If you must die
then I must live
to begin where you left off, although
you have never truly ceased.
Your poems journey across the world,
echo in my mind,
gather like a family’s embrace.
Your lessons visit me each night,
an alarm that stirs the soul,
reminding me to live,
always, and without fail.
I must live
to trace your steps,
stand where your footprints lie.
I must read in cafés and cars,
on bustling streets,
amidst the market stalls.
I must read at home and in the university —
just as you so often did.
I must meet you in the pages of your books —
Gaza Writes Back. Gaza Unsilenced.
No hesitation, I must live
to cling to the tail of a paper kite
soaring across the world,
boundless and free, no walls to hinder,
no soldier to halt my flight.
I fly with a pen in my hand as my weapon,
just as you did.
On my back I carry a bag
filled with your poems,
inked on paper, so true.
I must soar
to scatter the fragrance of your verses from the sky.
Your words descend, colorful blossoms upon the earth.
One drifts to a child with a paper kite in hand.
The child glimpses the brilliance you release
and is struck, as I was,
with a fever of love for poetry and art —
caught by it, just as I was.
I will live
to answer that little one’s questions,
to plant the seeds of your verses,
scatter the nectar of your steps,
and one day stand before you in the sky.
I will carry your trust on the wings of a plane,
deliver your message to all those children
who will be struck with love for poetry,
the children who tomorrow will rise,
successors to Refaat in poetry and letters.
I must live
to prosecute those who sentenced your art to death,
halted its rightful course
and sought to crush the scent of safety
your verses breathed into the hearts of your readers.
I must stand before your words,
draw hope there —
a hope I fear losing
as I lost you.
I must do my work
so you may rest in peace —
you’ve left your legacy in the right hands.
Your inheritance, divided justly, multiplies
and even strangers tremble at the weight of its value.
I will live
to mourn the tale of the great father,
to close the notebooks of barren grief,
to ignite a revolution of true poetry
and sound the warning of a searing fire,
to bring to the world the essence of your verses
and tear down the veil of Zionism,
as you once desired.
I can still imagine you there — in the university.
I must tell you how everyone yearned for your counsel,
how they hesitated to mourn you.
The students flocked to the Faculty of Arts
at the mere mention of your name in the news,
the weight of your death
pressed upon them,
even as they tried not to hear it.
I must craft endless poems
from the deepest part of my sea,
tuck them away in my travel bag
along with countless messages
from all who love you.
I will keep them safe for you
until we can meet.
The US is at war. It has always been at war. Whether a world war, a proxy conflict, an armed intervention, a psyop, or a regime change mission, the United States has not enjoyed a single moment of true, unadulterated peace.
And it’s not just at war with nations abroad. The US is also at war with itself.
Empires Eat Themselves: Trump’s Absurd War on Education
Positive peace is not just the absence of violence, but also the absence of oppression. In all the years of this country’s existence, oppression has flourished, leaching away the lies told about the land of the free. Many pretend not to see the institutional apartheid and chronic subjection of minorities, but it lurks in every city, town, and neighborhood, right under the nose of the social theater we all take part in.
Well, the US is in hospice, and it’s lashing out—a last gasping breath of the inhumane, psychopathic systems that perpetuate violence, at home and abroad.
As Ariel Durant wrote, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” No country needs to declare war on the United States—it’s caught in its own self-destructive web.
There are many casualties in war other than people. Truth was killed a long time ago, a necessary death for the proliferation of our military and the subjugation of countries and people that act against our interests. The next casualties will be the very values we tell ourselves we stand for, written boldly in our Constitution—though weren’t they also a lie? Overseas, human rights are meaningless. We’ve bombed and murdered scores of people, over and over and over again, and we’ve smiled with rotting teeth and declared it was all for the greater good.
Turns out the rot was coming from within.
If the US is at war with the world and itself, then every battlefield is a frontline—Ukraine, Gaza, China, the entire exploited global south, the self-declared allies with no true sovereignty… and here, university campuses are merely one more frontline.
Universities have a particular power in the US. They generally enjoy the ability to intellectually critique the US, its subjection of people, and the crimes it has inflicted on the global population. They are meant to have a level of separation from government interference and operate as beacons of education and places of global interaction and community. This doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does.
Why are educational institutions a threat? Because they have the tools needed to see through the cognitive shroud of militarized capitalism and talk about it. Students are the real change-makers because they haven’t spent a lifetime beaten down by the system, exhausted by its impossibilities, and bent hopeless by the apparent futility of trying to make change. Change is slow, but students are young, energized, hopeful, open-minded, and visionary. They are also the future.
Students observe injustice, and they act on it. They’ve protested every war we’ve decided was wrong long after the fact—Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Palestine. And every time, the government has cracked down on students, demanding arrests and university compliance with its global agenda. The Trump administration is not doing anything new—they’ve just crossed a few more lines and been obvious about it.
University protests and encampments protesting the Gaza genocide were the major catalyst for the most recent crackdowns on academia, providing the government justification for launching probes to investigate “antisemitism” on campuses. The Trump administration has also been actively targeting what they perceive to be “anti-American” fields of study, like postcolonialism, critical race theory, gender studies, and social theory—the very fields that act as tools to outthink the militarized capitalism thinking bubble. They emphasize a need for “patriotic education,” which is the newest terminology for imperialist propaganda.
A wall of protest over police brutality. As many Americans and U.S. institutions have attempted a true reckoning with the role that race and racism play in American history and society, certain Republican legislators and conservative activists have capitalized on this backlash. (Image by Ted Eytan/Creative Commons)
These actions coincided with unprecedented persecution of students and professors who have actively criticized the Gaza genocide and the United States’ role in funding it. Visa and green card holders alike have been arrested and face ongoing deportations merely for having an opinion that acts in opposition to state interests… the very definition of fascism.
Harvard is an interesting case. Widely seen as a symbol of American elitism, it almost seems counterintuitive for an oligarchic government to oppose. But there are no rules here, and the internal power systems have gone rabid, turning on themselves in an effort to choke out their own active failings. Trump plays the populist card well, but he’s hiding behind a mirror of his own gross corruption. He calls to “drain the swamp,” while bringing his ragtag group of billionaire friends into the White House and giving them political power they should never have—a blatant contradiction many choose to ignore.
Initially, Harvard University refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands, arguing they directly violated the university’s independence and constitutional rights. In response, Trump ordered federal agencies to freeze over $100 million in funds and attempted to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.
Harvard president Alan Gerber remains steadfast in his refusal to surrender, saying that Harvard must “stand firm” and set an example for other universities that will continue to be targeted.
To counter Harvard’s steadfastness, the administration’s most recent move reached absurd new heights. Last week, a joint letter from three congressional committees accused Harvard of partaking in global supervillain-esque activities such as training genocidal paramilitary groups from China, partnering with the Chinese military using US defense funds, collaborating with Iranian government-backed scientists, and even potentially helping to develop next-gen spy robots and transplant technology with illegal organ-harvesters.
The letter was ridiculous, reading less like a serious national security inquiry and more like a bureaucratic fever dream fueled by a conspiracy-laced Wikipedia binge. The “training” of a Chinese paramilitary group was actually a public health course that was attended by members of a Chinese administrative body. The accusations of Iran funding was regarding medical research on the bacterial properties of particles done in conjunction between Imam Khomeini International University, Harvard Medical School, and Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh Joint Institute—a great display of an international, collaborative scientific study that could help improve the lives of all people (There is clearly a profound misunderstanding on how scientific and medical research works. These fields are collaborative by design, and all nearly of these studies are public, peer-reviewed work).
And the most bizarre claim of all is that Harvard’s liver regeneration research is somehow aiding and abetting organ harvesting conspiracies. Do I even need to speak to that?
Ultimately, this letter has nothing to do with national security concerns and is merely another weapon for the current administration to throw at Harvard in its efforts to get it to capitulate to their demands. And if the anti-China warhawks can push their agenda a bit more by using their red-baiting, xenophobic grab-bag of buzzwords, then what’s stopping them? They will conflate academic exchange with espionage, collaboration with treason, and conference panels with covert operations as long as it helps obtain their end goal of wiping independent thinking off syllabuses and replacing it with strictly I-love-America propaganda. At the end of the day, they don’t want you to know how to think—they want to tell you what to think.
If the Trump administration thinks that defunding our top academic institutions will improve the already lagging education systems, and that censoring free speech and prohibiting collaborative research will be a boon for progress and productivity, they have another thing coming. These actions will only hurt the US and drag it further behind on its last-ditch efforts to maintain its slipping grasp on world domination.
Montesquieu wrote, “The corruption of each government almost always begins with that of its principles.” Well, the US has never represented the principles that it’s long claimed to stand for. Men have never been treated equally, speech has never been free, and liberty and liberation have always been things to strive for, never things that are. This is not a change that spontaneously occurred, but something that is inherent within the imperialist system. And now the decay is becoming visible, and the empire with its “immoderate greatness” is turning on itself—eating itself—and we are all vulnerable to its collapse.
Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NY, where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai and over eight years studying Mandarin Chinese. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.
The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump’s Useful Idiots – by Mr. Fish
by Chris Hedges/ Original to ScheerPost/ May 27, 2025
The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.
The conflation of outrage over the genocide with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions, weaponizing antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and you are fired or excoriated.
Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protest the genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.
In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher education institutions.
When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told the committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.
The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.
“I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in her letter to the police.
NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
“What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke.
Shafik volunteered that Franke, who is Jewish and whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is suing Columbia for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss.
The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote of the betrayal of Franke:
In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress.
You can see my [Hedges] interview with Franke here.
Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shark resigned a little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university.
The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people arrested and over 65 students suspended following a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman condemned the protest, stating, “Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and slander, which these institutions continue to embrace.
Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another failing of the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid apartheid and genocide genocide.
Media outlets regularly publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe.
The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing about Palestine, according to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines.
In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul sent a letter to university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group.” She warned that they would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action” by New York State. The following year, in late August, Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders.
Hochul made clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews.
“There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They’re filled with hate.”
The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel” against Jews.
“Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes, ignoring hundreds of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation.
The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different.
“We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” gloats Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, told Israel’s Channel 12 on May 16.
The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists would like to replicate on Brown and Black in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white South Africans.
Harvard, which is attempting to save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide.
The university’s former president Claudine Gay condemned the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.”
Harvard substantially tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and increased the police presence on its campus. It barred 13 students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students from their housing.
The capitulations and crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks.
Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide according to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3 billion), Columbia ($400 million), University of Pennsylvania ($175 million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5 million annually).
On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard by terminating its ability to enroll international students that make up around 27 percent of the student body.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary wrote on X, when posting screenshots of the letter she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their executioners.
They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
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Independent media is essential. Truth is not fake news, misinformation or disinformation. “Reasonable minds can disagree on solutions, but making progress as a society requires a willingness to learn facts, appreciate nuance, and engage in meaningful debate.” Barbara McQuade, Introduction, Attack from Within, How Disinformation is sabotaging America.
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Feds Leverage Assistance from Minneapolis Police & Hennepin County Sheriff’s
Office Debut Action of New Task Force Shocks Lake Street Community
Anonymous Federal Police Identify as “The Others” on Nameplate
Minneapolis, MN — Dozens of federal agents in a newly minted federal task force raided a business on East Lake Street in South Minneapolis on Tuesday morning (June 3) and were quickly met with a raucous crowd amid toxic smoke conditions from Canadian wildfires. The crowd of up to 200 people grew through the day under the impression an immigration raid was underway, at times blocking federal vehicles from vacating alleys and streets. Federal agents responded violently by shooting pepper balls and unleashing pepper spray; personnel from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Special Response Teams (SRT) were filmed shoving people. Mobilized community members eventually pressured the federal agents out of the neighborhood, while Minneapolis police officers provided crowd control.
ICE Special Response Team badge. Courtesy Brandon Schorch.
Inside the new “Homeland Security Task Force” (HSTF) network, the lead agency is Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), one of two divisions inside ICE. The other division of ICE, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) – which targets immigrants for deportation – was also involved, according to Jamie Holt, HSI’s acting special agent in charge in Minnesota. Holt said this was the debut action of the HSTF in the state. (More about the little-known new HSTF network below.) [Unicorn Riot leaked ICE HSI agent manuals in our #Icebreaker series.]
Pastor Ingrid Rasmussen (Holy Trinity Lutheran Church) confronts Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. Courtesy Aaron Johnson.
The raid started before noon and federal agents walked out of the neighborhood in groups sometime after 1 p.m. but street activity continued for hours into the afternoon. Authorities said they had a warrant to search Las Cuatro Milpas restaurant on Bloomington Avenue and Lake Street, claiming to be seeking evidence of drug trafficking and money laundering. The restaurant’s suburban location was also raided along with six other locations.
Unidentified ATF agents; one is wearing a tag saying “The Others.” Several ATF agents are wearing shirts with yellow “Sheriff” labels. Courtesy Brandon Schorch.
Badge featuring a Vegsivir design – the agent had ICE markings on the opposite shoulder. Courtesy Brandon Schorch.
Many of the federal agents were masked and did not have visible names or identification numbers, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to file lawsuits against individual agents in court.
Masked ATF agents walking on Lake Street. Garbage bins were placed in the street by community members to deter vehicles. Courtesy Aaron Johnson.
By the end of a full afternoon of confusion, at least five community members had been detained with a few being arrested. Unicorn Riot saw one forceful arrest shortly after 4 p.m. as Minneapolis police tried to practice crowd control.
Overall the incident showed that, similar to an ICE-led immigration raid in San Diego on Friday, May 30, people in local communities are becoming galvanized against the presence of masked and menacing federal law enforcement personnel targeting their neighborhoods.
Protesters gathered outside the site of the former Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct, at Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Courtesy Aaron Johnson.
Local politicians and officials have weighed in; several were on the site of the raid and during the community gathering after the feds pulled out in the afternoon:
State Senator Omar Fateh (DFL-62) described it as “blatant fascism.” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (DFL) said“it seemed like the point was to inflict terror and fear into the community.” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty posted“ICE is being used to terrorize people” and that local law enforcement should be “transparent about what assistance” they are giving to the Feds. Jazz Hampton posted that they saw someone they know personally knocked unconscious. (Hampton and Fateh are both running for mayor currently, as is incumbent Jacob Frey.)
…we cannot hope that a Federal Task Force led by this DHS or FBI will have any goal in mind other than to create maximum fear and anxiety while accelerating Trump’s agenda of family separation and deportations.
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt tried to push a message that community actions were triggered by “irresponsible rumors” while Frey attacked Fateh’s statement about “blatant fascism,” claiming this was “stoking panic.” (Frey attempted to distance this raid from immigration enforcement, but targeting immigrants is actually foundational to the Trump’s HSTF task force structure itself. More on that below.) Frey also made the rounds [1, 2] trying to reassure Lake Street business owners that he’s not assisting the Trump administration crackdown.
Minneapolis Police and the Hennepin County Sheriffs Department claim they were unaware of the raid until it occurred. In a press conference on June 4, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the raid was “tone-deaf.”
Groups in the Twin Cities including the Minnesota Immigrant Movement (MIM), Asamblea de los Derechos Civiles and Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) held a press conference outside Mayor Frey’s office on June 5, demanding “accountability from the mayor and MPD after local law enforcement helped federal authorities terrorize the immigrant community on Lake Street. […] [T]he mayor is unable to uphold this promise of safety for the city’s residents. […] This is what the Trump administration’s war on immigrants looks like.” Other groups including SEIU Local 26, Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), Indigenous Protector Movement (IPM), Twin Cities Coalition for Justice (TCC4J) and Wrongfully Incarcerated and Over-Sentenced Families Council-MN (WIAOCF-MN) are also supporting this press conference event.
‘Homeland Security Task Force’ Led by ICE-HSI Makes its Minnesota Debut
Mayor Frey claimed on Wednesday “our police officers will not work to enforce federal immigration law, we will not be involved in federal immigration actions.” However, Unicorn Riot obtained a memo showing all HSTF teams are built directly on “Border Enforcement Security Task Forces” — that entire document is transcribed below.
Very little is known about the new HSTF system. A new report from NBC News discusses HSTF alongside “Operation at Large.” A new estimate of 21,000 National Guard personnel are sought for this currently active White House-directed operation, along with 5,000 federal law enforcement personnel.
The text of this Homeland Security Investigations diagram is dated 2/21/2025. Agency badges include the departments of Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Here’s the full text of the document transcribed from the diagram image above:
ESTABLISHMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY TASK FORCES (HSTF)
In accordance with the President’s Executive Order (EO) 14159 section 6: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the National Security Council is directing the creation of a Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) network. The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General are directed to take all appropriate action to jointly establish HSTFs in all states nationwide — to include the establishment of a national command center to coordinate law enforcement activities of the HSTFs, provide support as required, and direct national-level priorities aligned with the EO. This whole-of government approach will include representatives from federal law enforcement agencies, federal prosecutors and other U.S. Government agencies with the ability to provide logistics, intelligence and operational support to the HSTFs. The approach will include representation from relevant state, territorial and local law enforcement agencies in the fight against transnational organized crime (TOC).
HSTF STRUCTURE
The HSTF will leverage the existing structure and capabilities of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)-led Border Enforcement Security Task Forces (BESTs) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) National Targeting Center (NTC), which together provide a strong foundation to meet the requirements for an HSTF network. There will be a minimum of one HSTF per U.S. state with interagency support staff provided by the executive steering committees.
