We have seen it in New Jersey and Texas, and now we will see it in North Carolina. The next bellwether primary election takes place on March 3; the damage of being a progressive except for Palestine (and progressive except for single-payer and except for rubber-stamping appropriations bills) may end the career of incumbent Valerie Foushee in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. Fourshee was a latecomer to the 2022 election, using AIPAC and Cryptocurrency donations of $2 million, knocking out the local favorite by 4,000 votes.
Nida Allam, former Vice Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party and current Durham County Commissioner, returns with more experience and a small donation campaign budget that exceeds Fourshee’s this time around. She promises “to build a brighter future for the Research Triangle, where our democracy works for all of us, and everyone has access to a living wage, affordable healthcare, a great public education, and a livable planet.”
Unlike Allam, who rejects corporate PAC money, Foushee has historically accepted donations from pharmaceutical and health product interests and from defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 2024 and 2025, she has cast votes that align her more with an establishment centrist than a fighter.
Foushee supports expanding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but she has not championed Medicare for All. Foushee voted for the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which provided over $26 billion in aid (all of which has been distributed), using the excuse that the Act included $ billion in aid for Gaza (of which only a fraction has been distributed*).
The race between Allam and Fourshee brings into focus the important transition from incremental hand-wringing Democratic leadership and the energy of the next generation. Should Allam win, it will further momentum for the coalition of 6 organizations dedicated to departing from big-money politics, a coalition willing to tax bloated excess in our society so that we can afford healthcare, education, and housing.
The 2026 Progressive Coalition: These independent organizations are collaborating under a shared strategy to challenge “establishment” moderate Democratic incumbents.
• Justice Democrats: Backing candidates like AOC and Cori Bush.
• Working Families Party (WFP): A multiracial party that focuses on building working-class power.
• Sunrise Movement: A youth-led climate organization that demands a “Green New Deal” litmus test for candidates.
• Our Revolution: A Bernie Sanders legacy campaign that focuses on grassroots organizing and local PAC coordination.
• People’s Alliance PAC: Provides the local “ground game” for these national groups.
• Leaders We Deserve: A newer PAC aimed at electing young progressives.
Allam is a leader and part of the leadership we all deserve. If we can expect anything other than capitulation and deadly compromise, we in California District 4 might also want to consider an alternative to the “centrist” in office. Mike Thompson has been given room to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill that funds ICE, but this “no” vote on an appropriations bill is not his usual position. He voted no this time, in large part, because he has a primary challenger and doing less would be political suicide, but his stance on funding the military and Israel is largely unchanged (credit to Thompson for signing HR 3565, No Funding of Offensive Weapons for Israel, back in July of 2025).
Thompson has had 27 years to be more aggressive about health care costs, education, and housing, while a few in the Democratic donor class have become astronomically wealthy.
What Thompson and his peers have been aggressive about is taking a considerable amount of money from the defense industry, pharmaceutical companies, corporate real estate, and, for California Incumbent Democrats, particularly, money from AI companies that want PG&E to charge us as much as the for-profit monopoly can, while devastating California’s homegrown renewable energy industry and sucking up our water and electricity on the cheap.
We want a way forward, and the first step we can take is to stop expecting old leadership to change. We need new leadership that is ready to work to improve our lives.
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
Oh, goodie, Steward’s weird obsession with Israel as the unique world evil comes to the Vanguard. Let’s rip it to shreds, shall we?
Steward frames the piece as a broad indictment of “establishment” Democrats, but it quickly becomes clear that this is a single-issue morality play with supporting characters. Health care, housing, and climate are present, but only as scenery. Israel is the obsession. In Steward’s formulation, being “progressive except for Palestine” voids everything else, as if domestic policy accomplishments are provisional until Israel is handled “correctly”.
Money is where Steward’s argument takes on its most peculiar shape, especially once AIPAC appears. It is not treated as one lobby among many, but as something darker and more corrupting by definition. The dollar amount is emphasized, not to show illegality or quid pro quo, but to signal moral contamination. Steward never quite explains why AIPAC money is uniquely disqualifying while other ideological or issue-based PACs are merely regrettable. Do a google search on where AIPAC falls in the list influence, relative to foreign money pouring in from many nations, including Israel’s ‘neighbors’, and expand to money pouring in to college campii from those same ‘neighbors’. AIPAC ain’t a flea on a gnat’s butt, or whatever that saying is. But, y’know, the Jews, eh, SS, antizionist, much?
