The 89th Texas Legislative Session will be remembered for many things—but if you’re a student, teacher, or parent trying to make public education work in this state, it’s going down as the year lawmakers finally dropped their mask. With the official end of the legislative session (called adjournment sinedie, which is looming on June 2), the Texas House made history by passing a private school voucher bill, Senate Bill 2, for the first time since 1957. It’s not just a symbolic win for GOP Governor Greg Abbott and his billionaire backers. It’s a real, measurable, billion-dollar transfer of public resources into private hands.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t education reform. It’s economic sabotage by design, not accident, as evidenced by the billion-dollar diversion from the public to the private sector with no public oversight. It’s a calculated attempt to shrink public institutions and turn education into a product, reserved for those who can already afford access. Despite the confetti statements from the Governor’s office, no, this is not a win for “parent choice.” It’s a win for privatization, and Texans—especially those in rural, immigrant, and working-class communities—will be paying the price.
Vouchers Passed, but Who’s Buying?
SB2 establishes a $1 billion Education Savings Account (ESA) program, giving qualifying families about $10,000 yearly to cover private school tuition, homeschool costs, transportation, textbooks, and therapy. On paper, it’s being sold as a lifeline for underserved students, but let’s not get distracted by the branding.
That $10,000 doesn’t come close to covering the actual cost of elite private schools in Texas, which average more than $11,000 annually and climb much higher in urban centers. More importantly, private schools participating in the ESA program aren’t required to accept anyone. They can—and will—cherry-pick their enrollees. That means students with disabilities, discipline histories, or families who can’t foot the rest of the bill will be left behind. Unlike public schools, these private institutions don’t have to abide by federal protections like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
To top it off, SB2 bars undocumented students from participating altogether. That’s right—while public schools remain constitutionally obligated to educate all students, the state is now writing checks that explicitly exclude immigrant families. So much for “choice.”
Rural Reality Check
Take it from Hazel, a Students Organized for a Real Shot (SORS) organizer and student in rural North Texas: “There’s no ‘choice’ where I live. My public school is the only school. And now they want to take money from it?”
That’s the reality for thousands of families across Texas. Public schools in small towns aren’t just classrooms—they’re lifelines. They’re often the largest employers, food hubs, and mental health support systems in the entire community. Gutting them doesn’t create opportunity. It hollows out the very infrastructure that keeps these places alive.
Some conservatives have recognized this contradiction. Though when it came time to vote, only two Republicans, former House Speaker Dade Phelan and Rep. Gary VanDeaver, dared to oppose SB2. The rest folded under pressure from Governor Abbott and the powerful voucher machine which includes groups like the American Federation for Children and Texas-based mega-donors (like Dick Uihlein and Jeff Yass) who’ve spent millions reshaping the Legislature through targeted primary campaigns. Make no mistake: This wasn’t just a policy fight. It was a hostile takeover.
Map depicting the flow of political contributions that supported school privatization efforts in Texas. The red dots indicate legislative seats won in 2024 by candidates supported by Jeff Yass and other advocates of school vouchers. Credit: Alyshaw, Little Sis, February 3, 2025.
What About Public Schools?
While many lawmakers were busy high-fiving over vouchers, public schools continued to drown under outdated funding formulas and chronic disinvestment. Texas still ranks in the bottom third of states for per-pupil spending, and even after the Legislature approved a $7.7 billion education package through House Bill 2, many districts are still facing budget shortfalls and teacher shortages.
Sure, HB2 raises the basic allotment from $6,160 to $6,555, and ties future increases to property value growth. But educators on the ground know it’s not enough. The funding doesn’t account for years of inflation or meet the rising costs of special education, staffing, and school maintenance. It’s a start, but it’s far from transformative, and lawmakers knew that when they passed it.
Meanwhile, teachers continue to leave the profession in staggering numbers. According to the Texas American Federation of Teachers, more than 66 percent considered quitting in 2022. Instead of offering competitive salaries or mental health support, this Legislature gave them censorship bills like Senate Bill 13, which would authorize politically-appointed parents to make sweeping decisionsabout what books students will be able to find in their school libraries, coupled with gestapo-like legal action against teachers deemed to have violated Texas state law by “teaching woke critical race theory.” Because nothing says “thank you for your service” quite like criminalizing your curriculum.
Manufactured Crisis, Manufactured Choice
First, they failed to fund us. Then, they blamed us for failing.
That’s the playbook. The state basic allotment per pupil hasn’t budged since 2019, starving school districts of resources. Yet when STAAR test scores dip, schools are cast as the problem, and the Texas Education Agency swoops in with state-mandated takeovers. That’s the manufactured crisis. Lawmakers are selling “choice” as the solution, but it’s a trapdoor, not a lifeline.
Jakiyla, a Students Organized for a Real Shot (SORS) Dallas-Fort Worth area organizer, noted, “After COVID, our schools were already struggling. And now with this voucher bill, we’re being told we don’t even deserve recovery. We’re just collateral damage in someone else’s agenda.” Jakiyla’s words speak to what countless students across Texas are feeling. Let’s not pretend vouchers are happening in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader campaign to destabilize and delegitimize public education.
Since 2021, Texas has passed multiple laws banning so-called “divisive topics,” cracked down on libraries, and launched attacks on curriculum deemed too inclusive. The state even flirted with legislation this session that would allow politicians to micromanage schoolbook collections—because apparently, To Kill a Mockingbird is a bigger threat than poverty or crumbling campuses.
This isn’t about helping kids. It’s about consolidating power and controlling what students learn and how they learn it. It’s about shifting accountability away from the public and into the hands of private actors with no obligation to serve all students, uphold civil rights, or even report outcomes.
What Happens After Sine Die?
As we approach June 2, the focus will shift to the implementation of these programs, legal challenges to SB2’s more extreme provisions (like its citizenship clause), and the behind-closed-doors conference committee process to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bill. Expect behind-closed-door negotiations over who gets priority for vouchers, what oversight looks like, and how funding rules may shift over time. Generally, expect more spin, but the facts don’t lie. Texas educates more than 5.4 million public school students, and each one deserves a fully funded, fully staffed, censorship-free education. That’s not some radical demand —it’s a moral and constitutional imperative.
Yet, with the passage of SB2, the Legislature made a choice to invest in exclusion instead of equity and privatization instead of the public good.
This Is How We Fight Back
This legislative session was billed as a turning point—a chance to “reinvest in Texas kids.” Instead, lawmakers handed our future over to lobbyists and political donors, making it clear that public schools are not their priority. Unless we organize, speak out, and hold them accountable, this billion-dollar heist will be just the beginning.
Charter expansions are next. Teacher “accountability” bills are on the horizon. More manufactured outrage over library and classroom content is guaranteed. The goal isn’t excellence—it’s control.
But here’s what they don’t expect: resistance. From rural towns to big cities, from high schoolers to retired educators, Texans are waking up. We know what’s being taken from us. And we’re not going quiet.
If Texas has taught us anything, it’s that underdogs don’t stay quiet—and when we rise, we raise hell, and we’re just getting started.
This article originally appeared on https://www.projectcensored.org/texas-billion-heist-public-education/
ANALYSIS:By Birte Leonhardt, Folker Hanusch and Shailendra B. Singh
The role of journalism in society is shaped not only by professional norms but also by deeply held cultural values. This is particularly evident in the Pacific Islands region, where journalists operate in media environments that are often small, tight-knit and embedded within traditional communities.
Our survey of journalists across Pacific Island countries provides new insight into how cultural values influence journalists’ self-perceptions and practices in the region. The findings are now available as an open access article in the journal Journalism.
Cultural factors are particularly observable in many collectivist societies, where journalists emphasise their intrinsic connection to their communities. This includes the small and micro-media systems of the Pacific, where “high social integration” includes close familial ties, as well as traditional and cultural affiliations.
The culture of the Pacific Islands is markedly distinct from Western cultures due to its collectivist nature, which prioritises group aspirations over individual aspirations. By foregrounding culture and values, our study demonstrates that the perception of their local cultural role is a dominant consideration for journalists, and we also see significant correlations between it and the cultural-value orientations of journalists.
We approach the concept of culture from the viewpoint of journalistic embeddedness, that is, “the extent to which journalists are enmeshed in the communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom they report, and the extent to which this may both enable and constrain their work”.
The term embeddedness has often been considered undesirable in mainstream journalism, given ideals of detachment and objectivity which originated in the West and experiences of how journalists were embedded with military forces, such as the Iraq War.
Yet, in alternative approaches to journalism, being close to those on whom they report has been a desirable value, such as in community journalism, whereas a critique of mainstream journalism has tended to be that those reporters do not really understand local communities.
Cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable What is more, in the Global South, embeddedness is often viewed as an intrinsic element of journalists’ identity, making cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable.
Recent research highlights that journalists in many regions of the world, including in unstable democracies, often experience more pronounced cultural influences on their work compared to their Western counterparts.
To explore how cultural values and identity shape journalism in the region, we surveyed 206 journalists across nine countries: Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru and the Marshall Islands.
The study was conducted as part of a broader project about Pacific Islands journalists between mid-2016 and mid-2018. About four in five of journalists in targeted newsrooms agreed to participate, making this one of the largest surveys of journalists in the region.
Respondents were asked about their perceptions of journalism’s role in society and the extent to which cultural values inform their work.
Our respondents averaged just under 37 years of age and were relatively evenly split in terms of gender (49 percent identified as female) with most in full-time employment (94 percent). They had an average of nine years of work experience. Around seven in 10 had studied at university, but only two-thirds of those had completed a university degree.
The findings showed that Pacific Islands journalists overwhelmingly supported ideas related to a local cultural role in reporting. A vast majority — 88 percent agreed that it was important for them to reflect local culture in reporting, while 75 percent also thought it was important to defend local traditions and values.
Important to preserve local culture
Further, 71 percent agreed it was important for journalists to preserve local culture. Together, these roles were considered substantially more important than traditional roles such as the monitorial role, where journalists pursue media’s watchdog function.
This suggests Pacific islands journalists see themselves not just as neutral observers or critics but as active cultural participants — conveying stories that strengthen identity, continuity and community cohesion.
To understand why journalists adopt this local cultural role, we looked at which values best predicted their orientation. We used a regression model to account for a range of potential influences, including socio-demographic aspects such as work experience, education, gender, the importance of religion and journalists’ cultural-value orientations.
Our results showed that the best predictor for whether journalists thought it was important to pursue a local cultural role lay in their own value system. In fact, the extent to which journalists adhered to so-called conservative values like self-restraint, the preservation of tradition and resistance to change emerged as the strongest predictors.
Hence, our findings suggest that journalists who emphasise tradition and social stability in their personal value systems are significantly more likely to prioritise a local cultural role.
These values reflect a preference for preserving the status quo, respecting established customs, and fostering social harmony — all consistent with Pacific cultural norms.
While the importance of cultural values was clear in how journalists perceive their role, the findings were more mixed when it came to reporting practices. In general, we found that such practices were valued.
Considerable consensus on customs
There was considerable consensus regarding the importance of respecting traditional customs in reporting, which 87 percent agreed with. A further 68 percent said that their traditional values guided their behaviour when reporting.
At the same time, only 29 percent agreed with the statement that they were a member of their cultural group first and a journalist second, whereas 44 percent disagreed. Conversely, 52 percent agreed that the story was more important than respecting traditional customs and values, while 27 percent disagreed.
These variations suggest that while Pacific journalists broadly endorse cultural preservation as a goal, the practical realities of journalism — such as covering conflict, corruption or political issues — may sometimes create tensions with cultural expectations.
Our findings support the notion that Pacific Islands journalists are deeply embedded in local culture, informed by collective values, strong community ties and a commitment to tradition.
Models of journalism training and institution-building that originated in the West often prioritise norms such as objectivity, autonomy and detached reporting, but in the Pacific such models may fall short or at least clash with the cultural values that underpin journalistic identity.
These aspects need to be taken into account when examining journalism in the region.
Recognising and respecting local value systems is not about compromising press freedom — it’s about contextualising journalism within its social environment. Effective support for journalism in the region must account for the realities of cultural embeddedness, where being a journalist often means being a community member as well.
Understanding the values that motivate journalists — particularly the desire to preserve tradition and promote social stability — can help actors and policymakers engage more meaningfully with media practitioners in the region.
Birte Leonhardt is a PhD candidate at the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on journalistic cultures, values and practices, as well as interventionist journalism.
Folker Hanusch is professor of journalism and heads the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also editor-in-chief of Journalism Studies, and vice-chair of the Worlds of Journalism Study.
Shailendra B. Singh is associate professor of Pacific journalism at the University of the South Pacific, based in Suva, Fiji, and a member of the advisory board of the Pacific Journalism Review.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.
The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.
But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.
The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.
In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.
Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.
Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.
Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”
Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.
A screenshot from a recording of a CCTV video shows Xander Reed being dragged down the hallway by a teacher at the Garrison School.
(Obtained by ProPublica)
Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”
Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.
The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.
Garrison School is part of a special education district that’s supposed to be under federal monitoring for violating the civil rights of its disabled students.
(Bryan Birks for ProPublica)
The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.
The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.
The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.
But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.
“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.
“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”
Scott and Amanda Reed, Xander’s parents, enrolled their son in Garrison School after being told they had no other options.
(Bryan Birks for ProPublica)
New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.
Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.
And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.
Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.
“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”
Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”
Not one, not two, but three of my books have been removed and banned from the United States Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library by the order of President Donald Trump’s appointed defense secretary and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. The New York Times reports that 378 others were also removed. Naval students and sailors must feel insulted by Hegseth’s lack of confidence in their intellectual…
At this year’s May graduation ceremony, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University’s Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban, was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition for her contribution to education.
Although she has now stepped down from the role, Luamanuvao served as the university’s Assistant Vice-Chancellor, Pasifika, for 14 years. In that time has worked tirelessly to raise Pasifika students’ achievement.
“It’s really important that they [Pasifika students] make the most of the opportunities that education has to offer,” she said.
“Secondly, education teaches you how to write, to research, to critique, but more importantly, become an informed voice and considering what’s happening in society now with AI and also technology and social media, it’s really important that we can tell our stories and share our values, and we counter that by receiving a good education and applying ourselves to do well.”
When asked about the importance of service, Luamanuvao explained “there’s a saying in Samoan, ‘o le ala i le pule o le tautua’ so the road to authority and leadership is through service”.
“And we’ve always been taught how important it is not to indulge in our own individual success, but to always become a voice and support our brothers and sisters, and our families and in our communities who are especially struggling.”
Juliana Faataualofa Lafaialii, Samoa’s Deputy Head of Mission/Counsellor to NZ (from left); Philippa Toleafoa; Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban; Afamasaga Faamatalaupu Toleafoa, Samoa’s High Commissioner to NZ; and Labour MP Pesetatamalelagi Barbara Edmonds . Image: Pesetatamalelagi Barbara Edmonds/RNZ Pacific
As she accepted her honorary doctorate, she spoke about the importance of women taking on leadership roles.
‘Our powerful women’
“Yes, many Pacific people will know how powerful our women are, especially our mothers, our grandmothers, and great grandmothers. We actually come from cultures of very powerful and very strong women . . . it’s not centered in the individual women. It’s centered on the well-being of our families, and our communities. And that’s what women leadership is all about in the Pacific.”
She did not expect the honourary doctorate from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University because “I’ve always been aspirational for others. And we Pacific people have been brought up that we are the people of the ‘we’ and not the me.”
The number of Pasifika students enrolled at the University, during Luamanuvao’s time as Assistant Vice-Chancellor, increased from 4.70 percent in 2010 to 6.64 pecent in 2024. She said she “would have loved to have doubled that number” so that it was more in line with the number of Pasifika people living in New Zealand.
Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban and supporters during an International Women’s day event in Wellington. Image: RNZ Pacific
Two of the initiatives she started, during her time at the University, was the Pasifika Roadshow taking information about university life out to the wider community and the Improving Pasifika Legal Education Project.
Helping Pasifika Law students succeed was very important to her. While Pasifika make up make up only 3 percent of Lawyers, they are overrepresented in the legal system, comprising 12 percent of the prison population.