HSTFs will be immediately deployed nationwide leveraging 112 BESTs operating in every state and U.S. territory. At the discretion of the HSI Special Agent in Charge, additional HSTFs can be established augmenting other existing law enforcement task forces with interagency personnel.
GOVERNANCE
The HSTF has a three-tiered governance structure with Interagency Support Staff (ISS):
1: Principals. Cabinet-level officials, chaired by the Secretary of Homeland Security and co-chaired by the Attorney General, with additional participation from the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Secretary of State.
2: Executive Steering Committee (ESC): Deputy Director-level official designated by the HSTF Principals to represent their respective Department and/or Agency Heads. The ESC will be chaired by HSI and co-chaired with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
3. Executive Steering Sub-Committees (ESSC): Established in all 30 HSI SAC (special agent in charge) offices, the ESSCs will report directly to the ESC. Each ESSC will be chaired by an HSI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) and co-chaired by an FBI SAC.
The HSTF National Command Center (NCC), located at ICE Headquarters (HQs) is staffed with ISS representatives from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with the ability to provide funding resources, logistics, criminal network analysis and operational support to nationwide HSTFs in the fight against TOC [transnational organized crime].
NCC chart includes three groupings. Intelligence Operations: Strategic, Data Integration, Targeting & Analysis. Global Operations: Immigration Enforcement, Human Trafficking, Transnational Gangs, Weapons Trafficking, Narcotics & Contraband Smuggling, Illicit Proceeds & Financial Crimes, Human Smuggling. Mission Support: Staffing & Personnel Security Unit, Legal, Policy & Planning, Budget & Performance, Training & Development.
Editor’s Note: For the full report published in Unicorn Riot on May 29, 2025, go to The New ‘ICE ARMY” Also available on WingsofChange.me under the same title.
Interview with reporter Dan Feidt on KFAI Radio, June 4, 2024 [Vimeo / YouTube]:
Niko Georgiades and Dingane Xaba contributed to this report.Cover image composition by Dan Feidt. Images courtesy Aaron Johnson and Brandon Schorsch.
New Federal Task Forces Under 287(g) Could Form ‘ICE Army’ From National Guard, State, Local & College Police
Demonstrators clash with officers as ICE, other federal officers, Minneapolis police, and other state officers raid Las Cuatro Milpas in Minneapolis, Minnesota Tuesday, June 3, 2025. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer) Link to MN Reformer article here.
The Trump Administration has dramatically ramped up arrests and sweeps of people residing in the U.S., with new highly visible incidents and court cases unfolding every week and reaching new heights by mid-May. A new development could spell much larger scales of activity on American streets under 287(g) agreements between state and local law enforcement agencies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While 287(g) is mostly known for changing how arrestees are processed in county jails by sheriffs’ departments, there is a mode of agreement called the “task force model” which would make police available from local or state agencies to work as extensions of federal immigration police. This would make it vastly more likely for immigrants to get detained during routine law enforcement encounters, and massively expand how many local police could participate in federally-managed “sweep” operations.
One such sweep recently netted around 196 arrests of undocumented residents in Nashville. It was carried out by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and ICE using the 287(g) program. The operation “quickly emptied the pews of several Spanish-speaking parishes in the Diocese of Nashville,” according to the Catholic OSV News Service: “Tennessee Highway Patrol officers have been conducting traffic stops to identify and detain persons in predominantly Latino neighborhoods.” This is the pattern of activity that the 287(g) program is intended to intensify, because there aren’t enough federal agents to screen traffic at this scale.
In our experience covering high-level police structures and programs, personnel, manpower and coordination are usually quite constrained. Various state and local governments work around this by creating key documents like “memoranda of understanding” (MOU) and “memoranda of agreement” (MOA).
The controversial agreement between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and ICE which surfaced on May 13 in American Oversight’s court case, is a great example of how these MOUs work. (A section on ICE and the IRS is below.)
The FBI is also possibly allocating one-third of its agents’ time in some field offices to civil immigration enforcement. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), U.S Marshals Service (USMS) and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are similarly getting tasked this way. (We have heard additional reports about other federal agents getting pulled from normal work and put onto this kind of activity but the full picture remains murky.)
Similar to the post-9/11 era, when the FBI fixated on ‘counterterrorism,’ a lot of other types of investigations these agencies are charged with, like weapons trafficking, white collar crime and human trafficking rings, will have to wait until the Trump Administration has sated itself or until other branches of the federal government intervene.
Arpaio’s overall model, which included spectacular mass confinement for the media and detainee exposure to desert conditions, was a forerunner of the Trump mass detention style. The American Immigration Council warned at the time, “the practice of allowing local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law increases the likelihood of racial profiling and pretextual arrests which leads to disastrous results for entire communities.”
As of May 28, there are 628 MOAs in 40 states. 99 agencies in 25 states have “jail enforcement model” agreements, 223 agencies in 30 states have “warrant service officer” agreements, and 306 agencies in 30 states have “task force model” agreements (Excel file). An additional 72 applications are pending: 8 jail enforcement models, 23 warrant service officers, and 41 pending task force model agreements (Excel file).
The interface to 287(g) could also include local regulations and policies about policing, immigration sweeps, joint operations, checklists for arrest encounters, and similar processes that should be available to the public and local policymakers. It has proven difficult for county boards and civil society groups to obtain policies about immigration sweeps.
The Miami Herald outlined 287(g) task force structures in detail: it “allows officers to challenge people on the street about their immigration status — and possibly arrest them… State and local officers are trained and deputized by ICE so they can question, detain and arrest individuals they suspect of violating civil immigration laws while officers are out policing the communities they are sworn to protect.”
In Florida, many police and state agencies have joined up in “task force” mode, which means they can try to enforce administrative warrants from executive branch immigration officials. There was a flashy sweep a few weeks ago to promote this. Even college campus police have been getting in on these task forces, bringing federal immigration enforcement down to the student dormitory level.
With little direct oversight from any bloc of public voters, college police departments will likely to be a tempting target for expanding immigration crackdown powers nationwide through systems like the 287(g) task force model.
According to ICE records, Florida higher ed policing for federal civil immigration now includes task force model agreements at Florida A&M University Board of Trustees, Florida Southwestern State College Police Department, Northwest Florida State College Police Department, and New College of Florida (a high profile takeover target of conservative education policy crusaders).
The Texas Observer reported on this “ICE Army” concept with Kristin Etter at the Texas Immigration Law Council warning it’s a “force multiplier of federal immigration agencies” with “officers in the streets stopping, detaining, questioning, interrogating, arresting” people. Law enforcement agencies have been joining 287(g) task forces as well, including the Texas National Guard and Attorney General’s Office. (Texas also has a separate MOU between the Texas National Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection under 8 USC section 1103(a)(10), 1357, 28 CFR section 65.80-85 and DHS Delegation 7010.3.2, as well as the Texas governor executive order GA-54; it says they use “State Active Duty” status and authority under Title 8 to “exercise the functions and duties of an immigration officer” under “supervision and direction of CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officials.”)
Immigration rights advocates in Maryland pushed to get a moratorium on 287(g) enrollments by state and local police, for at least the third year since 2020. However, as the legislative session wound down they came up empty-handed. Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become an international symbol this year after getting dumped into El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” returning Abrego Garcia to this country but it has not done so.
Maryland sheriffs’ departments are joining 287(g) en masse, particularly along the northern side of the state. According to a Bolts report, the Democratic Party-controlled Maryland Legislature may not have realized the aggressive nature of 287(g) until it was too late in the policy cycle, despite the pleas of immigration rights advocates.
State Senator Karen Lewis Young told Bolts, “I think if [Abrego Garcia’s detention] had happened earlier in session, the 287(g) bill might have moved, because I think it gave everybody a much more realistic awareness of how dangerous that program can be.” However, Abrego Garcia was not detained under 287(g).
The ACLU of Maryland outlined how Intergovernmental Services Agreements (IGSA) are another avenue for the feds to get money to local police, as ICE rents jail beds to function as immigration detention centers. This allows Frederick, Howard and Worcester counties to generate revenue. The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) is another similar revenue system.
The Maryland public defender’s office released a report (pdf) saying 287(g) agreements “undermine due process and make innocence irrelevant by requiring local law enforcement officials to screen, interrogate and detain without judicial authorization any arrestee suspected of being removable under civil immigration law. There is no exception for someone arrested based on mistaken identity.”
In Pennsylvania, the suburban political bellwether of Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, is the latest 287(g) flashpoint. Sheriff Fred Harran has been trying to enter into 287(g) without approval of the county commissioners, which the ACLU of Pennsylvania claims is illegal. In April, Harran confirmed he applied to get a “task force” model 287(g) program for about a dozen of his deputy sheriffs to act as ICE officers — not the more limited program that only applies to detention screening at the jail. On May 21 the Board of Commissioners voted 2-1 to oppose this enrollment.
Harran called the ACLU “lunatics” and his local critics “liars” in a “crabby rant” on a right-wing podcast. On May 13, ICE approved Harran’s 287(g) “Task force model” application.