Cryptocurrency donations are dragged in as well, which only highlights the pattern. Steward piles unrelated funding sources together to create a vibe of corruption rather than an argument. There is no claim that AIPAC broke the law, coordinated improperly, or even demanded specific votes. The insinuation is enough. Saying “AIPAC” is meant to end the conversation, not start one. For strange rangers obsessed with, y’know, the Jews.
When Steward turns to policy, the imbalance is glaring. ACA versus Medicare for All gets a drive-by mention. Housing, education, and climate are treated as assumed virtues rather than contested policy arenas. Israel, by contrast, gets accounting tables, moral language, and a footnote about Gaza aid framed as misleading. Steward scrutinizes money closely only when it flows through AIPAC, which raises the obvious question of why this lobby, alone, merits that level of suspicion. Maybe its . . . naw, couldn’t be . . .
The Israel Security Supplemental vote is waved away by Steward as an “excuse,” a word choice that preemptively delegitimizes any rationale other than his own. Gaza aid is minimized without sourcing, while the specter of mass harm is invoked. The shadow of AIPAC hovers over this section, doing rhetorical work without being directly argued, as if its presence alone explains everything that follows. That’s true, if you are obsessed with some weird magical power by that group of people . . . or that country . . . what is that name again?
Steward’s generational pitch doesn’t escape this gravity either. The “next generation” is defined less by policy skill than by ritual rejection of certain kinds of money, with AIPAC elevated above all other PACs as the ultimate proof of moral failure. Labor PACs, environmental PACs, tech PACs all fade into the background. Steward’s fixation suggests not a general anti-lobby stance, but a very specific hierarchy of suspicion on one group of people . . . what is that name? Starts with a “J” I think.
The pivot to California only reinforces the point. Steward uses a North Carolina race as a proxy to lecture . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . I’ll give you one guess based on the door in Woodland that Steward most frequently stands with sign protesting — yes it’s that unique obession ladies and germs: Mike Thompson!!!, barely engaging his long record on domestic policy while zeroing in again on military and Israel funding that is pretty much standard for members of congress – but someone fixated upon Thompson by Steward. Even praise is conditional. Signing the right bill buys a momentary reprieve, but the underlying sin, proximity to AIPAC, remains. Because of those . . . #ooooooscaryghostnoises# . . . what was the name of that group of people, with that tiny tiny country surrounded by dozens of giant nations, most of which expelled their people?
By the end, Steward calls for “new leadership,” but what that really means is leadership purified of the wrong associations. Capitulation doesn’t mean failing to deliver housing or health care. It means taking money from the “wrong” lobby and voting the “wrong way” on that tiny tiny country, the only country of refuge for a people pogromed and expelled and finally able to have a military to protect themselves, even as groups of religious extremists still ideologically obsessed with their destruction remain, and proxy funding from the “Big I” funds them, though significantly less than before the five-front war started 10/7/23. Steward never quite says why AIPAC is uniquely sinister, but the implication hangs there, heavy and unresolved. Maybe it’s because . . . naw, couldn’t be . . .
A broad-minded world is hard for some people to understand. Maybe Zionism is no longer able to hold water with a world that wants to recognize the inherent dignity of every person with policies that redistribute the rewards of an increasingly productive society. Articles are hard to write for critics who don’t have relevance. We are very used to this tattered attempt to delegitimize what is plainly observed and reported.
👍👍
“A broad-minded world is hard for some people to understand.”
What is a “broad-minded world,” exactly? Name it. Is Hamas broad-minded? Are the Ayatollahs broad-minded? Is Hezbollah? House of Saud? If not, why are they implicitly exempt from your moral universe while Israel is singled out for correction.?You don’t define the term, you just wield it as a personality diagnosis, which conveniently allows you to avoid engaging a single argument I actually made.
“Maybe Zionism is no longer able to hold water with a world that wants to recognize the inherent dignity of every person with policies that redistribute the rewards of an increasingly productive society.”
Here’s where it slips from vague moralizing into something concrete and ugly. Redistribute, from whom, to whom, and why only here? Why do only the seven million Jews in Israel need to “redistribute” to earn their moral standing? Why not Qatar? Why not Saudi Arabia? Why not the two billion Muslims globally, many governed by monarchies or theocracies with staggering inequality. Why is redistribution framed as a uniquely Jewish obligation from our tiny world population. Spell it out, because right now it reads less like economics and more like ‘selective moral bookkeeping’, probably bigotry.
