Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) rise and political future on “The Axios Show” on October 23, 2023. (Photo: Axios/screenshot)
In addition to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said the senator, “you’ve got a lot of great young people right now in the Progressive Caucus in the House… And that gives me a lot of optimism about our political future.”
Despite the Trump administration’s increasing assaults on immigrant communities, the political left, and the rule of law, US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday said he is optimistic “about our political future” when he looks at progressive leaders including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In excerpts of the latest episode of “The Axios Show” by the news outlet Axios, which is set to be released in full on Friday, Sanders (I-Vt.) weighed in on the recent news that Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is considering a presidential run in 2028.
When host Alex Thompson asked him whether Ocasio-Cortez would be a “formidable” candidate, Sanders replied, “I think she would.”
He added that a number of other Democratic elected officials would also be good candidates, and said the congresswoman’s future political moves are “her decision to make.” Ocasio-Cortez has also been named as a potential challenger to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2026.
Sanders spoke about Ocasio-Cortez’s ability to connect with voters she meets in person.
“I’ve been out on the streets with her, people come up, and how she responds to people is so incredibly genuine and open,” he said. “It’s just something that’s a gift that she has. It’s a quality that she has, she’s a great speaker out there.”
While progressive electoral successes like Ocasio-Cortez’s have often been dismissed by centrist Democrats and Republicans who claim left-wing candidates don’t have appeal outside of deep-blue urban areas like New York City, the congresswoman—who’s often called by her nickname, AOC—has received warm receptions in conservative, rural parts of the country, including when speaking to crowds of thousands with Sanders on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour this year.
“She comes from the working class, she was a kid who was cleaning houses with her mother,” he said. “She knows what it’s like not to have any money and she’s going out, fighting for working families all over this country.”
“I do want to say, it’s not just Alexandria,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of great young people right now in the Progressive Caucus in the House…I mean literally dozens… And that gives me a lot of optimism about our political future.”
Sanders also spoke about Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who is running a campaign focused on lifting up the working class in the primary against multiple candidates, including Gov. Janet Mills, as the party aims to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Platner has been the subject of controversy in recent days over deleted Reddit posts he wrote in the past and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol—one that he got while serving in the military and that didn’t prevent him from being approved to reenlist. He announced Wednesday that he had gotten the tattoo covered with another image, before continuing his campaign with a town hall where he spoke to hundreds of Maine voters.
When Thompson asked Sanders about Platner’s controversies, he answered that he is “not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, ‘What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest?’”
“Between you and me, there might be one or two more important issues,” he said before speaking about the progressive oyster farmer’s impressive campaign rallies and the “dark period” he went through in the past.
“He went through some very difficult experiences in the military,” said Sanders. “Seeing his friends killed… He went to the VA and by the way, he says they rebuilt his life. He went into a dark period in his life. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period.”
“The guy that I saw up on the stage in Portland, Maine, rather a brilliant guy,” said the senator. “Really a strong fighter for the working class, very articulate, very smart and what he said is, ‘Yeah, I went through a dark period and said stupid things. I am not the person that I was back then.’”
“And I think as a nation,” he added, “especially given the fact that we have a president who was convicted of 34 felonies, maybe we have to do a little bit of forgiveness.”
📺 EXCLUSIVE: On the latest episode of The Axios Show, @SenSanders defends Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, saying there might be "one or two more important issues" than the Marine veteran's tattoos.
Front Orca supports AOC, urges her to kick some ass.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Every few decades, Americans rediscover that their republic was built on a rejection – the rejection of being ruled by a monarch. Now, in one of the largest protest movements in many years, the phrase “No kings” is everywhere: on placards, online memes, and in chants aimed at a president who seems to want to rule rather than serve.
Yet the words are hardly new. They are the first note in the American political scale, the country’s founding slogan before it even had a flag.
Long before it echoed through the colonies, the slogan “No king but Jesus” rang out in the English civil war, where it was used to declare that divine authority, not royal prerogative, should rule the conscience.
When it crossed the Atlantic, colonial Americans inherited a phrase, a stance and an image that could turn theology into politics and rebellion into virtue.
As Thomas Paine put it in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “Of more worth is one honest man than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Republican speech was invented by rejecting monarchy.
When independence was achieved, America’s experiment rested on a paradox: it needed strong leadership but feared the aura of command. “No kings” was a self-diagnosis of a nervous republic. A way of keeping the charisma of a leader on a leash.
That allergy to grandeur shaped the early republic. In the 1790s when John Adams proposed that the president be addressed as “His Highness”, he was swiftly mocked as “His Rotundity”. The laughter mattered. It expressed the conviction that democracy could not survive reverence.
By the 1830s, this suspicion of pomp had become visual. Critics of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, issued a famous broadside “King Andrew the First” showing him crowned and trampling the constitution. It wasn’t just partisan art – it was an act of democratic hygiene.