According to the Bucks County Beacon, which uncovered the policy, Harran has not provided any written policy even though he claims his practices “would not include sweeps or raids, stating he has a ‘policy’ in place to prevent round ups.” On May 7, a number of civil society groups held a press conference in Doylestown before a county commissioners meeting (YouTube).
California, Illinois, and New Jersey ban 287(g) agreements statewide. In Minnesota, Cass, Crow Wing and Itasca counties have “task force model” agreements. Crow Wing, Freeborn, and Jackson counties have “warrant service officer” agreements. Jackson is the only Minnesota county with a “jail enforcement model” agreement.
How Task Forces and Multi-Agency Groups Get Constructed by Officials
We can compare 287(g) to other task force systems around the government, which are not often discussed.
Back on January 20, 2025, a White House “Presidential Action” statement, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” declared that “Homeland Security Task Forces” (HSTF) should be created in all 50 states, although groups with that kind of name already existed in some areas. (Org charts for these kind of task forces are attached to the Florida plan linked below.) A DHS “finding of a mass influx of aliens” was signed on January 23, 2025 (pdf) to further justify these measures.
Unicorn Riot found that the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) is commonly used to assemble and pay for counter-protest riot squads across state lines, including for the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and large crackdowns via Morton County at Standing Rock in 2016-2017 (using state troopers from Nebraska and Wisconsin, and police officers from various other states). The National Sheriffs Association was also an important actor in supporting EMAC activities, an adjunct effort to their “information war” against #NoDAPL protesters in the water protector movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The period around the police killing of Daunte Wright and Derek Chauvin’s trial in Minnesota also saw a massive EMAC pull from Ohio and Nebraska. This also includes temporarily deputizing law enforcement officers, insurance provisions, and arrangements for paid services, off a menu-like arrangement, including munitions, travel, and wages. (Typically, a local sheriff or police chief, and someone in the state Department of Public Safety would sign off on EMAC requests from other states.)
Earlier, we also found that the High-Intensity Drug Task Force (HIDTA) in Minnesota is doing biometrics for the Minneapolis police without a listed nexus to drug cases at all. HIDTA units can also include staff from state National Guard offices and advanced technologies to cross-index people and run investigations. HIDTA are usually not considered to be “fusion centers” although their capabilities are similar, if not more robust. The Washington/Baltimore HIDTA was established in 1994 by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and covers 26 counties and 11 cities, including DC and parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.
Besides HIDTA there are also Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) in most metro areas. JTTF often has deputized local law enforcement with federal authorities attached, making oversight over such specially empowered local police a puzzling matter.
In recent days, an FBI social media account posted a photo, apparently with one of their agents wearing a Safe Streets Task Force during some kind of activity at a residence, in reference to immigration. Here is an SSTF MOU between Fort Myers and the FBI (pdf) and the 2021 agenda item (pdf).
There is also some option for deputizing U.S. Marshals although the details are unclear. On May 12, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) claimed that 100 Florida Highway Patrol officers are now “special deputy U.S. Marshals” that can enforce immigration laws themselves. This is connected to a 37-page Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan (pdf) although the role of deputization isn’t specified within.
It’s worth considering how open conflicts between local governments and aggressive federal agencies will affect joint task forces like HIDTA, JTTF and UASI groups. For example, San Francisco police pulled out of JTTF for a time in 2017.
ImmigrationOS: Where is the Data Stored for an “ICE Army”?
Many in the U.S. government have tried to make large databases cross-connected from disparate departments for political ends. These type of super-databases have been considered political hot potatoes since the Watergate era; the Privacy Act was passed in 1974 to force the executive branch to outline the nature of these data systems as well as privacy protection measures. These policies were intended to prevent various abuses, like, say, Richard Nixon using the IRS to go after his enemies list.
Additional ICE RFIs in recent years showed that ICE is interested in “release and reporting management,”which includes tracking devices and “monitoring technology” for people who are not being held in detention centers.
The IRS-ICE Agreement that Shook Tax Agency Leadership
This IRS-ICE agreement obtained by American Oversight was produced after the acting commissioner Melanie Krause in resigned in April in objection to this agreement. Acting chief counsel William Paul was removed and replaced with Andrew De Mello to force this through as well. Why so much resistance from the top levels?
After Watergate, the Privacy Act was passed to constrain the use of “systems of records” for law enforcement and other purposes. This MoU tries to give assurances that everything will be handled by trained personnel. American Oversight says“the MOU fails to include any meaningful independent oversight of when and how the information is to be shared, relying on internal compliance and self-reporting and raising questions about how the public can ensure the government is following its own rules.” It showed the government redacted that the IRS would disclose “address information” of taxpayers to ICE, but the court forced these passages to be released.
“Project Homecoming” and Expanding Domestic National Guard Activity, via 287(g)
In a May 9 “proclamation” from the White House entitled “Establishing Project Homecoming,” buried at the end is yet another expansion of armed force in the works.
“[…]the Secretary of Homeland Security shall supplement existing enforcement and removal operations by deputizing and contracting with State and local law enforcement officers, former Federal officers, officers and personnel within other Federal agencies, and other individuals to increase the enforcement and removal operations force of the Department of Homeland Security by no less than 20,000 officers in order to conduct an intensive campaign to remove illegal aliens who have failed to depart voluntarily.”
In our research we found that the National Guard state agencies in Florida and Texas are already approved by ICE for the 287(g) task force model. Thus, the National Guard would not have to be “federalized” to do more operations for the feds, it could just use 287(g). Likewise, CNN reported the Guard units could be under state authority, not federal Title 32 mobilization. As the Brennan Center explains, National Guard personnel managed by their governor and adjutant general are not subject to the limitations of the Posse Comitatus Act.
It appears some of the militarized machinery here involves the concept of “force protection” as a way to coerce state and local governments to cooperate with the immigration crackdown, as liberal news site Talking Points Memo noted. An ominous release from the U.S. Army on April 15, “Joint Task Force Southern Guard protection cell secures the mission” describes how military “force protection” assets “address every possible security and safety scenario in support of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-led illegal alien holding operation (IAHO).” Southern Guard has been a very expensive operation to dump migrant detainees in the Pentagon’s offshore base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; it is led by U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).
Soldiers in engineering units install concertina wire on Nov. 5, 2018, at the Anzalduas International Bridge, Texas, part of a “military support” effort of U.S. Northern Command for DHS & Customs and Border Protection (CBP). (US Air Force photo by Airman First Class Daniel A. Hernandez)
Tension in Newark; Additional Detention Centers Sought for ICE Operations
On May 1, a federal lawsuit was heard in which New Jersey is trying to block all privately operated immigration prisons, with the state arguing it can control the private prison market, overriding the federal government’s hope to run a large facility in the region that it desperately needs to scale its mass detention and deportation agenda.
Report: Project 2025 Working Group Proposed Huge Police Command Network Under White House Control
A new report by Beau Hodai for Phoenix New Times/Cochise Regional News introduces elements of a major plan by the previously unreported Project 2025 Border Security Work Group, which offers some vision for a vast expansion and centralization of policing in the United States. Project 2025, a “900-page policy ‘wish list’,” was developed by several conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation to guide Trump Administration policies in a more focused fashion than the first term. The plans, developed by September 2024, include both a security policy and a propagandistic “strategic communications plan” to convince the American public that dreaded “terrorists” are loose in the land and only their extreme policies can save the day.
Hodai writes, “several of the policy proposals contained in the documents have already been executed,” including the IRS policy, dumping immigrants in Guantanamo, militarizing the U.S. border, and widespread revocation of immigrant parole programs and other legal status cancellations. Many “lines of operation” are proposed in the documents, and four new tiers of command controlled ultimately by the White House: Regional Command, State Command, District Command and one Headquarters Command.
In addition, Hodai found that “documents contemplate waiving 287(g) training requirements for sheriff’s deputies and municipal police working in ‘regional command’ units,” because watching 40 hours of training videos is apparently too high a bar to cross. Not surprisingly, the documents also “contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act” and “mobilization of up to one million troops to aid in proposed domestic security operations.”
Plugging leaks in this apparatus would be a serious program as well: “An active counter-intelligence effort must be organized, integrated across all levels, and actively conducted to identify and prosecute any individuals working for and providing classified or operationally sensitive information on border security plans and activities.” More details about these documents are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
All of these subjects can seem a bit overwhelming, but it is worth keeping in mind that the building blocks of this political situation were put in place more than two decades ago, after the September 11 attacks.
Many groups are working on opposing different aspects of the immigration crackdown, including by obtaining evidence of the policies, filing lawsuits, seeking injunctions, and challenging the vast levels of spending pouring out of the executive branch.
