On November 11 2025, independent Member of Parliament Catherine Connolly will become the new president of Ireland after winning an overwhelming victory over the fiercely unpopular Heather Humphreys.
In her acceptance speech, President Connolly vowed to remain rooted in service, stay humble, and actively practice neutrality. She is anti-war, anti-imperialist, pro-reunification, an advocate for disability rights, and fluent in Irish. She has also been openly critical of the European Union’s inaction on Gaza, and is distrustful of France and the United Kingdom due to their massive armament programs.
In her words, Connolly strives to be “a moral compass in a world increasingly driven by profit and spectacle. A voice for those too often silenced.”
As a former barrister, from a humble background, Connolly has spent her years volunteering with the elderly and taking night classes to train in law. She formally entered politics in 1999 with the mission of tackling Ireland’s dire housing shortage crisis.
After serving 17 years as a councillor in Galway for the Labour Party, she left, citing a lack of support, and began her journey as an independent. In 2020, she became the first woman elected to chair debates as deputy speaker in the Dáil Éireann.
Rather than pandering to corporate interests, the wealthy elite, or a personal ego trip bent on abusing power (naming no names), Connolly offers a hopeful vision for a more compassionate and responsible approach to politics.
Connolly’s victory marked an important moment for independent candidates around the world. As the world slides to the right, her humble message of peace, inclusivity, and democracy is a powerful reminder that there is light. We must continue to draw attention to and support those who stand up against the establishment.
Connolly has shown that it is possible for well-deserving underdogs such as Zohran Mamdani, Jeremy Corbyn, Zack Polanski, and Bernie Sanders to bring common-good policies into the mainstream.
In a demonstration of her ability to unify opposing voices, Connolly’s landslide win came after she secured the support of opposition parties Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit, and even her former party, Labour.
As an independent, Connolly pledged, in her opening speech, to be a ‘”president for all.” Her victory was secured after gaining the largest number of first-preference votes ever—the equivalent of 63%.
When we look at the bigger picture, however, it tells the story of a divided, disillusioned, and apathetic Ireland tired of the two-party system. Voter turnout was just 45.8%, and a huge 213,738 votes were either invalid or spoiled. This accounted for almost 13% of the overall vote, notably, more than 10 times the number in the last presidential election.
In the run-up to the election, violent riots broke out in the capital for two consecutive days. They took place in front of a hotel housing asylum seekers in an anti-immigration sentiment being witnessed across large parts of Europe. This is just one example of the ongoing immigration tensions in Ireland.
Irish citizens are frustrated with the government after years of austerity measures, the ongoing housing crisis, poor public services such as healthcare, and the fact that key candidates, such as Maria Steen, were not on the ballot.
With Connolly’s left-wing, progressive, and anti-war stance at the reins, the world eagerly awaits to see if Ireland can be the guiding light that so many nations need right now. In the face of fascist, authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Nicolás Maduro, we desperately need a new playbook.
Some of Connolly’s stances include:
With her pledge to be accountable to the citizens of Ireland, her policies are people-and-planet focused. Her commitment to justice, equality, and transparency is a refreshing change from the status quo. Rather than pandering to corporate interests, the wealthy elite, or a personal ego trip bent on abusing power (naming no names), Connolly offers a hopeful vision for a more compassionate and responsible approach to politics.
Let’s hope that her recent win bolsters the campaigns of other progressive candidates and serves as a reminder that positive change is possible. This is a huge win for the left; let’s keep the momentum going.
In the words of Catherine Connolly: “Use your voice in every way you can, because a republic and a democracy need constructive questioning, and together we can shape a new republic that values everybody.”
Living in the United States right now, it’s easy to feel rage and despair. Corporations and billionaires have amassed so much money and power that popular opinions held by everyday working people are no longer represented by our federal government, and corporations are freer than ever to do what they like.
The results are damning: rising costs of basic needs like healthcare, housing, insurance, and groceries, making them unaffordable. We are faced with increasingly dangerous extreme weather events, endangering our homes, businesses, and loved ones. We are exposed to more pollution and toxins in our air, water, and soil than ever before. On top of it all, our mandated tax dollars are being used to kill and starve children at home and abroad.
Now, we find ourselves asking: How can we possibly influence our government, these corporations, and the billionaire class to do the right thing? Our only choice is to work together: the climate and labor movement uniting to hit these corporations and billionaires where it hurts—their wallets.
Wells Fargo Workers United and Stop the Money Pipeline are teaming up to target one corporation that clearly doesn’t care about everyday people: Wells Fargo. In February, despite its rank as the fifth largest funder of fossil fuels in the world in 2024, Wells Fargo publicly dropped its 2030 and 2050 climate goals. Wells Fargo has also been caught union busting, recently allegedly eavesdropping on bargaining. The bank has already faced over 30 Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges, and has been found violating workers’ rights on multiple occasions. Since its founding, Wells Fargo executives have proven that they will prioritize profit over people and the planet.
There’s a magical reality that happens when talking to people about the power they already have to impact a corporation and the world.