Another passion of hers was encouraging Pasifika to enter academia. “I think we’ve had an increase in Pacific academics in some areas. For example, with the Faculty of Law, we’ve got two senior Pacific women in lecturer positions . . . We’ve also got four associate professors, and now I’ve finished, there’s also a vacancy for another.”
Prior to her work in education Luamanuvao was the first Pasifika woman to enter New Zealand politics, in 1999.
First Pacific woman MP
“I was fortunate that when I ran for Parliament, I ran first as a list MP, and as you know, within the parties, they have selection process that are quite robust, and so I became the first Pacific woman MP.”
“What motivated me was the car parts factory that closed in Wainuiomata, and most of the workers were men, but they were also Pacific, Māori and palagi, who basically arrived at work one morning and were told the factory was closing.”
“But what really hit me, and hurt me, that these were not the values of Aotearoa. They’re not the values of our Pacific region. These are human beings, and for many men, particularly, to have a job, it’s about providing for your family. It’s about status.
“So, if factories were going to close down, where was the planning to upskill them so they could continue in employment? None of them wanted to go for the unemployment benefit.
“They wanted to continue in paid work. So it’s those milestones that I make it worthwhile. It’s just a pity, because election cycles are three years, and as you know, people will vote how they want to vote, and if there’s a change, all the hard work you’ve put in gets reversed and but fundamentally, I believe that New Zealand and Pacific people have wonderful values that all of us try to live by, and that will continue to feed the light and ensure that people have a choice.”
Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban PhD and her husband Dr Peter Swain. Image: Trudy Logologo/RNZ Pacific
Although she first entered Parliament as a list MP, she subsequently won the Mana electorate seat. She retained the seat ,for the Labour party, from 2002 until she stepped away from politics in 2010.
During that time she was Minister of Pacific Peoples, 2007-2008, and even though Labour was defeated in the 2008 election, she continued to hold the Mana seat by a comfortable margin.
Mentoring many MPs
Although she has left political life, Luamanuvao has also been involved in mentoring many Pasifika Members of Parliament, and helping them cope with the challenges and opportunities that go with the role.
One of the primary motivators in her life has been the struggles of her parents, who left Samoa in 1954 to build a better future for their children, in New Zealand. She acknowledged that all of her successes can be attributed to her parents and the sacrifices they made.
“Yes, well, I think everybody can look at a genealogy of history of families leaving their homeland to come to Aotearoa, why, to build a better life and opportunities, including education for their children.
“And I often remind our generation of young people now that your parents left their home, for you. And I’ve often reflected because my parents have passed away on the pain of leaving their parents, but there was always this loving generosity in that both my parents were the eldest of huge families.
“They left everything for them, and actually arrived in New Zealand with very little. But there was this determination to succeed.
“Secondly, they are a minority in a country where they’re not the majority, or they are the indigenous people of their country. So also, overcoming those barriers, their hard work, their dreams, but more importantly, the huge love for our communities and fairness and justice was installed in Ken and I my brother, from a very young age, about serving and about giving and about reciprocity.”
Although she has left her role in tertiary education Luamanuvao vows to continue working to support the next generation of Pasifika leaders, in New Zealand and around the Pacific region.
We are heading down a perilous road. Vulnerable communities face growing threats. The climate crisis is outpacing scientists’ worst predictions. Authoritarianism is no longer a distant possibility — it is rising, with democracy backsliding across the globe. With Trump’s return, public services like education, labor protections, humane immigration policies, health care and diversity programs are being dismantled.
Meanwhile, trust in democracy is eroding — especially among young people. As political scientist Steven Levitsky points out, part of the problem is motivational: The political right is fighting for a clear, albeit dangerous, vision. The left, by contrast, is often fighting against that vision, with fewer compelling alternatives on offer.
Embedded in the House GOP’s advancing reconciliation package is a major, long-sought victory for school privatization advocates that would let rich funders of vouchers avoid taxation, a change that opponents warned would supercharge the right-wing assault on public education. The measure, which resembles the GOP-authored Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), was tucked into the House…
This year’s theme is, ‘Åf’ạkia ma rak’ạkia ‘os fäega ma ag fak Rotuma – tēfakhanisit Gagaja nā se ‘äe ma’, which translates to, ‘Treasure & teach our Rotuman language and culture — A gift given to you and I by God’.
With fewer than 1000 residents identifying as Rotuman, it is the younger generation stepping up to preserve their endangered language.
Two young people, who migrated to New Zealand from Rotuma Island, are using dance to stay connected with their culture from the tiny island almost 500km northwest of Fiji’s capital, Suva, which they proudly call home.
Kapieri Samisoni and Tristan Petueli, both born in Fiji and raised on Rotuma, now reside in Auckland.
Cultural guardians
They are leading a new wave of cultural guardians who use dance, music, and storytelling to stay rooted in their heritage and to pass it on to future generations.
“A lot of people get confused that they think Rotuma is in Fiji but Rotuma is just outside of Fiji,” Samisoni told RNZ Pacific Waves.
Rotuman Language Week. Video: RNZ Pacific
“We have our own culture, our own tradition, our own language.”
“When I moved to New Zealand, I would always say I am Fijian because that was easier for people to understand. But nowadays, I say I am Rotuman.
“A lot of people are starting to understand and realise . . . they know what Rotuma is and where Rotuma is, so it is nice saying that I am Rotuman,” he said.
Samisoni moved to New Zealand in 2007 when he was 11 years old with his parents and siblings.
He said dancing has become a powerful way to express his identity and honour the traditions of his homeland.
Learning more
“Moving away from Fiji and being so far away from the language, I think I took it for granted. But now that I am here in New Zealand, I want to learn more about my culture.
“With dance and music, that is the way of for me to keep the culture alive. It is also a good way to learn the language as well.”
For Petueli, the connection runs deep through performance and rhythm after having moved here in 2019, just before the covid-19 pandemic.
“It is quite difficult living in Aotearoa, where I cannot use the language as much in my day to day life,” Petueli said.
“The only time I get to do that is when I am on the phone with my parents back home, or when I am reading the Rotuman Bible and that kind of keeps me connected to my culture,” he said.
He added he definitely felt connected whenever he was dancing.
“Growing up, I learnt our traditional dances at a very young age.
Blessed and grateful
“My parents were always involved in the culture. They were also purotu, which is the choreographers and composers for our traditional dances. So, I was blessed and grateful to have that with me growing up, and I still have that with me today,” he said.
Celebrations of Rotuman Language Week first began as grassroots efforts in 2018, led by groups like the Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group Inc before receiving official support from the Ministry for Pacific Peoples in 2020.
Interview with Fesaitu Solomone. Video: RNZ Pacific
The Centre for Pacific Languages chief executive Fesaitu Solomone said young people played a critical role in this movement — but they don’t have to do it alone.
“Be not afraid to speak the language even if you make mistakes,” she said.
“Get together [and] look for people who can support you in terms of the language. We have our knowledge holders, your community, your church, your family.
“Reach out to anyone you know who can support you and create a safe environment for you to learn our Pasifika languages.”
Loved music and dance
She said one of the things that young people loved was music and dance and the centre wanted to make sure that they continued to learn language through that avenue.
“It is great pathway and we recognise that a lot of our people may not want to learn language in a classroom setting or in a face to face environment,” she said.
Fesaitu said for these young leaders, the bridge was already being crossed — one dance, one chant, and one proud declaration at a time.
“And that is the work that we try and do here, is to look at ways that our young people can engage, but also be able to empower them, and give them an opportunity to be part of it.”
Petueli hopes other countries follow the example being set in Aotearoa to preserve and celebrate Pacific languages.
“I do not think any other country, even in Fiji, is doing anything like this, like the Pacific languages [weeks], and pushing for it.
“I think we are doing a great job here, and I hope that we will everywhere else can see and follow through with it.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
An Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group seminar on “decolonisation” organised last night on Rotuman Day as part of the fellowship’s Rotuman Language Week programme at the Whānau Community Centre . . . facilitated by Ara Simmons (right) with speakers Cherie Nepia (from left), Rachael Mario and Joanna Bourke. Image: APR
Few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power than Donald Trump—if only because he tramples on them so frequently.
Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.
Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.
First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles.
Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights, summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.
Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Trump’s expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property.
Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all.
Even the Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment) have found new urgency: Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder.
Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.
Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.
Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.
Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. Between continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, including a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.
Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’s approved budgetary plan. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal.
Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will.
Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.
In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.
Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?
For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.
“We the people” have power, but we must use it or lose it.
Oklahoma’s rolling out a new curriculum, a $33 million curriculum, where high school students are going to be required to learn from their social studies teacher that the 2020 election may have been stolen from Donald Trump and this is the brainchild of Ryan Walters, the superintendent of all schools in the state of Oklahoma. […]
A group of New Zealand academics at Otago University have drawn up a “Declaration on Palestine” against genocide, apartheid and scholasticide of Palestinians by Israel that has illegally occupied their indigenous lands for more than seven decades.
The document, which had already drawn more than 300 signatures from staff, students and alumni by the weekend, will be formally adopted at a congress of the Otago Staff for Justice in Palestine (OSJP) group on Thursday.
“At a time when our universities, our public institutions and our political leaders are silent in the face of the daily horrors we are shown from illegally-occupied Palestine, this declaration is an act of solidarity with our Palestinian whānau,” declared Professor Richard Jackson from Te Ao O Rongomaraeroa — The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.
“It expresses the brutal truth of what is currently taking place in Palestine, as well as our commitment to international law and human rights, and our social responsibilities as academics.
“We hope the declaration will be an inspiration to others and a call to action at a moment when the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is accelerating at an alarming rate.”
Scholars and students at the university had expressed concern that they did not want to be teaching or learning about the Palestinian genocide in future courses on the history of the Palestinian people, Professor Jackson said.
Nor did they want to feel ashamed when they were asked what they did while the genocide was taking place.
‘Collective moral courage’
“Signing up to the declaration represents an act of individual and collective moral courage, and a public commitment to working to end the genocide.”
The declaration commits its signatories to an academic boycott as part of the wider Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanction (BDS) campaign “until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide”, they had national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The declaration says that given the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled there is a “plausible” case that Israel has been committing genocide, and that all states that are signatory to the Genocide Convention must take all necessary measures to prevent acts of genocide, the signatories commit themselves to an academic boycott.
BDS is a campaign, begun in 2005, to promote economic, social and cultural boycotts of the Israeli government, Israeli companies and companies that support Israel, in an effort to end the occupation of Palestinian territories and win equal rights for Palestinian citizens within Israel.
It draws inspiration from South African anti-apartheid campaigns and the United States civil rights movement.
The full text of the declaration:
The Otago Declaration on the Situation in Palestine
We, the staff, students and graduates, being members of the University of Otago, make the following declaration.
We fully and completely recognise that: – The Palestinian people have a right under international law to national self-determination; – The Palestinians have the right to security and the full enjoyment of all human and social rights as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
And furthermore that: – Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian nation, according to experts, official bodies, international lawyers and human rights organisations; – Israel operates a system of apartheid in the territories it controls, and denies the full expression and enjoyment of human rights to Palestinians, according to international courts, human rights organisations, legal and academic experts; – Israel is committing scholasticide, thereby denying Palestinians their right to education;
We recognise that: – Given the International Court of Justice has ruled that there is a plausible case that Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, that all states that are signatory to the Genocide Convention, which includes Aotearoa New Zealand, have a responsibility to take all necessary measures to prevent acts of genocide;
We also acknowledge that as members of a public institution with educational responsibilities: – We hold a legal and ethical responsibility to act as critic and conscience of society, both individually as members of the University and collectively as a social institution; – We have a responsibility to follow international law and norms and to act in an ethical manner in our personal and professional endeavours; – We hold an ethical responsibility to act in solidarity with oppressed and disadvantaged people, including those who struggle against settler colonial regimes or discriminatory apartheid systems and the harmful long-term effects of colonisation; – We owe a responsibility to fellow educators who are victimised by apartheid and scholasticide;
Therefore, we, the under-signed, do solemnly commit ourselves to: – Uphold the practices, standards and ethics of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in terms of investment and procurement as called for by Palestinian civil society and international legal bodies; until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide, national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. – Adopt as part of the BDS campaign an Academic Boycott, as called for by Palestinian civil society and international legal bodies; until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide, national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Otago Declaration congress meeting will be held on Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 12 noon at the Museum Lawn, Dunedin.
A new petition is calling for mandatory training for education staff on neurodivergence – and it’s already taking off. In just a matter of days, more than 800 people have signed in support, reflecting growing public demand for an education system that truly includes and supports neurodivergent pupils.
Petition calling for mandatory education staff training on neurodivergence
The petition calls on the government to ensure that neurodivergence is included as mandatory, core training for all education staff, including teachers, teaching assistants and support professionals across early years, primary, and secondary settings.
Despite rising awareness, only 14% of secondary teachers have received more than half a day’s autism training. Schools are more than twice as likely to exclude neurodivergent pupils – including autistic students, and those with ADHD, dyslexia, and other conditions.
The petition notes that this:
contributes to poor mental health and emotional distress.
Therefore, it makes the case that:
Mandatory training could help staff create inclusive classrooms, recognise distress early, make reasonable adjustments, and ensure neurodivergent children feel safe, supported, and able to thrive.
Neurodivergent students failed by the education system
Disability rights advocate Thomas Howard launched the vital new petition to help change the education environment for neurodivergent pupils. The Big Issue’snamed him in its Top 100 Changemakers in 2024. He was also the recipient of the 2025 Autism Hero Award for Personal Achievement. Thomas’s campaigning focuses on improving outcomes in education and employment for neurodivergent people, shaped by his own lived experience.
Thomas said:
As someone who was failed by the education system, I know how isolating it can feel to be misunderstood at school.
This campaign is about making sure no child is left behind just because they think differently. Neurodivergence should be recognised, respected, and supported – not punished.
Most teachers want to help, but they’re not given the training they need. This petition isn’t about blame –
it’s about building the understanding that should already be part of core training.
Thomas previously led a successful petition on higher education which reached over 16,000 signatures. Parliament debated this in December 2023. Now, this new petition broadens the scope to create a joined-up, inclusive approach from early years onwards.
At 10,000 signatures, the government must issue a formal response. At 100,000, it will be considered for a Parliamentary debate. So, Thomas is urging as many people as possible to support his call to ensure education settings are places of support and inclusivity for neurodivergent children.
A new Auckland-based kava business has found itself at the heart of a cultural debate, with critics raising concerns about appropriation, authenticity, and the future of kava as a deeply rooted Pacific tradition.
Vibes Kava, co-founded by Charles Byram and Derek Hillen, operates out of New Leaf Kombucha taproom in Grey Lynn.
The pair launched the business earlier this year, promoting it as a space for connection and community.
Byram, a Kiwi-American of Samoan descent, returned to Aotearoa after growing up in the United States. Hillen, originally from Canada, moved to New Zealand 10 years ago.
Both say they discovered kava during the covid-19 pandemic and credit it with helping them shift away from alcohol.
“We wanted to create something that brings people together in a healthier way,” the pair said.
However, their vision has been met with growing criticism, with people saying the business lacks cultural depth, misrepresents tradition, and risks commodifying a sacred practice.
Context and different perspectives Tensions escalated after Vibes Kava posted a promotional video on Instagram, describing their offering as “a modern take on a 3000-year-old tradition” and “a lifestyle shift, one shell at a time”.
On their website, Hillen is referred to as a “kava evangelist,” while videos feature Byram hosting casual kava circles and promoting fortnightly “kava socials.”
The kava they sell is bottled, with tag names referencing the effects of each different kava bottle — for example, “buzzy kava” and “chill kava”.
Their promotional content was later reposted on TikTok by a prominent Pacific influencer, prompting an influx of online input about the legitimacy of their business and the diversity of their kava circles.
The reposted video has since received more than 95,000 views, 1600 shares, and 11,000 interactions.
In the TikTok caption, the influencer questioned the ethical foundations of the business.
“I would like to know what type of ethics was put into the creation of this . . . who was consulted, and said it was okay to make a brand out of a tradition?”
Criticised the brand’s aesthetic
Speaking to RNZ Pacific anonymously, the influencer criticised the brand’s aesthetic and messaging, describing it as “exploitative”.
“Their website and Instagram portray trendy, wellness-style branding rather than a proud celebration of authentic Pacific customs or values,” they said.
