In the latest installment of Inequality Watch, TRNN investigative reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis explore the roots of today’s historic levels of economic inequality and the system that has perpetuated it while devastating the lives and livelihoods of wage earners. To do so, they speak with renowned economist Dr. Richard Wolff about how ideas hatched in the classroom decades ago prompted economic elites to put the US on a treacherous path that would hollow out the middle class, suppress wage growth for working people, and ensure a future where only the wealthiest benefit from America’s economic growth.

Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

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

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch. It’s a show that seeks to expose the dangers of extreme wealth inequality and discuss what we can do to fix it and to do so, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis

Stephen Janis:

Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Taya Graham:

It’s good to have you. Now, this is a form to examine the facts and figures, consequences, and solutions for our current wealth and balance, which infiltrates every aspect of our civic life. On this show, we won’t just tell you about inequality. We will dig deeper and show you how it works, how it affects your lives, and the political system that has grown inherently hostile to the working class. And to do so, we’ll be joined by a guest who knows more about this topic than anyone I can think of. Dr. Richard Wolfe is an expert economist who’s become YouTube’s foremost public intellectual at the intersection of economics and politics. And his analysis of what is driving America’s progression towards oligarchy has been critical for the movement to fight against it. And I know his historical context has helped me understand how politics can often sit decidedly downstream from economics.

So we’re going to have Dr. Wolff respond not just to the report, but to some recent pronouncements from politicians on Capitol Hill who we interviewed and some recent moves by the Trump administration. But before we get to Dr. Wolff, we want to delve into a new report about the devastating impact of our decades long march towards wealth imbalance, and it’s from the Rand Corporation. And reveal just how profoundly the inequities and unfairness are wired into the American economy. We will dig deep into the consequences of this stunning report and unravel deeper roots of unease. It is generated among Americans and how that lack of confidence in the system has manifested itself in the very tense politics of the present. But first, some of the details of the report itself. Now, as I said, it was released by the RAND Corporation. The premise of this analysis is relatively straightforward.

The authors take a look at working class income as a share of the overall GDP or all the goods and services produced by our economy in a given year. The study looks back 50 years to determine the share of income that went to working people and then compares it to the present. It’s an indicator of how much of the wealth of the largest economy in the world goes to the people who actually make it work. And guess what? It’s done nothing but drop consistently. Believe it or not, in 1975, roughly 75% of the total American economic output went to workers’ wages. That’s three quarters of all economic activity into workers’ pockets. You heard that right? Nearly 50 years ago, workers were the biggest beneficiaries of our country’s increasing wealth. But things have certainly changed. As recently as 2023, the RAND study found that the percentage had dropped dramatically to 46%. Over time, the share of the nation’s income that goes to workers has dropped by roughly 30 percentage points. And where has that income gone? Well, not just to the rich or the very rich or the extremely rich, but to the insanely rich to the top 1%, although, and all they’ve done well, don’t worry. In fact, the biggest bulk of the gain has actually gone to the 0.01%, not even the 1%, the actual

Stephen Janis:

Tip of

Taya Graham:

The iceberg 0.01%,

Stephen Janis:

The

Taya Graham:

Most absurdly wealthy group in America. And that income transfer has led to an astounding amount of loss of wealth for people who actually do the work to keep this country running. The RAM report estimates that since 1975, a jaw dropping $73 trillion of wealth has migrated from the working class to the elites. That’s trillion with a T. That’s twice the total annual output of our economy in any given year. And that trend is accelerating. That’s because in just 2023, a mind boggling, 3 trillion additional dollars would’ve gone to working people if wages had garnered the same share of economic growth as they did in the 1970s. And all of this, of course, brings us back to the most stunning takeaway from these incredible numbers, namely that wealth follows power. And with power accumulating and concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, our democracy becomes unable to solve complex problems. And Steven, this sort of becomes a vicious cycle.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think that this report points out and sort of parallels that you need to bring up to understand just how catastrophic it’s been, is the fact that we have been living in a progressively extractive economy. In other words, as the worker share has diminished the parts of the economy that actually produce things for people that are useful and improved, their lives has diminished. And that economy has come more and more extractive. And just to illustrate that point, to make it very simple, as you think about what share financial services have played in the economy since the 1970s where it was about two to 3% of the economy, meaning hedge funds, investment bankers, hedge funds actually didn’t exist, but investment bankers, people who feed off the froth of the economy, well, it’s tripled since then, tripled to almost eight or 9%.

And at one point, just before 2008, before the great recession, about 40% of corporate profits came from companies that just did nothing but shuffle the deck and make money off of money. And so that illustrates what happens. And that’s when you’re talking about sort the political paralysis that precedes it because the more people are extractive, the more antagonistic relationship they have with the working class, working class doesn’t become a group that you want to lift up and improve their lives. It becomes people that you want to extract money from and make their lives worse. And so I think that’s what evolves in parallel, and that’s where we see these sort of mean billionaires, angry billionaires all the time. They’re always angry. Elon Musk is always angry, and Donald Trump is pretty much always angry. And it has to do with the fact that their relationship with the people who actually make this economy run has become purely antagonistic in the sense that their wealth is based upon extracting from people. So I think that’s a good point, and that’s what comes out in this report.

Taya Graham:

That’s actually such an interesting point, and I really hope Dr. Wolf will respond to it.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, he will.

Taya Graham:

And you’re basically saying that bad policy follows

Stephen Janis:

Wealth

Taya Graham:

In a way that we can’t see

Stephen Janis:

Because good policy requires collective thinking and it requires thinking that is most beneficial to everyone. That’s a hard thing to do in a democracy. We don’t understand that it’s not easy to build a bullet train or to improve housing or to build more affordable housing. It takes concerted effort where people are kind of on the same page where I will benefit from what you will benefit. But when the economy becomes purely extractive and wealth is based on the power of accumulating so much that the people underneath you have no power whatsoever. You can’t think big in that sense. You can think big on individual scale, but not collective scale. And I think that’s what we’re seeing,

Taya Graham:

Steven. I think this imbalance also destabilizes communities and makes them more susceptible to things like over-policing and economic exploitation. I mean, so many of the small towns that we covered

Stephen Janis:

Were

Taya Graham:

Also under economic duress, and they had issues with policing. They were overwhelmed by aggressive ticketing and fines and general overreach and overspending on things like law enforcement.

Absolutely. But these are questions we can put to our guests. Dr. Richard Wolf, I’m sure will have a lot of interesting things to say about all of it, and I’m sure most of you are familiar with him, especially if you’re watching us on YouTube. Dr. Wolf is an esteemed economist and founder of Democracy at Work whose ability to analyze the economics of the present through the history of the past is unparalleled. He’s also the author of multiple books, including his latest capitalism crisis, deepens, and he’s perhaps one of the best people we know to break down the mechanics of how rampant inequality is reflected in the politics of the present. A topic of great importance now more than ever. Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Wolff:

My pleasure. I’m a big admirer of what you do as well, so this is thank an opportunity for me to join you, and that’s worth it for me right there.

Taya Graham:

Thank

Stephen Janis:

You, Dr. Wolf.

Taya Graham:

That’s so wonderful to hear. Thank you, Dr. So first I just wanted to address the Rand report, and to me the numbers were really quite shocking. So I guess my first question would be just taking in the raw numbers and weighing on the methodology, how does the economic share of wages drop so dramatically? I mean, how did the oligarchs pull this off basically? That’s a good question.

Richard Wolff:

Well, first of all, let me reinforce, this is a very historic process. You don’t see this very often. That is, you don’t see changes this big in so relatively short a historical period. So yes, you’re right to focus on it. It is stunning. And in order to explain it, you have to look at certain basic shifts here in the United States and in the global economy that span the last 40 years or so in terms of when this really took off. The 1975 is the right year for the Rand Corporation to have used because it is a crucial, not that particular year, but the 1970s are a crucial time. You should think about it as sort of the end of the very special situation that came out of the end of World War ii, 1945 to 75. Those 30 years were a period that the United States must have known, certainly the leaders knew could not possibly be sustained because all of the potential competitors in the world, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, were all destroyed.

Russia, if you want to ask them, they were literally destroyed. Immense bombing had wrecked their train systems, their factories, their cities killed enormous numbers and hurt enormous numbers of their people. So they were finished. Whereas in the United States, it was radically other, other than Pearl Harbor, no bombs fell in the United States. Pearl Harbor happened as you know at the very beginning. So for the bulk of the war, the United States was immune as a percentage of our population. We lost many fewer young people in the fighting compared to every other one of those countries. Japan had an atomic bomb dropped twice, we dropped it, but nobody dropped anything comparable on us. So in those years, the world readjusted itself. The war forced it, and suddenly we saw very dramatically the end, the final end, it had been dying, but the final end of the British empire that had dominated the world for the previous two to three centuries, it was completely gone.

The jewel of the empire, India became independent in 1947. It was over and there was no one to fill that void, no one with one exception, the United States. So in a very short time, the global currency went from the British pound sterling to the US dollar from the British Navy being the power force of the world to the American military operation on a global scale with atomic weapons. You cannot overstress this. The only way Japan and the Europe were able to rebuild from the war was because the United States lent them the money to buy the equipment from the US with which to do that. So after the 1970s, all of that was over the 1970s were in fact a watershed. The great fear in the United States, the great fear was to slide back into the economic problems that the United States had had before World War ii.

Let me remind you, 29 to the war or the great depression, the worst collapse of capitalism in the history of that system, even to this day, we have not had anything worse than the 1930s. So there was always a fear then that oh, what would happen if we slid back with that in the back of your mind? Then you get the results that the Rand Corporation, like many other investigations have shown that the response, and this is really important, folks, that the response of the capitalist class and who do I mean by that? I mean the people who are employers, the people who are in the position of hiring other human beings. The United States census tells us that 3% of the American people are employers, the other 97% are not. And what that means, whatever else you think, it puts that 3% in a position to make powerful decisions that the other 97% of us have to adjust to have to live with and basically have to accept unless we make a revolution, which as you both noticed, we have not had.

So here is what that 3% did, and then I’ll stop. The 3% started, particularly in the 1970s, realized that the Europeans in the Japanese had recovered from the war as everyone should have expected them to do. They were still the Germans in the Japanese, hardworking, highly skilled engineer, modern country, all of that. And they understood that their place in the sun could only be achieved if they could outdo the absolutely dominant economy in the world, namely the United States. So they set their goals on producing goods and services that were either better than or cheaper than, or hopefully both what was done in the United States that made the United States great, which is why Americans discovered in the 1970s and eighties, the Volkswagen and the Toyota and the Nissan, and they fill in the blank. They did it. They did what they set out to do. They produced better cars so that even Americans bought them ahead of the Ford, the Chevy, the Chrysler and so on.

And in that moment, the discovery of the American capitalist class was that if they didn’t do something dramatic, they would be sliding downward as their former adversaries. The Europeans in the Japanese made their move, and that move was more and more successful with each passing year. So here’s what they did. Number one, they made the decision to move the manufacturing base of the United States. Out of the United States. The working class in the United States had been so successful in pushing up wages over the previous century, a century in which profits froze faster than wages, but they rose fast enough right up until the seventies that the employer could share with the workers a modest increase every year that the union would negotiate. And when an employer didn’t do it, the unions had the muscle to strike and to get it, and so wages were much higher.

But in the 1970s, the invention of the jet engine and the invention of the internet made it possible to supervise, organize, monitor a manufacturing factory in China pretty much as easily as you used to do it across the street in New Jersey or St. Louis or Chicago or where you were. So they left. The second thing they did was to take advantage of their history and to automate, to really go about systematically focusing on replacing these high cost workers, which they kept seeing as their great problem. Wages were lower in Japan, wages were lower in Europe, significantly so, and so they realized how do we do well? We replace workers with machines and the third action bring cheap workers here when it wasn’t convenient to move production there where the cheap workers live, those three things, export of jobs, automation and immigration of working class people.

That is mostly people in their working ages, 20 to 50 who would come here with or without family. No one really cared but would work for Penny on the dollar compared to what Americans were used to. And I have to tell you that worked, that strategic move of the business class, those 3% who run the businesses work, they all did it. By the way, at the beginning. Many of them were hesitant. They didn’t want to go to China. China don’t speak English and China’s far away and China’s run by a communist party. Very scary, don’t want to do it. But they had to because the first ones who did it made such profits that those who were not willing to go had to overcome their cautionary anxieties and go, but I want to stress here because Americans are being fed real nonsense about all of this.

No one held a gun to their head. The Chinese never had the authority or the power to make that happen. They might’ve wished it, they might’ve wanted it, but they never had it. This is a decision made by Americans and by the way, their counterparts against whom they were competing in Japan and Europe followed suit, also went to China. And exactly for the same reasons, which is one of the reasons Europe is in the trouble. It is in now Japan having difficulties that it is in now. The world has changed. The people’s republic of China is an entity in the world economy, the likes of which we have not seen for a century. I need to explain to people so often, Russia, the Soviet Union, may and I underscore may, may have been an adversary, militarily may have been an adversary ideologically, but economically never.

It was much too poor. It could never hold a candle to the American economy. That was its Achilles heel. And then when it tried to match the arms race with the US, when it tried to control another country, Afghanistan, it discovered that it was simply too poor to pull that off. And having waited too late, it dissolved. It couldn’t survive. No one has missed that lesson, least of all the people’s republic of China. So they’ve been super careful. If you watch them now, they’re still, when they don’t actually need to anymore, be super careful. They don’t impose tariffs on us until and after we do that to them. That’s been their kind of behavior all the way through. But we Americans have to understand, we do not. We are not in position to win. We’re not even in a position to fight another Cold war. China isn’t the Cold War the way the Soviet Union was. The conditions are completely different. And if the United States pursues it, I as a betting person would bet we will lose. Not out of it, not that we aren’t strong, we are not that we aren’t rich, we are, but the world isn’t a place where statements like we’re rich and we’re strong carry the day that

Is over. And I think that is a necessary way to frame or to contextualize all of the other important issues.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for laying that out. That is really fascinating. And I guess when we’re talking about the Rand report, so they were at this sort of pivot point, they make this decision, was there an option to be more inclusive with the working class here? I mean, does it have to end up the way it did where wealth is so extremely unequal? I really appreciate the way you rooted that and we now kind of understand the mechanisms, but could they have done this a different way, in a way that would’ve led to less economic dislocation for the working class in this country, or was it just the table was set the way it was? That’s a good

Taya Graham:

Question.

Richard Wolff:

Well, the way I would answer it, which will upset some perhaps, but it’s the only way that makes sense to me. If you allow the system to function in the normal way that a capitalist economic system functions, then I have to give you the answer your own words. That’s the way the world was. That’s the way decisions got made and it isn’t neither surprising nor shocking that they were made in that way. Could you have had a different outcome? Absolutely. But in order to get it, and I’ll describe it to you in a moment, in order to get it, you would have to change the system. And what I mean by that is you would have to stop making the decision based on what is profitable. Look, I’m a professor of economics. I have learned about capitalism as the profit maximizing system. That’s what I learned, and I went to all the fanciest schools. This country has to learn it, and they tried their level best. Half of my professors were Nobel Prize winners and sitting next to me in my class at Yale where I got my PhD, was one of the very few women that took economics courses in those days, and her name is Janet Yellen.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Oh my god. Wow. So you were there in the room where it happened,

Richard Wolff:

And I know these people personally because we all went through college and university together, et cetera, et cetera. If you make profit the guiding, if profit is the bottom line, which not only I was taught, but I have taught that to generations of students as a professor, then you get these results. If you don’t want these results, you’ve got to deal with the way people are taught to make decisions. I’ll give you the simplest example. If you move your manufacturing out of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St. Louis and all the other places, Detroit. I mean I love to use Detroit. In 1975, it had 2 million people. Today it has 700,000 people. I mean, that’s it. End of conversation. That’s called an economic disaster. That’s as bad as having dropped bombs on that place and having killed all those people, obviously that’s not what happened,

But they were driven out by loss of jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So if you move your manufacturing, what is going to happen? Well, we know what happened to the companies that did it. They profited, which is why they did it and keep doing it. But let’s take a look, just you, me and the people participating here. If you produce it in China, it means you’re going to have to bring it back 10,000 miles from Shanghai or any of the in order to sell it to the American public. And you all know you can go buy an electronic device or furniture or kitchenware or a whole lot of other things and it says made in China. Well, what’s the problem here? The problem is you are be fouling the air with all the exhaust from all the freighters that are crisscrossing the ocean. What are you doing to the water? What are you doing to the fish?

Stephen Janis:

What

Richard Wolff:

Doing to the air? Well, here’s the important thing. No one has to worry about it because the companies that profit, even though they cause all of that turmoil, which will cost a fortune if you even can clean it up, they don’t have to pay a nickel. If they had to pay a nickel if they had to, they probably wouldn’t have done it because the profit wouldn’t have shown it as a reasonable thing to

Stephen Janis:

Do. So just so I understand, you’re saying that if the environmental costs were factored into this business decision to move everything to China, if the environmental costs were really factored in, then it wouldn’t be technically profitable to have this kind of transcontinental business or not transcontinental transatlantic. That’s

Richard Wolff:

Amazing.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

Only amendment I would give you is it’s not just the environmental costs. Let me give you a couple of other examples.

Stephen Janis:

Of course,

Richard Wolff:

When Detroit and I love the city, I’ve been there, I’ve been taken through it, the people treated me one, I have no complaint about the people, but an enormous part of Detroit is empty, burned out neighborhoods, mile after mile. They took me through, I’m talking, I’m not secondhand this, I saw with my own eyes, this is a disaster for these people. They had to pull up stakes, leave their homes, leave their families, leave their churches if they had kids in school, those kids at a very important time in life when they’re making friends and boyfriends and girlfriends, we yanked out of all of those relationships. One of the reasons all due respect that we have Mr. Trump in office is the dislocation of the white, particularly the white manufacturing working class.

It’s been a disaster for our labor movement because our unions were concentrated in manufacturing and you lost them and their member. And then remember all the communities in which those auto workers who lost their jobs lived, the stores in those communities went belly up. The housing market in those communities collapsed. They were unable to maintain their schools. How many children’s educations were interrupted, slowed down, deteriorated. This teach, if you add up all the costs, here’s the irony. Every one of the last eight or nine presidents of the United States have promised in their campaigns to bring manufacturing back. Our current president makes a thing of saying over and over again, he’s doing this to bring back manufacturing. None of them have done it. None of them have delivered on the promise. And we see why because private profit makes it. Well, let me give you an example. In his first presidency, Mr. Trump visited a factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, true temper or temper something, I forget the exact name. The factory made three quarters of all the wheelbarrows in the United States.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

In 2023, I just followed it through 2023, a venture capitalist bought the company out and did what they all do, which is carved it up into pieces, sold each of the pieces and made more money that way than they had to pay to get the factory in the first place. Today, that brand is still the brand of most wheelbarrows in America. But if you look at the label on the wheelbarrow underneath the same brand temper, whatever it was in small letters made in China,

Taya Graham:

Incredible.

Richard Wolff:

That’s how this works. If you leave the profit system in, if your loyalty to capitalism means that, then you’ve got a hard road ahoe because you’ve got to understand that commitment by you and by this society is producing the problems. Its presidents cannot and will not

Stephen Janis:

Solve. So Professor Wolf, this is kind of profound. It’s kind of effective because in Baltimore we have 11,000 vacant houses. I never conceptualized your thought of it that those ideas that were taught in that classroom, when you sat next to Janet Yell, and because we conceptualized profit in a certain way led to this destruction, which you kind of made an analogy to a war on the working class and cities like ours that were Baltimore is another example of postindustrial malaise. Absolutely. So you’re saying how these ideas were conceptualized, how we thought about profit, what profit meant has as much to do with the destruction we see as even any other force. Is that what you’re saying? I just want to understand because it’s pretty

Richard Wolff:

Profound. Yeah, you’ve understood me absolutely perfectly. We live in a society. Look, it’s really bad, you know that. I know that

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely.

Richard Wolff:

That part of that understanding. I know a little bit about the history, that understanding is part of the history of where the Real News network comes from and what it was designed to do by the people who have worked at it all these years. It’s an understanding, but we are now evolved enough in the United States that the taboo I’m about to mention doesn’t have its hold anymore. And you were very kind at the beginning to talk about me being all over the internet. Believe me, I’m as amazed by that as possible because having been a critic of capitalism most of my adult life, I know that people approached me always as a kind of an odd duck. If I didn’t have the credentials of the fancy universities, I wouldn’t be in these auditoriums. I wouldn’t be invited. It’s not me, it’s all the other you all know. You know how America works.

I’m here to tell you. Yeah, we now have to do what we have been afraid to do for 75 years, as I like to say, Americans are good. We question our education system, our transportation system, our hospital healthcare system. My God, we are in the forefront of questioning institutions like marriage, heterosexuality and so on, and good for us that we open up those questions. But when it comes to questioning capitalism, oh, all the old taboo sets in and you’re not supposed to go there. You’re not supposed to. Here’s the problem if you don’t go there, if we don’t go there, we are foregoing the solution to the problems. We say we. We should never have undone our manufacturing system that because there’s anything special about it. But a balanced economy is a diverse one. Yes, we need service industry. Yes, we need, but we also need manufacturing.

Right now, the most troubled part of our population are relatively less educated in the formal sense. Males without jobs and without any prospect forgetting them, those were the people who worked in manufacturing and a manufacturing job doesn’t have to be dirty and dusty and it can be clean and in noling if you want it to be. All of that is within reach. Unless we hold on to the taboo and the only people left for whom that taboo works is the very elite that the Rand Corporation makes so clear to us sits at the top. If it weren’t for them, I would be able to talk to 10 times more people and all the others like me. And I can assure you, I’m not the only one out there ready and willing to go would have the audiences that need to hear that message.

Stephen Janis:

Amazing. You’re asking the question, but I was just going to say Toay and to Dr. Wolf. I remember sitting in my macroeconomic was class and the professor said, all people make rational decisions. That was like the basis of it. Now it’s all falling apart as Dr. Wolf. But go ahead. You had the next question.

Taya Graham:

I was just thinking that criticizing our for-profit system, the way we accrue profits and how

Stephen Janis:

And

Taya Graham:

Conceptualizing even a person who is wonderful at accumulating those profits, how they’re lionized, how they’re

Stephen Janis:

Heroes, right? The ideology. The ideology,

Taya Graham:

It’s such this incredible ideology built around it and tackling that as a last taboo is just so important

And very powerful because I think people do sense the imbalance and that’s why when tariffs were proposed by our president that people have the feeling, well, yes, we do want these jobs back, but instead the way tariffs have been implemented has caused a lot of confusion. And so what I want to know is if you’ve discerned any strategy behind it, but before I have you answer, I actually asked Senator Sanders about Trump’s tariffs and what he was doing and I just want you to hear what Senator Sanders response was. And I just want to ask you a question. President Trump has been describing America as a sick patient and tariffs as secure. Do you think America is sick and what would you say should be the remedy

Senator Bernie Sanders:

In America today? My definition of what is wrong with America is very different than Trump’s. My definition of what’s wrong is that we have three people in America who sat beside Trump in his inauguration who own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. My definition of what’s wrong with America is we’re the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, that our childcare system is broken, that 60% of the people in this country, as you’ve heard today, are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to put food on the table. So that’s my analysis, which is very different than Trump’s. I happen not to believe in unfettered free trade. I helped lead the effort against nafta, PMTR, with China. I think we need trade policies that work for workers, not just the CEOs of large corporations. I think selective tariffs in the right time in the right place are exactly right. I think a blanket tariff in terms of what Trump is doing, which number one happens to be illegal, don’t have the power to do that, and second of one will be counterproductive. Okay, thank

Taya Graham:

You so much. So I guess my question for you is what do you think the approach should be with tariffs and what do you think of President Trump’s approach so far?

Richard Wolff:

Okay, I won’t comment on Bernie’s response, although that would be a conversation I think we could profitably all of us have about the tariffs. Here’s the problem. A tariff is a nasty action. It hurts other people. Americans love to imagine that somehow that’s not the case. If you put a tax, let’s take an example of our major trading partner Canada. If you put a tariff on the things that Canada ships into the United States, and remember, we have thousands of miles of unguarded border between our two countries and we are each other’s major trading partner. We more important for Canada than vice versa because it’s a much smaller country than we are in terms of population and activity, but nonetheless, we depend on each other. Okay? If you suddenly say that for every foot of timber Canada grows wood and we need wood for our housing industry and we bring it in from Canada, if every tree stump that we bring in has to now be paid for, so we have to give the Canadian company that cuts and ships the wood, whatever it costs to get it.

But now on top of that, the buyer in America has to give Uncle Sam tax. That’s what the tariff is. The tariff is exactly the same as a sales tax, right? When you go to the local store and you buy a shirt, if you are in a jurisdiction that has a sales tax, you pay for the shirt and then on top of it, the cash register rings for you. The tax, the sales tax that is for you, an extra cost of that shirt or that pot or whatever you bought. A tariff is exactly the same. It’s a sales tax on imported items, okay? This means that Americans will buy fewer of them because they have become more expensive. So a tariff imposes on the seller in this case, notice a American official not elected by any Canadian makes a decision, a tariff that hurts a Canadian lumber company. Same thing. If you put a tax on electricity, which US spies from Canada and from many other things, oil, gas, those are important exports. You are hurting them. You are telling them we here in America have some economic problems and we are going to kick you in the face to relieve ourselves.

