Aligning With the Divine

The human will is a magic power.
When it is purified of selfish desire
and aligned with the Great Architect,
it becomes an unstoppable force of nature.

– Franz Hartmann

The will is the most misunderstood faculty in the human being.

In popular thinking, willpower is the capacity to force yourself to do things you do not want to do. To override the body, suppress impulse, push through resistance. This conception of will is not wrong, it is simply shallow. It describes the ego’s crude approximation of something that, in its true form, operates entirely differently.

The esoteric traditions drew a sharp distinction between personal will and what Franz Hartmann, following the Rosicrucian and Theosophical lineage, called alignment with the universal will. The personal will, driven by desire, fear, ambition, the need to prove something, is powerful in the short term and self-defeating in the long. It fights against the current of existence. It exhausts itself in the effort of control. The Bhagavad Gita described this as action bound to ego and result, the kind that generates karma rather than liberation.

What Hartmann was pointing toward was something the Hermetic tradition called theurgy, the alignment of the individual will with the divine intelligence that underlies all form. The Great Architect is not a God to be appeased. It is the ordering principle of the cosmos itself, the logos, what the Stoics called the rational fire running through all things. To align with it is not submission. It is the recognition that the deepest current of your own nature and the current of the universe are not separate.

The alchemical process begins with the purification of the base material. In the work of the will, the base material is selfish desire, not desire itself, which is a form of life-force, but desire contracted around the small self. Calcination burns this away. What remains is will in its pure form: intentional, clear, undivided, moving without friction because it no longer moves against anything.

Jung described the individuation process as the ego learning to serve the Self rather than rule it. The will that has undergone this transformation does not push. It draws.

– Source

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• Keeping the Spark Alive
• Gifts of Abundance
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• A Season of Listening
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• The Source Is Within You
• Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Quote of the Day – February 8, 2013
• Inayat Khan on Mysticism
• The Fountain of Happiness Within
• The Alchemy of Happiness
• A Light That Will Always Shine
• A Living Light
• A Perpetual Fire Within
• One Wisdom
• Awakening and Turning
• Trusting the Flow

Image: Artist unknown.

“This Is Not a Moment to Be Silent”

Rick Chow shot a 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack Belton in the back for water bottles that he never actually stole. Yes, his life was worth less to this man than a bottle of water. A jury in South Carolina acquitted Chow of Cyrus’ murder.

Not even manslaughter?

Although he has shot people in the past, Chow was acquitted and is a free man today. The state of South Carolina also seems to feel that Cyrus’ life was worth less than a bottle of water.

Meanwhile in Texas, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony was outnumbered and bullied by White teens at a sporting event when one began to shove him. Karmelo stabbed him and, at 19, has been sentenced to 35 years for murder. He will be my age, 54, when released, will spend the next 35 years doing unpaid labor, and will never regain his voting rights. He has been returned to the slavery his ancestors endured. (That is what incarceration is.)

Not even manslaughter?

Our children are not safe in White towns or White spaces. Anti-Blackness in Asian American and Latin American communities makes those folks’ spaces frequently unsafe. This is why I chose to raise my children in Baltimore. The anti-Blackness in the U.S. puts us in far more danger than anything you might’ve seen on The Wire.

– Melanie Hood-Wilson
via social media
June 10, 2026

The real racial sickness in the Karmelo Anthony and Austin Metcalf case is not just that America reflexively sees Black boys as threats. It is that this country has a profound, almost religious inability to recognize white boys as violent, dangerous, deviant, and frightening despite this country’s long history of evidence.

White boys can be hulking, aggressive, entitled, bullying, reckless, and cruel, and still the culture rushes to soften them into “sons,” “athletes,” “good kids,” “troubled teens,” or “boys who made a mistake.” But let a Black boy say, “Don’t touch me,” and suddenly everybody and their mama becomes fluent in menace, intent, and criminal psychology.

The fact is, America has trained itself to see danger in Black fear and innocence in white violence, and that is why so many people cannot even ask whether Karmelo Anthony was afraid without first deciding he must have been the threat. This is a country that keeps pretending white aggression is not dangerous until somebody Black survives it.

– Stacey Patton
via social media
June 9, 2026

Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a rifle, killed two people, and went home free.