“I feel like co-owner Charles appears to use his Samoan heritage as a buffer against the backlash he’s received.
“Not to discredit his identity in any way; he is Samoan, and seems like a proud Samoan too.
“However, that should be reflected consistently in their branding. What’s currently shown on their website and Instagram is a mix of Fijian kava practice served in a Samoan tanoa. That to me is confusing and dilutes cultural authenticity.”
Fiji academic Dr Apo Aporosa said much of the misunderstanding stems from a narrow perception of kava as simply being a beverage.
“Most people who think they are using kava are not,” Aporosa said.
‘Detached from culture’
“What they’re consuming may contain Piper methysticum, but it’s detached from the cultural framework that defines what kava actually is.”
Aporosa said it is important to recognise kava as both a substance and a practice — one that involves ceremony, structure, and values.
“It is used to nurture vā, the relational space between people, and is traditionally accompanied by specific customs: woven mats, the tanoa bowl, coconut shell cups (bilo or ipu), and a shared sense of respect and order.”
He said that the commodification of kava, through flavoured drink extracts and Western “wellness” branding, is concerning, and that it distorts the plant’s original purpose.
“When people repackage kava without understanding or respecting the culture it comes from, it becomes cultural appropriation,” he said.
He added that it is not about restricting access to kava — it is about protecting its cultural integrity and honouring the knowledge Pacific communities have preserved for upwards of 2000 years.
Fijian students at the Victoria University of Wellington conduct a sevusevu (kava ceremony) to start off Fiji Language Week. Image: RNZ Pacific/Koroi Hawkins
‘We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide’ Dr Edmond Fehoko, is a renowned Tongan academic and senior lecturer at Otago University, garnered international attention for his research on the experiences and perceptions of New Zealand-born Tongan men who participate in faikava.
He said these situations are layered.
“I see the cultural appreciation side of things, and I see the cultural appropriation side of things,” Fehoko said.
“It is one of the few practices we hold dearly to our heart, and that is somewhat indigenous to our Pacific people — it can’t be found anywhere else.
“Hence, it holds a sacred place in our society. But, we as a peoples, have actually not done a good enough job to raise awareness of the practice to other societies, and now it’s a race issue, that only Pacific people have the rights to this — and I don’t think that is the case anymore.”
He explained that it is part of a broader dynamic around kava’s globalisation — and that for many people, both Pacific and non-Pacific, kava is an “interesting and exciting space, where all types of people, and all genders, come in and feel safe”.
“Yes, that is moving away from the cultural, customary way of things. But, we need to find new ways, and create new opportunities, to further disseminate our knowledge.
‘Not the same today’
“Our kava practice is not the same today as it was 10, 20 years ago. Kava practices have evolved significantly across generations.
“There are over 200 kava bars in the United States . . . kava is one of the few traditions that is uniquely Pacific. But our understanding of it has to evolve too. We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide,” he said.
Dr Edmond Fehoko . . . “Kava practices have evolved significantly across generations.” Image: RNZ Pacific/ Sara Vui-Talitu
He added that the issue of kava being commercialised by non-Pacific people cannot necessarily be criticised.
“It’s two-fold, and quite contradictory,” he said, adding that the criticism against these ventures often overlooks the parallel ways in which Pacific communities are also reshaping and profiting from the tradition.
“We argue that non-Pacific people are profiting off our culture, but the truth is, many of us are too,” he said.
“A minority have extensive knowledge of kava . . . and if others want to appreciate our culture, let them take it further with us, instead of the backlash.
“If these lads are enjoying a good time and have the same vibe . . . the only difference is the colour of their skin, and the language they are using, which has become the norm in our kava practices as well.
“But here, we have an opportunity to educate people on the importance of our practice. Let’s raise awareness. Kava is a practice we can use as a vehicle, or medium, to navigate these spaces.”
Vibes Kava co-founder Charles Byram . . . It’s tough to be this person and then get hurt online, without having a conversation with me. Nobody took the time to ask those questions.” Image: Brady Dyer/BradyDyer.com/RNZ Pacific
‘Getting judged for the colour of my skin’ “I completely understand the points that have been brought up,” Byram said in response to the criticism.
Tearing up, he said that was one of the most difficult things to swallow was backlash fixated on his cultural identity.
“I felt like I was getting judged for the colour of my skin, and for not understanding who I was or what I was trying to accomplish. If my skin was a bit darker, I might have been given some more grace.
“I was raised in a Samoan household. My grandfather is Samoan . . . my mum is Samoan. It’s tough to be this person and then get hurt online, without having a conversation with me. Nobody took the time to ask those questions,” he said.
The pair also pushed back on claims they are focused on profit.
“We went there to learn, to dive into the culture. We went to a lot of kava bars, interviewed farmers, just to understand the origin of kava, how it works within a community, and then how best to engage with, and showcase it,” Byram said.
“People have criticised that we are profiting — we’re making no money at this point. All the money we make from this kava has gone back to the farmers in Vanuatu.”
Representing a minority
Hillen thinks those criticising them represent a minority.
“We have a lot of Pasifika customers that come here [and] they support us.
“They are ecstatic their culture is being promoted this way, and love what we are doing. The negative response from a minority part of the population was surprising to us.”
Critics had argued that the business showcased confusing blends of different cultural approaches.
Byram and Hillen said that it is up to other people to investigate and learn about the cultures, and that they are simply trying to acknowledge all of them.
Byram, however, added that the critics brought up some good points — and that this will be a catalyst for change within their business.
“Yesterday, we joined the Pacific Business Hub. We are [taking] steps to integrate more about the culture, community, and what we are trying to accomplish here.”
They also addressed their initial silence and comment moderation.
‘Cycle so self-perpetuating’
“I think the cycle was so self-perpetuating, so I was like . . . I need to make sure I respond with candor, concern, and active communication.
“So I deleted comments and put a pause on things, so we could have some space before the comments get out of hand.
“At the end of the day . . . this is about my connection with my culture and people more than anything, and I’m excited to grow from it. I’m learning, and I’m utilising this as a growth point. We’re just doing our best,” Byram said.
Hillen added: “You have to understand, this business is super new, so we’re still figuring out how best to do things, how to market and grow along with not only the community.
“What we really want to represent as people who care about, and believe in this.”
Byram said they want to acknowledge as many peoples as possible.
“We don’t want to create ceremony or steal anything from the culture. We really just want to celebrate it, and so again, we acknowledge the concern,” he added.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
We’ve visited Ground Zero. Not once, but three times. But for generations, before these locations were designated as such, they were the ancestral home to the people of the Marshall Islands.
As part of a team of Greenpeace scientists and specialists from the Radiation Protection Advisers team, we have embarked on a six-week tour on board the Rainbow Warrior, sailing through one of the most disturbing chapters in human history: between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs across the Marshall Islands — equivalent to 7200 Hiroshima explosions.
During this period, testing nuclear weapons at the expense of wonderful ocean nations like the Marshall Islands was considered an acceptable practice, or as the US put it, “for the good of mankind”.
Instead, the radioactive fallout left a deep and complex legacy — one that is both scientific and profoundly human, with communities displaced for generations.
Between March and April, we travelled on the Greenpeace flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, throughout the Marshall Islands, including to three northern atolls that bear the most severe scars of Cold War nuclear weapons testing:
Enewetak atoll, where, on Runit Island, stands a massive leaking concrete dome beneath which lies plutonium-contaminated waste, a result of a partial “clean-up” of some of the islands after the nuclear tests;
Bikini atoll, a place so beautiful, yet rendered uninhabitable by some of the most powerful nuclear detonations ever conducted; and
Rongelap atoll, where residents were exposed to radiation fallout and later convinced to return to contaminated land, part of what is now known as Project 4.1, a US medical experiment to test humans’ exposure to radiation.
This isn’t fiction, nor the distant past. It’s a chapter of history still alive through the environment, the health of communities, and the data we’re collecting today.
Each location we visit, each sample we take, adds to a clearer picture of some of the long-term impacts of nuclear testing—and highlights the importance of continuing to document, investigate, and attempt to understand and share these findings.
These are our field notes from a journey through places that hold important lessons for science, justice, and global accountability.
Our mission: why are we here? With the permission and support of the Marshallese government, a group of Greenpeace science and radiation experts, together with independent scientists, are in the island nation to assess, investigate, and document the long-term environmental and radiological consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands.
Our mission is grounded in science. We’re conducting field sampling and radiological surveys to gather data on what radioactivity remains in the environment — isotopes such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240. These substances are released during nuclear explosions and can linger in the environment for decades, posing serious health risks, such as increased risk of cancers in organs and bones.
But this work is not only about radiation measurements, it is also about bearing witness.
We are here in solidarity with Marshallese communities who continue to live with the consequences of decisions made decades ago, without their consent and far from the public eye.
Stop 1: Enewetak Atoll — the dome that shouldn’t exist
At the far western edge of the Marshall Islands is Enewetak. The name might not ring a bell for many, but this atoll was the site of 43 US nuclear detonations. Today, it houses what may be one of the most radioactive places in the world — the Runit Dome.
Once a tropical paradise thick with coconut palms, Runit Island is capped by a massive concrete structure the size of a football field. Under this dome — cracked, weather-worn, and only 46 centimetres thick in some places — lies 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste. These substances are not only confined to the crater — they are also found across the island’s soil, rendering Runit Island uninhabitable for all time.
The contrast between what it once was and what it has become is staggering. We took samples near the dome’s base, where rising sea levels now routinely flood the area.
We collected coconut from the island, which will be processed and prepared in the Rainbow Warrior’s onboard laboratory. Crops such as coconut are a known vector for radioactive isotope transfer, and tracking levels in food sources is essential for understanding long-term environmental and health risks.
The local consequences of this simple fact are deeply unjust. While some atolls in the Marshall Islands can harvest and sell coconut products, the people of Enewetak are prohibited from doing so because of radioactive contamination.
They have lost not only their land and safety but also their ability to sustain themselves economically. The radioactive legacy has robbed them of income and opportunity.
One of the most alarming details about this dome is that there is no lining beneath the structure — it is in direct contact with the environment, while containing some of the most hazardous long-lived substances ever to exist on planet Earth. It was never built to withstand flooding, sea level rise, and climate change.
The scientific questions are urgent: how much of this material is already leaking into the lagoon? What are the exposure risks to marine ecosystems and local communities?
We are here to help answer questions with new, independent data, but still, being in the craters and walking on this ground where nuclear Armageddon was unleashed is an emotional and surreal journey.
Stop 2: Bikini — a nuclear catastrophe, labelled ‘for the good of mankind’
Unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima, where communities were devastated by catastrophic accidents, Bikini tells a different story. This was not an accident.
The nuclear destruction of Bikini was deliberate, calculated, and executed with full knowledge that entire ways of life were going to be destroyed.
Bikini Atoll is incredibly beautiful and would look idyllic on any postcard. But we know what lies beneath: the site of 23 nuclear detonations, including Castle Bravo, the largest ever nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States.
Castle Bravo alone released more than 1000 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. The radioactive fallout massively contaminated nearby islands and their populations, together with thousands of US military personnel.
Bikini’s former residents were forcibly relocated in 1946 before nuclear testing began, with promises of a safe return. But the atoll is still uninhabited, and most of the new generations of Bikinians have never seen their home island.
As we stood deep in the forest next to a massive concrete blast bunker, reality hit hard — behind its narrow lead-glass viewing window, US military personnel once watched the evaporation of Bikini lagoon.
On our visit, we noticed there’s a spectral quality to Bikini. The homes of the Bikini islanders are long gone. In its place now stand a scattering of buildings left by the US Department of Energy: rusting canteens, rotting offices, sleeping quarters with peeling walls, and traces of the scientific experiments conducted here after the bombs fell.
On dusty desks, we found radiation reports, notes detailing crop trials, and a notebook meticulously tracking the application of potassium to test plots of corn, alfalfa, lime, and native foods like coconut, pandanus, and banana. The potassium was intended to block the uptake of caesium-137, a radioactive isotope, by plant roots.
The logic was simple: if these crops could be decontaminated, perhaps one day Bikini could be repopulated.
We collected samples of coconuts and soil — key indicators of internal exposure risk if humans were to return. Bikini raises a stark question: What does “safe” mean, and who gets to decide?
The US declared parts of Bikini habitable in 1970, only to evacuate people again eight years later after resettled families suffered from radiation exposure. The science is not abstract here. It is personal. It is human. It has real consequences.
The Rainbow Warrior arrived at the eastern side of Rongelap atoll, anchoring one mile from the centre of Rongelap Island, the church spire and roofs of “new” buildings reflecting the bright sun.
n 1954, fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear detonation on Bikini blanketed this atoll in radioactive ash — fine, white powder that children played in, thinking it was snow. The US government waited three days to evacuate residents, despite knowing the risks. The US government declared it safe to return to Rongelap in 1957 — but it was a severely contaminated environment. The very significant radiation exposure to the Rongelap population caused severe health impacts: thyroid cancers, birth defects such as “jellyfish babies”, miscarriages, and much more.
In 1985, after a request to the US government to evacuate was dismissed, the Rongelap community asked Greenpeace to help relocate them from their ancestral lands. Using the first Rainbow Warrior, and over a period of 10 days and four trips, 350 residents collectively dismantled their homes, bringing everything with them — including livestock, and 100 metric tons of building material — where they resettled on the islands of Mejatto and Ebeye on Kwajalein atoll.
It is a part of history that lives on in the minds of the Marshallese people we meet in this ship voyage — in the gratitude they still express, the pride in keeping the fight for justice, and in the pain of still not having a permanent, safe home.
Now, once again, we are standing on their island of Rongelap, walking past abandoned buildings and rusting equipment, some of it dating from the 1980s and 1990s — a period when the US Department of Energy launched a push to encourage resettlement declaring that the island was safe — a declaration that this time, the population welcomed with mistrust, not having access to independent scientific data and remembering the deceitful relocation of some decades before.
Here, once again, we sample soil and fruits that could become food if people came back. It is essential to understand ongoing risks — especially for communities considering whether and how to return.
Our scientific mission is to take measurements, collect samples, and document contamination. But that’s not all we’re bringing back.
We carry with us the voices of the Marshallese who survived these tests and are still living with their consequences. We carry images of graves swallowed by tides near Runit Dome, stories of entire cultures displaced from their homelands, and measurements of radiation showing contamination still persists after many decades.
There are 9700 nuclear warheads still held by military powers around the world – mostly in the United States and Russian arsenals. The Marshall Islands was one of the first nations to suffer the consequences of nuclear weapons — and the legacy persists today.
We didn’t come to speak for the Marshallese. We came to listen, to bear witness, and to support their demand for justice. We plan to return next year, to follow up on our research and to make results available to the people of the Marshall Islands.
And we will keep telling these stories — until justice is more than just a word.
Kommol Tata (“thank you” in the beautiful Marshallese language) for following our journey.
Shaun Burnie is a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine and was part of the Rainbow Warrior team in the Marshall Islands. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa and is republished with permission.
President Donald Trump sparked widespread outrage Thursday by abruptly firing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden with a two-sentence email sent by the White House’s deputy director of presidential personnel. According to her bio, Hayden was the first woman and first African American to lead the national library, which is the largest in the world and home to more than 178 million items…
This article was initially set out to focus onThe Encampments, Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s impassioned documentary that chronicles the Columbia University student movement that shook the United States and captured imaginations the world over.
But then it came to my attention that a sparring film has been released around the same time, offering a staunchly pro-Israeli counter-narrative that vehemently attempts to discredit the account offered by The Encampments.
October 8 charts the alleged rise of antisemitism in the US in the wake of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian fighters.
A balanced record though, it is not. Wendy Sachs’s solo debut feature, which has the subhead, “The Fight for the Soul of America”, is essentially an unabashed defence of the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.
Its omissions are predictable; its moral logic is fascinatingly disturbing; its manipulative arguments are the stuff of Steven Bannon.
It’s easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across .
Ignoring October 8 would be injudicious, however. Selected only by a number of Jewish film festivals in the US, the film was released in mid-March by indie distribution outfit Briarcliff Entertainment in more than 125 theatres.
The film has amassed more than $1.3 million so far at the US box office, making it the second-highest grossing documentary of the year, ironically behind the self-distributed and Oscar-winning No Other Land about Palestine at $2.4 million.
