Justin Smeltzer

The endorsement by Democrat Haley Stevens of Republican Mike Rogers over Democrat @AbdulElSayed exposes the true character of the Democratic Party. It’s not only @HaleyforMI who has more in common with the Republican Party. The Democratic Party as a whole has very much a shared agenda with the Republican Party. Together, these parties are the two most powerful political institutions of global capitalism. Both parties represent the billionaires and multimillionaires and their profit extraction, mass exploitation, genocide, and imperialist war. Both parties are completely hostile to working-class, poor, and oppressed people. DSA electeds like @DarializaforNY are peddling the illusion that there is any possibility that the Democratic Party would “[fight] for the things working class voters want.” The Democratic Party is viciously opposed to working people. Under Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden, the Democratic Party refused to use their majorities in the House and Senate to do absolutely anything for the working class, whether an increase in the federal minimum wage, universal public healthcare, canceling student debt, or taxing the rich to fund our needs. Instead, among other rotten actions, they carried out financial deregulation to help the rich make a killing in profits and ravage the lives of tens of millions of working and poor people in the Great Recession, carried out a horrendous anti-immigrant agenda, invaded multiple nations and caused the deaths of millions of people, and led the active support for the genocide in Gaza. “Democratic socialists” like Chevalier and "progressives" like El-Sayed do the dirty work of whitewashing the Democratic Party’s record, even including the worst Democrats like genocidal Kamala Harris and Hakeem Jeffries. El-Sayed fully embraced Harris on the Michigan campaign trail. Chevalier has shamefully refused to pledge to vote against Jeffries for House Speaker, and instead appears to be greasing the wheels publicly for a potential yes vote by romanticizing Jeffries as the first Black speaker and "bringing the speakership to New York." The working class cannot afford to fall for these lies again and urgently needs a party of our own.

Solidarity with Jane Doe and other survivors of rape and sexual violence. Solidarity with the protests on Cornell campus and other protests happening nationwide this week. What has taken place at Cornell is unspeakable, but it is part of an overall pattern of sexual violence that needs to be directly confronted. Rape, sexual assault, misogyny, and oppression are intrinsic to capitalism, and are used by the wealthy and privileged to exploit the marginalized with impunity. We need mass student and labor action in order to fight against sexism and exploitation. We demand: 👉 The Cornell Seven rapists must be arrested and convicted for the gang rape and other crimes, including in relation to their horrifying group text messages. 👉 An independent investigation must be conducted into all the sexual assaults at Cornell by a team that is elected by the protest movement and includes students, social workers, and rank-and-file union members. 👉 Similar elected independent investigation teams must be set up at all campuses with fraternities to bring to light rapes and other sexual assaults and cases of extreme bullying and hazing. 👉 Fraternities must be banned from all campuses nationwide. Studies have found that fraternity members are three times more likely to rape than other male students. 👉 Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff must resign. Kotlikoff and the entire Cornell administration must be investigated for their utter inability and refusal to take campus sexual violence seriously. A 2025 survey found that about one in three women at Cornell have reported experiencing sexual assault. 👉 Unions on Cornell campus, such as the United Auto Workers, the Communication Workers of America, the Teamsters, and the Cornell Graduate Students must call for a one-day strike and campus shutdown, and escalate further if needed, in order to help win these demands. The Democratic and Republican parties represent the interests of the rich and powerful, and uphold the oppressive and sexist system of capitalism at all costs. We need a new independent party of the working class that fights against all forms of oppression. Such a party would be a historic step toward what is urgently needed: a revolutionary struggle to overthrow the capitalist system, which breeds violence, rape, and oppression, and replace it with a socialist world.

Solidarity with WA State Ferries workers in the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA) union in their fight for 20 percent raises! MEBA members operate, maintain and repair the engine rooms of Washington State Ferries. Democratic Governor Ferguson and the Democrat-dominated State Legislature have put forward a stunning ZERO-PERCENT-raise contract! MEBA members are fed up and angry. @wrkrsstrikeback and I stand in full solidarity with their sickouts! Public sector workers everywhere are facing the brutal impact of budget shortfalls that have been engineered by the Democratic and Republican parties who refuse to tax the rich. In Washington State, this means public-sector workers have been offered ZERO PERCENT raises across the board after two years that saw a 6 percent inflation rate and the billionaires and multimillionaires massively increasing their wealth. MEBA members have also been fighting to close a shocking 20-percent wage gap with comparable industry jobs for nearly a decade, so the recent ZERO-PERCENT-raise contract adds insult to injury. MEBA members are going on the offensive with sickouts. This is setting an example of the kind of fightback that the labor movement needs. Unfortunately, the leadership of most labor unions have refused to lead any kind of fight against the attacks on workers. The leadership of the Washington Federation of State Employees accepted ZERO-PERCENT-raise contracts this year without organizing any significant action against this rotten deal. Rank-and-file union members will need to organize around fighting demands and strategies and overcome the obstacle of union leaders who refuse to fight.