Karmelo Anthony was scared and defended himself. He faces life in prison.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14 years old, shot in the back while running away. The jury watched it on video. They still said not guilty.

Same country. Same justice system. Completely different outcomes based on the color of their skin.

We are exhausted. We are heartbroken. And some days, if we are being honest, we feel completely hopeless. Because how many verdicts do we have to survive before something changes?

– Constance Carter
via social media
June 9, 2026

Austin Metcalf should be alive. His parents should not have had to bury their son. No one should treat that loss like a side note. A child died at a high school track meet, and that grief is real. But grief does not mean silence. Austin’s death does not mean we have to ignore what Texas did to Karmelo Anthony.

Karmelo did not ask Texas for special treatment. He asked Texas to apply the same law it claims belongs to everyone. He asked a jury to believe that a Black teenager, surrounded in a tense confrontation, touched after warning someone not to touch him, could be scared enough to defend himself. Texas said no. Texas said his fear did not count enough. His panic did not matter enough. His life in that moment was not worth enough.

That is the rot in this case. Not because every self-defense claim should win. Not because every death can be excused. Not because a knife is harmless. A knife is deadly. A stab wound to the chest is deadly. Karmelo used deadly force. That is not the question. The question is whether Texas gives a Black teenager the same benefit of the doubt it gives other people when they say they were scared.

Had the roles been reversed, this country would not be struggling so hard to understand fear. If a white teenager had warned a Black teenager not to touch him, had been touched anyway, had said he was surrounded and scared, half this country would already be calling him a victim. They would call it tragic. They would call it complicated. They would call it self-defense. But when the scared teenager is Black, suddenly everyone becomes a prosecutor. Suddenly every second has to be perfect. Suddenly fear is no longer fear. It is treated like aggression.

Karmelo was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was 17 when this happened. His defense said he was smaller, outnumbered, frightened, and reacting in chaos. Prosecutors said this was not fear. They said it was escalation. They said it was murder. The jury accepted that story. Reporting from the courtroom said no Black jurors were seated, and the defense objected to the prosecution’s strikes of Black prospective jurors. The judge let the panel stand.

Self-defense is not a magic word. You do not say it and walk free. The law asks whether a person reasonably believed force was needed right then to protect himself. Deadly force has an even higher burden. But “reasonable” is where the bias hides. Reasonable to whom? Reasonable when the person afraid is white, armed, older, angry, or standing on property? Reasonable when the person afraid is Black, young, cornered, touched, and already treated like the threat? In America, white fear gets treated like evidence. Black fear gets treated like an excuse.

This country has spent generations treating Black children like adults whenever it wants to punish them. Black kids are children when America wants to lecture them, but adults when America wants to cage them. They are old enough to fear, old enough to blame, old enough to throw away, but somehow never young enough to protect. Black childhood comes with conditions. Black innocence can be taken back at any moment. Black fear is treated like a lie before the child even opens his mouth.

Karmelo was not some monster. By the accounts offered by his family and supporters, he was a student-athlete with a 3.7 GPA, a team captain, the oldest of four, a kid who worked real jobs at Foot Locker and H-E-B, and someone with no prior criminal record. That should not have to be said for his fear to matter. But in a country always hunting for a reason to strip Black children of innocence, it matters that even the “good kid” facts were not enough to make him fully human in that courtroom.

And no, the comparison cases do not have to be identical. That is the dodge people use when they do not want to face the pattern. Every case has different facts, different witnesses, different wounds, different judges, and different juries. The point is not that every case is the same. The point is that courts keep finding room for fear, panic, mistakes, confusion, and mercy when certain people claim self-defense. Then a Black defendant asks for the same room, and suddenly there is none.

The cleanest Texas comparison is Belton. Caysen Allison, a white student, stabbed Jose “Joe” Ramirez Jr. during a school bathroom fight. Ramirez died. Allison admitted he stabbed him. His defense said he was scared, being attacked, and feared for his safety. The jury did not convict him of murder. It convicted him of criminally negligent homicide, a lesser charge. The system saw a deadly school stabbing, a self-defense argument, and enough room to avoid the harshest label. He received 10 years. Karmelo received 35.

