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Received yesterday — 9 June 2026 ⏭

Higher education must not become a research arm of militarized power

✇The Real News Network
By: Henry A. Giroux
9 June 2026 at 20:18
A pro-Palestine protester holds a placard that says, "No more research for IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces)" during the rally. Rallies and protest camps persist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus as student demonstrators demand divestment from Israeli military ties. Photo by Vincent Ricci/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

This article was originally published by Truthout on June 08, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.

The Dangers of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex”

The late U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by what he called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address on the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower included the word “academic,” recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that threatened their intellectual independence and democratic mission.

This warning extends to countries that increasingly live in the shadow of the U.S.’s expanding warfare state and its militarized culture. For instance, against an increasingly militarized global order, the Canadian government has unveiled an expansive “Defence Industrial Strategy” backed by 81.8 billion Canadian dollars (around 60 billion in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending in Budget 2025, including 6.6 billion Canadian dollars devoted specifically to expanding the country’s defense-industrial infrastructure. The strategy marks the largest long-term expansion of Canada’s military economy since the Second World War.

What once appeared to be limited partnerships between North American universities and defense industries has evolved into a far broader transformation of higher education itself. As Canada dramatically expands military spending through its Defence Industrial Strategy, universities are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of defense priorities. Federal initiatives encourage partnerships between universities, defense contractors, and government agencies in fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, autonomous systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. Research funding is increasingly directed toward projects framed around national security, defense innovation, and military competitiveness. As these priorities gain influence, higher education is being reshaped by the social logics of militarization, technological control, and permanent security, altering not only what knowledge is produced but also the purposes to which it is put, raising urgent questions about the future of the university as a democratic public sphere.

Militarized knowledge production blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

The growing use of drones and AI-driven warfare systems is not simply a military development. It signals a broader transformation in how research and knowledge are produced, funded, and valued. As universities deepen their involvement in military research, fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data analytics to robotics and cybersecurity are increasingly organized around the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare. AI technologies are already being deployed by state agencies to monitor migrants, journalists, activists, and political dissidents, while drones have revolutionized warfare by making it cheaper, more remote, and less accountable. Under such conditions, knowledge is not viewed primarily as a public good serving democratic life. Instead, it is increasingly organized around military imperatives of prediction, control, targeting, and domination. The result is a form of militarized knowledge production that blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

Michael S. Sherry rightly argues that in an age in which state power is increasingly organized through militarized values and security logics, military culture now shapes not only state policy but “broad areas of national life.” As David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization no longer operates only through armies and weapons systems. It increasingly shapes culture, technology, modes of governance, and everyday life. As Goldberg observes:

The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purposes, the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The implications for higher education are profound. Militarization does not simply reshape culture, technology, and governance. It also reorganizes the production of knowledge itself, aligning university research with the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare while legitimating authoritarian forms of power. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence research tied to military and surveillance applications deepens these dangers. Universities are increasingly helping to develop technologies used for predictive policing, automated warfare, mass surveillance, and forms of digital authoritarianism that blur the line between security and repression. Such developments are routinely justified in the language of innovation, efficiency, and national security, yet they raise profound ethical questions about the role of higher education in designing technologies that deepen inequality, expand state violence, erode civil liberties, and facilitate the killing of civilians, including children, in conflicts largely removed from public scrutiny.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities, and the capacity for democratic agency itself. When higher education embraces military partnerships and military-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is recast as a threat rather than a democratic necessity.

How Militarization Reorganizes the Production of Knowledge

As militarization becomes woven into the fabric of political culture, universities increasingly reorganize knowledge, research priorities, and technological innovation around the assumptions of permanent conflict, geopolitical competition, and security management. In doing so, higher education normalizes the belief that militarized knowledge and military solutions should govern everyday life. Yet militarization does not merely reshape research priorities and institutional culture. It also reorganizes historical memory, civic identity, and the very terms through which democracy is understood.

Militarization also bears heavily on the production of knowledge itself. As Fintan O’Toole observes, contemporary authoritarian movements do more than expand military power; they seek to reshape historical memory and civic consciousness. Shameful histories are recast as heroic achievements, while assaults on democracy are reimagined as acts of patriotism. The Confederate rebellion is transformed from a defense of slavery into a noble cause, much as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is increasingly celebrated by its defenders as a patriotic uprising rather than an assault on democratic institutions. Equally troubling are efforts to remake the military itself through demands that soldiers be trained for loyalty to political leaders rather than to constitutional principles. Here, power seeks not only to command institutions but also to militarize knowledge, memory, and civic identity. Universities have a crucial responsibility to resist such distortions by defending historical truth, critical inquiry, and the capacity to distinguish education from propaganda.

As Kevin Baker notes, military solutions increasingly displace diplomacy, democratic institutions, and other civic responses to social problems. Within a culture saturated by militarism, aggression is celebrated as prevention, repression is justified in the name of security, and military force is invoked to discipline dissent and erode democratic values. Under such conditions, education is organized less around the imperatives of democratic culture than around the demands of the arms industry, surveillance systems, technological acceleration, and the national security state.

These developments become even more troubling when they intersect with the ongoing marketization of higher education. At its best, higher education functions as a democratic public sphere, a place where students learn to think critically, question authority, engage history, and imagine alternative democratic futures. Yet under the pressures of neoliberalism, universities have increasingly abandoned this mission. Education is now often reduced to job training, students are treated as consumers, faculty are deskilled and casualized, and learning is defined largely in instrumental terms. Questions about how education might nurture civic courage, ethical imagination, social responsibility, and democratic agency are increasingly sidelined in a market-driven university culture.

Yet the assault on higher education is not only economic. It is also ideological and political. In recent years, a growing chorus of liberal and conservative critics has claimed that universities have lost their way, charging that the humanities and critical scholarship have corrupted higher education through ideology and activism. Under the seductive language of “reform,” “balance,” “civility,” “institutional trust,” and “neutrality,” these critics present themselves as defenders of academic integrity while advancing a profoundly reactionary project. In some cases, liberal critics go so far as to treat “social justice” as a threat to scholarship rather than asking how power, exclusion, race, gender, class, empire, and inequality have always shaped what counts as knowledge. Their calls for neutrality, which function as a cover for depoliticization, do not protect intellectual freedom; they align with a broader assault on critical thought, historical memory, and democratic culture. They are aghast at the notion put forward by Thomas Chatterton Williams that “For humanities departments [and higher education in general] to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.” In doing so, they obscure the far more dangerous attacks on higher education coming from the right: censorship, book bans, assaults on DEI programs, the repression of student protest, and efforts to align universities with corporate, state, and military interests.

Critical scholarship is condemned as ideological, while militarized research, donor influence, state-directed threats of defunding, and forms of ideological indoctrination are celebrated as common sense. The real danger is not that universities have become too political, but that they are being stripped of their democratic mission and transformed into institutions that normalize conformity, surveillance, militarization, and authoritarian power. Higher education is not under attack because it has been ruined by the left. On the contrary, it is under assault by the Trump administration and a broader network of far right forces precisely because it keeps alive a dangerous truth: education is not merely about credentials, careers, or conformity to the status quo. At its best, it cultivates the capacity for critical judgment, informed dissent, compassion, and democratic agency. What authoritarian movements fear most is not ideological indoctrination but an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable, and imagining a more just future.

Militarization deepens anti-democratic tendencies. Research is increasingly tied to military applications, geopolitical competition, and outside funding rather than to the public good. Universities adopt the language of security, risk management, efficiency, and competitiveness while corporate and military values increasingly shape institutional priorities. As a Simons Foundation policy briefing warns, militarization has increasingly become a “default response” to political instability and global insecurity, reinforcing a culture in which social problems are framed through the logics of surveillance, strategic competition, and military preparedness rather than diplomacy, public investment, and democratic cooperation. As Professor Catherine Lutz notes, such actions run the risk of eroding legal and moral boundaries. In such a climate, higher education loses its civic character and becomes subordinated to the interests of the warfare state and defense industries.

As universities become increasingly tied to military and security logics, they risk abandoning their civic purpose in favor of a pedagogy of permanent emergency, one that privileges surveillance, strategic competition, and technological domination over critical inquiry, civic imagination, ethical responsibility, and social solidarity. What disappears in this militarized vision of higher education is the conviction that universities should cultivate informed citizens capable of holding power accountable rather than simply servicing the imperatives of the national security state.

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking, and instrumental rationality. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism, and state power are pushed aside in favor of managerial efficiency and national competitiveness. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, sexual violence, or war crimes are too often met not with dialogue but with surveillance, administrative repression, and policing.

The dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.”

In such instances, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture. As scholar John Gills notes, the dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.” In this way, universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education. Such developments raise not only political and educational concerns but also urgent ethical questions about the kinds of institutions that universities are becoming and the values they choose to endorse.

The militarization of higher education raises a profound ethical question: What happens when universities enter into partnerships with military institutions while remaining silent about documented human rights abuses associated with those same institutions? Such silence is never politically neutral. It suggests that violations of human rights can be overlooked, rationalized, or normalized when carried out in the name of security, defense, or national interest.

This issue extends beyond universities themselves and raises broader questions about the responsibilities of democratic governments. As Canada, among other countries, deepens military cooperation with allies and expands investments in defense industries, it cannot exempt those relationships from ethical scrutiny. If credible allegations of war crimes, torture, collective punishment, or sexual violence are ignored in the name of strategic alliances or national security, democratic principles are hollowed out from within. Universities, precisely because they are charged with fostering critical inquiry and ethical judgment, have a responsibility to challenge such silences rather than reproduce them.

These ethical concerns become especially urgent when universities maintain relationships with institutions implicated in serious human rights abuses. The issue is particularly troubling in light of allegations regarding the use of sexual violence against Palestinians. Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof noted that while there is no evidence that Israeli leaders explicitly order rape, United Nations investigators have reported that sexual violence has become one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” in the mistreatment of Palestinians. Other human rights organizations have reached similarly disturbing conclusions.

Such allegations also raise broader concerns about how security regimes can be used not only against occupied populations but also against those who challenge state policies. Reuters reported that organizers of a flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza alleged that some activists detained by Israeli authorities experienced physical abuse and that at least 15 reported sexual assaults, including allegations of rape. Zeteo provided shocking and wrenching video testimonies from some of the activists, largely ignored by Western media. Whatever the final findings regarding these allegations, they underscore the need for independent scrutiny of security institutions and the dangers of granting them unquestioned legitimacy in the name of national defense. When accusations of abuse are met with silence rather than investigation, the boundaries between security, impunity, and state-sanctioned violence become increasingly blurred.

If universities claim to uphold principles of human rights, social responsibility, and ethical inquiry, they cannot selectively ignore such evidence when it implicates states or institutions with which they maintain research, military, or security partnerships. To do so risks transforming universities from spaces of critical inquiry into institutions that legitimate power while remaining silent about its abuses. At stake is more than the question of particular research contracts. It is the moral integrity of higher education itself.

These concerns are not confined to particular institutions or isolated abuses. They are symptomatic of a broader culture in which militarized values increasingly shape public life, political discourse, and social priorities. From sporting events and military recruitment in schools to popular films, social media spectacles, gun culture, and state-sponsored propaganda, aggression, domination, and war are normalized as features of everyday life.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the influence of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who celebrates “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and wraps militarism in the language of white Christian nationalism and religious righteousness. As Jasper Craven observes, Hegseth champions a form of “military manliness” stripped of any ethical center. Such a worldview elevates domination as a virtue, defines violence as a moral ideal, and transforms, in Craven’s words, “the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological religious crusade.” As these values circulate through culture and public institutions, they increasingly shape higher education itself, influencing not only what universities teach but also the forms of knowledge they produce, fund, and legitimate.

Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression.

At the same time, vast intellectual, scientific, and financial resources are being diverted from urgent public needs such as climate justice, public health, democratic education, and social welfare toward the expansion of military technologies and security infrastructures. In the process, the arms industry reaps enormous profits while universities increasingly risk becoming laboratories for aggression rather than institutions dedicated to civic responsibility, ethical imagination, and the common good.

Defenders of militarized partnerships insist that universities must remain pragmatic and “neutral” in securing funding and advancing national interests. But neutrality in such cases is largely a myth. Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression. Higher education has no legitimate ethical mandate to function as a research arm of militarized power.

Universities Must Refuse to Become Laboratories for War

The issue is not whether universities are political, but what kind of politics they embody and in whose interests they function. In an age marked by rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, climate catastrophe, and endless wars, universities cannot escape matters of power and values, and they must decide whether they will serve democracy or militarized power. Nor can educators retreat into the call for neutrality. At stake here is more than institutional policy. It is the fate of the university as a democratic institution. Few writers understood these dangers more clearly than Toni Morrison, who warned: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”

Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning can nurture radical hope, civic responsibility, informed agency, critical thinking, and substantive democracy. The struggle against the militarization of Canadian universities is therefore not merely a fight over funding priorities. It is a struggle over whether education will serve democracy or become an extension of the warfare state. Activists from groups like World Beyond War Canada and the Canadian Federation of Students are right to insist that genuine security comes not from militarism and permanent war, but from investing in education, housing, public health, and the social good.

Universities must refuse their transformation into laboratories for war, surveillance, and technological domination. At stake is whether higher education will further accommodate militarized and authoritarian power or become a crucial site of resistance, critical consciousness, and democratic possibility, one that refuses to confuse security with fear, civic responsibility with obedience, and education with the demands of war and domination. In an age when militarism increasingly shapes culture, politics, and everyday life, universities must remain among the few institutions willing to defend critical inquiry, civic responsibility, and democratic freedom against the expanding reach of the warfare state.

Received — 8 June 2026 ⏭

Who’s afraid of Chris Smalls?

✇The Real News Network
By: Maximillian Alvarez
8 June 2026 at 20:00
Chris Smalls (left), co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez (right) at Red Emma's Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 4, 2026.

At a live event hosted at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez got to sit down for a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Alvarez and Smalls discuss Smalls’ new book, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class; they recount the incredible story of the formation of the Amazon Labor Union and the unionization of the first Amazon warehouse in the US; and they talk about Smalls’ journey from warehouse worker and labor organizer to becoming an internationally recognized public figure and a human rights activist who has sailed with humanitarian flotilla missions to Gaza and Cuba.

Additional links/info:

Featured Music:

  • Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song

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Transcript

The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really special episode for y’all today, which is a recording of a live event that I recently hosted at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore. And for that event, I got to sit down in front of a big, lively audience and have a real deep and wide ranging conversation with Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Chris has a new book out called When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class.

And that book recounts the incredible story of how a young working class Black man from Hackensack, New Jersey led a walkout from his Staten Island Amazon warehouse during COVID-19 got fired and then with hardly any resources banded together with a scrappy group of Staten Island warehouse workers to form the independent Amazon Labor Union to fight this epic David and Goliath battle against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the United States and Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, and to win and successfully unionize the first Amazon warehouse in the United States. And the book also traces Chris’s life story before the Amazon Labor Union and his journey from warehouse worker and labor organizer to becoming this internationally recognized public figure and a human rights activist who has sailed with humanitarian glotilla missions to Gaza and to Cuba, even facing detainment and harassment from ICE and imprisonment and abuse from the Israeli military because of it.

I’ve done a number of events with Chris over the years. I’ve interviewed him outside of the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and I interviewed him as he was sailing to Gaza with the Global Samuel Flotilla right before they were captured by the Israeli military last year. I’ve seen both up close and from afar what he, his story and the story of ALU mean to working people out there, young and old people across this country and beyond. I’ve seen up close and from afar how the media’s good and awful and obsessive coverage of Chris and ALU, how that’s all affected Chris and different members and factions within ALU. And I’ve watched them all try to do their best to navigate a situation and a spotlight that I don’t think any of them ever expected to be in and that most of us will frankly never be able to fully understand from the outside.

I’ve seen and learned about many of the struggles that Chris has been through. I’ve seen and learned about the things that he’s done to help others. I’ve seen and learned about mistakes that he’s made and regretful things that he’s done and said. I know he’s a controversial figure to different people for different reasons and I know that he’s an inspiration to different people for different reasons. I know that he’s a complex and imperfect person, like you, like me, and like the hundreds and hundreds of working people that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years. And I’ve said from the beginning of this show that the whole point of this project was to honor the full and beautiful and complex humanity of our fellow workers to lift up the unheard voices of working class people and to help them and us and others see ourselves as full people with important lives and stories, not just stereotypes, not just name tags and job titles.

We’re so much more than that. And as a fellow worker, Chris is no different. And whatever your thoughts are about him, I think we all need to remember that because I see a lot of people forgetting that and that is not to excuse or downplay any concerns that folks have about Chris, ALU, or the complicated relationship between media celebrity and political movements today. And of course, no one is above critique, not public figures like Chris and certainly not journalists like me and anyone who is part of the labor movement must hold themselves and be held accountable to that movement. I know that and I believe that, but I also know that movements don’t move and history doesn’t happen without people and people are complicated. And if we don’t have a healthy way as working people of talking and listening to each other and working through our shit, if the world is burning all around us and we cannot find ways to work together or work alongside each other for our common goals and common good, even if we don’t like each other, then to put it bluntly, we’re cooked.

And so with all that said, it was in that full spirit and with that same mission that I’ve had since I started this podcast eight years ago that I sat down with Chris Smalls for this important conversation that we had at Red Emma’s in Baltimore. I hope you guys enjoy it and I want to know what you think, but please first take a listen.

All right. Well, thank you so much to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for hosting us for this great event. I want y’all to give a proper Baltimore welcome to Brother Chris Smalls, the co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union here with us tonight. So we are of course here to talk about Chris’s new book, When the Revolution Comes, the Fight for the Future of the Working Class, but we’re also going to talk about so much more. And by way of getting us into this discussion, I wanted to just roll the clock back a second, right? Let’s go back five years, 2021, right? Feels like forever ago, but let’s not forget how crazy of a year that was. We had all just watched the batshit January 6th insurrection still in the middle of COVID, no vaccines yet. And out of this dark swamp in time, an unexpected source of light emerged in worker struggles and a sort of revived labor movement.

Everyone was talking about the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama who were trying to unionize with the retail wholesale and department store union down there. I went down there. That was actually my first field shoot for the real news. And of course those workers lost that election and it was very heartbreaking for a lot of us and it was really incredible to see that heartbreak turn into the energy that we would see later in the year with the first Starbucks store to unionize in Buffalo, New York and the emergence of this ragtag group of badass workers from Staten Island who were trying to unionize their Amazon warehouse. And so it can be easy to forget all that we were going through in that moment. And so I wanted that to sort of be the start. And Chris, I wanted to ask you to take us back there.

Remind us who Chris Smalls was before COVID and then talk us through, because I think we need a refresher. Talk us through the incredible saga from the walkout that you led to you guys winning that first union election.

Chris Smalls:

And thank you all for being here. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Baltimore, so I’m glad and honored to be back and good company and some good comrades, familiar faces in the crowd. So thank you all once again for showing up and supporting my book and being here tonight. I really appreciate that. Yeah. As you said, we have amnesia in America. We all know that. One thing being a news cycle for a few weeks and then it’s always something else, especially under this Trump administration. And ironically, six years ago when I got fired from Amazon, that was also an election year. Trump was still in the headlines still. So we wasn’t garnishing any attention. As you mentioned, leading up to 2021, 2020, COVID was the peak at its peak, especially in New York City being one of the epic centers of the world.

Yeah, workers were afraid, workers were catching COVID. I remember walking into my warehouse and how seeing my comrades at work just really sick and not really themselves. So it’s a really eerie moment. But for those who don’t know, I was an assistant manager at Amazon for four and a half years. I opened up three warehouses in the tri-state area, New Jersey, Connecticut, Staten Island New York was my last building. People’s person always, the same way you see me today, it was the same way I went to work at Amazon. Definitely loved my people. I spent 70 hours a week with them. They were like my extended family. And when COVID hit, I definitely was afraid for all of us and I wanted to speak up on their behalf as well, which led to my firing after I led the walkout on March 30th, 2020, which once again was six years ago.

Seems like it was a long time ago, but it was six years ago it flew. It flew past. But just giving you a background about myself, what you’re going to read about in the book if you haven’t already, is that I’m just like anybody else in this crowd. I’m a single parent. My twins at the time was, well, damn, they were maybe eight or nine years old. And yeah, you can imagine how much time that I’ve lost spending with them over the last years, especially during COVID, the years of COVID, if I was lucky to see them half a year, that was a thing as well. And I love sports, grew up playing basketball, football, track. You going to see that in the book. I also was a rapper. I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Was going to say, don’t bury the lead. There’s a little juicy story about your rap history in there.

Chris Smalls:

Yeah, yeah. There’s a little rap stink that I had briefly after college, dropped out of college because I wanted to pursue music. I thought I was going to blow up overnight and then I got hit with reality getting back into the workforce. I got married and divorced at a young age, but I was married for eight years and during that hardship, working at Amazon was our main source of income for my household, one of them at least. And having healthcare as well. Healthcare Amazon provided for me and my kids and my wife at the time. So when I lost all of that during the pandemic, it really showed me how much the company didn’t really care about anybody. After I poured five years of my blood, sweat and tears into the company after I’ve done so much opening up these warehouses for them, training thousands of Amazon workers, hundreds of their upper management, the companies just say, “You know what?

We don’t care. We’re going to fire you. ” And not only fire you, they did it in a way that martyred me by Jeff Bezos, who was the richest man in the world, signing off on the smear campaign, which basically said to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against Amazon, which is a good idea. But at the same time, the racist part in the beginning saying that I’m not smart or articulate, something that they use in these corporate settings to put upon Black people and Brown people, saying that we’re not smart enough or we’re not articulate enough to even talk about anything when it comes to work related issues. So that was really the catalyst of a moment right there where I embraced it and I said, “You know what? Even though I no longer work for the company, I’m going to continue fighting for the workers inside the building.” Ultimately, for a whole year from 2020 to 2021, we traveled the country protesting in front of debt bases, mansions and penthouses while Bessemer, Alabama was trying their efforts and we all was paying attention.

My folks in Staten Island, we were paying attention, but we took it a step further. We did drive down there. We drove 16 hours from New York City down to Bessemer in a car, one car squished up and we stayed about a week connecting with workers there, connecting with the union, trying to figure it out because we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We wanted to do something, but we didn’t really have all the answers. But unfortunately, yes, like Max said, when they lost, it was definitely devastating for everybody. We felt that because of several reasons. Number one, that building investment Alabama has about 6,000 employees, five, 6,000 employees. Majority of them are black people. 85% of the building is black, 80% of the workforce there are black women. So when Amazon spent millions of dollars stopping that campaign, that was a direct attack on black and brown people and that’s something that we resonated with in Staten Island, New York where the demographics are similar to our building as well.

So the next day after the results came out, it just so happened to be our birthday, four 20, four / 20 / 2021 is when we started our campaign the next day after those results came out. We didn’t even wait.

And yeah, that year was like a blur as well, but it was 11 months, over 300 plus days I set up an encampment outside of the building that fired me at a public bus stop talking to workers every single day, rain shine, how to call night or day about why we need to start a union. And originally we sent out the Olive branch to the established unions. We wanted some support. We wanted some resources, some help, but we got nothing in return because a lot of people didn’t believe in us. A lot of people thought that it wasn’t going to work. Who are you guys to unionize when y’all don’t have any resources, y’all don’t have any knowledge, experience, et cetera. But one thing we did know is that we’re Amazon workers. Whether we’re fired or not, we know the ins and out of the company better than Jeff Basils.

So we felt that was the only way, and I still believe that till this day that the only way it could have been done was grassroots, gorilla style tactics in the trenches every day, meeting your workers face-to-face. That was the only way it was going to work. We couldn’t take the shortcut routes. We couldn’t do the traditional style organizing methods that most unions use. We had to think outside of that box and also sacrifice. Sacrifice was one of the things that we all had to do as a collective. And yeah, it was successful. 11 months, hard blood sweat and tears into the campaign and it paid off to become the first union in American history for Amazon workers. And still, till this day, that building is the only unionized building in this country and that’s what people got to understand. And it’s pro and con to that.

Yes, it’s great that we still are standing, but it shouldn’t take four years for us to have a contract. Keep that in mind that even when I was the president for three years, the first thing we did when we won was demand the bargaining order from Amazon, or at least from the National Labor Relation Board so that we can negotiate with Amazon. We didn’t hear anything under the Biden administration. I don’t know what happened, but there was some magic in the air. We got a bargaining order in April of this year, but Amazon has already appealed it because they’ve been spending millions of dollars holding things up for the last four years. So for those and everybody who’s been questioning like, “Why don’t you guys have a contract or you guys are not getting a contract?” It’s not because of us. It’s literally because the system is broken.

The system is not worker friendly. As much as these progressives and politicians say that the system are usher us to the system that’s supposed to work for us, it doesn’t. It’s not in our favor. So we have to continue to fight every step of the way. And actually when we won in 2021, that was just the beginning of the fight. This fight is a lifetime struggle and now the only thing that I can see that our union can do, and not just our union, because there’s other unions out here, Starbucks workers, all these other unions that emerge, they’re still fighting for contracts too and negotiating their way through it. But the only thing I can see that’ll work for all of us is if we withhold our strongest weapon, which is our labor and go on strike.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it was wild too reporting on Bessemer and then reporting on you guys and sort of seeing how the things that worked for Amazon Imbessemer weren’t working on Staten Island. I think that was a real sort of moment of insurgent energy because in Bessemer, when the workers brought in the RWDSU, Amazon did what union busting employers always do where they’re like, “Oh, this is an outside force that’s trying to come in and get in between our relationship.” They couldn’t do that with you guys because it was like, no, these are literally just the workers in the warehouse. And so I wanted to touch on that because it was such a big debate at the time because of Bessemer and ALU especially, but everyone was talking about, is it better to go the independent route like Amazon Labor Union, Trader Joe’s United, the Home Depot workers who tried to unionize in Philly, or is it better to go with an established union like the Teamsters of the RWDSU?

And so with five, again, like you said, five, four years of experience since we were having those debates, I think it’s important for us to sort of revisit and update that and you know better than us. I wanted to ask after all that you’ve been through in this struggle, where have you landed on the independent or established union debate, especially in light of the AOU affiliating with the Teamster?

Chris Smalls:

Yeah. I mean, I still stick by my original sentiment that there was no other way that we was going to get it done, not with any established union. Didn’t matter how long they’ve been around, how powerful they are. The way we organize is completely against any type of style. You can’t read about it because it hasn’t been done before. And yeah, I still believe that independent unions are something that we still need to push. Not saying that established unions can’t support, but what’s happening over the last few years, to be honest, after we won in 2021, well, let me take it to the day of. The day we beat Amazon, we had $2.50 in our account. Now it’s funny because we were broke as hell. We didn’t have dudes paying members. We still don’t have dues paying members. We don’t have a contract. So I can’t ask for workers who are making $20 an hour to pay union dues.

I wasn’t going to do that as the union president. The next day we had almost half a million dollars because the bandwagon came, the unions, “Oh yeah, we supported. Oh yeah.” But they really, really didn’t. Actually, there was a reporting that all the established unions combined only contributed after we all won, talk about Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Amazon, you name it, they only contributed 3% of their resources into these campaigns. And I can tell you we didn’t get one of those 3%. We got zero. Literally nobody offered us anything before we won. And after we won, the bandwagon came and everybody said, “Oh yeah, we had some resurgence in the labor movement,” which is great. It was. It was definitely headlines, it was definitely international news and resonated with millions of workers around the world. The problem is that established unions didn’t use that opportunity to double down and really invest into grassroots movements because they was embarrassed.

We weren’t the first people who tried to unionize Amazon. Absolutely not. Actually, established unions have been trying to unionize Amazon for over a decade, even before Bessemer, Alabama. And guess what? You guys never heard about it. I never heard about it. It was actually a campaign at GFK8 while I was working there, didn’t even hear about it until we started and that was ran by the established union of the Teamsters. So when it comes to which side do I really ride with, I’m going to say the one that works and I know that there’s pros and cons to everything. The thing about independent unions and grassroots efforts, as we all know, if you’re grassroots, it’s a struggle. You’re not going to have all the tools and resources given to you all the time. You got to scrap, you got to sacrifice, you got to crowdfund, you got to have mutual aid.

We literally had a GoFundMe, which it’s sad to say, but that was our only lifeline of how we were able to feed our comrades and our workers there. So the reason why we had to affiliate with the Teamsters, which I signed by the way, is because we’re going up against a $2.2 trillion company like Amazon that has all the money to hold things up in federal court for four or five years like they have it, which you guys are not privy to this all the time, but Amazon has million dollar lawyers and while I was the president, I’ve been to federal court against Amazon. I lost count how many times over the years and all they do every time we do something, they appeal it into a federal court to try to get it to a right wing Supreme Court and try to get us decertified.

That is their game plan. They’re not trying to come to the table. They still don’t even want to recognize that we won. So the affiliation with the Teamsters was so that my union doesn’t go bankrupt because if we don’t have dues paying members and people are not going to continuously donate, we have to give resources to stay alive and stay afloat. The Teamsters was going to offer that. The affiliation agreement that I signed was something that I and my executive board negotiated along with our legal counsel and it was one that we benefited from the most. We have full autonomy with our local ALU, IBT, local one, full autonomy, full jurisdiction on Amazon. And the most important thing that I got in that contract was they have strike benefits. They can offer the workers at JFKA right now a thousand dollars a week to go on strike if they wanted to.

I’m not the president anymore, but this is something that I set up to help them succeed in that journey. It’s up to the workers, it’s up to the current leadership of the union. It’s up to them to take that initiative and utilize it. And hopefully they do because the clock is ticking. Right now since we’ve been issued a bargaining order, Amazon has already appealed it, but the clock is ticking for them to come to the table. They have about a year to do so. Otherwise, the game plan that Amazon is going to run is going to try to decertify the union. So hopefully they get their stuff together and they get it done. I’m always going to support my union, whether I have a position or not. And that’s what we all have to do in solidarity. We all have a role to play because our fight is absolutely your fight.

A lot of people don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes at Amazon are within these campaigns. So the reason why we’re here today, the reason why you guys are picking up this book is because this book is also not just a memoir, but it’s also a how-to. It’s going to give you some tools on how we can all fight back against the system that’s oppressing us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah.

So I really want to talk before we get to Q&A about your life, your work, your mission beyond ALU. And the last time we did an interview, you were sailing to Gaza for Christ’s sake. So I want us to get there, but before we do, just to pick up on what you were saying there, I think it’s really important for us to in this space, model a real, honest, no BS discussion about what we can learn from the beautiful, complicated, heartbreaking, inspiring story of the first Amazon union. Because so many struggles before you and there are going to be plenty after you, you guys faced a lot of external pressure and internal debates, division. This stuff happens and you write about some of that in the book and there’s a time and place to talk about that stuff and it’s not here. We’re not here to sort of air dirty laundry and point fingers.

Everyone knows Chris isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. And that’s, I think the point is that whether you’re organizing your shop or trying to build a political movement, you can’t do anything without the messy realities of messy human beings who make the movement. So our humanity is always part of the story and none of us is perfect. And so I wanted to ask you, Chris, again, not for us to get sucked into the … She said … I’ve talked to other Amazon members who have different versions of the story and I always tell them, like I told you, I was like, “It’s not my place to pick sides here. I’m not in this union. I’m a fucking journalist.” And it breaks my heart when I see these divisions because I want the best for everybody, but life doesn’t work out like the fairytales in our heads.

