Jeffries Speaker fight drags on, Florida subpoenas DSA, Palestinian-American challenges Fetterman’s Senate seat, Fox can’t quit Hasan Piker, early 2028 AOC buzz, and more in this edition of “Red All Over,” Democratic Left’s weekly news roundup.

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Socialists come together in a very “red” area to challenge a lobbyist-dominated local government.

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In a period of hyperpolitics defined by intense civil strife that produces a thin layer of institution-building, Zohran Mamdani’s rise shows similar limits. The left must now meet immediate political demands of governance through organizations that have never held such power.

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Akbar Shahid Ahmed reveals the structural arrogance of the Biden administration as it enabled genocide in Gaza.

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I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, where the adults around me always vaguely referred to our city as having a “homelessness problem.” I’d been told that homelessness was exacerbated by heroin addiction, something I never had reason or method to verify, but which seemed accurate enough based on the long, lingering stares and slumped over silhouettes that were common to witness. One day as a high schooler in the summer of 2015, I sat across from a homeless man on Pacific Avenue, who struck up a conversation and asked me what my aspirations were. In response, I mentioned I was applying to college. 

“Good,” said the man. “As long as you don’t join the army.”

“Were you in the army?” I asked. The man nodded.

“And they’ll never tell you this,” he said, “but the war in Afghanistan was only ever about drugs.”

At the time, I nodded politely, but started to doubt the direction the conversation was taking. My head was full of AP United States History knowledge; I knew we had Reagan to blame for the war on drugs and Bush to blame for the war in Afghanistan, but as far as a connection between drugs and Afghanistan, I didn’t think there was one.

“All I ever did was guard poppy fields,” the man explained. “Heroin,” he added, noticing my confused stare. 

Since this conversation, I’ve gained a college education, witnessed record breaking data spikes in overdose deaths, and read several bombshell accounts that further emphasized the truth about drug trafficking in the United States: Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, and Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel. Though the opioid crisis has become more universally recognized (yet not solved), the role of imperialism in the drug politics of the United States remains largely obscured to the public and easy for most people to doubt as I once did as a teenager. The Trump administration would like Americans to believe that drugs are a foreign threat crossing into our nation—it’s how they convince Americans to bolster border policy, escalate anti-immigrant attitudes, support foreign wars, and turn a blind eye toward big pharma. The myths surrounding drugs form some of the most dangerous contemporary right-wing propaganda. Our best chance at collapsing this rhetoric is to engage a meticulous, historically informed comprehension of how drugs reach the United States in the first place—not as a foreign threat, but as an imperial import. 

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: DRUGS ALL OVER THE MAP

The precedent for drug-favoring imperialism was set in the 20th century. Perhaps the first stand-out region is the “Golden Triangle,” where the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet. In 1972, Alfred McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, revealed years of CIA involvement in the regional drug trade. At the time he wrote the expose, Southeast Asia grew “about 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply” (McCoy 244). 

As U.S. troops exited the region at the end of our involvement in the Vietnam war, the local market for heroin shrank, and bulk shipments to the U.S.  increased (McCoy 245). The refineries that produced the majority of the Golden Triangle’s heroin product were located mostly in “areas totally controlled  by paramilitary groups closely identified with American military operations,” with the largest refinery operating in Laos, where the Meo region’s population was channeled into a thirty thousand person army faction that allied with the United States (McCoy 248).  Heroin production flourished in areas where the American CIA supported the armed forces in power, though this was mostly publicly overshadowed by atrocities in Vietnam. Still, “rather than sending U.S. combat troops into Laos,” for any intervention on the region’s largest heroin refinery, “four successive presidents and their foreign policy advisors worked through the CIA to build the Meo into the only effective army in Laos” (McCoy 264).  That same Meo army would collaborate with the U.S. military to add Air America landing strips throughout Laos, which were subsequently used by planes from many different nations to transport opium out of Laos and into global markets (McCoy 274-277). 

