Photo credits: Public domain and Steve Jurvetson (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is sending its first satellites into space. The company’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, seems keen to challenge all things Musk—including Elon’s SpaceX Starlink system.

The satellites in Amazon’s $10 billion-plus Kuiper Atlas project are being launched with the Lockheed Martin-designed Atlas V rocket, at Cape Canaveral’s Space Force Station.

OK, a few thoughts on the matter that corporate media probably won’t contemplate.

Astronomical Funding

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama’s White House trumpeted an increase in NASA funding. Obama said it would “help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth” and help companies produce “new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere”—first to an asteroid, later to Mars. I’m just a little unclear about how, overall, sending hundreds of billions of dollars into space has been improving my daily life so far. If you ask me, money for reliable bus service would help a lot more. Universal medical care. Free higher education.

The benefits to the planet’s most massive corporations are obvious. I hear Amazon’s lining up deals in Britain, Indonesia, Australia, and potentially Taiwan.

This lucrative new space race feeds off the human need for information, especially where internet access is sparse.

Profit Streams

Yes, Starlink connects people in far-flung places with internet services. And it calls these people markets. It’s not hard to imagine unbanked populations being converted into profit streams, once they’re online.

Moreover, when wealthy companies secure US government backing, they can become political instruments, manipulating the populations they claim to serve. Polish taxpayers have forked over an annual $50 million to provide Starlink’s services to Ukraine. But Poland’s foreign minister tweeted out concerns about the trustworthiness of US-based Starlink. Be quiet, small man, Musk snapped back. (Musk then bragged about having challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat.)

People with unfathomable wealth take more billions in handouts from the US military in the name of national security. General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force, recently named SpaceX as a recipient of nearly $6 billion more. Saltzman called the contract “a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Got it. Warfighters gonna warfight. Blam! Zonk! Kapow! Splat!

Cosmic Sprawl

So here comes Jeff Bezos, a prominent player in Donald Trump’s troupe of lickspittles since January. With the Trump regime now describing Amazon Prime as a model for deportation, who knows? Maybe “alien enemies” (those people who have autism awareness tattoos or otherwise ruffle the regime’s feathers) could be shipped into orbit.

In any case, Amazon’s space project will pile 3,200+ satellites onto the tens of thousands that Elon’s launching into the low Earth orbit (within a 1,200-mile band around Earth). Space scientists have long pressed for reviews of the satellites’ impact on the delicate balance of elements and molecules in the air when these things ultimately burn up in our atmosphere.

And the Federal Communications Commission enables it all.

Welcome to outer space in the Anthropocene.

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Photograph Source: Oren Rozen – CC BY-SA 4.0

In conversations about Israel and Palestine, I am often asked about my views on the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

My questioners point to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul over the past two years and inquire why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end Netanyahu’s rule.

My answer is simple – the real problem facing Israel is not its current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, and particularly not in relation to the basic human rights of Palestinians. A recent Israeli Supreme Court decision underscores my point.

On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with Israel’s Supreme Court, asking the court to instruct the Israeli government and military to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and address the civilian population’s humanitarian needs amid the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

The petition was submitted at a time when aid was entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimal needs of the population, of whom 75 percent had already been displaced. The rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north where there were already documented cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.

The court did not issue a ruling for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue restricting aid unchecked. Three weeks after the rights groups filed the petition, the court convened only to provide the government additional time to update its preliminary response to the petition. This set the tone for how the petition would proceed over the next 12 months.

Each time the petitioners provided data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and emphasized the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government for further updates. In its April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023, and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the checkpoints. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to every humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not come close to meeting the population’s needs.

In October 2024, at least half a year after the petition was submitted, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government claimed that it had been monitoring the situation in northern Gaza closely and that there was “no shortage of food”. Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza – thus acknowledging that the aid entering the Strip was insufficient.

On March 18, 2025, after Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed its bombardment of Gaza and the minister of energy and infrastructure halted the supply of electricity to the Strip, the petitioners submitted yet another urgent request for an interim order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court failed to issue a ruling.

Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations had filed the petition, the court issued a verdict. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that it lacked merit. Justice David Mintz interlaced his response with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] and the respondents went above and beyond to enable the provision of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even while taking the risk that the aid transferred would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”

Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed again and again to acute levels of malnutrition and starvation, Israel’s Supreme Court – both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling – has ignored Israel’s legal obligation to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including by wilfully impeding relief supplies. In effect, the court legitimized the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

This is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. It’s March 27 ruling – and almost all other rulings involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial court – one that protects the rights of the settler population while legitimizing the dispossession, displacement, and horrific violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court might not reflect the values of the existing government – particularly on issues relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.

Hence, the liberal Zionists who fill Tel Aviv’s streets every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial overhaul that endangers democracy, but against an overhaul that endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the court’s horrific ruling on humanitarian aid, or, for that matter, on how the court has consistently upheld Israeli apartheid and colonial pillars. The regime, in other words, can continue to eliminate Palestinians unhindered as long as the rights of Israel’s Jewish citizenry are secured.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera.

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Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY 4.0

The Israeli killing of medical workers in Gaza is further proof of a lack of any restraint on the part of Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF). They have been accused of executing 15 handcuffed medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza. As Middle East Eye reported on the medics: “They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them.” According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza; “At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless,” he added.

Here are some of the reactions to the execution:

The top United Nations interim official for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jonathan Whittall, told journalists: “What is happening here defies decency, it defies humanity, it defies the law. It really is a war without limits. It’s an endless loop of blood, pain, and death.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was “outraged.” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain stated: “Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.”

“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range,” a forensic consultant who examined the exhumed bodies told The Guardian, “since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

What was Israel’s explanation? “When Hamas terrorists operate in active combat zones — while using humanitarian vehicles as cover, launching rockets from hospitals and stealing aid — Israel will do whatever it takes to protect its soldiers and citizens,” justified Jonathan Harounoff, a spokesman for Israel’s mission to the U.N.

The New York Times contradicted Israel’s version of what happened: “The video obtained by the Timesshows that the approaching ambulances and fire truck were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.” The video was discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics.

After watching the video, Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl described what they saw and heard in the Times. It is worth repeating the gruesome details:

“Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.

The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the ‘shahada,’ or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. ’There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,’ the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.

‘Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,’ he said.’”

After reports on the video went public, Israeli officials modified their initial justifications. “The Israeli military on Saturday [April 5] acknowledged that the initial accounts from troops involved in the killing last month of 15 people in southern Gaza — who the United Nations said were paramedics and rescue workers — had been partially ‘mistaken,’” journalist Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Israel now says the episode was “under thorough examination.” (The Times has interviewed several witnesses to the shootings Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – The New York Times)

The outright assassination of medical workers is a new and different form of Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in its continuing refusal to respect international norms. Over 50,000 people, including women, the elderly and children, have died in Gaza. An entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions have been displaced. IHL in all its complexities is only effective if it is respected by all parties to a conflict. Israel signed the Geneva Conventions on Dec. 8, 1949, and ratified them on July 6, 1951.

What happens if a party to a conflict like Israel continues to violate IHL in the most egregious manner? So far, very little. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits Hungary and the United States as if they were normal diplomatic trips, ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued search warrants for his arrest. (The U.S. and has no obligation to arrest Netanyahu since is not party to the Rome Treaty.)

For years, my dear friend Eugene Schulman often wore a keffiyeh to honor the Palestinian people. He would regularly unfurl a Palestinian flag on his Geneva balcony in support of a Palestinian state. A non-practicing Jew, Gene was constantly outraged at how Palestinians were treated by Israel. Gene died five years ago next month – Matthew Stevenson movingly described him in CounterPunch (Our Friend Eugene Schulman – CounterPunch.org.). Gene would be beyond outrage today at what is happening to Palestinians.

Hunters have seasons to shoot. Their prey have respites. The IDF and Israeli military have shown it is an open season in Gaza. Nothing is out of bounds. There is no respite for anyone, including humanitarian workers and medics. Even the erudite Gene Schulman would not find words to describe what is taking place. He would be, as we all should be, beyond outrage.

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Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

We live in an age when disappearance is no longer a metaphor. It is both a threat and a governing principle. Under the Trump regime, language is no longer a prelude to violence—it is its echo, its announcement, its choreography. The rhetoric of erasure has been sharpened into policy, and policy has become the staging ground for an unfolding theater of cruelty. Immigrants, dissidents, students, institutions, and even sovereign nations are now targets of an authoritarian imagination that seeks not merely to silence but to unmake. What once lived in the realm of the unspeakable now materializes in the architecture of state violence, abduction, deportation, and political terror.

Dissent, once the lifeblood of democracy, is now branded as terrorism. The protester is no longer a citizen with a voice but a suspect under surveillance, a body to be silenced, imprisoned, or vanished—sometimes in distant nations where autocrats echo Trump’s contempt for law and human rights. Under the creeping shadow of authoritarianism, a student with a green card becomes a threat, a journalist is branded a traitor, entire immigrant populations of color are  viewed as a threat to national security and rendered disposable. Atrocities—such as the relentless bombardment and starvation of Palestinian women and children—vanish from mainstream coverage, their suffering lost in the machinery of genocide and indifference. In a culture fragmented into a thousand soundbites, social responsibility holds no market value; it evaporates in the toxic air of manufactured ignorance, hate, and despair. The moral compass of American society spins wildly, as cruelty becomes normalized, and conscience is silenced in the name of security, profit, and power.

When Stephen Miller stood before a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, and declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he was not merely indulging in a grotesque strain of ultra-nationalism—he was resurrecting the death-scented language of racial purity. His words, echoing the rhetoric of Hitler, did more than exclude immigrants; they targeted the very idea of shared humanity. The message was clear: not only Black and Latino immigrants, but anyone who defends their dignity and rights, belongs outside the nation’s moral and political borders. The crowd roared in approval as Miller gave voice to Trump’s own warning—that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—signaling the full return of a fascist logic in which citizenship is no longer a democratic right but a racialized weapon. In this worldview, those who do not conform—by birth, by belief, or by the color of their skin—are marked for removal, erasure, or expulsion.

