/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

'Stop gaslighting me!': Florida Democrats' Senate nominee and party chair have heated call over socialism
"Nikki wants her to back away from DSA, from socialism," said one person who spoke with Nixon. "She's listening to other people saying that they're afraid, they're scared — the Jewish members and the Hispanic caucus. But to Angie, Nikki doesn't want Angie to be who Angie is. Angie has already done the backing-away." On the call, Nixon told Fried, "You never gave a care about me from the beginning, and now you're telling me how to run my campaign?" according to the source. At one point, the source said, Nixon yelled, "stop gaslighting me!"
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/21/florida-democrats-angie-nixon-nikki-fried-socialism
https://archive.ph/8C0bC

US Postal Service issues rules to tighten mail-in voting if court gives OK
USPS said it ‌was issuing its 95-page rule so it could take immediate effect if a court lifted its injunctions on it and be in place for the upcoming election. Under the rule, USPS would not deliver ballots in ​states that do not comply with the rule's new standards.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-postal-service-issues-rules-tighten-mail-in-voting-if-court-gives-ok-2026-08-22/

Trump threatens $5bn lawsuit over liberal national guard policy report
The report released 13 July argues that the National Guard deployment in Washington DC, Memphis and Los Angeles failed to have a measurable impact on crime in these cities despite an estimated cost of $1.7bn. The report looks at the falling rate of crime in cities without a National Guard intervention and concludes that they are not statistically different from the rate of decrease in those that had the intervention, noting that violent crime began falling well before Trump took office in 2025.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/21/trump-lawsuit-threat-national-guard-deployment-report

Enrollment in SNAP grocery aid is dropping faster than expected as work requirements kick in
It’s also unclear how many have lost coverage because some state agencies that run the programs are overwhelmed trying to keep up with changes. That was the case in Arizona, which saw the nation’s largest enrollment drop. Tia Fields, who analyzes social safety net policies at the advocacy group Invest in Louisiana, said the main reason she’s seeing people lose coverage is not failure to meet work requirements. “A lot of it is administrative paperwork,” she said.
https://apnews.com/article/snap-benefits-children-work-requirement-34f582040d8f35a6f44443cdc57692e4

US appeals court throws out California, Giffords 'ghost guns' challenge
A federal appeals court ​threw out on Friday a lawsuit by California and the Giffords gun control advocacy ‌group claiming that a Biden administration-era rule to curtail the production of illegal, largely untraceable "ghost guns" was not strict enough.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-appeals-court-throws-out-california-giffords-ghost-guns-challenge-2026-08-21/

Hochul's business-friendly data center plan
Hochul is calling for a relatively short moratorium on data center construction — only one year — while other progressive Democrats want to make the construction contingent on achieving AI safety and other much loftier goals. Progressives in Hochul's own state also support a moratorium that is longer than one year. Hochul has not said whether she would back that.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/21/kathy-hochul-business-friendly-data-center-plan
https://archive.ph/xSPL6

Federal officials announce water cuts as Colorado River supplies continue to plunge
Under the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan, California, Nevada and Arizona will collectively reduce water use by 1.25 million acre-feet (about 1.54 billion cubic meters) annually during that period, with the possibility of larger cuts depending on conditions. Arizona will see the biggest cuts, while states upstream — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — do not face any for now.
https://apnews.com/article/colorado-river-drought-water-cuts-dfb3a5deec3ecaeab0632dca7a10612e

A Look Back at SDS, Michael Harrington and the Decline of Marxism
According to a familiar narrative, protest is a kind of parlor game of privileged students. When it occurs on Ivy League campuses, it gets its fair share of attention, creating an impression that social/political movements based on long tradition have their point of origin there. (The 170 students arrested at the City College of New York’s Gaza encampment on April 30, 2024, largely people of color, had a median family income less than a quarter of that of the students arrested at Columbia. The news coverage—of their pepper spraying—and reported tasering—and broken teeth and bones—was delayed a few days and then relegated to the back pages. (See Sarah Baum in the Progressive Magazine) In Campus Wars, Kenneth J. Heineman points out that student mobilization against the Vietnam War–and in support of free speech and the right to organize on campus–arose initially at publicly funded state universities. Enmeshed in a hot war and a cold war, awash in DoD grants for war-related research, the universities assumed a division of labor: Elite schools turned out foreign policy “experts”; while state schools supplied teachers and engineers for the home front as well as international policing experts needed to shore up the unpopular South Vietnamese government.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/21/a-look-back-at-sds-michael-harrington-and-the-decline-of-marxism/

Liberalism’s Cult of the Individual Has Failed Us
Is it better to “bowl alone” than to join anything that smacks of a sect? Were the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, which put millions to work rebuilding their country, just state-sanctioned “cults?” According to one prominent liberal: maybe! In an article entitled “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” Jerusalem Demsas, the liberal publisher of The Argument magazine, goes after Democratic Senator Chris Murphy for daring to argue that we ought to have some shared social commitment to the public good. For Murphy, Americans — particularly young men — are living through an epidemic of loneliness that’s not only corroding our democracy but destroying the social bonds that hold our society together. These men, particularly those without college degrees, are increasingly isolated and adrift post-COVID: they’ve fallen out of the labor force, they’re not having kids, they’re absent in their communities, and basically going nowhere fast. Social scientists are starting to take note. Last spring, researchers at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy published a report entitled Nobody to Call, the product of dozens of interviews with young men without college degrees. The report is devastating. When asked if they participate in any kind of social or community activities, their responses are bleak: “No, I do not. Except for my family, I don’t regularly do anything with anybody,” as one interviewee puts it. Another: “No, I can’t say I do. I would like to get into some extracurricular activities, but work [takes] a lot of my time.” And another: “No, not really. I used to go fishing, but that’s it. . . . I used to go to church a lot. I don’t do that no more, and I ain’t never been part of a club or anything like that.”
https://jacobin.com/2026/08/demsas-chris-murphy-liberalism-individualism

The Next Chapter in the Bolivian Struggle
The Bolivian people fought with the methods at their disposal, setting up roadblocks around the cities to snarl traffic and bringing the transport of goods to a halt. At the height of the struggle, there were almost 100 roadblocks across the Andean country; demonstrators used rocks, scrap, burning tires, and their own bodies to block the flow of traffic. Actions were typically organized and debated democratically in neighborhood assemblies and councils. One advanced example of this was the District 8 Blockade Coordinating Committee. It was organized by the movement’s rank and file in the working-class District 8 of El Alto and held town halls and assemblies to democratically discuss and debate next steps for the movement. They stood firm in defense of the rebellion’s demand for Paz’s resignation, rejecting any dialogue with the government until their demands were met. They also opposed any leaders who abandoned that demand made by the rebellion. The rebellion demonstrated that though the Right has temporarily, and with the complicity of the largest unions in the country, dispersed the demonstrations, it will not implement its plans with ease. The struggle in Bolivia has not been buried. A new chapter will soon be written.
https://www.leftvoice.org/the-next-chapter-in-the-bolivian-struggle/