The Democratic Party in Seattle, led by so-called “socialist” Mayor Katie Wilson, is proposing massive budget cuts for crucial city programs, while at the same time putting forward an additional $68 million for the already massively bloated police budget! Join me and @wrkrsstrikeback at a speakout at Seattle City Hall tomorrow, Tuesday October 6th, at 4pm. We demand: 👉 Slash the police budget! 👉 No cuts to the public services working people rely on, which are being dramatically underfunded while the ultra rich make historic profits! 👉 Raise the Amazon Tax to massively expand affordable housing and fully fund education and other services! RSVP to attend the speakout: workersstrikeback.org/events… Wilson's budget would be a huge 14% increase in the police funding, dramatically higher than increases by former Mayor Bruce Harrell. The massive funding increase to the police is a blatant betrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement. The proposed budget also includes a $65 million cut from funding for affordable housing. Media reports indicate that some departments facing cuts include Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle Department of Transportation, the Office of Sustainability and Environment, and the Office of Civil Rights, all of which are vital for the needs of working people in this city. This is more evidence of the fact that the Democratic Party is a thoroughly pro-billionaire, anti-worker party, just like the Republican Party. We need leaders who are independent of both these rotten parties, leaders who will go to war against big business and the political establishment. That is the approach I took in my 2014-2023 decade on the Seattle City Council. I used my elected position to lead movements of working people to defeat the Democratic Party over and over again to win victories like the highest minimum wage in the nation, the Amazon Tax, landmark renters' rights laws. My City Council office was, unfortunately, a unique example in our times, which is why I co-founded the national organization of Workers Strike Back, to continue the fighting strategy I used in my office by launching mass movements and mobilizing working people. Join me and Workers Strike Back, at a speakout at Seattle City Hall tomorrow, Tuesday October 6th at 4pm. We demand: 👉 Slash the police budget! 👉 No cuts to the public services working people rely on, which are being dramatically underfunded while the ultra rich make historic profits! 👉 Raise the Amazon Tax to massively expand affordable housing and fully fund education and other services! RSVP to attend the speakout: workersstrikeback.org/events…

The University of Michigan administration is spending a shocking $850 million to build a data center for nuclear weapons research. Join @wrkrsstrikeback, antiwar activists, and working people organizing against these data centers! Protest on Thursday, October 1, 2026 4:30 PM-6:30 PM Ann Arbor Marriott at Eagle Crest in Ypsilanti 1275 South Huron Street Ypsilanti, Michigan, 48197 Workers Strike Back is mobilizing to demand that U-M end all funding to the nuclear weapons data center project in Ypsilanti. We need to disrupt the business-as-usual of both the U-M admin and the Democratic and Republican parties in Michigan. We need mass action against these data centers, including mass civil disobedience and strike action. We demand: 👉 Stop the U-M Data Center! No Funding for Weapons of Imperialist War! 👉 Tax the Billionaire Tech and Energy Giants - Fund Affordable Housing, Free Healthcare, and All Our Needs! 👉 Take Big Tech and the Major Energy Companies into Democratic Worker Ownership!

Democratic @NYCMayor Zohran Mamdani promised during his campaign that he would arrest Netanyahu if he set foot in NYC. Since then, Mamdani has abandoned this promise, and recently announced that he will not be joining the protest campaign against Netanyahu. Instead, under Mamdani's leadership, the NYPD is arresting antiwar activists protesting Netanhayu. This is a horrific betrayal of the antiwar movement and the Palestinian people. Mamdani also re-hired Zionist and billionaire heir Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner and endorsed Governor Kathy Hochul for re-election and Congressmember Hakeem Jeffries for U.S. House Speaker, both of whom are arch Zionist Democrats. The strategy of putting faith in the Democratic Party or in DSA's elected Democrats is a dead end for the antiwar movement. @wrkrsstrikeback is calling for a new antiwar working class party. - Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes! - End all military aid to Israel! Permanent arms embargo on Israel now! - End the genocide in Gaza and brutal occupation of Palestinian lands! - Build an independent antiwar working-class party!