Then there is Kyle Carruth in Lubbock, a grown white man in a heated confrontation with Chad Read. Carruth got a rifle. Read ended up dead. A special grand jury chose not to indict Carruth on any criminal charge. Outside Texas, Rick Chow, a store owner, chased 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton after wrongly suspecting him of stealing water. Cyrus was shot in the back. Chow claimed he acted to protect his son. A jury acquitted him. Chow belongs in this argument not because he is white, but because the fear the jury accepted was not the fear of the Black child who ended up dead. These cases are not the same, but they show the same ugly truth. The system knows how to understand fear when the person asking for grace is not a Black teenager.

The Kyle Rittenhouse comparison is not about identical facts. It is about the machine that shows up for certain people. Rittenhouse killed two people and wounded a third, claimed self-defense, and was acquitted. But the verdict was only part of the story. Conservatives raised money for him. Politicians defended him. Media figures turned him into a hero. After his acquittal, he was welcomed onto stages as if killing people made him a spokesman for freedom. That machine does not show up for Black children who say they were scared. It calls them thugs, predators, criminals, animals, and monsters, then digs through their lives for anything that makes throwing them away feel easier.

This is not a demand that every Black defendant be acquitted. It is a demand that Black fear be allowed to exist. It is a demand that a Black teenager’s survival instinct not be treated like a crime by default. It is a demand that the same America that can imagine Kyle Rittenhouse as scared, Kyle Carruth as justified, Rick Chow as protective, and Caysen Allison as negligent instead of murderous stop pretending it cannot imagine Karmelo Anthony as terrified. Black people are told self-defense belongs to everyone until they try to use it. They are told the law is neutral until they ask it to recognize their panic. They are told their children are children until those children need mercy, and then suddenly they are men. America did not deny Karmelo Anthony the right to claim self-defense. It did something colder. It let him say the words, then refused to believe a Black child could mean them.

– Tony Pentimalli
“The Color of Fear”
via social media
June 11, 2026

I’ve been sitting with the Karmelo Anthony verdict. As a father of two Black boys, and as someone who has walked alongside countless young Black men at Alcorn, I am grieved.

Karmelo, 19 years old, will spend the next 18+ years in a Texas prison, sentenced by a predominantly white jury after prosecutors systematically struck every Black woman from the jury pool. The judge allowed it. The system called it justice.

Whether you agree with his defense or not, that young man deserved to have his humanity weighed by a jury of his actual peers.

He did not get that. The jury took less than three hours to decide his fate. Draw your own conclusions. But when a jury deliberates that quickly on a case this complex, this racially charged, this consequential it at least raises the question of whether they walked in already knowing what they were going to do.

To be sure, I am praying for the Metcalf family, who lost a son and will grieve that loss for the rest of their lives. Their pain is real and it is sacred.

And I am praying for Karmelo and his mother, who asked for mercy and received 35 years.

This is not a moment to be silent. It is a moment to be honest: our system does not weigh Black lives and white lives on the same scale. Until it does, the work continues.

– CJ Rhodes
via social media
June 10, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
South Carolina Jury Finds Store Owner Rick Chow Not Guilty of Murder in Killing of Black Teen Cyrus Carmack Belton – Associated Press via CNN (June 1, 2026).
Karmelo Anthony Found Guilty of the Murder of Austin Metcalf and Sentenced to 35 Years – Adria R Walker (The Guardian, June 9, 2026).
Why the Karmelo Anthony Trial Sparks Broader Debate Over Race and Fairness – Safia Samee Ali (NewsNation, June 9, 2026).
Texas Teen Caysen Allison Found Not Guilty of Murder in Stabbing Death of Fellow Student Jose Luis Ramirez Jr. Killed During Bathroom Brawl – Chris Spargo (People, April 26, 2025).

Yep . . .

When people ask about my politics, I tell them Bernie is as far to the right I am ever willing to go.

– Michael Hurwitz
via social media
June 9, 2026

Quote of the Day

The fact that Kamala Harris [left] walks around being applauded and convinced she “told us so” instead of being treated like someone who had one job and failed so spectacularly that it will go down in history as one of the greatest calamities in American politics, says everything to me about the rot in the Democrat Party.

There is simply not even a little blip of accountability in this institution. She had one job: earn more electoral votes than Donald Trump. She failed. She failed on a level that is nearly impossible to even comprehend, and all she’s done since then is continue sneering at the people whose votes she alienated, and somehow she’s still welcome to show her face in a political party.