Subscribe to the Newsletter: You are all an inspiration to me. Please join me on Wings of Change. It’s only the beginning as we still have so much work to do as many activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties are so much a part of Labor History in the United States that while they can also be separate, they are often inextricably tied to Labor in many instances. Immigration is linked to labor history as new immigrants were a labor force often mistreated and therefore became strong labor activists. For Black people the struggle for civil rights was constant and often linked to labor issues.
Some Immigration History and Now
Immigration is another area that Trump is active in, attempting to export as many refugees as possible, often in cases where they are actually in the U.S. legally. One example is Mahmoud Khalil, a young student with a green card who was arrested along with his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, for his pro-Palestine protests and activities, whose treatment is meant to make other protesters afraid.
FDR did not single out any particular group of immigrants; he included them all. He recognized the contributions they were making to the U.S. economy and culture. The influx of immigrants was initially primarily from Europe with the exception of the Chinese on the west coast whose labor built the western railroads to connect with the east for rails to cross the continent in the 1860s.
They came from Ireland during the potato famine in the mid 1800s, and many as refugees from Europe after WWI, and were followed by those who came just before and after WWII. In more recent times they have come from countries in Asia as a result of the Vietnam War when many Vietnamese and Hmong came to Minnesota.
The latest waves of immigrants have arrived from the Middle East wars and from Africa. Minnesota now has a large Somali population as many have immigrated due to our wars in their country. Many now are from other African countries as well, where settler colonialism has left them war-torn and the people destitute as multinational corporations from Western multinationals have robbed them of their natural resources and in effect enslaved their people to do hard labor in their mines.
Last, but certainly not least, many Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking people from South and Central America have left their countries to come to the United States, some fleeing from extreme dictatorships as political refugees and others from poor countries to better their economic situations. Their presence is evidenced by the need to have many formal government documents translated into Spanish, as well as Somali and other languages.
“Migrant Mother,” taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936, depicting Florence Owens Thompson, a mother with her children, during the Great Depression. Source: Wikipedia. Photo now is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Many Hispanic people originally came to work in the large farms that grew fruits and vegetables in California. Some even came to Minnesota to work for Green Giant, resulting in an area on the west side of St. Paul where many settled and stayed. The fight of these workers to unionize and to demand decent living accommodations and wages is well-documented in film, song and books that describe their struggle; often they feature union organizers Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta.
I might also add that the variety of ethnic groups represented as evidenced by the foods available from the many ethnic restaurants here in Minnesota— adding the food of the Black and Native cultures as well—speaks to America being a nation of immigrants, as it has been since the Mayflower.
Trump’s current attacks on immigrants and immigrant rights are massive as he arrests and deports recent immigrants illegally and with cold-hearted precision. There has been information about the treatment of the deportees in, for example, El Salvador where the accommodations are similar to the Nazi death camps in Germany in WWII, if not worse. He is snatching people off the streets, including students, and sending them to an ICE facility in Louisiana that is reported to be the worst in the country with a reputation for prisoner abuse. How he could possibly care about people is beyond comprehension. The contributions of immigrants to American culture, science, and so on are well-documented in books, articles and on the web.
Remembering Tammany Hall of legend in New York City, where the cops were all Irish: they had a stranglehold on the government and they were corrupt. I use that as an example because they were white, although sometimes were considered to be of another race to denigrate them. They also helped immigrants, particularly their own. The contributions of Tammany may have been somewhat negative, but they were not all the Irish who came to America during the famine. Men of Irish heritage fought on both the Confederate and the Union sides during the Civil War. Irish contributions to the culture of song and dance are immeasurable, especially when you live across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and visit sister city St. Paul on St. Patrick’s Day. Or visit, in my case, my Irish heritage friends who have done so much good in this world, not to mention a brother of theirs who was in the state legislature for many years. These Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph were rightfully honored by St. Paul’s History Theater with a play of their own. The Irish have left their positive imprint all over the United States in spite of prejudice because of their Roman Catholic religion. (“No Irish Need Apply.”)
Now we have the immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and those from across the southern border from South and Central America who work in the hotels and often as cleaners in various industries. From Somalia: many Somali men are taxi and truck drivers, at least here in Minnesota. Many are Muslims, and have built a number of mosques in Minneapolis and suburbs.
The immigration starting basically during my lifetime includes refugees from Vietnam and then the Hmong; it continues to the present day where many new African immigrants work in senior or rehabilitation facilities as nurses or nurses’ aids along with jobs in industry.
In other words, they are assimilating. And no, I do not see them so often in the suburbs when I visit. I live in the city, but since George Floyd I see them more often than I used to. What is important is to understand the waves of immigrants who have come to this country and the contributions they have made and that not all white immigrants were good people. But then not all were bad either, and Trump’s attempt to lump all immigrants, especially immigrants of color, into one evil group is in itself an evil, as are his deportations: especially the Hispanics that he is deporting right and left and the pro-Palestinian young college students, as he targets especially those who have taken action against genocide in Gaza.
In another racist/white supremacist move he has promised to restore all the monuments, the statues, torn down in the time of George Floyd protests that honored the Civil War Confederates in a glorification of both war and racism.
Of course there is no such thing as one evil race. In the history of the world not only has evil come from all races, including white of course, but also so many of the brilliant people who have made contributions to world culture are from a variety different races; I think particularly of music, poetry and art, but also science, which, because of its nature in work often done away from the public eye, is not acknowledged as often. No one race can claim total superiority. Or total evil either.
Trump’s obsession with The Wall that is between the U.S. and Mexico is not MAGA, not Make America Great Again, but MEGA in the sense of huge as he has ordered new walls built and increased border patrols, a militarization of the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
And he insists on drawing that “color line,” this time against Hispanics: Trump’s father once evicted Woody Guthrie because he couldn’t pay his rent. Woody immortalized it in song.
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
Beach Haven ain’t my home! No, I just can’t pay this rent! My money’s down the drain, And my soul is badly bent! Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower Where no black folks come to roam, No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!
But Trump of course is not alone in his efforts to destroy the good that America has done, the American values that so many have fought and died for and others have striven to not just preserve but make active and real in our daily lives, and continue to do so.
The 2025 program that Trump embraces was created by the Heritage Foundation. Much of a Republican Congress and some Democrats also support what he is doing as he continues to destroy America: There is no other way to describe it. He stands at the titular head of it all with his narcissism and his greed for approval and power, a W.T. Barnum of politics as he centers himself in “the greatest show on earth” as the American Empire crumbles.
Black People Under FDR
FDR did more for Black people than any previous president. He had what was called a Black Cabinet that was involved in labor. The Black Cabinet was an unofficial group of African-American advisors to FDR. They ensured that thousands of Black women and men received the training that enabled them to work in the defense industry during World War II. And while helping reverse segregation in the federal workforce, they brought about the first anti-discrimination clauses in government contracts.
Lynching Law
Although not related directly to labor, the Roosevelt connection to a lynching law also needs to be mentioned. A law against lynching was controversial at the time, although Eleanor Roosevelt was an avid supporter of creating a federal law against it. She even arranged a meeting between Walter White of the NAACP and FDR. White was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. White directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. But because of the southern senators who could block bills that FDR favored, especially Social Security, even though in private he expressed opposition to lynching, it took many years before a federal law took effect. (Ken Burns: The Roosevelts, Episode 5, PBS.) President Biden signed a federal bill making lynching a hate crime on March 29, 2022.
“The Spirit of the “People”
The spirit of the New Deal, with its emphasis on the people, a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” was not a government for what FDR called the “Economic Royalists,” who held power over the people. Today one name for them is the “ruling elite.” It is true that the U.S. Constitution as originally conceived favored white male landowners. That bias has to some extent been preserved; the white moneyed elite that today takes form in racism as white supremacists as personified by the Ku Klux Klan and in other racist myths that elevate the white race as superior. We currently have a president, with his fascist cohorts in Congress, leading in racist threats and comments and with exporting many people who have sought refuge and a better life in the United States.
In the writing of the Constitution there were long and serious debates about the status of the Negro and the three-fifths compromise made that was clearly based on economic considerations of the time. Cotton was King and a major part of the economy, which succeeded on the plantations thanks to Black slave labor. The rights of women and of indigenous people were ignored.
The movements and strikes around civil rights and liberties for people of color, for women, and for labor rights led to large protests early on and continue. often related to the right to unionize regarding pay and working conditions, no small thing.
Paul Robeson singing about Joe Hill, a labor organizer who was accused of murder and executed in 1915 and who is still remembered as an inspiration for labor organizers.
From the Chicago Haymarket Affair, a protest for an 8-hour workday in Chicago on May 4, 1886, to the organizing of the Hispanic farm workers in California in the 1960s and ‘70s for their right to unions, decent pay, and good working conditions. Today organizing continues to create unions in some professions or demand better pay and working conditions, as strikes have become a method to make demands of employers in the public sector and of corporations.
Many unions went on strike during and after WWI and after WWII into the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s and ‘50s, and they have continued along with other forms of Union building. The history of strikes in the U.S. is well-documented in books, articles. songs, and online on the web.
