Resistance is a defensive politics, but we also need a politics of offense, aimed at winning elections and seizing power.

https://progressive.org/magazine/the-politics-of-resistance-walzer-20251007/

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Sadly, as we were putting the final touches on this current issue of The Progressive, the world was glued to the TV and the Internet watching yet another horrific attack on democracy unfold, this time in Brazil. It didn't take long to understand that what was happening there was very much a carbon copy of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Following the mob violence perpetrated by supporters of rightwing fascist and former President Jair Bolsonaro, which trashed the country's supreme court, presidential palace, and congress, Brazil now has its own contemporary date that will live in infamy—January 8, 2023—and it has Trump's name all over it.

https://progressive.org/magazine/editor-note-what-we-do-with-what-weve-got-boddiger/

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The  Chinese surveillance balloon  that floated across the United States recently was  not exactly the cutting edge  of super-secret spy technology. For one thing, there it was in plain sight for days, visible to anyone along its path. Spy satellites and other methods accomplish much more—and are more difficult to spot. What the balloon did masterfully, however, was stoke rage and finger-pointing on the ground. It's actually a brilliant psychological warfare tactic: send a simple balloon across the United States and  watch the superpower bicker and fight .

https://progressive.org/latest/rage-balloons-fiore-02092023/

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How shocking and embarrassing that on November 8, 2022, Republicans raging wave turned out to be just a little ripple.

https://progressive.org/magazine/vox-populist-lessons-from-the-midterm-elections/

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Counting on John Roberts to fix what's wrong with the Supreme Court is a fool's errand. This was true before the latest round of scandals involving Clarence Thomas, and it remains true in their aftermath. Roberts may be an ' institutionalist ,' as he is often labeled by mainstream legal commentators, but he appears to be just fine with the direction and management of the institution he leads. Far from being a potential savior of the court, Roberts is at the center of its many burgeoning problems.

https://progressive.org/latest/unequal-justice-time-to-get-tough-with-john-roberts-blum-190523/

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The movement to ban certain books is gaining traction in Florida and around the country. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is  riding the book ban bandwagon to national fame  (after first riding the COVID misinformation bandwagon) as he prepares to run for president.  Organized groups have popped up over the past two years  to work with rightwing politicians to enact book bans and push back on diversity and, um, history, in school and library books. Politicians, legislatures, and conservative leaders are helping push the clock back to when we had good ol' fashioned 'Merican history and book learnin'—before education was complicated with things like inclusion, gender issues, and a reckoning with our nation's racism.

https://progressive.org/latest/freedom-liberry-fiore-20230224/

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Dave Wagner, a leader of the 1977 Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper strike at The Capital Times/Wisconsin State Journal , and a leader in the cooperatively-produced daily progressive newspaper Madison Press Connection (1977-1980) created by the striking workers, died on February 21 at the age of seventy-eight. David Cloyd Wagner was born on July 3, 1944, spent his early years with his widowed grandmother in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, at the heart of Amish country, where the formation of the Grange politics in the later nineteenth century had given farmers a voice in their destiny.

https://progressive.org/latest/remembering-dave-wagner-buhle-20230224/

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Just six days after being sworn into office in January 2021, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14008. The ambitious presidential action includes the establishment of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council as well as the Justice40 Initiative, which mandates that 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments go toward 'disadvantaged communities'—thereby putting environmental justice at the forefront of the President's climate agenda. That April, one of the most progressive members of Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, declared, '​​The Biden Administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.

https://progressive.org/magazine/global-crisis-demands-local-responses-rogers-wright

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As we revel in the joy and wonder of Thanksgiving, let us be particularly thankful that a good number of billionaires are making asses of themselves. (I focus on American billionaires in this cartoon since Thanksgiving for Billionaires is, of course, a U.S. holiday.) Elon Musk is doing the best job of opening our eyes to the fact that, just because you're a billionaire, you are not automatically a genius who brilliantly turns your every endeavor into gold. (Thank you, Twitter!)  Sam Bankman-Fried may not be tweeting quite as insanely as Elon, but he has done a masterful job of showing that he is, in fact, just an ordinary business hack and crypto scammer rolled into one.

https://progressive.org/latest/thanksgiving-for-billionaires-fiore-112622/

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As world leaders gather at the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt for the COP 27 United Nations climate conference, the ongoing flooding in Nigeria, which has wreaked havoc across the country, is a cruel reminder that climate change is already a catastrophic reality for many African countries. Beginning in late September, the worst floods to hit Nigeria since 2012 have overrun hundreds of communities. Thirty-three out of Nigeria's thirty-six states—representing a whopping 92 percent of the entire country's landmass—have been affected—some are still completely submerged.

https://progressive.org/latest/will-climate-reparations-be-enough-ikoku-111122/

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Along the rail corridor that runs through the mostly vanished industries of Milwaukee's north side lies a sloping garden larger than a city block. Here, Hmong families grow lush stands of sweet corn, rhubarb, and lemongrass, with pole beans twined around teepees of tree branches. A chain-link fence along the alley on the garden's west side is covered with a hodgepodge of overlapping wood scraps, fabric, and linoleum. A boarded-up two-story house looms across the alley. There, on an overcast morning in July 2021, Arijit Sen stopped his class of nine urban planning, architecture, and history students from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to admire the makeshift fence covering.

https://progressive.org/magazine/learning-to-listen-haynes/

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On the wall of Bascom Hall at the University of Wisconsin–Madison hangs a plaque that famously proclaims: 'Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.' These words are taken from an 1894 ruling by the UW Board of Regents in defense of a professor named Richard Ely, then-director of the university's School of Economics, Political Science, and History.

https://progressive.org/magazine/first-things-first-the-truth-about-fredric-march-lueders/

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