You don’t do that unless either you have a sense of entitlement that the whole world will hate you for or you feel you can browbeat and force them to accept it. And then you have the nerve, which by the way, president Trump did today with the visiting new leader of Canada. He told him today, we don’t want to buy Canadian automobiles. We don’t want to buy your steel, your aluminum. He mentioned half a dozen items. Well then only Mr. Trump could say that and seem, because I watched it actually live, seemed not to grasp that he was condemning major industries in Canada to unspeakable decline in a short amount of time. I mean, he’s making Detroit’s out of these places, but he’s not elected by them. Why they are sitting there. These Canadians, you can be sure, and I can tell you this again from personal experience, they are sitting there transforming a really positive attitude towards Americans, which they had into a really deep hatred for Americans.

Yes, they understand Trump is not all American and they’re not not children, but you are putting them and then now multiply this by virtually every other country on earth. Here’s the irony. After World War ii, if you remember, the policy of the United States was containment. George Kennan was a great thinker in American political science. That was a strategy. So the Americans put bases around Russia and we isolated and we constrained Russia, the Soviet Union. Here’s the irony. Today it is the United States pursuing that kind of policy, but with the absurd opposite result. We are isolating us. We are turning the whole world into looking at the United States, and understandably, I wish I could say they were wrong about it, but they’re not.

Mr. Trump is doing unspeakable damage. Now on the economics, if you are going to put a tariff the way we are doing, and you’re going to say as Mr. Trump does, I want automobiles to be built here. I don’t want them to be built in Canada. I don’t want them to be built in Mexico where a lot of them are. Well, okay, then put a tariff and hope cross your fingers that the profit calculations of the car companies will lead them to do what you hope they will do if you impose such a tariff. But here’s the one thing you cannot do. You cannot say, here’s the tariff, and then two days later take it away and then a week and a half later raise it up a bit more. You know why? Because that introduces uncertainty and here’s why that matters. Go to any large company that’s busy in Canada or Mexico or anywhere else. They hear about these tariffs and do they consider moving into the United States? Of course they do. They want to escape the damage that a tariff does to them, but to move back into the United States takes two or three years, costs a ton of money, and is an immense risk. If you have any reason to doubt that this tariff will stay the way it is, you would never do it.

That’s why no one is going to do it. That’s why that such a point policy. Policy is a roaring failure from the get go. Wow. He has economic advisors. I know them. Either they’re intimidated and don’t tell him these things or they tell him and he doesn’t care or doesn’t listen. I don’t know. I’m not privy to that sort of thing, but I can tell you that the whole world watches this look, it was a long shot for him, which he didn’t understand because he’s not going to be president in three and a half years and most of these moves of companies, they take much longer than he will be president. So they have to worry that whoever comes in, Kamala Harris or anybody else will undo all of this, in which case they will have spent a fortune of money and moved and be regretful that they ever did it. They’re not going to move there, they just aren’t.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Dr. Wolf, I’ve been really thinking about some of the things you’ve said, and a lot of us we’re kind of naive. We always look at economics as a science, right, as a science. But from what you’re telling me, economics as a philosophy and it’s a philosophy, kind of turned somewhat as a religion where we’re worshiping at the feet of Milton Freeman or something, and that where prophet has become invaluable, prophet is like the catechism or something. You can’t question it, and I’m kind of profoundly affected by this because I did take micro macro and I feel like, wow, I was misled. I mean, you’re talking profit has become sort of invaluable. You can’t say anything against it, is that

Richard Wolff:

Where we are? But let me correct you about something you said a few minutes ago, and you were very wise. If I heard you correctly. You said you sat in a course and the course began with the teacher saying to you, in this course, we assume that everybody is a rational person, who

Stephen Janis:

That’s what was said.

Richard Wolff:

Yeah, that’s what was said. But you were clever when you said it a few moments ago in this program, I’ve got you here. You said you let us know that you thought that was nuts, what we were being told.

Stephen Janis:

Yes I did. Even at 19 years old I did.

Richard Wolff:

Yes. Here you were 19 years old. You already knew that this was crazy. Well, let me just tell you, I am married. I’ve been married a very long time. I know I’m a dinosaur. I got married at 23. I’m still married to the same lady. Congrats.

Taya Graham:

That’s lovely.

Richard Wolff:

She is a psychotherapist, and when I was a graduate student, we were just sort of getting together. Then when I was a graduate student, I came home one day and I told her that I had heard in my class what you heard, that economics is based on the notion that decisions are rational.

She fell off her chair laughing. She thought I was making it up to pull her leg to say something humorous. I said, no, there was no humor at all. And she said, oh my God. My whole field of psychology is an attempt to understand the very difficult combination of drives and urges and fears, half of which we’re not even conscious of that determine RB, the notion we are all rational calculators of costs and benefits. She could finish the sentence. She started laughing again at the thought of mature men and women sitting around talking like that. It struck her as incredible,

Stephen Janis:

But why do we worship the notion of prophet if it’s irrationally derived? Do you know what I mean? That’s what I’m just thinking about. What you said was so profound because these were conscious decisions, but they really were also exclusive decisions. That’s right. We are going to exclude the working class because of this idea of profit. How come we’ve come to worship at this idea of the science of it when it really is more like a philosophy, I guess is what I’m asking, because you’re there

Richard Wolff:

When I teach it. Now, in order to get at this, when I teach it now, I say to the students, profits are part of the revenue when you sell, if you make shoes or you make software programs, when you sell your product, you get a revenue and part of that revenue stream comes into the pocket of the worker, and we have a name for that. That’s wages and salaries, and another part of the revenue stream goes into the hands of the employer, and we call that profits. Now, if you want to make a economic system, have an objective, a goal, if you make it to profits, then you say the whole system is supposed to work to maximize what goes to a tiny minority of the people involved. Why wouldn’t you say more democratic for sure that it is the wages that we are most interested in securing because that’s where most of the people’s needs lie with the wages and the salaries, not with the, and when I explain it that way, everybody nods. It makes sense if you don’t explain it that way. If you explain it the way most universities and colleges do, and I still teach. I’m sitting here in New York City, I teach at something called the New School University,

But that’s a recognized American university. But most of my colleagues, they continue to teach profit maximization as the royal road to efficiency it.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean, inequality is not efficient, right? That’s right. Can you explain that a little bit? How inequality is not efficient economic

Richard Wolff:

Principle, you should have stayed with economics. You’re getting perfectly well,

Stephen Janis:

I blew it. I was an economics minor, English major as you can imagine, but never too late, right? But yeah, so inequality is inefficient, right? Professor?

Richard Wolff:

Yeah, it’s a terrible inefficiency. And again, you can see because nobody has to calculate it in a profit system. If inequality means that inner city schools across America can barely hold it together as disciplinary institutions, let alone chances to motivate, educate, and inspire young people who need it, then you are going to pay a cost in those kids’ lives not being anywhere near the contributions that they’re actually capable of not being able to earn the income that they need for their fear. The social cost of this is enormous to tell me that private profit doesn’t see its way clear to deal with this is to tell me that we got a system that doesn’t work well. It’s making profit driven decisions that are outweighed by the social costs that these private profit calculators never have to take into account. And that’s cuckoo. That’s the distill way of organizing yourself, right? Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Professor Wolf, you were mentioning how tariffs work, and I remember Peter Navarro, who’s the White House senior counselor for trade. He said that the administration intends to raise 6 trillion over the next decade via these reciprocal tariffs and that this would actually shrink the annual trade deficit, which is about $1.2 trillion. So I would have a two-part question for you. So would the US government actually directly raise trillions of dollars via tariffs? And my second question, is a trade deficit really a bad thing?

Richard Wolff:

Yes. It’s a very, very old question. Okay,

Let me make a parenthetical remark just to set the context. Tariffs are not, new. Tariffs have been used by many countries over centuries. I tell you this only because there is a vast literature that has developed in all modern languages about tariffs because they have been used so often and we have lots of empirical studies. Under what conditions did they achieve the goals they set? Under what conditions did they fail to achieve? I’ve taught courses in international trade, and there’s a segment of the semester when you talk about tariffs. That’s how established they are. So having said that and wanting to remain very polite, I would tell you that Mr. Navarro is considered even in the economics profession, to be, I’m searching for the polite word, difficult to take seriously. I’ll leave it at that.

Taya Graham:

That’s very diplomatic.

Richard Wolff:

Yes. So the notion of the trillions, there is no way to know how much money a tariff will raise. That’s what the literature shows. Mr. Navarro should know that because it depends always on how people react. So for example, if the tariff, let me give you an example that’s real. The best and cheapest electric vehicles in the world are currently made in China by Chinese companies, the most famous of which the BYD three letters, which stands by the way for the English words, build your dream. That’s the name. The Chinese company took BYD. Let’s say you wanted to get one of those cars, which by the way, you’ll see on the roads of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The only place you don’t see him is here. Why? Because of the tariff. The tariff now stands right now at a hundred percent. It was raised from 27.5%.

That’s what Mr. Trump put on it in his first presidency, and Mr. Biden raised it to a hundred percent. So if you want a $30,000 BYD car or truck, you have to come up with 30 grand that goes to China to pay for the vehicle, and another 30%, another 30 grand, a hundred percent tariff go to Uncle Sam. So you would have to pay, or I would have to pay $60,000 for that $30,000 car. Now hear me out. Every competitor of the United States, every company in the world that uses electric trucks to get its inputs to ship its outputs, they are all able to buy the best and the cheapest truck for $30,000. But the American company that has to compete against them would have to pay 60,000 for the same truck. You know what that means? That America is shooting itself in the foot by what it’s doing.

It’s not going to make more jobs. And what are Americans going to do as a result? They’re not going to pay the tariff. They’re going to settle for a cheaper electric vehicle made by Ford or General Motors or Tesla or Toyota because it’s not as good as the Chinese, but it isn’t 60 grand. And so guess what? No tariff will be paid because Americans will get out of paying the tariff by buying the cheap car, buying the cheap truck with the end result. That step-by-step Americans will isolate themselves in a walled off tariff universe, which makes them progressively incapable of competing. Let me put it to you this way. I look at all of this as a professional economist, and my image is I’m watching one of those proverbial movie scenes where you see a train crowded with people having a good time, but from where you sit, you can see the train is heading for a stone wall. Oh, wow, Jesus. And you want to yell loudly, get off the train, but they’re having such a good time telling each other’s stories and drinking their cocktails that they simply can’t

Stephen Janis:

Hear me. Wow, it’s

Taya Graham:

A nightmare.

Stephen Janis:

I’m just thinking about what you’re saying. And so we have, as we discussed before, we have a irrational system that sort of presents itself with science, comes up to an irrational conclusion to create tremendous wealth inequality, which creates the conditions for a political class now that is making totally irrational decisions. And so are we looking at a point where capitalism is turning in on itself in America, because the elite said profit above all else, profit above people, and now people are pushing back. But what they’re getting is actually not a good solution, but really irrational decisions that are kind of based on that irrational idea in the first place. Not to be too circular, but

Richard Wolff:

Because of my time constraint, I have to get off, but let me end by breaking another taboo.

Stephen Janis:

Okay, great.

Richard Wolff:

Here it is. The way this system is going, the way it is acting, it is doing exactly what you said, holding on to the taboo and building the conditions, which I know we haven’t got there yet, but building the conditions where the next concept we will be discussing is revolution. You cannot do this to the mass of people. Our people are already showing many signs of extreme stress. Mr. Trump is an exemplar of where that stress can lead. It can go to the right, of course it can, but if it goes to the right, which it’s doing now, and if the right proves itself unable to solve these problems, which it’s clear to me it will, then the next step for the American people is to try to go to the left, which after all they did in the 1930s, there is no reason they can’t or won’t do it again. That’s a wonderful

Taya Graham:

Thing. Professor Wolf, I know you have a time constraint, but I was hoping I could just ask you one quick question.

Richard Wolff:

Okay. Quick.

Taya Graham:

Okay. The question is, I think this is really our most important question for you is what do you see on the horizon? What advice do you have for your average worker out there who’s paying off their car or their home or their credit card, who doesn’t have a whole bunch in their savings account, who doesn’t make over $70,000 a year? What should we be looking out for on the horizon? I mean, we’ve talked about the macro economics. What can we do on the micro to protect our wallets? What do we need to look out for?

Richard Wolff:

Well, the first part of the answer is to be honest. If people say to me, which they do, is it possible by some mixture of good luck that this all works out for Mr. Trump? The answer is yes, that could happen. It’s not a zero probability it could, but if you want me to tell you what I think is going to happen, I think it’s going to be a disaster. And therefore, I would say to every working man or woman, any person, you must now be extremely careful about your financial situation. Don’t make major expenditures if you don’t have to. Hold on. Find ways of accommodating and economizing because there are risks now of a recession, which by the way, most of Wall Street expects later this year or early next year, there are serious risks of an inflation. There are serious probabilities of a combination of both of those things, which we call stagflation. And all of those are terrible news for the working class. And I’ll add one more. Having told the working class for the last 70 years that there is this thing called the American Dream, and that if they work hard and study hard, they will have an entitled chance to get it, an nice home, a car, a vacation, a dog, a station wagon, all the rest of it.

You’re not providing that now to millions of people. And if we have an economic crisis, and remember the last two were immense. The 2008 and oh nine crisis was very, very bad. And the 2020 so-called pandemic crisis. Also, if we have another one on those scales on top of the receding American dream, you are putting your working class under X extraordinary stress, and it would be naive not to expect extraordinary political ideological outgrowths from that situation.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

Well,

Stephen Janis:

Dr. Wolf, thank you.

Taya Graham:

We appreciate you so much. So can

Richard Wolff:

We take your class?

Taya Graham:

I would like to sign up, please.

Richard Wolff:

Okay. Send me an email. I’m sure we can work it out.

Taya Graham:

That would be wonderful. I’m going to take you up on that. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much,

Stephen Janis:

Dr. Wolf.

Taya Graham:

We really appreciate you Professor Wolf.

Stephen Janis:

We take care. Bye.

Taya Graham:

Wow. We learned something new from

Stephen Janis:

Him.

Taya Graham:

Every time we ask a question,

Stephen Janis:

I mean the discussion of economics, it always sort of presents itself with a science. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t pursue it because it felt scientific to me. But the way he unpacks it, you understand. You see, you, Vince, the philosophy that defines it, which is so profound. We don’t even think about it. We accept it. Well, profit motive is the only thing. And look, I sound a little pollyannaish, but still to think about it in that context where he kind of turns it into a philosophy that you can kind of wrestle with and see the underlying assumptions is pretty powerful. And I really appreciate the way he does that, because we need to think of it that way. If we’re going to survive the next decade, we need to think of it as something that comes with conscious decisions, not made from scientific analysis, but someone’s preference. Preference of having inequality. And that’s the preference you’re expressing, right?

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

That’s what Milton Freedom Express is, absolute inequality, because there can only be so many capitalists. So when he equated, and I thought about Baltimore does look like a war zone. I mean, our own city looks like a war zone, right?

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we have 11,000 vacant buildings. A lot of them are burned out. We were just in Santown Winchester where Freddie Gray was killed in police custody. It doesn’t look any different. Someone’s living in a house that’s connected to a burned out building with part of the roof

Stephen Janis:

Missing.

Taya Graham:

I mean, how can you have hope to have any value in your home? How can you hope to have any wealth to pass on to your children when you have a home attached to a burned out building?

Stephen Janis:

And I used to think of it like Baltimore. I would look a war zone like post drug war, but the way Dr. Wolf said it, it was really post economic malaise. It really was affecting me profoundly. But anyway,

Taya Graham:

What’s interesting is the idea of interrogating the very base assumptions. I mean, for years he’s been speaking about interrogating those base assumptions. Exactly the way we run. That’s a better way our economy.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah,

Taya Graham:

It is for profit. Is that the direction it should be? It should be for profit, or should it be for people? And he’s asking us to really take a look at that, and I think people are finally now ready to at least ask these questions. It’s no longer so taboo to even ask the question, which

Stephen Janis:

It was. It’s interesting you called it taboo, because it really is.

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. It really is. Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

But thank you.

Taya Graham:

Well, as we discussed, the Rand report is shocking and sort of makes a point about the uncertain times we’re living in now. I mean, regardless of your partisan preference, it is undeniable that the curtain era is both turbulent and unpredictable, which is why the Rand Report meets such a deep impression for me, because along with the truisms, it revealed about how wealth inequality breeds more wealth inequality. I couldn’t help but think of something else, a special type of influence that accompanies this kind of economic dislocation. And that’s chaos. I mean, utter chaos. Just think about it, that shrinking piece of the pie for workers harms, people’s lives, real lives, people with family, with loved ones, with children, with elders, people who watched as their incomes technically shrank, who could nothing as fewer and fewer of the benefits of the wealthiest country in the world, were not shared with them. I don’t even think shared iss the right word here. Maybe denied or withheld. You know what? How about stolen? You know what? Pick your adjective. Pick your verb. But the effect is the same. But let’s use the word stolen in this case.

I mean, when you look at the numbers, I want you to imagine the lives that impacted and then imagine the chaos it created. All of us, no matter where we are in our lives, have experienced the trauma of losing a job or having trouble paying off a student loan or getting squeezed by your landlord or trying to figure out how you can pay for a car or fund your kid’s education or take care of your grandma. All of us have confronted these choices and often ask a question, how can anyone afford this? And what the heck are we going to do? And don’t even get me started about surprise medical bills. A fact that Bernie Sanders shared during his press conference pushing for Medicare for all. He said, think about this. 60% of cancer patients go through their entire life savings two years after their diagnosis, cancer patients and their families left destitute.

And add to that, the even more disturbing reality that roughly 500,000 people a year are pushed into bankruptcy by medical debt. That’s right, due to being in an accident or getting sick. How’s that for the wealthiest country on earth? But it’s also why this Rand report hit so hard, because it’s not just about 50 years of a declining share of income. It’s also about 50 years of chaos for working people. It’s about five decades of shrinking paychecks, fewer opportunities, insane student loans and unaffordable housing. It’s about the time we spend worrying about a utility bill or keeping a cell phone on or paying for an ailing parent that needs around the clock care. And even worse, it’s often about keeping a job we don’t even like just for the health benefits or working two jobs or even three, or working for a way to offers just enough to get by, but not enough to build a future.

Meanwhile, the horizon and opportunities for the 1% keeps expanding. The future for them gets brighter and brighter and brighter while ours, the working people of this country gets dimmer and dimmer. In fact, today’s conversation isn’t just about numbers or charts or percentages on a page. It’s about the lives of everyday Americans who have been systemically deprived of dignity, stability, and justice. By extreme wealth inequality, $73 trillion didn’t just disappear. It was taken. It was taken from working families, from communities and from our collective future and handed over to a tiny elite whose power and influence grow more unchecked each day. This isn’t an accident. It’s a choice, a political and economic decision made by those who benefit the most from the imbalance. But here’s our choice. We can stay informed, we can stay vigilant, and we can demand accountability, and we can refuse to accept a rig system is normal. This type of inequality thrives in silence, and I guess you can tell we won’t be silent. Isn’t that right, Steven?

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely. Clearly.

Taya Graham:

Well, I just want to again, thank our guest economist, Dr. Richard Wolfe, for helping us make sense of the dismal science and our current fiscal ups and downs. And of course, I have to thank you my cohost, reporters, Steven and Janice. Great. Thank you. I appreciate your insights in helping make this show

Stephen Janis:

Possible. Absolutely.

Taya Graham:

And of course, I have to thank our friends in the studio, Kayla Cameron, and Dave, thank you all for your support and I want to thank you out there watching. Thank you for watching us. Thank you for caring, and thank you for fighting the good fight. My name is Taya Graham. I’m your inequality watchdog. See you next time.

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, thousands of anti-Zionist Jews gathered to reaffirm their opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and to reject the antisemitic notion that the political ideology of Zionism represents all Jews. In this vital and wide-ranging discussion recorded during the JVP gathering in Baltimore, TRNN’s Marc Steiner sits down with self-identified Palestinian Jews Esther Farmer and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to discuss the complexities of Jewish identity and belonging today, the historical origins of Israel, and “the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life” that predate and reject the Zionist project.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a Palestinian Jew of African origins, film essayist, curator, and professor of modern culture and comparative literature at Brown University. She is the author of numerous books, including: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. 

Esther Farmer is a Palestinian Jew and native Brooklynite passionate about using theater as a tool for community development. She is former Ombudsman and Manager for the New York City Housing Authority, former United Nations representative for the International Association for Community Development and was an original founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. She is also a Jewish Voice for Peace NYC chapter leader and the director and playwright of “Wrestling with Zionism.”

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, it’s good to have you all with us.

Jewish Voice for Peace is having their national convention right here in Baltimore, and The Real News is there to bring you the story. Two of the leading participants in JVP are joining me in studio here at The Real News, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is professor of modern culture and media and comparative literature, and a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. Among her films: Un-Documented — Unlearning Imperial Plunder, and Civil Alliance, Palestine, 47-48. Among her exhibitions: “Errata” in Barcelona, “HKW” in Berlin; “Enough! The Natural Violence of the New World Order” that was done in Leipzig.

And we’re also joined by Esther Farmer, who is a Palestinian Jew, a native Brooklynite whose passion is using theater as a tool for community development. She’s the director of “Wrestling with Zionism,” a reader’s theater project in New York City, as well as the author of several published articles on theater and community development. Esther is an active member and part of the leadership team of Jewish Voice for Peace in New York City. And they join us here in studio.

So welcome both of you. It’s good to have you here. I’m really happy you could take the time from the conference to join us here for a little bit. One of the things that fascinated me about the two of you as I was going through all of your work — Not all of it, but going through your work, is that you both identify as Palestinian Jews. Can we talk about what that means? You never hear that. Maybe in certain circles you do, but in the rest of the world you don’t hear that notion, idea of Palestinian Jew and what that means and why that’s the way you identify.

Esther Farmer:  So my father was born in Hebron, Palestine. My grandfather was a Turkish Jew who went to Palestine pretty much to avoid the draft from World War I [Steiner laughs]. He was a draft dodger.

Marc Steiner:  Didn’t want to fight for the Turkish army.

Esther Farmer:  He was a progressive Jew, didn’t believe in war. I found out much later that the penalty for avoiding the draft was to be hung. So several Jews actually left. But he did not realize that since Palestine was a Turkish protectorate, he was drafted anyway, and that’s why they came to the United States. They came to New York.

So this was way before the Nakba and way before 1948. My family lived on the Lower East Side, they were very poor, and they were very anti-Zionist. So my family’s existence gives the lie to all Jews loved Israel, and certainly Ariella’s work really ties into that, that before the Holocaust, most Jews were not Zionists. So what does it mean to be a Palestinian Jew is that there was a country called Palestine, and it was Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. It was very diverse, and the vast majority at that time, 80%, were not Jewish, they were Muslim. So Israel was a creation of people who did not live there for their own interest.

Marc Steiner:  I want to get to that point because that’s really a critical point people don’t get about it, what Israel is and why it is. Ariella?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Yeah. So I think that first of all, we have to be reminded that the category of identity is a colonial category. And I was born into the Zionist colony in Palestine, and an identity was imposed on me at birth called Israeli identity. And this identity was fabricated 14 years before I was born, which means a synthetic identity that was meant to cultivate or to create a factory of Israeli babies, that their identity is predicated on their opposition to others who lived in this country, who lived in this place, which were defined Palestinians.

So when I’m speaking about these kind of human factories in the Zionist colony in Palestine, I’m speaking about the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life. Part of them took place in Palestine. My family moved to Palestine, my maternal side, they were expelled together with Muslims when the first white Christian state was created in Spain, when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain. So they moved from Spain to Portugal, France, Austria, Bulgaria, and then Palestine, way before the Zionist movement started to colonize or to aspire to colonize Palestine.

So they were Palestinian Jews in the very factual way. They were part of Palestine. And this is not a colonial identity, this is a form of belonging. And when I’m saying that I’m a Palestinian Jew, it is a way of undoing, first of all, the identity that was imposed on me at birth, that I’m not recognizing myself in it, and all the other colonial identities that await for me like American or like French. So claiming that I am a Palestinian Jew is claiming a form of belonging that was the form of belonging of my maternal ancestors. From my paternal side, we were Algerian Jews. And both identities were destroyed. Both forms of belonging, sorry, not identities were destroyed through two colonial projects: the French colonization of Algeria on the one hand, and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. So being an Algerian Jew, a Palestinian Jew, a Muslim Jew is a mode of reclaiming my ancestral modes of belonging.

Marc Steiner:  I love that. Both of you have really interesting stories, very powerful stories. I want to dive back into that. But I was thinking as you were talking that, and I’ve wrestled this a lot and I’ve written about this, which is that if there had been no Holocaust there’d be no Israel. I mean, that’s the fundamental… Most Jews were not interested in being Zionists. They were in the socialist movements here. They were doing whatever they were doing, whatever we were.

Esther Farmer:  I don’t know about that.

Marc Steiner:  OK, please go ahead.

Esther Farmer:  I mean, I don’t know how we could know that, but there’s an assumption there that the imperialist powers at that time wouldn’t have… I mean, they certainly used the Holocaust and the sympathy of the world, or the Zionists claimed that they absolutely had to have Israel, and it was seen as some kind of reparation or something. But as my father used to say — Also, I love Ariella’s work because it puts a context to things that my family would say is that the Zionists love Israel and they hate Jews. And I think that says a lot. So I don’t know that the imperialists wouldn’t have created Israel one way or another. I don’t know. I just think it’s an assumption.