Judy Collins sings Bread and Roses. The slogan “Bread and Roses” originated in a poem of that name by James Oppenheim, published in American Magazine in December 1911, which attributed it to “the women in the West.” It is commonly associated with the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts during January to March 1912, now often known as the “Bread and Roses strike.” The strike, which united dozens of immigrant communities under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World, was led to a large extent by women.
In the Twin Cities we have an annual labor celebration to remember the strike of 1934 and other labor history. The writer Meridel LeSueur, who participated as a young woman in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike later wrote, “No one can be neutral in the face of bullets ” in one of her short books, I Was Marching. She had joined the women working in the kitchen during the strike. As Minneapolis was a transportation center at the time, the strike attracted national attention. Two protesters were killed in that strike and 67 injured by the police.
Meridel LeSueur was blacklisted during the McCarthy era in the 1950s for her revolutionary writing.
Collective Bargaining
Collective bargaining is the process in which working people, through their unions, negotiate contracts with their employers to determine their terms of employment, including pay, benefits, hours, leave, job health and safety policies, ways to balance work and family, and more.
According to the AFL-CIO, in 1935 the National Labor Relations Act clarified the bargaining rights of most private-sector workers and established collective bargaining as the “policy of the United States.” While it had been used in earlier strikes, it was not a federal law until 1935 during Roosevelt’s first term.
In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act clarified the bargaining rights of most other private-sector workers and established collective bargaining as the “policy of the United States.” The right to collective bargaining also is recognized by international human rights conventions.
The freedom to form and join a union is core to the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights and is an “enabling” right—a fundamental right that ensures the ability to protect other rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt was the Chairperson of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that wrote the Declaration, and she contributed to its writing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948.
Flash Forward. March/April 2025
Statement from the AFL-CIO
Trump and Musk are trying to destroy the right of collective bargaining. It’s on their list of practices that are “unfriendly” to corporate autocratic domination of America.
March 27, 2025
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued a statement on a new executive order from the Trump administration stripping collective bargaining and union rights from workers across the federal government:
Straight out of Project 2025, this executive order is the very definition of union-busting. It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government at more than 30 agencies. The workers who make sure our food is safe to eat, care for our veterans, protect us from public health emergencies and much more will no longer have a voice on the job or the ability to organize with their coworkers for better conditions at work so they can efficiently provide the services the public relies upon. It’s clear that this order is punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court—and a blatant attempt to silence us Trump and Musk have now declared war on collective bargaining, and the AFO-CIO has reacted as they have joined in civil resistance to the daredevil duo’s many undercuttings of the rights of the people, who they are attacking.
We are in scary times. As we told you, even before Trump was inaugurated, a huge immigration operation has already begun in rural farm worker areas of Kern County, one of the top five most productive US agricultural counties. Border Patrol traveled 300+ miles from the US-Mexico border to profile the people who work so hard to harvest our food.
Then Trump was inaugurated. On his first day, he signed frightening Executive Orders including on immigration—which are terrifying farm workers and their families who are already badly shaken up from these raids that appeared to come out of nowhere. We immediately began having “Know Your Rights” sessions for farm workers throughout CA and producing “Know Your Rights” materials that we are distributing and sharing on social media and our website. As we’ve been dealing with this, many of our offices have received hate mail from “Trump’s Coming” with no return address. They say, “Report illegal aliens at schools, at work, at church, at restaurants, in your neighborhood … There is nowhere to hide!” We are not allowing these fear and intimidation tactics to stop us from doing our priority work of letting farm workers know that regardless of their immigration status they have rights. Our organizers are in the fields and communities sharing the resources we’ve been rushing to put together.
Yesterday, President Trump signed an order that tramples on the union rights of more than a million federal workers, stripping them of their ability to negotiate over their working conditions. The 1 million members of the UAW stand with federal workers and their union, AFGE, against the attacks from the Trump administration.
Update: April 25, 2025
Summary
Order exempting agencies from bargaining blocked pending lawsuit
Trump said order was necessary to protect national security
Unions claim retaliation for legal challenges to Trump policies
April 25 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of the ability to unionize and collectively bargain over working conditions.
Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., blocked an executive order Trump issued in March from being implemented pending the outcome of a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 160,000 federal employees.
AFL-CIO President Applauds Ruling to Restore Federal Workers’ Collective Bargaining Rights
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued the following statement on a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in case brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) blocking the Trump administration’s executive order that illegally stripped thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights:
We commend the court for recognizing the Trump administration’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights for what it was: illegal, retaliatory union-busting. This was the most significant attack on workers’ rights in history, and if Trump was allowed to do it to federal workers, he would be able to do it to every worker in America, in every workplace and every industry. So this ruling to restore federal workers’ collective bargaining rights and reinstate their existing contracts—even if temporarily while the case continues in court—is an important first step.
But this fight isn’t over, and it isn’t limited to the courts. Every member of Congress who stands with working people needs to support and vote to pass the Protecting America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550), a bill that would reverse this outrageous executive order and restore workers’ union contracts. We won’t rest until this illegal order is struck down once and for all.
May 16, 2025, Litigation Continues
A federal appeals court has cleared the way for President Donald Trump‘s executive order to move forward, aiming to curtail collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers while litigation continues.
***
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges in Washington, D.C., ruled that unions representing federal employees lack standing to sue. The majority cited the administration’s assurance that no existing collective bargaining agreements would be terminated during the ongoing legal proceedings.
Judges Karen Henderson, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush, and Justin Walker, appointed by Trump, supported the ruling; Judge Michelle Childs, appointed by former President Joe Biden, dissented.
[FDR] changed the relationship between government, business and labor forever.
—Doris Kerns Goodwin, Ken Burns: The Roosevelts,
Episode 5, PBS
Featured image:
“Hundreds of people join a protest in downtown Hamilton, Mont., in April supporting the work of federal employees as President Donald Trump oversees efforts to restructure the nation’s government. Federal scientific research and forestry work are part of this small town’s economic bedrock.” Photo: Katheryn Houghton/KFF Health News
President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology.
History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold. Historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson, will be social archetypes whose darker actions, including the decision to re-segregate the federal government and oversee one of the most aggressive campaigns of political repression in U.S. history, will be ignored.
In the America of our Trump-approved history books — I have read the textbooks used in “Christian” schools so this is not conjecture — equal opportunity for all exists and has always existed. America exemplifies human progress. It has constantly improved and perfected itself under the tutelage of its enlightened and almost exclusively white male rulers. It is the vanguard of “Western civilization.”
The great leaders of the past are portrayed as paragons of courage and wisdom, bringing civilization to the lesser breeds of the earth. George Washington, who with his wife owned and “rented” more than 300 slaves and oversaw brutal military campaigns against Native Americans, is a heroic model for imitation. The dark lust for conquest and wealth — which lay behind the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans — is sidelined to tell the story of the valiant struggle by European and Euro-American pioneers to build the greatest nation on earth. Capitalism is blessed as the highest freedom. Those who are poor and oppressed, who do not have enough in the land of equal opportunity, deserve their fate.
Those who fought injustice, often at the cost of their own lives, are disappeared or, as with Martin Luther King Jr., sanitized into a banal cliché, frozen forever in time with his “I Have a Dream” speech. The social movements that opened up democratic space in our society — the abolitionists, the labor movement, the suffragists, the socialists and communists, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements — are disappeared or ridiculed along with those writers and historians, such as Howard Zinn and Eric Foner, who document the struggles and achievements of popular movements. The status quo was not challenged in the past, according to this myth, and cannot be challenged in the present. We always had reverence for our leaders and must maintain this reverence.
“Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser presciently warned.
Trump’s executive order begins:
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
Authoritarians promise to replace bias with “objective truth.” But their “objective truth” is about sacralizing our civil religion and leadership cult. The civil religion has its sacred sites — Mount Rushmore, Plymouth Rock, Gettysburg, Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Stone Mountain, the huge bas-relief that depicts the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. It has its own rituals — Thanksgiving, Independence Day, President’s Day, Flag Day and Memorial Day. It is patriarchal and hyper patriotic. It fetishizes the flag, the Christian cross, the military, guns and Western civilization, a code for white supremacy. It justifies our exceptionalism and right to global dominance. It links us to a Biblical tradition that tells us we are a chosen people, a Christian Nation, as well as the true heirs of the Enlightenment. It informs us that the powerful and the wealthy are blessed and chosen by God. It feeds the dark elixir of unbridled nationalism, historical amnesia and unquestioning obedience.
There is proposed legislation in Congress calling for the carving of Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, making Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, putting Trump’s face on new $250 bills, renaming Washington Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport and amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term.
An education system, Jason Stanley writes in “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” is “the foundation upon which a political culture is built. Authoritarians have long understood that when they wish to change the political culture, they must begin by seizing control of education.”