Abraham LIncoln depicted as a king in 1864. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection
A generation later, Abraham Lincoln faced the same charge. During the American civil war, a notorious 1864 pamphlet Abraham Africanus I accused him of seeking to become a “hereditary ruler of the United States”. His sweeping wartime powers fed old fears that emergency rule would harden into monarchy.
Sometimes, the charge is justified. When Puck magazine in 1904 depicted Theodore Roosevelt crowning himself Louis XIV (or perhaps Napoleon), it captured the public’s mixture of thrill and alarm at his trust-busting, canal-building, imperial swagger. Citizens wanted vitality in office, but not vanity.
How the American Spectator depicted Barack Obama in 2014. American Spectator
Other times, the imagery seemed to speak more to American paternal longings. Take images of Dwight Eisenhower as “King Ike” in the 1950s, a genial ruler among smiling courtiers, soothing cold war nerves.
In our own century, the crown returns in sharper form. The American Spectator’s 2014 cover, “The Good King Barack” showed Obama beaming beneath a red velvet crown.
When Donald Trump triumphed in 2016, crown memes returned as America’s simplest moral shorthand for power that has gone too far.
It fell to his successor Joe Biden to officially declare, in response to the July 2024 Supreme Court ruling that Trump was not immune from prosecution: “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America.”
Why the crown keeps returning
The crown is both insult and safety valve at once. It’s an instantly legible piece of political folk art reminding citizens that authority is temporary, fallible and – like its wearer – mortal.
When protesters revive “No kings”, they aren’t just quoting the revolution. They’re translating an older language of civic republican virtue into an accent everyone can understand. No person above the law, no office above criticism, no citizen beneath respect.
The slogan reawakens the moral reflex that freedom depends on vigilance, and that dignity belongs to the governed as much as the governors.
And here’s the irony: both parties were founded on that same cry. Democrats and Republicans trace their roots to the anti-monarchical Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who defined their movement against the spectre of kingly power. That party later fractured, giving rise to both modern traditions.
In that sense, “No kings” was the nation’s first party platform, the point of agreement from which every later disagreement grew.
Can it still work?
In today’s fractured America, “No kings” offers something rare: a language of protest that feels constitutional rather than ideological. It has the potential to speak to conservatives alarmed by executive overreach, to progressives wary of authoritarian drift, and to independents nostalgic for civic balance.
"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!" –President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB
That gives it unusual rhetorical strength. Unlike most modern slogans – “Drill baby, drill”, “Make America great again” (Maga), or “Defund the police” – it doesn’t divide, it recalls a principle. “No kings” reminds Americans that what unites them is the rejection of tyranny.
The phrase also appeals to exhaustion as much as outrage. After years of political spectacle, “No kings” gestures toward humility, order and self-restraint: the virtues both parties claim to miss.
The movement may go nowhere. But if this moment does turn out to be an inflection point, it is a fitting way to frame it.
To chant “No kings” now is not nostalgia but muscle memory. That is how a republic tests its pulse: by mocking grandeur, refusing awe and rediscovering equality in the act of saying no.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Activist Sami Al Arian (R), author Kenize Mourad (2nd R), Professor Christine Chinkin (3rd R), academic Biljana Vankovska (3rd L), activist Chandra Muzaffar (2nd L), and Dr. Ghada Karmi (L) attend final session of the Gaza Tribunal, a global and independent initiative established to investigate Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza, held at Istanbul University, Turkiye on October 24, 2025. [Muhammed Enes Yıldırım – Anadolu Agency]
The Gaza Tribunal’s final session continued Friday at Istanbul University, with powerful expert testimony asserting that Israel deliberately dismantled Gaza’s health care and public health systems as part of a larger policy of “mass harm to civilians,” Anadolu reports.
Doctors and humanitarian specialists detailed what they described as systematic attacks on medical workers, hospitals, water systems, and the basic means of civilian survival.
During Friday morning’s panel titled “Targeting of Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure—Medical Systems,” four medical professionals, including International President of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim, Turkish physician Dr. Taner Kamaci, Norwegian emergency doctor and professor Dr. Mads Gilbert, and UK-based systemic psychotherapist and trainer Gwyn Daniel, presented evidence from the past two years of the Gaza war, calling for international accountability.
Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim, a British emergency physician and humanitarian with MSF, testified that Gaza’s hospitals and health workers were not merely collateral victims of conflict but the direct targets of a systematic strategy:
“Members of the jury, our health system has not collapsed by chance. It’s destroyed when hospitals are deliberately struck. Supplies are choked off. Health care workers are killed or detained. And the water and sanitation system is ruined.”
He noted staggering casualties among medical personnel, saying: “Over 1,700 health care workers have been killed since October 2023. At MSF, 15 of our colleagues have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.”