October 8 has sold more than 90,000 tickets, an impressive achievement given the fact that at least 73 percent of the 7.5 million Jewish Americans still hold a favourable view of Israel.
“It would be great if we were getting a lot of crossover, but I don’t know that we are,” Sachs admitted to the Hollywood Reporter.
Zionist films have been largely absent from most local and international film festivals — curation, after all, is an ethical occupation — while Palestinian stories, by contrast, have seen an enormous rise in popularity since October 7.
The phenomenon culminated with the Oscar win for No Other Land.
October 8 . . . “easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across.” Image: Briarcliff Entertainment
But the release of October 8 and the selection of several Israeli hostage dramas in February’s Berlin Film Festival indicates that the war has officially reached the big screen.
With the aforementioned hostage dramas due to be shown stateside later this year, and no less than four major Palestinian pictures set for theatrical release over the next 12 months, this Israeli-Palestinian film feud is just getting started.
Working for change The Encampments, which raked in a highly impressive $423,000 in 50 theatres after a month of release, has been garnering more headlines, not only due to the fact that the recently detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil happens to be one of its protagonists, but because it is clearly the better film.
Pritsker and Workman, who were on the ground with the students for most of the six-week duration of the set-in, provide a keenly observed, intimate view of the action, capturing the inspiring highs and dispiriting lows of the passionate demonstrations and wayward negotiations with Columbia’s administrations.
The narrative is anchored from the point of views of four students: Grant Miner, a Jewish PhD student who was expelled in March for his involvement in the protests; Sueda Polat, a protest negotiator and spokesperson for the encampments; Naye Idriss, a Palestinian organiser and Columbia alumni; and the soft-spoken Khalil, the Palestinian student elected to lead the negotiations.
A desire for justice, for holding Israel accountable for its crimes in Gaza, permeated the group’s calling for divesting Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment funds from weapons manufacturers and tech companies with business links to the Netanyahu’s administration.
Each of the four shares similar background stories, but Miner and Khalil stand out. As a Jew, Miner is an example of a young Jewish American generation that regard their Jewishness as a moral imperative for defending the Palestinian cause.
Khalil, meanwhile, carries the familiar burden of being a child of the camps: a descendant of a family that was forcibly displaced from their Tiberias home in 1948.
The personal histories provide ample opportunities for reflections around questions of identity, trauma, and the youthful desire for tangible change.
Each protester stresses that the encampment was a last and only resort after the Columbia hierarchy casually brushed aside their concerns.
These concerns transformed into demands when it became clear that only more strident action like sit-ins could push the Columbia administration to engage with them.
In an age when most people are content to sit idly behind their computers waiting for something to happen, these students took it upon themselves to actively work for change in a country where change, especially in the face of powerful lobbies, is arduous.
Only through protests, the viewers begin to realise, can these four lucidly deal with the senseless, numbing bloodshed and brutality in Gaza.
Crackdown on free speech Through skilled placement of archival footage, Pritsker and Workman aptly link the encampments with other student movements in Columbia, including the earlier occupation of Hamilton Hall in 1968 that demonstrated the university’s historic ties with bodies that supported America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Both anti-war movements were countered by an identical measure: the university’s summoning of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to violently dismantle the protests.
Neither the Columbia administration, represented by the disgraced ex-president Minouche Shafik, nor the NYPD are portrayed in a flattering fashion.
Shafik comes off as a wishy-washy figure, too protective of her position to take a concrete stance for or against the pro-Palestinian protesters.
The NYPD were a regular fixture outside universities in New York during the encampments during 2024 Image: MEE/Azad Essa
The NYPD’s employment of violence against the peaceful protests that they declared to have “devolved into antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric” is an admission that violence against words can be justified, undermining the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects free speech.
The Encampments is not without flaws. By strictly adhering to the testimonials of its subjects, Pritsker and Workman leave out several imperative details.
These include the identity of the companies behind endowment allocations, the fact that several Congress senators who most prominently criticised the encampments “received over $100,000 more on average from pro-Israel donors during their last election” according to a Guardianfinding, and the revelations that US police forces have received analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli army and Israeli think tanks.
The suggested link between the 1968 protests and the present situation is not entirely accurate either.
The endowments industry was nowhere as big as it is now, and there’s an argument to be made about the deprioritisation of education by universities vis-a-vis their endowments.
A bias towards Israel or a determination to assert the management’s authority is not the real motive behind their position — it’s the money.
Lastly, avoiding October 7 and the moral and political issues ingrained within the attack, while refraining from confronting the pro-Israel voices that accused the protesters of aggression and antisemitism, is a major blind spot that allows conservatives and pro-Israel pundits to accuse the filmmakers of bias.
One could be asking too much from a film directed by first-time filmmakers that was rushed into theatres to enhance awareness about Mahmoud Khalil’s political persecution, but The Encampments, which was co-produced by rapper Macklemore, remains an important, urgent, and honest document of an event that has been repeatedly tarnished by the media and self-serving politicians.
The politics of victimhood The imperfections of The Encampments are partially derived from lack of experience on its creators’ part.
Any accusations of malice are unfounded, especially since the directors do not waste time in arguing against Zionism or paint its subjects as victims. The same cannot be said of October 8.
Executive produced by actress Debra Messing of Will & Grace fame, who also appears in the film, October 8 adopts a shabby, scattershot structure vastly comprised of interviews with nearly every high-profile pro-Israel person in America.
The talking heads are interjected with dubious graphs and craftily edited footage culled from social media of alleged pro-Palestinian protesters in college campuses verbally attacking Jewish students and allegedly advocating the ideology of Hamas.
Needless to say, no context is given to these videos whose dates and locations are never identified.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve the victimisation card by using the same language that informed the pro-Palestine discourse
Every imaginable falsification and shaky allegation regarding the righteousness of Zionism is paraded: anti-Zionism is the new form of antisemitism; pro-Palestinian protesters harassed pro-Israel Jewish students; the media is flooded with pro-Palestinian bias.
Other tropes include the claim that Hamas is conspiring to destabilise American democracy and unleash hell on the Western world.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who defected to Israel in 1997, stresses that “my definition of Intifada is chaos”.
There is also the suggestion that the protests, if not contained, could spiral into Nazi era-like fascism.
Sachs goes as far as showing historical footage of the Third Reich to demonstrate her point.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve Israel’s victimhood by using the same language that informs pro-Palestine discourse. “Gaza hijacked all underdog stories in the world,” one interviewee laments.
At one point, the attacks of October 7 are described as a “genocide”, while Zionism is referred to as a “civil rights movement”.
One interviewee explains that the framing of the Gaza war as David and Goliath is erroneous when considering that Hamas is backed by almighty Iran and that Israel is surrounded by numerous hostile countries, such as Lebanon and Syria.
In the most fanciful segment of the film, the interviewees claim that the Students for Justice in Palestine is affiliated and under the command of Hamas, while haphazardly linking random terrorist attacks, such as 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting to Hamas and by extension the Palestinian cause.
A simmering racist charge delineate the film’s pro-Israel discourse in its instance on pigeonholing all Palestinians as radical Muslim Hamas supporters.
There isn’t a single mention of the occupied West Bank or Palestinian religious minorities or even anti-Hamas sentiment in Gaza.
Depicting all Palestinians as a rigid monolith profoundly contrasts Pritsker and Workman’s nuanced treatment of their Jewish subjects.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism
There’s a difference between subtraction and omission: the former affects logical form, while the latter affects logical content.
October 8 is built on a series of deliberate omissions and fear mongering, an unscrupulous if familiar tactic that betrays the subjects’ indignation and their weak conviction.
It is thus not surprising that there is no mention of the Nakba or the fact that the so-called “civil rights movement” is linked to a state founded on looted lands or the grand open prison Israel has turned Gaza into, or the endless humiliation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is also no mention of the racist and inciting statements by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Nor is there mention of the Palestinians who have been abducted and tortured and raped in Israeli prisons.
And definitely not of the more than 52,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date.
Sachs’ subjects naturally are too enveloped in their own conspiracies, in the tightly knotted narrative they concocted for themselves, to be aware of their privilege.
The problem is, these subjects want to have their cake and eat it. Throughout, they constantly complain of being silenced; that most institutions, be it the media or college hierarchies or human rights organisations, have not recognised the colossal loss of 7 October 7 and have focused instead on Palestinian suffering.
They theorise that the refusal of the authorities in taking firm and direct action against pro-Palestinian voices has fostered antisemitism.
At the same time, they have no qualms in flaunting their contribution to New York Times op-eds or the testimonies they were invited to present at the Congress.
All the while, Khalil and other Palestinian activists are arrested, deported and stripped of their residencies.
The value of good journalism October 8, which portrays the IDF as a brave, truth-seeking institution, is not merely a pro-Israel propaganda, it’s a far-right propaganda.
The subjects adopt Trump rhetoric in similarly blaming the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies for the rise of antisemitism, while dismissing intersectionality and anti-colonialism for giving legitimacy to the Palestinian cause.
As repugnant as October 8 is, it is crucial to engage with work of its ilk and confront its hyperboles.
Last month, the Hollywood Reporter set up an unanticipated discussion between Pritsker, who is in fact Jewish, and pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig.
The heated exchange that followed demonstrated the difficulty of communication with the pro-Israeli lobby, yet nonetheless underlines the necessity of communication, at least in film.
Mazzig spends the larger part of the discussion spewing unfounded accusations that he provides no validations for: “Mahmoud Khalil has links to Hamas,” he says at one point.
When asked about the Palestinian prisoners, he confidently attests that “the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners” — hostages, as Pritsker calls them — they have committed crimes and are held in Israeli prisons, right?
“In fact, in the latest hostage release eight Palestinian prisoners refused to go back to Gaza because they’ve enjoyed their treatment in these prisons.”
Mazzig dismisses pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the pro-Palestinian Jewish students who participated in the encampments.
“No one would make this argument but here we are able to tokenise a minority, a fringe community, and weaponise it against us,” he says.
“It’s not because they care about Jews and want Jews to be represented. It’s that they hate us so much that they’re doing this and gaslighting us.”
At this stage, attempting for the umpteenth time to stress that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not one and the same — a reality that the far-right rejects — is frankly pointless.
Attempting, like Khalil, to continually emphasise our unequivocal rejection of antisemitism, to underscore that our Jewish colleagues and friends are partners in our struggle for equality and justice, is frankly demeaning.
For Mazzig and Messing and the October 8 subjects, every Arab, every pro-Palestinian, is automatically an antisemite until proven otherwise.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism.
Emotionality has no place in this increasingly hostile landscape. The reason why The Bibi Files and Louis Theroux’s The Settlers work so well is due to their flawless journalism.
People may believe what they want to believe, but for the undecided and the uninformed, factuality and journalistic integrity — values that go over Sachs’ head — could prove to be the most potent weapon of all.
Joseph Fahim is an Egyptian film critic and programmer. He is the Arab delegate of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, a former member of Berlin Critics’ Week and the ex director of programming of the Cairo International Film Festival. This article was first published by Middle East Eye.
Despite endless insistence by privatizers that charter schools are public schools, many people spontaneously think that charter schools are not public schools.
Much of the public does not automatically see charter schools as public schools proper. They are viewed as being different from public schools and put in a separate category than public schools.
When asked what they think a charter school is, the average person often says something like: “I’m not really sure, aren’t they some sort of private school, I really don’t know, but I have heard of them, they seem like private schools to me.”
In this vein, people often share different things they have heard about charter schools. For example, they have heard that charter schools are deregulated schools, take money from public schools, have high teacher turnover rates, cherry-pick students, offer no teacher retirement plan, have no teachers union, pay teachers less than public school teachers, etc. Such facts naturally infiltrate the public sphere and produce a certain social consciousness about charter schools, which have been around for 33 years.
Although the mass media works overtime to promote disinformation about the “publicness”/”privateness” of charter schools, it is significant that people generally see charter schools as being private in some way. There is a pervasive sense that charter schools and public schools are dissimilar entities with different structures, functions, aims, and results.[1] A main problem here though is that while people are aware of certain facts about charter schools they rarely have an integrated, cogent, well-worked-out analysis of what charter schools represent as an education arrangement in the U.S. A detailed big-picture view connecting many important dots is often missing, leaving many vulnerable to disinformation about charter schools.
A main reason for the widespread public perception of charter schools as private education arrangements is that charter schools do in fact differ from public schools in many ways, despite neoliberal efforts to mix up the “publicness” and “privateness” of these two different organizations.
But to add even more confusion to the mix, even some prominent “critics” of charter schools claim that charter schools are neither completely public nor completely private in character. They are supposedly “a little bit of both;” they are “a mix” of public and private.
According to this view, charter schools, all of which are owned-operated by unelected private persons, organizations, or companies, are supposedly “hybrid schools”—they are semi-private and semi-public, so to speak.
In other words, charter schools ride the public/private fence without being fully one or the other. This implies that one aspect (public or private) does not eclipse the other, which suggests that it is erroneous to see charter schools as the essentially privatized arrangements that they really are.
Keeping in mind that the U.S. constitution does not recognize education as a basic human right, it is important to discuss whether charter schools really operate as public schools or privatized education arrangements. This is not a trivial issue. Moreover, can charter schools be considered “hybrid” schools with both private and public features in the proper sense of both words, as some claim?
For starters, public and private mean the opposite of each other; they are antonyms. Importantly, public law deals with relations between the state and individuals, while private law deals with relations between private citizens. Contract law, for example, is part of private law. Charter schools are contract schools. Charter means contract. Thus, the laws that apply to charter schools differ from the laws that apply traditional public schools. This is why, for example, teachers’ rights in charter schools are not the same as teachers’ rights in public schools.
Public refers to everyone, the common good, all people, transparency, affordability, accessibility, universality, non-rivalry, non-discrimination, and inclusiveness. Examples of public goods include public parks, public libraries, public roads, public schools, public colleges and universities, public hospitals, public restrooms, public housing, public banks, public events, forests, street lighting, and more. These goods are available to everyone, not just a few people. They are integral to a civil society that recognizes the role and significance of a public sphere in modern times. Such public provisions can be optimized only in the context of arrangements that are genuinely and thoroughly democratic.
Private, on the other hand, means exclusive, not for everyone, not for the common good, not for all people, not collective, not governmental, not free, not broadly obtainable, only available to or accessible by a few. Something is private when it is “designed or intended for one’s exclusive use.” Examples include private property, private facilities, private schools, private clubs, designer shoes, Ferraris, first class plane tickets, mansions, and more. Such phenomena usually cost money, they are based on ability to pay.
-Secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.
-Of or confined to the individual; personal.
-Undertaken on an individual basis.
-Not available for public use, control, or participation.
-Belonging to a particular person or persons, as opposed to the public or the government.
-Of, relating to, or derived from nongovernment sources.
-Conducted and supported primarily by individuals or groups not affiliated with governmental agencies or corporations.
-Not holding an official or public position.
-Not for public knowledge or disclosure; secret; confidential.
In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion;[2] it is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, collective well-being, or benefitting everyone. This is why when something is privatized, e.g., a public enterprise or social program, it is no longer available to everyone; it becomes something possessed and controlled by the few, for the few. This then ends up harming the public interest and social progress. Privatization typically increases corruption, reduces efficiency, lowers quality, raises costs, and restricts democracy. This applies to so-called “public-private partnerships” as well.
It is also worth noting that something does not become “public” just because it is called “public” many times a day. Simply repeating over and over again that something is public does not magically make it public. Nor does an entity spontaneously become “public” just because it receives public funds. This is not the definition of “publicness.” Thus, for example, as contract schools, charter schools do not automatically become state actors (i.e., public entities) just because they receive public funds. “Publicness” requires something more under State Action Doctrine.[3]
It is not surprising that there has always been a big chasm between charter school rhetoric and reality. Over-promising and under-delivering has been a stubborn but down-played feature of this deregulated private sector for 34 years. This can be seen in the large number of charter schools that have failed and closed in three decades, leaving millions out in the cold (see here and here).
Charter schools may look, sound, and feel public on paper, but they work differently in practice and under the law. Most charter schools operate in a manner that is the opposite of their description on paper. They do not live up to their description on paper.