We are now living through a globalized necropolitics in which the meaning of “citizen,” once tethered to democratic representation and civic belonging, has been hollowed out. What remains is a brutal calculus of disposability, a politics of unbeing. Entire populations are thrust into a liminal space, a state of enforced invisibility. As Achille Mbembe warns, “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead”—ghosts in plain sight, denied recognition until they disrupt, at which point they are declared pathological or dangerous, and swiftly cast out. In a corporate-controlled media landscape saturated with spectacle, education has been hollowed out and repurposed as a pedagogy of unreason—a toxic bullhorn for glorifying war, normalizing cruelty, and disseminating the lies, racial fantasies, and authoritarian dreams that sustain fascist ideology.

This assault on critical consciousness doesn’t just distort reality—it dismembers the very frameworks of belonging, paving the way for what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social homelessness”—a condition in which people are not simply unhoused but stripped of the very social and political structures that confer existence. This is the logic of neoliberal fascism, where the free market is sacrosanct, but the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the racialized are disposable. In this wasteland of abandonment, exclusion is terminal. Protection is denied, rights are withdrawn, and existence itself is rendered conditional.

But what is most chilling is that it is not just bodies that disappear. What vanishes in this discourse is memory, truth, solidarity, and the possibility of justice. Trump’s authoritarian grammar of erasure now extends even to entire nations. His fantastical threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or Panama are not the ravings of a deluded mind—they are ideological gestures toward empire, conquest, and the disappearance of sovereignty itself. What begins as ideological erasure—of history, borders, and human worth—inevitably manifests in real-world violence, where bodies are seized, visas are revoked, and lives discarded with bureaucratic precision.

The abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes agents of the state mark a terrifying threshold in the unfolding drama of American authoritarianism. These acts were not isolated law enforcement errors but political kidnappings, signaling that fascism in the United States is no longer a creeping threat—it is a reality. These young scholars, legal U.S. residents, were seized, denied due process, and imprisoned in remote detention centers for nothing more than their dissent against the Israeli-American genocide in Gaza. And many more were to follow. This is the new state terror: bureaucratically sanitized, legally justified, and ideologically ruthless.

To call these abductions “acts of state terror” is to recognize the intent behind them—not just the physical violence or legal abuses, but the psychological and political message they send. As in fascist regimes of the past, the disappearances are not meant solely to silence the individuals targeted. They are warnings to the rest of us: dissent will be punished, protest will be surveilled, and critique will be criminalized. The invocation of “support for terrorism” without evidence, and the convenient deployment of national security rhetoric, is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s use of “protective custody” and “public order” to justify mass arrests and detentions.

What allows this to happen—especially in elite spaces like Columbia University—is not simply external pressure from the state, but the internal corrosion of governance within higher education itself. Universities, once regarded as citadels of critical thought, have increasingly capitulated to political expediency, financial pressures, and market logics. They have surrendered to the seductions and rewards of neoliberalism and now function as craven adjuncts of a state captured by billionaires and ideological extremists. Institutions like Columbia and Harvard, by prioritizing corporate donations, federal contracts, and their own reputational security over academic freedom and human rights, have chosen cowardice over conscience. In refusing to defend Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia did not simply fail a student—it failed the very democratic ideals it claims to uphold.

The lessons of history make clear where this road leads. In 1933, as part of a national effort to align German institutions with Nazi ideology—a process known as Gleichschaltung—the regime targeted universities as key sites for ideological control. At Goethe University Frankfurt, Jewish professors were summarily dismissed, and Jewish students expelled. Many faculty members, rather than resisting, colluded—choosing the security of their positions and the continuation of their research over solidarity with colleagues and the defense of institutional autonomy. The same pattern unfolded at Heidelberg University, Munich, and others, where universities traded academic freedom for ideological conformity.

This history is not a relic; it is a warning. Today, when institutions like the University of Pennsylvania suspend students for political speech, or when MIT distances itself from scholars who criticize U.S. foreign policy, we are witnessing a similar erosion of moral courage and intellectual independence. Then as now, universities become accomplices in repression not only through what they do—but through what they refuse to defend. As Michael Roth bravely argues, it is time to challenge this institutional cowardice. Universities are not compelled to roll over in the face of political pressure; they have both the moral responsibility and the democratic obligation to support student activism and uphold the principles of free speech and modes of critical education that make such activism possible. Yet, As Samuel Karlin  in Left Curve notes, it is crucial  to   that academics join with both their unions and worker’s unions “take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.”

The broader institutional landscape mirrors this complicity. As Jason Stanley, the prominent philosopher of fascism, has made clear in his decision to leave Yale for a university in Ontario, there is now a systemic failure across U.S. academic and civic institutions to stand up to the fascist turn. His departure is not only a personal choice; it is a public indictment of a nation drifting—or rather, plunging—into authoritarianism.

In the face of Trump’s three-pronged assault—on the Palestinian movement, on immigrants, and on the autonomy of universities—the mainstream media offers only minimal resistance, and even that fails to connect these intersecting attacks as core elements of a fascist politics. Meanwhile, universities capitulate. Law firms once proud to defend civil rights now retreat. Together, these failures mark the collapse of civic imagination and moral courage. History teaches us that tyrants always move first against legal experts, educators, and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Strip away the defenders of law, and the victims of repression stand alone. When universities yield to fascist pressure, they don’t just betray their mission—they embolden further attacks on free thought. The assault on First Amendment rights is no anomaly; it’s a well-worn tactic of authoritarian rule. As G.S. Hans writes in Balls and Strikes:

By targeting lawyers and law firms for their advocacy, the White House mimics authoritarian regimes abroad, where despots intimidate or even kill lawyers who resist. In the Philippines, over sixty lawyers were murdered under Duterte. In China, human rights attorneys were jailed for defending dissidents. Without meaningful legal representation, activists either fall silent—or face brutal reprisal.

Khalil’s case, as I wrote recently, is about the fate of democracy itself. When legal residents with green cards are abducted and deported for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, we are no longer operating within a democratic framework. We are witnessing a perversion of law, where legality is weaponized to uphold injustice, and due process becomes an optional formality.

Donald Trump’s declaration that he wants to be “dictator for a day,” his chilling assertion that “he who saves the country does not violate the law,” and his claim that he intends to run for a third term—despite constitutional limits—are not rhetorical slips. They are the ideological scaffolding of fascism. We are now living in what I have called “authoritarianism with fascist overtones,” where the state no longer hides its contempt for democracy, but broadcasts it as a badge of strength. The machinery of repression today is draped in the language of legality, national security, and patriotism. But its core purpose remains: to suppress opposition, erase memory, and consolidate power.

Trump and his movement have already dehumanized vast swaths of the population—migrants, Muslims, people of color, and now students and educators. They are cast not as citizens but as threats. As Judith Butler has noted, such dehumanization is not incidental; it is foundational to fascist politics, which requires scapegoats to function.

Trump’s politics of perpetual turmoil—his ceaseless crises, dog whistles, and vendettas—serve a strategic purpose. They exhaust democratic response, disorient the public, and allow authoritarian measures to be passed under the cover of chaos. These are choreographed spectacles of trauma, animated by the energies of the dead, designed not only to terrorize but to numb—to make violence feel ordinary, to render dissent unimaginable. The true danger lies not only in what the state enacts, but in what the public comes to accept as normal, even necessary. What is at stake is more than a culture of silence or the routine cruelty of a politics of disappearance—it is the slow, methodical construction of a fascist subject. This is a subjectivity shaped by fear, seduced by obedience, and ultimately stripped of the capacity to recognize—or reject—the very forces that dominate it. It is not merely that people surrender to authoritarianism, but that they are fashioned by it, habituated to its violence, until resistance feels futile and complicity feels natural.

Yet, even amid this darkness, resistance is growing. The nationwide protests on April 5 signaled a new wave of opposition: tens of thousands in New York and Washington, thousands more in small towns, all rising to say that the line has been crossed. The creativity and moral clarity of these demonstrations offer a glimpse of what is possible. The question is not whether resistance will emerge—it has. The question is whether it will be sustained, deepened, and radicalized.

From here, we must push toward a broad-based front of democratic refusal. Universities must become sanctuaries for truth, not outposts of surveillance. Artists, journalists, educators, and students must converge to defend critical spaces, reclaim memory, and affirm a radical imagination. Law firms must unite against the fascist threats of the Trump administration. Moreover, they must all acknowledge that what they have in common is the need to resist together against the plague of fascism in its updated forms. As Robin D.G. Kelley insists, this moment demands more than protest—it requires organized, collective nonviolent direct action. Kelley calls for a resurgent solidarity among workers, unions, students, young people, educators, and higher education institutions. This is not merely a call for resistance, but for disruption—for coordinated actions that prevent this authoritarian regime from functioning. From strikes and walkouts to divestment campaigns and sanctuary networks, the goal is not to plead with power but to undermine its capacity to rule without legitimacy.

As Kelley reminds us in “Notes on Fighting Fascism,” “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’” This means thinking with an energizing and informed class consciousness, organizing across identities, and reviving a politics rooted in justice, collective power, and radical imagination. Building on Robin Kelley’s call for resistance, Samuel Karlin insists that any meaningful struggle must break free from illusions about capitalist institutions. Resistance, he argues, cannot be rooted in the very structures that sustain exploitation and domination. As Karlin writes:

As the Trump administration increases its authoritarian measures against Palestine activists, immigrants, universities, and more, it is essential that all those fighting these attacks rely on ourselves, not the institutions of capitalists. We need to start organizing spaces that can bring our movements together to debate and decide on how to fight these attacks. It will require broad democratic campaigns that mobilize masses across the country. And it is essential that unions, especially academic workers’ unions, take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.

History is not merely warning us. It is demanding that we act. The fascist capture of America is not inevitable, but its consolidation becomes more likely with every act of silence, complicity, and moral retreat. Democracy cannot survive if people look away, lapse into complicity, or speak out yet refuse to collectively organize against and tear down a gangster capitalism that now proudly displays its fascist mobilizing passions.  Democracy as a radical idea and practice will survive if—and only if—people rise with courage, defiance, and militant hope. It is time to pay attention, learn from history, connect the dots in order to recognize the totality of this authoritarian system, and make resistance a necessity rather than an afterthought. This is not merely about one administration or a single demagogue. It is about the fate of public memory, the survival of political agency, and the right to speak and act without fear. The United States is not approaching a crisis—it is already engulfed in a four-alarm fire. And the only antidote to this rising tide of authoritarianism is a resistance that is collective, courageous, and unrelenting.