The level of entitlement is just beyond comprehension, and it is *literally* anti-democratic. A view of politics that holds a politician is entitled to votes and if they fail to get them then it’s the voters’ fault is fundamentally hostile to democracy.

– Adam Bates
via social media
June 9, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
The Democratic Party: Architects of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism – Henry A. Giroux (CounterPunch, September 8, 2025).
Liberals Can’t Confront Authoritarianism – Cyrus Gazdar (The Medium, November 17, 2025).
Why the Democratic Party Can’t Save Us From Trump’s Authoritarianism – Henry A. Giroux (Truthout, August 21, 2017).
Kamala Harris: Still Blaming Everyone Else – Tim Black (Tim Black TV, October 6. 2025).
The Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump – Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, October 21, 2025).
Kamala Harris’s Memoir Shows Exactly Why Her Campaign Flopped – Yasmin Nair (Current Affairs, November 12, 2025).
Kamala Harris Admits Biden Administration Failed Gaza – Novara Media (November 13, 2025).
Report: Kamala Harris Lost 2024 Elections Over Gaza – Middle East Eye, March 12, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
• Authoritarianism With a Blue Sticker
• The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
• David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
• Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
• Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
• Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama
• Progressives and Obama
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• Nick Cruse: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is the Privileged Position”
• Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season
• Yes, Just Imagine
• Politics 101

Night Blessing

Night is gathering around you now,
drawing a veil between your spirit
and the noise of the world.
May this darkness become a place of rest,
where your heart no longer needs
to carry everything at once.
May you feel protected tonight,
as if unseen hands
have lit small lanterns around your soul,
keeping watch while you sleep.
May troubling thoughts loosen gently,
like knots easing from a ribbon
left for hours in warm sunlight.
And if the world has felt too loud, too hurried,
or too heavy, may this night hold you
like a quiet room filled with candlelight,
and sweet flower fragrance.
May sleep restore what was worn thin,
may peace settle deeply within you,
and may morning find your spirit
softer, steadier, and fully renewed.

– Rivers in the Ocean

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• November Song
• “Ice Luminaries” on the Northside
• Reclaiming the “Hour of God”
• Here in This Falling Darkness

Quote of the Day

Yes, while Graham Platner [right] does indeed have enough red flags to cancel a soccer tournament, no one who was silent in 2024 about U.S. support for genocide of Palestinians and *still is* silent about it now, with no contrition, remorse, or apology for that silence, gets to lecture anyone about Graham Platner OR ANYTHING ELSE.

Fix your hearts, and beg for forgiveness, or shut up, and buzz off

– James A. Robichaux
via social media
June 7, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Graham Platner’s Billionaire-Bashing Message Resonates in Maine Senate Race, Despite Controversies – Democracy Now! (June 8, 2026).
Graham Platner vs. the Machine – Andrew Perez (Zeteo, June 8, 2026).
Platner Opens Up 9-Point Lead Even After Pro-Collins PAC Spends Millions on Negative Ads – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, May 27, 2026).
“We Are Coming for You, Susan Collins”: 1,700+ Rally with Graham Platner and Bernie Sanders Against Oligarchy in Maine – Jon Queally and Julia Conley (Common Dreams, May 26, 2026).

UPDATES: Maine Votes as Scandal-Ridden Graham Platner Seeks Senate Primary Win – David Smith (The Guardian, June 9, 2026).
Graham Platner Wins Democratic Nomination to Challenge Susan Collins in November – Steve Mistler (Maine Public, June 9, 2026).
Bernie Sanders’ Candidates Just Keep Winning – William Steakin, Lisa Kashinsky and Andrew Howard (Politico, June 10, 2026).

Kshama Sawant on the Real Reason for Jacobin Magazine’s “Hatchet Job” on Chris Smalls

I’m currently reading Chris Smalls’s recently released memoir, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. It just so happens that within days of the book’s release, Jacobin magazine published what many people consider a hit piece on Smalls.

I appreciate Kshama Sawant’s response . . .

Jacobin magazine, the principal mouthpiece of the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), released a hit piece on Amazon labor leader Chris Smalls.

It could be legit if Jacobin had had an honest critique of Smalls to clarify what class struggle unionist leaders should be doing. But the article is not that at all.