Unfortunately, many do not question the description of charter schools on paper. They impulsively assume that if something is written on paper and declared “legal,” then it is automatically valid, unassailable, and true in reality. They embrace “paperism.” Critical thinking disappears in this scenario and anti-consciousness takes over. Dogmatic repetition of legal text takes hold and all thinking freezes.
The reason this obstinate large gap between rhetoric and reality remains under-appreciated by many to this day is because neoliberal discourse on charter schools keeps everything at the superficial level, regularly eschewing deep analysis, especially analysis that exposes the private character of charter schools and rampant corruption in the charter school sector. And combined with confounding what is on paper with what exists in reality, many are prevented from discerning the inherently privatized character of charter schools and the significance of this conclusion for education, society, the economy, and the national interest.
To be clear, charter schools are not hybrid public-private schools, nor are they public schools, properly speaking. They are private entities. And in the final analysis, the fundamental principle at stake is that public funds must not flow to private entities or so-called “semi-private” entities because public funds belong only to the public. The private sector has no legitimate claim to public funds that belong solely to the public. Only the public sector can control and use public funds for public goals.
Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are private businesses, regardless of their size, name, education philosophy, type, authorizer, general makeup, or location. Charter schools have always been owned-operated by private organizations. They are not state actors. They are not political subdivisions of the state or government agencies. They are not organic or natural components of state public education systems. They are not set up like that under state laws. Charter schools are not created by the State even though they may be delegated certain functions by the State. Creation and delegation are not synonymous. Furthermore, delegating a function (a way of doing something) is not the same as delegating authority (enforcing obedience). Charter schools are started/created by unelected private persons.
Charter schools have always been a different type of entity altogether: contract schools owned-operated by unelected private persons or organizations. They are performance-based contracts entered into by two distinct parties: a private organization and the government (or government-sanctioned entity). Naturally, partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. This is an important distinction in State Action Doctrine. Charter schools are not an arm of the government like traditional public schools are. They are not acting on behalf of a governmental body. Nor do they act with the same authority as the government. Interestingly, the appearance of the word “charter” before “school” is actually one of the many ways charter schools are distinguished from traditional public schools. It is also significant that the unelected private persons or corporations that own-operate charters, typically business people, derive more than an incidental benefit from owning-operating a charter school. Charter school administrators and trustees, for example, often derive a large amount of wealth and privilege from owning-operating a charter school.
For these and other reasons charter schools are intentionally called “independent,” “autonomous,” and “innovative” schools that do not follow most of the laws, rules, and regulations followed by public schools. These descriptors are key to the non-public character of charter schools. Consistent with “free market” ideology, charter schools are deregulated “schools of choice”—something “consumers” seek, even though most of the time it is the charter school that “chooses” the “shopper.”
Another major feature of the private character of charter schools is that, unlike public schools, they cannot levy taxes either. This is a particularly revealing difference between charter schools and public schools. Only the State and specific political subdivisions of the State (e.g., traditional public schools, cities, counties) can levy taxes. Charter schools are not part of this sovereign power. Also unlike public schools, charter schools are generally not zoned schools and their teachers are treated as “at will” employees, just like in a corporation. Many states even legally permit teachers to work in charter schools without any certification. Numerous other differences can be found here.
As “autonomous,” “independent,” “innovative, “rules-free” schools, charter schools are not entangled with the state in the same way that traditional public schools are. The state’s mere labeling of an institution as public or private does not determine whether it is a state actor in State Action Doctrine. Under the law and in practice, the state exercises far more control over traditional public schools than it does over charter schools, which are “schools of choice,” at least on paper. Enrollment in a charter school is voluntary. In this sense, charter schools are more like private schools that have dotted the American landscape for generations. The main point is that the State does not coerce or compel charter schools to act in the same way as public schools proper. The degree of “entanglement” between the State and the entity in question is a very important consideration in State Action Doctrine. Artificial indicators, superficial signs, or various labels are not sufficient forms of “deep entwinement” with the State. The State must be “significantly involved” in a private entity’s actions in order to conclude that State action (and therefore the 14th Amendment) is at play. For decades, the actions of deregulated charter schools have not been attributable to the government, certainly not in the same way as the actions of traditional public schools have.
This is precisely why various provisions of the U.S. Constitution do not apply to privately-operated charter schools. Many private actions are not subject to constitutional scrutiny under State Action Doctrine. Certain constitutional standards generally do not apply to acts of private persons or entities. Constitutional standards apply mainly to the States and their subdivisions (like cities, counties, and school districts). Thus, as deregulated private actors, charter schools are generally not subject to liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983,[4] while traditional public schools are. Never mind the fact that government has long been dominated by narrow private interests anyway. All levels of government today privilege private interests over the public interest. Americans exercise no control over what takes place in society.
The main reason neoliberals tirelessly repeat the disinformation that charter schools are public schools, or that charter schools have enough meaningful public features about them to render them “public” schools, is in order to justify siphoning billions of dollars a year from traditional public schools that have educated about ninety percent of America’s youth for generations. Charter schools could not seize these public funds if they were not called “public.” If they were openly recognized as the privatized entities that they are, what valid claim would they have to public funds? Public funds belong to the public. Why should public funds be handed over to private interests?
To go further, charter schools are privately-operated schools that increase segregation, intensify corruption, spend millions on advertising, have high teacher turnover rates, and constantly seek ways to maximize profits regardless of whether they are designated as non-profit or for-profit entities. They are fundamentally pay-the-rich schemes that are proliferating in the context of a continually failing economy dominated by major owners of capital. For these and other reasons, the intrinsic character of charter schools cannot be changed easily or quickly, especially given how long they have been around and how charter school laws have been written for 34 years. Can a charter school not be a charter school? Charter school owners-operators are big supporters of no governmental control and have long-referred to charter schools as “free market” schools.
For more than three decades this neoliberal financial parasitism has been cynically carried out in the name of “serving the kids,” “empowering parents,” “promoting innovation,” “getting results,” “providing choices,” “busting teacher unions,” and “increasing competition.”
Individualism, self-interest, consumerism, competition, and a dog-eat-dog ethos—the so-called “free market”—frame and drive this assault on public education and the public interest. Charter school advocates have long promoted a survival-of-the-fittest view of human relations. They believe parents are consumers who should fend-for-themselves in their quest to secure a “good education.” They think it is normal if a charter school fails, closes, and abandons everyone. This is how “businesses operate,” neoliberals casually declare.
Charter school promoters do not view parents and students as humans with an inalienable right to education that must be guaranteed in practice. You are basically on your own as you spend an extensive amount of time “shopping” for a “good” school. Fingers crossed. There are no guarantees of stability, quality, or security. Such an arrangement is claimed to be “the best of all worlds” in which the “fittest” survive while the “weak” fail. There is supposedly no conceivable alternative to this Social Darwinist ethos and the discredited racist doctrine of DNA that underlies such an obsolete ideology.
The private character of these outsourced contract schools also comes out in the fact that all charter schools in the U.S. are not only governed by unelected private persons, but many, if not most, are routinely supported, operated, or owned directly by wealthy individuals and organizations that are wreaking havoc in other spheres of society in the name of progress. In fact, many charter schools are openly operated as for-profit schools, which means cashing in on kids is their “education model.” Students are seen as a source of profit for these privately-owned-and-operated contract “schools of choice.”
Widespread patronage and nepotism in the charter school sector only add to the problems plaguing this deregulated sector, and a persistently low level of transparency and accountability in this deregulated sector does not help either. Charter authorizing bodies, the entities that supposedly oversee charter schools for a fee, have had little impact in ensuring high standards and quality in this nonpublic sector. In practice, “free market” accountability has actually lowered quality and standards.
Philosophically, legally, academically, organizationally, programmatically, and socially charter schools have little in common with public schools. They have more in common with private organizations and corporations than with public entities.
It is no accident that in recent years, neoliberal disinformation about the “publicness” and “privateness” of charter schools has become more debased in a desperate attempt to justify the expansion of charter schools across the country. Deliberate mystification about the “publicness” and “privateness” of charter schools has been at the forefront of neoliberal ideology and school privatization, disorienting even some critics of charter schools. But such “justifications” do not work because they lack legitimacy and authority; they are belied by reality.
A main thrust of the decades-long neoliberal antisocial offensive of neoliberals is to blur the distinction between public and private so as to promote narrow private interests in the name of serving the public interest. Such a top-down agenda carried out under the veneer of high ideals is self-serving because it damages education, society, the nation, and the economy. It undermines a modern nation-building project that empowers people and rejects monopolization of the economy by major owners of capital.
Charter schools prove that not every “innovation” that comes into being in the name of “education reform” benefits education, society, the economy, and the national interest.
The oral arguments presented on April 30, 2025 in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) on the public funding of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic K-12 Virtual School in Oklahoma show that there is a strong push to treat charter schools as the private entities they are, and that the long-standing critical distinction between public and private is marred by more confusion and disinformation than ever. Keeping in mind that charter schools are “public” only on paper, if SCOTUS deems charter schools to be state actors (i.e., public schools), then the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies, which means that charter school cannot be religious. However, early news reports suggest that, for the first time in history, SCOTUS may well approve the funneling of public funds to private religious actors like St. Isidore. While no court decision will change the long-standing private character of charter schools for the last 34 years, a final decision on this divisive landmark case by the SCOTUS is expected in June 2025. More on this in a future article.
The first charter school law in the U.S. was established in Minnesota in 1991. Today, about 3.8 million students attend roughly 8,000 charter schools across the country. Charter schools are legal in 47 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
ENDNOTES:
[1] The vast majority of teacher education students in the United States pursue teaching credentials in order to teach in a traditional public school. Very few, if any, are striving to become charter school teachers.
[2] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.
[3] It should always be borne in mind that the State today is a State of the rich and not a State that serves the public interest.
World Press Freedom Day is not just a celebration of the vital role journalism plays — it is also a moment to reflect on the pressures facing the profession and Pacific governments’ responsibility to protect it.
This was one of the key messages delivered by two guest speakers at The University of the South Pacific (USP) Journalism’s 2025 World Press Freedom Day celebrations this week, the UN Human Rights Adviser for the Pacific, Heike Alefsen, and Fiji Media Association’s general secretary, Stanley Simpson.
In her address to journalism students and other attendees on Monday, chief guest Alefsen emphasised that press freedom is a fundamental pillar of democracy, a human right, and essential for sustainable development and the rule of law.
“Media freedom is a prerequisite for inclusive, rights-respecting societies,” Alefsen said, warning of rising threats such as censorship, harassment, and surveillance of journalists — especially with the spread of AI tools used to manipulate information and monitor media workers.
UN Human Rights Adviser for the Pacific Heike Alefsen (from left), USP Journalism programme head Dr Shailendra Singh, and Fiji Media Association’s general secretary Stanley Simpson . . . reflecting on pressures facing the profession of journalism. Image: Mele Tu’uakitau
AI and human rights She stressed that AI must serve human rights — not undermine them — and that it must be used transparently, accountably, and in accordance with international human rights law.
“Some political actors exploit AI to spread disinformation and manipulate narratives for personal or political gain,” she said.
She added that these risks were compounded by the fact that a handful of powerful corporations and individuals now controlled much of the AI infrastructure and influenced the global media environment — able to amplify preferred messages or suppress dissenting voices.
“Innovation cannot come at the expense of press freedom, privacy, or journalist safety,” she said.
Regarding Fiji, Alefsen praised the 2023 repeal of the Media Industry Development Act (MIDA) as a “critical turning point,” noting its positive impact on Fiji’s ranking in the RSF World Press Freedom Index.
World Press Freedom Day at The University of the South Pacific on Monday. Image: USP — the country rose four places to 40th in the 2025 survey.
However, she emphasised that legal reforms must continue, especially regarding sedition laws, and she highlighted ongoing challenges across the Pacific, including financial precarity, political pressure, and threats to women journalists.
According to Alefsen, the media landscape in the Pacific was evolving for the better in some countries but concerns remained. She highlighted the working conditions of most journalists in the region, where financial insecurity, political interference, and lack of institutional support were prevalent.
“Independent journalism ensures transparency, combats disinformation, amplifies marginalised voices, and enables people to make informed decisions about their lives and governance. In too many countries around the world, journalists face censorship, detention, and in some cases, death — simply for doing their jobs,” she said.
Strengthening media independence and sustainability Keynote speaker Stanley Simpson, echoed these concerns, adding that “the era where the Fiji media could survive out of sheer will and guts is over.”
“Now, it’s about technology, sustainability, and mental health support,” he said.
Speaking on the theme, Strengthening Media Independence and Sustainability, Simpson emphasised the need for the media to remain independent, noting that journalists are often expected to make greater sacrifices than professionals in other industries.
“Independence — while difficult and challenging — is a must in the media industry for it to maintain credibility. We must be able to think, speak, write, and report freely on any matter or anyone,” Simpson said.
According to Simpson, there was a misconception in Fiji that being independent meant avoiding relationships or contacts.
“There is a need to build your networks — to access and get information from a wide variety of sources. In fact, strengthening media independence means being able to talk to everyone and hear all sides. Gather all views and present them in a fair, balanced and accurate manner.”
He argued that media could only be sustainable if it was independent — and that independence was only possible if sustainability was achieved. Simpson recalled the events of the 2006 political upheaval, which he said contributed to the decline of media freedom and the collapse of some media organisations in Fiji.
“Today, as we mark World Press Freedom Day, we gather at this great institution to reflect on a simple yet profound truth: media can only be truly sustainable if it is genuinely free.
“We need democratic, political, and governance structures in place, along with a culture of responsible free speech — believed in and practised by our leaders and the people of Fiji,” he said.
USP students and guests at the 2025 World Press Freedom Day event. Picture: Mele Tu’uakitau
The new media landscape Simpson also spoke about the evolving media landscape, noting the rise of social media influencers and AI generated content. He urged journalists to verify sources and ensure fairness, balance and accuracy — something most social media platforms were not bound by.
While some influencers have been accused of being clickbait-driven, Simpson acknowledged their role. “I think they are important new voices in our democracy and changing landscape,” he said.
He criticised AI-generated news platforms that republished content without editorial oversight, warning that they further eroded public trust in the media.
“Sites are popping up overnight claiming to be news platforms, but their content is just AI-regurgitated media releases,” he said. “This puts the entire credibility of journalism at risk.”
Fiji media challenges Simpson outlined several challenges facing the Fiji media, including financial constraints, journalist mental health, lack of investment in equipment, low salaries, and staff retention. He emphasised the importance of building strong democratic and governance structures and fostering a culture that respects and values free speech.
“Many fail to appreciate the full scale of the damage to the media industry landscape from the last 16 years. If there had not been a change in government, I believe there would have been no Mai TV, Fiji TV, or a few other local media organisations today. We would not have survived another four years,” he said.
According to Simpson, some media organisations in Fiji were only one or two months away from shutting down.
“We barely survived the last 16 years, while many media organisations in places like New Zealand — TV3’s NewsHub — have already closed down. The era where the Fiji media would survive out of sheer will and guts is over. We need to be more adaptive and respond quickly to changing realities — digital, social media, and artificial intelligence,” he said.
Dr Singh (left) moderates the student panel discussion with Riya Bhagwan, Maniesse Ikuinen-Perman and Vahefonua Tupola. Image: Mele Tu’uakitau
Young journalists respond During a panel discussion, second-year USP journalism student Vahefonua Tupola of Tonga highlighted the connection between the media and ethical journalism, sharing a personal experience to illustrate his point.
He said that while journalists should enjoy media freedom, they must also apply professional ethics, especially in challenging situations.
Tupola noted that the insights shared by the speakers and fellow students had a profound impact on his perspective.
Another panelist, third-year student and Journalism Students Association president Riya Bhagwan, addressed the intersection of artificial intelligence and journalism.
She said that in this era of rapid technological advancement, responsibility was more critical than ever — with the rise of AI, social media, and a constant stream of information.
“It’s no longer just professional journalists reporting the news — we also have citizen journalism, where members of the public create and share content that can significantly influence public opinion.
“With this shift, responsible journalism becomes essential. Journalists must uphold professional standards, especially in terms of accuracy and credibility,” she said.