We are not standing at the edge of fascism—we are living through its rehearsal, its staging ground, its opening act. The question is no longer whether we see it, but whether we have the will to stop it before the final curtain falls. Resistance offers no guarantees. But without it—if it falters, if it remains timid or fragmented—what dies is not only democracy as we know it, but the very possibility of imagining it anew.

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Dear Xenophobic America,

On November 14, 2024, I “confessed” that my late Mexican immigrant mother, Carmen Mejía Huerta, “stole” White American jobs. My mother’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” consisted of working as a domestic worker (doméstica)for over four decades, “stealing jobs” from White American women. These are the same gendered jobs that millions of White women discarded and outsourced during the second half of the 20^th Century (to the present) to pursue leisure and employment opportunities.

Like my mother, my late Mexican immigrant father, Salomón Chávez Huerta, participated in “criminal behavior” in the American workplace, “taking away jobs” from White American men. His first “American job heist” occurred during the 1960s, as a guest worker for the Bracero Program (or Mexican Farm Labor Program). As I documented in a past essay, “The day my Mexican father met César Chávez,” the “…Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad sector.”

While invited as a “guest” during a critical economic time in American history, my father and millions of his paisanosexperienced exploitation and humiliation in the workplace. Instead of being honored as essential farm workers (campesinos), they were treated more like animals—not that animals, as non-humans, should be abused or neglected. At the Mexican and U.S. processing centers for this bi-national program, government officials forced the Mexican men from the countryside to strip naked in large groups without privacy. The immoral officials sprayed the prospective braceros with the pesticide DDT.  DDT causes cancer, among other illnesses.

After suffering from this traumatizing and humiliating experience, my father rarely spoke about it. Once working on the agricultural fields, the exposure to toxic chemicals continued for my father and his paisanos, as the immoral farmers sprayed their agricultural fields with pesticides linked to cancer and other illnesses. These are the same pesticides that the United Farm Workers (UFW) fought against for many years.

From 1975 to 1985, my father “stole” another American job, when he worked as a janitor in a manufacturing factory. The factory produced chrome wheels for automobiles.  For a decade, my father was exposed to high levels of hexavalent chromium, as part of the chrome-plating process. Like DDT and other pesticides, hexavalent chromium causes cancer and other illnesses.  One day, a young White foreman ordered my father to work closer to the furnaces.  Instead of exposing himself to more heat and toxic chemicals, he quit. Like in the 1960s, when he worked as a farm worker, my father experienced toxic exposure and workplace abuse at the factory while never exceeding the federal minimum wage!

Racial capitalism broke my father’s work spirit.

Defeated, he sporadically worked as a day laborer (jornalero) into his early sixties.

On March 9, 1996, my father died—on his 66^th birthday—of cancer.

Racial capitalism killed my father.

As I critically reflect on my father’s tragic death, I don’t even need to apply my rigorous social science training from UC Berkeley to link my father’s exposure to carcinogens—at high levels for many years—to his early death.

If the xenophobic lords and complicit enablers want me to “return” the earned meager wages by my late immigrant parents, while toiling in discarded American jobs, they must perform a miracle.

Return my Mexican parents from the dead—if only for one day—so I can tell them, individually, what I failed miserably as their proud son to express:

“I love you.”

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Photo by Megan Lee

Veterans who get their health care from “The VA,” actually the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs, need to be aware that the Trump administration is quietly working to privatize the healthcare facet (Veterans Health Administration, or VHA) of the VA.

In May of 2014, it was alleged that 40 veterans had died while waiting for appointments at the VHA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. This claim was soon disproven, but investigation revealed that management at that hospital had created a policy of awarding bonuses to hospital employees who misrepresented appointment times. The resulting scandal led to the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014, and a three-year trial program known as Veterans

Choice. Based upon the very real circumstances wherein many veterans lived a sizable distance from the nearest VHA facility, and some of those facilities lacked the equipment or professional staff to deal with the veteran’s unique medical or mental status, the Choice program allowed a private vendor company to assign those vets to obtain care at a private or for-profit provider, with payment to that provider to come out of the VA’s budget. At least one of the vendor companies initiated a policy of paying the civilian providers exactly half of what they had billed, and putting the other half into their own corporate coffers.

By 2017, the Choice program had resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns, including $90 million in overbilling by its two main contractors. Before long, a large percentage of private providers refused to see VA/Choice referrals. The contractor companies ignored the problems and referred more and more veterans, regardless of location, to the private sector.

The Choice program was replaced by 2018’s Mission Act, which handed the ball to another vendor corporation, Community Care, which promptly outsourced even more veterans to for-profit walk-in clinics without a referral. Even worse, those private providers are not required to adhere to the VHA’s standards of care, and there is no provision for oversight by the VA to ensure quality of care. Again, payments for these questionable services come out of the VA’s budget. By 2019, the VHA had approximately 67,000 openings for doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and psychologists, but there were no provisions to increase wages for those positions. Payouts from the VA budget to private providers chosen by Community Care have skyrocketed. Veteran suicides continued to increase at a rate far exceeding that of the general public.

Will referrals of veterans healthcare to the private sector actually result in shorter appointment times, or any improvement in the levels of care provided? According to one government study, 77 percent of all U.S. counties face severe shortages of practicing psychiatrists, psychologists,  or social workers. Fifty-five percent, all rural counties, have no mental health professionals at all. (Southwest Virginia is an example). Even when private-sector psychiatrists are available, many are unwilling to accept either private insurances or federal reimbursement. Under such “market conditions,” not only do private-sector patients wait too long for appointments, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40% of Americans with schizophrenia and 51% suffering from bipolar disorder go untreated in any given year.

By contrast, data available on Capitol Hill in 2018 showed that the waiting time to see a VHA mental health professional averaged four days! And, the VHA personnel are trained to deal with the unique mental issues encountered by combat veterans such as PTSD. Proponents of VA privatization have doggedly refused to require any specialized training for the professionals to whom veterans will be outsourced. While campaigning for a second term as President, Donald Trump denied any familiarity with Project 2025, a guidebook created by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation with wide-ranging recommendations for the second Trump regime. Currently, adhering to the Project 2025 script, Trump / DOGE are working to gut the VA which is terribly understaffed, by cutting staff another 80,000.

Even more troubling, the Veterans ACCESS Act, currently being reviewed by committees in both the House and Senate, will, if passed, increase outsourcing of VA medical and mental health patients to the private medical industry. Hidden in the depths of the ACCESS ACT like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the VHA system quicker than you can say “privatization,” enabling all veterans seeking help for addiction or mental health challenges to walk into virtually any private medical or mental health provider and request outpatient care without any VA authorization, referral, approval, or oversight of the care provided.

The ultimate goal of the ACCESS Act, as stated in the Project 2025 playbook, is to eliminate all VA hospitals in approximately three years, and increase the number of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) to re-make VA health care into a chain of facilities resembling “urgent care” clinics. Within a very few years, the VA would be transformed into an insurance company, only able to pay the private industry from its $369 billion annual budget.

This project is already under way. Elon Musk’s DOGE has already fired 2,400 VA employees, a Reduction in Force (RIF) order was issued February 26th, and the goal is to reduce the VA’s employee count by 80,000 in the short term.

It should be noted that passage of the PACT Act, allowing VA coverage of ailments related to toxic substances such as Agent Orange in Vietnam veterans, and smoke from toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, has resulted in the addition of 400,000 more VA patients, and is expected to add another 400,000 in the near future. DOGE has also cut the VA’s research into muscular dystrophy, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and assorted cancers.

President Trump’s new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins has predicted that cuts to the VA’s workforce will “eliminate waste, reduce management and bureaucracy…and increase workforce efficiency.” Secretary Collins pledged to do this “without making cuts to healthcare or benefits” and warned critics that “we will be making major changes. So get used to it.”

Surveys indicate that 92% of veterans currently getting their health care from the VA prefer to get their care from it. Studies consistently show that VA health care is equal to or better than private-sector care without even considering that the VA is the only entity suited to treat medical and psychological issues specific to military service.

Again, the Veterans ACCESS Act is awaiting action in committees in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and veterans are urgently needed to contact their Reps and Senators and urge them to deny this unscrupulous bill. A call to the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 will guide you to the specific phone number for your Representative or Senator. If you hope to have VA medical care in the (near) future, you need to call today.

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Image by Paul Teysen.

Donald Trump’s paleo-conservative, isolationist attack on global capitalist trade is already having formidable impacts. If tariff levels and targeted announced on ‘Liberation Day,’ April 2, are sustained, a full-blown economic catastrophe could result, perhaps reminiscent of 1930s-scale Make America Great Depression Again.

Transactional Trump

The worst danger: national elites in victim countries will be divided-and-conquered. Even South African President Cyril Ramaphosa – who 15 months ago had bravely challenged Washington’s ‘rule of law’ fakery by authorizing Pretoria’s challenge to Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice – apparently feels compelled to dream up utterly irrational deals for Trump, ideally sealed over a game of golf. Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told the NY Times last month that Ramaphosa may soon offer to U.S. Big Oil firms generous offshore leases for methane gas exploration and extraction, in spite of enormous climate damage, Shell Oil’s courtroom setbacks, and widespread shoreline protests.

He’s not alone; more than 50 world leaders have ‘reached out’ to Washington in an obsequious manner, leading Trump to brag, “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”

Even before the April 2 announcements, Trump imposed 25% universal tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum (effective March 12) and on cars (and auto parts) (March 26), radically lowering demand for what are traditionally the three main South African exports to the U.S. under the tariff-free Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

According to Business Leadership South Africa’s Busisiwe Mavuso:

“Trump has made it clear that he wants concessions from each country if he is going to reduce or drop the tariffs. He emphasized that the tariffs put the U.S. in a position of power in the series of bilateral negotiations that are to come. Given the transactional nature of US politics, we have to think hard on what is commercially available and viable for all parties. The U.S. has exempted many of our key metal exports, including platinum, gold, manganese, copper, zinc and nickel, because these are considered critical to the U.S. economy.”

Twisted economic logic

Setting aside the exemptions on raw materials, which makes the whole operation appear as a neo-colonial resource grab that simultaneously stifles poor countries’ manufacturing sectors, what would justify these highest tariffs on U.S. imports in 130 years? Trump’s chief economic advisor (and investment banker) Stephen Miran, who holds a Harvard doctorate in economics, explained the underlying theory in a November 2024 report, celebrating the potential for a:

“generational change in the international trade and financial systems. The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade… Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline…”

This is wishful thinking, most experts believe. Currency adjustments are hard to predict but the dollar’s decline on April 2-3 (about 1%) is already being offset by its ‘safe haven’ status, providing a quick valuation bounce-back. The reason: international financial volatility always encourages global footloose capital’s short-term flight to dollar-denominated assets, no matter how irrational that may be in the medium term.

