The Wild Reed

Friday, April 24, 2026

Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk . . .

So when you’re in a conversation with a Leftist and they say, “You know, based on your proclaimed values of human rights and the enviroment, voting with the Green Party would actually be much more in alignment with those values.”

And you say, “Aw, man, you see, I can’t vote for the Green Party. They don’t win major elections.”

What just happened there was: you reversed cause and effect. You see, the reason you haven’t been voting for the Green Party isn’t because they haven’t been winning major elections. The reason the Green Party hasn’t been winning major elections is because we haven’t been voting for them.

See what I did there? I put the horse before the cart, which is something we’re going to need to do a lot more of to break the corrupt pro-genocide duopoly.

It’s up to us to make a third party successful; a party that stands on principle for people and planet, and does the right thing instead of the convenient thing, like maintaining the staus quo and white privilege by voting for lesser evil and half-decent Democrats.

So if you are in the most populated state in the nation which has the largest economy, which happens to be California (or if you know of anyone in California) I invite you to help promote Butch Ware’s campaign for Governor 2026.

In short, he’s pro all the good things: housing, healthcare, education, environment, social services; and anti all the bad things: fascism, ICE, corporate money in politics, genocide, the war machine.

– Anti-Fascist and Proud
via social media
April 17, 2026

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

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2026

Part 4: Gunnedah

I share this evening a few images from my recent time in Gunnedah, my Australian hometown.

Gunnedah and its surrounding area were originally inhabited by Indigenous Australians who spoke the Kamilaroi (Gamilaraay) language. The area now occupied by the town was settled by Europeans in 1833. Through my maternal grandmother’s family, the Millerds, my family can trace its connection to Gunnedah back to the town’s earliest days. For more about the town’s history and my family’s connection to it, see the previous Wild Reed posts, My “Bone Country” and Journey to Gunnedah.

Above: A depiction of Gambu Ganuurru, “Red Kangaroo,” the Indigenous Australian warrior and leader of the Gunn-e-dar people of the Kamilaroi tribe. After his death in the late 1700s, he was buried in the traditional way inside a carved tree.

Above and below: In driving from Port Macquarie to Gunnedah, one of my favorite sights is the area just on the other side of the mountains before one arrives at the town of Walcha. The landscape is dotted with popler trees, which at this time of the year (autumn in Australia) stand like columns of living flame. Just beautiful!

While in Gunnedah I stayed with my dear Aunty Ruth, my mum’s younger sister and only surviving sibling. We had a wonderful time.

While in Gunnedah I caught up with a number of childhood friends and neighbors, and enjoyed visiting places and viewing sights that feel part of my very bones.

NOTE: Commentary on the following images to follow.

NEXT: Armidale

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Australian Sojourn, March 2025 – Gunnedah
• Family Time in Melbourne, Guruk, and Gunnedah (2024)
• Australian Sojourn, March 2023 – Gunnedah
• Photo of the Day – March 25, 2023
• Across the Mountains . . . From Guruk to Gunnedah (2019)
• Family Time in Gunnedah (2019)
• A Visit to Gunnedah (2017)
• Australian Sojourn, May 2016 – Gunnedah
• Australian Sojourn, March 2015 – Gunnedah
• A Visit to Gunnedah (2014)
• Journey to Gunnedah (2011)
• This Corner of the Earth (2010)
• An Afternoon at the Gunnedah Convent of Mercy (2010)
• My “Bone Country” (2009)
• The White Rooster
• Remembering Nanna Smith
• One of These Boys is Not Like the Others
• Gunnedah (2006) – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Monday, April 20, 2026

The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party

Scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux penned the following words over seven months ago. Sadly, they remain as relevant and true today as they did then.

________________

The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home. The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.

It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise. Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion, working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.

. . . [T]he Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a recent column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people.

The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.

The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.

The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.

– Henry Giroux
Excerpted from “The Democratic Party:
Architects of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism”
CounterPunch
September 8, 2025

Saturday, April 18, 2026

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2026

Part 3: Guruk

I’ve spent the last four-and-a-half days in Guruk (aka Port Macquarie) on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Here with me during this time was my older brother, two of my four nephews, and my two great-nephews. They had all traveled up from Melbourne on Monday, April 13. My younger brother and his family, who live just south of Guruk, also joined us on a number of occasions. The primary purpose of our gathering in Guruk was to spend time with our mum/grandma/great-grandma (right).

Although she continues to make a good recovery from the stroke she experienced last April (just a day after my return to the U.S. after a month-long visit), my mum has moved into the assisted-living hostel that is part of the retirement village in Port Macquarie that’s been her home since 2013 – first with dad and then, after his passing in 2019, on her own.

As well as spending time with mum/grandma/great-grandma, my family also enjoyed time at the beach and a visit to Billabong Zoo, “Port Macquarie Koala and Wildlife Park.”

Above: Four generations are pictured in this photo – my mum, her eldest son Chris (my brother), Chris’s eldest son Ryan and third son Mitch, and Ryan’s two sons Ramy and Jake.