Soon, the pattern of drug-favoring imperialism continued in South America, a story that first came to public knowledge due to Gary Webb’s reporting with the San Jose Mercury News, and his subsequent 1998 book, Dark Alliance. From 1936 to 1971, the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua, doing “nearly everything that the United States asked,” from assisting in the 1954 coup in Guatemala to providing a secret base to the U.S. to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba (Webb 21). The United States sent “millions of dollars a year supplying weapons” to the Nicaraguan National Guard, also known as the Guardia, and instructing the officers “in the complex arts of anticommunism,” an obvious effort to maintain U.S. capitalist supremacy (Webb 22). By 1979,  Anastacio Somoza was coerced into leaving Nicaragua and exiling himself first to Florida, and then Paraguay. Human rights violations by his troops were a bad look; new U.S. president Jimmy Carter did not want to continue supporting Somoza in these, and thus he was being retired. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the United States “were worried about cocaine,” primarily an expensive South American drug (Webb 23). “The experts were careful to note that if cocaine became cheaper, it would be more widely available” and riskier to public health and safety (Webb 25). An inexpensive new format of the drug was to smoke it rather than snort it, which led to a different erratic effect on behavior of the user. Top U.S. public health officials wrote reports warning the government to take action via education and public health endeavors, but “congress and the Carter administration did exactly the opposite” and followed the DEA’s suggestion instead to attempt to wipe out the coca plant in South America (Webb 35). This was ineffective, and Carter soon left office in 1981. 

In the new decade, things were different: Ronald Reagan was president, and in Nicaragua, many former members of the Guardia reformed into “the Contras,” unified by the CIA, and sent to Argentina and Miami, Florida for training. “Fighting communism” was the reason, of course, for the U.S. to invest in the Contras in the first place, but a connection to drug trafficking quickly followed.  A former Somoza ally, Danilo Blandòn, purchased Contra-produced cocaine from Norwin Meneses, and sold it to South Central Los Angeles drug dealer Ricky Ross. Crack cocaine was sold in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, creating an uptick in crack cocaine addiction. The Contras’ fight against communism was thus financially supported by an expanding population of drug addicts from Los Angeles. When Blandòn was arrested in 1986, he confessed to his serious drug offenses. Though precedent should have placed him in prison for life, Blandòn was freed after 28 months and hired as a DEA informant, while Norwin Meneses was never arrested and instead,  joined the DEA from 1985 to 1991 (Webb xxi).

The most recent frontier: Afghanistan

The imperial frontier shifted yet again as the 1980s came to a violent close. In Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel, he starts by explaining a CIA campaign from the Reagan administration that drove out Russian occupiers from Afghanistan, yet again for the sake of suffocating communism, and once more, with a drug-related consequence. The effort was successful: Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. “For the next five years, the country suffered under the chaotic misrule of disputatious warlords,” whilst two members of Mujahideen (guerrilla fighters who, with the CIA’s backing,  had successfully ousted the Russians), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Nasim Akhundzada, “turned Afghanistan into a giant plantation for the cultivation of of the opium poppy plant” (Harp 43). Afghan people were thus coerced into “narco-serfdom,” pressured to grow poppy instead of food crops, in the early 1990s. When the Taliban emerged in 1994, their popularity in Afghanistan “mainly stemmed from their tough-on-crime policies,” which included a ban on poppy cultivation (Harp 44). In fact, during the summer of 2001, the Taliban “completed a country-wide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin” (Harp 44).

Where most Americans are familiar with entering the story, is not the CIA prequel, of course, but the events of 9/11, which happened right after aTaliban-led global heroin reduction in the summer of 2001. Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial flights in the United States, using the planes to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and attempted to attack a third target, often speculated to be the U.S. Capitol building. Osama Bin Laden, then leader of al-Qaeda, took credit for the attack, and Bush began his global war on terror, starting with the invasion of Afghanistan. Most Americans were on board; by the end of September 2001, Bush had a 90% approval rating. Within congress, the solitary vote against a military response in Afghanistan was famously that of Representative Barbara Lee.

So began the 21st century wave of prolonged conflict in the Middle East, with comorbidities of surveillance capitalism and legalized torture. In 2002, The Northern Alliance pushed the Taliban out of Kabul, and Osama Bin Laden was chased into the White Mountains to await a later fate during the Obama administration. “That one of the first official acts of the newly installed U.S.-backed Afghan government was to legalize poppy planting went all but unremarked,” by Americans, Harp points out (Harp 47). It was at this line that I felt chills on my skin, remembering the conversation I had with the homeless veteran over 10 years ago. “The war in Afghanistan was only ever about drugs,” he had told me.