U.S. consumer inflation will soar, it’s fair to predict. Already, those whose pensions have been invested in the world’s (admittedly way-overvalued) stock markets have suffered major losses, e.g. in South Africa and the U.S., more 10% on April 3-4 alone. As nervous money floods out of vulnerable countries, the interest rates investors demand to fund 10-year bonds are soaring, in South Africa’s case by 2.2%, from 8.9% at the end of January to a painful 11.1% in early April (at a time of long-term average inflation of 5%).

And as a distributional matter, left economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research points out,

“Import taxes are highly regressive, meaning that tariffs will cost ordinary working people a much higher share of their income than for high income people. This is because working people tend to spend most or all of their income, while high income people save a large portion of their income. Also, working people are more likely to spend their money on the goods subject to tariffs, whereas higher income people spend more money on services.”

Splintered oppositional narratives

Beyond Miran’s fantasies, five other narratives are generating anti-Trump ideologies that – without a coherent stitching together – risk splintering critics:

1. mainstream neoliberalism

The corporate and state elites who in most countries typically back neo-liberal trade deregulation are now in shock, as their own personal share portfolios crash. The Economist summed up, “Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc.”

In alliance with market-friendly ‘bastard Keynesians‘ like Paul Krugman, the neoliberals are expressing utter disgust at Trump because precepts of free trade are being violated in the most primitive manner. The powers and legitimacy of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) to police tariffs and trade are being trampled by Trump – leaving the body’s defense to some of the world’s most aggrieved neoliberal forces, in Beijing.

Because Trump is launching “economic nuclear war on every country,” even Bill Ackman – a strong supporter of the president and a billionaire fund manager – conceded, “we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.” Quite right.

(This growing establishment hatred of Washington is extremely useful if progressives want to forge even brief alliances, e.g. to ‘Vote Trump off the G20 Island,’ a true Survivor approach which would be indisputably popular in the bloc’s capital cities, except for Buenos Aires and maybe Rome, and set the stage for the 2026 G20 not to be held in the U.S., but maybe jointly by Mexico and Canada instead, as should the 2026 soccer World Cup and 2028 Olympics.)

2. radical Keynesianism combined with dependency theory

Both these approaches are highly critical of international trade, but not for the reasons Trump is. The last century’s leading British economist, John Maynard Keynes, at one point – in his 1933 Yale Review article – firmly advocated tariffs and other forms of protectionism, so as to support domestic industries and thus achieve much more balanced internal development: “let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national” (using tightened exchange controls).

As for global economic regulation, Keynes’ last (unsuccessful) major project was to propose penalties for economies that ran trade surpluses: the ‘Bancor’ International Currency Union proposal at Bretton Woods in 1944. His objective was to use trade and currency controls to achieve self-correcting international economic stability, in the wake of a Great Depression and war caused in part by extreme commercial and financial volatility.

From the Global South, a different critique of international trade and an even stronger advocacy of tariffs together aim to promote poor countries’ ‘delinking’ from dangerous international circuits of capital, and to protect infant manufacturing industries. Africa’s main contributor to this dependencia school was Egyptian political economist Samir Amin. He understood the differential labor values and ‘unequal ecological exchange’ (resource looting) that are embodied in South-to-North trade as benefiting transnational corporations, and causing Africa’s underdevelopment.

Amin also criticized trade between impoverished countries and South Africa which – even after apartheid was defeated in 1994 – he viewed (until his death in 2018) as a malevolent capitalist power on the continent: “nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies.”

Indeed AngloGold Ashanti and many similar Johannesburg firms have benefited from the South African National Defence Force’s ersatz quarter-century-long military presence in the eastern Congo. (Last November, these troops were recognized by the UN not for heroism, but as the peace-keeping force’s worst offenders for sexual exploitation, abuse and paternity lawsuits.) Pretoria’s troops were recently forced out of the DRC by invading Rwandan forces (and also lost battles in Northern Mozambique and the Central African Republic since 2013), but the critique of sub-imperial interests remains intact.

3. climate consciousness

Opponents of ecocide – surely, all of us who aren’t climate denialists – regret the massive greenhouse gas emissions caused by excessive, often pointless international trade: 7%+ of all CO2 emanates from shipping and air transport, according to the International Transport Forum.

And while the International Maritime Organization has hosted a decade of talks about its members’ dirty bunker-fuel emissions – which for the sake of ‘polluter pays’ policy, should be costed at $1056/tonne (even the World Economic Forum admits) – these have been futile. The modest $150/tonne tax on shipping emissions demanded by increasingly-desperate Pacific and Caribbean small island states is this week being rejected by rich Western countries and also by an alliance centered on four BRICS members: Brazil, China, Indonesia and South Africa.

Moreover, genuine ‘Just Transition’ plans are widely recognized as necessary to wean workers and affected communities off CO2-intensive export production, e.g. the West’s (highly flawed yet necessary) Just Energy Transition Partnerships and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms, but these and other climate obligations Trump has simply walked away from. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance had already called on the world to impose trade sanctions on the U.S. as a result, a call that now has much more purchase.

Indeed, to that end, many would support a ‘degrowth‘ approach seeking to stabilize and indeed diminish much of the high-carbon industrial output exported by many economies into the U.S. Those include steel, aluminum and automobiles – now 25% tariff victims – due to the vast waste involved in rich-country consumption. And South Africa is one of the worst, with the ‘Energy Intensive Users Group‘ of 27 multinational corporate exporters guzzling more than 40% of the country’s scarce electricity but hiring only 4% of workers in the formal sector.

4. African nationalism

African patriots logically perceive Trump’s hatred of the continent (full of ‘S-hole countries‘) as, in part, behind attacks on its trade-surplus countries. Tiny Lesotho was hit by Trump with the highest new tariff on April 2 mainly because of its $240 million trade surplus with the U.S.: mostly Levi’s and Wrangler jeans and diamond exports, whereas imports from the U.S. are indirect, as they first are cleared by customs in South Africa. Trump also imposed 40%+ tariffs on Madagascar and Mauritius, because of their trade surpluses.

The context for the continent’s (and world’s) rising anti-Americanism is Trump and Pretoria-born Elon Musk’s halt to financial support for African healthcare (especially AIDS-related – which could lead to 6.3 million unnecessary deaths by 2029 – and maternal), climate (mitigating emissions, strengthening resilience and covering ‘loss & damage’ relief), renewable energy and vitally-needed emergency humanitarian food supplies. Some critics here suggest these cuts reflect Trump’s white supremacy, called out by Pretoria’s fired ambassador to Washington, amplified by the fiscal chainsaw wielded by Musk, against whom protest is rapidly rising.

All this means Trump is discarding Washington’s soft power, which notwithstanding the vast destruction in the meantime, could ultimately be very useful for anti-imperialists (in contrast to last November’s internecine squabbling over a controversial National Endowment for Democracy conference held in Johannesburg).

4. Marxist political economy

Readers of Das Kapital understand that capitalist crises and the ‘devaluation’ of ‘overaccumulated capital’ (e.g. deindustrialization once businesses addicted to exports to the U.S. shut down) reflect the mode of production’s intrinsic contradictions. In reaction, capitalism often degenerates into inter-imperial and imperial/sub-imperial rivalries, generalized trade wars (often based on tit-for-tat tariffs) and stock market turbulence. The conclusion drawn is that eco-socialist planning of the global economy in the public and environmental interest, is the only route out. (Disclosure: that’s my main bias but I’ll travel a long way with advocates of positions 2-4 as well.)

For those outside mainstream, neoliberal logic, can the latter four framings be fused together for not only a coherent analysis but also a clear political response? The danger of not having a strategy linking Keynesians, environmentalists, nationalists and anti-capitalists is four-fold:

1/ under a beggar-thy-neighbour ‘reciprocal tariff’ trade war, we all face a new version of a 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act and then a 1930s-style Great Depression (which by the way, was an extremely constructive period for South African capitalism, which grew 8% per year as a result of import-substitution industrialization);

2/ recognizing the durable power of U.S. economic imperialism, individual governments will go cap-in-hand to Trump to beg for a bit of relief, offering absurd concessions in the process such as Ramaphosa’s invitation to drill baby drill;

3/ surplus countries will redirect already-produced (or in-production) manufactured goods and commodities away from the now shuttered U.S. market, flooding all other potential buyers, thus further deindustrializing South Africa – whose main anti-dumping measures applied by the International Trade Administration Commission are against various ultra-cheap imports from China; and

4/ Naturally the mainstream logic of ‘searching for new markets’ – now that the U.S. is closing its trade doors – won’t get at the root cause of the problem. That cause is sometimes termed ‘uneven and combined development,’ in which over the past 40 years, the global trading system became exceptionally volatile and generative of ever worsening inequalities (especially unequal ecological exchange), i.e., depleting, polluting and emitting against the interests of poor economies and natural environments.

A long pattern of economic abuse

This extreme abuse of commercial power being exercised with a vengeance by Trump, no matter how self-destructive financial markets have judged his Liberation Day, is only the latest reflection of Western economic chaos. The world has suffered extreme uneven development after the recovery from early-1980s global recession, as ‘Washington Consensus’ liberalization kicked in everywhere due to debt crises and IMF/World Bank squeezing, and especially via global commerce following the capture by nearly all governments’ policies by the World Trade Organization after 1994.

The limits of trade globalization became clear in 2008 – the peak year of world trade/GDP until until 2022 – as did the limits of financialised economies in recent months, in the form of overvalued ‘Buffett Indicators‘ of stock market capitalization, unprecedented debt loads, currency volatility and recognition of the $’s malevolence after two Fed-led ‘Quantitative Easings’ and interest rate manipulations, etc.

The damage done to South Africa’s industrial economy was amongst the most severe, as we lost most labor-intensive industries – clothing, textiles, footwear, appliances, electronics, etc – which had driven the manufacturing/GDP ratio up to 24%, before the steady decline to less than 13% by the 2010s. So the challenge is reversing that imbalance – i.e. fighting against uneven and combined development – with progressive policies, not merely relying upon the program of dissatisfied export-oriented capitalists.