Marc Steiner:  Good.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Maybe I can complete it from a different perspective.

Marc Steiner:  Yeah, please.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  I think that we cannot say that if there [were] not the Holocaust there won’t be the state of Israel. We have to ask ourself what is the continuity between the Holocaust and the state of Israel? In order to reply that we have to go back in time because the Holocaust didn’t arrive from nowhere.

OK, if it didn’t arrive from nowhere, we have to ask ourself what did Europe want from the Jews in order to have the Holocaust and then to force on the Jews all over the world to be represented by the Zionists that destroyed Palestine and created the state of Israel as the destiny of the Jewish people. For that, I invite in my book, The Jewelers of the Ummah, have it here with me, A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World. What I invite people to look at is in the wake of the French Revolution, when the modern citizenship was invented, Jews who lived in France were not part of the citizenship. They were “given” this citizenship a few years after the French Revolution.

But what interests me is not the fact that the Jews were naturalized in the wake of the French Revolution. What interests me is the price that they had to pay in order to become citizens. They had to forget that they were Jews. And forgetting that they were Jews, this was a European project. So eliminating the Jews either by assimilating them into the Christian world or assimilating them into what the Euro American powers invented in the wake of World War II as the Judeo Christian tradition, or eliminating the Jews through extermination, all these are part of the same project: what to do with the Jews. Europe invented the Jews as a question, as a problem. And at the same time that Europe invented the Jews as a problem, they also invented the “solution” to make out of diverse Jewish communities a Jewish people with a destiny.

This brings us to the beginning of the 19th century. [At] the beginning of the 19th century, they invent Palestine as a question, and they invent the Jews as a question, and they merge both questions. Napoleon, Napoleonic Wars already saw the possibility of transferring the Jews to Palestine. So this connection between Palestine and the Jews is something that Europe invented way before the Nakba.

And the last point in time that I would like to bring to our conversation is in the wake of World War II. After the Holocaust, Euro American powers imposed what they called [the] new world order. They created the UN as the organ to facilitate their solutions to different people. The Jews were in displaced person camps in Europe from ’45 to ’48. The Zionist movement was a marginal movement in the life of Jews, worldwide, marginalized movement. In the Jewish Muslim world, it has almost no presence.

And Europe, that was responsible for the extermination of the Jews, had to innocent itself, making Europe innocent, making Europe one of the liberating powers, had to what was relied on the exceptional of the Nazi, which legitimized all the European colonies and the exceptionalization of the Jewish suffering. This double exceptionalization and the recognition of the Zionist as representative of the Jews, which means those who were mandated to destroy a diverse Jewish life all over the world in Asia, in North Africa, in many other places. And the Zionists were mandated to destroy Palestine. This was part of Europe and Euro American powers, part of their response to what to do with the Jews.

So if we speak about the final solution by the Nazis as an extermination, the final final solution or the post final solution was to impose on the Jews a state that will be, for them, at the price of Palestine, at the price of the destruction of diverse Jewish communities.

Esther Farmer:  Which is fascinating to me because it’s the way that Zionism is so deeply antisemitic.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  It is antisemitic, obviously.

Esther Farmer:  By homogenizing.

Marc Steiner:  Let’s jump into that. Please go ahead.

Esther Farmer:  Well, just by homogenizing, and now it’s being used [crosstalk] —

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  [Inaudible] form of Jewish life, except the Zionist one.

Esther Farmer:  Right. And it’s this way of Jews being used. That was something that my family taught me very deeply in my DNA, that Jews are used by imperialists for their own interests. And the creation of Israel was so much about that. And yet, we’re all supposed to say that, as Jews, we all love Israel, which is the most antisemitic thing possible. And of course for me, as someone who comes from a very strong leftist Jewish background, what Israel is doing is a travesty.

And back to that question of the Zionists, love Israel and hate Jews, that incident that happened when there was a boatload of refugees and they were coming to the United States and they were turned away. They weren’t interested in going to Israel. They wanted to come to the United States. And the United States turned them away, and the Zionists were fine with that as long as the United States supported Israel.

So it’s just a perfect example in your face of how Jews and Israel are not the same thing, but we have been inundated with propaganda to make our identities. Ariella’s work is so fascinating to me because they’ve literally erased our memories and have changed the narrative and the dialogue to the point where it’s unrecognizable as to who people are. And now Christian nationalists are telling us what it is to be a Jew, which the IHRA definition says that you’re only a Jew if you support Zionism. So they’re literally erasing our memories and history.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Yeah, no, this goes back to Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon, who codified what is Judaism, who invented the Jewish [inaudible] story, who created Jewish life as a pyramidal modes of being, who are entangled being Jewish with the state in a way that the state, the states, different states can tell us today, what does it mean to be a Jew? And there are bad Jews and good Jews, and the anti-Zionists are being considered the bad Jews. And those are Christians who never reckoned with their antisemitism or anti Judaism with their racism toward many groups that are telling us what does it mean to be a Jew?

And I would like just to add that Europe, in order to innocent itself from its crimes against the Jews, first of all, imposed the state of Israel or imposed the Zionists as representative of the Jews, but also exchanged with the enemy of the Jews and created Palestinians, Arab, and Muslims as the enemies of the Jews.

And these were never our enemies. If the Jews had a systematic enemy, this was Europe. For centuries, Jews were expelled from one place to another in Europe. And it ended up with a project that is being called, as a euphemistic term to describe it, was called the emancipation of the Jews in the 18th century and the 19th century. What is this emancipation? This emancipation meant to kill the Jew within the Jew.

I think that here in the US, we have to think about it as similar to the project of killing the Indigenous within the Indigenous. It’s like the boarding schools. So on a global scale, Europe killed the Jew within the Jew, and many of the members of what is being called here in a way that always surprises me, American Jewry, many of the members of this community don’t even remember that they belong to other communities that were destroyed by Europe. American Jewry is an invention, is an amalgamation, is another amalgamation that is built on the European amalgamation of the Jewish people in the 19th century. So we have to be reminded also that Zionism started as a Christian movement. The colonization of Palestine was a Christian ideology before it became a Jewish Zionist ideology.

Esther Farmer:  It’s interesting that I remember when Biden said, if we didn’t have Israel, we would have to invent it. Which is, again, the most antisemitic thing in the world —

Marc Steiner:  Very telling.

Esther Farmer:  — Are you saying that Jews are not safe where they are? So we’re not safe here, so we have to create Israel, and you support that. You can’t get more antisemitic than that. But where are the Zionists? Where’s the outrage from the Zionist around that statement?

Marc Steiner:  You both have just said so much [laughs] that we can stay here for hours just pulling it all apart and really taking a deep dive here into all of it that you’ve said. What both of you have pointed out on one level, a number of levels, you have on one level is how antisemitism drove Zionism, in many ways, to create Israel for the power of the West, as I put it once a long time ago, is to force refugees, to create refugees.

And what you’ve all described, how do you take that and make it understood both politically and socially in this country? So some of the Zionist leaders will immediately call you and me self hating Jews. That’s the first thing they’ll say. But how do you take what you’ve just described and get people to really understand and put their hands around what it really means, how Israel was really created, what it stands for, and what it’s done to us?

Esther Farmer:  Well, we are doing this conference now where we have 2,000 anti-Zionist Jews in a room. 15 years ago, be lucky if you got 15 [Steiner laughs] anti-Zionist Jews in a room. So this is happening right now because the impact of what Zionism has done is war, militarism, and imperialism. And that’s being seen now throughout the whole world. So our job in JVP is to move Jews, and everyone, away from Zionism, and that’s happening.

The issue is that the narrative, I mean, I’ve been doing this work for 50 years, and I have never seen the narrative the way it is right now. It has substantially changed, and that took a tremendous amount of work, and we’re proud of that work. So that’s happening. And yet the policies of the United States are still the same. So that says a lot about what so-called democracy is, when the majority of the country is with us, poll after poll is saying they are not supporting what Israel is doing, but yet that’s still the policy.

So I think these issues of identity and the relentless propaganda that has gone on since this Zionist, I dunno what you want to call it, experiment, has been both so destructive to Palestinians and to Jews, really, really destructive. And that’s why it’s so important for us to have this, as Naomi Klein says it, exodus away from Zionism.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  No, I think that just maybe we have to remind ourselves that there is genocide going on. It’s almost two years, and there are some common ways to understand what is genocide, which is related to what was done by Lemkin and the UN the convention against genocide.

But I think that we have to maybe ask other questions about genocide. Rather than defining what is genocide, understanding that settler colonial regimes are genocidal regimes, and the state of Israel is a genocidal regime that serves the West, serves the West to “solve” the Jewish question another time in its history, and serves the West to have its mercenaries in the form of Israelis.

And I think that it became very clear that since October 2023, without the arms and the money and the propaganda machine all over the world, in the Western world, in what you call policies, and state apparatuses, the persecution of voices that are denouncing the genocide, without all these Western powers, the genocide will not last more than 1, 2, 3 weeks.

Israel does not have the power to have a genocide. Israel itself would not survive in ’48 without the destruction of Jewish diverse communities without forcing the Jews in Europe, the survivors to go to Palestine rather than to rebuild their communities in Europe, without inciting violence in the Jewish Muslim world and making the life of Jews in the Jewish Muslim world impossible in a way that they slowly, slowly, this world was dismantled and Jews had to leave. Most of them did not want to go to Palestine. The case of Algeria in ’62, at the moment of the end of the War of Independence —

Marc Steiner:  For Algeria.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  — In Algeria, only 20% of the Jews were forced to leave Algeria because two colonial projects forced them to leave Algeria. Only 20% went to the Zionist colony in Palestine. The rest of them went to Canada and France.

So they were not Zionists. So we have to understand that the state of Israel was sustained with Western power. It was not an expression of a Jewish liberation project. It was a European project, Euro American project to reorganize the entire world to create what they called the Jewish Judeo Christian tradition, which never existed, to remove the Jews from the Jewish Muslim world —

Marc Steiner:  Which did exist.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Yeah — To create Palestine as, allegedly, a state for the Jews, and to turn Palestinians into an exterminable group. So when I relate to the term genocide, when I wrote several texts since the beginning of the genocide, I put aside the legal definition of genocide, and I am trying to reconstruct how the genocide against Palestinians started. And it started in the wake of World War II when Western power, through the mediation of the UN, decided that Palestinians are exterminable for the sake of Zionists, for the sake of creating a Zionist state.

So rather than speaking about genocide as an event, I speak about genocidal regime, I speak about genocidal technologies. And when you understand the genocidal regime, you understand that already the Nakba was the beginning of the genocide because Palestinians were exterminable. They had to pay the price, they could be exterminated because their presence there was an obstacle for the imposition of the “new world order”, which was a Euro American project of innocenting Europe of its crimes against the Jews and of its crimes against other colonies.

We have to be reminded that in 45 European powers — And we’re speaking about the British, the French, Spanish, they still had colonies in different places in the world. So by exceptionalizing the Nazi, by exceptionalizing the suffering of the Jews, they actually continued to run the world and not to reckon with their crimes against the Jews and against other racialized communities.

Esther Farmer:  One of the things that gets me always is when people say, well, Israel has a right to exist, as if the country was established by God. Countries are created by the powers that be for their own interests. When I was growing up, there was no Bosnia. This was created, generally not created by the people that live in these places, it’s created, as Ariella was saying, by the Western world for their imperialist interest. So I don’t know why this country of Israel has any more right to exist than anybody else.

And I think there’s a difference between these countries and the people that live in them. But this idea that countries, that Israel has a right to exist, it’s just so interesting. It’s an example of how the assumptions and how we’ve been trained to think in these ways around nation states and the creation of these things that just has nothing to do with our actual lived experience and history.

Marc Steiner:  So you both have said so much and given such deep analysis about where this is, in some ways, I think, that is not heard very often and really original. It’s not the way people describe what is being faced at this moment. And as you were speaking, 10 things were going through my head. One was, how do you take the analytical description that you both have given us and popularize that message so people understand it, so people can grasp it? Because the way you describe it, it’s very simple, very clear about what created this — I’m sorry, go ahead.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  No, no. It just occurred to me to think about it not as we would do this work — JVP does an incredible work, but it is not only about people doing this work, the genocide made it clear to millions that this is a genocide and Israel is a genocidal regime. I can write this book and this book and you can do your work, et cetera. But people are not stupid. And there is a moment when people understand they cannot do accelerated lessons that you take with someone who already did the work. But with the beginning of the genocide, millions went to the street, took it to the street to say, this is a genocide, and they’re being persecuted constantly. All these draconian laws, all these draconian policies of the Trump administration is because there are millions who are saying that this is a genocidal regime.

So the question is not how you bring these ideas. The question is maybe how we exit, as Naomi Klein said, Zionism, but how we exit the structures that imperial powers created as benign structures: Museums, archives, nation states, borders, naturalization, all these structures are against people.

So the questions are much bigger than how you transmit the lies of Zionism to other people. For me, the main question is outcome. That all the crimes that were committed against the Jews as if they never existed because the Jews were “received” a state, or the Jews received a citizenship. The question is how to bring the Jews to participate in the anti-colonial, general global anti-colonial struggle to decolonize this world. So it’s not only how you convince your parents or your siblings, it’s about how we exit from those institutions that were normalized as benign institutions, but actually they are reproducing the destruction of the world.

Marc Steiner:  So one of the things I think about as you all describe where we are and why we’re here, I think about historically here in this country that 70% of all the civil rights workers in the South when I was a civil rights worker in the South as a young man were Jews. 70% of all the white civil rights workers, civil rights workers in the South were Jews. And that we were the heart of the labor movement. We were the heart of the revolutionary movements in Europe. There’s a different spirit, I think, that has to be grasped and put out there, a different heritage and tradition of who we are, as opposed to having it being defined by this Zionist domination that was pushed and created by the imperial powers, as you were talking about, so they have a beachhead in the Middle East and they figured out what to do with the Jews.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  But the example that you bring is very interesting because Jews participated in the Civil Rights Movement. They were in solidarity with the Black. They didn’t fight their own struggle as part of it. And I think that what JVP maybe today offers is how to think about the liberation aspirations of the Jews together with the liberation aspirations of other groups.

And I think that what happened with the US, what happened with this kind of erasure of what Europe did to us, what Euro American did to us, is the removal of the Jews from the history of colonization in a way that the Jews from a long time did not have a project of decolonization while they were still colonized. To act only as a blank American citizen in the movement for the Civil Rights Movement means not understanding how much Jews were still colonized. So they could act as blank citizens, but not as Jews who are affirming this as their own struggle. They struggle for Black Americans.

And I think that here there is a very interesting thing for Jews to do in the US, is to reclaim their histories. How come they became American Jews? How come their history is a very short history, the history of their life in America? Where is their history in Europe? What was taken from them? There are traditions, there are beliefs, there are many things [that] were taken from them. There are possibilities to live their life there. So I’m not speaking about in terms of returning to Europe, but I’m speaking about reclaiming their histories. If the Jews will reclaim their histories, they will not be blank citizens in empire, only joining other struggles.

And I think the JVPs, that maybe the first time that there is a broad Jewish movement in the US where Jews are speaking about what was taken from them. And cementing Zionism as their identity is part of what was taken from them. But there is much more to that.

Esther Farmer:  I feel very personally angry at Zionism from my experience as a leftist Jew. My father was a union organizer, and I grew up with that history of, as you say, in the labor movement and Jews. And I have always felt, and I have seen this with my own eyes, how this Zionist project has moved Jews to the right in the way that you are describing, has moved Jews in the direction where it’s unrecognizable to me. That’s the other way in which I see Zionism as so antisemitic. The whole history of Jews being for justice, even in the biblical text and stuff, it’s just completely thrown away by only us.

My mother used to say, we are Jews for justice, not just us [Steiner laughs]. That was the history, what it meant to me to be a Jew. And in Ariella’s work, it’s like a deliberate attempt to erase an understanding of Jews as standing with the oppressed in the world. That’s interesting what you said about… From my family, I did experience that connection between what happened to the Jews and other people, that solidarity. I did feel that, and I think that there were other people who did feel that. But I also think that there was a deliberate attempt to break that memory in some ways, though I think that’s what’s so interesting about what we’re talking about.

Marc Steiner:  I think the reason… I’m not usually at a loss for words because that’s how I make my living, but one of the things that really struck me about this conversation we’ve had so far is that it’s one that doesn’t take place in very many places, where there’s an introspection about Jewish history and Jewish life and what it means in what we face today and how we’ve become sucked into this imperial world oppressing Palestinians. And when I was a kid, it was the fight against Jewish store owners in inner city neighborhoods that we used to boycott and go after because of what they were doing. But now becomes a prominent aspect of American Jewry at this moment. And I think the way you two describe this, the depth of which you describe this is something I think that people need to wrestle with. Beyond JVP.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  There are many initiatives. If we see millions in the street protesting against the genocide, many of them are organized in different collectives. Strike MoMA, making munches, Beit Kohenet, so many collectives, small, middle size that are reclaiming their Jewish heritage. And reclaiming their Jewish heritage is saying, we are not white. Try to whiten us, this is what they’re saying, but Jews were never white.

So while accepting as part of the Jewish identity in the US, it’s something that always strikes me, accepting this category that the Jews are white is accepting to erase their history. They were first racialized, their histories were destroyed in order to tell them, we give you the passage to pass as white, but Jews are not white. So I think that we cannot see the millions in the street protesting against the genocide and believe that there is only JVP. JVP is very powerful, very broad because you have branches in different cities, but there are many, many initiatives all over to reclaim what was taken from the Jews.

And what was taken from the Jews, part of it is, major part of it today, their history as victims of genocide, and now the Zionists are perpetrating genocide that implicate the entire Jewish community because of a long history of conflating between Zionists and Jews. Because when the West recognized the Zionists as representing the Jewish people with no reason to recognize them, but it served the interest of the West, it created a conflation. And this conflation took from the Jews many things that people are struggling to today to introduce a distance from them and from this identification or this false mode of being represented by the state of Israel and the Zionist without renouncing the responsibility to continue the struggle against the genocidal regime.

Marc Steiner:  So as we conclude here, I was thinking about this neofascist regime that exists in Israel and this neofascist regime that’s taking over the country that we live in here, and all the experience the two of you have had and the creative work you’ve done and the political work you’ve done, and where you see the hope and where we’re going, where you see the struggle going, and what we face right now. Seeing JVP grow as it has is amazing, and other groups are there, but the right is really on the rise. And in many ways, as you were alluding to, the right often uses Jews, and people get sucked into the right. So where do you both think this takes us all, after all your years of struggle and being parts of movements in your work?

Esther Farmer:  Hits the horror and the hope every second. Across the street you’ve got 2,000 anti-Zionist Jews, that’s the hope. And we have this fascistic thing, is this really happening right now? Again, I think it’s a really interesting moment when the majority of the country is with us, and yet we still have these policies now. That contradiction is only going to grow.

I think there’s so much grassroots organizing going on, not just from JVP, in so many areas, and it’s really important, I think, this concept of intersectionality and solidarity is extremely important. And that’s the hope is the solidarity and the intersectionality of our movements.

And as Ariella was saying, it’s a worldwide thing. It’s not only about Israel, it’s not only about Palestine. It’s this whole way of understanding even how nation states are organized. I struggle with that myself because I come from a time when national liberation struggles were a very progressive thing and people wanted independence. And then there are these states that exist, and have they helped the world? Have they not helped the world? What does that mean to have the world organized by these nation states? Is there a difference between anti-colonial and decolonial? These are interesting questions that are coming up right now, for me, anyway. So yeah, I think there is hope. There is organizing going on. People are moving, and both sides are moving very fast.

Marc Steiner:  Yes, they are.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  So if I may just pick on something that you said right now, I don’t think that these were a national liberation movement. These were anti-colonial movements that were intercepted by the colonizers to become national liberation movements. All the process of decolonization of Africa was intercepted by the West through the creation of the UN. We have to be reminded that in 45, there were several 40, 45 states in the world. Today we have 200 states, which means that the decolonization of Africa, decolonization of Asia, rather than being decolonized from the imperial powers, the imperial powers created [an] international organization that imposed that the only way to decolonize a place would be to create a nation state.

Esther Farmer:  That’s very interesting.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  So I don’t think that these were national liberation struggles. These were anticolonial liberation struggles that were intercepted by the West. In Algeria, it’s very typical. It was an anticolonial struggle and it ended up with an independent state from where the Jews, Algerian Jews, had to leave because this was the model that is built on the purification of the body politic from elements that do not fit there. So the Jews didn’t fit here, and the Jews didn’t fit there, and the Jews didn’t fit there, and others didn’t fit there, and we got the new world order.

One comment about what you said, I don’t think that in Israel it is a neofascist regime. Israel is, as I said earlier, a genocidal regime to begin with. The fact that Netanyahu ran this genocide cannot make us forget that the genocide against Palestinians started in ’48. The destruction of Palestine, the destruction of the Palestinian society didn’t start with Netanyahu. And this phase of the genocide is horrible and is the highest in terms of casualties, but it is not the highest in terms of the destruction of the Palestinian society.

And when you ask about hope, if there is hope, it is in a global decolonial transformation of the world. Because all these structures that enabled 45 [states] to impose another settler colonial state as a liberation project for the Jews while it was a project of liberation of Europe from its crimes to appear in the world as the liberator. So I think that the fact that those organs continue to exist as benign organs, museums, for example, that looted so much of ancestral worlds of Black, of Jews, of Muslims, and impose themselves as the guardians of this culture while they participated in the decimation of the material culture of so many people.

So I think that there is a lot of work to be done in order to undo imperial plunder, to undo the imperial organization of the world, and not only to speak about throwing away this or that government. It’s about stopping the genocidal regimes that are still being recognized as [a] benign democratic regime with an accident, with [a] side project that should be reformed. Israel cannot be reformed. Israel is a genocidal regime. And Israeli state apparatuses should be dismantled in order to allow the return of Palestine in which Jews will also be part of it as one of the minority groups and not as the governor, the masters of the land.

Marc Steiner:  I want to say that this has been one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time, and mostly because I didn’t do much talking at all, which is great. I think you both brought a very profound and different analysis to this conversation that’s not often heard, and I wish we could sit here for the next three hours, but we can’t. And I just want to say thank you to Ariella Azoulay, and to you both, Esther Farmer, for being here today and being part of this conversation.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Thank you for inviting us. It was a pleasure.

Esther Farmer:  Yes. Thank you so much for having us [crosstalk].

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Pleasure to share the floor with you.

Marc Steiner:  I deeply appreciate it, really. The joke from my friends that were listening, Marc, you didn’t say anything. It’s OK because what came out of this, I think, was something that people have to really wrestle with about where our future is going, not just as Jews, not just as Israel Palestine, but in terms of where the world is going and why this is so central to all of that.

Esther Farmer:  And there’s something very liberating about thinking about the world without nation states or thinking about the world without borders. Can we have those imaginations? Can we think beyond what they’ve given us, that we have to think that way? Can we think beyond that? And now maybe is a moment, the horror and the hope, where we can think in different ways.

Marc Steiner:  We have to. Thank you both so much for taking all this time.

Esther Farmer:  Thank you.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:  Thank you.

Marc Steiner:  See you back at the JVP conference.

Once again, thank you to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Esther Farmer for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden and Cameron Granadino for running the program, and audio editor Alina Nehlich, and producer Rosette Sewali for always working her magic behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.

Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Esther Farmer for being our guests today here on The Marc Steiner Show at The Real News. And remember, we can’t do this without you, so please share, join our community by clicking on the subscribe button right below here and support The Real News Network. Do it now. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 13, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

House Republicans on Monday quietly revived a proposal that would grant the Trump administration broad authority to crush nonprofits it views as part of the political opposition, from environmental justice organizations to news outlets.

Fight for the Future and other advocacy groups called attention to the measure, which was buried in the final pages of the House Ways and Means Committee’s draft reconciliation bill, starting on page 380.

A markup hearing for the legislation is scheduled to take place on Tuesday at 2:30 pm ET.

The proposal would empower the U.S. Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed material supporters of terrorism, with only a hollow simulacrum of due process for the accused organizations. It is already illegal for nonprofits to provide material support for terrorism.

“The House is about to hand the Trump administration the ability to strip nonprofits of their 501(c)3 status without any reason or recourse. This is a five-alarm fire for nonprofits nationwide,” said Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at Fight for the Future. “If the text of last autumn’s H.R. 9495 is passed in the budget, any organization with goals that do not line up with MAGA can be destroyed with a wink from Trump to the Treasury.”

The measure passed the Republican-controlled House late last year with the support of more than a dozen Democrats, but it never received a vote in the Senate.

“This terribly thought-out legislation means that under the current administration, every environmental, racial justice, LGBTQ+, gender justice, immigration justice, and—particularly—any anti-genocide organization throughout the country may be on the chopping block,” said Holland. “If Democrats capitulate to the wanton destruction of crucial civil society institutions, they had better expect civil society to burn them to the ground for that betrayal.”

The GOP’s renewed push for what opponents have called the “nonprofit killer bill” comes as the Trump administration wages war on nonprofit organizations, threatening to strip them of their tax-exempt status as part of a sweeping attack on the president’s political opponents.