So what can we learn from y’all’s experience that can help others out there who are going through these struggles and it’s getting tough and the company, the employers appealing every victory, it’s like one step forward, three steps back. You’re losing friendships because shit just gets really tough. You have no money. What can folks out there who are experiencing that learn from what y’all went through in ALU?

Chris Smalls:

Yeah, great question. I mean, once again, when you’re taking on one of the most powerful companies in the world, you’re trying to bring people together from all different backgrounds, all different creeds, you’re going to have disagreements, you’re going to have different political ideologies, you’re going to have infighting, every union, every organization does. We just were under a microscope because of our historical victory and the mistake that the media Yeah, sort of did was comparing us to established unions that’s been around for a hundred years. We weren’t that. We’re grassroots organizers. Most of them weren’t even organizers. They were just everyday civilians that were inspired, that were passionate, that wanted to do something. Even myself as the leader at the time, I didn’t have all the answers as well. I had to learn and I’m still learning every day. I’m a sponge. I’m learning new what’s going on overseas is affecting us here.

The things that I’m doing with Palestine, Cuba, wherever I’m going, it affects us here. I try to connect those dots. Some people just can’t think that big and unfortunately it leads to disagreements, but the disagreements are that’s a democracy. That’s exactly what a democracy is.

Unfortunately, the movement has its way of weaning people out. It’s not for everybody. It’s just real. A lot of people will see social media posts or see something happening, protests, whatever it is. Even going back to George Floyd days when there was millions of people taken to the streets in America. But where are these millions of people now? They’re back at work. A lot of people see things for the moment they get involved and then they get burnt out. They get weeded out or they realize this is too tough for me. And a lot of it is what happened to our union. A lot of folks thought that it’s a lot easier than what it is. Yes, I do make things look cool sometimes. That’s intentional because organizing is stressful as shit. I know we all know that. Organizing hard, stressful, tiring, exhausting, all of the above.

And I tried to make it as simple, as cool, as fun as possible because I know what workers are dealing with working at Amazon. That was one of my biggest things is making sure that everybody around me was always good in some capacity. Unfortunately, once again, the movement is going to be the movement. And for those who jump into this movement or this type of work or any type of work, you got to know what you signed yourself up for. This is a lifetime struggle. Our ancestors paved the way and not only that lost their lives, some are incarcerated right now as we speak so that we can have the right to organize, that we can have a reason to organize. So when these type of movements, you can’t have one foot in, one foot out. You got to be fully committed for the long haul and you got to be fully committed to sacrificing something because if you spoke out about Palestine, you lost something.

I know I did. If you spoke out at your workplace, you’re going to be targeted. If not worse, you’re going to get terminated. If you speak out against all of the injustices that we’re seeing right now in this country, you’re going to lose friends. You’re going to lose loved ones. I know a lot of us in here that probably when they started talking about October 7th, it was tough conversations in the beginning because I could tell you I lost 10,000 followers on Instagram instantly when I posted about Palestine over three years ago. And it was the same people that said in my DMs, “Chris, we supported you for Amazon workers, but this is where I draw the line.” What? In return, you know what I said? Fuck you.

Because if you can’t make the relationship between Amazon and genocide, then I can’t help you. And I don’t give a damn if you one of my organizers or not. If you fighting over some petty shit when Jeff Bezos is flying in space on the penis rocket, you missing the plot. So people want to attack the wrong things and that happens a lot on the left. We’re talking about the character, the person, the individual, how I look, how I talk, where I’m going, what headlines I’m gathering. Meanwhile, Amazon is firing 30,000 people next week. And that was what I always tell my organizers. We’re fighting about what we doing next when Amazon is winning. They are in the building union busting and y’all worried about the wrong things. So for me, the biggest lesson I learned is you got to stay true to the mission. And I don’t debate too much.

I mean, I do sometimes because I have to defend myself in certain cases, but I’ve never played into the naysay about myself or about my union because I let the work speak for itself. We made history, unprecedented history, and people that were there, they know. That’s all I care about. My day ones that walked out of the building six years ago with me, they know. Everybody else that came afterwards that’s going to jump on board later on, that’s going to look back, reflect back, that none of that matters. What matters is what are you willing to do to get Amazon to come to the table? What are you willing to do to liberate the people of Palestine? And more importantly, if you don’t get up and do the work, who’s going to do it because there’s no calvary coming for us?

Maximillian Alvarez:

One of the things that has sort of always colored the way that I have watched your journey is the fact that I always think that I was working in warehouses back in Southern California 15 years ago in the depths of the Great Recession. Our family was losing our house like millions of others. It was awful. And the thought of one of us having the cultural international statue that you do that one of us would be giving so much hope to people around the country and around the world is just mind boggling to me, but it’s also like that’s got to be a lot to go through as a working warehouse guy to then kind of be catapulted to that. So that’s not to excuse anything. It’s just to be like, we should give each other as much grace as we possibly can while holding ourselves accountable to each other.

Do our best. That’s the best that we can do for each other. And I say that to say by getting us to your activism beyond the warehouse, because what is it about your story, ALU’s story that has spoken to so many people around the world? And how did that lead you to becoming a global activist for human rights from Gaza to Cuba?

Chris Smalls:

Great question. I mean, well, number one, if you’d have told me that I could look as cool as a rapper, as a union organizer, I’d have been doing this shit a long time ago, would have saved you some

Maximillian Alvarez:

Years.

Chris Smalls:

I don’t look like your typical union president. My union doesn’t look like your typical union. My executive board didn’t look like your typical union executive board. So culturally, we gravitated to the younger generation. They looked at us and said, “Oh wow, they look cool. Amazon Labor Union, oh man, they’re wearing sweats and T-shirts and hat backwards and whatever else.” And we did something at a time where once again, the world was watching and we captivated that moment in time. But the international piece came when I got a passport because I just got a passport when I became the president three, four years ago. I didn’t even have a passport and 70% of Americans don’t have a passport.

I encourage you, number one, get one because since I got a passport, I’ve been to 45 different countries around the world and counted. And when I go to these countries, I’m not on vacation. I’m not on tourist trips sort of because I need to learn some things, I need to see some things, but I’m meeting with Amazon workers and I’ll give you the best example that I have as far as how much dedication or how dedicated I am to the movement. I was invited two years ago when I was the president still. I was invited to Paris by Pharrell and Rihanna to walk in the Louis Vuitton runway for this grand opening. And the same day I was invited to the White House again for the second time from Kamala Harris while she was running for president. I declined both of those and went to an Amazon warehouse in Canada, literally.

And guess what? I’m proud to say that that Amazon warehouse in Canada is the first unionized building in Canada’s history. So once again, people could say what they want about me. I know how I move. I know I’m very conscious about what’s going on, what’s being out there, what’s put out there and those around me, once again, they know if you’ve met me in the past, if you’ve been around me, if you hung around, what you see is what you get. I don’t really have to put on a facade and I think that’s what really resonates with people is that they can relate to me and that they feel comfortable talking and actually working alongside or working with me in some way. I think the international piece, the international solidarity that I’ve shown is also shown other people that what’s happening abroad is coming back home to roots, especially when it comes to Palestine.

There was several reasons why I got on that flotilla. Number one, I’m an Amazon worker, sure. Amazon has invested $7.2 billion into project numbers. The technology that’s being used to target and surveil and kill innocent Palestinians is powered by Amazon Web Services, number one. Number two, I’m a black man and I have kids. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where we’re watching, scrolling every day, seeing dead people. I don’t know about you guys, but that shit is enough, traumatizing. And number three, I’m a taxpayer citizen, American taxpayer citizen like all of us. We all should be outraged where our taxpaying dollars are going. And I could tell you what I saw in Gaza is there’s no comparison. Less than a hundred miles away from Gaza Strip. I’ll never forget before we got … Well, we were already intercepted, but I will never forgive me crying on the ship because I was so angry that we didn’t make it, but just knowing that we were so close, 60 miles away from Gaza Strip, our boat got swarmed with flies and I’ll never forget I asked one of my comrades, “Where the hell did all these flies come from?” And it’s because there was so much death and so much bodies under rubble, vermin, whatever you want to call it, that the flies flew a hundred miles away from land to find food from our garbage and we were swarmed and I said, “Whatever we’re seeing on Instagram, it’s actually just a glimpse.

It’s not even close to how bad it is over there.” And I hear testimonies from doctors all the time. It’s beyond what I could put into words and obviously what happened to me is just confirmation that Israel is a racist apartheid state. That being said, spreading awareness, going back to who I am and why I do what I do and how I move.

What other labor leader in this country that you know is banned from Israel for a hundred years? That’ll be me. When it comes to Cuba, I brought 25 people from the Amazon Labor Union to Cuba three, four years ago, first labor delegation to Cuba and we delivered humanitarian aid back then. We graduated from Fidel Castro University. We stayed in bootcamp. We were disciplined. We learned the Cuban way and I’ve never looked back, been to Cuba every year since. And you may have saw that I was detained two months ago. I took my phone and they worry about the 16 other people that they took their phones from. They gave them their phones back, but some of the comrades that I was with heard the ICE agents talking about, “Oh, that’s the Amazon guy. We got the Amazon guy.” So the target on my back is very much real and they’re detaining other people questioning about me right now as we speak.

It’s just happened. So I think it’s important and then I know y’all saw me crash the Med Gala. I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t invited to the Med Gala so I had to crash the party, but we crashing the Med Gala was the spread awareness and it worked because if I would’ve sat home 20 minutes away from where Jeff Babes was about to walk the red carpet, 40 minutes away from the building where they have a negotiated contract in four years, I’m doing a disservice to myself and to my entire union and the working class as a labor leader. I do the things that I do because I ask myself this question, if Chris Smalls doesn’t do this work, who’s going to do it? And that answer sometimes is very scary because the answer is nobody. And that’s the same question that each and every one of y’all got to ask yourselves.

If you don’t get up and do this work, who’s going to do it? And hopefully that motivates you to continue in doing what you’re doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Give it up for Chris. Well, and I think that’s a perfect lead into a final question before we get to Q&A, because your book is called When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. And I want to talk about what that fight like, what’s really at stake and how big it is because right now from the excitement we felt when you guys won to the depression we feel that you still don’t have a contract to Trump strangling Cuba, invading Venezuela, kidnapping its president, going to war with Iran, the climate spiralantic in control, we tried and we failed to stop a genocide. It feels so hopeles sometimes, but the fight is where we actually have the chance to change the outcome and it’s not just in our workplaces and it’s not just in Gaza, but I wanted to ask you what your sort of final message is for a working class struggle and movement that can actually turn this tide and bring us back to a future that we can give to our kids that’s still worth living in.

Chris Smalls:

Yeah. Great question. And I mean, when I say a fight for the future of the working class, I mean, we’re fighting for humanity right now. There is no Calvary coming to save us. I’m going to tell you now, politicians are not our savior and in the history of the human race, we never voted our way to liberation. We always had to fight most of it with our lives. And when I’m talking about the revolution, well, the revolution starts with yourself. The times that we’re in right now, as you mentioned, they’re terrible. Society, things that are normalized, being desensitized, all of these things that are happening real time in our faces. Every day there’s something new on the headlines distracting us from the bigger picture. The way we was able to beat this $2.2 trillion company because we came together for one common cause the same way that people were coming together for Palestine because it wasn’t like this three years ago until we saw the student encampments, the protests in the streets, the flotillas, all of the different things that we’re seeing because people are fed up, young people, young people are fed up.

I knew one day when I walked into a middle school and this 10-year-old kid said, “Jeff Bezos is a bad man,” I said, “I’m doing something right.” Because I couldn’t imagine myself at 10 years old and I encourage teachers and many educators in the room, “Bring some of your labor leaders. I’ll come to your classroom. I will definitely come out. I’ve been to elementary schools, you name it. I’ve been there. University, I will be there because I know the importance of getting to the youth. We don’t want them to continue to praise these celebrities and athletes and musicians. We want them to praise the people that’s actually doing some great work and that’s people right here in our own community and reminding ourselves where we came from because society has changed because of companies like Amazon who’s forcing us to hit one click buy. Stay home, stay isolated, just audio package.

It shows up to your door. You see one person deliver it, but you never see the 10 or 12 people that that box done touched before it got there. Six of them got injured. One of them possibly could have got killed, but you would never hear about it. And that’s the message that we all have to spread because somebody in your household, somebody in your neighborhood doesn’t know this, doesn’t know what’s happening at these warehouses, doesn’t know what’s happened with the Amazon Labor Union. As big as that victory was, you already know we in a country that is very, very retroactive and a lot of people here got amnesias are living worse, living in their own bubbles. That’s saying you’re in your own bubble, but that’s not a good thing. That’s up to us to find these people, to meet them where they at, mainly work and to get them organized because when I say a fight for the future of the working class, and I say the revolution comes once again, that’s everybody in this room coming together for one common cause for the greater good of humanity.

And I’ll give you this last gem.

The fight for Palestine is going to liberate the world, but the fight for black and brown indigenous people is going to liberate everybody.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Chris Malls, everyone. All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guest, Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Go check out Chris’s new book, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. And thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for hosting this amazing event. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The election interference evidence no one is talking about

✇The Real News Network
By: Taya Graham and Stephen Janis
8 June 2026 at 19:28
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on June 03, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Are President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans publicly signaling that they plan to interfere in—and potentially rig—the 2026 midterm elections? If so, why is the media not taking the threat seriously? In this episode of Inequality Watch, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate the connections between wealth inequality, political power, ICE funding, the influence of Super PACs on elections, and growing concerns about democratic accountability in Trump’s America.

Credits:

  • Pre-Production: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
  • Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Stephen Janis
Transcript

The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Could President Trump and his MAGA Congress be planning to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections? Well, we have some evidence that might surprise you, which we will unpack on this episode of the Capitol Hill React Report. Hello, this is Taya Graham, myself, along with my reporting partner, Steven Janice, our Capitol Hill correspondence for the Real News Network. We report regularly on what’s happening in the nation’s Capitol, but with a twist. We examine the process of governance through the prism of the most powerful force in today’s politics, economic inequality. Now, before you say, tell you that seems sort of limited. Just let me explain a little bit before we get to the first video. Economic inequality is at its highest point in recent history. Just take a look at the latest report that showed American workers’ share of the economy has fallen to its lowest level since 1947.

That’s right. In 2025, the share of the economy that went to the people who actually make it run was 54% a historic low. Okay. So why is this context essential for reporting on politics? Well, because all that wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands translates into concentrated power and that power now flows into our elections in the form of cash. Cash, which translates into victories at the ballot box for the purveyors of an increasingly extractive economy, insulating it from ballot box accountability, which ultimately means that you can’t understand politics on Capitol Hill unless you comprehend what currently defines it, namely the rich getting richer. Stephen, how am I doing?

Stephen Janis:

So you’re doing great. I mean, one of the things we have to think about is we got to look at democracy as a whole here functioning through this prism of inequality. The idea of democracy that delivers a certain amount of freedom to the people who are part of it. Now, freedom is a limited resource. So as people get richer and richer, they hoard that freedom. And so there’s less freedom to go around. Freedom to do what you want, freedom to educate yourself, freedom to live where you want. All those things sort of translate into the affordability crisis we’re seeing now, which means that there’s less freedom for the working people and more and more freedom for the richest 1% and more and more freedom to control how we live. And that’s why we have this sort of crisis on Capitol Hill and that’s how we have to view what goes on on Capitol Hill.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, that is such a great point and brings us right back to the topic at hand. The incredibly tense state of American elections and why wealth inequality will play a key role in that autocratic calculus. So first, let’s be honest, Steven, the mainstream media has, in my opinion, been misreading Trump, specifically his pronouncements that he doesn’t care about gas prices or the quagmire in Iran. Let’s listen to him talk about it and then discuss. When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make it?

Donald Trump:

Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about American financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivated.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So the interpretation from the TV pundits has been that President Trump is just inexplicably tone deaf or detached or just disinterested, but we think Trump is telegraphing something much more insidious. So Steven, let me ask you a question after watching this video. Is Trump just really disengaged as the mainstream media says, or as they say he’s unhinged, or is there something else a little more troubling going on here?

Stephen Janis:

Well, Ted, this is one of many clips where Trump has kind of downplayed midterm elections or voters concerns or gas prices or whatever. He does it consistently. And of course it would be suicide for a politician in a functioning democracy to say something like that, right? Because this would directly affect how people vote. I really think for some reason gas prices, well, I kind of understand that gas prices are one of the biggest motivators for people when it comes to elections. And so it would be suicide, but what he’s really trying to say is, “I’m not worried about the midterms because I got this locked out. ” And look at what happened in the last presidential election. He tried to overturn it with a lost, but he wasn’t really prepared. He has been preparing for two years now to be able to interfere with the elections.

He subpoenaed ballots all over the country, including Fulton County and Georgia. He has set up this election integrity system run by a person who actually denied the 2020 election. He has increased the funding for ICE and Border Patrol, which we’ll talk about later. He has just simply put people in place who will be able to do what he needs to do. The Justice Department itself does whatever he wants. They’ll prosecute anybody. Very true. So they will certainly be willing to weigh in on this. He is prepared. He’s declared emergencies in so many situations. He is prepared and he is trying to say, “I’m not worried about it because no matter what happens, I’m going to make sure that I come out on top.” And I think that’s what we’re missing here. When he says he’s disinterested, what he’s saying is, “I’ve got this in the bag.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, I think you put your finger right on it here. The real danger here isn’t just what Trump is saying, but the fact that everyone keeps dismissing it. And you know what Trump hasn’t even ruled out paying the people who stormed the Capitol and those who tried to halt the counting of the electoral votes in 2020, despite the fact that his administration said the fund is dead, he was literally just quoted as saying, “I think they should be reimbursed by a crooked government.” Now, his remarks regarding the controversial $1.7 billion weaponization fund bolster, I think the case that he believes he can alter the midterm outcome. It would’ve set aside money for people who believe they were unjustly prosecuted, namely the Jan six insurrectionists. I mean, critics say if Trump has his way, he will literally be able to assemble a pratorian guard to disrupt the elections.

And I’m alluding to the elite core of Roman military officers who guarded the emperor, but who eventually just took power themselves. Steven, what does it mean if he gets his way?

Stephen Janis:

Well, what it means is because ways he has what you need the first … The most important element of any sort of autocratic takeover is having the money to pay people and having the freedom to pay people any way you want. Now this $1.7 billion fund would be an easy way just to dole out cash to people who had done his bidding before. Now he has other ways of doing this that we’ll talk about. But the main thing is it gives them the power of the purse in a way that’s totally up to his discretion and the Justice Department, which is an extension of him. Now what’s interesting about it is I don’t really think they need a fund. Those J6 is going to just sue and then Trump can approve the payouts. That’s right. So he’ll get it one way or another. But the point is he wants to signal to the people, “Hey, if you help interfere with an election, I will pay for it and I’ll reward you because these settlements could be huge.

$1.7 billion is a lot of money.” Sure is. So I think that’s what he’s trying to telegraph is saying, “Help me out with this and you’ll get paid.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, that is not only spot on, but it’s actually really scary. But what’s even more concerning to me is how much this election interference plan is hiding in plain sight with little or no pushback because he can’t do this alone. He needs help from his ever loyal contingent in Congress. And for the most part, they are in lockstep with Trump. And that was more than evident when the MAGA Congress started to plot a strategy to get more money to ice customs and border patrol for purposes that we’re going to touch on a litle bit later. Now their plan was to use a tactic called reconciliation, which allows legislation to bypass the filibuster provided it has significant fiscal impact on federal spending. Now, this was an unprecedented power grab because the funding bill was intended to provide routine annual appropriations and that’s a measure that is usually passed with bipartisan support, which brings me to an interesting encounter we had on Capitol Hill with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, who didn’t seem to want to answer our question when we asked why ICE and CBP needed an additional $70 billion in funding, but his reluctance is also revealing.

Let’s take a listen to what happened.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Fuck that up.

Stephen Janis:

Congressman, why does ICE need an additional $75 billion? Why is that funding? How do you justify that to the American people who now are suffering with high gas prices and things like that? Why is that even more money?

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, that’s the cost of funding the department. Are you for abolishing ICE?

Stephen Janis:

I’m just asking the question. They already have $14.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, you understand that that is the- I’m not

Stephen Janis:

For against anything.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

You understand that’s the appropriated amount, right? Yes. That’s been appropriated.

Stephen Janis:

Of course, but I’m asking

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Questions. So the reason additional funds, that’s the base budget for ICE and CBP, right? You understand that?

Stephen Janis:

I do.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Okay. So the additional funds that came through the Working Family’s tax cut bill were to increase border security. Why? Because Joe Biden let in 10 and a half million people into the country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, just for the record, are you for abolishing ICE? Because you didn’t answer the congressman’s question.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I’m for abolishing politicians to be able to answer a question with a question and evade answering the question I ask. I’m for abolishing that. But one thing I want to just say before we move on is that his sort of argument that that’s the appropriate amount for ICE is actually wildly inaccurate. I look back into the ICE funding and what ICE and CPB have been spending roughly eight to $10 billion a year. They already have $140 billion. This is not an appropriate amount for anything. That’s an absolute freaking lie. ICE and CBT do not need that much money. This is excess cash. Taxpayer cash, your taxpayer dollars that are simply being spent without accountability. I think there’s a reason for that we’ll talk about in a second, but really he was just FOS on that. And I just want to point that out because it really was infuriating.

I was trying to get his answer, but I couldn’t sit there and get into an argument with him about what he was saying was actually patently false.

Taya Graham:

Personally, when a politician answers a question with a question, in my opinion, that is a sign they don’t have an answer or they have an answer, they don’t want the public to know. And he

Stephen Janis:

Definitely didn’t have an answer in this point. So good point, Teo.

Taya Graham:

Thank you. But I mean, the question you were asking was not insignificant. I mean, in fact, it was a really big piece of the puzzle, led us to think that the threats to the midterm elections are widely underestimated. Now, the crux of the matter is funding. Now what you asked is why Republicans want to give ICE, customs, and Border Patrol another $70 billion. And what makes this so unusual is that the big beautiful bill dropped roughly $140 billion on both agencies just last year. But with ICE and CBP spending at best $20 billion annually, it begs the question, why so much? What is it really for? And Steven, you have a theory about this. Tell me about it.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I think the thing you have to think about is that they’re moving towards a more autocratic form of government. Autocracies and democracies have different incentives, basically, different incentive systems. Technically speaking, a democracy wants to award beneficial policy for constituents. So to get elected, you got to do stuff that people like. Autocracies don’t work that way. They need to punish people who might push back. They need to crush dissent and that’s through a system of incentivization of punishment. And so in my opinion, this money, which can, I guess when you add up $210 billion for a law enforcement agency is about constructing a great American punishment regime to prepare Americans for a more autocratic government.

When I looked into the records and tried to figure out how much money does ICE and CPP still have on the books, it’s really hard to figure out because the federal government really isn’t oriented towards reporting on multifiscal year cycles about how much money they have. But I looked, I found at least $73 billion that had been unallocated so far. And that’s after they’ve already built all these warehouses, these prisons where they’re incarcerating people. So they literally have what would be for those agencies unlimited funding. And unlimited funding for law enforcement gives you a way to institute punishment throughout all levels of governance. I mean, those detention centers can be used to detain people for a variety of reasons. They’ve already detained Americans. They’ll detain more. Having an unlimited amount of money to swarm CPB and swarm ICE into cities gives you this ability to do what Trump did in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago.

And when these elections come and when Trump is trying to say, Hey, they weren’t fair, they’re going to need these guys and women to come into cities and to try to disrupt the people who will be pushing back or to seize ballot box. I really think this excess money is insulating both institutions and that’s for a reason to create a punishment regime that will be reflective of the autocratic values that the Trump administration is espousing through their policy choices.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you did the classic thing every reporter should do and actually anyone watching should do, which is follow the money. You follow the money, you figure out what’s really going on. So let me just ask you a question about this. I was thinking back to the first time it really hit home with us that something was afoot with regard to democracy during the shutdown last year. So last year, Democrats wanted to extend the Obamacare tax credits and Republicans refused. But what struck me at the time was how the majority party approached the entire conflict. They simply shut down Congress. They simply stopped town halls and talking to their constituents. No debate, no work, just silence. And of course, all of that was just to deny people healthcare. And that seems like a pretty anti-Democratic strategy. So how does it play into that theme you’re talking about, about the punishment regime theme?

What do you think?

Stephen Janis:

Well, the thing is if you shut it down, you’re kind of punishing people because you’re taking away the deliberative legislative body that’s supposed to represent their interests where you are supposed to hash these things out and figure out how to get people healthcare. So what you’re saying is, we don’t care. You don’t have healthcare, you’re being punished. We’re going to punish you by not doing anything and showing you that we don’t have to do anything and disengaging from our constituents. And so I think it’s a big part of that. I mean, a functioning legislative body should be an accountability mechanism to make sure things like ICE and CBP don’t get out of control. But now when they shut it down and turn it into this absolute desert of democracy, well, then you don’t have a limited legislative body to represent you. Without representation, you’re done.

I mean, what people don’t understand, and I think you’ve talked about this really, really well, is that democracy is a culture that infiltrates all levels of government governance. When you change that to a punishment regime, to an autocratic culture, everything changes.Your ability as a constituent and to vote and to have some impact and some say in how you live diminishes quite quickly. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

Taya Graham:

Steven, that’s a really, really good point. And you touched on constituents actually having a voice and this is something we caught at a press conference where that idea that you’re touching on right there was absolutely front and center. Now it was an announcement by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Summer Lee to announce a bill that would shut down super PACS. Now Super PACS are of course the campaign behemoths that can spend unlimited amounts of money basically to buy elections. Super PACS are like the corporate love child of Citizens United, that famous decision that allowed corporations to also spend unlimited amounts on electing people to subject us the working class to the extractive tendencies of our current economy. Now this union between them was so fruitful that it gave birth to political organizations with unlimited spending power and an insatiable appetite for television ads, digital marketing, robocalls, and anyone who’s willing to rent out a swing state’s airwaves.

Now, Sanders and Lee basically want to undo all that with a limit on how much Super PACS can raise. Their bill with limit contributions to $5,000 per individual or corporation, essentially disabling the Super PAC system that allowed Elon Musk to dump $280 million over a quarter of a billion dollars into President Trump’s campaign, which resulted in the mess that we’re currently living with. But I asked Senator Sanders a question and he had an interesting answer. Let’s take a listen and you can react on the other side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

I don’t want people to think this is just another issue. What somebody said is right. It is the most important issue. If we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare at all, why is that? You think it may have something to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies who spend zillions of dollars making sure we don’t move to a Medicare for all system? Do you think the fact that we have a starvation minimum wage has something to do with the fact that a lot of these corporations and business people don’t want to pay their workers a living wage, don’t want workers to join unions. The point here, this is not another issue. This is an issue that touches every bloody issue facing working people in this country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, I really want to hear your thoughts here. Is Senator Sanders connecting the right dots?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, absolutely. Because money, cash, power, adulterates, democracy. And the way you adulterate it is to be able to deliver, to allow people who have the concentrated wealth to throw it all into the election. Now the whole idea of campaign laws is to limit influence of one individual or corporation. You can only donate so much no matter how rich you are. Now with super PACS, you can put everything you have into it if you want and that gives you disproportionate power and that creates an inequality basis for elections. So absolutely. And I want to point out one thing. You were the one who asked the question that set off that answer and I think it’s really vitally important because Sanders is connecting the dots. You can’t afford housing. Look at the super PAC. You can’t afford healthcare super PACs. All these super PACs create disproportionate influence for the smallest number of people possible.

It turns an election into really a choice of the oligarchy to decide who’s going to be in power and what policies they will implement. So it was a great answer and it’s absolutely spot on.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I asked the question because I felt like sometimes we, meaning journalists, don’t really connect the dots. And as we’ve discussed, as you’ve said, the great American punishment regime is a product of President Trump’s desire to diminish democracy, but it’s a political transformation that wouldn’t be happening if the system itself hadn’t failed to deliver for the majority of people who live under it. So what Sanders did is make the connection between big money and bad economics palpable and easy to see. He cut through the noise and made the argument that the wealth imbalance and the cash hoarding that it enables is cycled back into elections and fines forms and things like the affordability crisis or the housing shortage and of course our unresponsive and overly expensive healthcare system. These connections are crucial if political mechanisms like super PACS are both to be understood and mitigated.

If you don’t connect the accumulation of obscene wealth with the fact that you can’t pay your monthly utility bill, then it will be nearly impossible to sustain a movement to reform all of this. So Steven, how does Sanders and Lee’s idea fit into your theory of a punishment regime?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I want to say one thing first though before I answer that question, because it’s a great question, but I want to say this, I want to be the boy who cried wolf here. I am not saying this to be some sort of paranoid conspiracy theorist. I just see the tea leaves sitting up on Capitol Hill, like we talked about how they shut down Congress, like we talk about how Republicans don’t show up on the triangle anymore where most press conferences are held. I want to be wrong in this case, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing. And when Senator Sanders talked about super PACs, there wasn’t that much media there and there really wasn’t that much media coverage of what he did and what Summer Lee was proposing, Congresswoman Summer League, excuse me. So I really think these elements are all connected.That’s why we did this show to connect them.

The super PACs fuel the oligarchy and the oligarchy fuels autocracy. You can’t have dissent when few people want to hold onto all the wealth. It’s not just and people are going to push back against it, but the only way you can stop it is to incentivize punishment to say, “You know what? You speak up, you’re in trouble.” And the way to use that mechanism is to diminish the value, the integrity, and of course just create uncertainty around elections. Trump has sort up a lot of uncertainty. He’s got unlimited amount of cash to spend to bolster it. I am extremely concerned. I just wish more people would listen to Senator Sanders and Congresswoman Lee on this issue. It’s critically important and you’re right.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I’m so glad you connected the dots for us in this way because once you see it like this, you can’t unsee it. So thank you so much, Steven.

Stephen Janis:

You’re welcome.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So that’s the end of this edition of the Capitol Hill Inequality Watch React. So thank you so much for joining us. We are going to keep reporting for you on Capitol Hill while discussing how wealth inequality influences our politics, our economy, and our lives. I’m Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Steve and Janice. People please keep fighting, keep voting, and most of all, please keep caring. Our democracy needs you.

💾

Battles over ICE funding, super PAC money, and the limits of congressional power on Capitol Hill reveal the groundwork being laid for a new kind of election interference in the 2026 midterms.
Received — 5 June 2026 ⏭

The New School investigates student leaders who voted to strip Hillel of funding over genocide complicity

✇The Real News Network
By: Biplob Kumar Das
5 June 2026 at 18:57
Pro-Palestinian protesters confront supporters of Israel outside The New School in lower Manhattan as tensions over the war in Gaza continue on campuses and inside of colleges and universities throughout the city on May 02, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

This story originally appeared in Prism on June 04, 2026.

When members of The New School’s Student Senate were faced with a report detailing how Hillel International was providing material and logistical support to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, they voted on May 1 to cut all ties with their campus chapter of the national Jewish college network and to strip its funding. The student leaders hoped the school’s administration would go on to investigate Hillel’s presence on its New York City campus. 

Instead, after an intense pressure campaign by pro-Israel groups, advocates, and elected representatives, the university’s administration is now investigating the student senators who voted to cut ties with Hillel. 

“We were hoping that the university would act on the the evidence provided by the Student Senate report about Hillel’s complicity in genocide. They are investigating us instead,” said Ryder Glickman, who is chair of The New School Student Senate and helped produce the report.  