Abdelmoneim directly cited incidents communicated to Israeli authorities in advance, including the November 2023 strike on Al-Awda Hospital.
“We had repeatedly informed Israeli authorities that Al-Auda was a working hospital with patients and medical staff and therefore protected under international humanitarian law.”
He said two MSF doctors, Mohamed Abou-Jaida and Ahmed As-Saffar, were killed in the attack.
He added, several days earlier, “Our colleague Abad Shabab, a nurse, was killed when a clearly marked MSF convoy came under attack in Gaza City. Despite our authorization to evacuate, he was shot in the head.”
Abdelmoneim also described the detention and disappearance of medical personnel, referencing the Oct. 26 arrest of Dr. Abou-Jaida, who he said remains in prison without charge.
Stressing that public health failures were engineered, he provided examples to back up his claim. He said: “Less than a third of the fuel needs for desalination pumps and water trucks were allowed by Israel… Polio was declared in Gaza while I was there. It had been eradicated years previously.”
The consequences were visible in every clinic, he noted: “Patients with trauma injuries, chronic diseases, cancer, communicable illnesses, malnourished children, and pregnant women were dying from preventable causes.”
Abdelmoneim also urged the panel to treat these medical stories as legal evidence.
“It remains an urgent need for credible and proactive mechanisms to deliver justice for the thousands that have been killed and injured by Israeli actions over the past two years.”
He concluded with a stark indictment, saying: “It is the deliberate dismantling of the means to survive… The genocide is far from over.”
Dr. Taner Kamaci, speaking as a Turkish health official who worked inside Gaza, described health care conditions as a complete breakdown of protection for civilians.
“For two years, every day, people who have been deprived of electricity, water, and bread… have been deprived of their physical, social, and mental health. Therefore, Israel has deprived all people of water for the past two years, which is essential for their health.”
He shared firsthand accounts of surgery without anesthesia, children transported to hospitals by donkey carts, and patients dying in hallways due to a total shortage of surgical capacity.
His remarks underscored that the survival struggle does not end once the bomb falls, saying: “It’s not just a bomb… Surviving in Gaza during the war is almost a miracle.”
Kamaci cited numbers from Gaza health authorities documenting 1,722 health workers killed and 362 imprisoned. In two years, “at least 4,000 children, nearly 15,000 people, lost at least one limb.”
He finished by framing the war as an outright assault on humanity: “What is the meaning of the name of this genocide?”
– Evidence-based testimony on 40-year pattern
Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian emergency physician who has worked in Gaza for decades, began by naming colleagues killed with their families. “Within all these numbers we have, Palestinians are of course not numbers but humans with families just like us,” he said.
Gilbert broadened the timeline of alleged violations and said: “This has been going on… for more than 40 years… the root cause of ill health is the Israeli occupation.”
He described a long-documented pattern of Israeli attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and health workers, which he said had continued despite UN investigations dating back to 1982.
“We have surpassed 100,000 killed in Gaza. And don’t forget that three out of four are women and children, and between 80 and 90% are civilians.”
He described his approach as “evidence-based solidarity,” citing UN statistics, scientific studies, and 42 years of clinical experience.
Gilbert cited 328 UN situation reports since October 7, 2023, noting that scientists found 41% underreporting in the first year of casualties. He added that 10,000-20,000 more people are likely buried under the rubble.
Gilbert testified that at least 1,700 Palestinian health care workers have been killed, and 301 have been detained, many of whom have been tortured. According to a WHO dashboard, 2,853 health care workers and patients have been killed or injured in Gaza in the last two years alone—”one every six hours,” he said.
He described the attacks as “extremely systematic” with a clear strategic purpose. Removing hospitals from society’s safety net only leads to more deaths and to extinguishing the will to resist, he said.
Gilbert warned that 1,000-2,000 child amputees would need 10-20 surgeries to walk again, and described a campaign to “invalidate and harm as much as possible.”
He also highlighted dramatic collapses in public health indicators.
“It is the starvation program: dehydration, lack of water, and untreated diseases. Half the population is under 18. You have a system of genocide using scientific knowledge of what creates health to destroy health.”
Gilbert condemned the silence of Western medical institutions. “Staying silent, while pretending to be neutral, is a form of oppression. We will never forget, and we will never forgive.”
Yet he closed by affirming the perseverance of Palestinian health workers risking their lives daily. “To resist is to exist,” he remarked.
Gwyn Daniel, a systemic family therapist based in the UK, said that two years of continuous Israeli bombardment have precipitated an unprecedented psychological collapse in Gaza, describing conditions as “an ongoing genocide.”
“How do we understand mental health in the context of a genocide, an ongoing genocide?” she said. “One of the criteria for genocide is causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group. The mental harm is one that we all know about.”
Daniel stressed that Gaza’s trauma cannot be treated as a past event. “As my Palestinian colleagues always point out, there is no place for trauma. Trauma is continuous and ongoing.”