The capture of the education system, he writes “is not only to render a population ignorant of the nation’s history and problems but also to fracture those citizens into a multitude of different groups with no possibility of mutual understanding, and hence no possibility of mass unified action. As a consequence, anti-education renders a population apathetic — leaving the task of running the country to others, be they autocrats, plutocrats, or theocrats.”
At the same time, despots mobilize the supposedly aggrieved group — in our case white Americans — to carry out acts of intimidation and violence in support of the leader and the nation and to exact retribution. The twin goals of this anti-education campaign are paralysis among the subjugated and fanaticism among true believers.
The uprisings that swept the nation triggered by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery not only decried institutional racism and police brutality, but targeted statues, monuments and buildings commemorating white supremacy.
A statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon was spray-painted with the words “genocidal colonist” and torn down. The headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which spearheaded the erection of monuments to confederate leaders in the early part of the 20th century in Richmond, Virginia, was set on fire. The statue of newspaper editor Edward Carmack, a supporter of lynching who urged whites to kill the African-American journalist Ida B. Wells for her investigations into lynching, was ripped down. In Boston, a statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded and statues of the confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, along with one of the racist former mayor and police chief of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, were removed. Princeton University, which had long resisted calls to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public policy because of his virulent racism, finally relented.
Monuments are not history lessons. They are pledges of allegiance, idols to the white ancestor cult. They whitewash the crimes of the past to whitewash the crimes of the present. Owning up to our past, the goal of critical race theory, shatters the myth perpetuated by white supremacists that our racial hierarchy is the natural outcome of a meritocracy where whites are endowed with superior intelligence, talent and civilization, rather than one that is engineered and rigidly enforced. Blacks in this racial hierarchy deserve to be at the bottom of society because of their innate characteristics.
It is only by naming and documenting these injustices and working to ameliorate them that a society can sustain its democracy and move towards greater equality, inclusion and justice.
All of these strides towards truth and historical accountability are to be reversed. Trump singled out for attack exhibits at The Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park. He promises to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.” He demands monuments or exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” be removed and the nation “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
The executive order continues:
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.
The attacks on programs such as critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion as Stanley points out “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally being included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or an unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”
The goal is not to teach the public how to think, but what to think. Students will parrot back the mind-numbing slogans and clichés used to buttress power. This process strips education of any independence, intellectual inquiry or self-criticism. It turns schools and universities into indoctrination machines. Those who resist being indoctrinated are cast out.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
Oppressors always erase the history of the oppressed. They fear history. It was a crime to teach enslaved people to read. The ability to read meant they might have access to news of the slave uprising in Haiti, the only successful slave revolt in human history. They might learn of the slave revolts led by Nat Turner and John Brown. They might be inspired by the courage of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. They might have access to the writings of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists.
The organized struggle, vital to the history of people of color, the poor and the working class to secure equality, along with laws and regulations to protect them from exploitation, are to be fully shrouded in darkness. There will be no new investigations into our past. There will be no new historical evidence. There will be no new perspectives. We will be forbidden from excavating our identity as a people and a nation. This calcification is designed to deify our rulers, destroy a pluralistic, democratic society and inculcate personal and political somnambulism.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
─Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The Unraveling of the New Deal
By Sue Ann Martinson/ April 5, 2025
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
─ Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.,
June 27, 1936
Nowadays we have generation this and generation that, all in categories with their own characteristics. But FDR was referring to collective generations inhabiting the United States at the time. His statement applies now to the current generations of Americans.
In 1932 when FDR was running for president, he promised if elected a “New Deal” for the American people. At the time Herbert Hoover was president and the nation was in a deep depression caused by the stock market crash of 1929.
Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1932 before winning the election in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected.
The following are the words of FDR in his Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency on June 27, 1936. The full speech is included at the end of this post.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. [underline emphasis by Wings of Change]
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These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship of mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
[underlines emphasis by Wings of Change]
Almost immediately after the Constitution was passed, the Bill of Rights, based on English Common Law, was added, protecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble and petition, and freedom of religion, all in the First Amendment. The first ten amendments were the originals. New amendments were added to the original Bill of Rights over the years that reflect values and issues of importance to the American people. These rights along with the Constitution itself were the values that FDR championed.
FDR kept his promise for a New Deal for the American people if they elected him on the heels of the Great Depression that began with the failure of the stock market in 1929. In 1933 during his first term as president he kept his word and initiated bold reforms that became law. Passed with both Republican and Democratic support in Congress, 15 key laws were passed during his first 100 days of office. They were bold reforms that were part of his promised New Deal.
Among these laws was the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and banking activities; other laws guaranteed bank deposits for depositors (no runs on banks as had previously occurred), loans to homeowners who faced losing their homes because of lack of mortgage payments, and keeping farm prices high by paying farmers not to produce. The Civilian Conservation Corp allowed single men between the ages of 18 and 25 to enlist in work programs to improve America’s public lands, forests, and parks, their room and board paid for, they sent $25 of their $30 pay home to their families. The National Recovery Act (NRA) set prices and wages: two million employers in 541 industries signed up, promising to keep prices down and wages up. The Social Security Act was signed into law by FDR on August 14, 1935. It established a system of old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent mothers and children, blind persons, and persons with disabilities, funded by payroll taxes.
The Bottom Line ─ The Glass-Steagall Act (June 16, 1933)
The Glass-Steagall Act prevented commercial banks from speculative risk-taking to avoid a financial crisis experienced during the Great Depression. Banks were limited to earning 10 percent of their income from investments. This legislation under FDR was a direct response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting depression.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, under President Clinton, eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act’s restrictions against affiliations between commercial and investment banks in 1999, so unfortunately, the parts of the law that separated investment and speculative commercial interests were repealed, and that repeal is considered to be a cause of the 2008 global recession by many. Some parts of the original Glass-Steagall were maintained, a most important being the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that still protects deposits and against runs on banks.
But FDR’s influence was more than creating laws. FDR inspired people. As George Will said as quoted in Ken Burns, Episode 5 of “The Roosevelts” on PBS, he “changed the relationship of the citizen to the central government.“ He instituted the Fireside Chats on the radio, when citizens tuned in weekly to listen. He spoke to them as an equal, building courage and confidence. He established a progressive cabinet, including the first woman cabinet member, Frances Perkins, who oversaw the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in 1935, the WPA employed 8.5 million people in building projects and arts initiatives and spent more than $11 million in relief until it was discontinued during WWII.
Some Background
Some find it ironic that Roosevelt himself was part of the over-privileged class that was monied, as was Eleanor, his sixth cousin. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was her uncle and FDR’s fifth cousin.
The original Roosevelt came to this country in the 1600s from the Netherlands, but not under the name Roosevelt which came later. He had two sons and the two sides of the Roosevelts in FDR’S generation were descended respectively from these two sons. Ken Burns goes into detail about the two different families and their activities in his series about the Roosevelts on public television. Some of the information used in this “unraveling” is from this series, which Burns calls The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, as he describes the relationships between the two parts of the family as each produced a president ─ first Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt on one side and then FDR on the other. He discusses the effects that contracting polio had on FDR’s personal and political life. He also includes the journey of Eleanor Roosevelt from her shyness to becoming a strong person of influence herself and how that affected her relationship with FDR, remembering that she too was a Roosevelt.
While this essay focuses on FDR’s politics rather than his personal life, the Burns series weaves the two together and is well worth watching. Note that the New Deal and FDR has its critics, while others hail FDR as the greatest president certainly of the 20th century, and even more in the history of America.
The Present and the New Deal
Like FDR, President Trump has moved boldly in these early days of the presidency. His first 100 days, always taken as a presidential measure, have been characterized by taking bold action. But the parallel ends there.What is obvious is that his goals are the opposite of the New Deal. Trump seeks to revoke or eviscerate many of the laws and programs that FDR put into place or convert them to private money-making entities that private corporations control. Without FDR and the New Deal there would be no unemployment insurance, no social security, no limit on working hours. no minimum wage, and the laws that regulate money systems, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that protects bank deposits.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power,” said FDR. Yet it is these institutions that Trump and his cronies are attempting to destroy precisely because they do put controls on the power of these “economic royalists,” what today we often call the ruling elite. who, as FDR notes, “hide behind the Flag and the Constitution,” as Trump and Co. do by falsely exuding great Patriotism.
When FDR was inaugurated there were 15,000 million unemployed in America. The New Deal programs he initiated greatly reduced that number by 1935 going into his second term. It’s as if Trump is trying again to reach that number of unemployed through layoffs, releasing thousands of worker, while he and Elon Musk, operating outside of Congress, raid our institutions with layoffs and cutbacks in funding, all the while giving perks via tax cuts and investments to corporations that have raised prices and that continue to destroy the environment and contribute to the current climate crisis as well as increasing the already bloated military budget by taking money from social programs (never from corporations, which the government continues to fund.