We won’t let them get away with it. If enough Wells Fargo workers join the union, they can withhold, or threaten to withhold, their labor, which could cost the company real revenue loss. Workers can then use this leverage to negotiate for higher wages, more staff, and an end to Wells Fargo’s funding of the climate crisis. This the first time that a union is forming at a US bank this large.
We’re seeing real momentum. Already, 28 Wells Fargo branches have voted to unionize and are actively engaging in bargaining. In August, over 30 people from communities facing the brunt of pollution from fossil fuel build-out in the Gulf South visited bank branches in San Francisco to inform workers about the union and Wells Fargo dropping its climate targets.
There’s a magical reality that happens when talking to people about the power they already have to impact a corporation and the world. We’ve seen workers light up when we share more about the support system of workers who feel the same way they do. They lift out of the drudgery of their daily routine, and sparkle with energy as we explore the possibility of change in their workplaces. In a time when so many of us are isolated, the opportunity to come together safely in person and affect real meaningful change can be so fulfilling, and even joyful. We need as many people as possible talking to Wells Fargo workers about the union to build the power we need to win.
This isn’t just about what we’re against, this is about what we fight for: a collective future where all of us can thrive, drink clean water, and breathe clean air; where workers unite to build power for better working conditions and climate policies. Any worker, anywhere, can take action. If you are a union member, or connected to any climate or labor organizing, talk to your leadership to see what you can do to build these bridges.
I feel quite strongly that we should pay less attention to billionaires—indeed that’s rather the point of this small essay—so let me acknowledge at the outset that there is something odd about me therefore devoting an edition of this newsletter to replying to Bill Gates’ new missive about climate. But I fear I must, if only because it’s been treated as such important news by so many outlets—far more, say, than covered the United Nations Secretary General’s same-day appeal to international leaders that began with a forthright statement of the science. Here’s António Guterres:
In fact, I could probably just note that Gates, with impeccable timing, decided to drop his remarks at the same moment that Hurricane Melissa plowed into Jamaica, doing incalculable damage because of winds made stronger by the ocean heat attributable to global warming. As Jeff Masters reported:
And, oh, the same day Hue, in Vietnam, reported one of the two or three greatest rainfalls in recorded human history: 5 feet of rain in 24 hours, the kind of deluge made ever more likely by a warming atmosphere that can hold more water vapor. As the Associated Press reported, “Global warming is making tropical storms stronger and wetter, according to experts, because warmer oceans provide them with more fuel, driving more intense winds, heavier rainfall and shifting precipitation patterns across East Asia.”
Anyway, Bill Gates’ letter.
It was wrong of him to write it because if his high-priced pr team didn’t anticipate the reaction, they should be fired. I assume they did, and that they were okay with the entirely predictable result from our president. Here’s how the Washington Times described it:
Bill Gates didn’t, of course, say that. He said climate change was real and we should be worried about it, but that it wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” (which seems like the lowest of low bars) and that:
and therefore that’s where we should focus our money. His letter is actually directed at delegates to the global climate conference next month in Brazil, essentially telling them to back off the emissions reductions and concentrate on growing economies in the developing world because “health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”
Any conversation about Bill Gates and climate should begin by acknowledging that he’s been wrong about it over and over again. He’s explained that up until 2006—i.e., 18 years after Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress laying out the science, and well past the point where George W. Bush had acknowledged its reality—he like Trump thought the whole thing was a crock. “I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster,” he explained—at the time he was the richest man in the world, and yet his scientific advisers couldn’t get across the simple facts to him.
And he was last heard from on the topic in 2021, when he wrote a book explaining that it was going to be very hard to do renewable energy because it came with a “green premium”—i.e. it cost more. Sadly for his argument, that was pretty much the year that sun and wind crossed the invisible line making them less expensive than coal and oil and gas. (You can read my review from the New York Times here, and you can read his response to it in Rolling Stone here where he explains, “McKibben is stuck in this time warp.”)
So—if we were listening to people on the grounds of whether they had a good track record, the world would not spend a lot of time on Gates and climate. But if you have a hundred billion dollars all is forgiven, and so there has been lots of fawning coverage. The fact that Gates framed all this in a way designed to appeal to the president is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning (the richest men in the world have all been sucking up to him, so no extra shame here); let’s instead just go to the heart of his argument. Which is weak in the extreme.
Take the case of Jamaica. The warming-fueled hurricane that smashed into the island on Tuesday did a lot of damage. How much? The first estimates from the insurance industry say between 30 and 250% of the country’s annual GDP. The wide range is because we don’t yet have pictures from much of the country, so let’s go with the very low end of the range. Thirty percent of a country’s GDP is… a lot of money. It’s as if Hurricane Katrina had cost America $8 trillion. If America suddenly had an $8 trillion hole, what do you think that would do to its ability to pay for education and healthcare and the like? That’s what “development” is. Jamaica is in a hole it will spend forever getting out of.
And oh, Cuba and Haiti got smacked too. And Vietnam. And… and that was just last week. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, every one degree climb in temperature knocks 12% off GDP. The paper concluded that “by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change.” And who gets hurt the most? That would be the developing countries that Gates in theory worries about. Here’s a Stanford study showing that “the gap between the economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25% larger today than it would have been without global warming.”