“In the months since inauguration, Trump and his Cabinet have found other means of cracking down on political speech—particularly speech in favor of Palestinians—by deporting student activists and revoking hundreds of student visas. He has already threatened to attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, part of his larger quest to discipline and punish colleges,” journalist Noah Hurowitz wrote for The Intercept late Monday.

“But the nonprofit clause of the tax bill would give the president wider power to go after organizations that stand in his way,” Hurowitz added.

Robert McCaw, government affairs director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Monday that “this provision is the latest in a growing wave of legislative attacks on constitutional rights.”

“CAIR is urging every member of the Ways and Means Committee to VOTE NO on the inclusion of this provision and to support an expected amendment to strike the language,” the group said in a statement. “Three Democratic members of the committee—Reps. Brad Schneider (Ill.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.), and Jimmy Panetta (Calif.)—previously voted in favor of the Nonprofit Killer Bill on the House floor last year. They must reverse course and vote to oppose it in committee.”

It’s the early 1980s.

US-backed wars are wreaking havoc across Central America.

And, in particular, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Authoritarian governments have unleashed waves of violence on their populations.

Trained death squads disappeared thousands.

There are raids. US-backed massacres. 

One after the next. 

And so tens of thousands of people begin to flee to the one place they believe they may be safe…

The United States.

The very country helping to instigate the violence in their homelands.

But the United States says they are not welcome.

President Ronald Reagan refuses to admit that these thousands are fleeing abuses and government repression back home, because it will bar the US from funneling more support to the authoritarian Central American regimes… 

So Reagan calls them “economic migrants.” 

Fleeing not violence, but poverty.

And this bars them from receiving asylum.

But if the US government will not respond, others will stand up… 

“…A government that has failed in its responsibility to society, so other institutions must act.”

Local residents in Tucson, Arizona, begin to provide aid and assistance to the waves of Central American migrants that are arriving to the US border.

In March 1982, on the second anniversary of the killing of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero, Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church declared itself a sanctuary for migrants in need. 

They hang a banner outside the church. It reads: “This is a Sanctuary for the Oppressed of Central America.”

John Fife was the minister of that church and one of the founders of the Sanctuary Movement.

“Basic human rights had been violated in systematic ways. And every other possibility had been exhausted… And so the church in Tucson, Arizona remembered that God had given the communities of faith an ancient gift called sanctuary. That the church was given that gift by God to save lives, to keep families intact, to say to the government you have absolutely failed in your responsibility to do justice and therefore that failure means that the community of faith has been given a gift by God to stand up and in nonviolent direct ways say no to more deportations. No to more devastation of families.”

Other churches joined Southside Presbyterian. They would take in migrants and refugees. They would shelter them against government agents and border patrol. 

A new underground railroad for Central Americans fleeing US-backed violence abroad. 

It quickly became a national movement.

Within three years, 500 churches, synagogues and university campuses had joined and were actively protecting Central American migrants.

Good samaritans standing for their Central American brothers and sisters.

“On any given night there might be from two to 25 [refugees] sleeping in the church,” said one member of Southside Presbyterian. “The congregation set up a one-room apartment for them behind the chapel. When that was full, they slept on foam pads in the Sunday school wing.”

The US government responded. The Justice Department indicted 16 people for aiding undocumented immigrants.

“If I am guilty of anything, I am guilty of the Gospel,” said one defendant.

People protested at immigration departments in numerous cities. 

Half of those indicted were found guilty of human smuggling. Most received light sentences.

Finally, in 1990, Congress approved temporary protected status to Central Americans in need.

A tremendous victory that would benefit hundreds of thousands… millions of people. 

But the struggle continues. 

In recent decades, a New Sanctuary Movement has begun to fight to end injustices against immigrants regardless of immigration status.

Under Donald Trump’s first administration, the concept of sanctuary cities arose to respond to government policies that pushed deportations and immigrant crackdowns.

All of this is more important than ever… NOW.

Whereas in the past police and immigration officials were instructed not to arrest people in sensitive places, like churches. That policy has now been overturned.

Trump has unleashed a war on US immigrants… suspending visas and green cards and removing resident status at will.

But people are pushing back.

###

Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox.

This is episode 32 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, leave a review, or tell a friend. You can also check out exclusive pictures, follow my reporting, and support my work at my patreon, www.patreon.com/mfox. 

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is episode 32 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Resources

Below are several short videos about the Sanctuary Movement. 

This link includes an excellent talk from Presbyterian minister John Fife, which we used part of for the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwHOACm3Yaw

Sanctuary Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUzhG8kp8E8

1980′ Sanctuary Movement was about Politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NM8NsDpDGE

The Sanctuary Movement (Part 2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZwfdVbhsYM

Sanctuary Movement / Central Americans Refugees 1981: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0N_shkAOcc

Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine.

Will Falk is a Colorado-based poet, community organizer, and pro-bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. Max Wilbert is an Oregon-based writer, organizer, wilderness guide, and co-author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It; he co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass.

In September of 2023, TRNN teamed up with award-winning Indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day, and Canadian independent media outlets Ricochet Media and IndigiNews to produce a powerful documentary report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Watch the report, “Mining the Sacred: Indigenous nations fight lithium gold rush at Thacker Pass,” here.

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us in Nevada’s remote. Thacker Pass. A fight for our future is playing out between local indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities held bent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass. But for nearly five years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. In September of 2023, the Real News Network teamed up with award-winning indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day and Canadian Independent Media outlets, ricochet Media and Indigenous News to produce a powerful documentary report on the indigenous resistors putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Here’s a clip from that report,

Brandi Morin:

Rugged Serene, a vast stretch of parch desert and so-called Northern Nevada captivates the senses I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains white gold, lithium, and lots of it. The new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver based lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine, which will operate for the next 41 years. The company is backed by the Biden administration, andout, its General Motors as its biggest investor, 650 million to be exact, but for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she spoken out to protected at the mine site. Now Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company. So I just wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out? Oh, oh man,

Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:

I don’t even remember. Is it civil? Something trespassing and something about disobedience? I dunno. I didn’t really, I didn’t read the papers. I just threw them in a drawer. Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop. There’s 500 lithium mines coming. I just wanted my descent on record as an indigenous mother.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now the last voice that you heard there was Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, one of the six land defenders known as the Thacker past six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and had been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. Today on the Real News podcast, we are joined by two other members of the Thacker. Past six will Falk a Colorado based poet, community organizer, and pro bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. And we are also joined by Max Wilbert, an organ-based writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. Max is the co-author of the book, bright Green Lies, how the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. And he also co-founded Protect Thacker Pass. Max will thank you both so much for joining us today on the Real News Network.

Over the next half hour, we’re going to do our best to give listeners an update on the struggle at Thacker Pass, where things stand now and what people can do to help, because this is a critical story that our audience has gotten invested in through Brandy Morin and Jordy day’s. Brilliant reporting. But before we dig into the legal battle that y’all are embroiled in with Lithium Nevada Corporation, I want to start by asking if you could introduce yourselves and just tell us a little bit more about who you are, the work that you do and the path that led you to Thacker Pass.

Will Falk:

Yeah, I’ll start. This is Will Falk like you introduced me. I’m a poet, community organizer and attorney. I think my involvement in this kind of work started in my early twenties. I had some severe mental health issues and I found that going out into the natural world and listening to the natural world was the best medicine that I could find for those mental health issues. And while experiencing that, I realized that the natural world is consistently saving my life through offering me that medicine. And of course the natural world has given me and everyone I love their lives. So at that time, feeling the gratitude from that, I decided that I would devote my life to trying to protect as much of the natural world’s life as I possibly could. That has taken me to many frontline land defense campaigns and it’s often put me in allyship with Native Americans and other indigenous peoples who are resisting the destruction of their land.

So I got involved specifically with Thacker Pass after Max explained to me what was going on there. We both have spent a lot of time in the Great Basin and it’s an ecotype and a region that we both love very much. So when we found out that they were going to put this massive lithium mine on top of a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada, we decided we were going to try and stop it. So we went out to Thacker Pass on the very day that the federal government issued the last major permits for the mine, and we set up a protest camp right in the middle of where they were going to blow up the land to extract lithium. And we sort of had two goals. One, we wanted to stop the mine, but two, we wanted to force a bigger conversation about whether this transition to so-called green energy was actually green and whether we can really save the natural world by destroying more of the natural world, which is what it will take to manufacture things like electric cars and electric car batteries. But my involvement in this campaign is very much based in my love for the natural world and my recognition that everyone’s wellbeing is tied up in the wellbeing of the natural world. And this new wave of extraction for so-called green energy is just going to be another wave of destruction.

Max Wilbert:

Great to be on the show, max. Thanks for having us. I’ve been following the real news for years, so it’s great to finally have a chance to speak with you. I first became aware that there was a major problem in the environmental movement around 2006, 2005 when I went to an environmental fair in Washington state where I grew up and I came across a biodiesel Hummer out in the parking lot amidst all these organizations promoting protecting salmon and protecting forests and so on. And this was in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of this age where the whole nation, the whole world is grappling with empire and imperialism and war for oil. And to me, the problem with a Hummer goes far beyond the oil that’s in its tank. The problem gets to the minerals that are mine to create the Hummer, the mindset behind that that says that we need these massive individual vehicles to get around the world, the mindset of militarism and consumerism sort of wedding together in this conspicuous symbol of consumption. And so I knew at that point that there was a major problem in the environmental movement. I was just a teenager at the time. And so over the years I started to explore this more and more and started to question some of the orthodoxies around green technology as a solution to the global warming crisis and the broader environmental crisis.

I believe that these are very real and serious crises. It’s kind of unavoidable unarguable if you look at the way of the evidence and even just what we see and experience with our own eyes. But green technology as a solution is something that I really think is a problem. It emerges out of this mindset of industrial products, like things that come out of factories that you buy as the solution. And to me, I’m much more interested and I tend to gravitate towards simpler ways of living, lighter ways of living in relationship to the land that have emerged over many thousands of years in all kinds of different cultures around the world where people have had good relationships with the planet and the water and the other life around them. So when I heard about Facker Pass, I decided to go out and take a look at what was happening out there.

So I drove down, this was in the fall of 2020. I drove down there out into the middle of the outback in northern Nevada and spent a night or two camping up at Thacker Pass. And I just fell in love with the place the sun went down and the stars came out and the Milky Way shining bright across the sky and there are coyotes howling and bats flying around, and you can’t see a single light of a building or a city or anything for miles in every direction as far as the eye can see, which is a long way from the side of a mountain in Nevada where there’s no trees. There’s nothing blocking your view. And I felt like if I don’t try and fight for this place, then nobody else is going to because we’ve seen the mainstream environmental movement get very infatuated with these ideas that technology is going to solve all our environmental problems, that it’s going to lead us into some sort of utopian future. And so none of mainstream environmental groups have really challenged the rising threat of lithium mining and similar issues. That’s when I decided, you know what, we got to do something about this. I called up Will who was one of the few people who I know who I thought might be crazy enough to join me in the middle of the winter at a mile above sea level on the side of a mountain in Nevada to protest a mine. And he said, great, when do we start?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you just say a little more about when and how your efforts synced up with those of people living there, the members of the local tribes who’ve come together as part of this effort to stop the Thacker Pass Mining operation?

Will Falk:

Yeah. We had been up there in Thacker Pass trying to make as much noise as we could for I think six or eight weeks when some native folks from the closest reservation to the mine, the Fort McDermot PayU and Shoshone reservation came up and had seen some of the stuff that we put online and wanted to learn more about what the mine would do. And when they came up, that’s when we learned that Thacker Pass is a very sacred place to local native folks. It is known as Beha in the local Paiute dialect that translates to Rotten Moon in English. And the place name has contains some of the reason why Pima or Thacker Pass is so sacred. And there’s oral history that the Paiutes carry that talks about a massacre, a pre-European massacre that happened in Thacker Pass where some hunters were often in the next valley hunting and some people from a different tribe came and massacred the people there.

And when the hunters came back, they found their intestines actually strung out along the sage brush, and that created such a bad smell. And the past, if you’re looking at it from lower down in the basin floor, it looks like a crescent moon. So they named it ham. We also learned through Paiute oral history and confirmed it through documents that the Bureau of Land Management themselves possessed, that there was a massacre of at least 31 Paiute men, women and children in Thacker Pass on September 12th, 1865. This was a massacre that took place as part of what’s called the Snake War. This is a war that was fought primarily between settlers and minors, encroaching on PayU and Shoshone land in the 1860s. It’s been called the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississippi. But I’ve always found it to be incredibly ironic that there was this massacre, the American government massacred Paiute people while they were resisting mining encroachments on their land.

And that was back in 1865. Now in 2025, the American government has issued permits to a mining company to erase the evidence of that massacre by destroying the site. There we realized that no one was making arguments on behalf of Native Americans in the litigation that had been filed against the Bureau of Land Management for permitting the mine. And so no one was telling the court about all of this sacredness and the permitting process that the Bureau of Land Management used was expedited under the Trump administration. This really isn’t a Democrat or Republic can issue because Biden took credit for that expedited process shortly after he came into office. But by expediting the process, they had not actually consulted with any regional tribes about the mine. And so many native folks in the area were just finding out about the mine months after it had been permitted by seeing stuff that we were generating from Thacker Pass. But I ended up agreeing to represent a few tribes to try and insert that perspective into the litigation to explain how sacred this place was, to explain how bad the government’s tribal consultation process was and to make sure people understood that this mine, that everybody wants to be so green is actually destroying native culture.

Max Wilbert:

So there we were on the mountain side at this point. This is June of 2021 and will begins to represent one and then two of the local native tribes, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Summit Lake Ute tribe and is filing legal briefs from his laptop working inside his car and sleeping at night in the tent out on the mountainside, very difficult conditions to work in and doing it all pro bono, basically living on almost nothing as this is just a grassroots effort. And that’s what we went into it with the mindset. This is all during Covid. It’s very hard to get ahold of people, very hard to have public meetings or events and so on. So when we went out there, we didn’t know any of the indigenous people from the area. I had some other native friends from further east in Nevada and further south in different places and called them up and said, Hey, do you know anything about Pass and what’s going on there?

But they weren’t really local people from exactly that area. And so they said, no, sorry. So we just went out and we expected that we were going to connect with local people through the process of being out in the community and on the land. And that’s exactly what happened. We were able to build a really fruitful collaboration between the fact that Thacker Pass had the initial massacre, the Bema hub massacre, then the massacre that the US Army perpetrated the cavalry in 1865, and the fact that the place was occupied by native people for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. All kinds of campsites and archeological evidence of people’s occupation on the land there. Very significant sites, places where people hunt and gather wild foods and a place where people go to this day, well, I would say to this day, but you’re no longer allowed to go there because there’s a fence that’s been built. There’s bulldozers rolling and the land is being destroyed. So all the deer have been driven away. The pronghorn antelope, the Marmite, all the wildlife that people have relied on and had these relationships with for many generations, all the plants and herbal medicines and so on are being crushed or bulldozed out of the way as well. So it’s ultimately been a pretty heartbreaking fight as well. But it’s not unusual. It’s something that we’ve seen over and over again across what’s now the United States.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So let’s talk about the Thacker Pass six and Lithium Nevada Corporation’s lawsuit against you and four other land defenders, including some of the folks that our audience saw in Brandy Morton’s documentary. So you both Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, Bethany Sam, Dean Barlese and Paul Cienfuegos are being charged with civil conspiracy, nuisance trespass, tortuous interference with contractual relations, tortuous interference with perspective economic advantage. So what can you tell us about the substance of these charges and about how you’re all fighting them in court?

Will Falk:

Yeah, so I think one of the first things to understand is that on, we have to go back to an actual foundational law in American extractive industries, and that’s what’s called the 1872 General Mining Law, which was a law that was passed in 1872. It was passed partially to provide cheap leases to miners as a way to pay off the Civil War debt. And what that law did was it essentially said that mining is the highest and best use of American public lands, and that’s the way it’s been interpreted since 1872. So what this means is when a corporation locates valuable minerals on American public land, and I think the United States is something like 61% public land, if a corporation finds valuable minerals on that land, the 1872 mining law gives them an automatic right to mine those minerals to destroy the land where those minerals are, to extract those minerals.

The government does not have discretion to deny permits for these kinds of mines. It doesn’t matter if the place that they’re destroying is the most sacred place in the world to native folks. So what that means is that the lawsuits that we filed that we just talked about through the tribes with the tribes, those lawsuits that we filed, they never had the capability to stop the mine definitively stop the mine. All they had the capability to do was to force the government to go back and redo some part of the permitting process like tribal consultation. In other words, there is no legal way to stop public lands mines once corporations have found valuable minerals on that land. So that meant that once the lawsuits that we had filed against the Bureau of Land Management had failed and we had exhausted ways to try and force them to go back and redo that permitting process, the only real choice that we had left to try and protect Thacker Pass and all of the sacredness there was to engage in civil disobedience. So in 2023, we went out to peacefully protest, prayerfully protest the mine, and we did in fact interfere with some of the construction. We blocked some construction equipment from coming up some roads, and we apparently Lithium Nevada decided to move its employees to work on other parts of the mine that we weren’t at. And then we were sued for those actions.

It didn’t quite meet the legal definition of what they call a slap suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. But it very much worked in the same way we engaged in free speech, we engaged in our first amendment rights to protest our first amendment rights to petition the government for redress. But because we delayed some of the construction equipment from accessing the site, lithium Nevada sued us and was successful at achieving what’s called a preliminary injunction against us from returning to the mine site whatsoever. And it’s really important to understand that Max and I are not native, but we were sued with four other native folks. And those native folks, they descend from people who were killed in that 1865 massacre. And this means that they can’t go back to Thacker Pass to pray for their ancestors that were killed there. They’re not allowed to go back to their own homelands to mourn what has happened to Thacker Pass, but also when you’re sued like this in civil court, mainly what they call damages, if we lose the case, what we could owe is hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what a judge might order.

So Lithium Nevada was accusing us of things like that tortious interference stuff that you just listed out that’s a lot about, we were depriving them of fulfilling contracts with their contractors to come in and do the construction. We were forcing them to cause to spend money. These are the allegations to spend money that they wouldn’t have had to spend if we didn’t do that. So they’re asking a judge to get that money from us. But I think it, it’s really important to understand that there really is no legal recourse for fighting public lands mines. And it’s really insane where if you give mining corporations an automatic right to mine public lands and destroy sacred native land, and then the legal system also gives a corporation the power to file lawsuits against us that could cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re really talking about very thoroughly quieting any descent to these kinds of projects.

Max Wilbert:

Yep. It’s a little bit of double jeopardy. And we’ve talked about this all along. We were on a phone call with BC this morning who was in the video that Brandy did, and there’s a continuum between what happened in 1865 and what’s happening today, what was happening between 1864 and 1868 was a war that the US government waged on indigenous people of Thacker Pass and the surrounding Great Basin region in order to secure access to the resources of that region for settler, colonialists and corporate interests. And that process is continuing today. Now, when people in 1865 when people tried to protect Dacker pass from soldiers, they were massacred on mass. And today when indigenous people, descendants of those people who are massacred try to protect Dacker Pass, they’re, they’re either arrested, they’re fined, they’re barred by courts from going back to the land. And this is inherently a violent process because if those orders are ignored, then what happens is men with guns will show up and either take these people to jail or possess their assets and so on.

So this is an extended process of land seizure enclosure of what was formerly common land among those indigenous communities. It’s a process of the commodification of these landscapes. And now with the Trump administration will mention that this has been a bipartisan push that Trump in his first term streamlined the permitting for the Thacker Pass mine. So he pushed it through very quickly. Biden then claimed credit for it and decided to loan over 2 billion to the mining company and supported in all kinds of ways, including defending the project in court. And then Trump is now continuing that process. We’re seeing the removal of things like public comment periods being struck down, the environmental review process for future mining projects, which was already a very inadequate anti-democratic process that amounted to tell us what you think about this project and then we’re going to do whatever the hell we want.

Anyway, even that sort of truncated toxic mimic of a real democratic consensual process of community engagement is being completely undercut. And that’s what we’re facing in the future. Backer passes, passes being built right now. There’s literally thousands of mining claims for lithium across the state of Nevada and many more across the whole country. And we’re seeing a big expansion in rare earth mining, copper mining, iron ore mining, all kinds of different mining as well as the boom in fossil fuel extraction that we’re seeing. So it’s kind of an all fronts assault on the planet right now, and people who get in the way, endangered species who get in the way, the plan is just sweep them aside using whatever means are necessary.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that really leads into the somber next question I had for you both and it really building off what you just said, max, this is absolutely a bipartisan effort, not just in terms of ramping up domestic mining, oil extraction use of public lands, bulldozing like the very concept of indigenous sovereignty, which is as American as apple pie, I suppose. But on top of that, we also have the closing in of the state on efforts to oppose this and closing in on and repressing the methods of resistance from Jessica Chek to y’all in Thacker Pass to students protesting US backed genocide in Palestine. These are being categorized as domestic terrorism. So I wanted to ask, in this sort of hellish climate, what is the status of the fight over Thacker Pass and the fight for sovereignty on indigenous lands and the environmental justice effort to halt the worst effects of the climate crisis? What does that all look like today under the shadow of a second Trump administration?

Will Falk:

Things are pretty desperate right now. I think that as you were just saying, the Trump administration especially, but I think from here on out, I think each administration is going to figure out how to silence dissent, especially around anyone who is trying to interfere with the government or corporate access to the raw materials of industry like lithium, like copper, like iron ore, like aluminum. All these things that have to be ripped from the earth to create so many things, especially the weapons and war technologies that the United States uses. That’s a connection that I think really needs to be made. If the United States is going to continue sending weapons to Israel to conduct genocide and Palestine, there’s going to be a lot of public lands resources that are used to construct those weapons. If the United States does something like ramps up for war with Iran, it’s going to be a lot of public lands that are destroyed to create the weapons that are needed to fight that war.

And so I think that as American consumption continues to grow, as resources become harder and harder to come by and consumption intensifies, every administration is going to work to silence any interference with access to those kinds of things, that is absolutely not a reason to give up. It is a reason though for us to start to talk about our tactics and whether things like lawsuits and whether politely asking our senators to change their minds about things, whether this is really going to protect what’s left of the natural world. And while it is incredibly, incredibly hard work, we have to fight, there’s really no moral, there’s no other thing to do that allows us to keep our good conscience without fighting. And the truth is, if we fight, we might lose. We probably will lose. But if we don’t fight, we have no chance of winning, and we must fight to slow as much of this destruction as we possibly can.

Max Wilbert:

Yeah, well said, will. There’s a direct relationship between the destruction of the planet and the genocide and war that we’re seeing around the world. The links that I made earlier between the Hummer, for example, the military industrial complex, mass consumerism and resource extraction, and how that plays into imperialism and the exploitation of people all around the world, whether we’re talking about in the Congo or we’re talking about here in the United States, in these sort of rural hinterland, places like Thacker Pass where people get screwed over in a completely different way, but with similarities to what we see in Serbia, in Tibet, in all of these, in Mongolia, in all of these resource extraction districts around the world. And I think that we really need to break our allegiance to industrial capitalism to this way of living, this type of economy that we’re so used to right now, it’s really difficult because my food is in the fridge right over here. I’m reliant on the system. So many of us are. But the truth is that system is killing the planet and it’s killing all of us in the end. So I think the story of Thacker Pass for us is really about a transformation away from an industrial economy that is destroying everything to something that is much simpler and more sustainable.

It is been on my mind lately that during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, that fight was being conducted through legal means with community organizing and rallies and so on. And at a certain point, the apartheid state outlawed those forms of legal above ground organizing and the movement was forced for its very survival to go underground, to become clandestine and illegal. We’re not quite there yet, but we certainly seem to be headed there rapidly in this country where even what has previously been sort of well accepted means of protest and public dissent are being criminalized. And ultimately, I don’t know where that will take us, but I think too of the old JFK quote, which wasn’t about any situation like this, but he said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is a sense in which this sort of authoritarianism that we’re seeing, it leads only in one inevitable direction, which is that people will continue to fight back and resist. And we need to try and do that effectively because it’s not just principles or ideology or ideas that are at stake. It’s people’s lives. It’s our grandchildren’s future, our children’s future. It’s clean water, it’s access to the basic necessities of life, basic human dignity. All this is at stake right now and it’s imperative that we do something about it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And we here at The Real News will continue to cover that fight. And in that vein, max will, I know I got to let you guys go in a moment here, but with the remaining minutes that we have together, I just wanted to round out by asking how you and the other defendants are doing faring through all of this and what your message is to listeners out there about what they can do to help.

Will Falk:

Thank you for asking that about how we’re doing. Yeah, it’s been really scary dealing with the lawsuit and having the threat of hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines issued against us. And that’s a really scary thing, and that’s a heavy thing. It’s also, I think any sort of effective resistance is going to require us to make sacrifices, to put ourselves, our individual wellbeing at risk. And we absolutely have to do that in smart ways. But I think that it’s really important that people understand that we’re not going to save the planet without taking on big risks to ourselves and to our own wellbeing. And we can’t do this in a completely safe manner. And it’s not that we are the ones creating the unsafe conditions, but if we get effective, those in power are going to respond harshly. They’re going to respond violently. And I think this is kind of a deep, deep way to think about your question.

