whether the owner of the operation turns a profit. Education, healthcare, housing, food — all of it is subordinated to profit and the accumulation of capital.

What exactly is the state?

In my youth, had someone asked me to describe the state I would have said simply that it is the government.; I had never given it much thought. We are accustomed to thinking of government as a neutral institution — a referee that stands above competing interests in society and serves the common good. This is a comforting idea. It is also wrong.  

The modern state is not neutral. It is an organ of class rule and the ruling class in our situation are capitalists and we live in a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. Its laws, its institutions, its police, its courts, its military — all of these have been shaped over time to protect and reproduce the existing order: the order in which a small class of people own the productive wealth of society and the rest of us work for them. 

This does not mean that every politician is consciously conspiring, or that nothing can be won through political struggle. It means that the state, as a structure, exists to manage the affairs of the class that owns and controls the economy; Marx wrote in 1848 that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

When we watch the battles between the Republicans and Democrats (the two major capitalist parties) over which party gets to govern society for the next four years, we are witnessing different factions of the ruling class compete for control of the state apparatus, we are watching a fight over who manages the system, not a fight over whether the system should continue. When it comes to the working class, they are united against us.

Contradictions, not villains

This brings us back to the question of crisis. Capitalism is an exploitative system, and suffering, poverty, war, hunger etc. is integral to it. As capitalist crisis intensifies, we are told the cause is greed, incompetence, or the moral failings of particular leaders. If only we had better people at the top, the story goes, things would be different.

But greed is not a cause. It is a feature. Capitalism does not merely tolerate the single-minded pursuit of profit — it requires it. A business that fails to compete and accumulate will be swallowed by one that does. If individuals can’t pay for health care they don’t get it. If less developed nations, (the former colonies plundered by the advanced capitalist states) can’t afford the costs of infrastructure development, sewage, drinking water, etc.; they don’t get it. 

In the global competition between nations, there is no such thing as fair trade. Trade disputes and tariffs are actual wars. When the competition becomes acute. When capitalist states cannot resolve disputes over trade and markets, they go to war. Both WW1 and WW2 were a product of the competition between nation states over resources, markets and global plunder.The system produces this scenario but the capitalist education system and mass media blames it on individuals.

The real causes of crisis are structural. Capitalism contains internal contradictions — built-in tensions between the drive to accumulate and the limits of what any society can absorb — that periodically produce exactly the kind of economic and political instability we are living through now. These crises will recur, under different leaders, with different villains, until the structure itself is changed.

Why this matters

None of this means that individuals don't matter, or that who holds power is irrelevant. It means that changing the individuals without changing the system is not a solution — it is a reset that leads back to the same place.

Understanding that the state is an instrument of class power, and that crises are produced by the system rather than by the moral character of its managers, is not pessimism. It is clarity. And clarity about the nature of the problem is the first condition for doing something about it.

* Marx Capital, Vol 1 Chap. 16 Absolute and Relative Surplus Value

Michael Roberts and Jack Rasmus: The Twilight of American Imperialism

Richard Mellor

Marxist economist, Michael Roberts interviews Jack Rasmus about his latest book; The Twilight of American Imperialism. This is a fascinating discussion about the decline of US imperialism on the world stage and its causes. It is a short discussion packed with information about the decline and the level of it. 

It would be incorrect to refer to this decline as a collapse but a gradual decline that is, as the speakers point out, cased by the inability of the Empire to fund its operations, similar to the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century.

Order this book here

The book covers the period from the early 1990's to the present Trump Administration and, if the discussion above is anything to go by, will be easily accessible to the working class reader interested in the causes of the events that are occurring in the world today. 

Both authors feel confident that if the Democrats are successful in the Mid-Terms it will not significantly affect US foreign policy and it could be worse. As Jack Rasmus points out, " the Deep State" controls foreign policy.

As readers on this blog know, I publish and most of Michael Roberts economic writings, and blogs at https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/

Jack Rasmus also has a blog here: https://jackrasmus.com/

Order the book:  The Twilight of American Imperialism

Abdul El Sayed is Not a Capitalist.

