Support Ted’s Work

Shutdown Surrender Is Political Suicide for Democrats

•
Ted Rall
Democrats think they run against Republicans. Republicans think they run against Democrats. When swing voters existed as a significant segment of the electorate, that was at least partly true. In our age of polarization, there are too few swing voters to determine the outcome of most races. Elections are won by the party that most motivates its base. When turnout is king, a party’s biggest enemy isn’t the other party. It’s apathy. These days, each of the two parties runs against itself. Every race is an intra-party contest between novelty, which can generate excitement but also fear of the unknown, and establishmentarianism—the tendency of institutions to revert to their historical inertial center. Establishmentarianism makes its strongest case when people feel good about their job, their finances, their communities, and thus institutions like political parties and government. Americans haven’t felt happy about the economy or much else for at least the past decade or two. Which is why every election, even…
Read More

What To Do When Your Country Sucks

•
Ted Rall
In a New York Times op-ed titled “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” M. Gessen asks: “When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?” I applaud Gessen for raising this question and an otherwise stiflingly establishmentarian newspaper for publishing it. Still, it’s a bummer that the piece is primarily notable for raising an ethical quandary that older Americans believed to have been fully and correctly settled at least as far back as World War II. Gessen is concerned with the current American dilemma. What should we do as the United States “builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions?” There is no explanation for why, but Gessen traveled to Israel to ask Israelis opposed to their…
Read More

I Know Mamdani Is Too Young. I Don’t Care.

•
Ted Rall
In every election, the voters choose a candidate to do a job. In some races, they also have an opportunity to send a message. Sometimes, in a change election, voters pass over the best person for the job in favor of making a statement. Although she certainly wasn’t “the most qualified person ever to run for president,” former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was clearly more politically experienced and temperamentally suited to the presidency than Donald Trump, reality star and real-estate grifter, in 2016. But Americans, especially those in the Rust Belt swing states who felt ignored as their communities were ravaged by NAFTA and opioids, were angry—and they wanted Washington to know it. Trump represented a raised middle finger to the establishment, which always expects us to be satisfied with business as usual, even when usual really sucks for a lot of people. Not every election grants you an opportunity to send a message with your vote.…
Read More

Trump Is Every Day. The Resistance Is Every Few Months. Wonder Why He’s Winning?

•
Ted Rall
Hundreds of thousands of anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrators marched on Saturday through the streets of thousands of American cities, to expose general opposition to the ruling Republican Party and to express outrage over their various policies. Like its predecessors, this effort will have zero effect. Performative protests like “No Kings,” the 2017 Women’s March and the Hand’s Off marches this past April—organized by Democratic Party affiliates and allies—cannot accomplish meaningful change because they do not exert political pressure. Because they are nonviolent to the point of self-policing would-be militants in their midst and, occurring on weekends when most businesses and government offices are closed and therefore non-disruptive, the crowds pose no threat to the rich and powerful or their pet politicians. Trump and MAGA world are every day. They work tirelessly to push their radical right agenda. “No Kings” and likeminded exercises in safe, sanitized street displays (“in many places the events looked more like a street party”) meet once…
Read More

Hamas’ Stunning Victory

•
Ted Rall
TED RALL HAMAS’S STUNNING VICTORY RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025 Hamas’s victory over Israel will go down in history as one of the most stunning upsets in the history of modern warfare. It will be studied by future Resistance groups for instructions on how a guerrilla army can achieve its aims despite facing an adversary with seemingly insurmountable advantages in weaponry, technology, funding and international legitimacy. This Islamic group’s achievement was breathtaking. Indicating an astonishing ability to adapt, it pivoted from a ragtag outfit of irregular militants to a full-fledged governing authority with the organizational structure of a nation-state in 2007—ironically, with the support of Israel, which pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine Fatah’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Then, with the Abraham Accords and Arab states moving toward normalization of relations with Israel, Hamas leadership concluded that it needed a radical gamechanger, an incident that would expose the Jewish state as genocidal, scuttle its hopes of regional acceptance…
Read More

What Did You During the Trump Wars, Daddy?