The Student Senate acted upon the recommendations of the Registered Student Organizations (RSO) Compliance Committee, which presented a comprehensive report about the ways in which Hillel had assisted the Israeli military during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

The report found that students from The New School and a host of other New York City-based schools volunteered at the Israeli military’s Hatzerim Air Force Base in January 2024, as part of the Hillel on Base program. “Our students are packaging a days worth of rations to our soldiers,” stated an Instagram story by Hillel at Baruch College, the umbrella organization of Hillel at The New School, alongside a photo from the airbase, according to the report. 

The Hatzerim airbase reportedly has been used by the Israeli Air Force for hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza, with F-15s from the base dropping bombs in civilian areas. 

In the days following the publication of the report and the Student Senate vote to terminate funding to The New School’s Hillel, the university’s administration acted swiftly to discredit the findings.

“To avoid any misunderstanding, the University Student Senate does not have the authority to determine official status, funding eligibility, or the recognition of RSOs. Our Hillel chapter remains, as it always has been, in good standing, eligible for funding, and supporting Jewish life at The New School,” said an schoolwide email sent to from the university signed by President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and Vice Provost Robert Mack. 

“By distorting a qualified student organization and characterizing it as something it is not,” the statement continued, “the [University Student Senate] is using its platform to target fellow students in a misguided attempt to hold those students responsible for the acts of governments.”

On May 3, two days after the vote, Ilya Bratman, the executive director of Hillel at Baruch College, wrote in an email to Towers and other members of The New School’s leadership that the Student Senate’s actions were “a direct attack on Jewish students.” Bratman bcc’d the Student Senate email address, and members shared the email with Prism.

“We hope to meet with you in the coming days so that you can hear directly from the students affected by this action, and so that we can better understand the university’s plan of action moving forward. The [University Student Senate] has shown no indication that it intends to step back from these egregious and deeply troubling actions,” Bratman wrote. 

The New School administration and Hillel at Baruch College did not respond to Prism’s inquiry about whether university leadership and Hillel officials had the meeting. 

Days later, on May 8, Glickman received an email, viewed by Prism, from The New School’s office of Student Equity, Accessibility & Title IX. The email said that the school was investigating him for an allegation that the Student Senate’s decision to cut ties with Hillel was in “potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” The administration later clarified to Glickman that the university is investigating all student senators involved in the vote. 

External pushback

The university launched its investigation into student senators following a string of social media activity by pro-Israel groups, advocates, media, and elected representatives attacking the report. 

Glickman was called a “virulent anti-Israel activist” in an X post by Canary Mission, the secretive group notorious for doxing and targeting pro-Palestinian activists. 

A string of articles by pro-Israel publications, including The New York Post and The Times of Israel, reported on The New School administration rejecting the Student Senate vote while omitting the details and evidence found by the RSO about Hillel’s ties with the Israeli military. 

Two New York members of Congress took to social media to denounce the report. Rep. Dan Goldman—who recently marched in New York’s Israel Day parade featuring Israeli cabinet ministers who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes or have made genocidal statements about Palestinians—said the students were engaged in “hateful and vile antisemitism.” Rep. Ritchie Torres also condemned the vote, calling it “shameful” and “discrimination against Jewish individuals and institutions.” Goldman and Torres are heavily backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

“The fact that there was such open repression and universal condemnation of the report shows that the administration’s response was coordinated with Zionist organizations accusing us of antisemitism,” Glickman told Prism. “This is extremely worrying when we made a very basic case about international law.” 

Students volunteering with the Israeli military

Hillel at Baruch, which organized trips to Israel, acts as an umbrella organization for chapters in multiple New York schools in addition to The New School, including Fordham University, John Jay College, and City College. 

“Volunteer on an IDF (Israeli Defense Force) base in Southern Israel, wear IDF uniform, give back to the community on base, and explore Israel!” reads a description about the program on Hillel at Baruch’s website.

The 38-page report by the RSO compliance committee found that Hillel at Baruch organized several trips between May 2022 and January 2025 for students to volunteer at multiple Israeli army and air force bases. Hillel International also operates the Onward Israel program which organizes internship trips for American students to Israel and facilitates volunteering opportunities within the Israeli military.

The report further found that in July 2024, another post from Hillel at Baruch and New School Hillel’s Instagram account said, “Tonight, some of our onward students had the incredible opportunity to volunteer at the Tze’elim army base, where they helped prepare a barbecue for over 700 soldiers from the Oketz, Kfir, Golani and Handasa units in the IDF.” 

Soldiers of the Golani Brigade’s 631st Reconnaissance Battalion were behind the March 24, 2025, killing of 15 Palestinian emergency responders that included Red Crescent ambulance workers in Rafah, according to an investigation by Haaretz. 

In May 2024, a BBC analysis found that 11 soldiers of the Kfir brigade were responsible for posting photos and videos of Palestinian prisoners being abused.

By registering for the Hillel on Base program, participants also automatically register for the Volunteers for Israel (VFI) program, the report found.  

“VFI is the ONLY organization that creates opportunities for American students to volunteer in Israel on IDF bases,” says a description of the program, which includes activities such as packing medical supplies and repairing machinery and equipment for military units. 

The VFI program is run by Sar-El, an Israeli volunteer nonprofit organization under the direction of the Israeli Logistics Corps, a support branch of the Israeli military, establishing direct collaboration between Hillel and the Israeli government, according to the report. 

“I am nauseated by the fact that I have classmates who have provided direct material and logistical support to genocide,” Glickman said.

According to official sources, over 75,000 Palestinians, including over 35,000 women, children, and the elderly have been killed by the Israeli military since Oct. 7, 2023—which the United Nations Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, and multiple Israeli human rights groups have concluded constitutes a genocide. Experts have estimated the actual death toll could be much higher.

A week after The New School vote, the student leadership of the Hillel chapter of Middlebury College, Vermont, voted to change its name to the Jewish Association at Middlebury, after growing demand from its members to disaffiliate from Hillel International and its activities, according to reporting by the school’s newspaper.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

As ebola virus spreads, we see the terrifying effects of Trump dismantling USAID

✇The Real News Network
By: Sasha Abramsky
5 June 2026 at 16:06
Healthcare workers put on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the dressing area under the supervision of specialists before going to examine patients in the isolation ward during their shift at the Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) following its rehabilitation by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Munigi on June 2, 2026. Photo by Jospin Mwisha / AFP via Getty Images

This article was originally published by Truthout on June 04, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

In 2018, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) experienced a severe Ebola outbreak, more than 30 experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), close to 20 disaster-response specialists from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and 120 additional USAID staff were on the ground attempting to manage the outbreak, according to estimates from Friends of USAID, an advocacy organization mainly made up of ex-USAID staffers. With that level of staffing in 2018, by and large, they succeeded in limiting the extent to which the disease spread.

This year, as a particularly virulent strain of the Ebola virus — the Bundibugyo strain, against which there is no approved vaccine and for which there are no medicinal cures — runs rampant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Friends of USAID estimate there is only one CDC staffer on the ground there, along with five additional State Department personnel. There are of course no USAID workers present, since the Trump administration dismantled USAID during the purges led by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in 2025, summarily firing local health care contractors around the world, including in countries with extreme poverty rates such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In addition, since Donald Trump signed an executive order pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in early 2025 — a pullout that was completed in January of this year — CDC experts are no longer allowed to communicate with World Health Organization personnel. And despite a waiver having been granted for Ebola-related correspondence, in practice there has been a significant breakdown in communication between the two agencies over the past year — a breakdown promoted by the Trump administration, which recently sent out an email reminder to CDC staff not to correspond with the World Health Organization.

The consequences have already been devastating. In past Ebola outbreaks, even before mass testing of disease victims got underway, the CDC and USAID were able to tell when an epidemic was picking up steam based on on-the-ground medical observations and data about excess mortality figures. And, in response, they were able to position medical resources effectively.

In the current outbreak, the decimated remnants of the CDC were caught unawares, only finding out about the outbreak once hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people had already been infected — thus making it far more likely that this outbreak will prove particularly difficult to corral.

Because so many experts have been fired over the past 16 months, and because political overseers have been limiting what the remaining scientists can say and write, “the CDC is not really functional anymore,” Angela Rasmussen, professor of virology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told Truthout. Rasmussen, who also serves as science chair for the Save America Movement, a nonpartisan organization that works to stop ongoing assaults on public health, added that the administration was no longer bothering to consult remaining CDC experts when making policy to respond to the outbreak. “It used to be an evidence-driven process and now it’s a political-driven process,” Rasmussen said.

“I equate it to having the mayor’s office taking on a fire without having a fire department or a fire hose,” Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told Truthout. Daskalakis, who resigned last August because he was so concerned about the direction that the Department of Health and Human Services was taking under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, says that when faced with grave public health challenges, the administration is simply resorting to “a lot of posturing, with, I think, bad consequences.”

I equate it to having the mayor’s office taking on a fire without having a fire department or a fire hose.

Faced with the twin public health emergencies of the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, alongside the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship from which people disembarked to the four corners of the Earth, the Trump administration’s response has been, at best, ad hoc. Instead of implementing expert-driven protocols, it has leaned on its nativist instincts to simply attempt to lock the virus out. That attempt proved a colossal failure during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, according to Rasmussen and Daskalakis, the signs are not auspicious for it being a successful strategy against the global health crises of 2026.

For U.S. residents exposed to hantavirus, the Trump administration has ordered mandatory 42-day quarantines in a secure facility in Omaha, Nebraska — despite the fact that experts say the virus doesn’t spread easily and that home quarantine would be just as effective. For U.S. residents exposed to the Ebola virus in Africa, the response has been to refuse them entry back into the United States and to instead have them isolated and, if need be, treated in Kenya — a situation that Rasmussen and other experts say makes little sense given the huge investments made over the past decade in secure biocontainment units in the U.S. “They’re throwing evidence-based risk assessment out the window, and are trampling people’s 14th Amendment rights,” Rasmussen told Truthout. “If we’re going to take Americans’ freedom away, there should be a real basis for that — and there’s not.”

It took so long for the CDC to say anything about hantavirus or to hear from the DRC about Ebola. Relationships that took decades to build have simply disappeared.

Telling people in the U.S. that if they get exposed to the Ebola virus, they won’t be allowed back into their home country for months is, experts believe, a surefire way to discourage U.S. doctors and public health professionals from heading to Africa to try to contain the outbreak. In other words, it is a strategy all but guaranteed to make a bad situation worse.

At the same time, African victims of the disease, who could certainly benefit from access to the treatment center being established in Kenya, are being deliberately excluded from it. “There’s an equity issue,” Daskalakis says of this policy. This, too, will end up hurting public health, as the Ebola patients denied access to the Kenyan facility will, in all likelihood, end up spreading the disease further in their communities or in poorly resourced medical facilities to which some eventually may turn.

Aryn Backus, a CDC employee who has been on administrative leave for more than a year since her job was targeted by DOGE, and who is now deputy executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, told Truthout that the ham-handed U.S. response to the outbreak overseas makes it more likely that the disease will ultimately find its way to the United States. “Diseases don’t understand borders,” she said. And, without detailed international coordination, the likelihood of their spreading far and wide grows.

“We are seemingly not at the table anymore,” Daskalakis added, as he detailed the myriad ways that the U.S.’s role as global public health leader has been corroded. “It took so long for the CDC to say anything about hantavirus or to hear from the DRC about Ebola. Relationships that took decades to build have simply disappeared.”

Received — 4 June 2026 ⏭

Voters in California city become first in US to approve permanent ban on data centers

✇The Real News Network
By: Brad Reed
4 June 2026 at 19:29
Signs of protest pepper front yards in a nearby residential neighborhood in Monterey Park, CA on Wednesday, April 1, 2026. Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Common Dreams Logo

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 04, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Voters in Monterey Park, California on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a permanent ban on data centers within city limits, becoming the first city in the US to prohibit the power-hungry facilities via a ballot initiative.

In total, the anti-data center resolution passed with 86% voter support, with only 14% of voters opposed. The resolution’s text said that a ban was necessary to “protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”

Steven Kung, a leader of the local initiative, told ABC 7 Eyewitness News that the result was “a landslide victory.”

Kung listed multiple reasons why residents in the city resoundingly rejected building data centers in their community.

“The noise pollution, the air pollution, the rise in the electricity rates,” he said, “the deal just didn’t make sense and it doesn’t make sense for most, if not all, cities data centers go to.”

In an interview with Politico, Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang predicted that her city would be far from the last to pass data center bans, noting data center projects have spurred protests across the country.

“A lot of the other cities that are facing data center proposals are going to follow suit,” said Yang. “There’s [a] bad reputation across the board, across the country, from other data centers that have been built in neighborhoods.”

Monterey Park city councilmember Jose Sanchez expressed a similar sentiment, telling The Guardian that he hoped his city would become a inspiration to others.

“We hope that other communities will use the model set by residents here in Monterey Park,” said Sanchez, “as inspiration to stop data centers from encroaching in their backyard.”

Data centers have become political lightning rods in recent months, as residents across the country object to their massive resource consumption, which is leading to a major spike in utility bills, as well as the noise pollution they generate.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this year introduced a bill that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction “until strong national safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, and communities, defend privacy and civil rights, and ensure these technologies do not harm our environment.”

A poll released on Wednesday by Public First showed US residents more opposed to data center construction than any nation in the world, with just 26% of Americans registering support for building more data centers.

This opposition isn’t merely abstract, as it has caused major headaches for Big Tech firms that have been scrambling to increase their AI models’ compute power.

As The Financial Times reported on Thursday, “dozens of projects collectively worth at least $156 billion have been blocked or stalled since 2025” thanks to local opposition to their development.

Fired and Jailed: Attacks on free speech under Trump

✇The Real News Network
By: Michael Fox
4 June 2026 at 18:58
A view of signs left by demonstrators protesting the suspension of the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" show outside the El Capitan Entertainment Centre where the show is performed in Hollywood on September 18, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.
Transcript

MICHAEL FOX:  OK. One, two. OK. Yeah, we’re good. All right, I will start it off.

MARC STEINER:  OK, you want to start it off? Oh yeah. Then I’ll throw this out.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah, exactly.

MARC STEINER:  All right.

SPEAKER 1 [CLIP]:  …Under arrest.

SPEAKER 2 [CLIP]:  Turn around, turn around, turn around. Turn around [crosstalk].

SPEAKER 3 [CLIP]:  OK, let’s not — OK, OK. He’s not resisting.

SPEAKER 2 [CLIP]:  Stop resisting, stop resisting.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mahmoud Khalil was detained and arrested on March 8, 2025, outside of his Manhattan apartment. It’s a chilling video. Plainclothes agents are there. They refuse to give their names. He’s handcuffed and shoved into the back of a car. His wife, eight months pregnant, watches and tries to understand what’s happening. 

This is not a scene from some dark chapter of a distant past filled with black and white photos of bygone dictatorships. This happened here in the United States of America. Mahmoud Khalil is a graduate student from Columbia University. He led protests in 2024 against Israel’s US-backed occupation of Palestine and the genocide there. 

But speaking out today has a high price. Mahmoud Khalil is a US resident, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, but Trump officials said they stripped him of his green card. They held him for months at an ICE jail in Louisiana, far from his home in New York, far from his wife and newborn son.

He was finally released after 100 days in prison and widespread condemnation, just one highly visible victim of so many attacks on free speech in the United States today. And it’s getting worse.

MARC STEINER:  This is The Battle for Free Speech, a new multipart narrative podcast series brought to you by The Real News. We’re your hosts. I’m Marc Steiner.

MICHAEL FOX:  And I’m Michael Fox. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history.

MARC STEINER:  From the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights organizing to the threats facing free speech today and how battles are being waged over free speech at home and abroad. 

Today, we want to set the scene by beginning in the present. We met a pretty disturbing assault on First Amendment rights here in the United States. Mike is taking lead in reporting here, so why don’t you take off?

MICHAEL FOX:  Excellent, Marc. Thank you so much. So I wanted to start off today. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people in recent weeks, victims and lawyers about this current moment and the attacks on free speech rights. It’s harrowing hearing their stories, but also the context of looking at where we are today. And I wanted to kick us off with a conversation I had with a woman named Lisa Femia.

LISA FEMIA:  I am a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a nonprofit dedicated to protecting civil liberties and civil rights online and in the face of new and emerging technologies.

MICHAEL FOX:  And she’s been looking at all of this stuff, and in particular the Trump crackdown on noncitizens, residents within the United States, stripping them of their visas, the same thing we saw with Mahmoud Khalil.

Just for context, she said that obviously we’ve seen this increasing attack on free speech rights in recent years, but this massive uptick within Trump’s second administration, and that’s not a surprise to anyone. 

But she in particular underscored this question of Trump targeting noncitizens, visa holders, and how they’re clearly trying to censor and deport noncitizens for speaking out, particularly around the question of Palestine.

LISA FEMIA:  Yeah. I mean, in terms of specific numbers, it’s broad reaching because you have both people who have been arrested, been deported, had other negative actions taken against them, and some of them have been quite public, like Mahmoud Khalil, for example. But then you also have the mass chilling effect that happens for everybody’s speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, her organization has launched a lawsuit with the support of three different unions.

LISA FEMIA:  United Auto Workers, Communication Workers of America, and American Federation of Teachers.

MICHAEL FOX:  And what’s interesting here is that it’s specifically looking at the administration’s social media surveillance program against noncitizens.

LISA FEMIA:  And they each surveyed their members before we filed about how has this surveillance program affected your activity online and your willingness to express yourself? And overwhelming amounts of members said, yes, I have changed my behavior, especially the noncitizen members, but citizen members as well. Of the respondents aware of the surveillance program of the UAW, 85% of the visa holders said that they had changed their activity online, including just eliminating their presence online entirely.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, what does that mean? That means that, in some cases, they’ve just gotten offline altogether. They’ve deleted accounts. In other cases, they’ve changed the way they communicate online, what they post, what they don’t post, who they communicate with, who they retweet, how they talk about things. And this is interesting because oftentimes we hear about the high-profile cases and the situations which we’re going to dig into today, but this looks at the minutia of what happens when you’re censoring people, when you’re attempting to deport people or lock them up, when you’re firing teachers.

LISA FEMIA:  And I think maybe some people hear this and like, OK, but that’s just online speech. But you have to remember how much speech happens online now, how much political organizing happens online now. For the unions, how much labor organizing and being able to literally just communicate with their members happens online now. And people are just shutting down. They’re just locking down and keeping quiet because they’re scared. So, it’s almost hard to measure the effect of this because there’s so many people that are chilled even if they haven’t had a direct action against them yet.

MICHAEL FOX:  And what that means is then what we see online and what we see, the speech that becomes online and the speech that’s allowed to remain the way it is or becomes even more viral or becomes even more outspoken are those people who are in support of Donald Trump and far-right policies. And the other speech, say it’s in defense of Palestine or speaking out about Trump’s policies, becomes minimized because people are afraid to speak out. That’s literally what this one lawsuit is talking about. I just thought that was so fascinating because it’s not something that we’re hearing at all. It’s just this unprecedented moment that we’re seeing in the United States right now.

MARC STEINER:  I’m a huge student of what happened in Germany in World War II in the Third Reich. I’ve covered it a lot, done podcasts about the history, and it feels as if we are in 1930, as an analogous period, where the authoritarian forces of the right are really gaining strength. They have their figurehead at the top in Donald Trump, and he is mouthing the words that they want him to say so they can begin this authoritarian push in America to shut opposition down, to shut voices down, to kill the independent press, and to bring everybody in line to where they want to take America. 

I think we are in the most dangerous place we’ve been in the history of this country, unless you happen to be Indigenous or Black and living in the 19th century, even the 20th century in this country. 

I think that we can take lessons from Reconstruction. The lessons when there was this huge gasp of fresh air and people believing in freedom and building a new kind of democracy that was absolutely crushed by the forces in Washington, DC, and former Confederates that killed the rights of Black people in America and changed America for the next 90 years, became an oppressive nation for Black people in this country, and Indigenous and other people.

And what we’re facing now is broader, even. We’re facing a threat to the democracy that we have, and we’re facing a threat to freedom in general, and it’s building slowly. As a father and a grandfather and a great-grandfather, I am absolutely worried for all of my children and their friends and their peers and what they’re going to face because I see the right growing in power and I see the oppositional forces in absolute disarray. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole now. I just wanted to lay that out, but I think we’re in a very dangerous moment.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah. You know what’s fascinating, Marc, is obviously I agree with you and I see the question of free speech and I think that’s why this podcast that we’re embarking on is so important, because it’s almost as if this is the canary in the coal mine in a lot of ways with people being silenced, with people being fired, with people being deported for speaking out and the increasing attacks on this.

MARC STEINER:  For context, just to put it in everybody’s head who’s listening right now, because we take for granted the founding documents of our country — And those founding documents, yes, they were written by a slave owner, no question. He wrote them for white people, but they’re universal in terms of what they mean. And let me just read for all of us what the First Amendment says:

The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press and the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government. Our democracy has flaws, but it has helped make the democracy we have what it is. The right to speak your mind, say what you want, assemble and fight for your rights, assemble to protest is fundamental to this country. That’s what they’re eroding. That’s what they want to take away. That’s my fear.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s a perfect segue into this next world I want to take you. Because one of the places they have been most trying to silence people from speaking out and from standing up is around Palestine. And so I spoke recently with a woman named Corinna Mullin. She is a professor at CUNY, the City University of New York, or at least she was.

CORINNA MULLIN:  I’ve been teaching at CUNY for eight years, and also I teach about Palestine. I teach about settler colonialism. I teach about US imperialism. And the two Title VI investigations I was subjected to had to do with false accusations of antisemitism. And the university, rather than defend me from these accusations — And not only that, from the doxxing — And instead of defending us, they have contributed to it. They’ve thrown us under the bus.

MICHAEL FOX:  She is currently a member of the Fired Four. So, she and three colleagues were all fired for very similar situations. They all were very active in the pro-Palestine movement on campus. They were all very active [in] standing up and defending students and speaking out, and all four of them were fired.

CORINNA MULLIN:  In our cases of the Fired Four, we haven’t actually been given the reason for our firing. There’s almost no due process and very little in terms of contractual protections because we’re all adjuncts, and we could be fired for any reason or no reason at all. What we share in common is that we have all been outspoken in solidarity with Palestine in contesting the genocide and in challenging also the role of our institution in its complicity, its collusion with that genocide through its investments and contracts with companies that benefit from settler colonialism, war, and genocide.

MICHAEL FOX:  Now, they’ve had a big campaign to try and get them reinstated by the union, which has been really pushing this, which is exciting and important, but her situation and her case I think is so… it’s just one case of so many that we’ve seen around the country. So, both of those investigations against her were found to be unsubstantiated, but regardless, she talks about how her academic freedom was undermined.

CORINNA MULLIN:  Because when I am in class and I’m teaching a course on the politics of the Middle East, for example, and I’m talking about [Palestine] because I can’t teach a course on the politics of the Middle East without talking about the history of settler colonialism in Palestine, then of course that’s in the back of my head. There’s always going to be this fear that there might be another investigation despite the fact that these two investigations have been found to be unsubstantiated. So there’s that. 

The fact that the university allows for what is really a form of harassment, and many of these students might even be paid by Zionist organizations. They might have their own political agenda. So, to allow that to take place already and to pursue these investigations itself is a form of violation of academic freedom

MICHAEL FOX:  Again, the teachers union has stood up. Many students have defended her, and, in fact, the union president himself has called this a McCarthyite political purge.

SPEAKER 4 [CLIP]:  So we will not allow for these disingenuous McCarthy-like attacks on higher education. We will not allow it on CUNY. We will fight for the professors, for the students, for the people that make CUNY great every step of the way.

MICHAEL FOX:  And I think that connection to the past, to McCarthy, to remembering what has happened in the past when people stood up or spoke out, and what’s happening now clearly on university campuses. I mean, that’s like the big image around the country where people are being purged, where people are being attacked and undermined, and people are being fired or silenced.

CORINNA MULLIN:  And it’s only escalated since Trump has come to power. And now with the congressional hearings, for example, there’s the congressional hearing on higher education, so-called claims of antisemitism in higher education, which really are just conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

SPEAKER 5 [CLIP]:  We’ll hear today about antisemitism at three institutions: Haverford College, DePaul University, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

CORINNA MULLIN:  That all of this has really escalated and pushed the administration or emboldened the administration to really crack down on academic freedom and the rights of students to organize and speak out against settler colonialism and genocide on campus.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s a really concerning and terrifying moment that I know I haven’t seen in my lifetime. Marc, have you ever seen something like this at this level?

MARC STEINER:  At this level, I mean… I grew up in the shadow of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

SPEAKER 6 [CLIP]:  The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

SPEAKER 7 [CLIP]:  I’m framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his —

SPEAKER 6 [CLIP]:  Then you deny it —

SPEAKER 7 [CLIP]:  Which invades his absolutely…

MARC STEINER:  Family, friends, and some of my peers, a couple of my closest friends, their parents were dragged before HUAC for being allegedly communists or having been a member of the Communist Party, being active in trade unions, being active in progressive politics. And so that period was a very frightening moment. 

That period, and as I said, that and the end of Reconstruction are emblematic of what we face today, but it’s even more serious because I think the power of the right, the authoritarian nature of the power of the right is in ascendancy in some ways because the opposition is in disarray. I don’t mean to sound as if I think it’s all over. It’s not. But I’m saying that we’re facing a threat that authoritarianism will mask itself as freedom and take hold of the country.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, have you met or do you know many individuals who have seen, have been the victims of this backlash either at university campuses or elsewhere around the country?

MARC STEINER:  There are people I know who I’ve talked to around the country who are feeling immense pressure. Where we broadcast from in Maryland, we live in a state that has a pretty powerful progressive movement inside the Democratic Party and outside. And I think that’s a little different here. But around the country, there are people that are just terrified to open their mouths, to say anything. I think we take these things for granted because we live here and we think it’s inviolable. Nothing can stop it.

MICHAEL FOX:  I want to take this to Charlie Kirk because of the big issues that we’ve seen this year where there’s been silencing free speech and backlash, people losing their jobs, like the top two cases I think are around obviously Palestine and pro-Palestinian activism and around the fallout over Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

So, just for context here, for those who are listening, remember, Charlie Kirk was a right-wing political activist. He was the founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA. He did these tours on college campuses across the United States, and he had very radical extreme views. Hateful views, many would say.

CHARLIE KIRK [CLIP]:  Strong men built the West and won the wars and built the building that we’re in right now. And without strong men, then you all of a sudden see civilization unfold upon itself, and we’re seeing that happen in real time.

MICHAEL FOX:  And he was killed on Sept. 10, 2025, literally while he was speaking out in public, while he was doing one of these tours on a university campus. And I feel like in so many ways that upended so many things. 

A, it’s so important to say, and it’s so defining for free speech. It’s so important to say, first off, there’s no excuse for violence like this. There’s none. It has to be denounced from every place, particularly in a podcast about free speech where the whole idea is everyone has the right to speak their minds. Everyone has their right to speak. 

But what we saw in the backlash against those commenting on Charlie Kirk’s murder has been really shocking. The highest profile case, Marc, was clearly the whole firing and scandal and then rehiring of the comedian Jimmy Kimmel.

JIMMY KIMMEL [CLIP]:  Thank you. Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted [audience laughs], if you’re just joining us, we are preempting your regularly scheduled encore episode of Celebrity Family Feud [audience laughs] to bring you this special report. I’m happy to be here tonight with you all [audience cheers]…

MICHAEL FOX:  Did you watch this unfold? Did you follow Jimmy Kimmel’s work?

MARC STEINER:  I don’t follow religiously, but when this happened, I took a deep dive, yes.

MICHAEL FOX:  What did you find? Tell me about what did you see happening there?

MARC STEINER:  Given everything that’s coming out of the Trump administration, I think it was a fear among the people who own some huge broadcast stations that they were going to be attacked. They were going to be investigated. They were going to have their licenses removed. I think that Jimmy Kimmel was a test to see how far they could go in stopping freedom of speech in our country. It didn’t work, but it doesn’t mean it won’t work. It was a test run. I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that people are organizing their resistance to how America has changed. And Jimmy Kimmel was a test run. I see him as a test run.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s interesting how other comedians have spoken out, obviously clearly in defense of Jimmy Kimmel in the days and the weeks afterwards.

NEWS REPORT 1 [CLIP]:  Late night hosts are coming to Jimmy Kimmel’s defense tonight.

NEWS REPORT 2 [CLIP]:  In fact, both Stephen Colbert and John Stewart unloaded tonight on ABC’s decision to suspend Kimmel’s show, and both claim it’s part of a campaign by President Trump to limit free speech and silence his critics.

JON STEWART [CLIP]:  We have another fun, hilarious… administration-compliant show.

STEPHEN COLBERT [CLIP]:  Well, you know what my community values are, Buster? Freedom of speech [audience cheers].

MICHAEL FOX:  Obviously, it wasn’t just Jimmy Kimmel. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs: university professors, federal employees, private business, mostly for what they posted online or what they spoke out against, but clearly the backlash was shocking. 

So, I wanted to understand this from behind the scenes, what was happening with Jimmy Kimmel, but was always happening in the wake of Charlie Kirk. And so, recently I went to the offices of FIRE in Washington, DC. Do you know this organization? It’s the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It’s a free speech organization in downtown DC, big office. I was impressed by the amount of staffers and people who are there. And they’re doing incredible work all in defense of free speech today. So, I met with staff attorney David Rubin.

DAVID RUBIN:  I work on the litigation team, so we’re filing lawsuits in court and challenging speech-restrictive statutes and stuff like that. And then we also have a ton of other really smart lawyers who work here and nonlawyers who are doing a lot of different kind of advocacy work.

MICHAEL FOX:  And he has this really interesting background, Marc, because his background is actually in comedy.

DAVID RUBIN:  And so before law school, I worked in Los Angeles in the business of standup comedy for four or five years. I worked for Budd Friedman, who founded the Hollywood Improv and discovered Rodney Dangerfield, Bette Midler. And Lenny Bruce used to go there. But anyways, I have this longstanding love of comedy.

MICHAEL FOX:  So of course, the connection to Jimmy Kimmel and comedy in the United States historically today was really interesting to talk with him about that. Because he told me he only did stand-up a couple of times. It wasn’t really his thing [Steiner laughs]. But he worked in the stand-up world in Los Angeles for several years before becoming an attorney. And that’s really his passion. People like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin, which for him are like the exemplification of free speech.

DAVID RUBIN:  Comedy has a big role in First Amendment protection and just in building a free speech culture, like George Carlin and the seven dirty words and all that.

GEORGE CARLIN [CLIP]:  Nobody even tells you when you’re a kid what the words are that you’re supposed to avoid. You have to say them to find out which ones they are. Shit [smack]! Oh, fuck [audience laughs]! That’s two!

MICHAEL FOX:  For him, these folks exemplify what free speech should be, because you’re up there on stage and you’re making your own critique of the reality in the United States, whatever that might be, and it’s your freedom to be able to speak out in public or make jokes in public about this. So, that was like one just fascinating anecdote of speaking with David. 

Did you follow these people like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or some of these other comedians?

MARC STEINER:  All my life, Richard Pryor, all of them. They pushed humor to the cutting edge of America, almost at the abyss, and they were funny. But to some people, they were really dangerous and they had to be stopped. And they used sometimes not just their politics, but also the sexual content was too much for uprighteous Americans to take, at least some of them. It’s not surprising comedians, people in the creative world, are among the first to be attacked. It happened in Nazi Germany and it’s happening here.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah. So the main reason I actually went to speak with David was about this very specific case in Tennessee. Have you heard about the case of Larry Bushart Jr.?