Here in South Africa, the de facto retraction of AGOA zero-tariff access for locally-made luxury cars, aluminum, steel, petrochems, vineyard products and plantation nuts and citrus reminds that the main losers are capital-intensive extractive industries, carbon-intensive smelters and super-exploitative plantations, all with mainly white ownership. From Washington, the imperialist Hudson Institute last month even recommended not cutting the tariff-free AGOA trade program, since “The communities that benefit most from the AGOA largely support South Africa’s pro-American political parties.”

In contrast to Trump’s paleo-con isolationism and to neoliberal trade promotion, the four historically-progressive ideologies of Keynesianism, environmental justice, African nationalism and eco-socialism represent countervailing views. Programmatically, to move in their direction can only be assessed once the dust settles a bit and the distinction between those national leaders who are either fighting or who are obsequious, becomes clear.

So far, South Africa’s leaders, under threat of losing their Government of National Unity related to a budget dispute caused by excessive neoliberalism, are decidedly in the latter category.

In contrast, the potential for China to guide the international fightback is not merely witnessed in its WTO complaint against Trump, quickly filed on April 4. The same day, Beijing’s central bank experimented with a much more rapid, blockchain-secured digital alternative to the dollar-denominated cross-border bank settlement and clearance system, with 10 regional and another six West Asian economies now reportedly able to avoid the Brussels-based SWIFT network, even if merely for cost and speed savings.

There have been far too many false alarms and hyped hopes about de-dollarization. If it began in earnest thanks to Trump’s misstep, we’d much more likely see the venal, volatile Bitcoin take over, as Blackrock CEO Larry Fink warns, than the renminbi.

All this suggests a far more durable approach is needed, to get out from under Trump’s thumb and then the dollar’s domination, and then escape the tyranny of capital. A series of non-reformist reforms were offered to Democracy Now! by Indian radical economist Jayati Ghosh, worth mulling over for countries like South Africa, and all others, as a last word:

“There’s a silver lining in this for developing countries, which is that for too long, for maybe three decades, we’ve been told that the only way we can develop is through export-led growth. And that’s really — it’s been unfortunate, because we have never seen giving our own workers a fair deal as a good option. We’ve always seen wages as a cost, not as a source of our own domestic demand and market. It’s now time to actually change, to shift gears, to think about different trading arrangements, more regional arrangements, looking at other developing countries as markets, looking at our own population as markets, and thinking about the things we can do to create sustainable production, that’s not ecologically damaging, that actually provides living wages and decent working conditions within our own countries.”

(The University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change will convene a webinar on Trump tariffs in the G20-from-below series on Tuesday, April 15, 3pm SA time, 9am Washington time, here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84736248638 )

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Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Massachuset’s Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegsmeth have little in common.  Teixeira is serving a 15-year sentence for leaking Pentagon documents on an unclassified web site called 4chan and on Twitter and Telegram.  He then posted printouts of the documents at his parent’s home as well as on an instant messaging platform “Discord.”  The leaked documents were primarily related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, containing operational briefs from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.  The operational details would have been extremely valuable to Russian forces for they identified Ukrainian difficulties in countering Russian flanking maneuvers.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer who has academic degrees from Princeton University and Harvard University.  (Teixeira is a high school graduate.)  Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate as the 29th secretary of defense in U.S. history, requiring a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance.  It was only the second time in our history that a Cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by a vice president’s vote.  He is the second-youngest person to serve as secretary of defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest in serving President Gerald Ford and the oldest in serving President George W. Bush.  Like Teixeira, however, Hegseth released operational details from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff that identified details of an imminent U.S. military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.  Unlike Teixeira’s information, Hegseth’s operational intelligence could have endangered the lives of naval airmen and compromised the top secret mission.

There is a major difference between the two men regarding outcomes.  Unlike Teixeira, Hegseth has faced no punishment for his failure to comply with Department of Defense policies and procedures and to place the lives of U.S. servicemen at risk.  The Pentagon’s independent watchdog has agreed to a request from the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch a probe into Hegseth’s actions.  The review will determine whether Hegseth was in compliance with classification and records retention requirements.  Hegseth has lied, arguing falsely that no classified military plans has been discussed.

There are several aspects of this illegal activity that finds the two men have something in common.  First of all, Teixeira and Hegseth were engaging in performative actions that compromised national security interests of the United States.  Second, the two men were essentially boasting about their knowledge of extremely sensitive intelligence to what can be fairly described as their peers.  Teixeira’s peers were very young men in their teens and early twenties who seemed to have had no interest in the sensitive information that Teixeira provided, but were awed by Teixeira’s knowledge and access to unusual information available to very few people in the U.S. government.

Hegseth’s peers were high-level members of the Trump national security team who had no need for Hegseth’s information at that time because the decision to attack the Houthis had already been made, which is exactly what deputy chief of staff Steven Miller told the chat group in order to cut off any debate regarding the decision.  In other words, both men—the teenaged airman and the secretary of defense—were boasting about their knowledge of sensitive information for their own self-aggrandizing reasons.

As a result, the young, low-level braggart is in jail for the next 14 years, but the big-time braggart will go completely free; he’s “too big to jail.”  The same could be said for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz who set up the illegal chat room where Hegseth’s military plans were revealed.  Waltz is a particularly pathetic case because he was responsible for placing a liberal journalist in the controversial chat room.  More recently, Waltz’s lack of stature in the Trump administration was manifested when he couldn’t prevent the firing of six senior staffers from his NSC because of the rantings of a crazed conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer.  Loomer is well known for calling 9/11 an “inside job.”

Hegseth’s escapade fits a larger pattern that finds high-level officials escaping punishment, while lower level officials end up in jail.  Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton received no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security in using her personal cell phone for storing sensitive materials.  CIA director David Petreaus, a retired four-star general, provided sensitive intelligence to his biographer, who was also his mistress, but received a modest fine that was covered by a few of his speaking fees.  Former national security adviser Sandy Berger stuffed his pants with classified documents from the National Archives, but received a modest fine.

And former CIA director John Deutch placed the most sensitive CIA operational materials on his home computer, which was used to access pornographic sites.  Deutch was assessed a fine of $5,000, but received a pardon from President Bill Clinton before prosecutors could file the papers in federal court.  Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales kept sensitive documents about the NSA’s surveillance program at his home, but received no punishment.

Conversely, the “Jack Teixeira’s” of the world get hammered.  John Kiriakou, a CIA operative, received a thirty-month jail sentence in 2014 for giving two journalists the name of a CIA operative, although the name never appeared in the media.  Kiriakou was punished because he was the first CIA officer to reveal the torture and abuse program.  Meanwhile, the authors of the torture memoranda at the Department of Justice—John Yoo and Jay Bybee—received no punishment or even censure.  Moreover, Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s law school in Berkeley, and Bybee is a senior judge of the Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit.

A CIA colleague from the 1970s, Frank Snepp, wrote an important book on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that used no classified information, but had to forfeit considerable royalties because the book wasn’t submitted for the agency’s security review.  Meanwhile, former CIA directors Leon Panetta and George Tenet received special treatment from the CIA for their memoirs. (My CIA memoir contained no classified information and took nearly a year to be cleared, requiring the intervention of the ACLU to get the manuscript released.  The ACLU took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before it was predictably dismissed on national security grounds.)

The CIA’s review system is in fact a censorship system that can’t be squared with the Constitution.  At the same time, in the case of Secretary of Defense Hegseth, we find the government doing nothing to protecting bona fide national security secrets.

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Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

Some 40 people form a circle on the dusty, late-summer grass. Following days of uncertainty and fear, cut off from most forms of communication, families from Mapuche communities in Argentina’s Chubut province gather to talk about what happened to them on Feb. 11.

At 7 AM that Tuesday, hundreds of Argentina’s armed provincial and federal police forces raided their homes, smashing windows and destroying belongings. The special forces, wielding assault rifles, held men, women and children at gunpoint for more than ten hours.

During their day of terrorizing Mapuche families, police took cell phones and computers, leaving the communities—spread over miles at the eastern base of the Andes—cut off from each other. They confiscated books and farm tools, forced indigenous men, women and children to give DNA samples, semi-stripped young women and photographed tattoos and other body markings, manhandled elders, and separated young children from their parents while forcing toddlers to witness the violence against their mothers. In the twelve simultaneous strikes, police also broke into a Mapuche community radio in El Maiten, Radio Petu Mogelein, and destroyed vital communications equipment.

These communities, often just a handful of indigenous families that survived the bloody campaigns of genocide and displacement throughout Argentina’s colonial history, are the now the target of a new offensive under the “anarchocapitalist” policies of Javier Milei. The repression aims at stripping them of the little they have left of their ancestral territory and placing it in the hands of some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires.

Trawun, testimony

Outside one of the homes that was raided, Mapuche community members described the violence. A few international journalists and representatives of regional human rights organizations observed the trawun—a community gathering to share information, repair the community and plan strategy. We strained to hear the words of their testimonies as the wind whipped through a stand of poplar trees.

An 84-year-old elder pushed up his sleeve to show bruises from being thrown to the ground and cuffed by police. Young women described being forced to lie face down on the floor for hours and as police intimidated them with their guns. Children witnessed scenes of brutality that will mark them for life.

For hours the security forces refused to present a judicial order or inform indigenous families of the reason behind the violent invasion of their homes. Authorities finally presented a judicial order, signed by judge Jorge Criado, who was formally accused of racial discrimination against the Mapuche in a 2020 case, to investigate a vandalism attack Jan. 18 in Estancia Amancay 80 kilometers away.

Police arrested Victoria Núñez Fernández, a 37-year-old member of the Lof Pillan Mawiza who has lived with and worked with the Mapuche community for years. Witnesses and evidence from GPS records prove that Núñez Fernández was miles from the scene at the time the equipment was set on fire, but the judge ordered 60 days of house arrest as government authorities continue to declare her guilt.

Forest fires as a smokescreen

Since they began in December, Argentine government propaganda has blamed the Mapuches for forest fires that have burned more than 50,000 hectares of mostly national forest land in Patagonia. It’s a triple ploy– to distract from the role of climate change and government negligence in the fires, to divert attention from real estate interests waiting to take over land for megaprojects, and to criminalize the indigenous people who are the last the remaining bulwark against the mass exploitation and destruction of one of the world’s largest freshwater and forest reserves.