Richard Mellor

 

I wanted to post the short version of this but could not find  a way of doing it.  Fortunately, I found this longer version and the comments I am responding to below are at the very beginning. I certainly have no interest in watching the rest of it as Fox is not a news channel and the woman is not a journalist. I do not support the Democratic Party and I'm certainly not a Republican Party supporter. I feel the utmost sympathy for Abdul El Sayed having to suffer the racism and religious bigotry being thrown at him in this country with the Orange thing in the White House leading the charge. If I lived in Michigan I'd vote for him just to stick it to these racist, nationalist market loving ideologues.

 

Anyway I am responding here to Abdul El Sayed's response to this Fox propagandist on whether he is concerned as a capitalist, about the rise of Democratic Socialism in the U.S. She means DSA and social democratic political views. He answers it with dignity but there is more that should be said.

 

This is how poor the political discourse is in the US not to mention the class consciousness. It's quite staggering. As far as I know, Abdul El Sayed is not a capitalist, he is a worker. He gets paid a wage for his labor power and he gets paid quite well for it. It costs a lot to produce a doctor. I think he is a public servant.

Given that he earns a good living, he may well put some of that capital to work and have some sort of side business therefore acting as a capitalist in some way. I don't know. But I worked with guys (I had a good union civil service job) who owned a couple of properties, some of them it was what their parents left to them when they died. So they were landlords. But their basis for survival was their jobs. We had good pay, the opportunity to work a lot of overtime and we had very good benefits by American standards, especially health care. These essentials were covered by the jobs we had and that we were public sector workers and we had a union. So they could play capitalists for a bit, having a certain amount of security.

But landlordism, a section of the capitalist class whose means of subsistence is based solely on owning shelter (homes), is different than a worker who has some spare capital, having a decent job, and earns enough to borrow money and buy a place they can rent out. Some workers might earn enough that the moneylenders will lend them money to buy two or three properties, maybe enough to quit their regular job. Then they join (albeit at the lower rungs), of that section of the capitalist class we call landlordism. But as soon as hard times hit, small capitalists like that can quite easily end up back among the ranks of the working class or the unemployed or indigent.

So what my co-workers meant when they said they were capitalists, was they support capitalism. And generally they meant as opposed to socialism or particularly communism which they believed was the system in the Soviet Union or China. Though neither of these states are or were communist.

Of course they support capitalism and the right of the boss to lay off workers until it was their jobs that were on the chopping block.

I don't fault Abdul El Sayed for responding the way he does, he is a doctor not a political person to my knowledge. I don't know if he knows much about Eugene Debs or Karl Marx but it is important to point out the lack of clarity in the US that has come about due to the failure of the heads of organized labor on the one hand coupled with the absence of a national working class party and the power of the mass media. 

Just because you vote for a capitalist party (we only have two options here and they are both capitalist parties) doesn't mean you're a capitalist. But, let's be honest, workers refer to ourselves a middle class here, well paid union workers anyway. That reflects the power of the capitalist class and their media in this country in the post world war 2 era, that we can call ourselves what we're not.

US Threats Push Dependent Smaller States to Support the US Blockade on Cuba.

Trita Parsi*

Sad to see countries keep complaining about the lawlessness Trump is bringing to the international arena, but when push comes to shove, they not only don't dare to push back; they acquiesce to US pressure.

 

See, for instance, the annual resolution at the UNGA condemning the US's decades-long embargo on Cuba.

 

This resolution gets huge support every year. But this year, the US's strong-arming tactics moved the needle significantly in Washington's direction.

 

Support for the Cuban resolution fell from 165 countries in 2025 to 130 in 2026, while opposition rose from 7 to 17 and abstentions more than doubled, from 12 to 25.

 

Colombia, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago and the UAE went from voting for it to voting against it.

 

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Czechia, Ecuador, Lithuania, and Morocco moved from abstention in 2025 to an outright NO vote in 2026.

 

Then these countries went from supporting the resolution to abstaining:

 

Bahrain, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Jamaica, Montenegro, Netherlands, Palau, Peru, Qatar, South Korea, Solomon Islands.

 

The main common denominator for these states that have abandoned their longstanding opposition to an illegal embargo is their vulnerability to and dependence on the US. As US foreign policy grows more aggressive and unforgiving, the cost of defying it on this vote has become too high. For some of the smaller states, this is understandable given their near-total dependence on the US. 

 

But this does not apply to states such as Germany, Italy, South Korea, and the Netherlands. They don't have this excuse. Their failure is beyond embarrassing. 