It’s a hatchet job against a leading labor activist who has refused to toe the line of the DSA and the business unionist labor leaders who give cover to the so-called progressive Democrats and to the Democratic Party as a whole, despite shocking betrayals by them against working people.

The crux of the real reason why Jacobin went after Smalls is contained in this sentence: “[Smalls] blames the two-party system for the state of the American labor movement . . .”

Smalls is spot on about this and the need to break from the Democratic and Republican parties. We need a new party of the working class.

The DSA leadership, on the other hand, sees giving cover to the Democratic Party as job number one. The Democratic Party is the party under whom the genocide in Gaza began and which engineered the breaking of the railroad workers’ strike — both under President Joe Biden. ALL Democrats in the House, including DSA star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) voted to break the strike. The Democratic Party is one of the two most powerful capitalist parties in the world, and in no way represents working people or the oppressed.

Business unionist labor leaders are those who have made peace with the capitalist system and are driven by protecting their careers, which means placating the bosses, not organizing the rank and file against the bosses to win substantive working-class victories. Refusing to fight the bosses also means aligning with the parties of the bosses, like the Democratic Party.

The overwhelming majority of the labor leadership today is business unionist, with some crucial exceptions like Smalls. We need a reckoning in the labor movement.

Brother Smalls has put his life on the line for the anti-war movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the Israeli state’s genocide bankrolled by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Smalls went on a Gaza aid flotilla carrying food, baby formula, diapers and medicine in the context of catastrophic levels of mass starvation in Gaza. The flotilla was attacked by the Israeli military, who physically assaulted Smalls, and kicked and choked him.

In contrast, AOC has voted for the Iron Dome which is part of the Israeli state’s genocidal apparatus.

For having the temerity to expose AOC and other self-described “progressive” politicians, Smalls is called “narcissistic” by Jacobin [left], a term the magazine’s editors were apparently forced to retract after they got huge amounts of flak on all social media.

Personal attacks and character assassination like in this case are often used by the political establishment’s spokespeople as proxy for their real objections – in this case, the threat they feel from Smalls openly calling out the Democratic Party’s actual role.

The only way of rebuilding a militant labor movement is to pose a concrete threat to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which in turn requires a challenge to the business unionist labor leadership. That is the basis on which I won the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax during the decade I was the sole socialist on the Seattle City Council.

I am now running as an independent revolutionary socialist against genocidal Democrat Adam Smith. I am calling for an end to all military aid to Israel and an end to all weapons and tech for genocide and imperialist war.

– Kshama Sawant
via social media
June 5, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Chris Smalls Is Still Fighting the Bosses – Alex Skopic (Current Affairs, June 2, 2026).
“Amazon Is the New Slavery”: Chris Smalls on the Labor Fight of a Lifetime – Sara Franklin (The Nation, June 2, 2026).
A Better World: An Interview with Chris Smalls – Annika Bratton (Publishers Weekly, April 3, 2026).
My Interview with Chris Smalls – Marianne Williamson (Transform, July 31, 2022).

UPDATE: Who’s Afraid of Chris Smalls? – Maximillian Alvarez (The Real News Network, June 8, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Steven Donziger’s Shout-Out to Chris Smalls
• Chris Smalls: We Need to Escape the “Two-Party Plantation”
• Quote of the Day – August 5, 2025
• U.S. Labor Leader Chris Smalls Joins the Crew of the Handala

When the “Blue Wave” Is a “Blue Crackdown”

California, brace yourselves and head to higher ground. There is a Blue Wave coming that conceals a Blue Crackdown.

In New Jersey [right], all the liberals, progressives, and labor “officials” lined up behind a new Democrat governor to stop MAGA; instead, Mikie Sherrill stood with MAGA’s most notorious shock troops: private prisons, ICE, and cops against striking prison workers and their supporters rebelling against the new slavery.

In Virginia, new governor “CIA” Abigail Spanberger did the same, vetoing laws that might have placed small obstacles in Red MAGA’s path.

The California crackdown was already foretold when the Democrats kicked the Green Party’s Butch Ware off the ballot, and the progressives, labor “leaders,” radicals, and so-called socialists had nothing to say about it (except the DSA, which piled on).