“It’s so outrageous that we should be blamed when actually the Mapuche community has always done everything to protect life here. We´re part of the territory that we defend, and we’re going to protect the life of the river, the life of the mountain, the life of the forest”, Evis Millán of the Lof (community) Pillan Mawiza told me in an interview at her ranch by the river.

“We would never set fire to it. This set-up that the government of Chubut is carrying out with the national government has a clear objective–to name an internal enemy to cover up the criminalization and eviction of the Mapuche communities.”

Without a trial or investigation, the day after the police operation, Governor Ignacio Torres of Chubut province presented a PowerPoint accusing the Mapuche of the fires and the vandalism. Flanked by hooded agents bearing machine guns in what was supposed to be a press conference, he projected the faces of four indigenous women, calling them “the persons responsible for the attack [on Amancay]” and swore “they will rot in jail”. Among them was Victoria Núñez Fernández, still in custody, and Moira Millán. Moira Millán is an internationally known indigenous land defender, novelist and women’s rights leader.

Torres’ performance followed a playbook handed down from the far-right government of Javier Milei and his Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich. Bullrich, whose ministry is also responsible for preventing and controlling forest fires, has long promoted usurping land from indigenous peoples for sale on the international market. Following the raids, she released a video with images of the police raid on Millan’s home, stating, “These people will be declared under Article 41 TER-ROR-ISTS”.

Milei’s government established the legal framework for this extreme measure just days after the raids, when it listed  “RESISTENCIA ANCESTRAL MAPUCHE (RAM)” (Mapuche Ancestral resistance) as a terrorist organization in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing. The RAM is an invention to smear the Mapuche people; the communities have stated repeatedly they have no knowledge of or contact with it. There’s only one person identified with the RAM, Facundo Jones Huala. Despite taking credit for the vandalism at Amancay, Jones Huala has not been arrested and makes no effort to hide from authorities. Meanwhile, the government continues hold Núñez Fernandez on trumped-up charges and to make the untenable claim that a handful of Mapuche women torched the forests they live in as an act of revenge for efforts to displace them.

Mapuches in Patagonia point to powerful economic interests with ties to Milei’s government as the real culprits behind the fires.

A fire sale of Patagonia

The forest fires that destroyed thousands of acres in the summer months are finally being quelled by autumn rains. Experts have warned that the high temperatures and low rainfall caused by climate change is behind rising fire destruction in the region. But local governments and the government of Javier Milei—a climate change denier—prefer to blame the Mapuche, while taking advantage of the destruction to privatize a land coveted for its minerals and pure water, and for its natural beauty and remoteness.

Milei began preparations to sell off Patagonia to foreigners as soon as he took office. Using presidential decrees, he repealed the law that limited foreign land ownership on Dec. 21 as part of a package of decreesto deregulate the economy and promote sale of resources to foreign investors.

In what seem to be moves to increase the vulnerability of protected natural reserves, he eliminated the Fund for the Protection of Forests and transferred responsibility to the security ministry, leaving a huge void in know-how, infrastructure and funding to confront forest fires, despite the fact that each year fire destroys more forest land. He also cut spending of the National Service for Fire Management by 81%.

Milei also announced the repeal of the law that bans the immediate sale of land affected by fire for agribusiness and real estate development. This kind of law exists in most countries as a necessary safeguard against business incentives to torch public lands. Although the repeal has not gone into effect yet, it recently passed committee in the Senate and continues to be a key element in the government’s plan for a massive fire sale of Patagonian lands.

Mining companies, real estate interests, hydroelectric plants and other megaproject developers have long waited to get their hands on more land in Argentina’s Patagonia. Milei is banking on the sell-off of indigenous territories and resources to help pay for the huge debt he hopes to receive in order to prop up the Argentina peso and avoid the total collapse that looms under his radical free-market policies.

Neocolonialism, rebooted

The Milei government has mapped the road forward for Patagonia, and it runs right over the bodies and the territories of the Mapuche people. To mask its own complicity with business interests hoping to move onto affected lands, the Milei government launched a media and legal strategy to deflect attention from the link between the fires and land-use changes that stand to benefit billionaire foreigners, and to neutralize the Mapuche-Tehuelche people who stand in their way through criminalization, eviction and extermination.

The formula is not new. Crusades against the Mapuche began with the conquest of their ancestral lands centuries ago and has not let up since then. The current crisis has the same colonial roots as previous genocidal campaigns: racism and the takeover of land and resources by force.

In January, Bullrich ordered the eviction of the Lof Pailako in the Los Alerces National Park. To avoid bloodshed, community members abandoned their homes hours before the arrival of police forces. Families were left homeless, animals without sustenance and children without access to housing, health or education. Bullrich stated triumphantly: “This is the first eviction of a series that will mark the end of a period in which a lack of respect for private property reigned in Argentina.”

The Minister of Security acts with the full backing of the federal and provincial governments. Milei, an admirer of Donald Trump and member of the international far right, launched the offensive against the Mapuche with his trademark free-market and white supremacist zealotry. While giving investors free rein, he ended indigenous land registry programs and rescinded Law 26.160, the Emergency Indigenous Territory Law of 2006 that at least nominally suspended evictions of indigenous communities in indigenous territory. Despite having signed on to international indigenous rights treaties, successive governments of both the right and the left failed to institutionalize recognition of land and rights, paving the way for Milei to revert gains and protections for the communities.

Human rights organizations have denounced the repeal of indigenous rights to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Office of the Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The billionaire bonanza

As the Mapuche are violently evicted from the few hectares of land they live on, international billionaires already own, often illegally, millions of hectares in the Argentine Patagonia and are looking to take over more. The ultra-rich set their sights on this land with its sweeping views of the Andes and miles of clear lakes and open woods decades ago. The region holds much of the earth’s remaining fresh water, clean air and pristine forests. Corporations have moved in to exploit natural resources, and individual billionaires see the region as their private playground and a refuge for when the rest of the planet becomes inhabitable.

A case point is Lago Escondido, property of the British multimillionaire Joe Lewis. Lewis owns 12-14 thousand hectares including the entire lake. Although he has entertained Argentine presidents and foreign dignitaries on his property, it’s sealed it off to public access by physical barriers and armed guards. Other foreign interests with extensive holdings in the Argentine Patagonia include the Israeli firm Mekorot, the Italian firm Benetton, the actor Sylvester Stallone, and investment companies from United Arab Emirates, among others.

Like Trump, Milei’s government of the rich and for the rich has acted fast to remove environmental and social restrictions. Milei instituted a new Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI by its Spanish initials) last year that provides tax breaks, customs incentives and foreign exchange benefits for projects of more than 200 million dollars that are initiated within two years. The law will promote the kind of large-scale extractivist projects that citizen groups and Mapuche communities have opposed for uprooting communities and destroying the land.

An analysis of the likely impact of RIGI in Chubut finds that Patagonian province could see a rapid boom in mining and oil and gas exploitation. Chubut has a ban on open-pit mining–the result of grassroots organizing. Experts fear a legal challenge that could result in overturning the popular will expressed in the ban.

RIGI and the other programs to sell Patagonia to foreign investors set the scene for local conflicts over land and resource use. Billionaire land owners stand to profit enormously from Milei’s measures and already have drawn up plans to expand holdings and operations.

The attacks, expulsions and criminalization of the Mapuche communities can be seen as a preemptive measure to weaken forces that defend native lands and environmental protection.

Reinforcing the Police State

The federal government has prepared to put down resistance by legalizing violent repression of local and national opposition. On March 10, Congress passed the so-called  “Anti-Mafias Law” that mandates that all members of a group can be given the same sentence as a single member, a law the international associations of jurists and human rights organizations have called the “legalization of a virtual state of siege” especially designed to apply to those most hurt by Milei’s measure–the poor, political opposition, unionists and indigenous peoples.

Milei’s government also adopted an “anti-picket protocol” that criminalizes protest. These measures have led to more than a thousand protesters injured due to excessive use of force, according to a report by Amnesty International. Most recently, police fired a gas canister directly at a photographer during March 12 protests. The photographer Pablo Grillo, whose skull was broken, is still in intensive therapy.

The recreation of a brutal police state in Argentina conjures images of the military dictatorship, a period of state terrorism that lasted from 1976 to 1983. Millan warns that the Milei government is a dictatorship and that the country is seeing a return to the “state terrorism” that led to thousands of assassinations and disappearances during the military dictatorship.

When Caring for Land and Culture Means Risking your Life

It’s not surprising that the regime has made indigenous women the center of its defamation campaign. Women are the core of Mapuche defense of their territory and the protection of the land and life against extractivist projects and privatization. They’ve worked for decades to consolidate and reestablish communities in ancestral lands, teach new generations the Mapuche language and customs, and build peaceful resistance. The latest government-corporate offensive has put their lives and liberty at grave risk.

“This group in power—patriarchal, racist —feels threatened by the capacity and the defense of life that we women carry out,” Moira explained in a recent interview. “The State and the corporations know that women can build alliances among sectors to defend rights so they need to weaken this strong organizational process in this historic moment, including at the global level.” In this context she added, the openly misogynist attacks of the Milei government are strategic, they’re being incorporated into public policy, and they are a focus of repressive policies.

Despite all the forces against them, today’s Mapuche communities continue to live on and care for their land. They protect the rivers and lakes, and manage the forests to keep trees healthy, prevent fire damage and control invasive species. Some have lived on these lands continuously for generations, others have returned from forced migration to urban slums to rebuild their lives, their land and their identity.

Almost every day during the weeks of our visit, the women left the house early to hold traditional ceremonies. Language, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge and practices are nourished through daily life, family and community ties. Even after the genocidal campaigns and the speeches devoted to denying their existence (the government frequently speaks of “pseudo-Mapuches”) or spreading hate, these communities still survive and it’s because of them that the region still offers world-famous fresh water, abundant fish and unspoiled views.

The power of example can be more threatening to illegitimate power than might.

Two radically different views of the land and humans’ relationship to it are in play here. As plans advance to create an extractivist enclave out of nature’s masterpiece, Moira Millán summed it up: “We have firmly opposed extractivist large-scale mining, dams, hydroelectric projects that would murder the river to provide electricity to transnationals and lately the aqueduct that oil companies are pushing for. The Mapuche people recover land to reaffirm the commitment to life. For us, life is the most important. And not just human life, the life of everything in our surroundings.”

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a  period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.

First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism. Public institutions are hollowed out, courts are under siege, regulatory bodies are politicized and disempowered, and the mechanisms of governance now serve only the most ruthless forms of concentrated financial and political power.