The third panelist, second-year student Maniesse Ikuinen-Perman from the Federated States of Micronesia, acknowledged the challenges facing media organisations and journalists in the Pacific.
She shared that young and aspiring journalists like herself were only now beginning to understand the scope of difficulties journalists face in Fiji and across the region.
Maniesse emphasised the importance of not just studying journalism but also putting it into practice after graduation, particularly when returning to work in media organisations in their home countries.
The panel discussion, featuring journalism students responding to keynote addresses, was moderated by USP Journalism head of programme Dr Shailendra Singh.
Dr Singh concluded by noting that while Fiji had made significant progress with the repeal of the Media Industry Development Act (MIDA), global experience demonstrated that media freedom must never be taken for granted.
He stressed that maintaining media freedom was an ongoing struggle and always a work in progress.
“As far as media organisations are concerned, there is always a new challenge on the horizon,” he said, pointing to the complications brought about by digital disruption and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
Fiji rose four places to 40th (out of 180 nations) in the RSF 2025 World Press Freedom Index to make the country the Oceania media freedom leader outside of Australia (29) and New Zealand (16).
Niko Ratumaimuri is a second-year journalism student at The University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus. This article was first published by the student online news site Wansolwara and is republished in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.
USP Journalism students, staff and guests at the 2025 World Press Freedom Day celebrations at Laucala campus on Monday. Image: Mele Tu’uakitau
Public education is at a crossroads. Federal funds for public education have been threatened over the Trump administration’s war on DEI. Mental health funds for schools have been cut. The federal government’s move to slash AmeriCorps programs is already hitting classrooms in low-income ZIP codes hard. And all the while, teacher shortages continue to rise, and stark disparities in educational opportunities persist.
The future of our students depends on how we invest in and support our educators, especially teachers of color, who face systemic barriers to recruitment and retention despite their vital role in student success.
The author of the book Eyes of Fire, one of the countless publications on the Rainbow Warrior bombing almost 40 years ago but the only one by somebody actually on board the bombed ship, says he was under no illusions that France was behind the attack.
Eyes of Fire . . . the earlier 30th anniversary edition in 2015. Image: Little Island Press/DR
“You know with the horrible things they were doing at the time with their colonial policies in Kanaky New Caledonia, assassinating independence leaders and so on, and they had a heavy military presence.
“A sort of clamp down in New Caledonia, so it just fitted in with the pattern — an absolute disregard for the Pacific.”
He said it was ironic that four decades on, France had trashed the goodwill that had been evolving with the 1988 Matignon and 1998 Nouméa accords towards independence with harsh new policies that led to the riots in May last year.
Dr Robie’s series of books on the Rainbow Warrior focus on the impact of nuclear testing by both the Americans and the French, in particular, on Pacific peoples and especially the humanitarian voyages to relocate the Rongelap Islanders in the Marshall Islands barely two months before the bombing at Marsden wharf in Auckland on 10 July 1985.
Plantu’s cartoon on the Rainbow Warrior bombers from the slideshow. Image: David Robie/Plantu
“This edition is the most comprehensive work on the sinking of the first Rainbow Warrior, but also speaks to the first humanitarian mission undertaken by Greenpeace,” said publisher Tony Murrow.
“It’s an important work that shows us how we can act in the world and how we must continue to support all life on this unusual planet that is our only home.”
Little Island Press produced an educational microsite as a resource to accompany Eyes of Fire with print, image and video resources.
The book will be launched in association with a nuclear-free Pacific exhibition at Ellen Melville Centre in mid-July.
In California, the federal government was deep into an investigation of alleged racial discrimination at a school district where, a parent said, students called a Black peer racial slurs and played whipping sounds from their cellphones during a lesson about slavery. Then the U.S. Department of Education in March suddenly closed the California regional outpost of its Office for Civil Rights and…
An 11th-hour blitzkrieg for the Australian election 2025 tomorrow claims the Greens are enabling extremists who “will do anything in their power to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate”. Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon investigate the Dark Money election.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon
Minority Impact Coalition is a shadowy organisation which appeared on Australia’s political landscape in February of this year.
According to its constitution, its object is to promote “mutual respect and tolerance between groups of people in Australia by actively countering racism and bringing widespread understanding and tolerance amongst all sectors of the community”.
However, it is spreading ignorance, fear and Islamophobia to millions of mostly male Australians living in the outer suburbs and the regions.
Advance is ‘transparent … easy to deal with’ Speaking to an Australian Jewish Association webinar, Roslyn Mendelle, who is of Israeli-American origin and a director of Minority Impact Coalition (MIC), said the rightwing Advance introduced her to the concept of a third party.
“Advance has been nothing but absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with,” Mendelle said.
The electoral laws, which many say are “broken by design”, mean that it will be several months before MIC’s major donors are revealed. Donors making repeated donations below $15,900 are unlisted “dark money”. (This threshold will change to $5000 in 2026).
Who’s paying to undermine Australian democracy? Scam of the week Video: MWM
Coming in second place, are the returns from the Australian Taxation Office.
In NSW, it is targeting Greens candidates everywhere and is also focussed on the Labor-held seat of Gilmore, challenged by Liberal Party candidate Andrew Constance.
Independent journalist Alex McKinnon reported that MIC spokesperson and midwife, Sharon Stoliar, wrote in an open letter:
“When you chant ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ . . . while wearing NSW Health uniforms, you are representing NSW Health in a call for genocide of Jews. YOU. ARE. SUPPORTING. TERRORISM… I. WILL. REPORT. YOU.”
Its campaign material is authorised by Joshu Turier, a retired boxer and right-wing extremist.
According to Facebook library, MIC’s ads are targeted at men, particularly between ages 35 and 54 in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.
In mid-April, the group paid for an ad so extreme that Instagram pulled it, leading to Turier reposting on his own Facebook page again this week. He complained that “It’s beyond troubling when our media platforms remove simple, factual material.”
They are ‘coming for us’ {Editor … oh no!} By Wednesday, the video was back on MIC’s Facebook account. The video says that the Greens are deliberately enabling pro-Palestine student protesters, who
“Don’t actually believe in the concept of a nation. They don’t believe in borders. They don’t believe there is a national identity. They believe in the Islamic brotherhood.”
“. . . It is just the beginning. When antisemitism starts, it’s not going to stop. They are going to come for Christians, for Atheists, for Agnostics.”
MIC is spending big on billboards, campaign trucks, and professional videos targeting at least five electorates. But despite their big spending, they cannot be found on the Australian Electoral Commission transparency register.
According to the transparency advocacy group WhoTargets.Me, MIC has spent more than $50,000 on Google and Meta ads in the last month alone. This doesn’t account for billboards, trucks, labour, or the 200,000 addresses letterboxed in late March.
More investigation shows their donations will all flow through the QJ Collective Ltd (QJC), which also “powers” the Minority Impact Coalition website. QJC is registered as a significant third party with the Australian Electoral Commission.
Clones with ghost offices
Advance director Sandra Bourke and Roslyn Mendelle. Image: QJ Collective, Instagram
MIC and Queensland Jewish Collective are virtually identical. They have always had the same directors — with Azin Naghibi replacing Roslyn’s partner, Hava Mendelle, as both QJC and MIC director in March 2025.
When QJC first came to MWM’snotice last year, it was running a relatively well-funded campaign — although limited to several seats — to “Put the Greens Last” in the Queensland state election.
In September 2024, the group’s website stated that it was “non-partisan and not left or right-wing”, and that its “goal was to support Queenslanders in making informed decisions when voting for our leaders”. MIC is the vehicle for this campaign.
Today, neither the QJC nor MIC makes any such claim. The Collective’s website lists its leading “campaign’” as “exposing the two-faced nature of the Labor party”.
The alarming detail While the two “grassroots” groups share several of their total five different associated addresses, mostly consisting of shared offices, it is not a perfect match.
For both groups, directors Mendelle and Turier list their address as 470 St Pauls Terrace, Fortitude Valley, Queensland. There was no name or company, just an address, however, shared offices run by Jubilee Place are available at that location.
QJC and MIC director Naghibi lists her address on both extracts as 740 St Pauls Terrace, a non-commercial building.
Either Mendelle and Turier are living out of a shared office, or Naghibi is unable to remember the address of the shared office she has little real connection to.
Last year, MWM contacted the owners of QJC’s listed office address at Insolvency Company Accountants in Tewantin, Queensland. At first, the firm said that no one had heard of them. Following that, the firm said that the Collective is a client of the firm, however denied any further connection.
A fresh search this year showed an additional contact address listed by the grassroots Collective — this time 1700 km away — at 1250 Malvern Road, Malvern, Victoria. Again there was no name or company, just an address.
Located at that address is boutique accounting firm Greenberg & Co, which specialises in serving clients who are “high net worth individuals”. MWM contacted senior partner Jay Greenberg who said his role was only one of ‘financial compliance’. He said that he did have personal views on the election but these were not relevant. He declined to discuss further details.
Attack of the clones Better Australia is a third party campaigner that, like QJ Collective in 2024, claims to be bipartisan.
Its communications are authorised by Sophie Calland, an active member of NSW Labor’s Alexandria Branch. Her husband Ofir Birenbaum — from the nearby Rosebery Branch — is also a member of the third party Better Australia.
Co-convenor of Labor Friends of Israel, Eric Roozendaal, and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, provided further campaign advice at a members meeting.
Patron of Labor Friends of Israel and former Senator Nova Peris teamed up with Better Australia for a campaign video last week.
“When Greens leader Adam Bandt refuses to stand in front of the Australian flag,” Peris said, “I ask, how can you possibly stand for our country?”
Better Australia’s stated goal is to campaign for a major government “regardless of which major party is in office”.
The group urges voters to “put the Greens and Teals last”, warning that a Labor minority government would be chaos. The “non-partisan” third party has made no statements on the Liberal-National Coalition, nor on a minority government with One Nation.
Some Better Australia workers — who wear bright yellow jackets labelled “community advisor” — are paid, and others volunteer.
“Isabella” told MWM that her enlistment as a volunteer for the third party campaigner is “not political” — rather it is all “about Israel”.
Previously Isabella had protested in support of the Israeli hostages and prisoners of war held in Gaza.
Better Australia’s “community advisor” “Isabella” at a Bondi Junction polling booth. Image: Wendy Bacon/MWM
Another campaigner told us he was paid by Better Australia. He spoke little English and declined to say more.
Two schoolgirls campaigning at Rose Bay told MWM that they were paid by their father who had chaired a Better Australia meeting the previous evening. They declined to disclose his name.
Calland addressing her Israeli volunteers. Image: Better Australia/Instagram/MWM
MWM later interviewed this woman who is an Israeli on a working holiday visa. She was supporting the campaign because it fits her political “vision”: the Greens and independent MPs like Allegra Spender must be removed from office because they are “against Israel” and for a “Free Palestine” which would mean the end of “my country”.
Allegra Spender denies these assertions.
Greens leader Adam Bandt remained determinedly optimistic, telling MWM that organisations such as Better Australia and MIC,
“are able to run their disinformation campaigns because Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, which enables them to lie about the priorities of the Greens and crossbench without consequence, as well as huge corporate money flowing into politics.
“In this term of Parliament, Labor failed to progress truth in political advertising laws, and instead did a dirty deal with the Liberals on electoral reforms to try and shut out third parties and independents.”
Labor’s candidate for Wentworth, Savannah Peake, told MWM on Tuesday that she had known Calland for 18 months.
Peake said that while she knew Calland had previously founded Better Council, she had only discovered Calland was authorising Better Australia when she arrived at the booth that morning.
Peake told MWM that she had contacted the NSW Labor Head Office to voice her objections and was confident the issue would be “dealt with swiftly”.
The third party campaign runs contrary to Peake’s preferences, which tells supporters in Wentworth to vote #1 Labor and #2 Allegra Spender. MWM repeatedly tried to follow up with Peake throughout the week to find out what action NSW Labor had taken but received no reply.
Liberal candidate for Wentworth, Ro Knox, complies with Better Australia’s call to put Greens last on her voting preferences.
Many people in NSW Labor know about their fellow members’ involvement in Better Australia. The Minister for Environment and MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek, state member Ron Hoenig and NSW Labor have all previously refused to answer questions.
A Labor volunteer at a Wentworth pre-poll booth told MWM that he disapproved if a fellow party member was involved with the third party. Two older Labor volunteers were in disbelief, having incorrectly assumed that the anti-Teal posters were authorised by the Trumpet of Patriots party.
Another said he was aware of Calland’s activities but had decided “not to investigate” further.
Better Australia focuses on Richmond By the end of the week, Better Australia had left a trail of “Put the Greens last’ placards across Sydney’s Inner West, one of them outside the Cairo Takeaway cafe where the third party’s organiser Ofir Birenbaum was first exposed.
The third party have extended their polling campaign to the seat of Richmond, on the North coast of NSW where campaign sources are expecting more volunteers on election day.
As parties dash to the finishing line, they are calling for more donations to counter the astroturfers. According to website TheyTargetYou, the major parties alone have spent $11.5 million on Meta and Google ads over the last month.
Better Australia splurged $200,000 on ads targeting digital TV, social media, and the Australian Financial Review. Digital ads will continue in the final three days of the election, exploiting loopholes in the mandated political advertising blackout.
The Australian public has made little progress towards transparency in the current term of government.
Until reforms are made, Silicon Valley tech giants will continue to profit from dodgy ads and astroturfing groups sowing division with each Australian election cycle.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the Professor of Journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.
Yaakov Aharon is a Jewish-Australian living in Wollongong. He enjoys long walks on Wollongong Beach, unimpeded by Port Kembla smoke fumes and AUKUS submarines. The article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.
And I certainly did not expect Peter Dutton — amid an election campaign, one with citizens heading to the polls on World Press Freedom Day — to come out swinging at the ABC and Guardian Australia, telling his followers to ignore “the hate media”.
I’m not saying Labor is likely to be the great saviour of the free press either.
The ALP has been slow to act on a range of important press freedom issues, including continuing to charge journalism students upwards of $50,000 for the privilege of learning at university how to be a decent watchdog for society.
Labor has increased, slightly, funding for the ABC, and has tried to continue with the Coalition’s plans to force the big tech platforms to pay for news. But that is not enough.
The World Press Freedom Index has been telling us for some time that Australia’s press is in a perilous state. Last year, Australia dropped to 39th out of 190 countries because of what Reporters Without Borders said was a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.
We should know on election day if we’ve fallen even further.
What is happening in America is having a profound impact on journalism (and by extension journalism education) in Australia.
‘Friendly’ influencers
We’ve seen both parties subtly start to sideline the mainstream media by going to “friendly” influencers and podcasters, and avoid the harder questions that come from journalists whose job it is to read and understand the policies being presented.
What Australia really needs — on top of stable and guaranteed funding for independent and reliable public interest journalism, including the ABC and SBS — is a Media Freedom Act.
My colleague Professor Peter Greste has spent years working on the details of such an act, one that would give media in Australia the protection lacking from not having a Bill of Rights safeguarding media and free speech. So far, neither side of government has signed up to publicly support it.
Australia also needs an accompanying Journalism Australia organisation, where ethical and trained journalists committed to the job of watchdog journalism can distinguish themselves from individuals on YouTube and TikTok who may be pushing their own agendas and who aren’t held to the same journalistic code of ethics and standards.
I’m not going to argue that all parts of the Australian news media are working impartially in the best interests of ordinary people. But the good journalists who are need help.
The continuing underfunding of our national broadcasters needs to be resolved. University fees for journalism degrees need to be cut, in recognition of the value of the profession to the fabric of Australian society. We need regulations to force news organisations to disclose when they are using AI to do the job of journalists and broadcasters without human oversight.
And we need more funding for critical news literacy education, not just for school kids but also for adults.
Critical need for public interest journalism
There has never been a more critical need to support public interest journalism. We have all watched in horror as Donald Trump has denied wire services access for minor issues, such as failing to comply with an ungazetted decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And mere days ago, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned citing encroachments on his journalistic independence due to pressure from the president.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is so concerned about what’s occurring in America that it has issued a travel advisory for journalists travelling to the US, citing risks under Trump administration policies.
Those of us who cover politically sensitive issues that the US administration may view as critical or hostile may be stopped and questioned by border agents. That can extend to cardigan-wearing academics attending conferences.