MARC STEINER:  No. Tell us, what’s the case?

MICHAEL FOX:  OK. So it’s wild and it’s shocking because it’s one of those situations that just got to this extreme that it’s hard to even believe it’s happened within the United States.

DAVID RUBIN:  It was a speech chilling environment. It was a very crazy time for a week or two, but this happened in the late stage of that big wave.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, Larry Bushart Jr., he’s a retired police officer and sheriff’s deputy for 24 years. And between late September until the very end of October, he spent more than a month in jail for posting a meme on Facebook in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

MARC STEINER:  Oh, yes. Right.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, this story first went viral over The Intercept. FIRE was following it closely as well as David Rubin. Bushart Jr. was vocal on Facebook about Donald Trump, has been for a very long time. He called Trump and his supporters a cult. He was active online after Kirk’s killing about why he shouldn’t be praised, basically saying, look, we can’t praise this guy. And he was very active particularly on Facebook, but it was one meme in particular that got him in trouble.

DAVID RUBIN:  It’s just a picture of then-President Trump saying, after a shooting at an Iowa high school named Perry High School, after a shooting there, the day after he said, we’re all going to have to get over this, something to that effect, with the obvious implication that it meant perhaps we might be being a little hypocritical here where if we have to get over it the day after a bunch of kids get killed, and we’re still firing people nine days later because they say something bad about this one person.

MICHAEL FOX:  Underneath this quote were the words “Donald Trump on Perry High School mass shooting one day after.” And in the image that Bushart Jr. posted on Facebook, he wrote “seems relevant today.” So that was it. 

But the posts caught the attention of Perry County Sheriff. And that night at almost midnight, four officers came to his door, to the door of Bushart Jr. They had a warrant, they handcuffed him, and drove him to jail. And this video was released by The Intercept showing him as he’s arriving at the jail. An officer reads the warrant.

POLICE OFFICER [CLIP]:  Threatening mass violence at a school.

LARRY BUSHART JR. [CLIP]:  At a school?

POLICE OFFICER [CLIP]:  It’s referring to a school. I have no idea [crosstalk].

LARRY BUSHART JR. [CLIP]:  [Inaudible].

POLICE OFFICER [CLIP]:  That’s what they’ve called us for. And I ain’t getting to it.

LARRY BUSHART JR. [CLIP]:  I played on Facebook. I threatened no one. I know you don’t give a —

DAVID RUBIN:  They arrested him and charged him with making a threat of mass violence on a school, which is like a class E felony or something like that. So they put him in jail. The judge set a $2 million bond, which is pretty insanely high for any crime.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, essentially the sheriff said that people could read Bushart Jr.’s post as a possible future threat on a local school. And it’s just this shocking moment in America where someone can go to jail for more than 30 days for posting a meme on Facebook. I mean, it’s like we’ve reached another level. And it was so shocking that The Intercept, when it published this article on Oct. 23 and then there was clearly a backlash, and the charges were finally dropped in the very end of October, and he was released from jail the following week after Oct. 23.

DAVID RUBIN:  So they dropped the charges, and now he’s free.

SPEAKER 8 [CLIP]:  How do you feel right now?

LARRY BUSHART JR. [CLIP]:  Thanks to all and any supporters out there, and very happy to be going home. I didn’t seek to be a media sensation, but here we are. But that’s about all I can say right now.

MICHAEL FOX:  And the folks at FIRE believe it was in large part due to the pressure, both the media pressure from continued reporting on this case, but also the reality that there was nothing to stand on. It’s just somebody posting a meme.

Have we ever seen anything at this level before?

DAVID RUBIN:  I have not seen anything like this.

MICHAEL FOX:  This is the new world order almost that we’ve entered. Had you ever heard of anything like this before, Marc?

MARC STEINER:  I mean, not since I was really young during the Red Scare of the ’50s. When people I know whose parents were fired from their jobs, whether they were airline mechanics or physicians or whatever, they were teachers, were being fired here in Baltimore. And the only thing that stopped it was the end of McCarthy and, oddly enough, the beginning of Eisenhower began to change what was happening. 

But I think that we are facing something, that a similar moment is happening now, and I think that it’s creeping. This is not something that is overt and in your face every day, but it’s undermining our educational institutions. It’s undermining our freedoms, and it’s seeping in with the power of the right taking over the country.

So, I think it’s almost like, again, if you go back — And I don’t deal with hyperbole — But if you go back to 1931 Germany and study how slowly it moved and what it did, who they went after, the same process is happening now in this country. We’re on a cusp. 

Look, our broadcast, where we are now, The Real News, places like this, this is under threat, and I think that’ll be the first line. So, I think that one of the most important parts for me in doing this work with you at this moment is beginning to really sound the alarm, but also talk about people who are standing up to it and how you organize and fight against it.

MICHAEL FOX:  Well, we’ll get to organizing and fighting against it. We will get there, folks.

So, when I spoke with David, part of my question for him was what do we know about what’s behind the scenes about these situations? So we know that, for instance, hundreds of people have lost their jobs or faced backlash for their response to the Charlie Kirk assassination. We know that nearly 300 people have been investigated at the Pentagon. So, Pentagon employees who were investigated for their own response or their own views. We know that [the] State Department revoked the visas of several people who spoke out against Kirk. 

And Marc, did you follow this at all? It’s really crazy because they’re totally blatant where the State Department is actually retweeting tweets by people, other things that people have posted online, and it basically says, don’t like it? Visa revoked. It’s almost like this viral amusing joke meme, but they’re actually responding to what people have posted online in response to Kirk.

And we know that at least six people have lost their visas this way. Someone from Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, and Paraguay.

MARC STEINER:  And they’ve been shipped out.

MICHAEL FOX:  I don’t know the… but that’s what at least the State Department said online.

SPEAKER 9 [CLIP]:  I’m sure we should not be giving visas to people who are going to come to the United States and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the assassination of a political figure. We should not. And if they’re already here, we should be revoking their visa.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, I wanted to understand what’s behind the scenes here. How are people being targeted? And this is something we don’t hear a lot about in the news. We hear a lot about this professor was fired or [these] other people [are] trying to create a lawsuit to get their jobs back, or these other people from these different employment were fired for this, but we don’t necessarily understand what the minutia is behind this that’s driving these firings, because they’re not by accident. 

And in many cases, they’re these coordinated campaigns. I’m not saying nationally coordinated, but it’s a process that is actually happening and coordinated so that people then get to a place in which they are fired or so that powerful people take these decisions. 

So, this is what I sat down, part of what I sat down with David Rubin about, and I really wanted to understand what was actually happening, how were people being targeted.

And David Rubin said, no, this isn’t by accident.

DAVID RUBIN:  I would say there is a campaign, or many multiple smaller campaigns, certain influencers like Libs of TikTok or like Scott Pressler or like Robby Starbuck. If you look at them, they were crowdsourcing comments from people that they disagreed with that said something about Charlie Kirk, and then all their followers were going and tweeting to that person’s boss and saying, oh, you employ this person? You should fire him. You have to fire him.

MICHAEL FOX:  And he explained to me that this is very much a coordinated campaign, which he called it a heckler’s veto. Do you know this term?

MARC STEINER:  Yes, go ahead.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, it’s basically the idea that individuals who aren’t directly impacted by these professors, so they’re not necessarily the professor’s students. It might be a student or another student, but it’s usually individuals that have nothing to do with that local situation who then find something online, or they find a tweet online from these professors, and then they start to push it out virally and promote this to then more powerful people. Then it gets picked up by viral right-wing or conservative influencers, usually on Twitter but sometimes elsewhere like Libs of TikTok and other things. 

And this is how many of these firings have actually happened, where we’ve seen this coordinated campaign against left individuals speaking out in the wake of Kirk’s assassination or standing up in defense of Palestine

DAVID RUBIN:  And that’s one area in First Amendment law that needs to be addressed is this heckler’s veto that happens when politically interested but otherwise diffuse groups get really interested and keyed in on something. And if a teacher says something and their students’ parents have a problem with it, maybe that’s one thing. But if some random right-wing or whatever, left-wing podcaster and all their fans don’t like it, and then they send a bunch of emails and make a bunch of calls to the school, that is very anti-free speech culture.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think it’s interesting that, for instance, Charlie Kirk’s own group that he founded, Turning Point USA, has its own professor watch lists. So, these are professors, left and progressive professors. Some of these individuals who were then pointed out, detailed online, and then the campaigns raised for their firing are individuals who are on this Turning Point USA watch list.

SPEAKER 10 [CLIP]:  Turning Point USA leaders continue to publish an online database of university professors they say advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.

DAVID RUBIN:  I fear that this is the start of some kind of new wave of political violence on college campuses and that folks, for instance, on the professor watch list could be targeted as well.

MICHAEL FOX:  And it’s important to point out that there isn’t just one group that’s doing this. It’s being pushed by many different groups, by many different far-right social media influencers, but it is happening, and it’s in many ways coordinated. 

So here’s one very, very specific example, Marc, that I’m going to take you to Clemson University for a second.

MARC STEINER:  OK.

MICHAEL FOX:  I spoke with Allen Chaney.

ALLEN CHANEY:  I’m the legal director at the ACLU of South Carolina.

MICHAEL FOX:  And they’ve been very focused on this one case around a professor named Joshua Bregy. Bregy is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences. And then following Charlie Kirk’s murder, he reposted a friend’s post on Facebook.

ALLEN CHANEY:  That was vehemently nonviolent but, at the same time, pointed out the conflict between, on the one hand, the insistent lack of empathy by Mr. Kirk, and on the other hand, the militant demand for empathy by Mr. Kirk’s supporters in the wake of his death.

MICHAEL FOX:  What’s interesting about this case is that it’s so benign. The post first denounces Kirk’s assassination and clearly the violence. It expresses grief for Kirk’s friends and family, but it also points out the hypocrisy of Kirk’s own violent discourse, which is something we’ve seen a lot online by people in the response, right?

MARC STEINER:  Right.

MICHAEL FOX:  And so the post said, in one quote, “It sounds to me like karma is sometimes swift and ironic. As Kirk said, play certain games, win certain prizes.” And that’s probably the most demonizing phrase in the post.

ALLEN CHANEY:  Now, immediately after Dr. Bregy posted that on Facebook, nothing happened. Dr. Bregy does not have a particularly large Facebook profile. He’s a climate scientist, not a huge online presence really at all. And as news was starting to break about some of the retaliation against folks for their speech, Dr. Bregy went ahead and made his post private just in an abundance of caution. 

A few hours after that happened, Clemson College Republicans, which is an on-campus student group, reposted a portion of Dr. Bregy’s Facebook post, describing it as a now-deleted post, along with some old profile pictures of his, one of which had a “climate change is real” sign, and the other one which had a Black Lives Matter banner, and tagged Libs of TikTok as well as some other political profiles and demanded that Clemson fire him.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, this then makes its way all the way up to the South Carolina State House Rep. Thomas Beach, who also adds fuel to the campaign. Before you know it, it’s powerful elected representatives who are lobbying leaders at Clemson University.

ALLEN CHANEY:  That’s exactly right. And so, the Clemson College Republicans’ post and their tagging of Libs of TikTok is really what ignited this social media firestorm that was directed at Dr. Bregy, as well as one other Clemson professor, and then really at Clemson itself. 

And so you see some posts like — Give me a second, I can pull them up. So you see folks like Rep. Thomas Beach, who’s there in the Pickens area reposting the Clemson College Republicans’ post and saying, “Another leftist indoctrinator has been identified in the Clemson faculty. This is whose salary your dollars are paying for. We can do better. Take action, fire these radicals.” And when that doesn’t work, the threats become increasingly more explicit and they become more official as well. 

And so you no longer just have fringe Freedom Caucus folks like April Kromer and Thomas Beach and Jordan Pace. You see a letter from the speaker of the House, the president of the Senate on official General Assembly letterhead going to the Clemson University decision makers saying, your funding depends on you making the quote “right decision” here, and encouraging them to take decisive action.

And so, there was really no question that lawmakers were giving Clemson an ultimatum — Fire these professors, or we’re going to pull your funding.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, it’s this fluid, sometimes clear, sometimes unclear campaign whereby certain local groups, in some cases it might be the local university Republicans group, and in other cases it might be other groups online, who find these or who are actively looking for these types of posts and then making it, building a whole campaign. Then it’s getting pushed by social media influencers online to powerful right-wing or conservative Republican leaders who are then lobbying those schools or offices or businesses or whatever it might be to get these people fired.

ALLEN CHANEY:  But over the course of five days, you see the coercive tactics of lawmakers really start to erode Clemson’s commitment to the First Amendment. And then about five days later, before Dr. Breggie showed up to teach his first class after the Facebook post, he was fired. He was dismissed for cause and in a manner that really directly conflicts with Clemson’s own faculty manual.

MICHAEL FOX:  So it’s this fascinating thing that’s actually happening against left and progressive in particular professors, but also we’ve seen this elsewhere, singled out by these smaller groups. And what’s interesting is that in a lot of cases, like for instance this one, not necessarily did Professor Bregy do anything. He didn’t post. He reposted somebody else’s post that really wasn’t that damning. But the fact that he’s a professor that is probably on their watch list already, that is left a progressive, he’s a climate scientist in the environmental department, which is clearly proenvironment and whatnot. And so this is an individual they had clearly pointed out as someone they want to get removed. 

And this is like the epitome of what the heckler’s veto is. None of Professor Bregy’s… His students stood beside him. They stood up for him. The union stood up for him. His colleagues at Clemson University stood up in defense, and most of this campaign against him was from groups or individuals from outside Clemson University who have a clear political plan to try and get him fired or removed because of his views.

And what does this do? Again, it goes back to what we were talking [about] at the very beginning, Marc, where it’s not just the individual who has spoken up or spoken out or has posted something online, but it creates this chilling effect throughout the university and throughout other places where people are afraid to speak out. People are afraid to speak out against Trump, against the Trump administration, against other issues because they think, well, I might be next.

ALLEN CHANEY:  The disruption is not internal to these universities or colleges, nor is it organic. It’s manufactured. So, we see a coordinated effort to identify people within academia who made posts about Charlie Kirk that could be used as ammunition to push the universities to fire these people, not really for their comments about Charlie Kirk. 

I mean, you see it in my case where it’s really more about the Black Lives Matter and the climate science is real positions, and the Charlie Kirk comment is just the mechanism by which they can push their agenda into the universities and push out people who carry views that they don’t like anymore. 

And so it was political opportunism of the most discouraging sort where you have a national tragedy — Regardless of how you feel about Charlie Kirk and his views, the idea that someone was gunned down at a public event because of those views should be frightening to all of us — But then to in the hours following that, see an opportunity and seize on an opportunity to, because of public employees’ views, drive them out of the public workforce.

MICHAEL FOX:  And that’s the goal, really. The bottom line is to take out these professors, but also to create this chilling effect around speech so that people are not as vocal online and that people restrict their speech. We saw it from what I mentioned [at] the very beginning of that one situation of this one survey of individuals who were visa holders where 85% had changed their habits online. But I’m sure that if we were to look at some sort of other survey or other analysis that I don’t have in front of me, but if there was something like that done, we would see a huge difference in how people are interacting online over social media and what they are posting, what people are afraid to post, and how that’s impacting academic freedom at universities.

MARC STEINER:  And I think that one of the things we have to take into account here are the people who are in power in Washington now. When you look at Vance, Hegseth, Rubio, as much as some people who are liberal on the left don’t want to admit it, these are really, really brilliant men who are highly organized, and that’s what’s pushing this right-wing takeover of everything going on and the killing of free speech. I think that that is something that really has to be delved into deeply to understand who these people are and the powers behind the throne, what policies they’re putting in place, how they support what’s going on in these universities. I think that people have to connect these dots to understand what we’re up against and what we’re facing. 

As I said earlier, I think this is the most dangerous moment in American history in a long time. And I think what you just described is the tip of the iceberg, and it’s going to get deeper and more intense over the next several years in this administration. 

And in a pure political sense, one of the things that I’ve been reading a lot about, writing about, and thinking about how to produce is how weak the opposition is, how disorganized the opposition is, how there’s no game plan among people on the left or about Democrats about how to confront this and stop it. 

And I think that what you were just describing, again, if you go back to the 1930s and the early part of this in this country in the 1910s and the 1930s in Germany, this is how it began. You target what would be a weak link: universities. You target to begin the process, and that’s what we’re witnessing. That’s why what you just described is really critically important to understand in the context of how the right pushes power.

MICHAEL FOX:  Two things I want to say that I think are a little hopeful within this context, particularly —

MARC STEINER:  I didn’t mean to be so Mister Negative [laughs].

MICHAEL FOX:  No, of course. So first off, the ACLU has this case.

ALLEN CHANEY:  Yeah, we filed a complaint, and shortly thereafter we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction which asked the court to rule that we are likely to prevail on the merits of our First Amendment claim and to order Clemson to reinstate Dr. Bregy as faculty, put him back on the payroll, remove any adverse employment findings, and treat him as if he’s not done anything wrong, which we don’t think he’s done anything wrong, and we think that the First Amendment agrees with us.

MICHAEL FOX:  The timeline is slow. I asked them about the timeline. They said, well, we wish it was faster. I wish I could define the timeline, but it’s happening, and that’s what’s important. And that lawsuits like this are happening and pushing back around the country. 

I thought it was really interesting because I’ve been Googling this in recent days, and if you Google for “Charlie Kirk firing,” if you Google those words right now, it’s article after article of people pushing back, of lawsuits against universities, against school districts, of lawyers picking up people’s cases of trying to get people rehired. I think it’s really hopeful that if you had Googled the same thing just a couple months ago, then you would’ve seen story after story of people being fired, and now you’re seeing story after story of people of fighting back and trying to be rehired because they’re standing up for their free speech rights.

So I think that’s one thing that is really, really key. There’s a couple of the things that… Like I mentioned, Marc, I’ve been speaking to a lot of people in recent days and one of the things that was that almost everyone told me was that yes, of course, cancel culture happens on both the right and the left, and that’s what we’ve seen in recent administrations in recent years, but that this, what we’re seeing now is a whole new level and that things are bad and getting worse. Like you’ve mentioned McCarthyism, and the McCarthyist moment is the closest reference that almost all these people, all these different staff attorneys and victims and any people that I’ve been speaking with, this is like the main moment that so many of them reference of being particularly a US reference of where we are now and what this looks like.

JOSEPH MCCARTHY [CLIP]:  One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. One communist among the American advisors at Yalta was one communist too many. And even if there were only one communist in the State Department, even if there were only one communist in the State Department, there would still be one communist too many.

MICHAEL FOX:  And Marc, I wanted to come back to Lisa Femia just for a second — Remember, she’s from EFF, this free speech rights organization out in the Bay Area — Because I asked her one specific thing about our definition of free speech because for me, I’ve for a long time felt like we’re seeing an attempt to redefine free speech in America where it’s not just your right to say anything you want, where it’s clearly not right now your right to protest because we’ve seen these attacks against pro-Palestinian protests, and obviously Trump is calling out the National Guard against protests and things. 

So, clearly there’s this push to try and almost redefine what we understand as free speech. And I think Trump’s first day in office was a really clear moment in defining that. This is when he signed his executive order, which was called “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” He spoke about this in his inauguration.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.

LISA FEMIA:  Yeah. I think that there was a moment where you saw Trump and allies make these free speech arguments in a way that meant free speech for them, but not necessarily for people they disagreed with. I think in that early executive order on free speech, you could tell it wasn’t, for a variety of reasons, you could probably tell this wasn’t like a fully thought out full protection of free speech because it talked only about speech from the previous administration as if this hasn’t been a push and pull in American history since the founding. 

But recently, I’m not even sure, I think the administration in some ways has dropped the guise and has talked about speech in a way that is now categorizing speech they don’t like as potential domestic terrorism or threats trying to push speech into national security area, which is sort of an easier area of the law for the administration to get away with what it wants to. 

And I’m not sure I’m even seeing the administration talk about speech in the way that it did even last year anymore. And you see this with even Trump discussing his executive order on flag burning.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  And we’ve made it a one-year penalty for inciting riots. We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts and the court said you have freedom of speech. But what has happened is when they burn a flag, it agitates and you end up with riots. So we’re going on that basis. We’re looking at it from not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about but never passed the courts.

LISA FEMIA:  It’s like, maybe we don’t need free speech. I think the tone has shifted, and we’ve almost moved beyond some of the ideas that they were expressing before into a new area where they treat speech that is against their policies or their administration as a direct threat to the United States.

MICHAEL FOX:  Lisa’s quote on this, what she said to me, I think, was just so powerful. She’s like, we’re at a whole new level. It’s not just about the discourse or justification of free speech for my people, not for your people. It’s now just an open attack on free speech itself, and Trump feels like he doesn’t even have to [pay] lip service to it.

LISA FEMIA:  It’s a concerning shift. I’ve found it troubling, to say the least.

MARC STEINER:  Right. No, I think that first of all, the whole burning of the American flag, A, it is against the law, and you can use that law to attack people, arrest them, and go after them. It hasn’t been done in a long time. It was done in the ’60s, and I had friends of mine who were arrested for burning a flag in protest in this country. Then when you add that to this administration’s Orwellian speak about free speech, they’re at the doorstep. 

I think that as I said earlier, Trump is a figurehead. He’s not the danger. He’s an idiot, but he’s surrounded by brilliant minds who are organizing this push. I’m spelling it like the German push takeover of this country. I think that one of the things that’s really important for this particular series we’re doing, and for all of us to do, is to begin to bring it to light, to bring the stories to light so people know what’s happening around this country at this moment that no one sees.

Because the stories you just told, the examples you gave, most people aren’t thinking about them because they’re tucked away. They’re not in front of you. I think that it has to be exposed and we have to raise the alarm and talk to people who are fighting and organizing against it.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, Marc, we did that recording quite a few months ago, and since then there’s been quite a few updates, and I want to run through some of these things because it’s important for several reasons. First off, according to a Reuters investigation from November 2025, roughly 600 people were fired, disciplined, investigated, or suspended due to online posts following Charlie Kirk’s murder. 600. In fact, they compared it to an ideological purge. But many of those victims have been pushing back and it has made a difference.

SPEAKER 11 [CLIP]:  So didn’t you see this? A professor who was fired over a social media post about the killing of Charlie Kirk is now being reinstated…

SPEAKER 12 [CLIP]:  Newark six, a FWC biologist will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlement money after she was punished for sharing a social media post about Charlie Kirk’s death…

[Several clips overlap]

MICHAEL FOX:  So, if you remember Joshua Bregy, he’s the professor from Clemson University. He was fired on Sept. 26. He sued the university through the ACLU, saying that his termination was a violation of the First Amendment. And then in early January, he settled with Clemson University. They agreed to rescind his termination, pay his salary and benefits throughout the original term of his employment. He didn’t teach this last semester, but he received payment. He agreed to drop his lawsuit and resign from his position as of May 15, just last month. And the Clemson provost also agreed to provide letters of recommendation. 

Allen Chaney, who I interviewed, he’s the legal director of the ACLU in South Carolina. He said, “We’re honored to represent Dr. Bregy and to reach an agreement that restores his employment.” So good news, clearly, in the case of Joshua Bregy because he pushed back and fought for it. 

Also in January in New York, the movement to reinstate the Fired Four at CUNY, the City University of New York, was partially successful. So, the university found that three of the four adjuncts were once again eligible for employment at Brooklyn College. And that includes Corinna Mullin. She was one of the professors I spoke with at the beginning of this episode. She too was reinstated. They’re still fighting, however, to get the last of the Fired Four reinstated. 

And the last person that I wanted to bring in here an update was about Larry Bushart Jr. Marc, I don’t know if you remember, he was the retired policeman from Tennessee who was jailed for 37 days for posting a Trump meme on Facebook following Kirk’s killing. So, he settled, again in May, an “unlawful incarceration” lawsuit for $835,000.

So, these are all really hopeful steps. You also have the former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. He’s free. He’s not in jail, but of course he’s battling in the courts to remain free. 

I guess the overall vision here, Marc, is just the simple fact that organizing, fighting, pushing back can make a difference. And I think that’s just such an important theme to end up on here is that despite the attacks on free speech that are clearly happening throughout the United States that are being pushed by the Trump administration, what you have and what we’ve seen over the last six, seven, eight months are people standing up, people fighting back. And of course, not in all cases, but in many cases they’re being successful, and their rights are being defended.

MARC STEINER:  I’m glad you let all that out. I think that it’s really incredibly important for people to understand that it’s not just about people limiting our free speech. It’s about the struggle to fight for free speech and people standing up to it and not letting that go, and the bravery of people to lose their livelihood, to lose the life that they created because they stood up for free speech. It’s the most fundamental right in this country to stand up and be heard, to say what you believe and not be afraid that the law is going to come against you because you did. 

And I think that the more examples that we can give as in these podcasts that we do to tell the stories of people fighting for their free speech, that where it’s under attack, where it’s won, it’s fight back, or important for people to learn and understand, to keep that in front, because most people don’t see it because it’s not there. But the people you describe, their voices have to be heard. Their stories have to be heard because you’re next. Your name won’t be known, but you’re next if you don’t stand up.

MICHAEL FOX:  Hi, folks. Thanks for listening. We are so excited to have this series up and running. We’ve been working on it for a year.

MARC STEINER:  And next week we look back into the past at how free speech battles of the past help define the abolitionist and civil rights movements and what they mean today. That’s the next time on The Battle for Free Speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you liked this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. 

Also, please make sure to sign up for The Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com or you can click on the links in the show notes. 

If you’d like to find out more about the stories we talked about today in this episode, we’ve added some links also in the show notes. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Mahmoud Khalil was detained and arrested at his Manhattan apartment. The video is chilling. Plainclothes agents are there. They refuse to give their names. He’s handcuffed and shoved into the back of a car. His wife — eight months pregnant — watches and tries to understand what’s happening.

This is not a scene from some dark chapter of a distant past filled with black-and-white photos of bygone dictatorships. This happened here, in the United States of America, in 2025.

In this podcast series, in the lead-up to the country’s 250th anniversary, journalists Michael Fox and Marc Steiner look at the battle for our free speech rights today, and attacks on people speaking out in the United States.

Hosted by Michael Fox and Marc Steiner. Theme music by Michael Fox, Jordan Klein, and Daniel Nuñez. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Production and sound design by Michael Fox and Stephen Frank. Editorial support by Kayla Rivara and Heather Gies. Research by Ben Schweiger.

Guests: 

Resources: 

‘Huge win for the Constitution’ as House finally passes Iran war powers resolution

✇The Real News Network
By: Brett Wilkins
4 June 2026 at 17:50
A group of National Guardsmen walk past the Win Without War Billboard Truck displaying the message "No War With Iran" in front of the U.S. Capitol on State Of The Union Day on February 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Win Without War
Common Dreams Logo

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 03, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Raucous applause erupted in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after US lawmakers passed a war powers resolution aimed at ending Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice against Iran—although skeptics cautioned that the measure will likely have little impact on the actions of a president who has habitually shown utter contempt for the rule of law.

House lawmakers voted 215-208, with 7 legislators not voting, in favor of H.Con.Res.86, introduced in April by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and cosponsored by Reps. James Himes (D-Conn.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Gabe Amo (D-RI), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Every Democrat present voted for the resolution, while three Republicans—Reps. Tom Barrett (Mich.), Warren Davidson (Ohio), and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.)—broke ranks with their GOP colleagues and joined Massie in voting to approve the measure, which directs Trump to “remove United States armed forces from hostilities with Iran.”

Cheers in the House as the war powers resolution passes pic.twitter.com/nRL3eGm0Zr

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2026

“We are trapped in a war that won’t end because an incompetent president launched it thinking of only his own ego while failing to prepare for the consequences,” Meeks, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during floor debate ahead of Wednesday’s vote. “Diplomacy is the only exit from this, not more bombing, not more bluster.”

The War Powers Resolution of 1973—also known as the War Powers Act—requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing troops to military action and limiting such action to 60 days, with a 30-day withdrawal period, unless lawmakers declare war or issue an authorization for the use of military force.

It’s been 95 days since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, which followed last summer’s separate bombing campaigns by both allies. Since then, more than 3,400 Iranians—many of them civilians—have been killed and over 26,000 others wounded by airstrikes, while Iranian counterattacks have killed 13 US troops, 26 Israelis, and over 20 people in Gulf Arab states aligned with the US.

House lawmakers had tried and failed to pass Iran war powers resolutions on three previous occasions. Last month, after four US Senate Republicans helped Democrats advance one of the resolutions, GOP leadership in the House canceled two subsequent votes on the measure.

“Since President Trump’s illegal war of choice on Iran began, I have been extremely clear over and over again that Congress alone has the power to declare war,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who did not vote Wednesday because she was in India due to a family health emergency—said in a statement. “This war has had disastrous effects for the American people and for the world in the nearly 100 days since Trump began it without congressional approval.”

Jayapal continued:

“Waged with absolutely no imminent threat and no endgame, this war has already killed 13 US service members and injured many more; killed thousands of civilians in Iran and Lebanon, and displaced millions more; wasted billions in US taxpayer dollars that should have been spent on lowering healthcare and housing costs for Americans; and all while causing gas prices and grocery costs to skyrocket.

“The simple truth is that the American people are paying the price for Trump’s lawlessness,” Jayapal added. “Every day that this war continues is a violation of our Constitution.”

The House just passed the Iran War Powers Resolution 215 to 208. We should have done it 2 months ago when @RepThomasMassie and I proposed it. But now we are finally closer to bringing this disastrous war to an end. pic.twitter.com/sFJbUvMqxV

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) June 3, 2026

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) asserted that “our victory—while monumental—does not change the truth that this war never should have began, and never would have began, had the president not disgraced America and our laws to ensure that it did.”

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said on social media: “The American people are tired of presidents abusing their power by spending billions of our taxpayer dollars on unnecessary wars. I urge the Senate to quickly pass this bill to end Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

Civil society groups opposed to the war applauded Wednesday’s vote, which Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, called a “total rebuke of Trump.”

People power works. ✊

The House just passed a War Powers Resolution opposing Trump’s unauthorized war with Iran. A major rebuke to another endless war fought without congressional approval.

This victory didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people across the country… pic.twitter.com/bZ5b0RBoT3

— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 3, 2026

“After 95 days of illegal war, Congress is finally enacting the will of the people, who overwhelmingly oppose President Trump’s disastrous war on Iran,” Eric Eikenberry, government relations director at Win Without War, said in a statement.

“While congressional action is welcome, it is woefully late. Congress should not have taken over three months to pass a resolution that would force Trump to end this war,” he continued. “Their delay has left millions of people struggling amidst unnecessary, unacceptable human and economic consequences.”

“Lawmakers who’ve placed their loyalty to Trump over acting to determine when and whether the United States goes to war have failed both their constituents and their constitutional duty,” Eikenberry added.

At long last, Congress has remembered its constitutional duty in matters of war and peace. It is good news for our Constitution that both chambers have now voted to invoke the War Powers Resolution and halt Trump's reckless, illegal, and unconstitutional war against Iran. https://t.co/2lTIgBuLcD

— Defending Rights & Dissent (@RightsDissent) June 3, 2026

Naveed Shah, political director of the veterans’ group Common Defense, said following the vote, “Veterans understand the costs of war better than most Americans, which is why we commend the Republicans who joined Democrats on this vote and showed the kind of courage and independence this moment demands.”