Behind every Red MAGA chanting “America First,” stands a Blue MAGA repeating “lesser evil” as if a wedding vow. Instead of marriage to the machine, let’s all strive to tear it asunder.

– Richard Moser
via social media
June 2, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
The Democratic Party: Architects of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism – Henry A. Giroux (CounterPunch, September 8, 2025).
Liberals Can’t Confront Authoritarianism – Cyrus Gazdar (The Medium, November 17, 2025).
Why the Democratic Party Can’t Save Us From Trump’s Authoritarianism – Henry A. Giroux (Truthout, August 21, 2017).
The Iron Ceiling: Would the Oligarchy Steal an Election From the Green Party? – Dorothy Lennon (Dorothy Lennon Revolutionary, May 28, 2026).
Unions Decry Spanberger Veto of Collective Bargaining Bill as “Betrayal to Virginia’s Workers” – Stephen Prager (Common Dreams, May 15, 2026).
“Subversion of Law and Order”: ICE Violence Escalates at Newark’s GEO-Run Jail, Delaney Hall – Democracy Now! (May 29, 2026).
New Jersey State Police Join Crackdown Against Supporters of Hunger-Striking Immigrants at Delaney Hall – Democracy Now! (June 1, 2026).
Democrats Panic Over Green Party Candidate: An Interview with Dr. Butch Ware – Bad Faith (March 30, 2026).
Green Party Candidate for California Governor Butch Ware Kicked Off the Ballot – The Spiritual and Political Podcast (March 27, 2026).
Inside Butch Ware’s Vision For California: Healthcare, Housing, and a Political Shake-Up – Matthew Levitt (Fathom, March 2026).
Why Status-Quo Dems Should Heed the Progressive Earthquake in New Jersey – Martin Burns (Common Dreams, February 13, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
• Authoritarianism With a Blue Sticker
• The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
• David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
• Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
• Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
• Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama
• Progressives and Obama
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
• Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
• The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• Nick Cruse: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is the Privileged Position”
• Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season


BUTCH WARE
• Introducing California’s Gubernatorial Candidate Butch Ware
• “The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
• Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
• Butch Ware on Efforts by the Democratic Party to Block His Green Party Run for California Governor
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – June 5, 2025
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – November 26, 2025
• Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
• “We Have the Power to Stop the Flow of Money and the False Legitimacy Upon Which Empire Depends”
• “People Really Want New Options in Politics”
• Butch Ware on the Hard Knock Radio Show
• Photo of the Day – March 3, 2026
• Butch Ware and the Gatekeepers Within the Democratic Party
• Butch Ware: “I’m Trying to Take Care of People”
• Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk
• Butch Ware on the Democrats’ “Lawfare” to Keep Greens Off the Ballot
• Dorothy Lennon: Quote of the Day – June 1, 2026

Image: Anti-ICE protesters stand in opposition to a line of New Jersey State Police. (Photo: Julian Leshay Guadalupe / USA Today Network)

Quote of the Day

Tomorrow, California will vote for governor in its jungle primary. One candidate I would love to see triumph has been kicked off the ballot: Butch Ware. The Green Party nominee has resorted to a write-in campaign. Sadly, even with this campaign, there will be ways to cheat Ware.

Many election officials are sticklers when it comes to write-in candidates. If you spell part of the name wrong, if you check the wrong box to signal a write-in, your vote will be thrown out.

If it looks like Ware could advance, I believe the Democratic Party machine will find a way to cheat him out of victory. They rigged it against Cheri Honkala, another Green Party nominee for vice president, when she ran for a state seat in Pennsylvania. You can read about it in my Substack article.

Does this mean you shouldn’t vote or stay home if you live in California? No. Write-in Ware. We just need to be aware of the hurdles anti-oligarchic parties face.