What can people do to help? I think one thing people can do to help is start to get clear in their own minds that no one’s coming to save us. No one’s coming to swoop in and stop the destruction of the planet. Just stop the destruction of communities. And we’re going to have to learn how protect ourselves and to create the change that we know is so massively needed. And I think that if we can really start to develop a culture, a larger group of people that understand this and don’t quit when the inevitable repression and retaliation from the government and corporations come, then we’ll have a bigger community of people that can keep doing this kind of work and the sort of loneliness that often comes with activism and social justice work. If there’s more of us who understand what that’s like, what it actually feels like to put yourself in those kinds of positions, then we’re going to be much more resilient as a resistance community. We’re going to be much stronger together. And so, yeah, my biggest thing, what can people do? Consider thinking about the fact that we are the ones that have to stand up for ourselves. Get your mind right, get your soul right to understand that it’s not going to be an easy path. We don’t get to do it and stay completely safe, but it’s absolutely something that we must do. And the more of us that can see things like that, the more we can all support each other and the more effective we can ultimately be.

Max Wilbert:

I can’t say it any better than that. Courage. If folks want to learn more about what’s happening at Thacker Pass, follow our legal case, donate to our legal support fund. You can find all that information@protectthackerpass.org. And we’re gearing up there too for the next mine, the next project. And as this legal case hopefully comes to a conclusion one way or another in coming months and years, we’ve got more work to do. And so we’re just going to be pivoting straight to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to thank our guests Will Falk and Max Wilbert, co-founders of the group Protect Thacker Pass, and two members of the group of Land Defenders known as the Thacker Pass, six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. We’ve included reference links in the show notes for this episode so you can learn more about the Thacker Pass six and the ongoing struggle there in Nevada. And before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News Network is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now. We’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. Please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and get more on the ground coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

It’s Mother’s Day, again. That time for showering your mom with cards and flowers, and chocolates and gifts… right? 

Wrong. Or at least, that was NOT the intention of the original holiday, nor the goal for the women who dreamed of it.

Peace. Unity. Solidarity was.

The year was 1870. Just after the Civil War, in the United States. More than half a million people had died.

And one woman decided to stand for peace and an end to war. 

Her name was Julia Ward Howe. She was a well-known author and poet. An abolitionist and an activist. She wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a patriotic song for the Union ahead of the war. 

And in 1870 she wrote her “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world”… Her “Mothers’ Day Proclamation.”

“Arise, then… women of this day!” She wrote.

“Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

“From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.”

She called on women to unite. To meet. To join hands across cultures and nations and lead the way for an end to war.

She called for a Mother’s Day for Peace.

Around this time an organizer and social activist from West Virginia named Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis was already picking up the cause. She’d started Mother’s Day Work Clubs in several cities to help improve health conditions. During the Civil War, they’d declared neutrality and offered medical aid and assistance to soldiers from both the North and the South.

After the war, she worked to reunite communities destroyed and divided by the fighting. Despite threats of violence, she planned a “Mothers Friendship Day.” In Pruntytown, West Virginia, they brought together soldiers from both sides, the Union and the Confederacy, to help each other heal. They sang songs. They cried.

And when Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis passed in 1905, her daughter, Anna Jarvis, made it her life’s mission to establish a day for mothers in her honor. 

She held the first Mother’s Day ceremonies in May 1908, in Philadelphia and Grafton, West Virginia. She distributed white carnations to those in attendance to symbolize the quote “truth, purity and broad-charity of mother love.”

She campaigned tirelessly for the day to be transformed into a national holiday. She organized. She wrote letters to powerful people.

And… they listened. 

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May a national holiday — Mother’s Day.

But… It did not go as planned. 

Jarvis saw her holiday coopted by businesses trying to make a buck. How it was being commercialized with the sale of flowers, gifts, and greeting cards.

That was not the idea. And she railed against it. 

She famously said, “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

She filed lawsuits against companies she said were profiting off of the holiday. 

She protested. And was arrested for obstructing the sale of flowers.

In the 1940s, she organized a petition to rescind the day.

Mother’s Day, she said, had lost its essence. Its meaning. In the name of profit.

It had lost its roots of peace. Love and Unity… 

But it is never too late. 

This Mother’s Day, let’s remember where this holiday came from.

Forgo the presents, and the flowers and the chocolate. 

And instead give your mom a hug and share with her the story of the true meaning of Mother’s Day.

A Mother’s Day for Peace.

An end to war.

An end to violence.

An end to the separation of families.

A call for unity among nations and peoples.

Regardless of the color of their skin, their language,

Or their immigration status.

###

Thanks so much for listening. 

I want to send a special thanks and shout out to the peace organization Code Pink for their excellent article that shined light on this forgotten story of Mother’s Day. The article was written over a decade ago, but nothing has changed. I was inspired to do this episode thanks to it. I’ll add a link in the show notes to that article as well as some other stories with background to this forgotten history.

As always, I’m your host Michael Fox. This is Stories of Resistance, a new podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review. 

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is episode 31 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Resources

The Radical History of Mother’s Day: https://www.codepink.org/the_radical_history_of_mother_s_day

“Why Was Mother’s Day Created and Why Did Its Founder Protest Against It?”: https://medium.com/@rgdaksh03122005/why-was-mothers-day-created-and-why-did-its-founder-protest-against-it-81807571a7ee

She invented Mother’s Day — then waged a lifelong campaign against it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/05/11/anna-jarvis-mothers-day-founder

Antisemitism is a real, violent, and pervasive scourge that spans the globe, but as anti-Zionist Jews like Molly Kraft argue, conflating opposition to Israel with antisemitism will make Jewish people less safe, not more. “Any systematic review of antisemitism must separate antisemitism from the Israeli state’s claims to represent all Jewish people, or more precisely, all Jewish safety,” Kraft writes in The Grind. “This is both because no colonial state can provide safety as it destroys and expels Indigenous populations, but also because Jewish safety will only come through the destruction of all oppressive systems.” In the latest installment of “Not in Our Name,” a Marc Steiner Show series bringing together voices across the Jewish world speaking out against Israel’s Occupation and destruction of Palestine, Marc Steiner speaks with Kraft about the need to accurately identify and fight antisemitism while forcefully rejecting Zionists’ attempts to weaponize antisemitism to perpetuate genocidal violence and justify repressive censorship.

Molly Kraft is a Canadian labor and community organizer, writer, a founding member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, and co-founder of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) – Toronto.

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

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

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show, here at the Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And this is another edition of Not in Our name, and today we’re talking to Molly Kraft, who’s in Canada. She’s a union and grassroots organizer over 20 years experience organizing and she is motivated to support movements to win by building collective power to tear down all kinds of oppressive systems of showing up for racial justice. Toronto Jews say No to genocide, their national coalition in Canada of anti-Zionist groups. She’s been works at this intensely. She lives in Toronto, as I said with her partner. They have two children. She fights for justice, that’s her life’s work and also organizes with the nurses union. So she’s a busy woman and takes time out for us today. Welcome. Good to see you, Molly. Good to have you here.

Molly Kraft:

Thanks, Marc. You

Marc Steiner:

Wrote this article that I thought was really, really well done and powerful and it’s called, and we’re going to link to this here so you all can read it yourselves. It’s in a magazine called The Grind To Fight Antisemitism, we need to accurately identify it. Too often we’re failing. So one of the things that really struck me about the piece that you wrote is this, the difficulty of really getting to the heart of both antisemitism, the death of its history for thousands of years, people trying to wipe us off the face of the earth, but then in comes the state of Israel, which intensifies antisemitism while it oppresses Palestinians and forgets our own struggles for survival and fighting for justice. So talk about how you put that together and your theory of all that.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it’s important to position myself so that people understand why I would make this claim. So I’m the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and they fled and lost their whole families and ended up in displaced persons camps and are highly traumatized from the Holocaust. And even my aunt, so I’m not even really technically a full third generation. My mom’s sister died in a concentration camp. So my mom was lucky enough to be born in the United States. My mom met my dad in Canada, and I grew up with a very clear understanding that it was only because of people who fought for justice, that my grandparents were saved and brought over to the United States by being sponsored by friends of friends coming to Peoria, Illinois and being able to start their life. So my understanding of why oppression is able to lead to the mass murder of people is through the funding by state apparatus that allow those things to happen.

And so when I look at the history and the trajectory of antisemitism, which allowed the killing of my family, I see exactly to your point, the creation of Israel and the massive amount of funding backed by both Britain and then the US and now really global superpowers everywhere. To say that this is a state that is to do absolutely anything that it wants in the name of Jewish safety or fighting antisemitism, that actually that just replicates the kind of violence that we all fled from. And so the connection that I see is that Ashkenazi Jews, specifically in the West we’re able to come into whiteness, be welcomed into whiteness, be closer to power, to get to what they thought was safety, what we thought was safety, right? We’re going to become more like white people. We’re going to become more normal. We’re going to assimilated into American society, and that’s going to be our ticket away from these violent histories.

And Israel is going to be the primary place that makes this happen. We’re going to get away from the vision of that really weak Yiddish Jew, and we’re going to become this masculinized Israeli white like big buff, modern man Jew, and no one’s ever going to do that to us again. And that cozying up to whiteness, that closeness to whiteness, that closeness to empire, to imperial power then allows a state funding of a kind of impunity that we’ve really rarely seen before. And I think it’s important that we actually debunk it, pull it apart, say that this doesn’t actually, most of this doesn’t have to do with antisemitism anymore. It’s an imperial project. And that Jews have to identify the difference between real antisemitism, like you said, that has historical and painful roots, deeply connected to white supremacy and then criticism of the state of Israel and their absolute death cults, destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. And so it felt very important to me personally to say I have a stake in that as well because my own history is tied up in that narrative.

Marc Steiner:

Lemme tell you something, Lord, I have mercy. You laid out so much here. I got to figure out how to parse this out.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah, sorry. We’ll just slow

Marc Steiner:

Down. No, no, it’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s great because you gave us a kind of analytical history of why we’re here and who we are.

Molly Kraft:

I

Marc Steiner:

Think it’s really important. Lemme ask you a quick personal question.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

And then jump into this. So did you know your grandparents with numbers on their arms?

Molly Kraft:

No. So my grandparents were both very lucky. They survived through not being in camps. So they were actually communists and they were imprisoned because they were communist and because they were Polish, Russian polish, as soon as they got out of jail, their communist friends said, you’ve got to get out of here because you’re communist. They’re coming for you. So they left their daughter and one of them went and fought on the eastern front, and he actually survived the war through fighting the Nazis on the other side. So he was a survivor through never being in a camp. My bubba hid and snuck around and made it all the way again to a displaced person’s camp in Stuttgart, Germany. And they were reunited in that displaced person’s camp. So they are lucky enough to have never been in a concentration camp, but they did live for three years in a displaced person’s camp. And that’s where they had my second aunt. But the family members that I grew up with had numbers on their arms. So when I would go to Peac or any other family holiday in Fort Lauderdale, which is where they all ended up after living in New York,

Marc Steiner:

Where else would they go?

Molly Kraft:

Where would they go after living in New York City for many years. So at payback, people would show us these were the numbers on their arms, and it was very strict in our family. There was not going to be any tattoos on any part of our arms. We have tattoos elsewhere. But as Jews who were supposed to be respecting these elders, we were not supposed to do that. And we grew up with stories of this is part of you, it’s part of our blood, it’s part of our very much present in everything we do. It’s a joke, but it isn’t, I’m sure people have said this to you, but which Christian friends going to hide you? What will you do when the day comes that this inevitably returns? What will you do to survive? And that was very much a part of our identity growing up.

Marc Steiner:

That’s a very interesting story in itself. I mean, just growing up in a left Jewish family that survived the war, that could be a movie on its own.

Molly Kraft:

Yes, exactly.

Marc Steiner:

It could. So I really want to explore your thoughts on antisemitism and how that plays into what’s happening now in Israel Palestine, and also how this struggle against Palestinian oppression can also bubble up the antisemitism because of what Israel is doing. Not blaming Jews for antisemitism, but just saying because it’s there. So talk a bit about your analysis that you wrote about that incredible

Molly Kraft:

Article. Yeah, so that’s such a brilliant question, and if we can’t actually have this conversation, I don’t believe that we will ever be able to come to justice because I think that if the left does not have a sharp analysis of antisemitism, we will never be able to bring Jews over from Zionism. And I think what I mean by that is that antisemitism is so prevalent within our societies because we live in Christian dominant societies. Antisemitism is part of Christian dominant societies, just the same way patriarchy is. It’s the soil, it’s the air. So to imagine ourselves on the left as somehow outside of that is an error because it leaves Jews saying, wait a minute, I don’t want to be in this group because they don’t acknowledge it. I actually believe that the primary backlash to DEI comes from, at least in Canada, there’s a huge movement of white Jews who said, wait a minute.

I was forced to go into the white group with all the Christians to caucus and talk about whiteness, but nobody’s talking about antisemitism. And to give them credit where credit is due until the left is able to say antisemitism is a unique and specific form of discrimination that changes. And it is about the being cast out and being brought back in. And so what do we mean by that? Ashkenazi Jews have been sent out othered, and then in times when it’s convenient brought back in, when do we see that close? Clearly Donald Trump, anti-Semitic, literal Nazis in his circles would’ve cast out Jews when it was convenient. And now the bringing back in unquote of Jews, even though actually the neo-Nazis all are still in his inner circles, but using Jews very much as a scapegoat to do his own fascist state repression of free speech on campuses and education policies and funding of universities.

This is how antisemitism operates. That’s different than, for example, anti-black racism. Anti-black racism is a permanent pushing down, a permanent casting out. You are different because of blackness. You are far from whiteness. So we have to have an analysis on the left. That’s the first thing to understand how to have multiracial movements. Because if we don’t know what antisemitism is, we actually can’t include left Jews in these movements. So when we look at things like how we talk about Israel Palestine, what we so often miss is an analysis that says Israel by cozying up to imperial powers, by becoming best friends with the United States, this is not a coincidence. The money to mass murder children in Gaza, the money to occupy the West Bank, the direct movement of Michael from Brooklyn into a house, someone’s Palestinian’s house in the West Bank, these are not accidents. The United States imperial project of overtaking land in a very, very special place in this earth is intended to maintain white colonial power. And the Jews, I actually believe are a bit of a scapegoat in this. Unfortunately, this is a historical and biblical connection for Jews. We can debate how much or how little, that’s a whole other podcast,

But it’s not an accident that the United States is this invested in this genocide or in the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. And what happens is we don’t have an analysis of the fact that Christian Zionism, so there are more Christian Zionists in the world than there are Jews there absolutely believe more Christian Zionists even in the United States than there are Jews in the

Marc Steiner:

United States. Correct.

Molly Kraft:

So what we have to be able to say is that confluence of things, it doesn’t make antisemitism go away. It also doesn’t make it the biggest oppression of all time. There are bigger oppressions, especially because most Jews, it’s hard to say exactly how many, but most Jews globally are probably more like Ashkenazi, probably present more like white in societies where whiteness is the norm, that means that they are closer to power, which means that, for example, I do have the ability to not face discrimination all the time because most people probably don’t know that I’m Jewish. Again,

Marc Steiner:

To

Molly Kraft:

Distinguish from anti-black racism, it’s not the same form of discrimination. White Jews coming to America, I’m bouncing around here, but white Jews coming to America and cosing up to whiteness to try to escape those lineages of violence and try to get to safety have traded in saying that we have to fight all oppressions at the same time. And if we believed that we had to fight all oppressions at the same time, then we would’ve never displaced anyone from the West Bank. We would’ve never stolen occupied lands in Israel. Whatever land had been given, we would’ve co occupied because if we believed that all oppressions were interlinked, if we believed that our survival was bound up in the success of the Palestinians that already existed on that land, then we would be fighting that as co-conspirators. And so for me, it’s very obvious that Israel is a settler colonial project with an imperial power backing it.

And what I believe is so important for the left to be able to name is that that settler power backing it is the United States. It is Christian hegemony, it is imperial power that cares about gas and oil. These things matter because otherwise we get into, oh, the Jews in Israel have so much power. Oh, the reason the world is letting this happen is because it’s the Jews. And then you get into global conspiracy theories which are antisemitic in nature. And so as long as we can say Israel doesn’t have more power because of being Jewish, Israel has more power because Christian Zionism is invested in Israeli Jewish Zionism to flourish. That is an important piece of this story,

Marc Steiner:

Right? It is. And preach this to preach.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

Right. So two quick questions in the time we have here.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

So given the analysis you just laid out in the table for everybody to ponder, how does that affect the ability to organize in the Jewish world? Let’s start there in the Jewish world to move people over. I mean, you can see generationally now that more and more younger Jews, your generation and younger are moving over saying something’s wrong. What Israel is doing is not right. This is not who we are. We can’t be the oppressor. So talk about your experience in that kind of organizing and where you think that’s going.

Molly Kraft:

Yeah, I think it’s such a good point. And even just your own framing of that reminds us why it’s like if you tap into the humanity of most Jewish folks’ story, if you can get a little bit of distance from that trauma. That’s why I believe it is generational. I believe that my mom’s generation, the older generations are a little bit too close and there is a genuine traumatic response that does not tell people to say, I’m looking at other human beings. There is a full transference. I mean, Naomi Klein talks way better about this than I can, but a full transference of Nazis to Palestinians like the Palestinians have become the people that they did nothing to us, but instead we will avenge all of our trauma on them. So that space into this next generation. Exactly. To your point, I think that if you can tap into the humanity of what is happening to say there is absolutely no justification for the mass slaughter of innocent children, men, women, elders, hospitals, community clinics, places where people eat playgrounds.

Like most young Jewish people, if they are not being fed absolute propaganda and lies about their own safety, I think can see that if the reverse, if this was our story and we were talking about fighting Nazis that no one would, there would be no question. And so I think that you go into the place of what safety will come from this, where will you get, we do not end up in a safer place if every single one of these people is slaughtered. We end up in a place where there will be many more people who hate Jews. I personally believe that the rise of actual antisemitism is far worse because of the situation that we find ourselves in. And I believe that the Trump administration is key in this because of scapegoating. Now, Jews, and I’ve been listening to American news in the last couple of days, and I think Jewish Americans are starting to say the repression of Palestinian pro-Palestinian protestors in the states will only lead to more antisemitism because it looks like a Jewish conspiracy. It looks like the Jews in power are saying you don’t talk like that. You don’t get to say that you don’t get funding like global Jewish conspiracy much. It’s very playing into classic antisemitic tropes,

Marc Steiner:

Right?

Molly Kraft:

So I think when we speak to Jews in North America, white Jews about organizing, it has to be collective humanity, our own histories. How is our own liberation tied up in this? And where will you actually find safety in this? You will never, ever get safe through mass murdering children. It’s just not possible. And I think young people know that.

Marc Steiner:

Again, you’ve said so much here, and I think that there is this generational trauma. I mean, I spent a long time in the Zionist movement as a young person, Haman and the Marxist Zionist after, because we all grew up with those stories. I mean, in my family, my bubby, my grandmother who’s also Ashkenazi, and folks who are listening, Ashkenazi means Eastern European Jews. If you don’t know that, we grew up with those stories because there were people in our living room with numbers in their arms growing up. And my grandmother, my bubby, her story was chilling. When the cossacks attacked her, she told the Jewish ghetto she ran from them holding her little sister’s hand, and the cossack rode up next to them and lopped off her little sister’s head while she was holding her hand. So we grew up with these stories, and I think that in some ways what you’re saying is that we have to make other Jews understand other people as well. But other Jews understand that what is being done in our name in Palestine and Israel against Palestinians is no different than what happened to my bubby.

Molly Kraft:

Exactly, exactly.

Marc Steiner:

To bring people over emotionally to see this is not us. This is not who we should be.

Molly Kraft:

Exactly.

Marc Steiner:

And I think that your work and your words are just really profound. I want to tell you that I think they are, because analytically and dialectically kind of put these ideas together both in your article and the way you describe it. So I’m curious where you think as we conclude, we can stay for the next two hours. I know we can’t. Where do you think the struggle goes from here, given everything that’s going on right now with Gaza in Israel, with this rightwing government in the United States with right wing growing across the globe as well? Tell me your own analysis, where you think it goes and where historical goes now, especially when it comes to Israel Palestine.

Molly Kraft:

Well also thank you for sharing that story because I think it’s so telling of why you have the politics that you do, which is that if you really embody what that means to a human being’s life, you carry that. And it means that you look at every Palestinian child and you think of your bubby sister and you know that you are responsible. We always say there’s that amazing quote of, I want you to look at every child like they’re your child.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, my bubby used to wear her little sister’s necklace around her neck until the day she died.

Molly Kraft:

That’s so beautiful. And you carry the hope of fighting for that whoever that new little sister is each day. And we’ve heard too many countless stories of those little sisters in Gaza, and we are not doing enough to save them. So I believe the way we make those connections is through saying that the actual root of all of this is white supremacist colonial violence, and if we cannot tie all of our struggles together, then we’ll get nowhere. So for example, the reason the Democratic party has crashed and burned so hard is because those struggles have been separated. And the working classes of America are saying, actually, you don’t represent me anymore because you’re so fixated on only fighting for the elite, right? We have to say as white Jews that we are invested in fighting anti-black racism, anti Palestinian racism, fighting for indigenous sovereignty. And the reason that must be part of our struggle is because if we don’t make those connections, governments will take over and manipulate our, that is what is happening.

They will manipulate our struggles. So right now, antisemitism is being used to enact some of the most violent state sanctioned policies of fascist repression that we’ve probably seen since the McCarthy era, both in Canada and the United States. If you so much as say that you support Palestine, you have a chance of being deported, losing your job, we’re doxed a lot up here. I’m sure you guys are as well, where our public information is shared online, we’re threatened, our children are threatened, our jobs are threatened. That is happening because actually the people who are in power are white supremacists, neo-Nazis. They’re not invested in my safety. And it’s my job to say I know that because I understand. I have a clear seeing of the whole operation of power. I know that you don’t actually care about the safety of my neighbors, of my black neighbors, of my undocumented neighbors, of my native neighbors, of my disabled neighbors.

We must make cross intersectional analysis for our fights for justice in order to tie our struggles to others. I think that the question for Jews right now is very complicated, and I think it still remains to be seen where we are best positioned at the beginning of all of this. At the beginning of the genocide, it was so powerful to hear us say, not in our name, this will not happen. And now we’re being manipulated in that. And so I think we will have to continue to put our heads together to say, how can we support our Palestinian families across both North America and in Palestine by dismantling empire? And that is a bigger question because I actually think we’ll need our Christians in that, right? This isn’t going to go anywhere until we have mass public pressure saying that your tax dollars, my tax dollars are not going to pay for weapons. I read that ridiculous statistic at the beginning of the genocide, that it was only three days that if America cut off the supply of weapons, there was only a three day weapons supply because that’s how many weapons are using. So

If all taxpayers were invested in saying that needs to end now, maybe that’s our way through. I’m not so sure where Jews fit into that, but I do know that it comes from building coalition. We must build coalition, and we must be clear that these values are not Jewish. These values are not in leftist. They’re not in any tradition of a radical anti-oppressive fighting to say that we allow this kind of behavior and anyone who tells us that is manipulating us and is using Jews, I believe as scapegoat in order to do their bidding.

Marc Steiner:

Monica, I want to thank you so much for being here today. I mean, I just think that your analysis is really sharp and intense with its depth, and I really appreciate you taking the time here for the Marc Steiner show and not in our name. And we’re going to link to your article. People need to read it so well written. You’ll just sit and go through it. And I look forward to other conversations and staying in touch. Thank you so much for your work and putting everything on the line, and I appreciate you joining us today.

Molly Kraft:

Thank you so much, Marc, for having me. It was a real pleasure.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, let me thank Molly Kraft for joining us today with her brilliant and coaching analysis and ideas, and we’ll link to her work and her article from The Grind. It’s called To Fight Antisemitism. We need to accurately identify it. Too often we are failing. It’s brilliantly written, so I encourage you all to go there and read it. And thanks to Cameron Grino for running the program today and audio editor Alina Nek, who working her magic Roset Ali for producing the Marc Steiner show and the titleless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Molly Craft for joining us today. It was a great conversation. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

On Jan. 19, 2025, a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel went into effect—and, for an all-too-brief moment, the slaughter in Gaza halted. TRNN was on the ground in Gaza speaking with displaced Palestinians about their reactions to the ceasefire, the incalculable losses and horrors they had experienced during the previous 15 months, and their hopes for the future once they returned to the ruins of their homes. “I haven’t seen my family for 430 days,” journalist Mustafa Zarzour says. “I’ve been literally waiting for the moment to see my family—since the beginning of the war.”

Since the filming of this report, Israel broke the ceasefire agreement and re-launched its assault on Gaza, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stating that Israel had “resumed combat in full force.” Netanyahu further stated Israel’s intent this week to conquer and control the Gaza Strip, adding that Gaza’s remaining Palestinian population “will be moved.” According to the UN, 90% of Gaza’s remaining population have been forced from their homes, and no aid has been allowed into the Gaza Strip since March 2, 2025—the longest period of aid blockage since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

Khalil Khater:

Honestly, I felt happy but not so much. You feel like your heart is split. I mean, it’s true people are returning to their homes, but I don’t have a home. And still, it’s bittersweet. I lost my brother and his children. It felt like he died again when they announced the ceasefire.

Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:

A huge joy that can’t be described—I was overjoyed. The first thing I thought was: I will find my son and bury him. I want to go to Gaza City, find my house and bury my son and look for reminders of him—pictures, or some mementos of him. Anything really, that has his scent. God is greater. God is greater. God is greater. There is no God but Allah.

Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:

Frankly, there are mixed feelings. Between joy and the fact that we have forgotten the meaning of joy. Because we’ve spent 470 days witnessing bloodshed, air strikes, explosions, displacement. But today, something has returned to us—something like joy. Despite all the blood and all the loss—we have all lost—I lost my brother. This joy is because despite all that happened we are still steadfast.

Mohammed Rayan – Head of Admissions, Shuhada Al Aqsa Hospital:

Frankly, our pain is vast and our wounds are big, there’s not really a lot of room for joy, honestly. What we will do is visit the graves of our martyrs and pay our respects to them. Our feelings swing between happiness and despair, pain and loss, hope, and the immense suffering that our people will continue to endure in the coming days. The loss—because there is no home in the Gaza Strip that has not suffered loss.

Khalil Khater:

I love your uncle and your cousins, sweetheart. OK, I’ll stop crying—for you. We’ll go to Gaza, God willing, and see your grandpa. You can play with your cousins, because you miss them a lot, right?

Chantings:

God is greater. God is greater.

Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:

I lost my brother, my son, and my brother’s children. I lost two brothers who were taken prisoner. My family had already lost 18 martyrs. My mother, the embrace of my loving mother. My siblings in the North, I’ve missed them so much.

Khalil Khater:

What did the war take? First it took my health. I’m really exhausted. It took the most important people from me. It took them. That’s what it took from me. I lost my work—I was a kindergarten teacher. I lost my home, where I used to feel safe, where I raised my children. Life in a tent is really, really hard. And I lost my brother, of course I can’t get him back, only memories remain. God rest his soul. God rest his soul. Praise be to God in every circumstance.

Rayef Mustafa Al Adadla:

I shall search for my second martyred son, who hasn’t been buried. Then we will return to our homes and fill them. We will rebuild them to say: we rebuild our nation, no matter what the occupation destroys.

Khalil Khater:

I don’t want to return to our old neighborhood because that’s it—we were kicked out of our home. There’s no place for us there. Our neighborhood was near the border, there are a lot of houses that were destroyed, and the building we were in was bombed many times. The tower block next to us was also bombed repeatedly.

Rayef Mustafa Al Adadla:

My house is destroyed, but I will return to it. Despite all the circumstances, I will set up a tent on its ruins or beside it. I will stay on my land, beside my house. We won’t go far. We won’t abandon Gaza, and we won’t emigrate, because we are steadfast—like the mountains. We will stay beside it in the same area, God willing.

Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:

Our house was struck six times. It’s just rubble now, but we will organize this rubble and build again, God willing. What will I find? I’ll find rubble. Blood mixed with rubble. I’ll find ashes. I’ll find… body parts. I won’t find any people, but I’ll return, rebuild it, and live there. We will thank God and continue with our lives. We will move forward, get married, have children—all of us will do this, God willing.

Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:

My house was destroyed early in the war, on day four. I think I’ll find it bulldozed. I hope I will find some photos of my son. Some of his belongings, to remind us of him. All will be well, God willing. We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Khalil Khater:

We’ve been waiting for a ceasefire for a long time. I didn’t sleep all night. I waited until 08:30 to hear them announce a ceasefire.

Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:

One and a half years. From the beginning of the war, I kept saying: “Tomorrow it will be over, tomorrow it will be over.” Hopefully—thank God—today, it’s over. God willing.

Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:

I haven’t seen my family for 430 days. I’ve been literally waiting for the moment to see my family—since the beginning of the war. From day one, I’ve been praying for it to end. We go, we come back again. We’ve been waiting to return for 470 days. Today, the feelings… I literally don’t know how to describe them. Beyond description. Peace means the oppressor and occupier leave all of Palestine—not just Gaza, and not just a ceasefire. Because this is a war of extermination. A war of extermination—where they committed every kind of war crime. It’s not two states. There is only one Palestine. They are the brutal occupier. So our peace is when the occupation leaves.

Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:

Peace and safety mean no massacres, no bodies, no mass extermination. No martyrs, no jets, no drones, no tanks.

Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:

God rest his soul—my older brother, who was my father’s successor, died. I want to see his kids. His kids are now my responsibility. So the first thing I want to do is see my brother’s children.

Khalil Khater:

When I truly believe that the war is over, I will go and throw myself into my mother’s arms. I don’t know… I’m sure that Gaza City will have changed. All its landmarks will have changed.

Freedom House, the $94 million, nominally independent “human rights” NGO, has been suspiciously quiet as the Trump administration disappears, imprisons, and deports activists opposing the US and Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil on March 8 kicked off an harrowing wave of free speech suppression aimed at those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Over 300 high-profile arrests and deportation threats followed Khalil, including that of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who has been rotting in a prison for 41 days for simply writing an op-ed critical of Israel in a student paper. She is being held in gulag-like conditions in a Louisiana prison, far from her family, despite the fact that the State Department’s own internal report found she broke no law. Since March 8, Freedom House has published dozens of reports, essays, blog posts, articles, media quotes and social media posts. But, strangely for an alleged human rights group, none have mentioned the White House’s unprecedented crackdown on free expression.

Freedom House’s own website makes clear that defending “free speech” is central to its mission. “Free speech and expression is the lifeblood of democracy, facilitating open debate, the proper consideration of diverse interests and perspectives,” they wax romantically. Which makes it all the more strange they have said nothing about these textbook cases of criminalizing freedom of expression. 

TRNN reached out to Freedom House several times for comment on their silence, or to explain why they haven’t issued a statement of solidarity with any of those who disappeared for Gaza activism, but the organization did not return our emails. Freedom House receives over 80% of its budget from the US State Department and, by its own admission, has been hit hard by Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. In their statement asking for private donors to fill the void left by the Trump cuts, they hinted at one reason why they are silent on Trump’s authoritarian crackdown—it seems only “America’s adversaries” can be authoritarian, not the US or its allies. “Freedom House has been severely impacted by the disruption of US foreign assistance,” they wrote, “and the termination of critical programs that Congress funded to counter America’s authoritarian adversaries and support the global struggle for democracy.”

So what happens when the US is the authoritarian in question? It seems the response is to simply act like the draconian suppression of speech doesn’t exist. Trump’s crackdown on Gaza activists isn’t the first time the US has been authoritarian, of course. The US has long had the world’s largest prison population by a wide margin, long had a deeply racist and unequal justice system, long visited authoritarian violence and economic hardship on other countries—including the underlying genocide in Gaza in question. 

But Trump’s deportation and imprisoning of people for—by the White House’s own admission—pure political speech marks a meaningful escalation that is clearly in conflict with Freedom House’s already limited, negative rights framework of “freedom.” Plenty of other freedom of speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have aggressively defended Khalil and others by filing lawsuits, issuing statements, and making clear where they stand. Why hasn’t an organization with tens of millions of dollars like Freedom House done the same?

The answer is obvious: Freedom House is not an independent organization. They are, and always have been, a soft power organ of the US State Department that uses the thin patina of independence to meddle and concern troll the human rights abuses of “foreign adversaries” while downplaying and whitewashing those by the US and its allies. Israel, for example, always gets their nice green “free” label despite currently carrying out what Amnesty International labels a “genocide” and militarily occupying 4.5 million Palestinians who, even before Oct. 7, were either subject to decades of siege in Gaza or brutal occupation in the West Bank. But don’t worry, Freedom House bifurcates the West Bank from Israel’s score. Why? It’s unclear. Israel has waged a decades-long occupation of Palestine, where the freedom of movement, commerce, food, everyday internal travel, and basic human dignity of Palestinians is subject to the whims of Israeli leaders, but, Freedom House has to get that score above 70 and bestow Israel with a nice green label, lest they get angry phone calls from Congress and the White House.

The silence from the risibly named “Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners” program housed within Freedom House is the most conspicuous. We tried to reach them specifically for comment, but they also did not respond to our request. The program is named after the late Washington Post columnist Fred Haitt, whose most impactful contribution to American politics was lying and lobbying for the Invasion of Iraq both in his personal capacity and as editorial page editor at the Post. Which is the perfect face of an organization entirely neoconservative in its feigned concern for “freedom,” a selective tool of shallow moralizing unconcerned with introspection or criticism of the myriad ways the United States suppressed freedom of speech and human rights. Even when Trump comes into office and unleashes an unsophisticated, explicitly illiberal attack on basic liberal rights, Freedom House can’t bring itself to release a token statement or half-hearted condemnation to maintain the pretense of independence. Instead, its reaction is cowardly silence and moving on to condemn safe, official Bad Guy Countries like China and Cuba.

While state officials and legislators have positioned Texas to be “the bitcoin mining capital of the world,” in small towns like Granbury, working-class residents living next to giant, loud, environmentally destructive data centers are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. “None of us are sleeping,” Cheryl Shadden, a Granbury resident who lives across the street from a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining data center owned by Marathon Digital, tells TRNN. “We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes…This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived.”

In this episode of Working People, we dive deeper into the reality of living next to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, the unseen threats they pose to human and nonhuman life, and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with: Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury, who lives right next to the site of the Marathon bitcoin mining operation; Dr. Shannon Wolf, Precinct Chair in Hood County, who lives about 3 miles from the bitcoin mine; and Nannette Samuelson, County Commissioner for Precinct 2 in Hood County.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “A bitcoin mine in Texas is “killing us slowly,” local residents say”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are diving back into a new sacrifice zone investigation that we began two weeks ago, and we’re returning to the small rural town of Granbury, Texas, which is about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. In the first episode that we did on this, I spoke with Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and Karen’s parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, four residents of Granbury who all lived near the site of a giant 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation.

I mean, Danny, Nick, and Virginia literally live right across the street from that thing. And the Bitcoin mine itself, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida based cryptocurrency company uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers there from overheating on a daily basis. And many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their town, that they are developing negative health effects like hypertension, heart palpitations, tinnitus, migraines and more. And they say that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. And speaking of government officials, let’s not forget that Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in 2021, I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto and quote, and it was Republican governor Greg Abbott who said in 2024 that Texas wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world.

But in small towns like Granbury residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. In today’s episode, we dive deeper into the reality of living next door to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, Texas, and the unseen but not unheard threats that they pose to human and non-human life and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. I was extremely grateful to get a chance to sit down and talk with Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury who lives right next to the site of the Marathon Bitcoin Mining operation, Dr. Shannon Wolf, precinct chair in Hood County, who lives about three miles from the Bitcoin mine and Nannette Samuelson County Commissioner for Precinct two in Hood County. Here’s our conversation recorded on April 27th, 2025.

Well, Cheryl, Dr. Wolf, Nannette, thank you all so much for joining us today. And as I told your neighbors in our last episode, it’s really great to connect with you, but I really truly wish we were connecting under les horrifying circumstances, but I’m really grateful to y’all for joining us today to help us and our listeners understand this situation on a deeper level and to show how it’s not even just the marathon Bitcoin mine that we’re talking about here. So we’ve got a lot to dig into here. And Cheryl, I wanted to start by asking if we could first get just a little introduction to you. You live right across the street from this Bitcoin mine, like the folks we talked to in the last episode. So could you tell us just a little more about yourself, where you live, what you do, and how your life has changed since this Bitcoin mining operation moved in right next door to you?

Cheryl Shadden:

Absolutely. Thank you, max. We really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Cheryl Shadden. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. So I work in healthcare when I’ve been here for over 30 years. My home was here long before crypto. Mine came in long before the power plants that they’re plugged into came in. So I’m living out here in the country with my horses and my dogs, and I just want a peaceful life. I want to be able to do my job, take care of patients, have my horses, ride them around and have a peaceful country life. In the fall of 23, I hear all of this noise. This isn’t just a little bit of the power plant noise. This is standing on the edge of Niagara Falls. This is sleeping with a vacuum cleaner. This is laying on a flight deck where jets are taking off, but the jets don’t take off.

They stay there and they keep running. And so when we first started hearing this noise, we thought, well, they’re just building onto the power plant here. That’s what all of this humming is. And it was just a slight hum in the background. And then the hum got worse and worse and worse. It felt like an airline invasion. None of us in this area knew what a crypto mine is. Nobody knew what a data center was. Nobody had any idea. And then as the initial owners sold out to somebody else and then sold out to somebody else, the noise got worse and worse and worse. Finally, by the fall of 23, we didn’t know what this was. Now the sound is invading our homes. It’s inside of my house with ceiling fans on and TVs on. You can’t think you’re motion’s sick, nauseated, you’re dizzy. You have a hard time getting out of bed.

You feel like you’ve got a concussion. And so then we realized that this is a crypto mine. Well, we didn’t know what that was, so we started looking it up and the process of all of that, I had family come to visit and they asked me their mom, what is this? And I said, well, it’s a crypto mine. They’re like, why are you living like this? What’s going on? How can you live this way? And I thought, well, how can my family come and see me from out of state and be appalled? Why am I not more appalled? Why am I not doing anything about this? So I started calling my commissioner and I talked to my constable and I said, what can I do? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what this is. What do we do? And so my constable said, you’re going to have to get community involvement.

If you want anybody to be aware of this, you’re going to have to get the community involved. I thought, well, I have no idea how to do that. So I started reaching out on social media and I was telling everybody what’s going on and posting videos and asking if everybody was sick or if anybody was ill. Next thing you know, neighbor, after neighbor, after neighbor in our county and the county south of it is telling me the same things that are going on with me and some are sicker and some are less sick and children are sick. And I thought, oh my God, it’s not just me. It’s so many people in this area. So I started reaching out and collecting health information on everybody. And when this happened in the fall, commissioner Samuelson said Yes, she’d already started getting complaints about all of this.

She was planning on having a town hall in January. And so I thought, well, I dunno how many people in this area are on social media. So I started driving house to house, house to house and knocking on doors and telling people, this is what’s going on. We have to do something. We’re having a town hall. Please come. I’m Cheryl. I’m standing up. I’m here. We have to do something. Oh my God. And so then Commissioner Samuelson had a town hall. It was well attended. There was standing room only and story after story of community member after community member after community member of the horrific things that they’re having to live with on a daily basis. Wildlife that’s gone, dogs that are having seizures, people that can’t sleep. One person said he lives near Shannon and the noise was so bad in his driveway at night, he said it would drop him to his knees.

None of us are sleeping. We have sleep disturbances. We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes. We didn’t know what to do about it. And so it was a pretty heated town hall meeting. We had media there and we started reaching and from connection to connection to connection, I got in touch with Texas Coalition Against Crypto Mining and they got me in touch with Andrew Chow with Time Magazine. He did the first article we had here and got us some national interest and people are shocked that we’re living this way. And then with all of the media coming out and doing videos and interviews, it was horrific what we’re living through. This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived until you crack and you talk. It feels like being a prisoner of war, but I get the feeling that prisoners of war are treated better than we are here. This is not Okay.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Commissioner Samuelson, I’d love to bring you in here and ask like what the hell this was all looking like from your side, both as a resident and elected official. Could you help our audience understand a bit more where this crypto came from and I guess what the regulation situation is over there that has allowed such loud operation to operate so close to residents homes?

Nannette Samuelson:

Right. Thank you again for getting us all together. And again, I’m Nannette Samuelson. I’m the commissioner for Precinct two, which includes the unincorporated area that Shannon, Dr. Wolf and Cheryl and all the people that you’ve mentioned live in as well as the cryptocurrency data center. So I took office in January of 23 and almost immediately started getting phone calls about what is this noise I’m hearing out here? And I asked the person, well, tell me more about it. Do you have a decibel meter? What are the decibels? And so we just started collecting information. I started researching what the noise regulations were in the state of Texas and what we could do about it. And so the state of Texas does not give counties very much regulatory authority at all. If you live in a city, you can have a noise ordinance, you can have zoning for residential or commercial.

But in unincorporated parts of the counties in Texas, you have very little, we don’t regulate zoning. We don’t regulate noise. So all we have is to rely on is what the state calls a noise nuisance, which is 85 decibels or higher. That is industrial level noise. That’s not something that someone should be subjected to 24 hours a day, seven days a week without hearing protection. And that’s what I tell people that ask about this. I said, it’s like putting a leaf blower next to your bed and never turning it off and trying to live with that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, people go, if you go to NASCAR or something loud, you wear hearing protection and you know that in a little while you’re going to leave and go home to peace and quiet. These people cannot do that. They are subjected to this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So I started looking into it. So back to the history, and Constable Shirley and I, he bought a what I’d call an industrial grade decibel meter because there are decibel meters that you can download on your phone with an app, but those aren’t necessarily that scientific. So we bought an industrial grade commercial decibel meter and started taking readings all over this area all the way six miles away to right across the street right next door, Cheryl’s house, the neighborhood that’s right next door. And we contacted the owners at that time was generate capital, and then it was operated by us Bitcoin, so we started contacting them. So maybe I should back up and talk to you about how it started. You asked me that. That was before I took office, but let me go back to that. So as I mentioned, the county does have platting authority, but unless something is infringing on us, I’m sorry, a TDOT road, not us, but a TDOT road or it’s in a floodplain, there’s really not anything that the county can do to deny it as long as they have proper sewage and water.

So if you’re going to build a housing addition, you have to provide sewage and water, but this isn’t a housing. So as long as they have enough water for the two or three workers that are there and sewage for the two or three workers that are there, and it’s not in a floodplain, there was nothing that the county could do to deny it from being built. That’s how it got there. But when it came it, I was sitting in court, not a member of the court, but I was there as an audience member. And when they brought that to court, it was just Compute North, which is out of North Dakota where the original owners, and it was just called a data center and it was just going to have nine containers. And then they brought back the second development and it had more containers, but it was still called a data center.

The commissioners at the time didn’t really know what a data center was or cryptocurrency. What they said was they were going to harvest unused power to power a data center is what they were telling the court. So when I got there, it had already been well on the way actually Compute North went bankrupt in 2022, I believe, early 2022, and then generate capital, bought it out of bankruptcy, hired us Bitcoin to operate it and complete the development of it. And they went live in either late 2022 or early 2023, but it wasn’t totally built out. But that’s when I started getting the complaints. So we started working with US Bitcoin and they were actually very wanting to be good neighbors. They met with us. They came down here several times. Constable Shirley and I drove them around with our decibel meter and said, look how we’re six miles away and look at the readings that we’re getting.

And they were very open to whatever it is that we have to do to be good neighbors, we want to do it. They did build a wall, but as Cheryl knows, that wall ended up, it wasn’t a wall all the way around. It was a partial wall on the southeast side of the building of the plant right next to the neighborhood there. But all it did was cause the sound to ricochet off that wall and head straight to Cheryl’s house, and it just really amplified it. So I called, this is still US Bitcoin. I emailed or called him back and I said, did you get a performance bond on that or a performance requirement on that wall? Because if whatever they told you it was going to do to the sound, it’s not working, you need to get your money back because I’m getting more complaints now than I did before you built the wall.

And so they actually came back out, we drove around again, and then they said, okay, we’re committed to getting a new sound study. We’re going to do whatever it is we need to do. About two weeks later, he emailed me back and said, well, this was December of 23. We just found out we’re being put up for sale. So I really can’t do anything until I know who the new owners are. So it kind of just drug out until January. The sale closed, really kind of coincidentally, right before I had that town hall. So the new owners marathon, a couple of the people from Marathon actually came to our town hall and listened to heart wrenching Heart, heart-wrenching stories from all of these residents about what it’s like to live with this noise and the illness that they’re going. I don’t know if anyone’s brought up from the previous discussions that you had, but the doctor out of Portugal, Dr. Marina Alvez. Have you heard that name yet?

I have not. Okay. She is an expert in infrasound, which is sound waves that your ear can’t hear, but your body can. Your body is absorbing these sound waves, but your ear cannot detect them. So when you think about the 85 decibels, the 85 decibels is what your ear can hear. It’s not taking any measurement about what your body is absorbing that your ear can’t hear. So we started listening to getting more information from her studies and marathon after that town hall pretty much. That’s really the last conversations that I’ve had with them. They pretty much went radio silent. They did hire PR person. They said, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to first hire a PR person, then we’re going to put all these containers in dielectric fluid, which should decrease the noise and two or three other things. Well, they hired the PR person and that person has never called me, has never emailed me, has never even tried to get in touch with me, and they had an open house last Good Friday.

So that’s another story is they decided to have a town hall in April and they last year they announced it on Wednesday on social media for Friday, which was Good Friday, which didn’t give people very much notice. Plus it’s on Good Friday. So we all went because we were not going to miss an opportunity to speak to the marathon people. And I met the PR person and I asked her, I said, I’m the commissioner for precinct too. I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t tried to call me or contact me. And she said, well, no one told me I was supposed to, and she still hasn’t since then. My phone number’s on the county website, I don’t remember for sure, but I’m sure I gave her my card. I always do when I introduce myself, but still nothing. But so that’s been kind of the history of what’s happened.

And we tried. So one of the things that we did, because the counties don’t have regulatory authority, we started working with our two legislators, our Senator Birdwell and Shelby Slawson about getting something changed in the Texas law that would allow us more ability to put sound, noise, regulation, noise wouldn’t be called an ordinance because that’s what cities do. Counties don’t have ordinances in Texas. But some ability to allow our constable or our sheriff’s department to do something to monitor this noise level for the people that live there. Even if it was like at airports where it’s after eight o’clock at night and before eight o’clock morning, which doesn’t help Cheryl that much. She gets up at like three in the morning. But something that we could do, and we started last summer, we drafted a resolution at Commissioner’s Court, passed five zero. I took it down to a hearing last summer about the grid because the other thing that these cryptocurrency, as you probably know, the cryptocurrency data centers are a huge draw on the grid.

And so that was what the hearing was about. But I used that opportunity to say, in addition to the draw on the grid, this is what it’s doing to people’s lives. And I talked about the illnesses, but I said, which I don’t know if anybody’s mentioned yet, but I said, the people that live around here, their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. They cannot sell their property even if they wanted to because nobody wants to live next to this constant noise. So we started working with our legislatures. I was on the phone with other senators, Senator Cole Kirst, who’s on the Health and Human Services Committee, Senator May Middleton, again, Brian Birdwell, they are just now here. We are almost at the end of the legislative session and nothing has been changed. So all of our efforts to work with the senator and the legislature and our representative, I don’t think that any bill is going to see the light of day that’s going to give us any more ability to help the people that live here live around this cryptocurrency data center. I don’t have a good feeling for it at all.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Well, I want to pick up on the Good Friday meeting. As Nanette said, we were all there and the first thing that happened was they demanded that we all sign in, give our email addresses and our phone number. So they were gathering information from all of us, and I refused to sign. And I was telling people, you don’t have to do that. And the marathon folks were saying, oh, yes you do. And I just walked in without signing. And a couple of other people did. But the other thing they did was they had plants that were standing in line as people were kind of waiting for others to sign in to get into the town hall. So they had planted attorneys and other that were officials at Marathon were all in line without telling us that that’s who they were. I just happened to recognize an attorney that I knew represented Marathon in line, and then they demanded that we sit at tables where one of their representatives was at.

And so they were wanting to gain information without telling us that they were trying to gain information from us. They wanted to know what the symptoms were. They wanted us to tell them what exactly our grievances were, but not for the purpose of helping us. It was for the purpose of just gaining information, probably to try to lessen the impact of the community’s outcry. That’s my belief from that town hall. They have done nothing. They presented information that could have been pulled, and actually I think it was pulled right off the internet. It was nothing that was thought out, but they made all these promises, this is what we’re doing. We’re in the process of doing this. Fill in the blank, whatever that was. And I don’t think they have done any of that. I might be wrong, Nanette and Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong on that one, but it did not foster goodwill.

It actually made the majority of us highly suspicious of them. And remember, this is a multi-billion dollar company, and the folks that live out here in this precinct, they are good people, but they are really normal working class kinds of people. So we cannot fight in the court system, these kinds of these problems because they’re drowning us in all kinds of paperwork, all kinds of demands, and they refuse to give information, but they demand it from us. It is just a mess out here. But I have walked with Cheryl and Annette and others that are living out here since what, January of 23? Is that right? Cheryl? January of 24 was when I first became aware of what was going on out there. And I just remember standing outside. My husband and I drove out there and I stood across the street and it gave me an immediate headache.

My head was just pounding. And I had been out there maybe just a few seconds. I stood outside my car. My husband was also feeling it. He said that it was pounding on his chest, he said, and so we ended up leaving and my thought was, surely if somebody knew about this, they would be able to correct it, whoever this somebody was. And as I talked to people, our Constable, Shirley, Nanette, other people, Nanette, and I sat down in a meeting with our representative, Shelby Slauson, and I thought, okay, yes, now, now something’s going to happen. And nothing did, nothing did. And I think for people to understand Texas, Texas is really a live and let live kind of a place. We’re not going to tell somebody else how to live their lives. We just don’t want them to tell us how to live ours.

And so people really like to live in rural areas so that if we want to raise chickens or if we want to ride horses, or if we want to do whatever we want to do, it’s an okay thing as long as we’re not bothering other people. So I understand why people move into the rural areas. It’s a beautiful place out here. I also saw, just skipping a little bit, I also saw an interview, I think it was a B, C news where Marathon said, this is a well-established industrial zone. And that is a lie. That is a lie. This is not an industrial zone. This area out here, we’ve got all kinds of wildlife. We have bald eagles, we have golden eagles, we have endangered species out here. We’ve got horses and cows and farms and orchards and all kinds of stuff. It is a wonderful place to be out here. And as Cheryl said, they moved in on top of us. This is not an industrial zone, but they’re lying to people to justify them being out here. The other thing that I would say that your listeners probably would find interesting, the energy plant that owns the property that Marathon sits on was not running at full capacity when Marathon moved in. Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong, they were running at two thirds capacity. Is that right?