“This was an important step toward ending a dangerous war and ensuring that the American people have a voice through their elected representatives,” Shah added. “It is long past time to put guardrails on this brazen president, who launched us into an illegal war with Iran.”

Alix Fraser, vice president of advocacy at Issue One, a group dedicated to reducing the role of money in politics, said in a statement that “today’s vote is a huge win for the Constitution and for the American people.”

“The House finally had the political willpower to stand up to the president’s unconstitutional war,” Fraser added. “Americans should celebrate this massive victory, but have every right to feel frustrated that it took this long for Congress to work on behalf of the people. That must change. Our democracy will not survive if Congress fails to uphold its responsibility to check executive power at this critical juncture.”

“Every day that this war continues is a violation of our Constitution.”

Some observers noted that Wednesday’s vote is likely to be largely symbolic, pointing to Trump’s veto—and the Senate’s failure to overturn it—of a 2019 bipartisan war powers resolution directing him to end US military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Still, lawmakers and advocates urged the Senate to pass the Iran resolution to uphold the rule of law and force Trump’s hand.

“Ending this war is a moral imperative,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) implored upper chamber lawmakers to “immediately follow suit and act to end this war.”

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) posted on Bluesky: “Now it’s time to pass the Senate. The power to declare war has been with Congress. Now let’s get it done and end this war!”

Benjamin said: “Now it’s time for the Senate to act. Let’s keep the pressure on and send this resolution to Trump’s desk. No more illegal wars. No more blank checks for militarism.”

Received — 3 June 2026 ⏭

‘Debases the democratic process’: Sotomayor pens scathing dissent as Supreme Court allows racist Alabama map

✇The Real News Network
By: Jake Johnson
3 June 2026 at 20:20
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor and U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson listen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 03, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

The US Supreme Court late Tuesday gave Alabama a green light to use an aggressively gerrymandered congressional map that a lower court said was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

The unsigned decision, from which the high court’s three liberal justices dissented, enables Alabama’s Republican-dominated government to replace its current congressional map, which has two majority-Black districts, with a map that the US Supreme Court struck down in 2023. That map has just one majority-Black district.

In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the court today doubles down on chaos.”

“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” wrote Sotomayor. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

The liberal justice noted that in order to switch to the map previously struck down by the high court, Alabama election officials “will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the state to new congressional districts.”

“Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts,” Sotomayor noted. “These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the state’s total number of registered voters).”

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, postponed US House primary elections in the wake of the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which severely narrowed the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination and paved the way for Alabama and other states to impose new maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

“The Supreme Court’s shameful ruling allowing Alabama to move forward with a gerrymander that was drawn with the explicit intent to dilute Black voting power—as found by a panel of judges that included two Trump appointees—is an absolute affront to the founding principles of our democracy, and wipes out whatever was left of the court’s credibility,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation. “This country deserves better, and we must continue to work toward federal legislation that not only bans partisan and racial gerrymandering but also ensures that our rights cannot be undermined by captured courts.”

The ruling drew condemnation from the two Democrats in Alabama’s US congressional delegation. Rep. Shomari Figures, who was elected to the US House under the independently drawn map that Alabama Republicans are working to replace, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court has now confirmed that there is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America, and states are essentially free to discriminate against minority voters with no consequences.”

“This is a dangerous ruling that sets the state and this nation back decades,” said Figures.

Rep. Terri Sewell called the ruling “just the latest in a pattern of outrageous Supreme Court decisions that help Republicans desperately cling to power ahead of the midterm elections while diluting Black voices and erasing decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.”

“No matter how hard Alabama state officials may try, they will not succeed in silencing our voices,” said Sewell. “We will not go back to the Jim Crow era. The fight for fair representation continues.”

‘Disturbing trend of lawlessness’: UN experts denounce Trump’s coercive brutalization of Cuban people

✇The Real News Network
By: Julia Conley
3 June 2026 at 19:12
A woman checks a cell phone during a blackout in the Centro Habana neighbourhood in Havana on June 2, 2026. Photo by ADALBERTO ROQUE / AFP via Getty Images
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 03, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A trio of United Nations rights experts on Tuesday demanded that the US government “cease all threats” against Cuba and accused President Donald Trump of furthering a “disturbing trend of lawlessness” with preparations to attack the island nation; a indictment of its former president; and a protracted oil blockade that has left Cubans facing blackouts and a breakdown of their lauded healthcare system.

“Efforts to change the constitutional order of a sovereign state through threats and coercion echo colonial-era practices,” said George Katrougalos, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic international order; Zaina Jallad, special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures; and Ben Saul, special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights.

The experts pointed to Trump’s declaration of what’s become known as the Donroe Doctrine, “asserting US predominance over the Western Hemisphere” through military might, and his repeated comments regarding the possibility of taking over Cuba, whose communist government, Trump has said, has turned the country into a “failing nation.”

“Statements by the US president regarding the ‘honor of taking Cuba’ reflect a deeply concerning strategy of coercion against a sovereign state,” said the experts. “This assertion is not mere rhetoric, but part of a broader strategy involving the long-standing embargo on Cuba, its listing as a state-sponsor of terrorism, the recent fuel blockade, and the imposition of coercive measures on third parties.”

Experts @profbensaul, @gkatr and Zeina Jallad express concern regarding US escalating threats, coercive measures & judicial weaponisation against #Cuba.

“Efforts to change the constitutional order of a sovereign State through threats and coercion echo colonial-era practices.” pic.twitter.com/9feklXLRuQ

— United Nations Geneva (@UNGeneva) June 3, 2026

In January, Trump issued an executive order centered around the assertion—a laughable one, according to Cuban and international officials—that the country poses an “extraordinary threat” to the US, and warned other countries to stop providing oil to the island. The Trump administration had already cut off Cuba’s main energy source earlier that month when it abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and took control of the country’s oil reserves.

The oil blockade—which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently denied the existence of—has left hospitals facing shortages of supplies and medicines, forced schools to cut hours, caused trash to pile up in streets as sanitation operations have struggled to continue, and left cities and towns across the country with just a few hours of electricity per day.

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who left the country for the US years before Fidel Castro took power following the 1959 revolution, has long called for regime change in Cuba and has resisted efforts to normalize US-Cuban relations.

The UN experts said the blocking of oil imports to Cuba is “part of a disturbing trend of lawlessness and contempt of multilateralism and the UN Charter. The normalization of coercion and threats of regime change undermines the integrity of the entire international legal order.”

The experts also condemned the US indictment last month of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, which they said appeared connected to the administration’s “efforts to undermine Cuba’s sovereignty” and characterized as a “misuse of domestic judicial proceedings.”

The also said that the indictment—“an instrument of coercive foreign policy”—represents “an abuse of process that violates the principles of sovereign equality and self-determination under the UN Charter.”

Additionally, the deployment of the USS Nimitz to the southern Caribbean, they said, contravenes articles 2(4) and 2(7) of the UN Charter, which, respectively, prohibit the threat or use of force and demand non-intervention in domestic affairs by the UN.

The experts called on UN member states to “refrain from recognizing or implementing measures that violate the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention” and urged the UN Security Council and General Assembly to “urgently address the threats against Cuba as a matter affecting international peace and security.”

“A democratic and equitable international order,” they said, “requires that all states, regardless of size or power, participate on equal footing, free from undue pressure.”

Received — 2 June 2026 ⏭

‘Absolutely crazy’: Horror as Trump moves to dismantle crucial ocean monitoring system

✇The Real News Network
By: Julia Conley
2 June 2026 at 20:56
An aerial view of Pacific Ocean waves hitting a seawall protecting homes on December 30, 2023 near Ventura, California. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 02, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

In what a number of scientists suggested was the Trump administration’s latest effort to stop tracking the changing climate in hopes of convincing the public that the climate emergency isn’t happening, the National Science Foundation announced Monday that it was dismantling a crucial deep-ocean monitoring system that for years has helped researchers understand the impacts of the crisis on the world’s oceans.

The NSF said it plans to send ships this month to remove more than 900 instruments, part of a project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The project collects data on temperatures, currents, and the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide off the coasts of Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and North Carolina, as well as in the Irminger Sea between Iceland and Greenland.

A spokesperson for NSF told The New York Times that the dismantling of the initiative will help the NSF in “prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

The reasoning given for the shuttering of the project, said Tara Blume, a journalist at Oklahoma City NBC affiliate KFOR, was “a master class in obfuscation and doublespeak.”

Genevieve Guenther of the group End Climate Silence shared her own interpretation of why the $368 million ocean observation system is being discontinued, despite the fact that it had been set to collect data for 25 years.

“We need to track ocean currents to assess how close we are to climate tipping points that will essentially destroy the world as we know it,” said Guenther. “The GOP doesn’t want us to be able to do that. That’s why they’re dismantling ocean monitoring.”

"By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership." https://t.co/TSKsORuTX9

— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) June 2, 2026

Scientists have used data gathered by moorings, robotic vehicles, and other instruments that transmit the information to research laboratories, to study changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a current system that moves warm water northward and cools the Arctic and Northern Atlantic regions while absorbing carbon dioxide deep into the ocean and keeping it out of the atmosphere.

Data gathered at the observation station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding AMOC, which scientists fear is gradually weakening due to planetary heating and could ultimately collapse, likely causing major global weather changes.

“This is absolutely crazy,” said David Doniger, a senior strategist and attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and energy department. “Wouldn’t you want to know if the ocean currents are changing? Wouldn’t you want to know ocean temperatures? These things affect everything from fishing to hurricanes.”

Following the announcement that the stations will be dismantled in the coming weeks, said Blume, “science gasps for breath.”

President Donald Trump has attempted several times to shut down or drastically reduce the budget of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which costs $48 million annually to run. Congress has restored the program’s funding.

The dismantling of the program comes months after the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the “endangerment finding,” which for years had underpinned the department’s environmental regulations; after the administration closed down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which had gathered data on hurricanes and extreme weather to help improve forecasts; and after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released a statement on record-breaking temperatures in 2024 and 2025—without any mention of the climate crisis or climate change.

“Blinding the public to climate change won’t make it go away. It will only accelerate its profound consequences,” said clinical researcher Iris Gorfinkel.

According to the Trump administration, said historian Nick Kapur, “apparently climate change doesn’t exist if you prevent scientists from measuring it.”

Received — 1 June 2026 ⏭

Richard Wolff: Europe and the US at the crossroads, then and now

✇The Real News Network
By: Richard D. Wolff
1 June 2026 at 19:45
The USA and the EU flags are side by side prior a group photo at the end of an EU Trade Ministers meeting in the Europa building the EU Council headquarter on November 21, 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on May 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

By the end of World War 2 in Europe, that continent’s extremely violent self-destruction had killed tens of millions and wrecked many economies. Its politically dominant employer classes had driven their national governments to a clash that had produced those results. By 1945 the war’s outcome had proved far worse than many in those classes had imagined or wanted before the war. Europeans had struggled after 1917/1918 to overcome their self-destruction in World War 1. In the short span between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second World War, Europe destabilized itself via its reparations program, Germany’s staggering inflation, and then global capitalism’s worst ever collapse in 1929. The consequences of those destabilizations ramified across Europe and undermined the League of Nations effort to prevent a second world war.

In 1945, for most Europeans, the greatest urgency attached to recovery from the war. For Europe’s employing classes, more urgent still were defenses against certain immediate threats. Russia’s army had been crucial to defeating the Nazis and to forging Russia’s post-war alliances with Eastern Europe. The mass of the USSR’s military forces, potentially supplemented by those of its new Eastern European allies, struck western Europe’s employer classes as existential threats. After 1945, western Europe’s employer classes smoothly and quickly refocused their hatred from a dead Hitler to the living Stalin and to their nations’ communist parties allied to Stalin.

Western Europe’s employer classes were threatened domestically by communist and socialist political parties whose militants had often led underground anti-fascist or anti-Nazi resistances. Thereby those militants often became broadly popular leaders. Across Europe national communist parties collaborated in various ways with one another (including the powerful Soviet party). Some post-war European heads of state such as France’s Charles de Gaulle included communist party leaders in their governments. In reaction to such developments, Europe’s employer classes quickly became obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.”

A parallel development had happened across the Atlantic in the US. There the Great Depression after 1929 had provoked a mass political shift leftward by the US public. Employees in unprecedented numbers had joined industrial unions allied in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. Because the socialists and communists were often the militants in the CIO’s successful organizing drives across major industries, employers in the US were all the more alarmed by those successes in the 1930s and the 1940s. The CIO, socialist and communist parties also formed a far more powerful coalition within the Democratic Party than they had ever been before 1929.

The alliance between the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt and the CIO-socialist-communist collaborations – the so-called “New Deal” coalition – terrified the employer class. The coalition’s key 1930s achievements included establishing the Social Security system, federal unemployment insurance, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal public jobs program that hired many millions of the then unemployed. What terrified the employer class even more was how the New Deal coalition paid for those achievements. It reformed the federal tax system in a sharply progressive direction. Because corporations and the rich were especially taxed, US wealth and income inequalities dropped sharply. Then in the 1940s, the same US government that took huge steps against economic inequality at home allied itself with the Communist Party leadership of the USSR (Stalin) to fight World War 2 against fascism.

By 1945, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the US employer class had become, like its European counterpart, obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.” Parallel obsessions in western Europe and the US converged in a joint plan. Employers and their political supporters and dependents attacked Communist parties everywhere, depicting them as mere agents or dupes of a foreign power, namely the USSR. They demonized the USSR as the epitome of evil, a dark empire threatening democracy, freedom, Judeo-Christian values, religion per se, civil liberties, and so on. A Cold War was declared between the former allies, NATO emerged, and the Warsaw Pact followed as did arms races and geo-political confrontations. The US would lead NATO to “contain the Soviet threat.” The US organized alliances across other continents while locating hundreds of military bases across them. Beyond means of “containment,” the bases marked and enforced a new informal US global empire that replaced much of the old British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Japanese, and other expiring colonialisms.

“Anti-communism” ideologically unified the domestic and international strategies of the employer classes in Europe and the United States. Under that ideological banner, those employer classes mobilized their governments to collaborate with them to destroy national communist parties and the USSR. As global hegemon, the US went further. It demonized socialism and socialist parties by defining and treating them as nearly identical with their communist counterparts. It also used anti-communism as a major ideological weapon to replace formal European and Japanese colonialisms by the informal, US-dominated “rules based international order.”

The US-western Europe connection helped employer classes in both regions to repress or at least weaken their nations’ communist and socialist parties. The US moved very aggressively (as in the Taft-Hartley law of 1947) also to destroy labor unions at home and collaborated with anti-union forces across Europe. Where war-weakened Europe lost its colonies, a strong post-war US could and did rush in to integrate the ex-European colonies into a US empire. The new US empire had to be informal. It had to allow the ex-colonies formal political independence even as it subordinated them to US economic, military, and political dominance across most of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europe sank into the role of the US’s very junior partner.

The US-western Europe connection brought the US valuable allies against the USSR. Given the military technology of the two world wars – reliance on huge armies fighting across immense terrains – Europe was a land buffer usefully located between the US and the USSR. It provided added protection to the Atlantic ocean’s water buffer. European colonialism had created a genuine world economy that the US could take over. Within that world economy’s particular hierarchy, Europeans were dominant nearly everywhere (except, of course, in the case of Japanese colonialism). Non-Europeans were integrated as subordinated people (economically, politically, culturally). As the Europeans’ formal empires gave way to the US informal empire, colonialist hierarchies persisted with the only real changes occurring at the top. There the civilian and military chiefs of the US (and their delegates) chose, elevated and enriched local elites to direct its informal empire’s development.

The Marshall Plan funded postwar Europe’s recovery in ways that also secured its subordinate role in the new US empire. Funds distributed by the US Central Intelligence Agency since 1947, by the US Endowment for Democracy since 1983, and by other public and private groups supplemented the Marshall money. The advisers who often came with the funds gave Europe’s anti-communist political parties, mass media, labor unions, academic and cultural organizations, many means to use against their domestic enemies. The post-1945 US-western Europe alliance mounted an immense, richly-funded, never ending campaign to shape and control world history. It worked well, overcoming numerous challenges, for 70 years until internal and external forces combined to end it. Now, as the US-western Europe connection dissolves, the contours of its totality and historical significance become clearer.

The relentless rise of China’s economy outgrew the economies of all parts of the US-western Europe alliance over recent decades. China thereby contributed crucially to that alliance’s dissolution. So too has China’s ability simultaneously to forge a new global economic coalition, the BRICS (initially Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The BRICS’ establishment and growth (with new members and partners) responded to their felt needs for mutual support and less economic dependence on the US. The BRICS passed a milestone in 2020 (downplayed in Europe and the US) when their aggregate GDP surpassed that of the G7. The former has continued without interruption to outgrow the latter through the present.

The anti-colonialism that inspired the transitions from colonies to independent nations over the last century has survived that transition. It sometimes infuses rebellions against the hegemony of the US. At other times and places it coalesces with religious movements and populist social movements. In these and other ways, it too helps shape changing patterns of global trade and investment. Ex-colonies seek and engage alternatives to trade and investment with former colonial masters in London, Paris, Berlin, etc. They form new economic partnerships with China and increasingly with other BRICS. Increasing competition and lost economic opportunities challenge western Europe, Japan and the US. They also reduce the role of the US dollar as world currency.

The Trump regime represents both the extent of that decline and extreme efforts to stop or at least slow it. Hitting nearly the whole world with tariffs, suddenly and massively without warnings or negotiations, is a desperate act. Offering subsequently to lower initially high tariff rates in exchange for tribute (foreign nations’ commitments to spend and invest $ hundreds of billions in the US) is a blunt, stark, and hostile act. That European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accepted it is a craven act of Europe’s even more desperate submission. The war on Iran with Israel without consultation or preparation with its European and other allies, coupled with demands for massive, risky support for the US war effort, was also a desperate act. Its goal was to reverse the decline of the US empire; its result was the opposite. The decline accelerated.

The decline, still not admissible publicly in most US politicians’ discourses, nonetheless lurks everywhere in widespread feelings of lost national direction and/or impending social doom. Trump bitterly reproaches former allies like Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and, above all, western Europe. For example, he rewrites post-1945 history as a story of western Europeans, among others, cheating and abusing the US economy because weak US governments failed to resist and fight back. Trump presents his tariffs as the overdue fight back heroically ending the previous weak governments. Trump was so invested in such political theater situating him as “the strong leader,” that his sudden, rushed tariff program was intolerable even to a Supreme Court he otherwise controls.

Abducting Maduro from Venezuela, the 12-day war on Iran with Israel in June, 2025, and their longer one begun in March, 2026: these are also pieces of the same political theater. They are made-for-the-media distractions: not just from the hovering Epstein scandals or the deeply-troubled inequalities of the domestic US economy, but from the deeper threats of a declining empire. Thus a reaction formation type of neo-colonialism inspires many of Trump’s favorite distractions. So far from admitting decline, those distractions construct a US empire as strong and growing, taking over nations like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran while planning the same for Panama, Canada, Greenland, Mexico and others. When charged with violating international law and the whole United Nations project, Trump proudly rebrands both actions as bold signs of US strength.

Now again, as in 1945, western Europe and the US find themselves at crossroads. The declining empires then were the Europeans’. Now in 2026 it is the decline of the US empire that has become both the US’s and Europe’s problem. In its desperate moves to slow or stop that decline, the US has turned on its subordinated European partners. That problem and that turning derive from the empire decline shaping this historical moment.

In Trump’s second presidency, he withdrew much of the US’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. This not only weakened the Ukrainian side in that war but also left a militarily underdeveloped Europe to rely even more on economic sanctions against Russia. Europe thus lost access to cheap Russian oil and gas. High energy prices resulted, drove up European export prices, and thus damaged its competitiveness. Meanwhile, China’s relentless growth miracle (fast-rising productivity and low inflation) continued its many years of outperforming both Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder and European competitiveness generally. China’s GDP growth far exceeded that of the entire West for the last few decades. Volkswagen’s crisis was so severe it seriously considered the US invitation to move its immense company to the US from Germany. Deindustrialization now deeply disturbs all of Europe’s economies.

The global economy looks increasingly like a great contest between China and the US with Europe increasingly out of the picture or merely a footnote to it. Trump’s massive tariffs on or demands for tribute from Europe combine both abandonments and assaults by the US on its former allies. NATO trembles and faces growing forces of dissolution. Trump demands European nations fund their own defenses in part because the declining US empire needs to enlarge its own military as an offset, Trump hopes, to that decline.

The Europeans are stuck in that metaphorical room whose walls are closing in on them. Their subordination is reflected in their passage from junior partners in US led Coalitions of the Willing to the 2026 Iran war that Spain and Italy have refused to join. Trump openly threatens to leave NATO. The employer classes of Europe are most worried about the combination of no more US-funded defense protection via NATO and the compensatory need to fund expanded European military spending. That will likely mean reducing European spending on its social welfare model of capitalism. Employer classes who do that risk triggering massive opposition from the left (labor unions, socialist, communist and anti-capitalist parties increasingly working together).

So far, Europe’s employer classes have tried to cope with this situation by a quasi-hysterical campaign to demonize Russia as a threat to invade and conquer its European neighbors. Europe’s current, mostly low-in-the-polls heads of state position themselves as great bulwarks against the Russian danger. This strategy aims to justify the increased spending on defense that in turn necessitates reduced government welfare spending. The latter is then rationalized as the whole society’s necessary sacrifice for safety from the Russian demon. The employer classes hope that this way of retaining their wealth, income and power will not be opposed by their working classes as the political issue of our times. The employer classes prefer that the great hyped Russian danger be the political issue.

While the Russian danger discourse might secure Europe’s employer classes a few more years of sitting atop Europe’s wealth and power distributions, it fails to address Europe’s long-term decline. That promises to continue and quite possibly accelerate because little is being done in Europe to directly oppose that continuance. Indeed, the disagreements inside Europe on whether to join the US/Israeli war on Iran coupled with fear of being singled out for retaliations by Trump heightened the competitive pandering among Europeans to curry favor with him. Such divisions have always weakened European unity. Rebuilding that unity is surely a necessary, albeit insufficient, component of any imaginable rescue of Europe from its deepening decline.

The long, uneven, and sometimes frustratingly slow historical shift from capitalist colonialism to today’s anti-imperialism undermined first Europe’s and now the US’s empires. A new crossroads beckons. One way leads toward a new Chinese global empire. Another leads toward a multi-national program of mutual accommodation, a kind of socialism with global characteristics.

Abby Martin: The US military machine is destroying our planet

✇The Real News Network
By: Maximillian Alvarez
1 June 2026 at 18:39
Still image of independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin speaking into a microphone at the TRNN studio in Baltimore, MD, on Jan. 29, 2026. Credit: TRNN.

We sit down for an hour-long discussion with legendary independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin to discuss her new blockbuster documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, and the existential threat that US empire in general—and the US military specifically—poses to humanity and to our planet.

Editor’s Note: This conversation was recorded on Jan. 29, 2026, before the beginning of the illegal US-Israeli War in Iran.

Guests:

Additional links/info:

Credits:

  • Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here in the Real News Network studio in downtown Baltimore and I could not be more excited to have legendary independent journalist and filmmaker, the one and only Abby Martin here with me in person. Now, some of you may not know this, but Abby is actually a Real News alumnus. And Sister Abby, I know it’s been a minute since you’ve been back here in your old stomping grounds, but I just wanted to start by saying on behalf of the entire team here, welcome back to Baltimore. Congratulations on all the incredible essential work that you’ve done and we are all just so proud of you and so honored to be in this struggle for truth with you.

Abby Martin:

Oh my gosh. Well, the feeling’s more than mutual, Max. I mean, just being here back in the studio just brings me back to just the origins of Empire Files. Being in the Real News studio, working all hours of the night trying to knock out those weekly documentaries. And it was just such a cool crew to be a part of and it’s so amazing to be back.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what an incredible journey you and the Empire Files have been on since then. And we are of course here today to talk about your blockbuster new documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which is engrossing, expansive and frankly, terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US Empire in general and the US military specifically pose to humanity and to our planet. Now, I know that this project was years in the making and projects of this magnitude can often start as one thing and then become something much greater by the end of it. And so I wanted to start by asking, what is this documentary? Where did it start and what did it become by the time you and your co-director, Mike Prisner, were finished?

Abby Martin:

Wow. It was a long journey indeed and it was five years in the making, as you mentioned. And it started off during COVID with the birth of our first child and kind of joining our passions together, Mike, as an anti-imperialist, anti-war veteran organizer and me as an anti-war journalist who had been advocating against US imperialism my entire career as an advocacy journalist. So I advocate for issues. I wear my bias on my sleeve and I find it very refreshing in this kind of world of access, journalism and corporate media. And so combining those passions together and wanting to approach a subject that tackles the environmental impact of the military because of our obsession with the future, bringing a child into this world, having the responsibility of basically investing in the future. It is on our shoulders now. We’re all in. And so we saw that statistic kind of floating around that the US military was the largest institutional polluter in the world.

This is something that’s been kind of synthesized in academia when you look at just oil purchases, which the US military hadn’t even really disclosed until relatively recently. And there’s been some scholars who have addressed this in literature and studies, but no one had synthesized it in a cinematic way, certainly in a documentary fashion. But Max, once we got into the subject matter, every stone unturned is another documentary. And so we’re looking at legacy contamination of just radiation Agent Orange and then you look at the expansion of militarism all around the world with these 800 bases. Every base is a story. Every victim is another story. And then you add on top of that just the maintenance of the military arsenal, the actual infrastructure of the US military empire and how the entire thing exists as a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to maintain a fossil fuel infrastructure.

And it’s never been laid bare more with Trump in power with this kind of imperial belligerence when we see Venezuela, Greenland. So the documentary took a life of its own and started catapulting in every which way and kind of made us realize we wanted to prove the thesis here. We wanted to go into it not just talking about emissions, which is one story in itself, which we tackle. We wanted to tackle all of it. We wanted to go into the totality to sit someone down and inject them with the truth and you cannot walk away without having your brain rewired in terms of the way you look at the military in this country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, and I could say that as someone who’s watched it and was, like I said, quite terrified by what I was seeing and what you have given us kind of concrete evidence to prove. But I wanted to ask what kind of a monumental struggle that must have been to first research and then visualize the scope and scale of this problem. Could you just talk about that for a little bit?

Abby Martin:

I mean, especially when it comes to emissions, because this is something that’s been very secretive under the pretense of national security and not disclosed by the US military establishment. So it was unearthing so much data accumulated and synthesized by scientists independently to try to calculate these things based on just oil purchases. And then when you extrapolate that out and look at the lifecycle emissions, look at the application of the weaponry, the maintenance of this global supply chain, it totally becomes unquantifiable. And then you wrap into that the actual basically NATO, the machinery of the entire military empire, the great power competition with China, Russia, all of the building up of those arsenals and response to our aggression and belligerence. So it becomes simply unquantifiable and it was so difficult. And Max, at a point in the documentary, we bring in this philosopher and he says something really, really important where he says, number’s numb.

And he gives kind of this take on it’s so hard to get overwhelmed by the existential nature of US imperialism of capitalism because it’s so far reaching and all inclusive and all these issues are interconnected as we’re realizing more and more, but numbers, when you’re just looking at sheer facts and data, data, data, it can numb you. It can become meaningless. And I think we see that psychologically, I think with the genocide going on for three years straight, the data and the numbers become numbing. And so at a certain point it became more about just the storytelling and the emotion and collaging these narratives together to kind of give people that gut punch that it’s not about the numbers. Look, we proved the thesis over and over again, that’s done. But I think what really hits people is seeing how this is you, this is your children.

Your children are those children in Iraq. You are Alex Pretty. You are Renee Goode. You are every one of these victims of US imperialism because it affects every single person on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think back to the days of COVID-19 and when I heard those words in your documentary, Numbers Numb, that was the first thing that came to my head was sort of bearing witness to the monstrous spectacle of the bigger the numbers of people lost to COVID-19 got, the more numb people got to the human lives that were being lost. And I think there really is a terrifying truth there. And again, it speaks to the service that you and Mike Preisner have done in not just compiling what could be compiled in terms of the research numbers and from the emissions of all the military vehicles to the environmental impact of all the explosions and wasted munitions that are blown up or dumped into the ocean. I mean, the list is just so incredibly long and it’s impossible, like you said, to try to quantify it.

But I think what was even more horrifying to learn was that from Bill Clinton to now, all these kind of global US-led climate agreements don’t factor in the US military when they’re talking about our national emissions output.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, exactly. And people do not realize that. I’ve talked to several climate scientists, environmental academics, and they were absolutely flabbergasted at that fact that should be widely known, that militarism, not just US militarism, but every country’s militarism is excluded. Under the Paris Accords, they gave an option to opt in, but of course many countries are like, “Why would I do that? ” It’s not mandatory. Yeah, you know what? So it’s just completely insane and totally a farce that for the last 30 years of these international climate treaties, the US military has led the exemption of all military emissions and it’s gargantuan. It is completely gargantuan and totally hidden from this growing total. And so what’s astonishing to me is that why am I the first person to confront these major politicians at these conferences? Decades in the making, you see this bipartisan consensus for empire and just the acceptance of lying about this, of accepting it as normal and it’s totally outrageous.

And the whole dystopian nature of these climate conferences in general, which real news has covered extensively is just off the charts. I mean, it’s all about corporate profit. It’s all about how can we market this? How can we make money off of it? And then it’s like, well, no wonder you have a contingent of society that’s detaching itself less and less from that consensus reality that climate change is this existential threat that we need to globally cooperate on because simply the opposition to the fascist takeover, they’re not treating it like the emergency it is and they’re not acting accordingly. So it just makes it look like a money making venture and it’s really unfortunate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Another word might be a racket.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It’s a goddamn racket. Yep.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There it is. I wanted to ask if you could sort of lay out this double helix death spiral of US wars and military imperialism around the world and like the climate crisis, like how those two things and how you unpack it in this documentary, but like how those two things are intertwined in the most monstrous way.

Abby Martin:

And this goes before obviously World War II with the advent of the war making industry, how because Europe was left in ruins, you had the US kind of concentrating the actual war machinery and that’s where you see the genesis of the war economy being a kind of a permanent footing in the US. It established well before that. I mean, we’re talking about the first extraterritorial military basis that were established through obviously the veins of the genocidal takeover in the first settler colonies here, but those first extraterritorial military bases were to protect extractive industries of fur and mining just to basically … I mean, we almost drove beavers into extinction just so people could have funny hats in Europe and then it became coal. So the first bases that were overseas were to access coal and to basically be infrastructural holding cells for coal. And of course, once the national security priority turned to oil, once oil was discovered and replaced coal, that’s when we saw that just completely combined where oil became the dominant priority for access and expansion.

And then like you said, it became the self-fulfilling prophecy where in order to expand the military, you needed more oil and more resources and then you need to justify the expanse of the military to get more resources. So now this massive empire around the world with 800 bases spread across nearly every continent, it maintains itself through the access to oil, the pillaging of every last vestige of natural resources on the planet. And that’s exactly laid bare with Trump’s rhetoric today. He is literally saying, “We need Greenland.” That is the last basically unbridled wilderness on the planet. I mean, the amount of coal oil and rare earth minerals that are under that ice, they are saying explicitly they need that for their national security interests. And so you just have to read between the lines here. I mean, you don’t even really have to. He’s saying, “We need the oil from Venezuela.