 

Germany is particularly noteworthy. Germany, for the first time, lost a bid earlier this year for an elected seat at the UNSC. This is particularly embarrassing for Germany since it has long sought a permanent seat on the Council. The overarching reason for this failure is the common view that Germany has abandoned international law - it insisted on it in Ukraine, but abandoned it in Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran.

 

Add Cuba to that list. Rather than restoring its standing, Germany dug a deeper hole for itself with this vote.

 

* Trita Parsi is a co-founder and Executive VP of the Quincy Institute. 

Michael Roberts: Asian AI bubble bursts

Asian AI bubble bursts

by Michael Roberts

It seems that the Asian AI bubble has burst. It all started in South Korea with the KOSPI stock market index plunging over 8% on 15 October. That just added to a huge fall in the Korean index of 41% from a peak of the Korean AI investment boom last June. The share prices of the two large Korean tech companies, SK Hynix and the mega Samsung Electronics, fell over 10% on that one day.

Now the bursting of the bubble has spread to China.  The STAR50 stock index, tracking key AI and chip firms, has dropped 40% since its July high, while the broader CSI 300 entered bear market territory after a 20% fall from June. When placed alongside Seoul’s $900 billion seven-day wipeout on October 15, nearly $1.4 trillion in ‘fictitious capital’ has been vaporised across the East Asian hardware supply chain in October alone. By fictitious capital, Marx meant the market value of stocks and bonds, which are claims on the value of real assets like machinery, software and components etc that companies have. It’s fictitious because it can be way out of line with the real value of assets owned and employed by companies to make profits.

In Asia, it has been retail investors (that’s households) who have been pitching into the stock market.  Household savings rates are high, especially in China, and the previous investor boom in Chinese real estate collapsed years ago. Buying AI stock is the latest craze to make a fortune. But now it seems that investors have decided that the price of investment in AI-driven Asian companies is well over the top.

SK Hynix and Samsung are key companies that supply the semi-conductor chips required to run advanced AI accelerators and data centres. For the past two years, Samsung and SK Hynix appeared to be making huge profits on chip sales exploiting extreme global demand for chips from cash-rich US tech monopolies badly needing more server memory for their AI projects. But these super profits now appear in jeopardy, especially after China’s CXMT unveiled a data centre server memory dramatically reducing the cost of chips. Korean stock market investors saw the writing on the wall – no more super profits.

CXMT’s break into the Korean share of the chip market doubled its global DRAM market share from 4% to 10% year-on-year in Q2 2026). But that had its own consequences for the Chinese stock market. Chinese and Asian AI labs have shifted towards so-called “open-weight” models (free to use). Falling chip costs has also meant falling prices for AI companies in China, where the competition has been intense. Capital had flooded so much into chip design, memory, and robotics that profit margins are disappearing.

So China’s speculative investors have got worried and CXMT itself has lost more than 25% of its stock market value. According to Goldman Sachs, AI-related stocks had swollen to 42% of China’s total equity market capitalisation and 57% of total trading turnover across China mainland A-shares and Hong Kong H-shares. Even after losing 40.4% of its value, the STAR 50 still trades at roughly 100 times trailing earnings (down from nearly 250x at its June/July peak), more than triple the US Nasdaq tech stock index.

As commentator Saad Zaidi explained, China’s rapid horizontal replication of AI hardware capacity has compressed profit margins across the entire East Asian supply chain, with loss of pricing power amid overcapacity. Caught in a pincer movement between faltering returns on downstream AI capital expenditure on one side, and China’s state-directed tech industry lowering profit margins on the other, the speculative bubble in East Asian hardware is visibly fracturing.

As Zaidi says, this follows Marx’s law of profitability, namely that any rapid rise in investment in technology will eventually weigh down profitability, unless it drastically raises the productivity of living labour across the wider economy. And so far, as I have shown before, total factor productivity (economic gains from AI innovation) have hardly risen. “The market is now waking up to the reality that upstream hardware valuations cannot stay detached from downstream profitability forever.” (Zaidi)

As I have shown before, this AI mania mirrors that of the 19th century investment in burgeoning railway technology. Then, railways were also seen as a powerful new technology that could transform transport and travel, and so boost productivity. This led to massive speculation in railway shares as company after company launched new rail lines across Britain during the 1840s and in the US in the 1870s. Eventually, investor concerns about overcapacity rail projects, along with increasing distrust of railroad securities, triggered crashes.