I will be visiting the Israeli-occupied West Bank later this month, thanks to the incredible efforts of activists and organizers on the ground in the West Bank and @BeIfrd in Europe. I will be talking to Palestinians and Palestinian Americans about the holocaust being carried out by the Israeli state and the brutality of the decades of occupation. Our goal will be to help further expose the horrors taking place on Palestinian lands. I will also be visiting Palestinian children in Egypt and Turkey, all of whom are sole survivors of their families and have suffered untold atrocities. All of these children have personally faced Israeli bombardment and have had to undergo limb amputations. The Israeli state, empowered by U.S. imperialism and war-profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires, has continued the genocide in Gaza for well over a thousand days. At the same time, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has dramatically escalated, both directly from the Israeli state forces and from state-sanctioned, right-wing settlers. In total, since the genocide began, Israel has killed over a thousand people in the West Bank and inflicted incalculable damage on Palestinian homes and farms. Nothing short of smashing the apartheid state of Israel will end the indescribable suffering of the Palestinian people. For that, working-class militant movements in the United States will be crucial because Israel exists as a garrison state for the economic and geopolitical interests of the American capitalist class and other imperialist powers. This also means that it is a fool’s errand to place any faith in either the Democratic Party or Republican Party, as both are parties of the war-profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires. The strategy of the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of supporting careerist Democratic Party politicians is a complete dead end for the Palestinian cause. Anything other than leadership to build an antiwar movement that unambiguously fights against both the Democratic and Republican parties will lead to further betrayals of the Palestinian people.

Read my new article in @NatCounterPunch. counterpunch.org/2026/08/28/… Contrary to his claims of wanting to protect unions, NYC Mayor Mamdani’s threat of lawsuit against $10,000 bonuses to grossly underpaid teaching assistants (members of UFT union) is because he wants to comply with the odiously anti-union Taylor law. The Taylor Law bans any gains for NYC public-sector unions from City legislation and ALSO bans strikes. Overturning the Taylor Law should be a top priority of Mamdani and other “democratic socialists,” not to enforce it against some of the city’s poorest-paid workers. Business unionist labor leaders like 17-year UFT President Michael Mulgrew have allowed the dire situation to worsen over decades. We need a reckoning in the labor movement, and class struggle unionism to replace business unionism. Class struggle unionism also means a fight against both the Democratic and Republican parties — the opposite of the DSA leadership's strategy.

Mamdani, currently the most prominent public figure of the Democratic Socialists of America, continues to support genocidal Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House if the Democrats win a majority. Mamdani maintains this position even though Jeffries has been further exposed recently over a private meeting with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to see "how Democrats and the [Trump] administration could work together." The Democratic Party simply offers NO WAY FORWARD for our movements to win victories for working people, defeat Trump and the right wing, and end the genocide and occupation. The DSA leadership's project of trying to launder the Democratic Party's reputation and build up their own track record of betrayals is a total dead end. We need a new party of, by, and for the working class - one that will build fighting movements against the billionaires and to bring down BOTH of their parties.

The two most prominent DSA electeds, AOC and Zohran Mamdani, are betraying in broad daylight the movement against racism and police brutality. There is zero prospect for movements to succeed in slashing the $120-billion budget of U.S. police departments, shutting down ICE, and ending the genocide in Gaza unless we fight against both the Democratic and Republican parties. This also means exposing the progressive and DSA Democratic Party politicians when they act as gatekeepers and betray our movements.

Our campaign was by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress. We've so far won a historic 16.9 percent of the vote in a five-way race, in Washington’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District, which spans suburban areas with a significant proportion of Republican voters in addition to large parts of the major urban areas of Seattle and Bellevue. We ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally. We achieved this result despite the many obstacles we faced. Both the Democratic and Republican parties maneuvered by running candidates specifically to block our campaign from getting into the November election, which would have resulted in a head-to-head battle between our campaign and genocidal Democrat Adam Smith. We faced a corporate media blackout, and hostility and outright attacks from DSA leaders and many "progressive" podcasters. Many labor leaders shamelessly endorsed Adam Smith, while others remained silent, effectively supporting Smith. All of these obstacles were predictable. Our decade on the Seattle City Council showed what a threat we are to the political establishment and those who give them cover. We used our decade on the Seattle City Council to relentlessly build working-class movements, winning four elections and unparalleled victories such as the nation's highest minimum wage, which also led to substantive raises for tens of millions of workers across the United States, defeating Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and repeatedly beating corporate landlords to win unprecedented renters' rights. Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers. The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around. We urgently need militant movements of the working class and a new mass party that can defeat the billionaires and both their parties. And we need revolutionary socialist campaigns like mine that don't try to join the establishment and help administer the capitalist system, but instead fight to overthrow it.