We need the oil from Iran.” That’s what this is about. You had the Bush administration spending about a year trying to propagandize us into complacency with invading a country that had nothing to do with nine eleven just to seize the oil, but they wasted a lot of time to propagandize us, ties with WMDs. And so now this mask is so ripped off where they don’t even need to pretend. They’re just saying explicitly, “We are trying to grab every last drop of oil because that’s ours.” So in a way, it’s an important moment, Max, because for the first time in my life, things are just very laid bare and I feel like people are really putting all of this together in their mind and organizing with that international scope with the US Empire being the machinery that’s oppressing all of us around the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think you’re right and it really makes me sort of reflect on the conditions that have made that more possible now than it was in the post nine eleven years. And I want to kind of break the fourth wall here and part of this question is going to be me asking if you could talk a bit about how this documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy embodies your own trajectory as a political activist, as a journalist, like from the Iraq war to now, because I’ll be honest, we would not be sitting next to each other, 23 years ago. I grew up very conservative. My family and I were totally bought in on the Iraq war propaganda. We were part of the US majority that just felt so hurt, shocked, and aimlessly hurt and shocked after nine eleven and trusted far too much in our own government to sort of tell us what to do next.

It took a lot of years for me to sort of uncouple myself from that conditioning. But at the time, I did not understand the kind of what to me was a left wing talking point of like, why would we be going to war with another country just for oil? What does that mean? And now here I am like nearly 25 years later being like, “Jesus, how could you not see what was right in front of you? ” So I guess first of all, how were you able to see what I was not? And I guess connect us from there to here like how the seeing of the monstrosity that was always there, like how more of us have actually come into the light and seen what we’re actually up against.

Abby Martin:

I think it all goes back to just my love for the environment, my love for nature, my love for humanity. I just really love people and I love connecting on an interpersonal level. I think when you look at this kind of death spiral, as you called it, this machinery of capitalism and the subjugation of the rest of the planet at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun to say subject or die to global capitalism, it is just so counterintuitive to like love, solidarity, having a habitable planet and future. And I never was able to really articulate that capitalism was the problem. I was kind of a confused anarchist, libertarian back when I was first being radicalized by politics, because I thought Bush was evil incarnate. I was just like, “Who the hell are these people? They’re demons. Why are they doing this? ” And then Nancy Pelot and then you slowly kind of unpack.

You’re like, “Hold on, the Democrats are part of this. Hold on. The media is part of this too.” But it was always so obvious to me because of my just repulsion for war. When the media started talking about Iraq, I was so confused, Max. I mean, I think it helped because I was surrounded by militarism at San Diego State University. I was just thrown into this where I was surrounded by military frat bros and I was just so taken aback. I mean, growing up in the Bay Area, so the proximity to Berkeley, the hippies, just that counterculture of the revolutionary fervor of Berkeley, Mario Savo and the free speech steps and things like that. And so that was always baked in, even though I was just kind of like a generic Demo from suburban Pleasanton, California. I think when the Iraq War started and the bombing of Baghdad, I was sitting in the cafeteria at San Diego State University and I felt nauseous.

I felt sick and people around me were cheering and I’ll never forget that moment. I just was like, “What’s going on? I’m so alone. Why people think this is good? This is sick. What did Saddam do to us?” I remember calling my mom, I said, “Did Saddam do something?” And she was like, “No, the media just started talking about this. ” And I just said, “What is happening?” And it was so hard to organize there, but it became so powerful to realize media was a tool to tell these stories because I started watching radical media. We were talking at the time, this was around 2003, it was like Democracy Now and Alex Jones. It was like a very weird … The internet was very strange, but you also had the capacity to do things. I mean, there was this egalitarian sense of the internet that was very exciting where you could build real friendships and find things that were just really like not … It wasn’t fed to you by the algorithm.

And so I was able to pursue so much knowledge and learn and be self-taught and how to do these tools. And so anyway, I’m going on this very long tangent to say it all synthesized for me very obviously, but it is also a journey I think for a lot of people. I’ve met people who are my age who said I didn’t know anything before October 7th, which brings me to your second question. I think October 7th and the genocide in Gaza has been an extremely revealing moment, catalyzing moment for tens of millions of people around the world. And I’m anecdotally, I can say that just traveling across the country with this documentary already going in rural, urban areas, driving everywhere, talking to people, everyone has been motivated by the fact that this government has subsidized and overseen this genocide and how it has been bipartisan and the failure of the so- called opposition and the Democratic Party to stop it and incubate what we now have.

It’s all just so crystal clear and it’s been actually really amazing to see the radicalization occur in circles that I never would’ve expected at all. Older religious people, I mean, but really it’s the youth. It’s the youth who are seen, they don’t have a future if they let this just grow unabated, if they let the data centers take over, they let the unregulated nature of global capitalism take over, unregulated nature of imperialism, which turns inward, which we’re seeing the ICE executions in the street. So I’d say there’s an explosion of consciousness around the world, synthesizing all these issues, putting Palestine as the cornerstone of our collective liberation and realizing how all these things interconnect. And it’s beautiful, Max, because on the streets during the Iraq war, Palestine was too controversial. In the streets were in Occupy Wall Street, Obama was off limits. And so it’s all burgeoning now.

It’s all right beneath the surface and people are so ready to hear that phrase national strike, national strike. They know we’ve been in the streets with sustained protests. I’m an activist and a journalist. Again, I’m an advocacy journalist, so I advocate my own activism and I embed myself in the people’s stories and people’s struggles and try to uplift those stories just as real news does. And so I’m speaking from the streets. I was just in the streets in Minneapolis. I’ve never seen energy like I have now and people standing up in solidarity with their brothers and sisters because they want to terrorize us in a submission and silence and fear and I’m seeing the opposite happen and that’s something extremely powerful and again, kind of incalculable in terms of like what will happen with this energy. It’s very exciting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. And this is a moment in history not to be wasted because it won’t be around forever.

And it also sort of makes me think about like again, what is so different between our moment now in the year of our Lord 2026 and our moment then in the post nine eleven years at the turn of the millennium. And I of course can’t help but think about my own trajectory, my own family, like what has changed in our lives since then? Well, a massive economic global financial meltdown happened. We lost everything that my parents had worked for, including the house that I grew up in and it’s been a very long kind of struggle to get back to a place of peace and normalcy for our entire family since then. And now as someone who goes around interviewing, working people around the country talking about their lives and their stories, I hear a lot of echoes of that similar trajectory for a lot of people.

And I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying that at the turn of the century when we were as a country much more gung-ho about … Yeah, we have the right as the United States to go around the world telling other countries what to do. We have the right to spread democracy because it’s the best system in the world. We’re liberating people, we’re not doing something bad, yada, yada, yada.That was a time pre 2008 crash when the American dream was still plausible for a lot of us. You go out on the streets now, you talk to people now, no one believes in the American dream. I mean, if a handful of billionaires own everything and all of our money is just being sucked out of the public coffers and into the war industry. And so what I hear now when I go to these demonstrations in Baltimore, DC, what I hear now when I talk to poor and working class people in deep red Trump country districts in the Midwest or the South or here in the Mid-Atlantic, the common refrain that I hear is like, “Why is my money going there when we’re all kind of floundering here?” And I think that that is also a very significant sign of where we are as a country, but also a significant kind of mobilizing factor that presents an opportunity for people to look around and realize we’re all getting screwed by very identifiable villains.

And I wanted to sort of like hook that back into earth’s greatest enemy and ask who are the identifiable villains in this story that you’re telling and how do we take them on?

Abby Martin:

Yeah. I mean, the problem with capitalism and the status quo of neoliberalism is that everything’s been co-opted, superficialized, tokenized, our struggles have been bought and sold back to us. And so for the last 50 years, labor density, unions, that revolutionary undercurrent of all the progressive struggles, it’s been kind of co-opted into these corporate branding and marketing campaigns and it’s been really, really horrific to see because we’re getting back to our footing where people were in the 60s and 70s with this fundamental understanding of ideology and being able to articulate what we are fighting for and against. And so we’re getting back to that. I think Bernie and Democratic socialists of America and things like that have really resurrected the spirit of what we can all kind of orient ourselves around. But for the longest time, Max, I mean, I grew up very anti-communist. I mean, this was very, very baked in to American society because of the history against the ruling class.

And so what you see now is parasitic billionaires who have basically seized that distrust that did exist for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about, the disaffected masses who lost everything during the financial crisis, who knew that we were lied to about nine eleven and in the Iraq war, they don’t trust these people, but Trump was very smart in the way that they seized that momentum and siphoned all of the energy into this faux populism. And again, there was no opposition infrastructure to counteract that. And so a lot of us are kind of flailing saying, “How do we gain ground when they have taken over everything?” And then the Democrats kind of incubated it and laid the groundwork for them to take over everything because they’re basically Republican lights because everything is about making profit at the end of the day. And so I think what we need to do is realize we are all victims of propaganda.

We’re all at different steps of our journey of breaking out of that, but that’s all baked into all of us. And so approaching each other, and I’m not talking about fascists or people who are apologists for genocide. There are certain contingent of society that can’t be helped. They’ve succumbed to the darkness. They’ve been beaten down by the system and they’ve commodified everything. They have lost their empathy. I’m not saying that they’re born like that. I’m just saying that a lot of them can’t be helped right now and we need to let that go. But I think the vast majority of people are empathetic. They’re humanitarians. They want civil liberties. They want the foundation of what they believed America to be, human rights, the First Amendment, free speech, the beautiful things that make this country supposedly great. Those are the people that we need to reach out to with humility and empathy and reaching them where they’re at.

I’m talking about service members. I’m talking about veterans. They are not the enemy. They are victims of the enemy. The enemy is the top brass of the military, the government officials who are complicit in this, who are profiting off of war, who are invested in the war machinery, editors in chief at the New York Times, the Washington Post who are putting out the propaganda that sows the seeds for genocide, who perpetuate the status quo of this death cycle. Earth’s greatest enemy, that was the Biden administration. That was before Trump. That’s the status quo. That’s what we’ve accepted as normal, barreling us off a cliff, killing every last living thing on the planet, a finite planet. It’s collective lunacy and madness to go into this year after year knowing the outcome max. And I think people are so ready. They’re starving for this information. They’re sick of being gaslit and lied to and they’re realizing, “Hey, this is not the reality that I see.

This is not the reality that my neighbor sees.” COVID was very important for the ruling class. We were fighting each other about vaccines, about God knows what while they cannibalized every last industry. They siphoned every last drop of wealth. They pillaged everything. They gained what tripled their wealth in the last five years. And what happened to us atomized, isolated, siloed off, brain rodted on our phones thinking we can’t ever do anything about this. We lost. That’s what they want. Just like Barry Sanders in the movie says, “See what you see. Don’t be duped. See what’s right in front of your face.” And I’m not talking about on your phone, on your screen. I’m talking about in reality, vast majority of people are ready. They’re waiting for you to talk about these things because they don’t have the chance. They don’t have that opportunity or those avenues because Elon Musk wants them to believe something else.

And we have to ask, why is the richest man in the world showing us what he’s showing us? So when we get on our devices, yes, the advent of social media, the advent of Palestinian voices dictating their reality and taking back their agencies, been monumental, revolutionary, assisted to all of this, but we have to also be calculating strategic, creative, getting off of these devices and meeting like we used to because that’s how we win. We don’t win on here. That’s just one tool for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put and vitally true. And we’re saying this as two media makers, you know, Media personalities. Media can only do so much and we are trying to do as much as we can with it and your new documentary is an incredible example of that. But I could not agree more with your last point that we’re not going to bring a coalition of poor working class regular people banding together to stop the destruction of our society and our planet online.That’s not going to happen.You don’t get 50,000 people marching through the streets of Minneapolis just by posting and sending emails. You have to have that in- person connection, which is all I’m hearing coming from Minneapolis. People are saying I’m both simultaneously more afraid of my government than I’ve ever been, but I’ve never felt safer in my own neighborhood because everyone’s talking to each other and everyone’s kind of working together.

We were already losing that basic infrastructure for society as such well before 2020. But I think COVID really did a number on what was left of our social infrastructure, on our social being. So many of us just stayed closed in, stayed cut off, stayed glued to our phones and our computers. And as you mentioned, the powers that be, the people who control the media, those platforms, they know that and they are manipulating that to the point that no one has an agreed upon basis of the reality that we’re actually all living in because depending on what feed you’re looking at, where you live, what your search history is, you’re going to see an entirely different world be outside your window than the person who’s living next door to you. And

Abby Martin:

That’s a

Maximillian Alvarez:

Very dangerous and dark place to be. But I wanted to kind of hook that back into something else that you said, which was the value of not only talking to service members and military veterans, but that was made manifest in this documentary. I mean, it’s important in and of itself because as you said, they are not the enemy. They are the victims of this monstrous machine. They are the human grist for the proverbial mill of US imperialism. But it also kind of hooks into the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about how hard it is to actually research and understand this topic of just how big of an environmental threat is the US military to the world. And it was so clear to me in your documentary that if you go and try to get answers to those questions from top government officials or military brass, you’re not going to get anywhere.

But when you and Mike Preisner are talking to veterans, the rank and file of the military, you get a very different perspective on the problem. And I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how different that perspective actually is.

Abby Martin:

Okay. So there’s this hive mind that kind of operates in a similar fashion to how a corporate board would. So let’s say someone just has a conscience all of a sudden who’s on the executive board of Amazon or something, they would just be kicked out. You need to make money, you need to make more money than the last quarter, otherwise you’re not profitable. You’re a failing entity. That’s exactly how the US military operates. So when you’re looking at who’s sitting on the board of these board of directors of the defense contractors, they’re all interlocking with the media arms and all of these things. And that kind of explains this hive mind operational structure of a system that kind of works on its own. It doesn’t have a conscience, but of course it’s comprised of people who do and they can speak out and they have voices and they have their own minds, even though you’re beaten down in the military to not have your own mind.

So when you break out of that, when you see it for what it is, it’s such a powerful thing. I know hundreds of service members, because of my husband’s work, obviously, organizing soldiers and getting people out because anyone can get out of the military. It doesn’t need to be something specific. Anyone can file a CO packet and get out today. You never need to stay in and Mike can orient you through that. But it’s just so amazing to see people who are coming to the movie, watching it, who are active duty. My cousin who was a 20-year-old naval officer watched it and he was just like, “You know, because I don’t agree with your politics, but I’m here to support you. ” After the movie, he was just shaking. He’s like, “I’m ready to F and go, dude. I’m ready to fight.” And it’s just reaching people on a human level because I think especially when you reach out to service members, they’re victims, they’re not profiting off of this.

They don’t benefit from this system. They’re cannon fodder. They’re the human detritists that are going to be kicked out in the street like Levon, the homeless veteran at the beginning of the movie. He represents kind of the consequences of the system. I mean, he represents all of the destruction of the environment, the garbage that’s tossed in the ocean, every bullet fragment that’s exploded and the chemical exposure of all the toxins left everywhere that were bombing and shooting shells. And that story alone is so powerful, just one single homeless vet who was in a commercial for the army.

Levon:

First Air Cav Brigade. I was in US Army. I joined up in 2004, deployed out in 2006 and it was hell. I was at Camp Taji, seven miles south of Baghdad. I was one of the “Army of One” commercials. I was a guy with the helicopters.

Army Officer 1:

Everybody listen up. This is Levon.

Wenty:

Hey, Levon. I’m Wenty.

Army Officer 1:

You’re on the 120 today. So if there’s anything you need, just ask these guys. They’ll take care of it. All right?

Army Officer 2:

Welcome aboard.

Levon:

Thank you.

Army Officer 2:

You ever been around anything this fast before?

Levon:

He walks in and goes, “You ever worked around anything this fast before?” Yeah. My last job.

“Army of One” Commercial Narrator:

See how army training gives you strength for now, strength for later. GoArmy.Com.

Levon:

Yeah, it was all a lie. I have nerve damage, so I’m actually losing my hands. So I’m trying to use them as much as I can until they’re all gone. It hurts. It actually hurts. But that’s what the hydraulic fluid in service does. Laughing is the only way I can get through, otherwise I’m crying.

Abby Martin:

It encapsulates everything. It’s like you’re exploited, your story, your body, and then you’re thrown in the trash and you’re left to die with no help. And that’s the thing that veterans need to understand, whether it’s burn pits or agent orange, chemical exposure. There’s no help on the other end under this system. It’s just about churning your body out for profit. You’re just another commodity. And once you realize that you join the fight because you can always get out and you can make your own decisions and agency to realize it’s not worth it. It’s not worth your life. Your life has value and your life has dignity and you need to put it toward benefiting humanity and the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, that was very beautifully and powerfully put and it really kind of chills my blood hearing everything that you’re saying because it sounds so eerily familiar from the reporting that I’ve been doing over the past few years starting in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. And we are having this conversation at the end of January 2026. I’m going to be back in East Palestine next week. It’ll be the three year anniversary since the Norfolk Southern bomb train derailed in these people’s backyards, turned their lives upside down, trained filled with toxic chemicals that in an industry that has been just cut to the bone on the labor side, on the safety side, but is making more profits than it ever has. And who benefits from that? The shareholders and the executives. Who bears the costs of that? The workers on the rails and the people in towns like East Palestine, Ohio.

And this is an entire region that has been poisoned by industrial or corporate profit seeking greed and government complicity and negligence. Our own EPA was telling people there, “You’re fine. It’s okay to go back home. The air’s safe. The water’s safe.” And here they are three years later telling me people are getting all kinds of weird cancers. People have to leave because they can’t stay in their homes without getting nosebleeds, rashes, their kids bleeding out of every orifice. It is a shit show, a monstrous shit show that is sadly not unique to Ohio. What I have learned going to different sacrifice zones so called around the country, talking to different poor and working class people here in South Baltimore, down in Georgia near the biolab fire that happened last year, moss landing like in California, this is everywhere and people are being poisoned and abandoned in the exact same way that you just described as like military veterans and the people living abroad who are if not killed by our munitions are poisoned by them for years and the rest of their lives.

So all of that is here at home as much as it is there abroad. And frankly, I don’t think your average American knows that when it comes to like sites of industrial and mass pollution here in the United States, the biggest portion of super fun sites that come from one source is the Department of Defense. It’s like military bases. It’s weapons manufacturing plants. It’s the kind of foam that they use to put out fires that puts forever chemicals in the water that we’re all drinking. And so I wanted to kind of bring it back home for a second and ask if you could talk about the vast environmental kind of impact that the war machine is having on Americans and like how that connects to the imperial monster of American militarism abroad.

Abby Martin:

You look at just legacy contamination of what the US did during the Cold War, during World War II. I mean, you even still see dead zones from World War I from small munitions, which just kind of shows you how detrimental these are in just training. I mean, even just training alone, like you mentioned forever chemicals. I mean, the firefighting foam that’s used extensively by the military. The military is one of the most pervasive users of PFAS contamination. There are safe alternatives there have been forever, but they just don’t use them because it’s, I guess, less cost effective and they’d rather just dump them all and contaminate water supplies. So people may know peripherally about Camp Lejeune, which is the worst water contamination event in US history. This is now a super fun site, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina military base where they dumped toxic compounds for decades.

And after they knew that it was toxic, they continued to do it and cover it up. And so a million people were poisoned harmed by this toxic dumping and there was a huge amount of poisoned infants that were stillborn babies. And what was most shocking about this, Max, is this could be looked at as like, “Oh, it’s just a 60 year old story. The government took care of everyone and they’ll never do it again.” Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Well, it’s amazing to think that now 60 years later, people are still dying. They have ailments, they’re generational and physically impaired from the toxic water contamination and there’s no database. They are trying to try every single individual claim and the judge said it would take over a century to try to actually give all of these people what they deserve. And of course a lot of them have died.

They’re just waiting for all them to die off so they just don’t have to deal with them anymore. But I think it really just explains how they deal with victims of burn pits, with victims of aging orange poisoning. They deny, they deny, they deny. They try to just resist doling out even a penny for the victims and then the site is left destroyed. I mean, it’s a super fun site. This is just a poison toxic site that doesn’t go through proper remediation. There are hundreds of them all across the US. Like you said, the vast majority are either US military installations or have previously housed military uses. So bullet manufacturing, you have the Hanford nuclear site, which is like a ticking time bomb that can poison three states at once in the entire river that supplies water to half the country. So these are serious problems that are not being dealt with because we don’t have a functional government that is going around saying, “Hey, how do we do this clean up properly?” No, no, no.

We’re just going to commit fraud. We’re just going to lie. Governors don’t want the black spot on their record by saying, “We have a super fund site. We need to clean it up. We need to divert resources.” They’d rather ignore it. And of course, the military is sacred. It’s worshiped so they don’t even want to combat it. In on amazing instance, Jay Inslee, who was the governor, previous governor of Washington who ran on climate change as his entire doctrine, he wouldn’t even criticize the military. He wouldn’t even answer a basic question on should these be included or not in emissions reporting. I mean, the cowardice is frankly horrifying and disgusting.

It’s so far reaching here. When you put legacy contamination aside, just again, the maintenance of the arsenal here at home. We have hundreds of bases here in the US. Every base is dumping forever chemicals in the ground. Every base has contamination. Some of them much higher than Camp Lejeune. We talked to a person who is testing the groundwater around bases in the US. He is saying he is finding ground contamination higher than Camp Lejeune. Why don’t we hear about this, Max? Why? This is the most base level big tent ever for a human being. Clean water, clean air, clean food. If we can’t build an opposition or an organizational infrastructure around that, what are we doing? What are we doing? So again, it’s this total ignorance, total ignorance of the military being actually not a benevolent force spreading democracy and human rights. A force for profit that is destructive, deadly, totally dissociated from human life, the sanctity of life.

It’s willing to kill everything and everyone on the planet. So Jeff Bezos can have another yacht. Is it worth it? Hell no, it’s not. Hell no, it’s not. And so this just brings it all home and especially with ICE, because at the end of the movie we talk about the militarization of the police. So that concept of the imperial boomerang, I mean, of course it’s always been our tactics of colonialism, genocide. They’ve always been circling back, right? But I think the visceral nature of it now where we see storm troopers masked, immunized in the streets, state executioners in military guard where you can’t even distinguish, is this Palestine? Is this here? What am I looking at? It’s here, baby. It’s here to roost. And so I don’t even … There’s no difference anymore. I think for a long time people were trying to convince people, “Hey, no, no, you should care about Palestine.

This is all going to come back up. And you shouldn’t care about it because eventually it’s going to come back home. You should care about it because it’s human life. It’s human life and it’s on our shoulders. This is our government doing this. ” But I think especially now people are saying, “Oh my God, it’s here. It’s here and we’re all of our liberations intrinsically tied to one another.” And I think it’s becoming so, so clear. And especially when you tie in the environment, Max, because it’s not just one life loss, this is the air, this is the water, this is our planet and it doesn’t stop with Palestine. It doesn’t stop with the Congo, the rainforest, it’s the lungs of the planet. Every drop of water comes back and that’s what’s so crucial about the collaborative nature of approaching this existential crisis is that instead we have the great power competition where we’re fighting, we’re preparing a war with China when we should be cooperating.

How can we approach these together to actually give us a fighting chance?

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to kind of end on that powerful note, right? Because as much fire as I’m feeling in my belly thinking about our collective duty

To respond to this moment in history for humanity, for life on this planet, for our children, our grandchildren, all of it. I am feeling more called to this fight than ever before at the same time that I, like everyone else who’s watching this right now am feeling more distraught about the state of things in the world right now and it seems like we just have a brick on the gas pedal careening in the exact wrong direction, not only in terms of tackling the climate crisis, but in that double helix fashion, like stopping the US war machine, Jesus, we’re only in the first month of 2026 and we’ve invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president. US is talking about just going in and taking Greenland, invading Iran. It feels like the very monster that you photograph and document and detail in this documentary is on a murderous planet destroying rampage.

I know a lot of people out there are feeling like, “Oh my God, this can’t be stopped.” But I want to end on the note that it can

Abby Martin:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

It must and what tools your documentary gives us to help make that a reality.

Abby Martin:

I think this is very important. Like we said, see what you see, don’t be duped. So see what you see, meaning the success stories, the things that the billionaire class does not want us to see the victories across the country, the mobilizations, the coalescing these movements, the burgeoning of consciousness. I mean, I always say empire, Zionism, it’s a paper tiger and that’s why the propaganda is so desperate and that’s why the violence is so extreme because the colonizer mind cannot beat a liberated on. They can kill. They can kill and destroy, but they can’t win. They can’t be victorious. And all an empire knows is that every problem is a nail. And so the more that they dig their own graves, the more people wake up, the question is, are we going to wake up fast enough? And I think that when we see success stories like last year, Max 35 data centers got stopped in the US, where is that on the news?

So it’s us seeking out the things that can actually reinvigorate our revolutionary spirit energy and not get despawned and paralyzed with the sheer, terrifying nature of it all because it is overwhelming. And again, it’s intentional to berate and barrage our minds like this. They’ve psychologically, it’s a psychic assault. It’s a physical assault. It’s an all body, all mind assault and they know exactly how to manipulate us. If they’ve learned anything from the last mass uprising, it’s that. And so I think having that consciousness, yes, they’ve wanted to individualize everything and that’s the whole problem with liberalism, capitalism, individualizing our struggles and the solution. Papers, straws, driving … Look, and I have solar panels. I’m a militant composter. You don’t get a shred of food past me. Ask my husband, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand who is the perpetrator, who’s actually at fault.

It’s not us, it’s them. And so while you need to act in your individual choices with whatever capacity you have, with whatever talents you have, build and guide that to the struggle, because if it didn’t matter what you said online, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on propaganda to manipulate and curate our realities. If it didn’t matter what you did out there, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on storm troopers to terrorize us and to make us feel scared to walk out of our houses, obey or die, comply or die, right? That’s what they said about Alex Pretty. You should have stayed inside. No, we have the right to assert our liberties. We have the right to do these things. So to kind of reclaim reality is like a revolutionary act in itself because it is a war on our minds. That’s the first step, joining an organization, getting out there, being a part of the community.

Because Max, we don’t do this. We don’t do this work because we know we’re going to win tomorrow. We do it because we have to. Like Chris Hedges said, we fight fascists because they’re fascists. We have to fight it because we brought children in this world and not just that, because I love this planet. I want my children to go scuba diving in Noko Bay. I want them to meet the Tugong. I don’t want him to think that I gave up because I just succumbed to the darkness. I want them to know that we fought till the end. And so we have to. We do it because we have to because we love life and we do it to preserve life and we win when we know that we can because guess what? We have the power. We have billions of people on this planet and the rest of the world is ready to go.

They’re waiting for Americans. They’re looking at us saying, “It’s time. It’s time for you guys to wake up because we don’t want our planet destroyed because if you’re out of control government and military empire.” So as crazy and dystopian as things may seem, and yes, indeed they are, there is an alternative path that is becoming more and more urgent by the day and I think people are realizing that more and more, that the status quo is death, that you’re in or out and I think a lot more people are choosing life. They’re choosing to be all in organizationally lending whatever they can to the struggle because we have to Max and I think once that consciousness flips, mass education, of course, is a very important tool. That’s why we do what we do. Once that flips, it’s going to happen quick. Occupy happened quick. That was amazing.

That was one thing that I was like, “This is going to end in a couple days.” And it lasted for months and months. That was beautiful, revolutionary. And we took that spirit and I think it still carries on with us today and we’re waiting for that moment and I think it’s really right around the corner. It’s coming. And once it’s here, it’s unstoppable and we need millions of people, civil disobedience, nonviolent civil disobedience, because we cannot fight the military empire with violence. We can’t fight it with military might. We shut down capital. That’s the language these people speak. We haven’t even tried to strike, but baby, when we do it, that’s going to send shockwaves through the world and we can move mountains when we stop business as usual.

💾

“The rest of the world is ready to go. They're waiting for Americans. They're looking at us and saying, ‘It's time for you guys to wake up, because we don't want our planet destroyed [by] your out-of-control government and military empire."

‘We demand freedom’: Immigrants on strike in New Jersey prison

✇The Real News Network
By: Luis Feliz Leon
29 May 2026 at 18:33
ICE agents spray a protestor with a chemical irritant before detaining them outside of the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall, where ICE is housing detained immigrants, on May 28, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images
Labor Notes logo

This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on May 29, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

On a patch of sidewalk on a busy industrial corridor in Newark, federal agents with rifles, metal batons, flak vests, and balaclavas faced off against unarmed activists with cardboard signs and a bullhorn. Detained workers could be heard on the soccer field behind the prison walls, shouting in Spanish, “¡Libertad!” (Freedom!)

Since May 22, 300 of them are on a work stoppage and hunger strike. Over video chat, one worker told the crowd outside that they had stopped eating and working for as little as $1 an hour (or no pay at all) to demand an improvement in their living conditions. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom. We’re not treated like people. We’re treated like animals.”

The hunger strikers are demanding to meet with the governor, the release of young and elderly detainees and all medically vulnerable people, and ultimately, freedom for all.

For months a group of activists with the ICE Out of NJ coalition, which includes the immigrant rights group Cosecha, the Catholic advocacy group Pax Christi, and the worker center New Labor, has been protesting outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed privately owned detention center where immigrants, mostly Latino, are jailed without due process.

Families and lawyers of the detainees report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and guards with the GEO Group, the private-prison contractor, have been denying them medical care, offering them food swarming with worms, and refusing them bail bond or access to their lawyers. Many were snatched from construction job sites, or still wearing their service-industry work clothes; others were taken while reporting at courthouses for green-card appointments.

“In our cases, we had already been processed, we were complying with legal requirements, and there was no order from a judge for our detention or arrest,” wrote a worker identified as Brian in a handwritten letter in early May, co-signed by 300 others with redacted names, pleading for help from elected officials. “ICE officers did not take into account the fact that there was already an immigration court date, and they arrested us during check-in appointments at USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] facilities.”

FROM SCARCE FOOD TO NONE

They struck because they wanted to hit their jailers’ bottom line, but they were already going without food, and their health has further deteriorated. “People aren’t eating because of the strike we are organizing and there’s no medical assistance,” said a released hunger striker named Luis to Radio Jornalera (Day Laborer Radio). Speaking with his back to the camera to conceal his identity for fear of retaliation by ICE, Luis said another detainee had become severely dehydrated and couldn’t walk. Food was already scarce or inedible, even before the strike.

When hunger strikers sought medical help at the nursing center in the prison, “they wouldn’t lend us the wheelchair,” Luis said. “We had to put in our own pills, give our own liquids with sugar and a little salt to compensate for electrolytes.” He said there has been no due process for the detentions; he was detained by ICE during a routine check-in, which doesn’t normally occur for people who have a legal case going through the immigration system. People with no criminal records have faced exorbitant fees of upwards of $50,000 for bail, or outright denials to be released on bond.

“If they freed us, we wouldn’t generate profit for this business,” Luis told the Guardian.

Nationwide, the majority of imprisoned immigrants through 2025 had no criminal records. As the American Prospect has reported, the GEO Group is raking in record profits with a federal contract valued at $1 billion. Some of these profits come from imprisoned immigrants working for little or no pay. Workers report they are coerced into participating in the government’s supposedly Voluntary Work Program through solitary confinement and other forms of torture.

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, with an asterisk: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Convicted or not, all labor has value. But what’s doubly wrong is that immigrants in ICE jails haven’t even been convicted, and are being denied due process.