In the UK, the mania reached its zenith in the 1840s. Marx noted then that, “in the railway swindle from summer 1844, railway investors apparently expected much higher than the average profit rate.” Marx called it the ‘great railway swindle’ to emphasise that the claims made by the railway companies for huge profits to be made were deliberately overstated (shades of US AI companies now). Investors naïvely poured capital into schemes that were significantly less profitable than they expected and and rail company directors had promised.

The question now is whether investor fears about overinvestment and declining prospects for profits from AI will spread to the heart of the AI mania: the US.  Competition from China’s free or very cheap to use and every improving AI models is eating into the potential profits of the US AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic. All top five most popular models are now Chinese and, according to a WSJ report published last week, “approximately 45% of all tracked tokens now flow through Chinese models.”

As Torsten Slok at Apollo Capital has pointed out, despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. “The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.”

And the profitability of the mega hyperscalers that are driving AI investment has been falling: in return for over a trillion dollars of capital expenditures they have seen their return on invested capital drop on a quarterly basis.

And there are signs that the US AI investor bubble may be leaking. Yesterday, the Alphabet (Google) share price fell 10% after it boosted its AI spending to more than $50bn in the third quarter, leading to a record ‘cash burn’ that spooked investors. Free cash flow (ie money available to invest) fell to minus $9.1bn in September compared to minus $5.9bn in the prior quarter. To back its spending spree, Alphabet has taken on tens of billions in debt and in June announced plans to raise about $85bn in its first share sale in more than two decades — a sharp reversal after years of buying back its own shares.

But the big test is coming: Anthropic is about to release shares to the public in order to raise $150bn, making the company’s market value equivalent to $1.5trn – a truly staggering market value for a company that makes no profit yet. As Anthropic put it in the prospectus to potential share holders: “We are at an early stage of our revenue growth, we have experienced rapid growth in recent periods, and our historical growth rates are not indicative of future performance or our ability to sustain or forecast future revenue growth. We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all.”! It’s one big bet. 

The Trump/Epstein Affair Just Won't Go Away

Rachel Hurley

So, House Judiciary Democrats dropped a new 52-page staff report on the Epstein files this week - and I finally got through it. 

The report lays out what they call "the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein files and DOJ's desperate efforts to cover it up." 

 

They're calling for an independent special counsel to dig into Epstein's co-conspirators and the DOJ's cover-up. They also say Trump's attorney general may have committed "criminal obstruction of justice."

 

The report accuses Trump of being "an active participant" in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of young women and girls in the '90s. It also accuses the DOJ of covering it up.

 

It details new claims from Beatrice Keul, a former Swiss pageant contestant. She told committee staff that Trump raped her at New York's Plaza Hotel in 1993, and she called the assault "brutal."

 

The report also cites an FBI search that tied Trump and Epstein to a 2007 "exploitation of minors" case number. A whistleblower says documents linked to that case are being withheld.

 

It also points to a 2009 document that the DOJ blacked out. In it, Trump reportedly said Epstein was "never asked to leave" Mar-a-Lago. That contradicts his long-running claim that he kicked Epstein out.

 

There's a lot of other stuff in the report - and it also sheds new light on a rumor that won't die about how Donald Trump met his third wife.

 

Every love story has a "how we met" moment, and the Trumps' story starts in a model apartment on Varick Street in NYC.

 

I've written about Paolo Zampolli before - but if you're new here, he was an Italian modeling agent in the '90s. He put the young women he brought to New York in that apartment, and he's been in the Epstein and Trump orbit for decades.

 

The new report says one of those women was a Slovenian model named Melania Knauss.

 

Another was a 19-year-old Polish model who later went to work for Jeffrey Epstein. A third was an 18-year-old who told the FBI that Epstein raped her when she went to his house to give a massage.

All three women had the same agent, and they all lived at the same address.

 

The report also covers five women who say Trump raped or sexually assaulted them while Epstein was around - and that's what the press has focused on, as it should.

 

But there's a part on pages 11 to 14 that almost nobody is talking about. The story of how the President met his wife now has two possible matchmakers, and both of them show up in a congressional report about sex trafficking.

 

You've probably heard the first version.

 

Zampolli says he introduced Donald and Melania at a party he threw at the Kit Kat Club in September 1998. Melania tells the same story in her 2024 book. In April, she told reporters that Epstein didn't introduce her to her husband and that they met by chance at a party. Zampolli backed her up and said he'd tell Congress the same thing under oath.