She argued that ethical mental health responses must confront the political causes of suffering.
“The only ethical responses to collective trauma on this scale are those that address evidence of political violence and the need for self-determination and liberation,” she said. “That means supporting interventions that embrace activism and modes of resistance.”
– Children bear most extreme impact
Daniel described a population living “in a death zone,” where people feel “they are already dead, or longing to be alive,” and where the destruction of hospitals, schools, and community structures “aids at the heart and soul of the community… its collective consciousness and its systems of mutual support.”
Children, she said, are bearing the most extreme impact. “Nearly 40,000 children have lost their lives there,” she noted. Constant fear and hyperarousal “will have a permanent impact, because there are no contacts by children from those states.”
Despite the devastation, Daniel emphasized the courage of Palestinian professionals who continue working: “It means supporting those mental health practitioners already operating in Gaza… operating at great risk to themselves.”
Quoting the latest report from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, she concluded: “Gaza, despite the pain, continues to pulse with life… it is the duty of all of us in the international community to remain alongside it.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the media after visiting the Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel on October 24, 2025. [Photo by FADEL SENNA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
The US is exploring ways to deploy international forces to Gaza, possibly under a UN mandate, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday, Anadolu reports.
“Some of these countries can’t participate unless they have a mandate from the UN,” Rubio told the press at the US-Israel coordination center for Gaza in Kiryat Gat, a city in southern Israel.
“So maybe it’ll be a UN resolution—that’s one route. We could have an international agreement as well. We’re working through that. We’ll find the right formula to do it. Maybe the UN,” he added.
Rubio also warned about Israeli bills to annex the occupied West Bank. “It’s a threat to the peace process.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Students from leading universities across the United Kingdom hold a march to mark the second anniversary of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, in London, United Kingdom on October 7, 2025. [Aysu Biçer – Anadolu Agency]
King’s College London (KCL), a prestigious UK university, is facing legal action over its decision to indefinitely suspend a student and revoke his visa sponsorship, triggering potential deportation to Egypt. The move has been widely condemned as a targeted response to the student’s pro-Palestine activism and part of a wider trend of institutional repression against dissent over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Usama Ghanem, a second-year international relations student and Egyptian national, was issued with an indefinite suspension after participating in a series of pro-Palestine protests on campus. The suspension automatically triggered the withdrawal of his visa sponsorship, a process likened to “Trumpian” deportation tactics by campaigners.
Ghanem, who fled Egypt due to political persecution, has a documented history of torture and trauma, having been detained and abused by Egyptian authorities in 2020 alongside members of his family. His experiences led to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which the university had been made aware of during his application and studies.
The case has drawn condemnation from CAGE International, which is supporting Ghanem’s legal action against KCL for alleged human rights violations, including unlawful discrimination, personal injury and harassment.
“King’s College London has built its repression on the existing frameworks of racist and Islamophobic counter-extremism policies, demonstrating what we’ve always known: such powers exist primarily to crush dissent,” said Naila Ahmed, Head of Campaigns at CAGE International.
“It is shameful that one of the country’s leading institutions of learning has resorted to indefinitely suspending a student and triggering his potential deportation to a country with a deplorable human rights record. The legal challenge he has launched is crucial to ending such egregious abuses of power.”
Speaking to CAGE International, Ghanem, said: “I first started protesting on campus after the start of the genocide in Gaza. I discovered more about King’s complicity within the genocide; about the investments, the heavy connections they have, not only with Israeli universities, but with Israeli military and forces, helping them research and develop their weapons and all of their studies and their research capabilities to kill more Palestinians.”
Ghanem went on to add: “I felt an insane amount of complicity within institutions that I paid tens of thousands of Pounds for per year as an international student. It all formed within me a very deep conviction that it is a betrayal, not only to the Palestinian people, but to my Muslim identity and my humanity to just see this happening and turn a blind eye.”
“I got singled out for an action that the student body had taken collectively against KCL… Kings chose to single me out, label me as a leader and tried to punish me and punish any dissent against its investments in Israel and to make an example of its students when they target their university for complicity, then this happens to them.”
The university’s action is said to have followed pressure from an external pro-Israel organisation calling for disciplinary action against students who took part in a campus protest opposing Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza.
Ghanem played a key role in the KCL Gaza Solidarity Encampment, launched in May 2024 in protest against Israel’s genocide on the besieged enclave and the university’s financial ties to companies complicit in the occupation and war crimes.
Since 7 October 2023, over 68,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, a third of them children, according to Gaza health authorities. In September, a UN commission of inquiry found Israel has committed acts of genocide in the territory.
Students at the encampment demanded that KCL sever all ties with Israeli institutions complicit in apartheid, divest from arms companies involved in Palestinian deaths, and commit to rebuilding Gaza’s devastated education sector.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