Whether seeing the military as heroes that rightfully neutralize threats in far away places, or as imperialists that meddle where they shouldn’t, the default concept of our military across political leanings is still that of an outward facing institution. The strength of Harp’s book is an incessant emphasis on the domestic threat of the military, revealing the other side of the coin for an institution that we’re told only aims at our “enemies.” 

The main actors identified in The Fort Bragg Cartel were William “Billy” Lavigne, a Delta Force officer with a suspicious record of drug abuse and killing fellow soldier Mark Leshikar in so-called self-defense; Timothy Dumas, a fellow soldier and drug dealer, and Freddie Wayne Huff, a former DEA agent turned drug dealer. In February 2019, Dumas brought a thumb drive to Huff, which contained a blackmail letter. Four of Harp’s sources independently described the content of the letter as addressed to a high ranking general and including a list of service members who were transporting “commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan’s marquee nation product into the United States” to sell to the market of American drug users (Harp 182). Dumas instructed Huff to release the letter if anything ever were to happen to him. 

In December 2020, Lavigne, and Dumas were both found shot dead in a rural wooded area near McArthur Lake, beside a truck that was stuck at an odd angle in a trail rut. An off-duty soldier stumbled upon the crime scene while deer hunting, and called 911. The responding team to the scene were military police, and they quickly constructed  a theory that Lavigne, an addict, owed someone drug money, and that Dumas, a dealer, had been hired by a higher level dealer to kill Lavigne. They theorized that Dumas brought a third person in to get the job done, and that this mystery individual betrayed Dumas after the truck got stuck, killing him too to make a fast getaway. 

Within days, Huff was under investigation as a suspect in the murder of Lavigne and Dumas, and after five months, he was arrested for drug trafficking. At this point, “the task force swept up all the electronic devices” that belonged to Huff, which according to Huff  included the thumb drive, and therefore the letter which named “the members of a drug cartel embedded in the Special Forces at Fort Bragg” (Harp 224-225). The thumb drive was logged as evidence, then locked away. 

“Huff described the blackmail letter that Dumas had written,” and revealed the thumb drive’s location while bargaining for a plea deal,  believing it would be important to their investigation into who really murdered the two soldiers. “But to his surprise, they seemed uninterested in this information” (Harp 287).  Harp, with permission from Huff, “requested that the police department turn over the thumb drive on the grounds that the case against Huff [had] been fully adjudicated” at that point, and the thumb drive was Huff’s personal property (Harp 309). The police department agreed to provide a digital copy of its contents, but within a few days of this promise, Harp was contacted with unfortunate news—the detective who went to copy the drive claims he found it empty of any files. Harp was left with no means to verify this, and the drive itself is still languishing in the Winston-Salem Police Department’s evidence room. In 2023, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against a young Black man, Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr., accusing him of both the murder of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas, and related drug trafficking charges and destruction of evidence. The indictment has not been made public and the trial is pending. 

The war on drugs

In the 21st century, it’s easy to see the Middle East as a place where the U.S. has continually mutated the same war repeatedly into new forms—the left largely sees this as the Bush family legacy. But a more historically informed view, with the precedent of McCoy and Webb’s reporting, is important to keep in mind. It’s not just wars in the Middle East that shapeshift, and the Bush presidencies are not isolated incidents. The war on drugs itself has mutated, and the global infrastructure of drug trade has easily adapted across borders and administrations. 

The term “the war on drugs” comes from Reagan himself, when he declared at a 1986 press conference that we were actively in “another war for our freedom,” against drug addiction, parallel to World War II, and thus in need of a patriotic response. In terms of the policies that Reagan came up with, the most famous are mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenders, and stop and frisk searches which are largely carried out via racial profiling. These laws criminalized drug users for consuming the very product that Reagan’s foreign policy had brought into the United States. Mandatory minimums led to incarcerations in cases that previously would not have led to imprisonment, and Black and Brown individuals were more likely to be convicted. This mass incarceration of people of color was an act of voter suppression—like Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, the wave of felony convictions took away voting rights specifically from Black men. 

