Ben, Thanks for circulating this before it goes to print. You handed out nearly eight hundred copies at the last No Kings, which had a real audience. You asked for corrections, so here are mine. Most are small. One is serious.
The strongest thing in the newsletter is your point about the Democrats and No Kings, and you can make it harder. The October 17 call is now "No Kings: Vote Early." The national organizers describe it as a nonpartisan day of voter participation, and some local events will turn into canvassing and phone banking partway through the afternoon. You called the movement leashed. The organizers have now shown everyone the leash, so quote their own framing and let it do the work. It also means some sites will have registration tables and voting-plan workshops more than a march, which matters for where you stand with your stack. I also think you're right that the Iran war has been a strategic defeat for Washington and that the cheap-drone economics you describe explain a lot of it. Now the corrections. Gaza. "Probably half a million have been starved to death" has to come out. Recorded direct deaths are around 73,000. Confirmed famine deaths number in the hundreds. The serious excess-mortality estimates run to the tens of thousands. Alex de Waal says hunger and disease deaths have certainly passed 10,000 and fears several multiples of that ( https://worldpeacefoundation.org/blog/how-many-people-have-died-of-famine-in-gaza-updated/ ). The Lancet Global Health household survey published in February estimated 75,200 violent deaths through January 2025 alone and found the Gaza Ministry of Health's figures conservative and reliable ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00522-4/fulltext ). I'd use that one. It comes from a population survey, and it answers the "Hamas numbers" line before anyone raises it. A leaflet that says half a million gives every hostile reader a reason to throw it away, and the documented figures are damning enough. Iran. Iran has closed the Strait to "unfriendly" shipping, claimed sovereignty over it, and hit US positions around the Gulf as recently as this month. But I can't find anything to support "all bases destroyed," "run out of missiles," or "unable to feed its own sailors." The US and Israel have also done severe damage to Iran's conventional forces. The Pax Americana argument holds up without the exaggeration. "Fascist theocracy" for Israel. Apartheid state, settler state, whatever you're prepared to defend. Theocracy is the word readers will stop on, and then they'll stop reading. January 6 was 2021. Sheeran. He cried after saying friends and family had distanced themselves and after thanking the crowd for showing up. The acts who quit were his openers: Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, and Beoga. Beoga played a few songs inside his set, which is probably where "his own band" came from. The billionaire has a name, Robert Kraft, and Kraft confirmed he barred Macklemore from Gillette. Also, after Macklemore pledged $1 million and dared Kraft to match it, Kraft and Sheeran each pledged $2 million for Palestinian relief. Somebody at the rally will know that. Better to say it yourself and make the case that a donation doesn't undo taking the owners' side. Typos: "Pax American" in the headline, "missles," "billionarie," "neaarly," "No King's." Two arguments I'd push on. First, the ruling class. You say its center of gravity may decide to "unplug the Trump balloon." In the next breath you say it may want a firm hand and are considering letting him grab more power. Both versions assume a class that can still switch its political instruments on and off. I've been arguing for a while, under the name patrimonial Bonapartism, that the danger is the opposite. Trump governs through personal loyalty. The capitalist class is split over tariffs, the war, and what to do about a crisis it can see coming, and the executive gains room to move precisely because the class can't agree on who should run things. If that's right, the plug image misleads people. It tells them someone upstairs will sort this out. Your own point about shared donors fits better here than "Epstein class," which reads as a conspiracy claim and doesn't add anything the donor point doesn't already establish. Second, DSA. It isn't a party. It has no ballot line, and its electeds run and govern as Democrats. You explain DSA's caution as a wish to look reasonable to the ruling class. Some of its leaders may well want that. The structural reason is plainer. DSA has no means of making its officeholders do anything: no recall, no binding mandate, and no requirement that a DSA legislator vote with a DSA fraction. An organization of 120,000 that can't discipline its own electeds will act cautiously whatever its members want. I'd rather readers leave with that than with a guess about motives, because it points at what would have to change. On cutting to two pages, I'd drop Sheeran. It's the most perishable item, and the one most likely to start an argument you don't need at a voting rally. One thing I think the leaflet needs that I can't give you. The midterm section says Trump's plan "has been covered by a number of news outlets" and then doesn't name a single mechanism. Someone taking a leaflet on the sidewalk hasn't read those outlets. One concrete example would carry the whole section. I haven't followed the postal and certification fights closely enough to tell you which one is strongest. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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