Gates goes on and on about public health, but as the US Global Leadership Coalition (a group he has lauded extensively) said a few years ago:
Is this a smaller effect than the things he worries about? On the same day that Gates issued his letter, the premier medical journal the Lancet issued its annual update on climate and health, and what it found was:
The irony of Gates’ new letter is that he acknowledges, in passing, how wrong he was four years ago about the “green premium”:
But he uses that new knowledge to argue that since they’ve done so well we’ve knocked the high end off climate projections and hence can calm down about it all. He misses the most obvious point, which is that if you care about development the rapid expansion of solar and wind power gives us the greatest possible chance we’ve ever had to really knock down poverty, at exactly the same point that we’re spreading the technology that can help limit how high the temperature eventually gets.
Jigar Shah, who led the Department of Energy loans office under Biden, put it best:
Here’s Rajiv Shah, writing in the New York Times last year, about the opportunity:
As Rajiv Shah explained in the headline to that article, “Want to End Poverty? Focus on One Thing.” Clean electricity.
I doubt Rajiv Shah can say anything about Gates’ letter—he worked at the Gates Foundation for years as part of his long and distinguished career. In fact, not many people can really reply—Gates money is too important to too many agencies and organizations. But since I don’t get any of it, let me say: He’s really not the guy to be listening to on this stuff. Really.
For more than two decades, Marwan Barghouti has sat behind Israeli bars—a living emblem of a brutal occupation that has denied Palestinians their freedom and dignity. His continued imprisonment is not merely unjust; it silences the one leader most capable of uniting the Palestinian people and leading them toward a political solution. Polls over many years show he is the most popular Palestinian political figure, trusted across factions and generations—even by many who have lost faith in politics. Releasing him is not a concession. It is a prerequisite for peace.
When the Second Intifada (uprising) began in 2000, Barghouti was a prominent member of Fatah, the Palestinian political faction that dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs limited parts of the occupied West Bank. He was also an elected parliamentarian. He was arrested by Israeli forces on April 15, 2002, and in 2004 an Israeli court convicted him and sentenced him to five life terms plus 40 years, accusing him of involvement in attacks that killed Israelis. Barghouti denied the charges, refused to recognize the court’s legitimacy, and declared himself a political prisoner under occupation.
Independent observers, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, later found that the proceedings failed to meet international fair-trial standards and bore the marks of political persecution.
Barghouti’s case is inseparable from the larger machinery of occupation: like thousands of other Palestinian prisoners, he has endured brutal and degrading treatment, including torture, solitary confinement, and denial of adequate medical care. Israeli authorities are obligated under international law to ensure due process, humane treatment, and access to counsel and healthcare—obligations they routinely violate.
[The case of Marwan Barghouti] is inseparable from the larger machinery of occupation: like thousands of other Palestinian prisoners, he has endured brutal and degrading treatment, including torture, solitary confinement, and denial of adequate medical care.
Throughout his imprisonment, Barghouti has supported a principled stance: he rejects attacks on civilians and defends the right of a people living under military occupation to resist within international law. He has long advocated for negotiations grounded in equality and self-determination. That combination makes him uniquely capable of serving as a key mediator.
It is precisely this credibility that Israel fears. As his son Arab Barghouti said, “Israel sees my father as a danger because of his ability to bring Palestinians together.” Keeping him locked away serves two aims for Israel: decapitating credible Palestinian leadership and perpetuating the fiction that “there is no partner for peace.”
His family fears for his life, with witness reports that he was severely beaten by guards in September. That fear increased on August 15, 2025, when Israeli Minister Itamar Ben Gvir released a video in which he personally threatened Barghouti inside his prison cell.
The family has repeatedly asked Israel to allow international lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit him, but their requests have been denied.
There was hope that Barghouti would be released as part of the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and Trump said he was considering pressing Israel for his release, but Israel refused.
For years, world leaders have championed his cause. In 2013, Former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and other prominent world leaders and Nobel Peace Laureates called for his release. More recently, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said, “Anyone serious about ‘peace’ should ensure his release, as the most popular—and unlawfully detained—Palestinian leader.” On October 29, a group of global leaders called The Elders, which was started by Nelson Mandela in 2007, called on President Trump to demand Barghouti’s release, “capitalising on the opportunity opened up by the fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza.”
Even senior Israeli security figures, including former Shin Bet director Ari Ayalon, have acknowledged that if Israel truly wants a partner who can deliver the Palestinian public to an agreement, Barghouti is the one leader with the legitimacy to do it.
But perhaps the most interesting recent advocate is Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, who–behind the scenes–lobbied for Barghouti as a gesture to the Arab countries pushing for his release.
Barghouti’s popularity as a uniting figure is why so many Palestinians call him their Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s release did not solve South Africa’s problems overnight, but it unlocked a door that had been nailed shut. Barghouti’s freedom could do the same.
If Israel truly seeks peace, it must stop locking away the very leadership capable of achieving it. If the international community truly stands for human rights, it must raise the political cost of Barghouti’s continued detention.
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