Second, we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education, both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment, critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt power visible. What once served as a space for reflection, dissent, and civic engagement is being transformed into a battlefield of ideological control, where questioning authority is replaced by obedience, and pedagogy is reduced to training, conformity, and propaganda. Education is explicitly no longer on the side of empowerment for the many. It has become an ideological tool of massive repression, indoctrination, surveillance, and an adjunct of the billionaire elite and the walking dead with blood in their mouths.

Books that illuminate injustice, affirm histories of resistance, and introduce critical ideas are being banned. Entire fields of knowledge—gender studies, critical race theory, decolonial thought—are outlawed. Professors are fired, blacklisted, or harassed for daring to speak the truth, especially those who denounce the genocidal violence being waged by Israel, which has now taken the lives of over 50,000 Palestinians, many of them children. Journalists are doxxed, detained, or demonized.

Cultural institutions are defunded or coerced into silence. The arts are no longer sacred; they are now suspect. Social media platforms and news outlets are intimidated, policed, and purged. Elite law firms are targeted,  intimidated, silenced or forced into complicity by the Trump administration. Scott Cummings rightly argues President Donald Trump’s recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant as a declaration of war against lawyers. Some prestigious law firms and attorneys—once alleged guardians of justice—now grovel before authoritarianism in acts of staggering complicity. The public sphere is shrinking under the weight of repression.

Third—and perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable, on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency. This is not hyperbole. Immigrants are caged in squalid detention centers, separated from their families, deported without due process to detention centers in Louisiana or to Guantanamo, or simply disappeared. Muslims are vilified, surveilled, and targeted with impunity. Black and brown communities are over-policed and under-protected, sacrificed to the machinery of carceral violence. State terrorism is normalized.  The state is actively criminalizing existence itself for all those who do not fit the white Christian nationalist fantasy of purity, obedience, and subjugation.

This is a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination, and the very capacity to think, make connections, and to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal.

Consider just a glimpse of the horror now unfolding:

Venezuelan migrants are being disappeared into a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon  in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. A legendary British punk band, the UK Subs, denied entry for voicing dissent against Trump’s authoritarian policies. A French scientist barred at the border for criticizing Trump, who with sneering smile, tears up the Constitution with performative contempt. Trump violates court orders with impunity. Student visas are revoked in the dead of night. Their dorm rooms raided, their wrists bound in handcuffs, they are forced into unmarked cars by agents of a system that is both cruel and clandestine. Young people—Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung—are disappeared, imprisoned in Louisiana, and await deportation under a regime of malignant legalities.  cloaked in legalese. These are not arrests—they are abductions. Not justice—but the slow machinery of fear made flesh. Dissent is now branded as terrorism, and those who challenge Trump’s authoritarian grip vanish into the void—arrested, erased, rendered disposable.

Trump’s totalitarian machine is waging a relentless war on colleges and universities. As Chris Hedges observes, the administration has threatened to strip federal funding from more than 60 elite higher education institutions under the guise of protecting Jewish students—while already pulling $500 million from Columbia University, an action that has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. The charge is a smokescreen, a cynical pretext to silence protest and crush dissent—especially in support of Palestinian freedom. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.”

Elite universities once proud of their intellectual autonomy are being transformed into fortified zones of surveillance and submission.  Columbia among the most glaring, where the campus now resembles a police precinct more than a place of progressive ideas and democratic values. Only now, as the darkness thickens, are a handful of journalists and liberal commentators awakening to the authoritarian siege on higher education—a siege some of us have been naming for decades.

Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference,  cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means being attentive,  learning from history, analyzing the mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism and the force of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity. And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance, and refuse to be silent.

In the face of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented, polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent. As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not  enough to fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers, and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity, defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of liberation.

Academics, including faculty and administrators, must form a common front to stop the insidious assault on higher education.  Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity. Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic. Fascism feeds on fear and isolation. As Robin D. G. Kelley brilliantly argues, it must be met with solidarity, imagination, and relentless struggle, based on a revived class politics. In a culture of immediacy, cruelty, and staggering inequality, power must be named for its actions, and the language of critique and hope must give way to mass collective action.  History is not watching—it is demanding. The only question is whether anti-fascist forces will rise to meet it.

This darkness is not without precedent, nor is it without models of resistance.  During the rise of fascism in Europe, teachers and intellectuals in Nazi-occupied France joined the underground, distributing banned literature and teaching forbidden truths in secret classrooms. In apartheid South Africa, students in Soweto sparked a nationwide uprising, defying bullets with the cry that liberation begins with education. In the American South, Black freedom fighters risked their lives to build freedom schools, challenge police terror, and reimagine democracy in the face of white supremacy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas created autonomous zones rooted in dignity, justice, and Indigenous knowledge. Palestinian writers, youth, freedom fighters, and teachers continue to create under siege powerful examples of resistance, insisting through every poem, every painting, every lesson, that their people will not be erased, their memories will survive, and settler-colonialism will not only be relentlessly resisted but will be defeated. There is no other choice.

Today, movements like Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Futures, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives and Indigenous Rights Movements are keeping alive the traditions of collective struggle. Courageous campus coalitions, in spite of the shameful crackdowns by the government and in some cases universities themselves, are resisting militarized policing and corporate capture of higher education. Migrant justice organizations are building sanctuary networks to protect those the state seeks to expel. These are not just moments of protest—they are blueprints for democratic rebirth. The task now is to connect these diverse movements in a mass movement with the power to wage strikes, engage in direct action, teach-ins, and use any viable non-violent form of resistance to overcome the fascist nightmare spreading across the globe.

The stakes could not be higher. This is a time to reimagine justice, to reclaim the promise of a radical democracy yet to be realized. Fascism feeds on despair, cynicism, and silence—but history teaches otherwise. Again and again, it is when ordinary people refuse to be silent, when they teach, create, march, strike, and speak with fierce clarity, that the foundations of tyranny begin to crack. Fascism has returned from the shadows of history to once more dismantle justice, equality, and freedom. But its resurgence must not be mistaken for fate. It is not the final script of a defeated democratic future—it is a warning. And with that warning comes a call to breathe life into a vision of democracy rooted in solidarity and imagination, to turn resistance into a hammer that shatters the machinery of cruelty, the policies of disposability, and the totalitarian and oligarchic opportunists who feed on fear. As we stand before the terrifying rise of authoritarianism, it becomes undeniable: the fire we face is not some distant, abstract peril, but a fierce and immediate struggle — the fire this time is the fascist capture of America. This is the moment to make education central to politics, to shape history with intention, to summon a collective courage rooted in the demands of freedom, equality, and justice—to act together with a militant hope that does not yield. Fascism will not prevail—unless we let it. In times like these, resistance is not a choice; it is the condition of survival.

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US striking Houthi positions in Yemen. Image Source: U.S. Air Force – Public Domain

On March 24, the country learned that a group of senior Trump administration officials (including the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, among others) accidentally sent classified details of military strikes against Yemen to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Since Goldberg broke the story, there has been a steady stream of commentary about “Signalgate,” most adding little but sound and fury. The public discourse about Signalgate reveals something important about American politics—far more important than the incompetence at the center of the scandal. What has rarely been mentioned during the national conversation is the elephant in the room: the United States’ attacks on Yemen violate international law and contribute to one of the world’s most significant humanitarian crises.

The nightmare of the Washington ruling class is that we might finally open our eyes to the real, documented crimes going on in a country most Americans can’t find on a map. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of brutality and suffering that the United States has foisted upon the people of Yemen. And it is impossible to separate the United States’ strategic approach to Yemen from its support of the genocidal onslaught in Palestine. In the first year of the brutally one-sided terror campaign in the Gaza Strip, the U.S. gave billions in arms and other support to Israel, no questions asked. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project:

U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting. This estimate is conservative; while it includes approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economic costs.

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, adds that arms offers during this period (that is, beyond the $17.9 billion in military aid, including items that have yet to be delivered) are worth more than $30 billion. Yemen’s Houthis have harried shipping lanes in response to the U.S.-supported genocide in the Gaza Strip, prompting the Biden administration to re-assign the group to its spurious terror list. Washington has frequently justified its crimes against the people of Yemen by pointing to the threat of Iran, treated as a state sponsor of terror. The first Trump administration, citing a national security emergency created by Tehran, rushed weapons to the Saudis against widespread concerns about the safety of civilians—members of the Trump government were sacked for raising concerns. It is worth asking: what is a state sponsor of terror? As it has been applied to real-world events, the notion itself is incoherent and unintelligible—that is, it is propaganda aimed at confusing and misleading comfortable Americans. To give meaning to this standard requires that we grapple with uncomfortable facts, and particularly after its illegal actions against Palestine and Yemen, the United States must be regarded as the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism.

The U.S. has killed no less than 61 people since it began a new round of strikes on March 15, but its reckless attacks and disregard for civilian life go back more than two decades. The U.S. first began drone operations and airstrikes in Yemen in 2002, causing “significant civilian harm, and no one has been held to account for these actions.” According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, coalition airstrikes alone have killed almost 20,000 civilians, more than 2,300 of whom were children. At least 4 million people have been forcibly displaced. Today, Yemen is among the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries. We must be clear about what is happening in Yemen, because our media are committed to obscuring the truth: the intentional policy of the United States has been to starve Yemen—and to bomb its people when they cannot be starved to death. When Washington wants to kill massive numbers of innocent people without military action—to make sure they don’t have food, medicine, energy, and the other necessities of life—it uses a global-scale program of economic blockades, rationalized with vague gestures to “terrorism.” For years, the U.S. government has cut Yemen’s people off from the bare minimum necessary to survive, while attacking and destroying critical infrastructure. According to the UN Refugee Agency, over “18.2 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance and protection services,” with 5 million in conditions of acute food insecurity. About 10 million children in Yemen need humanitarian assistance of some kind. The U.S. supported war and the blockade have created an economic disaster in Yemen. Last summer, a World Bank report stated that in the years between 2015 and 2023, Yemen lost more than half (54 percent) of its real GDP per person, putting most people in the country in dire poverty.

The language around “terrorism” is central to Washington’s attempts to control the narrative and to conjure public support for—or at least public ignorance of—its patently illegal campaign in Yemen. As Phyllis Bennis recently pointed out, the U.S. attacks on Yemen are “always referred to as ‘bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels’ to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.”