 

The FBI has a different version.

 

In 2019, a woman who used to work for Epstein told the FBI that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald. That same FBI file says Zampolli was trying to buy a big modeling agency called Elite with Epstein. That part's true, by the way. In 2004, the two men teamed up to try to buy Elite's New York office, but the deal fell through.

 

Anyway - my biggest takeaway about Epstein introducing Melania to Trump is - if true - there’s a very good chance that he was gifting her to him. Extrapolate what you will from that.

 

The report says Epstein used to stop by Zampolli's agency when models were trying out for jobs. He'd flip through their photo books and look at pictures of girls in swimsuit bottoms. Which sounds like he was flipping through a to-go menu.

 

The report also says Zampolli had an affair with the 19-year-old model he'd signed before she went to work for Epstein. The DOJ blacked out that line before it released the file.

 

You might recall that Zampolli worked for the Trump administration at the time, so the DOJ was hiding a detail about one of its own guys. Democrats now say Zampolli and Trump "may have been co-conspirators," which means they may have helped Epstein commit his crimes.

 

Zampolli's name also comes up five years before the Kit Kat Club party.

 

Remember Beatrice Keul? She told congressional staff that at that 1993 pageant, Trump promised her a visa and said his friend "Paolo" would handle it.

 

A few minutes later, she says, Epstein walked up and called himself "Don's best friend." That's the same day she says Trump raped her in a suite at the Plaza.

 

Then there's Amanda Ungaro.

 

She was Zampolli's partner for almost 20 years, and they have a son together. She also says Epstein was the one who introduced the Trumps.

 

You might remember her name - cause she doesn't live in the U.S. anymore. The NYT reported that Ungaro was arrested in Miami on fraud charges last year, and then Zampolli contacted a top ICE official about her case. ICE picked her up before she could post bail, and the government sent her back to Brazil. Zampolli says he never asked ICE to do that. DHS says she was deported because her visa had run out.

 

The Trumps have kept Zampolli close for 30 years. The report says Trump put him on the Kennedy Center board because Melania asked him to. 

 

Then last year, Trump gave him a job as a special envoy, which is kind of like a traveling ambassador. Zampolli flew all over the world on the taxpayers' dime, and he even went to Hungary with VP JD Vance. 

 

Last month, a young Republican model sued him and said he drugged and raped her in 2023. On Oct. 15, after a nasty email fight with a top State Department official, he got fired.

 

That happened just 11 days before this report came out. Zampolli didn't seem too upset about it. "President Trump changed my life once," he said. "He just did it again."

 

But who knows how this will all play out now. If Dems win the midterms - I expect they will call Zampolli in for a little chat.

 

When Trump ran in 2024, he told people he'd release the Epstein files. Instead, he made his old defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, the AG. Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's partner in crime, and he stopped her three times when she started talking about a girl who had connected Trump to Epstein. And Blanche's DOJ blacked out an FBI file to protect a guy the White House fired anyway.

 

I'm hoping more people will finally have the same "aha" moment I had right after I graduated high school. That's when I walked into a bar and saw my high school crush making out with another guy. 

 

I’d heard a rumor or two while we were still in school - but I dismissed them because it wasn’t the reality I wanted.

 

When I saw it with my own eyes - I felt so dumb - not because he turned out to be gay - because I had failed to see something so obvious.  

Rachel Hurley on Facebook

Read further writings or contribute at Rachel and the City

 

#ratcclips #griftmatrix

 

Sources

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/.../judiciary...

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/.../2026-10.hjc...

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein.../

https://newrepublic.com/.../democrats-50-page-report...

https://thehill.com/.../6172897-house-democrats-trump.../

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dems-plot-to-make-trumps...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/epstein-assistant-told.../

https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/?p=360040

https://gvwire.com/.../trump-friend-asked-ice-to-detain.../

https://keyt.com/?p=1491016

https://www.alternet.org/paolo-zampolli-fired/

https://www.tbsnews.net/node/1453396

https://whowhatwhy.org/.../eyes-on-epstein-the-story.../

El-Sayed Is National Security Threat, Gov’t Says

Why you’re not allowed to vote for the Michigan populist 

Ken Klippenstein Oct 27 2026

Abdul-El Sayed campaigning for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat

For daily coverage of next week’s elections and access to my private chat discussing them, please become a paid subscriber (you can also chip in via my GoFundMe here) — Ken

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“Jihadist,” “Muslim Brotherhood guy,” “on the side of the terrorists” — these are the kinds of smears Donald Trump is deploying against Abdul El-Sayed. 

