AUGUST 7, 2026

MSM view of the shock value of DSA — in brief — ‘Democratic Socialists of America revamped its platform ahead of a national summit this weekend in Chicago, shifting some official positions on immigration and democracy, as Republicans try to cast the entire Democratic Party in its mold ahead of the midterms. “We’re getting a lot of attention lately,” said Ashik Siddique, a DSA co-chair, on the call that announced the new version of its “Workers Deserve More” agenda. “And a lot of that attention is about our program.” The 2024 version of DSA’s agenda endorsed “freedom of movement,” which allows immigrants to cross borders to live and work, and a call to “end all immigrant detention and deportations.” Now, “Workers Deserve More” includes calls to “abolish ICE,” “legalize migration,” and grant “amnesty” to immigrants already here. It does not call for an end to all deportation.’ Dave Weigel, Semafor/DC.

AND the envelope, please — MSM view of DSA post-summit/primary stunners transits from oddity to odyssey, as “man with moves” collectivizes to “comrades with moves.” 

DSA is Democratic base, co-chair says reports The Hill. > The major MSM freakout that ignores the long game: the Economist (paywalled) bleats “Could a populist-left candidate win the Democrats’ presidential nomination in 2028?” > and revving up the fear and trembling department, the NYT blares “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left — One moderate group says the progressive wins are ‘deeply troubling’ and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.”

Mamdani-Style Mayors Should Study Peru’s Democracy Experiment
Peru has been home to the world’s most ambitious experiments in participatory democracy. American progressive and democratic socialist mayors should look to them for both inspiration and warning. [In a new book, the authors’] empirical verdict is clear: participatory budgeting and related institutions demonstrably improve local democratic life even when they face severe structural headwinds. Peru’s participatory institutions increased civic engagement, improved government responsiveness, and measurably improved citizen well-being. These aren’t trivial accomplishments. Legal mandates matter a great deal. When participatory processes are properly resourced, sustained, and embedded into annual budget cycles, citizens engage more often and governments respond more meaningfully to citizen input, leading to both better lives and stronger democracy. Jacobin

What’s Behind the Heat Wave Scorching Huge Parts of the World
A combination of El Niño, unusually hot ocean waters, and jet stream changes is sending temperatures soaring in the US, Europe, and Asia. The sweltering temperatures are being driven in part by a series of heat domes, or areas of high pressure that lock in sunny skies and warmth. The reason so many areas of high pressure are locked in place is due to the shape of the jet stream. The band of air that blows from west to east around the northern hemisphere “creates and steers most of the weather we experience,” says Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. When the jet stream becomes wavy, that can allow tropical air to push northward and get locked in place over areas that are usually more temperate. In Europe’s case, the jet stream is bringing extra heat from abnormally warm ocean waters around the continent. “The seas all around Europe are running a fever,” Francis says. Wired

Listen to the Hibakusha This Hiroshima Day — the World Doesn’t Need More Nuclear Weapons
“Hiroshima is a reminder that nuclear weapons have one purpose, and one purpose only: to cause death and destruction on a colossal scale. I will never understand the pride and excitement with which so many politicians proclaim they would be prepared to launch a nuclear attack. In what circumstances is it necessary to annihilate humanity? Do they know what a global nuclear war would actually look like? The hibakusha do.” Jeremy Corbin in Morning Star via Portside

Ceuta was a carnival of anti-migrant content for hateful opportunists on the right — and a lesson for the left
It [entry of refugees via Morocco into Spanish enclave on coast] was framed as a perfect storm because nativists dearly wanted it to be. Looking on, progressives failed to meet the moment, too. ‘Ceuta functions as a kind of border porn for the global far right: a locus upon which to project their most vivid and apocalyptic fantasies. If the historian Mike Davis once described the US-Mexico border wall as “a political stage set”, then in the age of the deepfake and the troll-farm, Ceuta has proved a similarly fertile source of content: the border interface reimagined as digital theatre, mass migration as primetime television. […] The photos and footage coming out of the enclave in recent days, all shot from distance and almost never in closeup, are all geared towards a single end: to encourage the viewer to see these brown bodies as a single mass, each indistinguishable from the other, the accountants and surgeons from the bomb-makers and rapists, the living from the dead. And so, by small degrees, the line between nationalism and pure-blood white supremacy blurs a little more.’ The Guardian

A 4-Day Work Week Sounds Great. How Do We Get One?
Workers deserve far more time off the job. But getting to a shorter work week will require a labor movement that can wield power to extract such demand. In her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, [Juliet] Schor expresses disappointment that — ​“despite widespread agreement that Americans were working too much — the issue died” during the Clinton era, as neoliberal economics became ascendant. Schor has returned to the subject of shorter hours with good timing. In our new ​“age of galloping artificial intelligence (AI),” millions of hourly and salaried workers are starting to get very worried about job elimination — and not just in the tech industry, where downsizing is already underway. In These Times via Portside

‘A Towering Piece of Monoculture’: How the Odyssey Discourse Has Dominated This Summer
Christopher Nolan’s smash hit epic has continued to excite and enrage everyone from rightwingers to academics, an old-fashioned throwback to a uniting big-screen event. Normally, volume of discourse about a movie should not be mistaken for a sign that people are actually seeing it. Sometimes online factions just have a bored fixation not shared by the rest of the world. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has some major receipts at the box office, too. Even that ginned-up faux-outrage about the movie’s diversity became amusingly sporting with the gradual and merry realization that most people truly do not care about what infuriates Elon Musk. The movie that a vocal minority insisted was bringing about the destruction of the west, or whatever they were prattling on about, has turned out to be a great unifier. The Guardian