Yemen and Palestine have tested the limits of the imperial system—how many innocent women and children can we liquidate before self-absorbed, mindlessly scrolling, Netflix-watching, garbage-eating Americans will bat an eyelash? Lots of them apparently. The Signal story is the perfect apparently anti-Trump narrative for the chattering classes: they need not even pretend to stake out a progressive position contrary to Trump. As legal residents who have broken no law are disappeared from our streets for opposing a genocide in Palestine—fully supported by both wings of the ruling class—the ruling class can focus our attention and loyalties on America’s righteous military mission.

Imperialism is the shared faith of the ruling class because the entire American economic and social system depends on it—the cheap treats that pacify us and hide the true features of the system of production: the land theft, the slave labor, the extraction of natural resources, the oppressive “intellectual property” regime that gives the very ideas themselves to privileged corporate rentiers. If the forever wars are ever questioned, the whole governing ideology and political paradigm are thrown open to scrutiny. And they cannot survive a closer look, because they represent criminal behavior at its most shameless.

Washington’s savagery in Yemen, and the corporate press’s bizarre reaction thereto, points to a deep moral crisis and loss of direction in the United States. We seem to be incapable of confronting the government’s malign influence in the world and its near-constant violations of the most fundamental principles of international law. But we will not understand MAGA fascism as a social and political phenomenon until we see clearly its connection with American empire and its crimes against innocent people, including those of Yemen.

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Upper Tenderloin Historic District. Photograph Source: Smallbones – CC0

“Any city that doesn’t have a Tenderloin isn’t a city at all”

– Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist

Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19^th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.

At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms.

In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LBGTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.

The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.

For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue-collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.

A Unionized Non-Profit

The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord owned ones.

Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement which safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood that includes many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.

In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege.

That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry.

In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC is hosting a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.” (For ticket info, see here.)

Community Benefits Agreements

Other Californians fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many Left Coast cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”

A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”

However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”

An Organizing Case Study

Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle.

During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”

Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.

Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.

Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials.

Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with a few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.

Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues.  Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).

Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…”

But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a colorful past and always uncertain future.

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Photograph Source: Oleg Yunakov – CC BY-SA 4.0

Many Americans felt anxious and fearful about the Trump administration long before it assumed power in January. Three months after Trump’s inauguration, that disquiet is no longer simply fueled by recommendations from Project 2025; many of its suggestions have been born out in real-world ways.

Shuttering life-saving programs abroad, firing federal workers without cause, arresting lawful migrants for protesting, and effacing people’s gender identities are just some of the administration’s activities. Many of the president’s Executive Orders are patently illegal and downright cruel.

Things may become much worse.

The word fascism comes up a lot in connection to the current executive, and naturally so do the names Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

In contrast to Germans and Italians of the 1920s and 1930s, it should be obvious that we face far fewer obstacles to oppose encroaching authoritarianism and can do so at less risk to ourselves. Evoking the images of Hitler and Mussolini might create a kind of social paralysis, one that conjures up deep-seated fear that there is nothing one can do to confront an increasingly repressive government.

It is important to consider some of the conditions in Germany and Italy that led to and bolstered those dictatorships and compare them to twenty-first century American politics. The differences are illuminating and oddly heartening.

No Threats from the Left

Conservative political elites in Germany—with the support of high-ranking military figures and powerful businessmen—installed Hitler as Reich Chancellor. He did not enjoy majority support among the population. In Italy, the threat of widespread violence and the backing of rightwing figures propelled Mussolini to power. Italian King Victor Emannuel III signed off on Mussolini’s premiership.  Why did they do that? Because they were fending off the growing influence of leftist parties, as well as the social instability and conflict that resulted from political impasses.

By the “Left,” I mean the aggregate of socialist and communist parties in Germany and Italy. They collectively had many seats in their respective parliaments (the communist party had fewer than the socialist-inspired ones in Germany, though). Socialist and communist party membership in those two countries numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It’s difficult to imagine it today, but during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, socialism was a real force.

To win concessions from their governments, leftists often successfully shut down or took over factories, public transport, and garbage collection. In the German state of Bavaria, they even started a revolution. In Italy, ordinary workers sometimes took effective control of many of the factories in the country’s industrial north.

The ultra conservative right and upper middle classes in those countries were terrified that their privileges would be taken away, so they sought strongmen who headed paramilitary organizations to stop the leftward drift. Mussolini and Hitler fit the bill. They had the manpower, organization, and notoriety to put a lid on developments and quieten society.

By contrast, the United States has no political left in positions of power. Only about 15, 000 people belong to the organization Communist Party USA. They have not run a presidential candidate in many years. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 90,000 people according to its website. In a country of over 340 million, that’s not a remotely threatening number. They don’t have any seats in Congress.

Despite what he calls himself, Senator Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. He is a Social Democrat. In fact, he’s a New Deal FDR Democrat. Of course, he is situated to the left of Trump and his allies in the US Congress, but Bernie is not calling for the abolition of private property or outlawing corporations.

As author and political analyst Gregory Harms has argued in his book No Politics, No Religion?, the center is the left edge of the viable political spectrum in the United States. That was simply not the case in Germany and Italy in the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

In other words, there is no serious leftist threat whatsoever to the interests of the big business community or other dominant institutions either from inside the government or from the streets. There is therefore no motive to silently nod at a strongman to make unlawful arrests, disappear citizens, order extrajudicial executions, or build a network of forced labor camps.

Rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are two factions of a business party oligarchy. With some exceptions, they generally take the same money from the same people. They are already the establishment and happy with conditions as they stand, even though the Democrats are a bit less happy these days in the wake of a lost election.

 It is highly probable that if President Trump starts costing Wall Street money because, for example, he makes good on his campaign promise to deport an incredibly inexpensive and highly exploitable labor force, or if he attempts to control the military establishment for his own political ends, the show will be over. They will tolerate his reality show-style shenanigans only so far.

Lack of Loyalty in Military Circles

Speaking of the military, Hitler and Mussolini had direct control of their military forces for a long time. Generals and enlisted personnel swore loyalty to Hitler. In Italy, the armed forces swore an oath to the king, but Mussolini was effectively in command. Here, members of the US military swear fealty to the US Constitution.

More importantly, after it lost the first world war, the German military had a serious axe to grind. It wanted to regain its power and prestige after the Treaty of Versailles, which stipulated severe reductions to its size. Hitler endorsed a massive rebuilding of Germany’s army, navy, and air force. Many Germans, including the military establishment, viewed those efforts as ways to amend what they viewed as a set of dishonorable and insulting restrictions on their power and influence.

The US military, however, is in no such comparable position. Far from it. It is the most powerful, well-funded, and technologically equipped military in the world; it needs no radical, outlier advocate. Both establishment political parties, despite their other disputes, usually agree on funding the US military to extravagant and unnecessary degrees.

Also, Hitler and Mussolini were highly decorated war veterans, and that played well among many career military personnel, as well as the paramilitary organizations that they led.

By contrast, Trump was not inducted into the army during the Vietnam War because of bone spurs. Furthermore, his negative remarks about martial sacrifice and his antipathy to being photographed with injured veterans have not gone over well. Consequently, Trump is not popular in military circles, at least if the polling data can be believed. It’s important to note that many high-ranking officers dislike him very much and have said so publicly.

It’s difficult to unleash the US military on its own population when, in addition to a lack of legal obligation to the president as a person, most armed services personnel do not think well of Mr. Trump.

No Interest in Cultivating Mass Popular Support

Improving the material quality of life for citizens was a priority for both fascist regimes for a variety of reasons, not least of which was to increase the dictators’ personal popularity and bolster fascist ideology.

Importantly, Hitler kept and developed educational and healthcare reforms that had been instituted many years before he came to power. Starting in the late nineteenth century, free public education had been the norm. Under the Weimar Republic—the post-World War I government that preceded Hitler—universal health care was available to the German population. Backtracking on or defunding entitlements would have been politically unwise.

As a relatively recent example shows, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to defund public services for the British population did not go over well. Once people have important benefits, they are not keen to see them taken away, and they remember when politicians attempt to dismantle them. It’s important to recall that in Britain the reaction to Thatcher’s death was often celebratory. Sometimes, people have longer memories than is comfortable for the political establishment.

By contrast, the Trump administration offers comparatively little or nothing. It just abolished the Department of Education and supports greater school privatization. They want to gut public education by “school choice” or “vouchers.” That translates to less access and greater rationing of education by wealth. Both the later and former problems already exist, but Trump’s decisions will likely make them worse.

Trump and the GOP also want to get rid of what’s left of the Affordable Care Act. The Republican budget (not the reconciliation, keep-the-government-running bill that just passed), calls for steep cuts to entities that administer Medicaid and SNAP. Tax cuts for the super-rich and corporations are likely coming soon.

In other words, Trump and the GOP are not interested in providing people with much at all. In fact, they want to reduce already-existing benefits while further enriching the wealthy. How far they can or will go with that is anybody’s guess. The larger point is that this is not the behavior of a government that wants to cultivate mass popular appeal.

In their first several years in power, Hitler and Mussolini’s popularity skyrocketed partially because of greater domestic social support, more public infrastructure programs, and dramatic gains in employment. Trump’s popularity is already declining. It may get a lot worse as his hodgepodge of cuts starts to negatively affect more people.

Trump himself has said many times that he will never receive much more political support than he already has. The polling numbers show he is correct; it’s usually been 60 percent against him and 40 percent of various flavors of favorable. That means he neither requires fealty to himself nor to the party from the direction of the entire population.

Hitler and Mussolini required mass expressions of support, and that always requires coercion. It is impossible for unanimity of feeling among 10 people, much less millions.

Trump’s lack of interest in compelling everyone to love him (he seems to enjoy any attention, good or bad) and no subsequent requirement for public displays of North Korea-style adoration of Dear Leader mean there is no need for physical coercion and knocks on the door at 3:00 am to take away a disobedient neighbor.

Make no mistake. Trump is an authoritarian figure. He loves strongmen, but he does not demand absolute loyalty from all and that spells a different hardwiring than a Hitler or a Mussolini.

We should remember that we are not helpless prisoners of fate or trapped in a cyclical history. The numerous civil liberties we still possess suggest constructive ways forward to deal with the many problems we face.

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Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024. Photo credit: Hideko Otake.

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-levelTrump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries sayingthat what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets … This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

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