VIOLENT RETALIATION

In what activists are calling retaliation, on May 28 the GEO guards and ICE agents responded to the hunger strike and work stoppage with beatings. Detainees have reported to their lawyers and families that striking units have even had the building’s ventilation cut off, while the floors in some cells are smeared with the blood of detainees.

“Right now there are ICE agents inside of Delaney Hall violently beating the hunger strikers,” Nedia Morsy, director of the nonprofit Make the Road NJ, said in a statement. “Someone will be killed if no one intervenes and shuts this down.”

Gabriela Fuentes said her husband Jose Marroquin called her around 1:30 p.m. to “say they were being beaten and pepper sprayed… This started because they [ICE] wanted to take the only person who translates for them in the unit.”

“They wanted to take him away,” she said outside the prison in a video recording. “So all of the prisoners asked to not take him away. So then agents, ICE agents came to the unit and tried to cuff him, and that’s when the confrontation started.”

She said that the detainees lifted their hands to indicate they didn’t want to fight. The guards took them to their cells. “And then there were the prisoners banging on the doors to please let them out,” Fuentes said. “My husband says there was blood in the floor and in the walls that clearly the agents now were cleaning up because they knew they messed up.”

In a statement, Fuentes said that she bolted to the prison to speak out about what was happening inside. When she got there, she saw that “one of the guys was taken by the ambulance because a guard broke his nose.”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said agents responded to “to a physical fight involving detainees at Delaney Hall.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwyane Mullin has upped the ante, threatening to retaliate against sanctuary cities by pulling Customs and Border Protection officers from airports.

Even before the strike, speaking out about conditions in the prison was met with retaliation. “We have to be very careful, everything we say and do is closely monitored, at all times,” Jordi Alvarado told local news outlet NJ.com in early May. “And then, almost as if on cue, his face abruptly disappeared from the screen of the iPhone advocates had used to call him,” reported NJ.com columnist Daysi Calavia-Robertson. On the blacked out screen, a message popped up. “Call paused.” And shortly after, “Call ended.”

OFFICIAL ACTION DEMANDED

Local and federal elected officials have put out statements condemning the deplorable living conditions and treatment of detainees. New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat, went inside the prison on May 25, came out, joined the protestors, and got pepper sprayed. But the ICE Out of NJ coalition is demanding more action.

“Elected officials, the Governor, and the Attorney General cannot continue ignoring what is happening behind these walls,” said Jorge Torres of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in a statement. “They must enter the facility immediately, speak directly with the people, and hold GEO Group and ICE accountable for this violence.” The detained immigrant workers have written three letters to legislators pleading for their release; they’ve received no reply.

“I have never thought Delaney Hall should open,” said New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill at a news conference on May 26. “We had a law here in New Jersey against privately run detention facilities…The fact that they wouldn’t let me in there gives you some sense that there is some ‘there’ there, and that’s really concerning to me.”

The cruel impunity is as plain as day, both inside and outside the immigration detention center. On the night of May 27, federal agents struck protesters with batons, pushing one into the path of a tractor trailer wheel, a video shows.

On Thursday after reports of assaults on detainees began circulation, some local elected officials were allowed inside the prison, but access is still limited. That same day, the New Jersey Department of Health was denied full access for an inspection.

The reports often come from the families of the detained. “We’ve been hearing from constituents who have family members inside, including a mother who is being beaten by ICE agents and an 11-year-old girl who spoke to her father inside who said that there are a lot of people inside who are bloodied,” U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman told NJ.com on the afternoon of May 28.

SOLIDARITY FUNDRAISERS

Gabriela Soto’s husband Martin Soto Hernandez was detained in January while buying diapers. He had previously been arrested for a domestic violence incident, but the charges were later dismissed and expunged, according to his lawyers. His lawyer says Soto Hernandez has lost 110 pounds: “He’s skin and bones.”

Even in his poor condition, he helped organize the hunger strike and was later transferred to a different detention camp in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on May 25.

“My husband Martin Soto got illegally detained by ICE tonight,” Soto wrote on a GoFundMe page to raise funds for her husband’s legal defense shortly after he was imprisoned. “We never fully got a lawyer for his immigration status because his court date was due for 2028… I want to be able to have a lawyer defend him so that he can stay here. His kids depend on him. His daughter knows he is her world. This is unfair what Trump is doing to this country. He’s ripping families apart and this is not fair. Please help us.”

“At this very moment, Delaney represents a dark and desolate world for those who sought to attain the American Dream,” said Gloria Guerrero of New Labor in Spanish to Labor Notes. Guerrero organizes alongside domestic workers whose husbands have been detained in ICE prisons. “Children wait for the return of parents detained by a cruel and inhumane system—locked in dungeons, treated like criminals, and stripped of every right, including the right to humane treatment,” she said.

“Yet for others, it is the greatest business venture in history—one that utterly disregards the dignity of human beings. Delaney is a Latino concentration camp where many are forced to sell themselves out of sheer necessity, shielding their faces in shame from a community that cries out: ‘Quit that job now! I am your people! I am your kin!’ Meanwhile, on the inside, others are holding fast in a strike of protest and resistance—a struggle to which we offer hope, and which we support from the outside!”

Workers, students, and indigenous movements shut down Bolivia in popular rebellion

✇The Real News Network
By: Sam Carliner
29 May 2026 at 16:57
An Indigenous woman gestures in front of riot police during a protest against the government of President Rodrigo Paz on Mother's Day in La Paz on May 27, 2026. Photo by Marvin RECINOS / AFP via Getty Images

This article was originally published by Truthout on May 28, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

For more than a week, the nation of Bolivia has been in a state of full-on revolt.

In response to neoliberal reforms by the recently elected right-wing government led by President Rodrigo Paz, unions have launched a general strike, peasants and Indigenous peoples have set up dozens of roadblocks throughout the country, and massive marches have been held in the capital, La Paz. These are just a few expressions of a much broader social discontent, which has brought the country to a halt and stoked mass resistance to the larger project of U.S-aligned, right-wing attacks on workers and social movements in Latin America.

Joseph Bouchard, a social scientist and journalist currently in La Paz as a visiting fellow at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, explained the diverse character of the movement. “It’s sort of a grouping of different social movements and groups that I think represents the wide spectrum within the Bolivian left,” Bouchard told Truthout. “You have teachers unions and workers unions. You have mining unions. You have just regular people joining who are not necessarily part of any movement. You have an Indigenous federation who used to be part of an anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s. You have [former president Evo Morales’s] people … And so you have really all these groups that together add up to sort of the largest representation of the Bolivian left, disaffected voters, organized groups, disorganized groups.”

While the diversity of the movement also brings a wide range of demands, one of the most popular is for President Paz to resign, with some sectors of the movement arguing that the country should maintain a general strike indefinitely until Paz has been ousted. The level of outrage is especially profound considering that Paz has only been in office for six months.

How to Lose a Populace in 6 Months

In October 2025, Bolivia elected right-wing populist Rodrigo Paz, ending 20 years of government by the left-wing MAS (Movement to Socialism) party founded by former president Evo Morales. Paz, running on a campaign of “capitalism for all,” promised to address economic hardships plaguing the country. His campaign also benefited from the implosion of MAS, which was experiencing intense infighting from which it has not recovered.

Despite appealing to the economic concerns of the Bolivian people and positioning himself as more of a centrist than the country’s established (and much more extreme) right, once elected Paz wasted no time in carrying out attacks on the country’s workers and poor. One of his first moves was to eliminate a tax on large fortunes. He has also proposed education policies that teachers have criticized as privatization-oriented measures.

Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: a land privatization law and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies.

Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: Law 1720, a land privatization law which many see as a move to hand over Indigenous lands to agribusiness and other large-scale landowners, and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies, practically doubling the consumer cost of fuel overnight. Along with the rising fuel costs, Paz’s government has further angered Bolivians by importing low quality fuel, or “junk fuel,” as the people call it, which has reportedly damaged people’s vehicles, imposing repair costs many cannot afford.

It did not take long for the outrage to spread. Bolivia had already seen significant protests in December 2025, just a month into Paz’s presidency, but these were halted due to negotiations between the government and the country’s largest union federation, Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). Despite these negotiations the Paz administration continued advancing neoliberal reforms, further fueling outrage and forcing COB and other unions, including teachers unions, to call strikes at the start of May. Around the same time, rural Indigenous communities embarked on a long march to the capital, while other peasant and Indigenous communities erected blockades across major roads.

Despite its best efforts, the Bolivian government has not yet quashed the nationwide shutdown, though on May 26 the country’s Chamber of Deputies voted to repeal restrictions on the use of military force against protesters. Even before the vote, the state had deployed militarized forces against protesters. This repression has only further radicalized the movement, with some protesters using dynamite, rocks, and slingshots to defend themselves against the military, according to multiple sources on the ground who spoke with Truthout. Reports emerging on social media confirm this as well.

A history student at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés who spoke with Truthout described the repressive climate that the protesters are braving.

“Especially police, they have been repressing the movement with chemical agents, rubber bullets, and so on,” she told Truthout. “[The military] tried to stop the blockades which have been in the roads, but 30 minutes after they left, the blockades were rebuilt with even more people.”

The student, who is a member of the socialist youth group Combate Rojo, asked to remain anonymous due to the doxxing to which members of her organization have been subjected from the far right. She mentioned that arrests and violence have been common in the crackdown on protests.

A Challenge to the Regional Right and U.S. Imperialism

The protests in Bolivia are not merely a national issue. They have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests. These interests are expressed clearly in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which names the Western Hemisphere as the administration’s top region of strategic interest. It states, “The goal is for our partner nations to build up their domestic economies, while an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.”

The protests in Bolivia have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests.

Paz has closely aligned Bolivia with the United States, joining the recently formed Shield of the Americas, a military alliance composed mostly of right-wing governments with the stated mission of fighting cartels. On May 21, the alliance issued a joint statement condemning the protests in Bolivia, alleging that the protesters are being led by “criminals and drug traffickers.”

Under the Trump administration, allegations of drug trafficking have been used to justify a wide range of interventionist and militaristic policies including the attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the establishment of a seemingly permanent military occupation along the U.S.-Mexico border, dozens of illegal and deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean, and a growing military campaign in Ecuador that has resulted in the bombing of a civilian farm in a rural village.

Bouchard argued that the U.S. response to the protests is a rejection of Latin American sovereignty.

“You can vote for a government and then decide you’re unhappy with what they’re doing if you feel like they’re betraying their promises or not fulfilling what they voted for,” Bouchard said. “This is how democracy works. U.S. government and right-wing allies in Latin America are basically saying that no protests are ever legitimate; if you vote for a government you’re basically supposed to accept whatever they do after.”

Several of the Latin American governments who signed the Shield of the Americas statement are likely observing the protests in Bolivia with concern that their own populations could draw inspiration from them.

The same week that Bolivian trade unions launched their general strike, Argentina and Chile saw massive student-led demonstrations against attacks on public education. Both Argentine President Javier Milei and Chilean President José Antonio Kast have been pushing their own neoliberal reforms similar to those carried out by Paz.

They know that they can bring down governments … They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions.

Even in Brazil, which is currently governed by the left-wing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, university students and municipal teachers in São Paulo have been on strike and held combative marches against austerity pushed by the state’s far right governor. While the protests in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have not reached anywhere near the level of widespread anger expressed in Bolivia, they demonstrate a regional trend in which workers, students, and broader communities are beginning to rise up against economic strain and far right movements.

The history student who spoke with Truthout said that there are many in the movement in Bolivia who understand that their uprising poses a challenge to far more than just Paz’s agenda.

“[Protesters] mention Milei, they mention the genocide [in Gaza],” she said. “That internationalist connection to U.S. imperialism and Israel, it’s there. You just can’t hide it.”

Bouchard said that the Bolivian people understand their country’s history, and this informs how radical the movement has become and how much more radical it can get.

“They know that they can bring down governments,” Bouchard said. “They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions. They know that the Paz government is quite weak, and if they use these tactics like they’ve done before they can win.”

Protests erupt at New Jersey detention center in support of hunger striking detainees

✇The Real News Network
By: Shireen Akram-Boshar
28 May 2026 at 21:30
ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) agents and pro-immigration activists face off outside the Delaney Hall migrant detention center on May 25, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

This article was originally published by Truthout on May 26, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Protests erupted on Sunday night outside of the Delaney Hall immigrant jail in Newark, New Jersey, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moved to transfer a strike leader from the jail.

Some 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike on Friday in protest of the conditions at the ICE jail. On Sunday, activists and family members learned that the jail was preparing to move Martin Soto, one of the detainees who had announced the strike.

Gabriela Soto, Martin’s wife, saw ICE agents loading Martin into a van, and ran to block the van that held her husband from leaving the site. Other demonstrators joined in blocking the van from leaving the facility, and forced it back to the detention facility. Protestors formed a blockade for hours to prevent Martin Soto from being moved out of the site.

“Free Martin!” the protestors chanted. “Free them all!”

Later, around 1 am on Monday, ICE agents began to move a caravan of vehicles out of the facility, and protestors again attempted to block the vehicles from leaving. ICE agents then shoved aside protestors, pushing them against the sidewalk and against cars, and pepper sprayed at least one protestor.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson announced on Monday that after “ICE successfully dispersed approximately 70 agitators” it succeeded in transferring Martin to another facility.

Since the start of the hunger strike, family members and supporters have gathered outside of the detention center. Among others, a 10-year-old child spoke about her father, who is currently being imprisoned in the facility by ICE.

On Friday, Gabriela Soto translated calls from prisoners, including her husband Martin, who said, “We deal with racism, with bad conditions, with guards that do not help us…. It gets worse all the time, and they don’t treat us like people.”

The guards soon cut access to the detainees’ phones so that these calls could not continue.

People being imprisoned at Delaney began a hunger strike after signing two letters describing their circumstances and conditions.

“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped — detained without justification — not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” they wrote. “Families are being destroyed and separated.”

“We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases,” they went on. “We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court.”

One participant in the labor and hunger strike wrote in a letter describing the conditions of the jail:

We have people sleeping on the floor for not being processed quick enough. They neglect medications for people who are in dire need of it. All of our bonds are denied and they are telling us to file habeas corpus for everyone that is in here, they constantly tell us we are a danger to society. The same judge that denies your bond is the same judge that reviews our immigration court cases and that is not fair.

Delaney opened as an ICE jail in May 2025 in a $1 billion, 15-year contract between private prison contractor GEO Group and ICE. It is the largest ICE facility on the East Coast and has faced pushback since the announcement of its opening.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim visited the detention center Saturday, and wrote on X that he saw inside it a “high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate senior year”; a woman “who had a miscarriage in the detention facility” and was “left to manage [it] all on her own”; and a “carton with the milk inside congealed solid.”

On Monday, Kim returned to the site, and said that he was pepper sprayed. “Instead of engaging with me and others about the poor conditions, ICE sent in an armored vehicle and a line of armed agents that only poured gasoline on the fire,” he wrote on X. Kim described ICE agents tackling and restraining protestors and firing pepper balls and spray into the crowd.

On Tuesday morning, the protest continued, and video footage from outside Delaney once again shows ICE agents detaining and dragging protestors.

Leqaa Kordia — a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who was arrested in Newark when meeting with immigration officials about her status and then detained for over a year in ICE jails for her Palestine activism — wrote a statement in solidarity with the Delaney hunger strikers.

“When you choose hunger over submission, you’re doing something that terrifies ICE,” she wrote on Monday. “You are proving that even when they break your bodies, they can’t break your will. You are proving that a person stripped of freedom can’t be stripped of dignity.”

“I know the conditions you’re enduring,” she went on. “The rotten food. The medical neglect. The psychological torture of indefinite limbo. I know what it took for you to look at that tray of slop and say: No more. Not until I’m free.”

‘Logical conclusion’ of Citizens United as Delaware judge lets corporations vote in local elections

✇The Real News Network
By: Brett Wilkins
28 May 2026 at 18:32
Attendees hold signs as they listen to speakers during a rally calling for an end to corporate money in politics and to mark the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, at Lafayette Square near the White House, January 21, 2015 in Washington, DC. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Common Dreams Logo

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 27, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A judge in Delaware—a state with more registered business entities than people—ruled Monday in favor of a small town that allows corporations to vote in local elections.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz ruled that the town of Fenwick Island, population 400, did not violate the state Constitution by permitting business entities—which make up 12% of the town’s “population”—to vote in municipal elections, as case plaintiff the ACLU of Delaware had claimed.

“What is a ‘person?’ When one cuts to the heart of this case, that is the question,” Karsnitz wrote to open his 20-page ruling.

‼️‼️Delaware Superior Court upholds a municipal ordinance allowing individuals to cast votes on behalf of LLCs, trusts, and corporations in local elections against a challenge that the ordinance constitutes unlawful vote dilution for real persons under the state constitution. aboutblaw.com/blQg

— Anthony Michael Kreis (@anthonymkreis.bsky.social) 2026-05-27T20:46:10.133Z

“According to the law, a person is anyone or anything that can initiate and be subject to legal proceedings. By this conception, any adult, corporation, or institution is a person, but a minor is not a person, a fetus is not a person, and a humanoid robot… is not a person,” the ruling continues. “This highlights that legal personhood is dependent solely on legal recognition.”

The judge noted that in 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended Fenwick Island’s charter “to expand its voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick.”

“Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts,” Karsnitz added.

“I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners,” the judge wrote.

“Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction,” he continued,“ referring to the malevolent artificial intelligence-powered computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film version of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ”However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.“

“Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself,” Karsnitz concluded. “And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.”

Fenwick Island Mayor Natalie Magdeburger told Reuters earlier this year that “a property owner who pays taxes and is subject to our ordinances should have a say in who represents them on our Town Council.”

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Delaware contends that “with over 2 million business entities incorporated in Delaware–roughly double the amount of actual people living in the state–the people of Delaware risk having their voices drowned out when towns like Fenwick Island allow corporate voting.”

Karsnitz’s ruling does not mention Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 US Supreme Court decision affirming that political spending by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other groups is a form of free speech protected by the 1st Amendment that government cannot restrict. The decision ushered in the era of super PACs—which can raise unlimited amounts of money to spend on campaigns—and secret spending on elections with so-called “dark money.”

While Delaware’s corporate personhood laws long predate Citizens United, numerous critics of Monday’s ruling referred to the case, including the progressive legal advocacy group Demand Justice.

A Delaware state judge just ruled that corporations can vote in local elections.

Over 200 "artificial entities" (LLCs, trusts, corporations) are now registered voters in Fenwick Island. That's 12% of the electorate.

Delaware has more corporations chartered in the state than… pic.twitter.com/YJ5EZ1F1en

— Demand Justice (@WeDemandJustice) May 27, 2026

“Corporations aren’t people,” the group asserted on X. “They don’t have kids in local schools, they don’t drink the water, they can’t be jailed for crimes, and they shouldn’t get a vote.”

Some compared Hawaii, where Democratic Gov. Josh Green recently signed legislation clarifying that corporations are not people, with Delaware.

“Hawaii made a move to rein in Citizens United,” writer Van Dennis posted on X, “and Delaware responded, ”The fuck you are.“

Trump admin cuts to USAID, WHO, likely stalled response to ebola, experts warn

✇The Real News Network
By: Chris Walker
28 May 2026 at 17:47
Health workers wearing protective equipment are disinfected after leaving the isolation area at the General Referral Hospital during the Ebola outbreak response on May 21, 2026 in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Michel Lunanga/Getty Images

This article was originally published by Truthout on May 26, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Trump administration cuts to grants disbursed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) likely resulted in a delayed response to the current Ebola outbreak in parts of central Africa, former federal health officials have said.

As of Monday, at least 220 people are suspected to have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. More than 500 cases of Ebola have been detected in Congo alone.

Though the virus was officially uncovered just last week, it’s believed that it had been spreading undetected for at least several weeks prior.

The Trump White House dismantled USAID last year, with the State Department absorbing its remaining necessary programs. The cuts affected billions of dollars in grant money for thousands of programs and nonprofit organizations around the world.

If left intact, some of that funding could have resulted in faster detection times for the current outbreak, former federal officials within USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told NBC News,

“What we’ve lost is speed, which is the most important thing in an outbreak like this,” said Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID.

People who were once employed in programs funded by the U.S. have had to find new jobs, former CDC medical officer Daniel Bausch pointed out.

“Now they’re driving a taxi in Kinshasa or selling fruit somewhere. So this cadre of reasonably trained people that you can employ just isn’t around,” Bausch explained.

Heather Reoch Kerr, country director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the DRC, also said the lack of funding is disrupting the response to the Ebola outbreak.

“Many facilities in affected areas are operating without basic protective supplies” because of cuts to USAID, Reoch Kerr said.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently addressed the outbreak, saying that health officials within the organization are prepared to tackle the situation head-on. However, “we are facing an extremely serious and difficult outbreak,” Tedros added. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

The cuts to USAID, as well as the Trump administration’s decision to exit WHO (a choice that was finalized earlier this year), will undoubtedly disrupt global health responses, like what’s being seen in central Africa right now, health experts predicted.

The cuts have “disrupted the ability for contact tracing to happen, for those preventive activities to be mounted very well,” Abraham Leno, director of government relations for the humanitarian organization Alight, told The Hill.

Other experts predicted this outcome several months ago.

“Because of these two decisions and the long-lasting consequences, lives will be lost,” said Lindsey Locks, an assistant professor of Global Health at Boston University, in an op-ed last year.

Beyond disease outbreaks, the Trump administration’s decisions will “reverse decades of progress in reducing malnutrition and hunger worldwide,” Locks said.

The administration’s moves to dismantle international health infrastructure will “weaken the shared governance architecture for outbreak preparedness and response,” Chatham House fellow Ebere Okereke wrote in January.

“The WHO’s authority has been diminished,” Okereke added, noting, “Disease surveillance depends on trust.”

‘They were going after everyone’: Baltimore security officers fired and removed from schedules after lawful strike

✇The Real News Network
By: Maximillian Alvarez
27 May 2026 at 18:21
Non-union city and commercially contracted security officers picket in front of City Hall in downtown Baltimore, MD, on April 9, 2026, during a one-day Unfair Labor Practice strike against their employers: Abacus Corporation, Metropolitan Protective Services, and Urban Development Solutions. Photo courtesy of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 32BJ.

Nearly a year after workers voted to authorize a strike, non-union city and commercially contracted security officers in Baltimore, Maryland, walked off the job on April 9 on an unfair labor practice strike against their employers, Abacus Corporation, Metropolitan Protective Services, and Urban Development Solutions. Now, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) say that workers have been retaliated against by Metropolitan Protective Services (MPS), alleging that the city contractor “fired and harassed workers following [the] lawful strike.” MPS denies these allegations and claims “that no employees have been terminated due to union involvement.” In this episode, we speak with Victoria Cox, a former MPS employee who worked to reach the rank of sergeant, and Daril Riley, a former MPS employee who reached the rank of corporal. Both Cox and Riley have had their shifts taken off the schedule—and, essentially, their jobs taken away—and both have been put under investigation by MPS since the strike in April.

Additional links/info:

Featured Music:

  • Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song

Credits:

  • Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Statement from Derrick Parks, CEO and President of Metropolitan Protective Services (5/26/26):

Metropolitan Protective Services, Inc. (MPSI) maintains that no employees have been terminated due to union involvement. We fully support our employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union.

The individuals recently removed from the schedule were terminated for failing to maintain the current Maryland guard license required by the Maryland State Police. Regarding Sergeant Cox, she was removed from the schedule at the specific request of the client following multiple advisements regarding violations of client policy and insubordination.

Of our 175 employees, only six have been removed from the schedule or terminated, all due to licensing issues or performance concerns. We find these allegations to be without merit and believe they are being used by the union to exert pressure on the company.

Furthermore, we have received reports of union representatives harassing employees who chose not to join, including unauthorized site visits and the use of derogatory language. MPSI is currently considering filing a cease and desist order and a harassment lawsuit to protect the rights of our staff. Our priority remains protecting all employees, regardless of their union status.

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got an important follow-up to a story here in Baltimore that we reported on back in April. To refresh your guys’ memory on April 9th, nearly a year after workers voted to authorize a strike, non-union city and commercially contracted security officers in Baltimore walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike against their employers, Abacus Corporation, Metropolitan Protective Services, and Urban Development Solutions. The strike involved security guards stationed at city and commercial sites around Baltimore, including Harbor East, the water treatment facility, the Able Woolman Building, police stations, and housing developments among others.

In what has been a protracted years long effort to unionize with the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, workers have been fighting for more job security, better pay, accessible healthcare, and safer working conditions. And in the episode that we published just before the strike, I got to talk about all of that with Laura Dixon, a veteran security officer and Abacus employee and Jaime Contreras, Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 32BJ. And today we’re talking about the latest infuriating update from this story. On Friday, May 22nd, I got a press email from SEIU Local 32BJ with the title, City Security Officers Fired and Threatened after going on strike according to labor charges filed against city contractor. Now, according to the union, quote, “Non-union security officers have filed unfair labor practice charges alleging their employer, city contractor Metropolitan Protective Services, fired and harassed workers following a lawful strike that took place on Thursday, April 9th.

NPS, which employs at least 70 officers who protect 10 public housing units run by the Baltimore Housing Authority, among other sites, receives $15 million from the Baltimore Housing Authority and $6 million from the Maryland Department of General Services. Starting the day after officers went on strike, NPS also stopped bringing paychecks to Baltimore from their Hyattsville headquarters and instead required officers to drive over 30 miles to Hyattsville, creating a new barrier between officers and access to their pay. Seven officers reported losing their jobs or being removed from their schedule for actions that MPS permitted prior to the strike, including Victoria Cox for simply eating lunch in her car after two years on the job protecting Westport housing in South Baltimore, where Cox dealt with domestic violence, break-ins, and shootings. After the strike in early April, an NPS supervisor interrogated an officer over union involvement and told the officer that he could lose his job.

Multiple officers also reported being interrogated by a supervisor after their participation in the lawful strike. So as part of my journalistic due diligence, I reached out to NPS for comment on these allegations and I received a reply from CEO and president of MPS, Derek Parks, which says in part, “Metropolitan Protective Services, Inc. Maintains that no employees have been terminated due to union involvement. We fully support our employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union. Of our 175 employees, only six have been removed from the schedule or terminated all due to licensing issues or performance concerns. We find these allegations to be without merit and believe they are being used by the union to exert pressure on the company.” So I’ve included the full statement from NPS CEO and President Derek Parks in the show notes for this episode so that you can read the full thing.

But for now, as we always do, we’re going to take you guys to the front lines of this struggle so that you can hear directly from the working people at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by Victoria Cox herself. Victoria is a former MPS employee who worked to get to the rank of Sergeant. And we’re also joined by Daril Riley, a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daril have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since the strike began. Victoria, Daril, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it and I really wish we were meeting under less infuriating circumstances and I want to talk about all of this with you in the short time that we have.

And to start, I wanted to just ask if you guys could both remind our listeners where this strike came from. What are the key issues that you and fellow security guards face on the job? Why have you been trying to unionize and why were you prepared to go on an unfair labor practice strike in April? I just want to make sure that folks listening remember before we talk about what happened after the strike, what this is all about.

Victoria Cox:

Well, for one, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out to hear us. We need to be heard. Enough is enough. Things need to be stopped. I’m a little emotional because we’ve been riding it out for a minute without pay. We got families, we got bills. I just bought a new car. We got bills and stuff to pay and we’re behind. So basically I’m just reaching out for help answers. The investigation being investigated too long. The reason why I’m low emotional because two years is coming up and I’m a sergeant. I’m not understanding why is this happening. I did overtime. I even did fire watch for them on my days off and the union has really stuck by me supporting me. I just need answers and why is this happening? Ever since we’ve been on strike, things has been really like hell, truthfully help for us.

Change has been like every day since we’ve been on strike, things has been like a change every day. Every day is everything. More has been added onto us and we obeyed it. When I did the 16 hours and came in the next day at nine o’clock, I think I was rightfully deserved, rightfully deserved a break. And I took my break at 11:30. As I took my break at 11:30, they came marching down like military people and asked me why was I sitting in my car on my lunch break and even lied to me and said in post orders, “I’m not allowed to sit in my car for a lunch break.” And I asked them to show me that in the post orders. They couldn’t. I pulled it up. It was nothing there. I screenshotted, sent Gmails no reply nicely. And it started off, I said, “Good morning and good afternoon.” It also ended with, “Thank you.

Can you respond to me to let me know what am I under investigated for? ” No response. So today I have gotten a Gmail saying, “Oh, it got moved to higher up chief. We need answers. We have bills. We have family. This is not fair.

We are not taking off the schedule. If you’re done with us and we’re fine, tell us that so we can move on and get unemployment and go further.” But they’re not responding and not saying nothing to us. Right now, we’re not getting paid, noth. And it’s so unfair. I just need answers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much for sharing that, Victoria. I really appreciate it and I completely understand why you’re feeling the way that you are. My heart breaks thinking about all the many working people I’ve talked to who are in situations like yours and just how callous these bosses are towards our pain, how callous politicians can be to that pain, how much the media can ignore it. And of course we’re doing our best here to sort of counteract that, but I guess I’m appealing to everyone listening to this that don’t let these stories and these injustices just fade into the background. Nothing’s going to happen here unless fellow workers stand up and demand accountability. And we’re going to talk more about that as this conversation goes on. And Darrell, I wanted to bring you in here and I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about what it was like working for you at NPS before the strike and then help remind our listeners why you went on strike and then we’ll talk about what happened to you after the strike.

Daril Riley:

Actually, before the strike, the job really wasn’t so bad. We didn’t have a whole bunch of rules or whatever. However, the job always been dangerous on most jobs is the police and then you. On our job, it’s us first and then the police. So we go into everything, like I said, head on, we get paid a little bit of money and we take all the brunt of the work. Like I said, we go in all kind of dangerous situations where it’s shootouts, where somebody got killed in the house, all that. We go first. The police is second to that, but we was really doing our job just fine basically until after the strike. So I mean, of course we want better situation because at the end of the day, we not the police. You know what I’m saying? But we acting like it, but we don’t get to pay that they get.

You know what I mean? So basically we was just trying to ask for better conditions for the job that we worked. I mean, we think we deserve it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I’m just remembering some of the things we talked about in that last episode. I mean, all the different things you guys have to deal with. And we also talked about the fact that it’s tough because most people don’t have good interactions with security guards. And so people tend to not want to sympathize with workers that they hear are security guards. But then when you listen to the kind of stuff that you guys deal with on your shift and the kind of pay that you’re getting and the kind of crap you got to deal with from your management, I think it’s really important that everyone hear that and consider the human being behind the uniform. And so talk to me about the strike itself. I mean, how were you both feeling going into the strike? And then let’s talk about how quickly things changed after the strike in early April.

Victoria Cox:

Well, wow. I’m going to take it a little bit and rewind it back and I apologize I didn’t bring this up. We also, me and my partner, which is Daril Riley was stuck at work for three days and they promised us that they were going to … I don’t know what the surprise was supposed to have been and we never got it. We stayed away for three days. They never called a checkup on us or anything. So we sucked that up, let it go, say, “Hey, well, we rolled it out. We still doing to do our job. We still was dedicated. I didn’t know it was going to go this far. We still continue to do our job.” But soon as when the union got involved, of course they said, “No, y’all don’t need no union, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” We said, “No, we need a union.” So of course I stuck out that sore thumb because I said, “We need this.