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Trump and his cohorts, especially Elon Musk, have created the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It was not created by Congress but by an executive order of Trump’s. Although DOGE is supposedly managed by the bipartisan DOGE Caucus whose purpose is “pave the way for the House of Representatives to streamline government operations and to save taxpayer money,” they are dismantling and cutting off funding for most programs that support ordinary citizens in need as well as some foreign programs like USAid.
Despite its full name, DOGE is not an official government department, which would have had to be established by an act of Congress. Instead it came into being through one of Trump’s presidential executive orders, and operates as an advisory body with at least four employees dedicated to each government agency.
Trump and Musk are conducting a hell-bent crusade against as many social programs as possible. While their actions may not directly be the repeal of all the same laws that were passed by Congress under FDR’s presidency, with so many people laid off it is as if Trump and his cronies are trying to match the 15 million people who were unemployed when FDR officially became president in 1933, along with the millions of immigrants Trump has deported or plans to deport, some of whom are American citizens or hold green cards.
Musk and Trump, under the auspices of DOGE, are slashing programs that benefit the citizens of America with broad strokes. What they call a campaign against fraud in reality is a gutting of social programs that benefit ordinary citizens. At the same time Trump continues more than excessive military spending by funding foreign wars ─ most obviously the Ukraine War and the continuing genocide against the people of Palestine/Gaza being criminally perpetrated by Israel─ as well as maintaining an excessive and very expensive worldwide military network. At the same time they are gutting the Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) and increasing rather than curtailing the use of fossil fuels, a CO2 pollutant that is a major cause of the Climate Crisis that puts the whole planet at risk.
The Trump administration and Trump himself pretend and encourage their followers to pretend that there is no relationship between the climate crisis and the use of fossil fuels, yet the Union of Concerned Scientists and other responsible and realistic academics as well as ordinary people have shown us otherwise with their analyses and activism alike. And the U.S. military continues to be the a major polluter in the world with its use of fossil fuels that release CO2 and methane gas into the atmosphere as well as by the pollution of water, especially by what are called PFAS pollutants, with the 1000 plus military bases and military installations worldwide.
In addition Trump is acting in true autocratic manner in attempting to shut down free speech in the colleges where pro-Palestine students are attempting to exercise the right of free speech. This ban extends to all media by his demands that no critical articles be written about him and there be no critiques of his platform and actions. In addition, the Trump administration’s policies result in the threatening of academic freedom of college and university faculty members. His actions mimic Hitler’s seeing that Jewish professors and anyone opposed to him were fired from colleges and universities and punishing students who opposed his policies, such as the White Rose student group who were murdered by Hitler for distributing pamphlets against him. The book bans that are being legislated in many states are also an attack on free speech and approximate the book burnings under Hitler.
As usual, Trump is pursuing his policy of hate and hyper-militarism for specious reasons that attack the most basic American values such as free speech and the peoples’ right to assemble along with the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances; they rationalize this Constitutional crisis with all the geopolitical ins and outs and machinations and excuses they can create. Congress keeps pouring money into weapons and then sending them to Ukraine for continued war and to Israel for the continued genocide against the people of Palestine, making sure the war industry is well-funded and much of the profits are returned to members of Congress for their election campaigns and personal use, Congress appears to have been brain-washed; when interviewed by Medea Benjamin and other Code Pink members in its halls in response to their questions, they shift all blame back to Hamas when it is the U.S. that is guilty of supporting Israel’s continuing apartheid and oppression of Palestine since 1948. It is the U.S. that keeps shipping weapons and money to Israel so they can continue with the genocide. Any attempts at forming a ceasefire Trump’s part have failed.
End of Part 1, The Unraveling of the New Deal
++++++++++++++++++++
FDR Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for Presidency on June 27, 1936. Full address:
Senator Robinson, Members of the Democratic Convention, my friends:
Here, and in every community throughout the land, we are met at a time of great moment to the future of the Nation. It is an occasion to be dedicated to the simple and sincere expression of an attitude toward problems, the determination of which will profoundly affect America.
I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.
For the sympathy, help and confidence with which Americans have sustained me in my task I am grateful. For their loyalty I salute the members of our great party, in and out of political life in every part of the Union. I salute those of other parties, especially those in the Congress of the United States who on so many occasions have put partisanship aside. I thank the Governors of the several States, their Legislatures, their State and local officials who participated unselfishly and regardless of party in our efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses. Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm.
America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.
In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.
But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.
Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.
That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people’s money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.
But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.
For more than three years we have fought for them. This Convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that that fight will go on.
The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our Government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of Government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.
We do not see faith, hope and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a Nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.
Faith— in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.
Hope—renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.
Charity— in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.
We seek not merely to make Government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.
We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.
In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.
It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.
I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208917
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power.
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.
Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.
The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.
These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.
Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.
Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.
“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.
“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:
And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.
You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.
Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have calledpolice to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long beforethe protests and encampments began.
Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.
The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.
Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.
“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”
James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhofer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks afterthe Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along withthe sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.
Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.
“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.
And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.
This article may or may not reflect the opinion of Wings of Change.
At the Munich Conference in February, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Yi invited Europe to join with China in working on trade routes. He then spoke of multilateralism — all nations working together for their mutual benefit.
State-owned Bestune carmaker comes with a Japanese-anime girl on the dashboard; she has a choice of several outfits.
Image: South China Post
We Find Out that China Has Cars and Computers
by Mary Beaudoin/ Women Against Military Madness Newsletter,
Vol. 43 No. 1, Winter 2025
The U.S. Congress passed a bill in January banning the popular app TikTok when members realized that young people were not just watching short videos of dancing and clowning around. They were also seeing posts of genocide in Gaza. This prompted Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney, who introduced the bill, to comment:
Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of times it mentions Palestinians, relative to other media sites – it’s overwhelmingly so many TikTok broadcasts.
Apparently, Congress was happy to support genocide, but not people knowing about it. What they did not foresee is that TikTok refugees would migrate to Rednote,[1]also a Chinese-owned app, and used extensively by the Chinese. Thus American interest was piqued, not only by Palestinians but by Chinese.
To the delight and surprise of many connecting via Rednote, the Chinese youth whom they met on the app had grown up learning English and appeared open, friendly, and eager to share their lives. Americans began to discover that, while they themselves struggle to keep up with the cost of living, their Chinese counterparts have low- to no-cost healthcare, abundant food, nice apartments and houses (90 percent of Chinese own their own home), affordable college tuition, and cool cars, including electric models, at a fraction of the cost of vehicles in the U.S.
In comparison with the U.S. and its encampments of unhoused people and too many food-insecure families, the Chinese government has eliminated extreme poverty. Can we get over our outdated paranoia about Commies coming to take away our freedoms? Can we set aside our (undeserved) hubris about being the best in the world, and maybe learn something from another part of the world? The Chinese government at least attempts to practice equality and distribution of benefits and appears to have done so successfully for a majority of its citizens. The U.S., instead, is on a trajectory transferring our country’s wealth to an ever-smaller number at the top.
An even greater surprise to Americans that has come from China is DeepSeek, an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. The low cost ($6 million start-up) of its development and training enables greater access to AI. Its capabilities and accessibility sent shock waves through Silicon Valley. A handful of tech giants had formed a joint-venture private company to build Stargate[2], a next-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) super-computing system. Investors have been looking to raise $500 billion for Stargate’s grand plan to “not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.” *It would be alarming to have so much power under the control of a private company. However, the invention of DeepSeek can open up the AI commons to the broader public and challenges the idea that Stargate is viable.
What’s the U.S. reaction to Chinese technological advances? We know that chips are a necessary component of electronics in computers, cars, etc. The U.S. is sanctioning the sale of chips to China and Russia, believing that this policy will slow down competition. But China manufactures its own chips and is making improvements all the time.
The U.S. hasn’t really caught up yet with the idea of shifting power in the world, doesn’t have a concept of fair trade, and is still trying to hold onto the idea of being the sole hegemonic power. However, China and Russia, with their combined resources, are working on uniting global trade by land through the Belt and Road Initiative, as the U.S. militarizes sea routes in an effort to cut China off from trade.
Diplomats of the other great powers speak in very different terms from the U.S. At the Munich Security Conference on February 17, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi invited Europe to join with China in cooperating on trade routes. He then spoke of multilateralism — all nations working together for their mutual benefit. He cautioned that the “self-interest only” approach to international relations leads to a lose-lose scenario and “a small yard with high fences only results in restraining oneself.” Is it time for our U.S. government to listen?
[1] For examples, see: The Rednote Diaries, Carl Zha on Youtube. tinyurl.com/4a5635vx
[2] Description from “Announcing The Stargate Project” OPENAI. Accessed February 22, 2025. tinyurl.com/5b8ct3k3
Mary Beaudoin is the editor of the Women Against Military Madness Newsletter. Carol Masters and Ilze Mueller edited this article.
The opinions expressed in this article may or may not reflect the opinions of the Wings of Change editor.
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