•
Ted Rall
My darling daughter gave me two dramatic blinks of her Aryan-blue eyes and flipped back her pure, naturally-blonde pigtails. “What did you do during the Trump Wars, daddy?” It felt like a fever dream. What’s that, evil libtard? I don’t have a “Children of the Corn” daughter? Or any daughter at all? Who are you to say that to me, a Patriot Hero of the Trump Wars? You, who don’t even know the difference between a man and a woman? How would you be able to tell whether a beautiful young girl like my imaginary daughter exists? Back to my story. “Unlike some of my fellow Americans,” I told her—let’s say her name is/was/could have been Stephanie—“I answered my nation’s call at her time of greatest need.” I sunk into my recliner. “As everyone knows, the United States was being horrifically terribly tragically outrageously attacked by domestic terrorist cells of far-left extremists. We were seconds away from Marxism. Gulags, Soviet…
Read More

Israel Is Finished

•
Ted Rall
Dying regimes do funny things. Dying superpowers plan for a future that never comes. I have a 1992 Soviet ruble note, redesigned the year before. Considering that the USSR closed shop in 1991, they probably should have focused on something more pressing than their next Five Year Plan. Dying dictatorships bluff and bluster. Despite the obvious facts, Gaddafi claimed to control Libyan cities his forces had fled. “Victory will be ours soon,” Saddam assured Iraqis as U.S. forces closed in on Baghdad. “We are firm as a monkey’s tail,” ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier bragged as he boarded a plane fleeing Haiti. Dying genocidal regimes ramp up the killing. Driven by a combination of ideological fanaticism and a desperate attempt to erase evidence of industrialized mass murder, Nazi Germany intensified the pace of killings at death camps in the final months of World War II, particularly in 1944 and early 1945, as the government faced impending defeat. With the Allies advancing, the…
Read More

The History of Presidential Grift

•
Ted Rall
Everyone knows that Donald Trump is the Grifter-in-Chief. Earlier this month, the president and his family raked in approximately $5 billion from meme coins, stablecoins and tokens. His businesses skimmed about $2.5 billion in profits from politically-connected real estate deals during his first term. People eager to suck up to the leader of the free world are paying tens of millions to join Mar-a-Lago and stay at his hotels. Trump’s shares in his social-media outfit Truth Social are worth $2 billion—value that would instantly go poof were he no longer president. And there’s still time for him to partner with Israel to develop post-genocide Gaza. As with his tariffs, deportations and suppression of dissent, it’s important to point out that, while Trump’s unseemly pigging out at the capitalist trough is rightfully shocking, it is not new. Many of his predecessors paved the corruption-paved road on which Trump is profiteering, but very little was done to stop it from happening again.…
Read More

Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship

•
Ted Rall
First they came for Jimmy Kimmel, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t…a lameass? No. In this Niemöller scenario, the deplatforming of the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” comes at the end of the slippery slope, not the beginning. ABC canned Bill Maher 23 years ago for mocking Bush-era propaganda about our sainted Middle East occupation troops. Also at the request of right-wing Bushies after 9/11, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue—despite having the network’s highest ratings—for being too liberal and not pro-war. CBS News fired Dan Rather on a trumped-up ethical breach, and CBS radio fired Don Imus. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 while appealing a prison sentence for obscenity. The Smothers Brothers, a top-rated comedy show, was canceled by CBS at the request of LBJ in 1969. As broadcast television matured and corporatized over the better part of a century, it sanitized itself of content whose politics unabashedly leaned left, replacing Norman Lear’s 1970s progressive social-commentary programs like “All…
Read More

Why Americans Love Political Violence

•
Ted Rall
“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” Voltaire said. But not really. Stephen G. Tallentyre wrote it in his 1906 book about Voltaire, as a paraphrase of his attitude toward free speech. Actually, that’s not true either: “Tallentyre” was a pseudonym. “He” was really a she: Evelyn Beatrice Hall. That this most famous quotation about standing up for free expression with integrity turns out to be fake is perfect. As we grapple with the gruesome public assassination of 31-year-old right-wing ranter Charlie Kirk, Americans say they support free speech. Some of them even believe it. The truth is, the only freedom of speech most Americans support is the speech they agree with. Shortly after Kirk was gunned down, the President of the United States appeared on Fox News. Ainsley Earhardt asked him: “Because we have radicals on the right as well. We have radicals on the left. People have…
Read More
keyboard_arrow_up
css.php