One of Reagan’s lesser known laws is the 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, which enabled the U.S. Military to cooperate with domestic and foreign law enforcement agencies. It’s this law that I think is most pertinent to keep in mind when considering how history has led us to the contemporary moment. Evolved from the traditional drug criminalization, the war on drugs now deploys ICE, a rogue paramilitary agency that defies any checks and balances or transparency, perpetuating a  moral panic about “foreign” cartels. 

According to President Trump, the United States is  fighting “narco-terrorists.” Drugs, supposedly, are the reason that Venezuela’s government has recently been targeted by the Trump administration, and the continually fabricated statement that ICE is heroically deporting cartel and gang members is cited as the justification for ex-judicial murders in our streets, and the torture of thousands in ICE detainment. Under this messaging, 38% of Americans believe that the benefits of using U.S. Military force to combat drug cartels in other countries outweigh the costs. Meanwhile, 22% believe that ICE’s violence within the United States is appropriate and 12% think ICE isn’t going far enough. It’s tempting to be soothed by percentages under 50%, but it’s a significant minority that’s responding affirmatively to ICE and military intervention in Latin America, and the murders ICE has committed are stacking up with an appalling lack of accountability, regardless of how many of us respond to a poll with a negative opinion of the agency. 

For true MAGA believers, paramilitary action from ICE is heroism against violent gang and cartel members. That ICE  and CBP receive equipment, training, and support from the military due to Reagan’s largely forgotten 1981 war on drugs policy, the Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, is something rarely cited in ongoing conversations about ICE and CBP.  I suspect if MAGA knew this, it would simply make them worship both the military and ICE even more than they already do. 

But in the context of The Fort Bragg Cartel’s revelations, and the historical precedent documented in Dark Alliance and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, it’s profoundly ironic. Each journalist’s research is a damning indictment of a long-hidden drug trade facilitated by none other than the U.S. Military and intelligence agencies. No matter how much propaganda claims to be fighting the influx of drugs, the truth is that our government facilitates their arrival. How we could get MAGA believers to ever part with their beloved misinformation about ICE and the military, I’m not totally sure. But I believe if progressives are to counter it, we must start by contending with the underlying logos of this faulty reasoning, which is a mutation of the war on drugs. If drug trafficking is so paramount to the justifications MAGA has for ICE, CBP, and imperialism in Venezuela, then we must be armed with more accurate information on how drugs enter our country, and then ask ourselves why these facts alone don’t seem to undo MAGA beliefs. The most current and blatant example of U.S. backed drug trade  is Fort Bragg—with more overdoses than any other military base, at least 24 murders between 2020 and 2024, and several other suspicious deaths, it’s teeming with signs of drug trafficking. The reality of this many soldiers overdosing and dying at a military base in a red state might be the crack in the drug narrative that can shift someone’s confidence in the misinformation they’ve been relying on.

narrative reinforcement of hegemony

As someone with an MFA in creative writing, I find propaganda interesting because it makes use of the human brain’s desire for a compelling narrative. It’s hard to deconstruct a story, because they’re built to make sense just like a math problem. Narrative endings are clean, definitive and memorable. The assumption of factuality and inevitability, which endings so neatly provide,  is crucial for the continuance of hegemony—the ubiquitous state of acceptance across a society that the systems they live under are natural, inevitable, and preferred. Deprecatingly, it’s the ease with which states can encourage people to act like sheep. 

Conceptualized by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1929-1935 Prison Notebooks, hegemony was described as having two separate mechanisms for states to enforce their ideologies through. Firstly, ideology was maintained through coercion from armies, police, or legal systems—in the context of what you’ve just read, that’ll include the CIA, the military, and ICE. But Gramsci also rightfully identified the power of generating consent, and hegemony is the word that encapsulates the universal acceptance of unquestionable truths, which ordinary people perpetuate and use to self-placate. 

 This might seem to be an inaccurate concept, because of how much Americans disagree when it comes to politics. But hegemony exists in our paradigms—like the belief that the military is only an external facing force rather than a simultaneous internal threat, or that coordinated efforts to create drug addiction crises in specific communities are too conspiratorial to be real. You can witness hegemony’s reach in the ways we apply plausible deniability to patterns, and give credence to chance and coincidence. It’s the reason I doubted what the homeless veteran told me about Afghanistan when I was a teenager.