Okay, here we are, it's PRIMARY ELECTION DAY today. If you are in Washington state's Ninth Congressional District and haven't voted yet for our socialist antiwar campaign yet but you have been meaning to: PLEASE VOTE NOW!! DON'T PUT IT OFF! We need your vote to help us get into the November election and have a chance to defeat genocidal billionaire-backed Zionist-lobby-bankrolled Democrat Adam Smith!

My campaign is honored to be endorsed by Norway's Peace and Justice Party, FOR @FredogRett, and their leader, @marielleLeraand International working-class solidarity is central to ending genocide and imperialist wars, climate catastrophe, and the exploitation of billions of people. "For many in FOR, Kshama has been a moral compass, a rare example of a politician whose words are matched by action. She lives what she advocates for. Her consistency over the years has earned her genuine respect from the left. "FOR endorses her because her platform is rooted in our own values."

News flash for Adam Smith! Working people and I won the nation’s first major-city $15/hour minimum wage TWELVE YEARS AGO (Seattle's minimum wage is now $21.30 because we won inflation adjustment)! Since we won, workers in cities and states around the country, including in so-called “red states” have won $15/hour. Another newsflash for Smith: In 2026, $15/hour is nowhere near enough! This is why I’m campaigning for a $25/hour federal minimum wage. It should be at least $30/hour in major cities. Help us GET OUT THE VOTE NOW for the August 4th primary election! kshamasawant.org

This week, the House Ways and Means Committee, in conjunction with Trump officials, have subpoenaed The Peoples Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research for financial records, internal communications, and organizational records. The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), CODEPINK, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Venceremos Brigade, and IFCO/Pastors for Peace are also under intense scrutiny. These organizations have been active participants in the fight against the unspeakable genocidal assault on Gaza since 2023, the holocaust of the 21st century. This subpoena shows a dangerous escalation of the tactics by Trump and the right wing to dismantle the antiwar left. My Congressional campaign stands in solidarity with all the organizations under attack. When Trump took office in 2025, one of his first acts with ICE was to round up all the protesters who played key roles in the student encampments against the genocide in Gaza. This subpoena is designed to have a similarly chilling effect on the antiwar movement, by targeting organizations that have been active in the fight against the genocide in Gaza, the horrific blockade and sanctions against the Cuban people, and against the terror campaign by ICE. Defeating Trump's attacks on working people and the antiwar movement will also mean fighting the Democratic Party, which represents the interests of the same billionaires and multimillionaires that fuel Trump and the right wing. My opponent, genocidal Democrat Adam Smith, is being bankrolled by AIPAC and other pro-genocide Zionist lobby groups as well as top weapons CEOs and PACs for companies like Palentir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, Space X, and General Dynamics. Many of Smith’s campaign funders are the same corporations that have given large donations to Trump to carry out his vicious right-wing agenda. Smith has voted repeatedly to fund the genocide in Gaza, to create and fund ICE, for imperialist wars in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. Just last December, Smith cosponsored the $906 billion war budget that gave free rein to Trump's war on Iran that has left a trail of blood. Both of these parties have blood all over their hands. Their representatives like Trump, Marco Rubio, and Adam Smith need to go. In contrast, my independent socialist campaign for Congress is fighting for a complete and permanent arms embargo on Israel and to stop all imperialist wars by cutting off all weapons and tech. My campaign is also fighting to shut down ICE and the detention centers and for a new party for the working class. We are fighting for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich and we are fighting to bring down Trump, the billionaires, and both their parties. kshamasawant.org/fight-trump…

A perennial complaint from genocidal Democrat Adam Smith has been that antiwar and left activists supposedly just don't know how to have a "civil" debate and that left activists talk over people they disagree with. In terms of "civil" debate, at yesterday's @BreakingPointsN interview, Smith barely allowed @krystalball to even finish a question. He did a live demonstration of how to talk nonstop over people he disagrees with. He continously interrupted Krystal Ball during the entire 45-minute interview. It's Adam Smith who is so afraid of actual debate that he refused to show up to the one and only debate that was to happen in this primary election, which was the @TheStranger endorsement interview. He could have agreed at anytime to have a public debate with me during this primary election. Instead, he sent a pouting letter to The Stranger and hid from our socialist campaign. It's no surprise. He's getting called out for his horrible 29-year record of actively supporting Zionism, war, genocide, and brutal austerity for American working people. It's long past time to throw this guy out. I'm running against him as an independent antiwar socialist in the August 4th primary election. My campaign is calling for an end to all military aid to Israel, for a permanent arms embargo on Israel, for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and for national rent control. Donate and get involved at kshamasawant.org