Cheryl Shadden:

Correct. 66% capacity,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

66% capacity. And when Marathon moved in, all of a sudden they are running at full capacity. And so Constellation Energy has petitioned our state to build a new energy plant out here. So yet again, they are wanting to buy up ranches and other places in order to build more industry that the community does not want. And quite frankly, it’s making us sicker.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Cheryl Nanette, Dr. Wolf, I wanted to ask about, this is something that high up politicians in Texas have been championing for years. I mean, Ted Cruz said in 2021 that he wanted to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto, and Governor Abbott said that wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world last year. I wanted to ask y’all, when they were saying stuff like that, were regular working folks around the state, you all, did they give you any sense of what that was going to look like? Did they tell you that this is going to be the reality of making Texas a Bitcoin mining capital of the world, the things that you and your neighbors are going through? Is that something people want? I mean, this isn’t like it’s a manufacturing operation providing jobs. This is a massive data center like creating massive amounts of noise and using massive amounts of water for something that’s harder to grab your hands around than a bigger industrial operation. So I just wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit more from your vantage points about the promise versus the reality of making Texas this crypto capital of the world.

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, living this life and living with this barrage of problems here, I feel like I’ve been sold out. So I notice that these crypto mines aren’t next door to probably Ted Cruz’s home or next door to Governor Abbott’s home. And when we started this initial battle and we’re emailing all of the regulatory agencies here in the Texas legislature and state, they’re like, well, nobody could help us. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to listen. And so when you stop and think about it, technically we’re subsidizing this. Taxpayers are subsidizing this. The infrastructure that it takes to build electric lines to all of these crypto mines that’s subsidized by taxpayers and by you paying your electric bill, all of our electricity out here has gone up.

Now here in the state of Texas, crypto Mars don’t have to rate back when we’re struggling with excessive heat or excessive cold, or when a hurricane comes up through the Gulf of Mexico, they don’t have to regulate back. They don’t have to ramp back. But if they do, they buy their electricity on the cheap bargain, basement, bulk pricing, not what I pay, not what Commissioner Samuelson pays or Shannon or anybody in this area. So they buy their electricity on the cheap. Now if they sell it back to the grid by their own choosing, they don’t have to. This mine here is behind the meter so they can do whatever they want. They sell it back to the grid at inflated prices. And so who takes that in? The fanny is me, taxpayers and people that are paying their electric bills every day, consumers. So we’re actually paying the state of Texas to torture us.

That’s not okay. That’s not remotely, okay, come out here, stay the night at my house, sleep in my house, listen to this noise through shut doors and windows camp out in my backyard. I’d love to have you come stay with me and see what it’s like. It’s not just me, it’s everybody in this area. So you can tell us that this is going to be the crypto mine capital mecca of the United States, but the reality is they don’t care. This is big business in Texas. So that’s all they care about. And reality here, they’re taking a third of the power from this 1200 megawatt power plant, which is Constellation Energy’s Willo two, it’s a gas steam plant constellation doesn’t own the other power plant, which is Willo one, which is a gas turbine plant. So now that they’re drawing all of this power off of Constellation energies, Willo two, now they’re running at 99 6% capacity.

So since this has happened, now we experience valve blows on a regular basis. We had a valve blow that happened last week that went on for three days. And it’s not just extreme noise, honest to God makes you feel like you’ve lost their mind. So everybody in this area has hearing loss. One family had a child that was having seizures. They took a second mortgage and moved out. And so they’re struggling. People here have cardiovascular disease. One of my neighbors, the electrical system in his ventricle shorted out. He had to be resuscitated multiple times. Now he’s in the hospital right now having had a stroke. So it’s not just the noise, it’s the damage to our soft tissues, the damage to our blood vessels. Like Dr. Alvarez says, there’s so much damage here. And Governor Abbott doesn’t care. Ted Cruz doesn’t care. It’s big business in Texas.

Who cares if working class people like me get mowed over? It’s not next to their home. And so the reality is how do we fight that? So we’ve tried everything. We have a lawsuit with Earth Justice right now. That’s an injunctive lawsuit. Some of the people in this area have hired personal attorneys to fight for all of the detriment that’s occurred. My property values have decreased. So going through the checklist, I’ve gone to the Hood County Appraisal District and I’m contesting my property taxes again this year. So my property taxes were dropped 25% and a previous year they were dropped 25%. You’re going, wow, that’s great. Your property taxes have dropped 50%. The reality is that’s drop in the bucket of my property. I have absolutely no value at all. So people say, go ahead and move. You can move. How can I move? I’ve been here for 30 years. My home and my property are paid off. Nobody would buy this property. Nobody.

Nannette Samuelson:

And that just puts an exclamation point on what I told the Senate committee last summer is their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. So one of the things that the reason that Senate committee had a meeting in summer, so in Texas, the legislature only once every two years. So they went into session in January of 25, and they’re about to be finished unless they call special sessions, they’ll be finished at end of May. But to get prepare for the legislative session, they had hearings last summer. And the hearing that this one was regarding was the grid because the head of the PUC had made a statement last June saying that the demand for electricity in Texas is going to double by 2030 due to data centers and Bitcoin. And so they started having meetings with the legislature to figure out, okay, how do we address this?

So yes, you want all this business to come here, but your infrastructure isn’t able to do that. Hold on, my husband is joining us. So the Texas legislature started trying to figure out how to address the impact to the grid from the Bitcoin and the data centers. One of the things that the legislature needs to do is, and I hope that some legislation will pass this legislative session that will put some type of, it’s called bring your own power kind of thing. But what that’s going to do is require battery energy storage systems to be installed with data centers and cryptocurrency, which those bring their own risks. Battery energy storage systems are at this point in time, lithium ion batteries. And just like with a Tesla or some other electric vehicle, if they start on fire, they cannot be put out with water. They have to just burn out.

And if you have acres and acres and acres of battery energy storage systems with lithium ion batteries, if a fire starts, it’s called a thermal runaway and it just heats up and heats up and while it’s heating up, it’s putting off all kinds of toxins into the air. So one, as Cheryl said, they’re currently drawing from gas powered power plants energy, but the legislature possibly if this bill passes, is going to require crypto and data centers to bring their own power, which means battery energy storage systems, or they can have small gas powered power plants on property. One of the things that is unique, sadly unique about our little precinct is that we have gas pipelines running through our precinct and we have access to the grid very close together. So that is why these projects are coming to our little part of Hood County is because of the gas pipelines and the grid, and so they can get the energy and they can dispatch the energy very quickly. I think that when Governor Abbott and Ted Cruz and all of the legislators that are talking about Texas becoming the crypto and the data center capital of the United States, I don’t think they realize the impact to people’s lives. And if this data center was out surrounded by 500 acres of industrial area or non-residential area, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But that’s not what’s happening. Texas in enjoys businesses. We are a pro business state, but not at the expense of people’s lives or their property. And that’s what is happening in this little community here.

Cheryl Shadden:

So here across the street from where I live, if you think about being on the streets south Baltimore, so Constellation Energy owns this property across the street. They’re the slumlord, the drug dealer on the street corners, marathon Digital. They own all that property there. They’re leasing their property to Marathon Digital, marathon Digital doesn’t own the property that they’re sitting on. So now you have Marathon Digital causing problems with the community, making us sick, dropped our property values, not allowing us to sleep at night. You have Constellation Energy who holds the lease, who is leasing this property. They don’t care that they have a harmful renter on their property. They don’t care. They haven’t done anything to mitigate the noise that it’s there. Now you have Constellation Energy wanting to put in eight turbine gas power plant right in the middle of all of this to cause more problems. So you start looking at all of the air pollution, sulfuric acid, sulfur, hexa, fluoride, ozone, greenhouse gases, and then you have the first power plant here, Wolf Hollow one wanting to extend their air permit and drop some more acid rain on us. So this is a huge problem here. This isn’t just a little bit of a noise problem. This is a huge industrial pollution problem that’s ruining people’s lives here.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I would also add to this, that regulation usually follows a problem. So regulation’s going to have to catch up with what’s going on out here. Now, as far as Bitcoin goes, I am pro-business as long as they’re not hurting people. I don’t really care if they have a Bitcoin plant, but they’re hurting people. So I’m not angry at Bitcoin itself. It could be any industry that’s doing this, and I would have a problem with ’em, Ted Cruz and Abbott. I’m with Cheryl. I’m frustrated with them, but I also agree with Nanette. I really want to believe that they have no clue the damage that they are encouraging out here. Now, perhaps they are aware, and if that’s the truth of that, then I have lost all respect for them. I do think that they need to hear people because we’re not quiet about this. They have to know that something’s going on out here, and I think that they need to come out here and talk to us.

I think this is a big enough deal that they need to come out here. I want to talk about the valves that are blowing and explain for some of your listeners that may be unaware, and Cheryl, you jump into because you understand this really well. Those valves are a safety mechanism that takes a lot of the pollutants, those really dangerous kinds of things from getting into the air. So when that valve blows, that means that safety measure that is in that particular place is not working. So when a series of valves blow, that means that we are getting contaminants into our air and we’re breathing them. Our animals are breathing them, they’re in the ground. These things are really important to understand. It’s not just the sound, it’s what is being released and we’re breathing it and it’s on our skin. And this is dangerous. I also want to talk about,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I ask really quick, is that from the cooling operation that’s at the Bitcoin mine or is this from,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

This is the plant power plant. Its the power plant. So as Marathon is demanding more and more power, in order for them to do whatever it is that they do, the power plant right next door to it cannot keep up with it. And so it’s blowing their valves, which is the safety mechanism that keeps the pollutants from reaching the air and the people around us. So we are having this more and more and more, and now they want to build Constellation Energy, wants to build another bigger power plant. And we’re talking about an area that, goodness, I don’t even think it’s a mile around this. So we’re going to have three power plants and a Bitcoin mine. And there is talk about moving in another data center within a mile. So I cannot even imagine what this area is going to look like if they are successful.

Nannette Samuelson:

Dr. Wolf, what is the name of the California Battery Energy storage system that

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Was on fire? I looked that up today. And I want to say it was the one out of Monterey, but I don’t remember the actual name of it, but I think it was in Monterey, California, the one that caught on fire back in January of this year. Yes, hit that.

Nannette Samuelson:

Just look up battery energy storage system, fire California. And you’ll be able to see how the toxins that were in the air, the toxins that then were into the soil, the radius of the people that had to evacuate because of that. And that’s one thing, as I was saying, is snowballing into the other. The cryptocurrency is pulling and data centers are pulling so much power from the grid. One of the answers that the Texas legislature may do, or they may, the data centers themselves, may do it on their own. If their business model says this is cheaper or more cost effective is to bring those battery energy storage systems on their own property to how electricity markets work. When the demand goes up, the price goes up, demand goes down, the price goes down. So if I have a business that uses a lot of energy, then one of the things I can do to hedge that is to store my own power in these battery cells.

And then when the demand goes up, when Wolf Hollow can make more money selling their energy to the grid than selling it to me cryptocurrency marathon, I can offset that by storing my own power on my own property. And now I can keep running at full capacity because I’ve stored my own power in batteries. So then we have the add onto that, the risk of the fires with the battery energy storage system. So one of the things we’re looking into as a county is implementing some national fire safety protocols called NFPA 8 85 or 8 55. I’m sorry, I have to look that up to be sure exactly which one it is. But our fire marshal is in the process of working on that because we see this coming next. First, we have the regulation really lack of any regulation to do with noise. And now we have really lack of any regulation to do with fighting the dangers of fires or other situations that are caused by the batteries that are going to start being used to store the energy

Cheryl Shadden:

Well. And then let’s put these battery systems right next to a gas power plant, really make the explosion great,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Right? Right. Talk about dangerous and then add that we have a volunteer fire department out here, the closest volunteer fire department to the existing best system that’s out here, battery energy storage system that’s already here. The closest fire department is 14 miles away. Their backup is 23 miles away. So imagine putting one of these right next to a gas powered electrical system or energy plant. Imagine what this is going to do to the community. This would be catastrophic. This is inhumane.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. I mean there’s so many other words that I have for it, but at base it is inhumane, it’s cruel. It is absurd. And the thing that is really just pummeling my heart right now is how often I hear stories like these around the country, and this should be an exception. This should be the kind of thing we write about in history books as a really awful accident that happened one time and we learned our lesson.

Nannette Samuelson:

Like Aaron Brockovich comes, right,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. Yeah. It should not be the kind of thing that I’m interviewing people about every week from all over the country, from Red Hill in Hawaii to Cancer Alley in Louisiana to South Baltimore, 20 minutes from where I am to East Palestinian, Ohio to Granbury, Texas. This crap is everywhere. And that goes to, I wanted to, we only have a few minutes left here with each other and we’re going to have to do more follows. There’s so much more to talk about here. But I wanted to, in the last 10 minutes that we have here, talk about a few of these larger connecting points. And we’re talking directly to the audience here and to people who may hear this because I hear the same refrain that y’all have heard all the time. People say, why don’t they just move first and foremost, most people can’t do that.

You listening to this, do you have the money to just pick up and move somewhere? What if the house that you live in, you couldn’t sell? Like the people in East Palestine not only have their property values plummeted, they don’t want to sell them because they can’t in good conscience pass off a toxic home to another family. So what are they supposed to do? How could Cheryl pass off her home to someone who’s going to have to live across from this massive power plant and data center? So that’s the kind of situation that folks are in in terms of why don’t people just move? First of all, it’s a real huge burden that most working people can’t take on, but if they have to flee and become refugees from their own hometowns to save their lives, like the people we’ve talked to in Conyers, Georgia who had to flee the Biolab fire in September, that’s what they’re going to have to do.

But also as we’re pointing out here, where are you going to go? Because this stuff is everywhere. And if you’re fleeing one sacrifice zone, you may find yourself living next to a toxic landfill. You may find yourself living underneath the side of a mountaintop removal operation. And so when heavy rains come, you’re going to be getting flooded. Like the folks in Asheville, North Carolina we spoke to during Hurricane Helene. So there’s almost nowhere to escape to because we’ve let this stuff pervade our homes all around this country. But the other thing that I always hear that I wanted to give you all a chance to respond to, but I don’t want to make you responsible for it, so I want to really clarify that because it’s something that drives me nuts. As an admittedly, I am a lefty nut job. I grew up very conservative and it’s been a long road to the socialist that you see before you.

But I don’t care about any of that. When I go to towns and talk to people who are suffering through things that they did not cause, they did not ask for whether they’re Trump voters, non voters, Biden voters, anybody and people on the internet will say, well, they deserved it. They voted for this. Or their Republicans, who cares. Or when the fires in my home of Southern California burn whole neighborhoods, people say, well, they’re Democrats. Who cares? We got to stop thinking like this or we’re going to keep dying and our communities are going to keep getting destroyed while the rich assholes, pardon my French, who are causing all this pain are getting off. So that’s my little tirade here. I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any thoughts on that or on how to correct the thinking for people listening to this, knowing that these are the times that we’re in, people are going to say stuff like this and we here are trying to get people to cut through that noise and just care about the fact that flesh and blood, fellow working people, red state, blue state, whatever it is, our people, our neighbors, our fellow workers are hurting and we are being hurt as well.

That is what we should care about. If a car is on fire and someone’s inside you don’t go and ask who they voted for before you pull ’em out. If you guys could just talk to people out there who should be listening to what you’re saying, but are letting stuff like this get in the way, what would you say to them?

Cheryl Shadden:

Where is your humanity? If your family is hurt? Wouldn’t you want me to help take care of them? If you were broken down on the side of the road and you needed a hand, do you care who I vote for when I stopped to help you? When I’m doing your anesthesia and we’re taking your gallbladder out or your kid’s going to emergency surgery, I don’t check your voting status before I take care of you. We take care of people because we, that’s who we all are Now. I don’t care if my neighbors are pink with purple polka dots, I don’t care who they voted for. My community is suffering. I will do anything that I can to help the people in this area that are suffering. Some of these people can’t stand up. They are so sick. And you know what? Step up. Put your money where your mouth is, step up and be a human.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think for me it’s that you look at another human being and you have compassion for another human being. I don’t care where you go to church or if you go to church, you’re a human being. And I think that we need to be more mindful. I think the United States used to be like that some time ago. We just cared about people. And I think that we need to get back to that place where people are more important than industry. People are more important than your thoughts. People are just important and we need to stand up for each other, especially those who cannot stand up for themselves.

Nannette Samuelson:

Yeah, very well said. Both of you. There’s, I think Cheryl or Dr. Wolf said this early on is that the peaceful enjoyment of one’s property is a right that we have and that is not happening in this. They’re not able to peacefully enjoy their property and the respect business needs to respect individual’s rights as well as both of them said so. Well, we are humans. We all care about protecting each other and making sure that each other is safe. And when I became the commissioner, I had no idea that this was going to be part of what I was doing. I thought it was budget and making sure that the county offices are running smoothly and figuring ways to cut taxes and those types of things. And this became front and center right away. And like I said earlier, the stories that people told at that first town hall, what they’re dealing with, it’s just not right. I mean, industries should not be able to impact people’s health and their property without any consequences. Agreed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, we’re going to have to have y’all back on. And to our listeners, we are going to continue our investigation into not just the Bitcoin mine in Granbury, Texas, but looking at the larger surrounds that includes other toxic polluters that folks are also dealing with. Just like here in South Baltimore, as you guys have heard listening to this show, it’s not just the CSX rail terminal that’s getting coal dust over everyone’s houses and in their lungs, they’re also breathing in the toxic pollutants from the medical waste incinerator and all the other toxic polluters concentrated in that part of the city. So we are going to do more follow-ups on and with folks from Granbury, but with the last minute or two that I have y’all, I just wanted to do a quick round around the table and ask if y’all could say, in terms of the struggle to hold marathon accountable and to protect people in Hood County, where do things stand now and what can folks listening do to help?

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, we thought we were battling. And so we have more and more battles every day. We thought we were fighting one arm of this octopus. No, there’s eight arms on this octopus that we’re fighting. Stand up for your next door neighbor, knock on their door, see how they’re doing. If you’re suffering from problems, your neighbors all are suffering as well. Stand up, take a stand. Tell them. No, it’s a shame you should have to fight for your life. But when I first started this, it was just a few of us standing here. Now I’m standing with a mighty, mighty group of warriors that actually care about one another. And so it’s not ideal. No, but now I’m not standing by myself.

Nannette Samuelson:

And Cheryl, did you talk about the incorporation already?

Cheryl Shadden:

I started off doing that. So one of the things that we’re trying to do is we’re trying to incorporate this area, this community, into a township so that we can develop statutes and taxation and environmental impact fees. So we’re giving this a really good, hard, strong try, trying to get control over our area. We need some control of our lives and what’s happening to all the people here.

Nannette Samuelson:

So what that will do, as I mentioned at the beginning, because cities have regulatory authority, zoning, ordinance, authority that counties don’t have, so that if they’re successful incorporating, they will be able to have ordinances and regulations, zoning because they will be a municipality inside of the county. So then that will take precedence over the lack of authority or ability that the county, we don’t have what, like I was saying earlier, it’s pretty much water, sewer, and that’s about it.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I think with the incorporation, just know that it’s not a done deal. I wish it was an easy thing, but we have a couple of hurdles and we have a person that can say no to us. So we’re a little nervous about that. That’s going to happen this coming week. And yeah, we could use prayer if you pray we could use your good thoughts. If you don’t, that’s okay. But one of the things that I do want to encourage everyone is if you see something coming in your neighborhood, tackle it early. Don’t let it get a foothold because then you’ve got a battle on your hands.

Nannette Samuelson:

And if you live in Texas, call your senator, your state senator, call your state representative, send them emails, call ours, call Senator Birdwell, call Representative Slauson and tell ’em you heard about this that’s happening in their area of responsibility and that their constituents are suffering and that they would support any change to the noise ordinance, regulation or setback requirements, things that would help the residents that live there. That’s what I would say. Call your state rep and your state senator. Call Shelby Slauson. Call Senator Birdwell. Tell him you heard about it. Here’s an ironic thing as Granberry just for what the third or fourth year in a row was, just voted the best historic small town in the United States we’re also the celebration capital of Texas.

Cheryl Shadden:

We’re celebrating air pollution.

Nannette Samuelson:

So that happened and here we are, this whole community of people that live around don’t live in the city limits of Granbury but live very close to in Hood County that are going through this struggle. And because like I said earlier, the proximity of gas lines, the proximity of the access to the grid, low property values, it’s coming. This isn’t the last project that we have in our little precinct.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas. Cheryl Shedden, hood County Precinct Chair, Dr. Shannon Wolf and Hood County Commissioner Nanette Samuelson. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

World-renowned political cartoonist Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of the new McCarthyist assault on free expression and higher education. While employed as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Booth became a target of Zionist and pro-Israel critics, and his work became a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing in March. Facing charges that certain cartoons contained anti-Semitic tropes, J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as “reprehensible.”

In a statement about his firing, Booth writes: “The reality – and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn – is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with the largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans/black/immigrant, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research – speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.”

In this special edition of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc sits down with Booth in the TRNN studio in Baltimore to discuss the events that led to his firing, the purpose and effects of political art, and how to respond to the repressive crackdown on art and dissent as genocide is unfolding and fascism is rising.

Producer: Rosette Sewali

Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

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

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us.

A wave of authoritarian oppression has gripped colleges and universities. Life on campus looks in some ways similar but in other ways very intensely different than it did when I was a young man in the 1960s. International students like Mahmoud, Khalil are being abducted on the street and disappeared by ICE agents in broad daylight, and hundreds of student visas have been abruptly revoked. Faculty and graduate students are being fired, expelled, and doxxed online. From Columbia University to Harvard, Northwestern to Cornell, the Trump administration is holding billions of dollars of federal grants and contracts hostage in order to bend universities to Trump’s will and to squash our constitutional protected rights to free speech and free assembly.

Now, while the administration has justified these unprecedented attacks as necessary to root out so-called woke scours like diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and trans athletes playing college sports, the primary justification they’ve cited is combating antisemitism on campuses, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism, opposition to Israel, its political ideolog, Zionism, and Israel’s US-backed obliteration of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Now, our guest today is Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of this top-down political battle to reshape higher education in our country. Booth is a world-renowned political cartoonist based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in venues like Harvard’s Magazine, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Atlantic. Until recently, he was a lecturer at the Annenberg School [for] Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. And just days after the Trump administration announced it was freezing $175 million in federal funds depend, Booth was fired.

Booth’s work has become a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing, facing charges that certain cartoons he made contained antisemitic tropes. J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as reprehensible.

In a statement about his firing posted on his Patreon page on March 20, Booth wrote this: “The reality and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans, Black, immigrants, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research, speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.

Today we’re going straight to the heart of the matter, and we’re speaking with Mr. Fish himself right here in The Real News Studio. Welcome. Good to have you with us.

Dwayne Booth:

Great to be here.

Marc Steiner:

So I gotta ask you this question first. Just get it out of the way. So where did the fish come from?

Dwayne Booth:

Oh my gosh. Well, that’s a long tale. I attempted to name my mother, had gotten my stepfather a new bird for Father’s Day. And this was right after I dropped out of college and was living in the back of my parents’ house and fulfilling the dream of every parent to have their son return. I’m not getting a job, I’m going to draw cartoons, and my real name is Dwayne Booth, and I wasn’t going to start. I started to draw cartoons just as a side, and I couldn’t sign it “Booth” because George Booth was the main cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, and I couldn’t just write “Dwayne” because it was too Cher or Madonna, I wasn’t going to go for just this straight first name.

So I attempted to name this new bird that came into the house. My mother asked for names and I said, Mr. Fish is the best name for a pet bird, and she rejected it. So I said, I’ll use it. And I signed all my cartoons “Mr. Fish”, and I immediately got published. And one of the editors, in fact, who published me immediately had pretended to follow me for 30 years. Mr. Fish, I can’t believe Mr. Fish finally sent us. Oh, it was locked in. I had to be Mr. Fish.

Marc Steiner:

I love it. I love it. So the work you’ve been doing, first of all, it’s amazing that a person without artistic training creates these incredible, complicated, intricate cartoons. Clearly it’s just innate inside of you.

You have this piece you did, I dunno why this one keeps sticking in my head, but the “Guernica” piece, which takes on the Trump administration and puts their figures in the place of the original work, to talk about that for a minute, how you came to create that, and why you use “Guernica”?

Dwayne Booth:

Well, it’s called “Eternal Damn Nation”. And one of the things that we should be responsible and how we communicate our dismay to other people. Now, what we attempt to do as artists is figure out the quickest path to make your point. So we tend to utilize various iconic images or things from history that will get the viewer to a certain emotional state and then piggyback the modern version on top of it, and also challenge the whole notion that these kinds of injustices have been happening over and over and over again. Because the Picasso piece is about fascism. Guess what? Guess what’s happening now? So you want to use those things to say that this might refer to a historical truism from the past, but it has application now, and it speaks to people, as you said, it resonated. Why did it resonate? Because it seems like a blunt version of truth that we have to contend with.