When considering the revelations that are brought forth in the journalism of McCoy, Webb and Harp, we can’t only consider the coercive forces that they unravel. Equally as powerful in this miasma of drugs, violence, and secrecy is that little voice in the back of a reader’s head casting doubt on the conclusion that there’s something conspiratorial afoot. Hegemony is all about rejecting alternatives—whether it’s alternative systems or explanations, we’re poised to feel unsettled when refuting narratives, tempted to return to the comfort of the standardized story.

The step we need to take then, as leftists, is to understand that we’re not just fighting misinformation when it comes to MAGA. We’re undoing the hegemony that they build their beliefs on, and even sometimes toppling our own paradigms along the way. We’re collapsing myths that our class enemies have people rely on for a sense of comfort and security, which fundamentally undermines a sense of reality. Knowing how disquieting this experience must be, we must  approach our political hopes for an anti-imperialist  socialist future with proper respect for what narratives can do, though facts remain crucial. Underestimating the emotionality of losing a paradigmatic story, and thinking factuality alone can replace it without friction, is part of how we’re failing to contend with propaganda. It’s not just the facts that we have to be armed with, but the goal of writing new endings. We need narrative comprehension to use history as the actual story that it is, to lead people  toward a new politics for the future. To replace the comfort of lies that so many are fed, we can provide comfort and hope in the third act that lies ahead of us. 

References

Ackerman, Spencer, and Jeremy Scahill. “The Long-Lasting Consequences of the War on Terror.” The Intercept, September 3, 2021. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/01/intercepted-reign-of-terror-spencer-ackerman/. 

“The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack – FPIF.” Foreign Policy In Focus, May 8, 2013. https://fpif.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/. 

Gelman, Andrew, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss. “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 102, no. 479 (September 2007): 813–23. https://doi.org/10.1198/016214506000001040. 

“Guide to Investigating Organized Crime in the Golden Triangle.” Global Investigative Journalism Network, November 28, 2022. https://gijn.org/resource/guide-to-investigating-organized-crime-in-the-golden-triangle-introduction/. 

Harp, Seth. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. New York, NY: Viking, 2025. 

“How Mandatory Minimums Perpetuate Mass Incarceration and What to Do about It.” The Sentencing Project, 15 Feb. 2024, www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/how-mandatory-minimums-perpetuate-mass-incarceration-and-what-to-do-about-it/. 

Loffman, Matt. “Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Say Ice Has Gone Too Far in Immigration Crackdown.” PBS, February 5, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-nearly-two-thirds-of-americans-say-ice-has-gone-too-far-in-immigration-crackdown. 

Martin, James. “Antonio Gramsci.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 13, 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/#Hege. 

McCoy, Alfred W. Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Harper & Row, 1972. 

“New Report Details Ice’s Expanding and Increasingly Unaccountable Detention System.” American Immigration Council, July 16, 2026. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-expanding-detention-system/. 

Office, U.S. Government Accountability. “U.S. Gao.” Military Cooperation With Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies. Accessed August 15, 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/122004. 

“Presidential Approval Ratings – George W. Bush.” Gallup.com, February 9, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx. 

Reagan, Ronald. Address to the Nation on the Campaign Against Drug abuse. Accessed August 15, 2026. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-campaign-against-drug-abuse. 

Roberts, Roxanne. “Barbara Lee Doesn’t Feel Vindicated for Voting against Afghan War: ‘I Almost Wish … I Had Been Wrong’ – the Washington Post.” The Washington Post, August 18, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/08/18/barbara-lee-vote-afghanistan-war/. 

Skopic, Alex. “No War with Venezuela!” Current Affairs, October 28, 2025. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/no-war-with-venezuela. 

Tyson, Alec, and Annaleise Azevedo Lohr. “Most Americans Feel the Risks of Military Action against Drug Cartels Outweigh the Benefits.” Ipsos, December 18, 2025. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/most-americans-feel-risks-military-action-against-drug-cartels-outweigh-benefits. 

Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. 

Wolf, Zachary B. “The ‘war on Drugs’ Felt over. Donald Trump Restarted It.” CNN, December 6, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/06/politics/war-on-drugs-trump-boat-strikes-venezuela.