– Dorothy Lennon
via social media
June 1, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
The Iron Ceiling: Would the Oligarchy Steal an Election From the Green Party? – Dorothy Lennon (Dorothy Lennon Revolutionary, May 28, 2026).
The Green Party’s Butch Ware: “I Love a Good Fight” – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, April 22, 2026).
Butch Ware: The Green Candidate – The Latino Newsletter (April 6, 2026).
Democrats Panic Over Green Party Candidate: An Interview with Dr. Butch Ware – Bad Faith (March 30, 2026).
Judge Rejects Green Party Candidate Butch Ware’s Bid to Appear on California Governor Ballots – Yue Stella Yu (CalMatters.org, March 26, 2026).
Green Party Candidate for California Governor Butch Ware Kicked Off the Ballot – The Spiritual and Political Podcast (March 27, 2026).
Inside Butch Ware’s Vision For California: Healthcare, Housing, and a Political Shake-Up – Matthew Levitt (Fathom, March 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Introducing California’s Gubernatorial Candidate Butch Ware
• “The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
• Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
• Butch Ware on Efforts by the Democratic Party to Block His Green Party Run for California Governor
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – June 5, 2025
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – November 26, 2025
• Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
• “We Have the Power to Stop the Flow of Money and the False Legitimacy Upon Which Empire Depends”
• “People Really Want New Options in Politics”
• Butch Ware on the Hard Knock Radio Show
• Photo of the Day – March 3, 2026
• Butch Ware and the Gatekeepers Within the Democratic Party
• Butch Ware: “I’m Trying to Take Care of People”
• Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk
• Butch Ware on the Democrats’ “Lawfare” to Keep Greens Off the Ballot

May Vignettes

See also the previous Wild Reed May 2026 posts:
• Australian Sojourn: April-May 2026 – Brisbane, Montville, and the Sunshine Coast
• Australian Sojourn: April-May 2026 – Return to Guruk

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• May Vignettes (2025)
• Gifts of Abundance
• Dandelion: A Celebration
• May Vignettes (2023)
• Spring . . . Within and Beyond (2022)
• Spring . . . Within and Beyond (2021)
• Spring Awakens! (2020)

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Butch Ware on Why Third Parties Are Crucial

Earlier today Butch Ware, Green Party candidate for California Governor, was a guest on Cam James’s podcast The Fact Check with Cam James.

In this hour-long interview, Butch talks about the difference between liberals and leftists, and why independent people-powered parties (often referred to as “third parties”) are crucial to the health and survival of U.S. democracy. He also shares his percepctive on his removal from the ballot by the Democratic establishment in California, and the differences and similarities between the two major corporatist/oligarchic parties – “Team Blue Genocide and Team Red Fascism,” as Ware calls them.

Says Ware:

A majority of registered voters [63%] say that both parties do such a “poor job” that a “third major party” is needed. . . . The two-party system is a fabrication [and] the “lesser of two evils” argument was actually formulated by the CIA in the 1960s to try to prevent the emergence of genuine leftist politics, and especially of genuine Black leftist politics. It’s a psyop [psychological operation], and we’re living under it. The people who live outside of this constant mental conditioning see through it. . . . What we perceive from the inside as a battle between Democrats and Republicans is actually a factional dispute inside a single capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist party. They alternate power back and forth, and that’s it. What they never do is create space for you to express your political dissent from the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist framework in its totality. . . . The system is so fragile right now. We can break the duopoly control. A majority of people do not identify with this political system at all. The time is ripe for a third party. And you know who knows it? The Democrats. That’s the reason why they’ve sued to knock me off the ballot in California [and] the reason they spent 20 million dollars trying to knock Dr. Jill Stein and myself off the ballot in 2024.

Following is more of what Dr. Ware says in the above interview.

The relationship between Team Blue Genocide and Team Red Fascism is that one steals while the other holds the bag. So while one can argue that Republicans were responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade, when the Democrats had control over the House, the Senate, and the White House, did they protect Roe v. Wade? Did they enshine and codify it into law?

Just ask yourself a set of questions about what function the Democrats are actually playing. . . . They have preferred to weaponize issues and rights [a woman’s right to choose, the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, and DEI) as ways to activate their voter base in “lesser of two evils” arguments rather than just securing and protecting [all of these rights] because their job is actually to weaponize your fear of Team Red in order for them to undertake identical policies.

[For instance] I push back strongly against the idea that the Republicans are [solely] responsible for ICE. The Democrats massively funded and escalated ICE. The Democrats were the ones responsible for starting the policies of family separations, for pioneering putting kids in cages. Trump, despite the theatrics of the [recent] escalation, and the visibility and the fascist violence we see in the streets, is still chasing Obama’s deportation record. He can’t catch the “Deporter in Chief.” . . . The problem is when Rebuplicans do it, liberals resist; and when the Democrats do it, liberals applaud.