There’s the naked racism, of course, but also the insinuation that El-Sayed’s candidacy represents a national security crisis. “He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate,” Trump said Sunday at a rally for El-Sayed’s opponent.

A quarter century after 9/11 and we still have to pass through metal detectors to get on a plane. Now the government wants your vote to pass through the same security theater, too.

Like Trump, Washington’s case against the 41-year-old populist candidate for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat doesn’t bother with policy or positions. It just says how dangerous he is to “national security” — and by extension, how unqualified you are to understand the dangers. 

“Abdul El-Sayed’s radical ideology is a threat to our national security,” El-Sayed’s opponent, former Congressman Mike Rogers, said. Rogers is a former FBI agent and served as the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee. 

The casual racism isn’t new, but the attempt to dignify it with security-speak is. It’s absurd on two levels. First, the rhetoric I’ve quoted isn’t saying any of El-Sayed’s policies or positions are dangerous; they’re saying he himself is, as if he’s going to take to the floor of Congress wearing a suicide vest. Second, it takes what is supposed to be an exercise of popular will and turns it into a “national security” matter that is technical in nature.

Imagine applying literally any other type of technical standard to a politician is and the absurdity becomes apparent. ‘Abdul El-Sayed’ — not his policies but the man himself — ‘is a threat to municipal wastewater management.’ ‘He’s a destabilizing influence on air traffic control.’ ‘He’s an existential threat to the nation’s bridge integrity.’

Saying a political candidate is a threat to national security is just as silly; but because it’s language we’re so used to hearing from Washington, the insanity of it barely registers. Washington loves the national security frame because it doesn’t stir up much interest among ordinary people, unlike issues like affordability and healthcare — the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign. It’s a ploy to shift the debate from concerns that the public has to that of think tank “experts” and the professional commentators. 

In one of the funnier demonstrations of this, the Washington Times recently published a letter to the editor from a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer raising the question surely on the mind of Michigan voters: can El-Sayed pass a background investigation for a security clearance?

Per the letter:

“I question whether he could pass even a basic security clearance review, let alone get within a mile of the kind of classified material to which Mike Rogers had accessed in the U.S. House.”

Set aside for a moment the creepiness of the idea that elected officials should need approval from the national security bureaucracy to know things, which isn’t a thing (yet). Imagine any other type of certification or credential being applied to an election. For example: ‘I question whether Abdul El-Sayed could pass a forklift operator certification, let alone get within a mile of the heavy machinery to which Mike Rogers had access.’

It’s laughable. And yet, it’s the go-to attack from not only El-Sayed’s opponent, but the President and other top officials, including sitting senators.

“Chuck Schumer could place Abdul El-Sayed on the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Senator Ted Cruz said recently, going on to warn of the grave danger to our beloved troops:

“He would have access to the very highest level of classified materials. And I believe, if that were to happen, there would be an unacceptably high risk that American servicemen and women, their lives would be endangered, and that our covert intelligence assets, their lives would be in danger because [there’s] every reason to believe Abdul El-Sayed would share that classified information with Muslim Brotherhood terrorists.”

Covert intelligence assets. Access to the very highest level. Classified information. Is this an election or a Tom Clancy novel?

In other words, you can’t vote for this guy not because of his policy positions or how he might vote in Congress but because he might divulge state secrets to an organization that he has consistently denounced. Oh, the horror (just in time for Halloween)!

Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, says much the same, warning of the “serious national security questions” raised by El-Sayed’s character:

“Abdul El-Sayed’s ties to this group raise serious national security questions. As senators, we have access to some of our nation’s most sensitive, classified information, and I have serious concerns about the security risks posed by anyone associated with such a group serving in the Senate.”

I could go on and on like this but you get the idea. It’s spitting in the face of not just El-Sayed but anyone who thinks they’re capable of choosing who to vote for without the help of mommy and daddy in D.C.

For daily coverage of next week’s elections and access to my private chat discussing them, please become a paid subscriber (you can also chip in via my GoFundMe here) — Ken