“Articles are hard to write for critics who don’t have relevance.”
That’s not an argument, it’s a dodge. You didn’t respond to AIPAC being treated as uniquely evil among all lobbying funds. You didn’t respond to the single-issue obsession with Israel. You didn’t respond to the absence of proportionality or evidence. You just waved the word “relevance” like a credit check. If this is what relevance looks like, it seems mostly useful for avoiding substance. Prove to me your greater relevance, or at least explain your path to seeing it that way. Stating something as ‘obvious’ is not evidence, it just shows you obviously have no argument..
“We are very used to this tattered attempt to delegitimize what is plainly observed and reported.”
Nothing you “observed and reported” was challenged as unknowable. It was challenged as selective, obsessive, and rhetorically dishonest. You didn’t defend your fixation on Israel. You didn’t explain why AIPAC is uniquely sinister. You didn’t engage the redistribution asymmetry. You didn’t answer why Israel alone is burdened, by you, with your moral theory.
The total absence of argument, evidence, or engagement is the clearest proof of irrelevance on display here.
👍👍
The gang of II. – The inability to see that contempt is not a trait of good leadership. This is probably why the detractors of the information in my article can’t identify with any part of the content that might suggest that Arabs Muslims (Christian, Buddhist etc.), Palestinians, and combinations thereof, are people too.
Allam represents a governance that emphasizes an accessible and lasting path to housing, healthcare, and education. The kinds of votes for or attempts to create policy around do not reflect the same direct no nonsense “get-it-done” integrity that Allam has demonstrated as a County Commissioner. That’s why she will win.
“The gang of II.”
Two the who now?
“The inability to see that contempt is not a trait of good leadership.”
What contempt are you speaking of by who?
“This is probably why the detractors of the information in my article can’t identify with any part of the content that might suggest that Arabs Muslims (Christian, Buddhist etc.), Palestinians, and combinations thereof, are people too.”
No one denied anyone’s humanity. Whre did anyone do that? You are substituting moral accusation for argument, and doing it without evidence. Worse, you still refuse to explain why affirming the humanity of Arabs and Palestinians requires an obsessive focus on Israel alone, or why other actors are exempt from your moral attack framework. You imply dehumanization but you cannot answer criticism. You are simply ‘right’ because: obviously you are. It’s observable. And why is “Christian, Buddhist etc.” in parenthesis after “Muslim” ? Make it make sense!
“Allam represents a governance that emphasizes an accessible and lasting path to housing, healthcare, and education.”
If you say so.
“The kinds of votes for or attempts to create policy around do not reflect the same direct no nonsense ‘get-it-done’ integrity that Allam has demonstrated as a County Commissioner.”
Which votes? Which attempts? Which policies? What grammar? Which integrity, specifically? You contrast without comparing, praise without proving.
“That’s why she will win.”
Maybe so, but that prediction does not follow from anything argued, because nothing was argued. It is confidence without content, certainty without analysis. You end exactly where you began, asserting moral authority while refusing to engage a single substantive point raised against those arguments. Again, who is actually struggling with relevance?
“Articles are hard to write for critics who don’t have relevance.”
We will see on election day who has relevance. My prediction is Mike Thompson shows you how little traction your scene has locally. Time will tell.
Maybe. On the other hand, we saw a few years ago, AOC took out a pretty high ranking establishment figure, so this will be an interesting test in our own backyard.
Thompson’s challenger is no AOC and Napa isn’t Brooklyn.
Perhaps. But he does have resources. Time will tell. This is one of the races I’m watching to see if there is a shift on the left to match the one on the right.
All the dude has is money. No voting record. Two weeks ago Thompson’s opponent had my friend Dillian Horton and some guy claiming to be his brother tabling at the Farmers Market. That same week Mike Thompson held an Anti-ICE rally, was at the Firefighter’s Union Crab Feed to raise money to fight breast cancer benefiting the Think Pink scene and delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Yolo Food bank.
I’m not sure what you mean by “a shift on the left to match the one on the right”.
If we’re speaking Jew-hatred, there has certainly already been “a shift on the far-right to match the one on the far-left”. But I think you mean some other shift.
I wasn’t
Chicken and Egg when it was actually the Rooster :-|
AIPAC screwed up by demanding Trump-like fealty. It will be interesting to see if AIPAC can course correct.
Possibly so. So give to J Street instead. We live in the US and have that choice. I’m not sure it would matter to the critics if they took three ticks to the left — they’d likely still be demons in the critic’s eyes.