. . . Voters are constantly fear-mongered about the other side being worse. . . . It’s a toxic relationship. The Republicans do the same thing with Democrats that Democrats do with Republicans. It is a game of mutual recrimination and fear that is built on stoking a fake culture war that does not affect the money flow of the corporations and the billionaires that are at the top of the system. They want you identifying with those parties because they know that those parties serve their interests one way or the other.

[A major study from 2014 showed] that there is “little or no” correlation between what either the Democratic voting base or the Republican voting base want and what our elected officials do. But there is a 100% correlation between what the donor class wants and what the political parties do. And the reason is simple: who funds you runs you.

. . . My colleague at UC-Riverside, Dylan Rodriguez, says that "the Democrat Party is the most effective counter-insurgency organization ever to come into existence in human history." They are where real possibilities for change go to die.

If you remove the Democrats from the equation, American fascism becomes virtually impossible because that hard white supremacist core that is driving the extreme right is actually a small fraction of people. But people are so disaffected with the Democrats and do not see any possibility of any emancipation coming through their corrupt capitalist imperialist practices, that they disengage. If we had an actual opposition party rather than just two factions of a single white supremacist party, coalitions which are possible would [form and] drown out this small hard core kernal of white supremacy. [That core] would become vastly outnumbered once the Democrats are out of the way.

But the Democrats are in the way of a real opposition party emerging, and they have to continuously weaponize identity politics in order to keep that position of material privilege where they control the access to resources. As long as they are there, no liberation is possible.

– Butch Ware
May 31, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
The Green Party’s Butch Ware: “I Love a Good Fight” – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, April 22, 2026).
Butch Ware: The Green Candidate – The Latino Newsletter (April 6, 2026).
Democrats Panic Over Green Party Candidate: An Interview with Dr. Butch Ware – Bad Faith (March 30, 2026).
Judge Rejects Green Party Candidate Butch Ware’s Bid to Appear on California Governor Ballots – Yue Stella Yu (CalMatters.org, March 26, 2026).
Green Party Candidate for California Governor Butch Ware Kicked Off the Ballot – The Spiritual and Political Podcast (March 27, 2026).
Inside Butch Ware’s Vision for California: Healthcare, Housing, and a Political Shake-Up – Matthew Levitt (Fathom, March 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

BUTCH WARE
• Introducing California’s Gubernatorial Candidate Butch Ware
• Butch Ware on the Democrats’ “Lawfare” to Keep Greens Off the Ballot
• Butch Ware on Efforts by the Democratic Party to Block His Green Party Run for California Governor
• Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk
• Butch Ware: “I’m Trying to Take Care of People”
• “People Really Want New Options in Politics”
• Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
• “We Have the Power to Stop the Flow of Money and the False Legitimacy Upon Which Empire Depends”
• Butch Ware on the Hard Knock Radio Show
• Butch Ware and the Gatekeepers Within the Democratic Party
• Photo of the Day – March 3, 2026
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – November 26, 2025
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – June 5, 2025
• Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
• “The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
• “This Is a Tragic, Heartbreaking Moment in the History of Humanity”: Butch Ware on the Gaza Genocide
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis (2024)
• Butch Ware: “You Can Actually Vote Your Conscience”


GREEN PARTY
• “Green Wave 2026 is Global”
• Meet Some of the “People-Powered” Green Party Candidates for 2026
• An Opportunity for Organizing Against Duopoly
• “It Is Our Responsibility to Make a Third Party Viable”
• Something to Think About – December 8, 2024
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
• “We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”
• We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
• The “Green Smoothie” Option
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
• Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”
• Jill Stein: “Americans Deserve Choices”
• Elise Labott on How Third Parties Can Revitalize Democracy
• Third Parties and the Historical Record
• Something to Think About – August 15, 2024
• Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
• Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election
• Cornel West: “The Next Step Is a Green Step, a Progressive Step”
• Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein: Is a “Historic Collaboration” in the Making? (2016)
• Voting Green: Hope Over Fear


THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
• Authoritarianism With a Blue Sticker
• The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
• David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
• Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
• Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
• Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama
• Progressives and Obama
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
• Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
• The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• Nick Cruse: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is the Privileged Position”
• Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season