While we don’t have the latest Australian figures from the annual Reuters survey, a new Pew Research Centre study shows a growing gap between how much Americans say they value press freedom and how free they think the press actually is. Two-thirds of Americans believe press freedom is critical. But only a third believe the media is truly free to do its job.
If the press isn’t free in the US (where it is guaranteed in their constitution), how are we in Australia expected to be able to keep the powerful honest?
Every single day, journalists put their lives on the line for journalism. It’s not always as dramatic as those who are covering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, but those in the media in Australia still front up and do the job across a range of news organisations in some fairly poor conditions.
If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know.
Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.
A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.”
In this installment of The Real News Network podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of scholars about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks we’re seeing play out today, and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight them. Panelists include:
Studio Production: David Hebden Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News and it’s so great to have you all with us. Higher education looks very different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education during the first Trump administration just a few short years ago. As you have heard from the harrowing interviews that we’ve published at the Real News interviews with faculty members, graduate students and union representatives, a dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities under the second Trump administration fear of ice agents snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight student visas revoked on mass overnight funding cuts that have upended countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure, self-censorship online and in the classroom, students expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, an all out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by police, internet vigilantes and even university administrators.
Now, when you go digging into the darker parts of American history to find comparisons to the bleak situation we find ourselves in now, one of the obvious periods that stands out is that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist red scare in the 1950s. In her canonical book, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the universities historian Ellen Schreker writes the following, the academy’s enforcement of McCarthyism had silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and snuffed out all meaningful opposition to the official version of the Cold War. When by the late fifties the hearings and dismissals tapered off. It was not because they encountered resistance, but because they were no longer necessary, all was quiet on the academic front. In another era, perhaps Schreker also writes, the academy might not have cooperated so readily, but the 1950s was the period when the nation’s, colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent upon and responsive toward the federal government, the academic communities collaboration with McCarthyism was part of that process.
My friends, we now find ourselves in another era and we are going to find out if colleges and universities will take the path they didn’t travel in the 1950s or if we’re going to continue down the horrifying path that we are currently on. Today we’re going to talk about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on an effort to remake higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks that we’re seeing play out today and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight it to help us navigate this hairy terrain. I am truly honored to be joined by three esteemed guests. First, we are joined by Ellen Schreker herself. Professor Schreker is a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American Higher Education, and she’s a member of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
She’s the author of numerous irreplaceable books including her most recent work, which she co-edited called The Right to Learn, resisting the Right Wing Attack on Academic Freedom and other Titles Like The Lost Promise American Universities in the 1960s, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the Universities, and many are the Crimes McCarthyism in America. We are also joined by Professor David Plumal Liu Louise Hewlett Nixon professor in comparative literature at Stanford University. David is the author of several books including his most recent one, speaking out of Place, getting Our Political Voices Back. He is also the host of the podcast speaking out of place which everyone should listen to. And lastly, we are joined by Professor Alan Walt. Alan is an editor of Against the Current and Science and Society. He’s the h Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan.
Wald is the author of a vital trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina press about writers and communism in the United States, and he serves as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and full disclosure here, I myself am a former student of Allen’s, but he really kicked my butt in grad school, so trust me when I say I don’t think you guys have to worry about any special treatment here. David Ellen Allen, thank you all so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I truly appreciate it and I wanted to just kind of dive right in and ask if we could go around the table and start where we are here and now from your vantage points, how would you describe and assess what’s happening to higher education in America right now? Would you describe this as fascism, McCarthyism, an authoritarian takeover or something else? And does it even matter what we call it at this point?
Ellen Schrecker:
We can call it all of the above and then some or as my favorite sign at the first really big demonstration I was at I guess about two weeks ago, make dystopia fiction again. That’s where we are, and I used to get all sort of into, was it McCarthyism? Of course, it’s not just one man, it’s not even just Trump, although he seems to have a sort of lock on authoritarianism of a certain what shall we say, manic type. But it’s the difference between what I’ve been studying for the past 40 years, I guess if not longer, is that now everything is at play during the McCarthy period, and I do use the term McCarthyism just because it’s sort of specifically located in the anti-communist red scare of the Early Cold War. We could call it the home front of the Cold War if you wanted, just focused on individual communists, their past, their refusal to collaborate with that iteration of political oppression. And today it’s much broader. What the Trump administration is doing is focusing completely on everything that has to do with higher education as well as pretty much everything that has to do with everything else. I mean, this administration is worse than anything I’ve ever seen as a historian or studied. The closest that it comes to really is the rollback of the Civil War, the rollback against reconstruction when people were being shot by the dozens, and we haven’t gotten that blood thirsty, but I’m scared to death.
Alan Wald:
There are two points that I want to make. First of all, as Ellen very effectively pointed out, we’re now in this kind of broad spectrum crisis every single day, everything’s happening all at once. It’s hard to get a fix on what the most important thing to me from my perspective and my experience, you can’t lose sight of what precipitated the current situation. Would it begin, and I referred to it as the antisemitism scare. It’s an obvious comparison to the red skin, but there’s a pretext for what’s going on today, and that started several a while back like October, 2023. That’s when the real assault on student rights and academic freedom began and was started under the Biden Harris administration that is Democrats as well as Republicans. They targeted pro-Palestinian speech in action with this exaggerated claim. They were claiming that there was an epidemic of antisemitism rampant on the campuses.
You hear those two terms over and over epidemic rampant, and they said it was an epidemic that was endangering the safety of Jewish students. Of course, Jewish students were in the vanguard. Now we’re not talking about a small number of real anti-Semitic acts. Those could have occurred if there were real anti-Semitic acts I’m against. I want to oppose ’em if we can accurately identify them. But what was happening was this kind of bonkers exaggeration, a conflation of militant anti-Israel and anti-Zionist critique, which it can be vulgar or sometimes simplistic and sometimes not very helpful, but it’s not antisemitism. And it became a kind of smokescreen anti antisemitism now that Trump administration is using to attack all these other things because it worked. I mean, for a while they were trying to use critical race theory and so on, but this antisemitism and for various reasons we can discuss that was a better smear.
Now the other question you raised that I’ll try to tackle briefly is just this, is it fascism? I’ve been in study groups where we go back and forth about this. Are we talking about fascism as a rigorous theoretical economic concept or is this fascism thing and a rhetorical advice because we want to sound the alarm or is it just an epithet? Everybody’s a fascist. Reagan was a fascist, Johnson was a Goldwater, everybody. And what does it mean if you call somebody a fascist? What does that imply in terms of your action? Joe Biden did not do any great favors when he called Trump a fascist. Then he smiles and hands the guy, the keys to the White House. Is that what you do when there’s real fascism? Some people would say that that kind of obscures the situation. So we have to be careful about these terms.
I don’t think rhetorical overkill will help things. But on the other hand, there is the resemblance to classical fascism and what’s going on in terms of a mass movement right wing, the usurp of political powers and so on. At the same time as I understand that there is a fascist aspect, this, and maybe it’s a kind of new fascism post fascism on the edge of fascism, probably it’s more like or band’s dictatorship over Hungary where he used economic coercion to undermine the universities, undermine the press, undermine everything. But one thing about this fascism cry, if we go back to McCarthyism, and Ellen knows this better than I do, they left and especially the communist movement said that was fascism. They said it was one minute to midnight and the communists, they did what you do when you think it’s fascism. They sent a layer of people underground.
They sent a whole leadership underground because that’s what you do when you’re facing fascism. And it looked bad. 1954, they had executed the Rosenbergs, they had the leadership of the party and a lot of the secondary leadership were in prison. Lots of people were being fired, terrible things were going on. And yet in 1955 in December, in the deep South, which is where things were much worse, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred under fascism supposedly September 19, I mean December, 1955. And in September 57, the Little Rock nine stood up and went to a school and faced down a mob and so on. And in 1960, the sit-in movement began. This is just shortly after we supposedly had fascism, and then of course 1961 of Freedom Rides 1964, the Berkeley free spoof free speech. We know this because some of us, we lived through all that. So if that had really been fascism as people were saying, then why did it disappear in this matter? And it was just a small number of people at first who fought against it. So we have to be careful about using that term fascism. I think it’s good to look at the comparison and gird ourselves, but we shouldn’t get too hysterical and think all us lost start leaving the country like certain professors at Yale have done. We have to gird ourselves through a tough fight. And there are a lot of ways we could wage this fight, which I’m sure we’ll get into in a future discussion.
David Palumbo-Liu:
Yeah, I mean, I would just say in terms of fascism, we think we can all agree to bracket it and refer to it because there are certainly fascistic elements in it. And the classic definition, or one classic definition, I suppose there are lots, a fascism is the collusion of the business in political classes. And you can see that precisely in Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, the intense privatization of everything in education, not just education, but any kind of public good. That’s the primary aim that Musk is driving for. And for Bannon, its immigrants. I mean, it’s a very racialized attack, feeding off America’s pretty natural racism and the attacks on brown and black people. And I’m thinking, I’m here for the list of, I’m here as a substitute, a last minute substitute for Cherise Bird and Stelli, and I urge everybody to read her book Black Scare Red Scare because she puts these two facets together historically beautifully.
But I think that’s this powerful conversions of these two things. And when it comes to universities, the fact that they’re attacking the funding, which is public funding, is emblematic of what we’re up against. And so that’s where I think I would like to respond to the fashion what we’re up against. It is massive. The other thing I would add simply because I’m here in Silicon Valley is techno fascism. We are dealing with an entirely different mediascape. So thank God for the Real News Network. It is all US alternative media. It is an incredibly important instrument in the fight against the mainstream media and Trump’s absolute mastery of playing that. So I think we have to understand the technological changes that have occurred to make the battle both more challenging, but also offer us different kinds of instruments.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, there’s so much to think about in just these opening responses from you all, and I want to dig deeper into the historical roots of this moment. But before I do, I just wanted to go back around the table really quick and ask if you guys could just tell us a little bit about what this looks like from your vantage point. What are you and your colleagues, your students, your former students feeling right now? I mean, David, we had you on during the student encampment movement last year, Alan, I was organizing in Ann Arbor during the last Trump administration. Things have, the vibe has shifted as my generation says. So can you tell us a little bit of just what this all looks like from your sides of the academy right now?
Ellen Schrecker:
I’ve been retired now for, I think it’s 12 years. And so my normal was a campus that is very different from all other campuses in the United States. It’s an orthodox Jewish institution whose sort of cultural, what shall we say, politics is that of the Zionist, right? So I could not do any organizing on my campus, not because I was afraid of being fired or anything like that, but I just never would’ve had any students in my classes. So that was that. But what I’m seeing now is absolutely amazing. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, they are really out for blood, but on the same time, the pushback is amazing. During McCarthyism, there was no student activity whatsoever, or if there was, it was secret. And I think there was some, and it was secret. And then all of a sudden the civil rights movement sort of burst into full flower.
And there was a realization, I mean I do agree with Alan on this, that the civil rights movement ended McCarthyism, no question about it. All of a sudden the political establishment had to deal with real problems, not fake communist subversion. So hopefully the moment will shift and people will begin to think about civil liberties and constitutional freedom and free speech just like the good old days of the 1950s. But it’s still very, very scary and it shows you that we are living and have been living longer than we knew with a very powerful state. And I think I’ll leave it there
Alan Wald:
In regard to anti-Zionist activity, it’s kind of an amazing development. I came to University of Michigan in 1975. I was involved then in the Palestine Human Rights Committee, all three of us. And it was a terrible struggle. We couldn’t even get Noam Chomsky permission to speak on the campus when sponsored by departments. We had to use other means and so on. So to see a massive, relatively large anti-Zionist movement is inspiring and it is fed by a new generation of Jews that is unlike my generation. There was a generation of young people who were thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionism after the 67 war throughout the late last century whose eyes were opened mostly by operation cast led and the events in Gaza in the early 20th century. And now they’re angry that they were lied to and they’re kind of the backbone. I mean, of course there are Palestinians and other students involved, but an important element are Jewish students who realized that they were deceived about what’s going on in the Middle East.
So that’s good. There’s also a big upsurge of faculty activism in areas not seen before. As Ellen has documented, the a UP was not very nice during the 1950s. It kind of disappeared. A UP is terrific today. I mean, I dunno might have something to do with the departure of Kerry Nelson, but the new president is wonderful and the chapter here is vital and vibrant. And also the faculty senate at University of Michigan, which was pretty dormant during my time of activist politics, is now playing a terrific role, has a terrific leadership, but it’s not much around Palestine, I have to say. That’s why I’m worried about that issue getting pushed aside. They’re very upset about what happened with DEI, diversity and equity and inclusion here at University of Michigan because just overnight without any real threat from the government, they just dropped it and pretty much forced out the director who’s now moving on to another position.
And so people are upset about that issue and the procedure used and they’re upset about the other threats, although we haven’t actually had the removal of faculty from programs like they did at Harvard’s one. But the Palestine issue is not that central. And some of the things related to it, like the new excessive surveillance, which I guess Maximilian didn’t experience, but there are cameras everywhere now on campus. I mean, you can’t do a thing without being photographed. People are upset about that. Those kinds of issues are mobilizing people, but I am worried about somebody being put under the bus and a compromise being made around Palestine rights and Palestine speech.
David Palumbo-Liu:
I’m going to take the liberty of answering the question in rather a fuller form because I might have to leave. So I want to get some of these points and sort of picks up on what Alan said. But to answer your question directly, max, how is it like at Stanford? Well, the Harvard statement gave everybody a shot of courage and it was great. I fully support it. However, I find it very deficient in all sorts of ways, even while admiring it. I’ll tell you a short anecdote to illustrate what I’m talking about. We had a focus group in the faculty senate and I was sitting next to this person from the med school and she said, well, yes, it’s horrible. Everybody’s talking about their grants being taken away. That’s the real surgeons of a lot of faculty activities. My grants have been taken away, so she said five of my grants were taken away, but two got replaced after I went through this application process.
So maybe that’s the new norm. And I said, well, only in baseball is batting 400 a good thing. And she said, well, I’m in ear, nose, throat, whatever. Thank God I’m not in gynecology or obstetrics. Then I’d really be in my grants. And I said, well, I teach race and ethnicity. What are you going to say about me not even be able to give a class much less? So I said to her, think of this as structural, not particular. It’s a structural attempt to take over, not just the university, but everything public. And that’s something I think we really need to drive home to folks, is that unless we see all these struggles interconnected, and that’s one of the big problems with the university is it’s not that we’re woke, it’s that we’re removed. We are not connected to human beings anymore. We’re connected to our, too much of us and our ones are connected to research.
And Ellen mentioned Jennifer Ruth, who’s a strong ally of mine. The day of action was amazing. This was a national day of action that was put on by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. And it combined not only labor unions, but K through 12. And it had a vision of what we could do that far exceeded the, I will say it, selfishness of some of our elite colleagues in our elite schools who are just there to keep the money rolling. All they want is to reset the clock before Trump sort of mythical time that things were fine, but it was fine for them. And if they don’t understand exactly what Alan said and what we all think, if we can’t protect the most vulnerable of us, then we are leaving a gaping hole in the structure so that protect all of us. And so we can’t throw Palestinians, immigrants, undocumented folks, queer throat folks to the machine saying, well, we will appease you with these things and this is what happens under fascism. So I really want to encourage people to look, check out khi, check out the new reinvigorated a UP, thank God that it has partnered with a FT. These are the kinds of things that I think, if not save us, at least give us a sense of comradeship that we are doing something together that can be productive at whatever scale.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to go back around the table and hopefully we can get back to you, David, before you have to hop off for your next class. But we already started getting into this in the first round of questions, but I wanted to go a bit deeper and ask, when it comes to the state and non-state actors converging to attack the institutions and the very foundations of higher education, what historical precedents would you compare our current moment to, right? I mean, it doesn’t have to just be McCarthyism, but even if it is, what aspects of McCarthyism or what other periods do you want to point listeners to? And also what historical antecedents have laid the groundwork for the current assault on higher ed? So Ellen, let’s start again with you and go back around the table.