” So I made sure that I went up to a lot of the other officers. We got it done. Of course we go on strike and who faces biggest days on the poster mine. So of course I was a target. I was told by other officers that, “Oh yeah, we’re going to get her. She going to be the first one.” They were going after everyone that went on strike. But again, I kept a professional. Before I went on strike, I did. I told them I’m going on strike, but I have courage. And I did have coverage and I did the rightful thing. I just didn’t walk off the job. I didn’t abandon anything and I still did the rifle thing to protect my job and I still get treated like this.

I’m lost. I’m lost for words. So I just feel like they made it even worse. When we joined the union, it’s like, “Yeah, okay. Y’all not going to do what we say. We got something.” So it was like they was trying to find … I felt we were set up. They were trying to find something, something on us. So they said, “Let’s just pick with Sergeant Cox. She was sitting in our car, this just did 16 hours, came back nine o’clock. When all of us make 11:30, nah.” But I always cover myself by having proof. It was nothing said on the post orders. And then it was a smack my face the next day. The captain told me, “Hey, what so- and-so did 16 hours?” And I gave her 40 minutes and she went off post. I said, “I’m a sergeant, so what’s make her different from me?

” And she’s a new guard, so that’s why I’m hurting. I’m not understanding. I never have gotten written up either. I always was a yes or a person, even though when it was wrong, because at the end of the day, I have bills. I have bills to pay. I didn’t have a family to feed and now my family questioning me, what’s going on? And now I’m behind on some things. And I don’t even know, and I’m going to be honest with you, we even try to cash out with PTO. I don’t even know if they going to set that. And we’re in this interview right now and it’s crazy because I just got a call from Metropolitan and I got a text message from SOC telling me to call her. That’s what I wanted to bring up as well. I don’t know what this is about either.

What they going to say, no, I can’t get PTO now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So just to make sure that we’ve got it all clear here. So Victoria, we’re working at Westport Housing, you’ve worked there for a while. Like you said earlier, you’d never been written up, you did double shifts, you’re a team player, right? And then after working a 16-hour day, the next morning you come in and at 9:00 AM in the morning, you take your lunch break at 11:00 and you have your lunch in your car and then they use that to essentially take your shifts and your job and everything away.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. They literally told Fib and said, “Oh, you on your lunch break for a whole hour.” I’m like, “What?” And I’m not being funny because I have a monkey joke. Literally, they was walking down. I didn’t even really start my lunch this year. I was eating a banana and I continued to eat my banana as I was talking to them. But I also, when they were saying something crazy, I showed them a screenshot where the post order saying that I cannot leave the post or cannot sit in my car for a lunch break. They just had their head down. So they was really trying to find something on me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, this is just my ignorance of the situation. They’re trying to say that this is like a fireable offense.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. Under investigation,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yep. Yeah. I want to be careful for listeners because Sergeant Cox has not been fired, but is under investigation, has essentially been taken all off the schedule, which is effectively firing a person without firing them, but I want to be careful with the language that we’re using. And so Victoria, so they said that because you left your post to eat your lunch in your car, that’s why it happened?

Victoria Cox:

I have them laugh on this. I’m sorry, because it’s my nerves. I have to laugh on this because when they said I left the post, I swear if you go down there, anybody that hear this go down at Westport, they be like, “Wait a minute, I even showed pictures.” I did not leave the post at all where where I was at was right there that still said Westport. I was still on the property, still there. No restaurant carry out, nothing. I was sitting in my car on the side that still say Westport. I was still in … If that’s the case, if I was off the property, how did you find me?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And how soon did this happen after the strike? Oh,

Victoria Cox:

God. I’m going to say I’d say three weeks. Again,

Maximillian Alvarez:

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but from what you’ve been saying, it sounds like things were kind of getting noticeably worse

Victoria Cox:

Over the course

Maximillian Alvarez:

Of those three weeks.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. It seemed like ever since that happened, they would come down ain’t never their entire life because me and Corporal Riley kept saying, “Wait a minute, I’m Sergeant, you called. Why are they coming down here every day and they switch stuff up? All right y’all, y’all can’t be right here. Y’all can’t eat inside the building.” I said, “Well, I’m going to sit in my car to eat lunch.” Or, “I’m going to need y’all to start checking the front and unlocking it. I mean, making sure these doors unlock and lock.” It was things changed. It was changing every day, every day. And I even asked her when it’s pulled down raining, we said, “Yeah, I want y’all out here. Just keep walking, keep walking.” So if your legs start hurt, just keep walking or laying up against the fence. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

And now I guess they feel they won, “Well, yeah, we got her out of here on my lunch break.” And they also asked me why was he in his view? I said, “He’s not supposed to be alone. If something happened to him, then it’s not going to fall on me. ” So what is the problem? No one stands alone, correct? We supposed to be a team together and we were still on property. So if something did kick, we had the radios. We had to stop what we was doing and jump to it immediately like we always do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daryl, how about you? Can you talk us through what this was all looking like from your vantage point after the strike?

Daril Riley:

After the strike, basically rules we never even heard of before, never even seen was now a rule that we didn’t know nothing about, you know what I’m saying? It was all new. They was basically just doing everything off the cuff, you know what I’m saying? After that, it was just like whatever, we’ll just find anything or whatever. But before then, these same things and all that with never an issue was never talked about or whatever. And the thing about it is everybody anyway goes off a property to go take their 30-minute break. You call it into command that you taking your 30-minute break so they know it. You call it in and then you call it out when it’s over. So two days before that, our captain came and said that one of the people from the contract said that we left the site or whatever.

I said, “No.” I said, “I left the site.” I went to Popeye’s. I said, “I called in the 30 minutes to command and then when I got back, I called it back out. ” And he said, “Well, that’s for us. That’s not for them.” So basically he was saying, “Okay, it’s really okay for the company.” But he don’t want the contractors to know that that’s what it is. But basically we got in trouble anyway because of it just after that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, I’ll qualify this by saying that I’m drawing this comparison just as myself, Max Alvarez, a journalist who’s interviewed workers in different situations across this country, including workers at Starbucks stores that have been unionizing or trying to unionize or successfully voted to unionize. This is the kind of crap that those workers have been telling me for years. They say, “Yeah, man, all of a sudden managers are writing us up for things that they have never written a single person up for ever before. They’re saying that they’re not retaliating against us for union activity, but suddenly my hours are getting cut and now I’m losing my healthcare. I’m being assigned shifts in another store. It feels like blatant retaliation and punishment for protected union activity for everyone listening, that is illegal. Employers cannot do that. It is illegal for an employer to retaliate against you or any other worker engaging in lawful concerted union activity.

Those are your rights. And what it sounds like here is that we have another situation where workers, yourselves included, engaged in those protected rights to walk out on an unfair labor practice strike and then faced what sounds like weeks worth of retaliatory action culminating in these BS investigations and charges that you guys abandoned your posts and got taken off the schedule. So that’s again, just my commentary and observation, but the question I want to ask you both because it’s a significant one is do you suspect that you were being retaliated against for engaging in the strike?

Victoria Cox:

Yes, I know for sure. I’m telling you, I have gotten a lot of phone calls that was backing me up and saying, Hey, and I’m not even being funny, but they said, I’m just letting you know since you’ve been on that strike, you’ve been on the news and you posted up. The major came to them and told them, which is unprofessional, that I was on the chopper board. They want to make sure they get rid of me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daril, do you believe you were retaliated against for participating in the strike?

Daril Riley:

Yeah, of course. I mean, because the company never wanted it to begin with. They made all kind of snide remarks and basically tried to put us against the union. They never wanted. And then once we went to it and then once it was over, then basically they showing us that they never wanted this. And so basically that’s what we’re going through now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about what you’re going through now. As much as you’re comfortable sharing, nothing you’re uncomfortable sharing, but I know I got to let you guys go in a few minutes. And with the little time that we have left, I wanted to talk about what this has meant for you and your families, like how this has affected your lives and where the hell things stand now with this investigation, your jobs, and what is the union doing to help and what can people listening do to help?

Victoria Cox:

Well, I have to say this, and I’m sorry I’m getting emotional again. The God I serve, I know he’s going to have an answer for me and they always say when one door is shut another one open and thank God that I have a good support system and my fiance has really supported me through it all. They told me keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting. So without her and family members, trust me, you just don’t know. I probably had a nervous breakdown, but like I said, the God I serve and thank God I have them in my life, I will be devastated with how y’all be out here doing things I ain’t got no business doing. So I’m just asking those that’s listening to keep us in prayer and keep fighting and fighting for us and we just want answers. We need your help. We out here and been out of work with no pay, no unemployment and not understanding why.

Why? We just need help and prayer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Darrell, please hop in here, but I just wanted to underline something that Victoria said for everyone listening in case we haven’t made it clear if you don’t get outright fired but you just get taken off the schedule, you can’t collect unemployment. So it’s like screwing someone over twice. They can’t work to pay their bills and they can’t collect unemployment to help with the cost of that. And that’s what Daryl and Victoria are dealing with right now. Daryl, please hop in here and whatever you’re comfortable sharing with folks, just tell us where things are for you, what the union’s doing and what folks listening can do to help.

Daril Riley:

Wow. I mean, basically the union has been great for us and very supportive and basically, I mean, I’m glad I’m with them and I mean, I’m glad I met those people. However, bills do still go on even though since pretty much now I’m at a standstill. I mean, I’m sure it’s fired because basically they saying that, but they won’t say that. So basically, like you said, I mean, no unemployment, can’t get my 401k out until something happened or whatever. So basically, I mean, I have a family, I don’t know how it’s going to be, really, really tough to support them. So I mean, right now, I mean, I really don’t know what. We just going

Victoria Cox:

To keep fighting. We just going to keep fighting. Like he said, the union has really, really has been reaching us even on holidays. They reach out to us to make sure that we okay. You need anything, let us know. So we just want answers and need you guys help. Don’t give up on us and we are not going to give up on you guys. We just going to keep fighting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Victoria Cox and Darryl Riley. Victoria is a former employee of Metropolitan Protective Services who work to get to the rank of Sergeant and Daryl is a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daryl have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially had their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since they participated in an unfair labor practice strike in early April. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The world is in crisis. William C. Anderson sees a way out

✇The Real News Network
By: Mansa Musa
27 May 2026 at 18:16
A protester holds a sign that reads that is a variation on the black power raised fist and is a raised middle finger in front of Trump International Hotel and Tower. Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

In 2026, fascism in the US is rising while “the left” descends further into powerlessness, goofiness, and irrelevance—but, author William C. Anderson argues, it doesn’t have to stay that way. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Anderson returns to the show for an unflinching conversation with former political prisoner and host Mansa Musa about the state of the political left today and the lessons organizers and everyday people can learn from the Black Liberation Movement and figures like the late Russell Maroon Shoatz.

Editor’s Note: This conversation was recorded on May 1, 2026.

Guests:

Additional links/info:

Credits:

  • Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino
Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Joining us today again is William C. Anderson, author and columnist of Prism. If you missed our first conversation where we explore how Black citizenship has historically been called into question, you can find it on our YouTube channel. The history feels especially urgent this week following the United States Supreme Court’s ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act. This is clearly part of the continuation by the right to reverse black progress.

William, before you dive into your latest prism article which critiques the current left and offer a path forward, what is your assessment of what you see coming out of the Supreme Court this week?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I saw the news, and I wasn’t surprised by it. I thought it was to be expected. As you might know, this is something that I wrote about in the Nation on No Map, and specifically I mentioned the 2013 Voting Rights Act decision in terms of the case with Shelby v. Holder, just following it up to that point because the book came out in 2021.

So with things being where they were at that stage, I was anticipating it getting to this point and becoming even more dismantled and even more deconstructed.

And the thing that I would say about it is it’s an especially personal matter for me because I’m from Alabama, From Shelby County, who brought the case against the Obama administration withholder. And in that original ruling at that point, one of the things that Chief Justice John Roberts had said was that something to the effect of that at 50 years later, things had changed quite dramatically and it was kind of implying that there was enough progress that had been made that is not necessary anymore to have something like the Voting Rights Act. And that’s what kind of underscores a lot of these white supremacists and fascist attacks on Black history and on legislation that has been beneficial to Black people. It’s kind of trying to illuminate some sort of postracial society that we know clearly doesn’t exist because they’re becoming increasingly racist. They’re not becoming less racist.

So it’s really just more evidence that if we really want to be able to see better conditions that are permanent and that are only making progress for the betterment of our lives and the sustenance and the resources that we need, then we have to have liberatory politics that actually push for those things in a way that is wholesale, that is comprehensive, that is expansive, and that’s not incremental. And that’s not to do anything or say anything that diminishes all of the blood, sweat, and tears that were put in by the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement across the board from the more radical ends to the more moderate ends of the civil rights [movement].

What is to say is that we should be able to learn from this history that no matter what, when we’re relying on the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill and representative democracy to try to do something for us that we know it’s not designed to do, that it’s always going to end up like this. It’s always going to be dismantled. It’s always going to be rolled back. It’s always going to be trying to correct itself to get back to serving white supremacy and capitalism in the fullest extent, and not doing anything that it’s not meant to do originally.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, I agree 100%. This week, Prism published a new installment of your series, Another Way Out, titled We Need a Mosaic Movement and you write, “instead of a call for resentment field, unity or traditional fronts, we can look to what former Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army members, and political prisoner Russell Maroon Schultz called The Mosaic.” Could you walk us through the core argument of your article and could you provide a brief introduction to the life and legacy of Russell Maroon Schultz?

William C. Anderson:

For sure. I’ll start with Russell Maroon Shoatz. And Russell Maroon Shoatz was a really interesting and spectacular and dynamic individual. He was a former Panther and Black liberation army soldier, and he became active in politics, I want to say in the 60s, and was a founding member of the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia, and they later merged with the Black Panther Party.

So he put in a lot of work. He has a deep history in movement and in struggle and he got locked up in 1972 for the first time, and he becomes a really extraordinary political prisoner because he’s writing, he’s thinking, and he’s developing over time.

And what’s so interesting about Russell Maroon Shoatz is that he’s prolific. He’s a prolific thinker and individual in the sense that he spends a lot of his time questioning. He doesn’t get incarcerated and kind of sit there holding the same position for 30, 40, 50 years. He’s asking questions the whole time. He’s developing, he’s expanding his analysis, and he is moving towards politics that are ultimately really, really interesting and fascinating.

So one of the things that I really appreciate about his work is that he was bringing in elements that I would say he wasn’t necessarily always speaking about or being influenced by. There were things that were coming to him later over time If you look at the chorus of his work, the development he had as a person.

And so one of those aspects is something that comes forth in the essay that I’m referencing in my latest column at prism. And this is from an essay called The Dragon and the Hydra. The Dragon and the Hydra is an essay that is an organizational study that looks at the maroons and the slave revolts and the struggles of African descended people in the Americas and the fights against slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

And what is so dynamic about this essay is that you can see a departure really with Schoatz and certain aspects of his past. So he is making a critique of democratic centralism, he’s making a critique of vanguardism, and he’s making a critique of some of the politics that are associated with the Black Panther Party. And he’s calling in to question even a lot of the projects of Marxist Leninism and the state socialist projects that were struggling in building national socialism.

So he is making a critique that is, I think, probably controversial in some regards for some people. And he also at the same time he’s critiquing these things, he draws from them still. He still talks about his influence, the influence that these things had in his life.

but he also brings in element. He says at the beginning of the essay, “I’m going to say a lot of things that sound like anarchism.” And he says, “I’m not an anarchist, but as long as anarchists are willing to stand on mutual footing in the struggle for intercommunal self-determination, that you should be able to see the overlap and see where things have parallels.”

So ultimately in this essay, Schoatz, he puts forth this organizational study and he says that it’s important for people to be able to learn from the past and not just keep doing the same thing over and over again. That’s at the core of that essay.

I was drawing on in the essay that I wrote for prism, it is about this last section that’s included in the collected writings of Russell Maroon Schoatz called Maroon the Implacable. And what is in that last section is called the Mosaic, It’s a section called the Mosaic. What is in that last section is a solution because he doesn’t just put forth the critique. He offers a solution for how people can struggle separately and autonomously but understand their collective interest as different groups, as different genders, as different ideologies, as different political backgrounds and so on and so forth.

And it’s not a traditional or typical call for a united front. It is a call for people to understand their common interest and to be able to have mutual respect enough to come together and to struggle to overthrow the conditions that are oppressing them.

So the core argument of my essay is about challenging what I feel is really a lot of silliness with the current state of the US left, especially with my generation and, unfortunately, a lot with younger generations than me, there’s just a lot of sectarianism, there’s a lot of beef, there’s a lot of conflict, and there’s a lot of issues over things that really don’t have anything to do with the current different denominations of the US left.

And what I mean by that is that the current US left doesn’t have control over anything. It doesn’t have any blocs that it controls. It doesn’t have any territory that it controls. It doesn’t have power in the government. It doesn’t have a party. It doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have a military. These are different fragmented individuals who at best might have an organization that can do something in the community here or there or might be able to serve some interest or need in some other way, but this isn’t like some massive part of the US population. In the article I was saying, if you put all of these folks together, these different factions of the left, they don’t even equal half a percent of the US population.

So I was just trying to really say that this is a good time when we understand that fascism is not even at the door, it’s inside of the house. It’s a good time to let go of a lot of the rhetoric, a lot of the dogma, and a lot of the silliness that is just so prevalent on the US left, people thinking that they’re way more relevant than they actually are, way more powerful than they actually are and bring forth an analysis like what Russell Maroon Schoatz offers with the mosaic.

Mansa Musa:

Your critique of the left is blistering to say the least and rightly so. You state as it stands, we do not have an oppositional or even a functional left. We have leftists and leftism, and there’s a difference. Could you expound on that distinction?

William C. Anderson:

The current state of the left, the lefts, because it is different groups and different factions and sects. The current state of things is it is basically nonexistent.

When I’m talking about the left, I should first make the distinction that there isn’t really a functioning coherent unified or homogenous group that we know as the left. When people say the term the left, they oftentimes are grouping lots of different things that are in conflict with one another.

So some people say the left and they mean like liberals and progressives, and then maybe some of the more further left elements. Typically when I’m talking about the left, I’m talking about the historical movement that divided up in the struggle to ultimately build socialism. And I’m talking about the people who would identify as Marxists, as Marxist Leninist, as anarchist, who are formerly known as libertarian socialists in the socialist movement before the meaning of that term changed, and also talking about all of the different offshoots and developments within those respective things because then you have different types of people within each of those larger umbrella terms. That’s typically what I’m talking about, which is for some people, the more radical left. So I think that it’s important to first make that distinction.

Secondly, I would say that since it is not a functional opposition and it’s not really something that exists because it’s so fragmented and divided up into these different kind of sporadic groups, it’s interesting because a lot of what you see from within these different elements that I’m referring to is largely posturing because there’s no power base that warrants the level of arrogance that you see coming from a lot of people within these different factions of the left. If you’re not in control of anything and you don’t have the power to actually overthrow or to seize or to dismantle the oppressive instruments that you’re constantly talking about, then you have to operate from a place where you’re in touch with reality, the reality of yourself and the reality of what you are in the country that you inhabit.

So I’m ultimately a bit confused because when I’m saying that there’s a lot of posturing, I’m looking at these people who might reference something like the Black Panther Party as an endorsement of their ideology. Saying they’re a Marxist Leninist, and they say, “Well, the Black Panther Party used Marxist Leninism or Maoism or anything to push their organization forward and do this, that, or the third.” The thing is, okay, that wasn’t you though. If you’re a person who identifies as an anarchist and you glorifying the zapatistas and talking about what they’ve been able to accomplish and how it influences you, that’s not you either. You’re talking about Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and talking about what that means to you as a Marxist, that’s not you. You didn’t do that. You’re an anarchist talking about Nestor Machno and talking about what’s being accomplished in Ukraine with that army, that wasn’t you.

So I’m very confused by the posturing because if you’re not inhabiting the position to be able to affect change and to change things for the better in your own conditions in your own time, you can’t lay claim to the accomplishments of people from the past or the present that don’t have anything to do with you or don’t have anything to do with what you’re doing in your [crosstalk] community.

You can’t just look and say, “I’m this ideology, I’m an anarchist, I’m a Marxist Leninist, I’m a Maoist, I’m a Trotskyist,” and then lay claim to historical victories and project yourself onto them and then act as if they’re yours. That’s not how that works. Your accomplishments have to speak for themselves based on the praxis and the revolutionary activity that you self-organize within your own time and your own conditions.

And so you have all these people online fighting over things that they didn’t even achieve. You have people fighting over things that they have nothing to do with. Governments that they have no role in, no stake in.

And it just blows my mind because it feels like a lot of people have lost the plot, that we are supposed to be activating ourselves within our communities to build power so that we can decide together what kind of society we want to live in based on our unique conditions and time period. Not saying I’m an ideology that I chose off of Wikipedia and I’m going to then make a decision about what the future looks like based off of my identity crisis because I’m over here with all this talk and I haven’t accomplished anything.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, very well put. And there’s a lot of lip service and we in the age of social media, so you can give lip service to it and you can put your social media platform together, and that become your revolution. Your revolution is I’m more vocal in the social media network, but I have yet to feed people. I have yet to create a school. I have yet to create any institution or things that’s raising people’s conscience or creating an environment where people come together to talk about what kind of society they think we should live in.

But as we mark the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, how do you define their ultimate contribution to social justice? Additionally, in your book, The Nation on No Maps, Black Anarchism and Abolition, what land policy do you highlight as successful examples of self-determination and sovereignty?

William C. Anderson:

The interesting thing about the way that I feel in relation to the Black Panther Party and some of the elements of what I just mentioned is that, again, a lot of what I feel is a large misstep with people who have come along after, especially in my generation, is that there is a discussion and a sort of… What’s the word I would use? I would say that there’s a lot of discussion and reverence for the Black Panther Party that oversimplifies the legacy.

And as you know, Mansa, the Black Panther Party was an organization that had different chapters, and it had different eras, and it had splits, and it had internal fighting, and a lot of other things that went on over the course it existed.

So when you talk about the Black Panther Party and you homogenize it and make it into one thing, which is what a lot of people during this era that have come all along later do, you are not able to learn from the successes and the failures of the Black Panther Party. And unfortunately, we have to discuss failures in order to not repeat them. And one of the things that gets lost is how the Black Panther Party changed course a number of times, not just in terms of leadership, but in terms of politics.

So just a second ago when I was talking about these different people within the left laying claim to things that they have no right to lay claim to, one of the things that is kind of mind boggling to me is how the Black Panther Party is oversimplified to glorify certain ideologies, whether it be Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, or whatever the case, when the current fact of the matter is, I’m on here today talking about Russell Maroon Shoatz, who’s a former Black Panther Party member. Russell Maroon Schoatz’s critique of democratic centralism is a part of a larger thread, which is the discussion that I had with you last time I was on.

The larger thread that it’s a part of is that you had a number of people who after the dissolution of the Black Panther Party or who left the party became anarchist. Russell Maroon Schoatz doesn’t fall into that category, but you have people like Lorenzo Komboa Irvin, you have people like Ashanti Alston, Kuwesi Balagun, Ojoy Lutello, all these political prisoners and revolutionaries who became attracted to anarchism, Jenina Irvin, who was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper.

And so not only do certain people change later within the context of the party and at the time that it was going through different changes and splits, you had someone like Huey P. Newton who brings forth his theory of intercommunalism, which I write also about in The Nation on No Map.

When he brings forth the theory of intercommunalism and he gives a speech at Boston College in 1970, Huey P. Newton is raising this issue about a lot of the Marxist Leninist dogma getting too deep within the party, about how they were supposed to be changing, and he starts asking questions about the nation and about the state, and you see a radical sort of turn is happening within the party.

This is something that Bobby Seal also spoke about. Bobby Seal also became increasingly critical of a lot of these elements, this sort of traditional sort of state socialism that had once been a big part of the party. And they talk about the development from Black nationalism to Marxist Leninism, Maoism towards that place that they had come, or that they had arrived at.

Another person who talks about it was Phil Marshall Don Cox. Phil Marshall Don Cox was increasingly critical.

So I just named a plethora of people The Black Panther Party who started saying, “Actually, we need to start rethinking this and moving away from this. And they start saying a lot of things that if they weren’t outright anarchist, become increasingly anarchistic in their thinking. Just think that it’s important, extremely important to notice that thread, to acknowledge it and not pretend like it didn’t exist, and to talk about what it actually meant and not freeze the Black Panther Party in one era and one chapter of its development of it as an organization.

So that’s one of my biggest concerns with my work and that’s one of the reasons that I write about Black anarchism. It’s not because I’m trying to be doctrinaire or create a new ideology, or bring forth a new ideology rather, to some people’s attention for them to become zealots about or so dogmatic about. I just think it’s important to be able to look at the bigger picture of the Black Panther Party and to talk about the entire scope of what happened, what occurred, and the changes that people made at the end of their lives.

Just like I was talking about Russell Maroon Shots at the beginning being a person who developed over time, so too was everybody else that you look at from the Black Panther Party. They all developed, they all changed, they all became people who departed from positions that they had once held.

And you have to acknowledge that. You can’t just freeze them as Marxist Leninist or this or that. That’s what they were and that means that this is good forever and that’s the way it is. You have to look at the entire picture.

And I think that one of the things that leads me to do is to call into question a lot of the necessity for the politics that they started to depart from, or did depart from depending on who you’re talking about, respectively. And that’s why when I talk about land politics, when I think about land, when I think about territory, I’m a person who tries to move away from the idea of just building a nation state and having borders and having a regime that creates oppression for some and not for others or has a ruling party or a ruling class. I don’t tend to think about things that way in relation to the land. I think that we have to have a more holistic and a more thoughtful approach that doesn’t rehash or recreate any of the trappings of colonialism or the class instrument that we know as the nation state.

Mansa Musa:

And we recognize like to your point, like the Republic of New Africa, Overdele and them, they had an ideological perspective of what they wanted in terms of land. And when we look at the evolution of the thinking of party members, when we came out with the constant theory of intercommunalism, it took a change of trajectory in terms of the thinking because now we defining what we see as our role and what we see as how we go about implementing our ideas in the face of oversurmounting repression, they never seen nothing like this. You being bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and murders.

So to your point, it’s interesting to see how people, when they take and making a historical analysis, I’m kind of questioning what is their intent. Go back to your point, you referencing valid historical events and activities to substantiate your position.

But as we close out, talk about where we stand at and how we get out this quagmire that we’re in with this, how you think we’re going to get out this contradiction?

William C. Anderson:

Mansa, I think that one of the most important things that we have to do to be able to escape this situation, and this is a lot of the subject matter that I try to focus on in my column, which is why it’s called Another Way Out. And that is, to a large extent, a reference to Amy Cesare and his resignation from the French Communist Party when he said the world is in an impasse, but that didn’t mean that there was no way out.

I’m looking at the situation as someone who has has failed a lot. I say these things with all respect to the people who have come before me, the people who exist alongside me who are operating from a place of genuineness and sincerity, and the people who are going to come along in the future. It’s with respect to them that I truly believe in my heart of hearts that at this point, what we know as leftism in the United States, like I was arguing in the article, we have an abundance of leftism and leftists, I think that at this point in time that all of this has become a bit of a trap, and I say that because the way that it’s currently functioning, the level of disconnect that you can identify amongst a lot of young people, this Schoatz essay that I’m referencing, the Dragon and the Hydra, it’s from 2006, it’s from 20 years ago. It’s not A Really old essay. That was when I first started coming into left spaces That was around the time I first started entering left spaces.

Things have gotten much worse, much worse. I’m talking about the divide, the sectarianism and the anti-intellectualism that is becoming an increasing problem. A lot of the things I’m complaining about and critiquing are actually rooted in a lot of ignorance because a lot of this for people is just rhetoric and it’s not actually based in real world experiences or conditions that are outside. It is a lot of performance that comes from a place that doesn’t seem to have much to do with making the world better. It comes from a place of repetition that I feel is indicating and exposing that leftism as we know it in the US has become secular religion.

And what I mean by that is it is turning into something that it was not supposed to have any intention of being. It’s become a faith and a zealotry for a lot of people. When you’re constantly fighting about these accomplishments and these tenets and these associations of the past, that reminds me of religions. It reminds me of the way that people adapt institutional and oppressive fundamentalist and theocratic views and then start going around trying to bash people in the head with them and say, if you don’t do and adapt to what I say, then you’re the enemy and you have to go. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to have anything to do with liberating people and the working class seizing the means of production. I think that that is completely being lost here. I thought we were trying to get workers in control of the means of production and we were trying to make sure that everybody was able to live and have resources and be happy and at peace. I did not think that this was supposed to be something that becomes so toxic and inundated with rhetoric that is completely based off of opinion with a lack of good faith arguments found hardly anywhere. When we’re at that place, this isn’t anything that’s taking us in a progressive direction anymore.

And so I think that that was one of the problems that was at the beginnings of leftism, Western leftism as we know it in Europe that has now reared its ugly head in such a way that a lot of the warnings that happened at the beginnings of the socialist movement have now become increasingly clear.

One of the things I think about is a letter that the person who coined the term “anarchist,” Pierre Joseph Prudon, wrote a letter to Marx during their time saying something to the effect of, if we’re not careful that this is going to start looking a lot like religion, these issues that we have amongst each other, these disagreements. And that’s where we’re at. That’s the same type of reasoning that Malcolm X had when he said, “We don’t need to discuss religion when we come together. Let’s leave it at the door and let’s figure out what we need to figure out together so that we can make progress.” That’s one of the turns that Malcolm made in his life.

And I just feel like this is where we’re at and we have to depart from it. We have to depart from this relationship that is completely and overly ideological and theoretical and not rooted in praxis and humble ourselves to say, we’re going to do what we need to do here to defeat empire so that we can change the world and change our community for the better instead of just talking all this ideology, ideology, ideology. I’m not here to talk about anarchism and Marxist Leninism and all of these things as some sort of proselytizing on a soapbox. I’m preaching at you trying to convert you to my faith. I’m here to talk about these things as tools. They all [have things to] learn from respectively as tools so that we can make progress and you need different tools in order to assemble a house that we can live in together.

And so I’m here to look at those things respectively in that way and to evolve and to grow so that we can get beyond them, not be trapped by them and have fights in the name of ghosts and dead people who are not here and not living with us. I’m not here to fight on behalf of no ghosts with nobody. I don’t have any time for that type of stuff. I hope that there are other people out there who feel similarly. I know that there are, who are willing to build something like what Russell Maroon Schoatz was offering with the mosaic, because I think that that’s the format that I find really inspiring right now to help us get out of this situation.

Mansa Musa:

Well, you definitely rattle the bars today, William.

And we want to remind our audience that when you find yourself in a space where you can’t afford to pay your rent, medical insurance is high, can’t afford childcare, you can’t turn left or turn right without losing something, the last thing you want someone to talk to you about is why you should believe a certain way and that belief system has not converted, has not changed nothing, has not changed your rent, has not changed your living condition. So if we want you to look at this particular podcast and recognize that we’re talking about thinking, we’re talking about understanding social, economic, political conditions enough to understand how to change them as opposed to like, before I can change them, I got to say, I got to tag myself, I’m a leftist, I’m a Marxist, I’m a Leninist, I’m a Stalinist.

No. To change social conditions, first you need to understand what the problem is and then come together collectively how to resolve the problem.

Thank you, William. You definitely rattle the bars today.

We ask our audience to continue to support the real news and rattling the bar, because guess what? We actually the real news.

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In 2026, fascism in the US is rising while “the left” descends further into powerlessness, goofiness, and irrelevance—but, author William C. Anderson argues, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
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