Ellen Schrecker:
Okay, well, the main thing about McCarthyism, which is sort of a classic case of collaboration of mainstream institutions with official red baiters at the time, now it’s official, what is it? Defenders of the Jews, thank you very much. It’s that collaboration. McCarthyism did it very cleverly. I don’t think they intended it, but they had sort of McCarthy as their straw man. He was up there, he was a drunk, he was out of control. He was making charges against innocent people. And so they would say, oh, McCarthyism is dreadful. And then fire three tenured professors, and we are seeing that, or we were up until, if you can believe it, Harvard, I have three Harvard degrees. I want you to know, and I thought I loved every minute of it and thought I got such a lousy education. You can’t believe it. But that’s beside the point. That’s not what you go to school for anyhow. You go to school to stay out of the job market as long as you possibly can. But anyhow, what we saw throughout McCarthyism throughout the 1960s, throughout going way back to the beginning of the 20th century, is that your private institutions are collaborating with the forces of what will be called political repression.
Political repression would not succeed in the United States without the collaboration of mainstream establishment institutions, the corporations. I’ve been starting to have bad dreams about Jamie Diamond Dimon the head of Citi Corp that he’s coming after me next and they’re going to close out my credit cards and there I’ll be standing in line in the homeless areas. But what we’re seeing is and have been seeing and is the American form of political repression, is that collaboration between mainstream institutions, including the mainstream media, Hollywood certainly going along with depriving the American population of access to information they need. I mean, that’s one of our functions as a force for resistance is to give people the intellectual ammunition to fight back. And I think everybody else here would probably agree.
Alan Wald:
My view is that in the 20th century there’s always been this collaboration, but it had a lot to do with foreign policy. As I remember the World War I period when they fired professors from Columbia and other colleges is because they were anti-war against the first World war. And during the Little Red Scare, 1939 or 41, it was because of the hit Hitler Stalin pack to the beginning of World War I and so on, which the communists were opposed to US intervention and the allies and so on. Then during the McCarthy period, again, it was reinforcing US foreign policy in the Cold War and during the Vietnam period when professors were fired, Bruce Franklin and other people were persecuted. Again, it was US foreign policy and now today around the assault on Gaza and support of the Israeli state, and again, it’s US foreign policy. So I see that as a very consistent factor and at every stage, community groups, businesses, and eventually the universities found some way to collaborate in a process even in the red skier, which I think is the most obvious comparison.
The government didn’t do the well, government fired it. It had its own subversive investigation in the government, and they fired a lot of people and forced a lot of people to quietly resign. That’s very similar to the situation today. But in terms of the faculty and other places, they counted on the universities to do the firing. They didn’t send many people to jail. They sent Chandler Davis to jail because of the contempt of Congress, but the others were fired by the university and the public schools and businesses blacklisted them and so on. So there was this kind of collaboration that went all the way. And of course they counted on the private sector to jump in certain areas and do their dirty work. All those are red channels. Those were private investigators. That wasn’t the government. The government may have fed them names, but today of course, we have Canary mission and we have other organizations that blacklist people and publicize their names and so on. And of course we have these massive email campaigns against universities having speakers like Maura Stein, if she goes to speak somewhere about being fired, thousands of emails will suddenly appear and they’ll try to cancel or some way change the venue of her speaking and so on. So this kind of pattern of interventions is pretty much consistent and it pretty consistently involves the state working with universities and businesses.
David Palumbo-Liu:
Yeah. Well, I think that you asked be at the beginning where you asked us all what’s going on campuses and what’s really striking a lot of fear of course is ice. And I think back to the Palmer raids, the Palmer raids, which were sort of the beginning of the justice Department acting as criminals and the whole idea of during the red summer, for example, and Max, this whole stop cop city, the Rico case being pressed against the protestors, right? This imaginary notion that they were all conniving together like mafia when the actual mafia is in the White House itself. So I think the whole capture of the Justice Department by the fascist state is what’s going to be one of the most formidable things because, and we’re pressing our universities, there are laws about where ice can go and where not, but they’re turning. They’re not making any public statements.
Some universities are giving sort of surreptitious, covert good legal advice to people who are getting their measles roped. But this is what’s appalling to me. No university leaders are really coming out and saying, no, dad, God damnit, this is illegal. I mean, they’re not speaking truth, and that’s what makes the whole enterprise shaky and vulnerable to assault. The more you push back, the Japanese called it, well with the trade wars, it’s extortion. You don’t pay an extortionist. Columbia tried it and failed miserably, and yet other are lining up saying, well, maybe in our case it’ll be different. And that’s sort of the definition of crazy when you keep on doing the same thing expecting a different result.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that takes my mind to the antecedent question, right? Because we’ve mentioned the new leadership of the American Association of University professors. I myself just interviewed President Todd Wolfson on our podcast working people, and he talked about this, how the decades long process of corporatization and neoliberal about which you have all written, and Ellen’s written an entire book about this subject, multiple books in fact. But Todd pointed to how that process over the past four decades has contributed to making universities uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that they’re facing now, which is a bit different from the situation described in Ellen’s book about McCarthyism and higher education that I quoted in the introduction where Ellen, you mentioned that in the fifties this was a period where colleges and universities were becoming more dependent on the federal government, and so they were more vulnerable to the top down like power moves of the federal government at that time. So I just wanted to ask what that looks like now in the year of our Lord 2025 when I ask about antecedents. What are the sort of changes to the very structure of higher education that have led to universities capitulating to the Trump administration, like David was just saying, or not defending their students, not defending academic freedom as vigorously as we would expect them to?
Ellen Schrecker:
Well, we could start with the backlash against the student movement of the sixties, which was orchestrated in large part by certain right wing groups, within groups of billionaires and right-wing think tanks and groups of libertarian, sort of pundit types that are now becoming fairly well known within the academic community before they were operating secretly. Now, they can’t quite keep everything secret because a lot of smart people have been writing about this, and especially the key work here that I always push is Nancy McLean’s book Democracy and Chains, which really sort of chronicles the rise of these right wings, think tanks that are creating scenarios for how you take over a university and destroy it. And also of course, how you take over a legal system and destroy it and how you take over a political system and destroy it often through the use of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, we are talking about very big rich people, many of them, shall we say in the oil industry. I mean, they’re protecting their interests and they’re doing a very good job of that. I have the feeling that Elon Musk just sort of sticks a intravenous needle into the federal Treasury and withdraws however much money he wants. That is always the image I have of how he’s operating. And so the federal government is incredibly important here in a way that it wasn’t in the 1950s, in the 1950s, they were just throwing money at higher education. This is a period that’s been called by many historians, the golden age of American higher education. Well, it was in a certain sense, but they sold their soul at the same time to McCarthyism. So we’re always looking at these amazing contradictions and trying to figure out, okay, what’s their next step?
Rather than thinking about what should be their next step? How do we fight back? How do we can’t go back to a golden age? There was no golden age. Let’s start there and say, how can we get something that is going to support a democratic system of higher education for everybody in America and then go on. We’re not. But unfortunately for the past 40 or 50 years, they’ve just been backpedaling. These higher education establishment has been seeding ground to the forces of ignorance, and now we’re stuck with having to fight back. And luckily we are fighting back, even if not necessarily in a way that we love, because seeding an awful lot of ground.
Maximillian Alvarez:
With the few minutes I have left with y’all, I want to talk about the fight back, and I want to ask y’all like what lessons we can draw from our own history, both the victories and the losses about what we’re really facing and how we can effectively fight it, and also what will happen, what will our universities and society look like if we don’t fight now?
David Palumbo-Liu:
Okay, so I’ll say add my two minutes and pick up actually from what Ellen said, because yes, it was the reaction to the student protest movements in the sixties that for one thing made student loans unforgivable. That was Congress’s little knife in the gut. But remember the trilateral commission that Samuel Huntington headed, and he actually published this scree called There’s Too much Democracy. And to answer Max’s point, my recommendation is to restore a sense of what democracy should look like. And that’s the only way to do that is not to stay in our ivory towers, but to draw the resources for democracy and instill the capacity for action in everybody and make it possible for everybody to see that nobody is immune from this. This is tearing down the common trust that we have with each other and substituting this oligarchy that is beyond scale. Thank you so much for having me on. I’ll let you continue your conversations, but it’s been such an honor and a pleasure to be with Ellen. And Ellen and Max, I’ll see you a bit.
Alan Wald:
Okay. Look, first of all, I think that Ellen’s making a good point about the no golden age. It’s not if the universities were terrific defenders of student rights during the 1960s. I was at Berkeley. I mean, when I arrived at Berkeley, the National Guard was occupying the city. It was not a very nice atmosphere. And even here at University of Michigan, I was involved in a 15 year struggle to stop divestment in South Africa and get a degree for Nelson Mandela, 15 years. It took us of constant protests and trying to get to the regents meeting which they would ban us from, or they’d move to secret locations and have a million excuses. Oh, we can’t give a degree to Mandela in prison. We don’t give it to prisoners. Of course, eventually they gave in and they did give it to him, but it took 15 years.
And I mentioned already the problem with Palestine rights on the campus arguing for that was hell. So it’s not been perfect. I mean, now they’re invoking all kinds of new rules and regulations about time and place and bullhorn use of a bullhorn that they didn’t have before, or at least they weren’t punishing people before. So it wasn’t so great. And in terms of university repression, yes, it’s much worse for the Palestine protestors for some other groups, eil their protestors, they seem to get away with all kinds of things. But in terms of responses, first of all, everybody is saying, we need unity. We can’t give in. If we give in, it’s like putting blood in the water. The sharks come after you even more. And I apologize to these sharks who are offended by comparison with the Trump administration. But yeah, so we all agree on that, but I am concerned about them giving in on this IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Everybody’s praising Harvard, wonderful, wonderful, but Harvard already agreed to that horrible definition and they set a precedent, and that’s going to happen at a lot of places. And that is the wedge that’s going to cut out free speech and free discussion. If you don’t know this definition, the International Holocaust Nce Association that’s being promoted by Congress and supported by the Trump administration and I think will become the law of the land for Adeem. You should look at it carefully because of the 11 definitions of antisemitism. Seven, refer to Israel. Now, anybody who does research on antisemitism and the US knows that most antisemitism is young men who get it from social media. They get these conspiracy theories and so on. There is very little antisemitism on the left. The left is involved in criticizing Israeli state racism. But in addition, these 11 no-nos for defining antisemitism say that if you call the Israeli state racist, you’re an antisemite and antisemitism is not on the campus.
So instead of refuting that claim that Israel is a racist state, which it seems that way, especially with their law saying that only Jews have self-determination and not Palestinians, and they have 60 or so laws on the books against Palestinians and Apartheid and so on, instead of trying to refute that argument, they’re just trying to suppress it. And they’re also trying to suppress any comparisons with Nazi Germany. Now, that’s not something that I myself do a lot, but you can’t have scholarship without serious comparisons. And there’s certainly good arguments that there are comparisons to be made. So they’re trying to silence these things instead of refuting them in intellectual debate. And once they do that and get that institutionalized, that’ll lead to a lot of other things. So we have to draw a line, and I think that’s one of the things we got to draw a line on the IHRA definition.
Ellen Schrecker:
I couldn’t agree with you more, but it’s really hard when I get up to talk to sort of stick it in there and make sure that I say, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, this has to stop. But at the same time, I know there are people who maybe aren’t aware of Gaza. It’s too horrible. You can’t look at it or something. I don’t know. It’s a very hard issue to deal with because I know that people will stop listening to you. How do you talk to, you make alliances with people who don’t want to hear what you say when you have to make alliances with those people. I don’t know how to do it yet. I’m learning, but I’m curious. I would like to discuss that issue and probably argue with you about it a bit.
Alan Wald:
Well, I’m not sure where the argument is. I think that the pro-Palestinian rights movement has to be more disciplined. I much support what Jewish Voice for Peace does. That’s why I join them. I think that they’re focusing on Stop the genocide. Jews don’t do it in our name. That’s great. Some of the other groups that march around waving flags that people don’t understand the difference between a Palestinian flag and a Hamas flag. So they’re told it’s Hamas flag and they believe it, or they use slogans that are incomprehensible or mean different things. Or
Ellen Schrecker:
If
Alan Wald:
You put a bus sticker on somebody’s house because you want to show that that administrator’s a Nazi, people know that the Nazi sign is something that’s used to intimidate Jews. So it’s confusing. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that needs to be cleaned up. I think it’s just a minority that’s not acting in a way that says, what will convince people before you do something, what is going to win people over? So there are debates about where to draw the line. For example, Peter Byard, he came here to speak recently and he said, I believe it’s genocide, but if I use the word genocide, people, they’ll shut up. They won’t listen to me. They’ll put their hands over their ears. So I describe all the things that amount to genocide, but I don’t use the term maybe in some audiences you have to do that. Solidarity is not just showing your anger and showing your support, it’s also figuring out how to help people. In this case, we have to build a mass movement to get the Zionist state and the United States off the backs of the Palestinians so that they’re free to determine their own future and their own kind of leadership, which I hope will be a democratic and secular one, not a conservative right wing religious one like Hamas. But we have to get the US and the Israeli state off their backs first. And that means building a mass movement.
Ellen Schrecker:
I have been waking up in the morning reading the New York Times much too closely and feeling incredibly depressed, and recently I am somewhat less depressed. I can go right to my computer and start writing something. I can feel that maybe it’s going to make a difference because I’m seeing much more fight back against political repression that I, as a historian, and I’m speaking as a historian, never saw in the past in a similar situation. And I think that I used to sort of say, well, we must fight. We must have solidarity. But I’d never said, I have hope, and now I do have hope. I think we are on the upswing, that the forces of ignorance are now shooting at each other and shooting themselves in the foot and are beginning to really understand that they’re not going to win because nobody what they want. And that’s as simple as that. Thank you.
Alan Wald:
I don’t think I can add much, but one mistake Trump is making is he is attacking so many different sections of the society that we have the basis for a majority against him. I mean, he is firing all these people. He is screwing up the economy. He’s taking away healthcare. I mean, it’s not just the universities. So there’s an objective basis for a majority toe against him. We just have to find a way to do that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to thank all of our brilliant guests today, professor Ellen Schreker, professor Allen Wald, and Professor David Pumba Liu for this vital conversation. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. Before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now, we’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. So please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
After a successful beta-launch this month, PodTalk.live has now called for people to register as foundation members — it’s free to join the post and podcast social platform.
The foundation membership soft-launch is a great opportunity for founders to help shape a brand new, vibrant, algorithm-free, info discussion and debate social platform.
“PodTalk.live has been put to test by selected individuals and we’re pleased to report that it has performed fabulously,” said the the platform developer Selwyn Manning.
Manning is founder and managing director of the company that custom-developed PodTalk.live — Multimedia Investments Ltd.
PodTalk.live . . . a new era. Image: PodTalk screenshot APR
MIL is based in Aotearoa New Zealand, where PodTalk.live was developed and is served from.
And now, PodTalk.live has emerged from its beta stage and is ready for foundation members to shape the next phase of its development.
An alternative platform
PodTalk.live was designed to be an alternative platform to other social media platforms.
PodTalk has all the functions that most social media platforms have but has placed the user-experience at the centre of its backend design and engineering.
PodTalk.live has been custom-designed, created and is served from New Zealand.
“We ourselves became annoyed at how social media giants use algorithms to drive what content their users see and experience,” Manning said.
“And, we also were appalled at how some social media companies trade user data, and were unresponsive to user-concerns.
“So we decided to create a platform that focuses on ‘discussion and debate’ communities, and we have engineered PodTalk to ensure the content that users see is what they choose — rather than some obscure algorithm making that decision for them.
“PodTalk.live is independent from other social media platforms, and at best will become an alternative choice for people who seek a community where they are the centre of a platform’s core purpose.
Sign-up invitation
““And today, we invite people to sign up now and become foundation members of this new and ethically-based social community platform,” Manning said.
What PodTalk.live provides includes:
user profiles with full interactivities with other users and friends;
user created groups, posts, video, images, polls, and file sharing;
private and secure one-on-one (and group) messages;
availability of all the above for entry users with a free membership;
premium membership for podcasters and event publishers requiring easy to use podcast publication and syndication services; and next-level community engagement tools that users have all on the one platform.
Manning said PodTalk.live was founded on the belief that for social, political and economical progress to occur people needed to discuss issues in a safe environment and embark on robust debate.
The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well.
According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.
In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.
“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.
This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk.
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