Marc Steiner:

So when you draw your pieces, before we go to Israel Palestine, I want to talk about Trump for a moment. Trump has been a target of your cartoons from the beginning. And the way he’s portrayed eating feces — Can I say the other word? Eating shit and just having shit all over him, a big fat slob and a beast of a fascist. Talk about your own image of this man, why you portray him this way. What do you think he represents here at this moment?

Dwayne Booth:

Well, it’s interesting because, in many ways, what I try to do with the images, the cartoons that you’re referring to, is, yes, I try to make it as obscene as I possibly can because the reality is also obscene. So I always want to challenge somebody who might look at something like that and say, oh my gosh, I don’t want to look at it. It’s important to look at these things.

The reality is, yes, I create these metaphors, eating shit and being a very lethal buffoon and clown. Those, to me, are the metaphors for something that is actually more dangerous. He’s being enabled by a power structure and being legitimized by these power brokers that surround him to enact real misery in America and the rest of the world, so you don’t want to treat somebody respectfully who is doing that. You want to say, this is shit. This is bullshit. This is an obscenity that we have to not shy away from and face it.

And if it is that ugly, if the metaphor is that ugly, again, challenge me to say that I should be respecting this person in a different way, should be pulling my punches. No, no. We should be going full-throated dissent against this kind of person and this kind of movement because it is an obscenity and we have to do something about it.

Marc Steiner:

The way you portray what’s happening in this country at this moment in many of your cartoons, in many of your works, Trump next door with Hitler, Trump as a figure with his middle finger to the air, all of that, when you do these things. How do you think about transient that into political action?

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s one of the tricks with satire, and I think that satire, I don’t think people know how to read satire anymore. What stands —

Marc Steiner:

It’s a lost art.

Dwayne Booth:

It’s a lost art. People think that Saturday Night Live is satire, and it’s not. It’s comedy, it’s burlesque is what it is.

Marc Steiner:

It’s burlesque.

Dwayne Booth:

It’s burlesque, it’s parody —

Marc Steiner:

It’s burlesque.

Dwayne Booth:

And what it does is it allows people to address politics in a way that ends with laughter and ridicule, which is the physiological reaction. And when you laugh at something, you’re telling your body, in a way, that it’s going to be okay. We can now congregate around our disdain and minimize the monstrosity by turning Trump into a clown or a buffoon. Only then we can say we’ve done our work. Look at how ridiculous he is. Now we can rely on other people, then, to do something about it.

Satire is supposed to, from my understanding through history, is supposed to have some humor in it. A lot of the humor is just speaking the blatant truth about something, and it’s supposed to reveal social injustices and political villainy in such a way that when you’re finished with it, you’re still upset and you do want to do something about it. Again, if we have to start worrying about how we are communicating our disdain about something that is deserving of disdain, Lenny Bruce quote, something that always has moved me and is the reason I do what I do. When he said, “Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government.”

Marc Steiner:

Yes, I saw that in one of your pieces.

Dwayne Booth:

We need that tool. So when I am addressing something that I find upsetting, I lead with my heart because it is a visceral reaction. It’s very, very upsetting. I pour that into the artwork that I’m rendering, and then I share with other people because people are suffering. I know what suffering feels like. So the emotional component is really, really important to me.

And if you notice, looking at the cartooning that I do about Trump, is those are very involved, most often, fine art pieces. They’re not the whimsy of a cartoon because it’s more serious than that. I want to communicate through the craft that I bring to the piece that I’m willing to spend. Some of those things take me days to complete.

Marc Steiner:

I’m sure.

Dwayne Booth:

This is so important to me, and you’re going to see my dedication to, A, giving a shit and wanting to do something about it. If I can keep you in front of that piece of art longer than if it was just a zippy cartoon, it might seep into your understanding, your soul, and your enthusiasm to also join some sort of movement to change things.

Marc Steiner:

What popped in my head when I first started looking into the piece was the use of humor and satire in attacking fascism, attacking the growth of fascism. Maybe think of Charlie Chaplin.

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah, The Great Dictator

Marc Steiner:

That was so effective. But the buffoonery that he characterized Hitler with is the same with Trump. It is frightening and close.

Dwayne Booth:

It is. And I would say, again, one thing I just want to be clear about is that there can be elements of parody and burlesque in there, because what that does is that that invites the viewer into the conversation. It says that this is not so dangerous that you should cower. This person is a fool — A fool who is capable of great catastrophic actions, but he’s an idiot. He’s an idiot. You’re allowed to be smarter than an idiot, and you’re allowed to lose patience with an idiot.

So the second question. So, OK, if you can inspire somebody to be upset and recognize that they are somewhere in this strategy coming from an authoritarian of I will devour you at some point, and maybe this is where… I don’t know if you want to get into the college experience necessarily right now, but that was one of the things that’s interesting about being a professor for. I taught there for 11 years, and it’s always been in my mind. I love teaching, but I was hired as a professional because I was a professional cartoonist. I’m actually a college dropout, and so I bring the practice of what I do into the classroom.

One of the things that was very interesting is, as the world blows up, colleges and universities are institutions of privilege. There’s no way around it. There’s students, yes, that might be there with a great deal of financial aid or some part of a program that gets them in, but by and large, these are communities of privilege. So it was very interesting to see when the society was falling apart, when there was an obvious threat before it was exactly demonstrated about academic freedom and so forth, the strategy from many colleagues that I spoke to was, all right, if we hold our breaths and maybe get to the midterms, we’ll be okay. If we can hold our breaths and just keep our heads down for four years, maybe things will be better. And my reaction was just, do you realize that that’s a privileged position? There’s people who are really suffering. If that is what your strategy is moving forward, then we are doomed because there’s no reason to be brave and stick your neck out.

Marc Steiner:

A number of the things running through my head as you were just describing this, before we go back to your cartoons, which I want to get right back to, which is I was part of the student movement into the 1960s. We took over places, we fought police, we got arrested and expelled from schools. I was thrown out of University of Maryland after three semesters and got drafted. Don’t have to go into that story now, but that happened. So I’m saying there’ve always been places of radical disruption and anger and fighting for justice.

How do you see that different now? I mean, look, in terms of the work you do and what happened to you at Annenberg, tossing you out.

Dwayne Booth:

Well, that’s a two-part question, and we can get to the second part of that in a second. But when it comes to that question of what has happened to college campuses, essentially, is look around. The commodification of everything has reduced the call for speaking your mind, for free speech. Because if you’re going to be indoctrinated into thinking that the commodification of everything is what’s calling you to a successful life, then colleges and universities become indoctrination centers for job placement, way more than even… When I was in college, it was different. You were there to explore, to figure out who you were, what you wanted to do, literally, with the rest of your life. It wasn’t about like, OK, this is how you play the game and keep your mouth shut if you want to succeed. That is the new paradigm that is now framing the kinds of conversations and the pressures inside the classroom to “succeed”.

But my thing with my classes, I would always tell my class a version of the very first day is, what you’re going to learn in this class is not going to help you get a job [Steiner laughs]. What it’s going to do, if I’m successful, and I hope I will be, is it will allow you the potentiality to keep a white-knuckled grip on your soul. Because the stuff we’re looking at is how did the arts community communicate what the humanitarian approach to life should be? That’s not a moneymaking scenario. In fact, there’s examples all through history where you’re penalized for that kind of thinking.

But what is revealed to students is that this is a glimpse into what makes a meaningful life. It’s not surrendering to bureaucracy and hierarchy. It’s about pushing back against that.

Marc Steiner:

Right. And the most important thing in an institution can do — And I don’t want to dive too deep into this now — But is make you question and make you probe and uncover. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not teaching, and you’re not learning.

Dwayne Booth:

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And that’s where we are now. Just even asking the question has become a huge problem. Even when everything started to happen with Gaza and with Israel, we had some conversations in class, without even getting, I wasn’t even trying to start conversations about which side are you going to be on? This is why you should be on this side and abhor the other side. It wasn’t even questions like that. The conversations we ended up having was the terror on the campus to even broach the subject.

My classes where we spoke very frankly about, I can’t even say the word “Israel”, I can’t say it. And it was also among the faculty. And I don’t know if you’ve spoken to other faculty members at other universities, and this shouldn’t be shocking, but at some point, a year ago, we were told, and we all agreed unanimously, not to use school email. They’re listening. We were going to communicate with WhatsApp or try to have personal conversations off campus because we do not trust the administration not to surrender all of our personal correspondence with these congressional committees attempting to blow up universities.

And they did that with me. There was some communication about Congress wants all of your communication with colleagues and students.

Marc Steiner:

That literally happened.

Dwayne Booth:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

They wanted all your communication?

Dwayne Booth:

Yes. And I wasn’t alone. This is what’s going on on college campuses. So A, it’s a really interesting thing to ask because I don’t own the correspondence I have on the servers at school. I don’t. So it’s not even up to me. I can say no, but they’re still going to do it. So that kind of question, what that does is say, you are under our boot. We want to make sure that you understand that you are under our boot and that you’re going to cooperate.

So what was my answer to that? My answer was, fuck you. Because this is coming after a semester where a couple of times I had to teach remotely because not only there were death threats on me, but being the professor in front of this class, there were death threats on my students. So knowing that and really being angry at the main administration and the interim president Jameson for surrendering to this kind of McCarthyism. Again, that’s an easy equation to make, but it’s accurate. It’s a hundred percent accurate.

Marc Steiner:

I’m really curious. Let’s stay with this for a moment before we leap into some other areas here, that when did you become first aware that they were coming after you? And B, how did they do it? What did they literally do to push you out?

Dwayne Booth:

Me being pushed out, it’s an interesting question to ask because Annenberg actually protected me. Jameson wanted me out when The Washington Free Beacon article came out in February of last year.

Marc Steiner:

The one that accused you of being an antisemite?

Dwayne Booth:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

Right.

Dwayne Booth:

So again, what do we do with that? We clean house. We don’t look at the truth of the matter. We don’t look at the specifics. We don’t push back, we surrender. That’s the stance of the administration. So he wanted me fired, but the Dean of Annenberg was just like, no. So they protected me. It’s the School for Communication. It has a history of…

Marc Steiner:

It’s a school where you’re trained journalists and other people to tell the truth and tell the stories and dig deep and put it out there.

Dwayne Booth:

And to say no when you need to say no.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Dwayne Booth:

Right. So that happened. So they protected me. I was there because Annenburg protected me. It didn’t stop the administration, as you said at the beginning of the segment, Jameson then makes a public statement that basically says I’m an antisemite and that I’m reprehensible.

So that went on for all of last year, not so much the beginning of this semester because everybody was very focused on what the election was going to reveal.

So I was given the opportunity to develop a new class for this coming fall. So I took off the semester, was paid to develop this new course for, actually, about the alternative press and the underground comics movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

Marc Steiner:

I remember it well [laughs].

Dwayne Booth:

Very good. And so that’s considered the golden age for opinion journalism, which is lacking now. So I’m like, this is a great opportunity to, again, expose what our responsibility is as a free and open society. Let’s really talk about it. I even was going to start a newspaper as part of the class that students were going to contribute to. It was going to be a very big to-do.

Trump won. The newspaper was the first thing to be canceled. We don’t want to invite too much attention from this new regime on the campus. Again, it’s this cowardice that has real ramifications, as you were saying. These funds, as soon as there’s money involved, the strategy for moving forward becomes an economic decision and not one that has to do with people and their lives.

So me being let go, I was part of a number of adjuncts and lecturers who were also let go. So it’s not an easy connection to say that I was specifically targeted as somebody who should be fired. But that said, you could feel some relief. And as a matter of fact, being let go and then being, again, the attacks from the right-wing press increased, and all of a sudden we’re like, finally UPenn has gotten rid of the antisemite. And then we’re back in this old ridiculous argument.

And luckily, I’m not alone. I’m not so much in the spotlight because many people are stepping forward and, again, trying to promote the right kind of conversation about this.

Marc Steiner:

One of the things, a bunch of things that went through my head as you were talking, I was thinking about the course you wanted to teach on alternative press. I you ever get to teach that course again, I have tons of files for you to have, to go through.

Dwayne Booth:

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was writing the textbook.

Marc Steiner:

Textbook. Oh, were you? OK.

Dwayne Booth:

I’m going to France, actually, and I’m going to interview Robert Crumb. I’m staying over his house. Oh, that’s great.

Marc Steiner:

Oh, that’s great. He must be really old now.

Dwayne Booth:

Yes. I’m really looking forward to it.

Marc Steiner:

[Laughs] I was there at the very [beginning]. I helped found Liberation News Service.

Dwayne Booth:

Oh, see.

Marc Steiner:

And I was at Washington Free Press back in the ’60s.

Dwayne Booth:

See? So you know. I curated an exhibit on the alternative press for the University of Connecticut a couple years ago. Hugely popular. They have an archive that is dizzying. It might be the biggest in the country. And so when I was curating and putting together that exhibit, I would go in and I would be, all day, I wouldn’t even eat, and I would pore through these newspapers and magazines at the time. And I would leave, and I would actually have this real sense of woe because looking at what that kind of journalism was attempting and accomplishing made me feel like we have lost.

Marc Steiner:

Every city and community had an underground paper across the country, and Liberation newspapers were there to service all those papers and bring them together. The power of the media in that era was very different and very strong.

Dwayne Booth:

Well, the work that I do as a cartoonist and somebody who uses visuals to communicate this stuff, that was all through these newspapers, all through this movement. The idea being is the arts community is there — Well, let’s do it this way. The job of journalism, one could say, is that it provides us with the first draft of history, which we’ve heard.

Marc Steiner:

Exactly.

Dwayne Booth:

So the idea as a journalist, what you’re supposed to be asking yourself is what is the real story here? And I’m going to approach it and try to be objective about it, but what is the real story here? The job of an artist in the arts community is to ask the very same question. What is this story really about? What does this feel like? But rather than searching for the objective version of that, it’s about looking for the subjective. This is how I feel about it. And that invites people in to share their own stories. Because really we’re just stories. We’re really just stories.

Marc Steiner:

Storytellers.

Dwayne Booth:

Exactly. So if you can have a form of journalism that not only draws on straight journalism but also can bring in Allen Ginsburg to write a poem that will then explore what does it mean to be a human being? Why are we vulnerable and why do we deserve protection? Until you have that inside of a conversation, why argue in favor of protecting, say, the people of Gaza?

Marc Steiner:

Let’s talk a bit about that. Now, look, this is what got you fired [laughs].

Dwayne Booth:

Well, I don’t… Well, again.

Marc Steiner:

It’s part of what got you fired.

Dwayne Booth:

It created a lot of heat for me last year, we can say.

Marc Steiner:

It is a very difficult question on many levels, being accused of being an antisemite or a self-hating Jew. If you criticize Israel, whether you use the word genocide or slaughter, whatever word you use has infected the entire country at this moment. Campuses, newspapers, everywhere, magazines. And in itself, it seems to me, also creates antisemitism. It makes it bubble up. Because it’s always there, it’s just below the surface. It doesn’t take much to unleash it. So I think we’re in this very dangerous moment.

Dwayne Booth:

We are. But I would say that, with that broad description, if people only approach the question with that broad of an approach, I think we’re in trouble.

Marc Steiner:

What do you mean by that?

Dwayne Booth:

I think the question of attempting to criticize Israel and then being called an antisemite is conflating politics with religion, nationalism with religion. Because really, again, look at it. Just look at all of the conversations that people have been having. To criticize the state of Israel is criticizing the state of Israel. It has really nothing to do with criticizing Judaism at all. Now, if somebody is Jewish and supporting Israel, OK, they’ve made that connection for themselves. So therefore, you can’t have an argument that says, you’re hurting my Jewishness, my Jewish identity by attacking a nation state, because they’re two different things. And if you’re protecting the virtue of a nation state, that is nationalism.

Marc Steiner:

It is. I don’t want to digress on this too deeply, but I think that when you are part of a minority that has been persecuted — My grandfather fought the czars, people in the streets of Warsaw, in the pogroms. My dad fought the Nazis. When you know that they just hate you because of who you are, which is the excuse they used to create Israel out of Palestine, which makes it a very complex matter. It was FDR who would not let Jews here and said, you have to go. You want to get out of those camps? You’re going there.

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah. There is that. Yep.

Marc Steiner:

So what I’m saying to all that, I’m saying it’s a very complicated matter.

Dwayne Booth:

And so the argument, though, and I totally agree with you. So what is important for that, the fact that it is a complicated matter, then you need to create space for the conversation to happen, and you have to create the space to be large enough to accommodate all of the emotion, the emotional component that is part of this, because that’s also very, very real. And then the less emotional stuff, like what is the intellectual argument piece of this? So yes, it is all completely knotted up, but the solution is to recognize how complicated it is and then create the space for people then to untangle it.

Because again, that’s why I said about the broad approach. The broad approach is not going to help us. The broad approach is going to actually disenfranchise people from wanting to enter into the conversation. Because you don’t want to say, and as you can see it happening over and over again, anybody who says, I’m against Israel, what Israel is doing, immediately they’re called, they’re shut down by people who don’t want to have that conversation, as being antisemitic. And nobody wants to feel like they could be called an antisemitic, especially if they are not one. Remember, people who are antisemitic, they tend to be proud of the fact that they are antisemitic.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I know. But there are a lot of antisemites out there, a lot of racists who don’t admit that they’re antisemitic or racist.

Dwayne Booth:

Again, and the question, they don’t admit it. So again, so that’s where you need that kind of conversation to turn the light on in that darkness and give them the opportunity to either defend their antisemitism, have their antisemitism revealed so that they can then self-assess who they are. Because a lot of prejudices people have, they don’t know that they have them, and they have not been challenged.

So much of what we think and feel is reflexive thinking and feeling. You can’t burn that flag. I’m an American, it’s hurting my heart. Let’s look at the issue. What is trying to be communicated by the burning of the flag? It’s not shitting on your grandfather for fighting in the Second World War. But again, if somebody is going to have all that knotted up into this emotional cluster, it’s up to us as sane human beings who are seeking understanding and also empathy with each other to be able to enter in those things assuming, until it’s disproven, that we actually have the potential for empathy and understanding among each other. But you need to create the space and the conversation for that to happen.

Marc Steiner:

What was the specific work that had them attack you as an antisemite at Annenberg? What did they pull out?

Dwayne Booth:

They pulled out some cartoons that I had. It was interesting because they pulled out mostly illustrations that I had done for Chris Hedges. I’ve been Chris Hedges’s illustrator for a very long time.

Marc Steiner:

He used to work out of this building [laughs].

Dwayne Booth:

Yes, exactly. And so what they did was they pulled out these illustrations completely out of context from the article that I was illustrating, had them as standalone pieces, which again, if you’re doing cartoons or you’re doing any illustrations, what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to be provocative and communicate with a very short form. If it’s something as fiery as this issue, then you need, potentially, more information to know what my intent is as an artist. Those were connected to Chris Hedges’s articles that had them make absolute sense. So those were shown without the context of Chris Hedges’s articles.

They showed a couple cartoons that also were just standalone cartoons that had been published and posted for four months without anything except great adulation from readers, because I also work for Scheer Post, which is Robert Scheer’s publication. And I’ve known Bob for decades. And if you don’t know who Bob is, you should know who Bob is. He was the editor of Ramparts and has a very long history of attempting independent journalism.

Marc Steiner:

I can’t believe he’s still rolling.

Dwayne Booth:

He is. He’s 89.

Marc Steiner:

I know [laughs].

Dwayne Booth:

It’s amazing. And so he was running my cartoons. He lost more than half of his family in the Holocaust. He knows what antisemitism looks like. And so these cartoons that were pulled, again, I had nothing but people understanding what I was trying to say. But taken, again, out of context, shown to an audience that is looking for any excuse to call somebody an antisemite, which is the Washington Free Beacon, who has called everybody an antisemite: Obama, Bernie Sanders, just everybody. And framing the parameters of that slander, presenting it to their audience who blew up, again, then started writing me: I want to rape your wife and murder your children. I know where you live. All of those sorts of things all of a sudden come out. So that happened.

And so again, there I am — And I’ve had hate mail. I’ve had death threats before. I’ve never been part of an institution where the strategy for moving forward is being part of a community was… All right. I was told to just not say anything at first. We’ll see if we can weather this. And then when the Jameson statement came out, I wrote to my dean and I said, I have to say something now. I can’t sit back and just let these people frame the argument because it’s not accurate.

Marc Steiner:

Right, right.

Dwayne Booth:

Then I started to talk to the press, and again, started to say, we need to understand that there is intent and context for all of these things, and I cannot allow the truncation of communication to happen to the degree where people are silenced and then people are encouraged to self-censor.

Marc Steiner:

So I’ll ask you a question. I’ve been wrestling with this question I wanted to ask you about one of your cartoons. It’s the cartoon where Netanyahu [inaudible] are drinking blood.

Dwayne Booth:

It’s not Netanyahu. I know which… Is it with the dove?

Marc Steiner:

Yeah.

Dwayne Booth:

OK. Yeah. Netanyahu is not in there.

Marc Steiner:

That’s right, I’m sorry. So the first thing that popped in my head when I saw that picture was the blood libel against the Jews by the Christians that took place. My father told me stories about when he was a kid how Christian kids across from Patterson, the other side of the park, would chase him. You killed, you drank Jesus’s blood, you killed Jesus, the major fights that they had. So talk a bit about that. That’s not the reaction you want us to have.

Dwayne Booth:

No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. It is interesting because I think that’s probably the leading one that people — And now when all this started up, again, they don’t even show it, they just describe it, and they describe it so inaccurately [Steiner laughs] that it just makes me crazy.

Marc Steiner:

You’re not shocked, are you [both laugh]?

Dwayne Booth:

No, no. But in the cartoon, it’s actually, it’s power brokers. These guys look like they’re power brokers from the 1950s. I like to draw that style of… And if you want to look at these guys, they look completely not Jewish. I pulled them from, like I said, they’re basically clip art from the 1950s. So they’re power brokers at a cocktail party. It’s playing off of the New Yorker style of the cocktail party with the upper class.

So they’re upper crust power brokers. Behind them is a hybrid flag that is half the American flag and half the Israeli flag. And they are drinking blood from glasses that says “Gaza”. And there is a peace dove that is walking into the room and somebody says, who invited that lousy antisemite.

As a cartoonist, understand that when it comes to, as I said earlier, trying to figure out how to make the point as quickly as you can and as eye catching as you can. If you look through the history of the genre, drinking blood is what monsters do. They do it all of the time in their criticism of people who are powerful and who are called monsters. I, frankly, when I was drawing it, I [wasn’t] like, well, this might be misinterpreted as blood libel. I didn’t know what blood libel was.

Marc Steiner:

I’m sure you didn’t.

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah. And again, and it was posted for a long time and nobody’s said anything about it. But then when it was called that, it became a very interesting conversation because it was like, oh, OK. So now I can see how that would flood the interpretation of the cartoon. And again, this is what happens in regular conversation. And particularly if you’re communicating as somebody who uses the visuals as your form of communication, there’s a thousand ways to interpret a visual.

Marc Steiner:

There are.

Dwayne Booth:

There are. And as the artist, you have to understand that you’re going to do the best that you can and hope that the majority of people are going to get what you’re trying to do. Which brings us, again, back to that second question or that point that I was making earlier, which is let’s have the conversation afterwards. If you understand that my intent was playing off of not a Jewish trope but a trope of criticizing power — Which, actually, out of curiosity, I went through the internet and I all of a sudden started to assemble, through time, using people are drinking blood constantly who are evil. So it’s used and so forth.

And so the challenge with something like that was to then try to communicate that that was not my intent. I know a communications, a free speech expert, in fact. She and I had a really interesting conversation about it because she is such a radical, she’s been more radical than I am. She wanted me to know that it was blood libel, and she wanted to hear me say, yes, I knew it was blood libel, but I’m going to use that to force the conversation and reclaim what that blood libel was supposed to be as, A, this ridiculous thing that actually is being applied as a truism in this circumstance.

But all of a sudden it became this academic conversation and I was just like, whoa, I don’t need it to be that, because you don’t want to upset everybody and confuse what your communication is, obviously. So I said, it wasn’t that. She goes, you sure [Steiner laughs]? Are you sure you weren’t trying to do that? I’m like, no, I wasn’t trying to do that. So that’s what that one was.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m glad we talked about this because I think that… I’m not going to dwell on this cartoon, but when I first showed this to some of my friends —

Dwayne Booth:

You’re not alone [crosstalk]. I get it. I totally get it.

Marc Steiner:

As I was preparing for our conversation, that was their first reaction as well.

Dwayne Booth:

Right. Right.

Marc Steiner:

Because your cartoons, they’re really powerful, and they get under an issue, and it glares in front of your eyes like a bright light. And they’re very to hard look at sometimes, whether it’s Trump eating shit, literally [both laugh], and the other images you give us. It’s like you can’t allow us to look away. You want us to ingest them.

Dwayne Booth:

I want you to ingest them and then have an honest reaction. And then, again, it doesn’t have to be in a conversation with me, have a conversation with somebody else. Because that cartoon that you were talking about, it started a bunch of debates.

Marc Steiner:

The Trump one?

Dwayne Booth:

No, no, no.

Marc Steiner:

Oh, the blood libel.

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah, yeah — Don’t call it the blood libel one. See what I mean, man [both laugh]? So it started, what I would say is necessary debate to really get to the bottom of issues. Again, that’s really what we should be doing. We should be encouraging more and more difficult conversations. Because we’re not, and look at where we are. People are uncomfortable to even go into the streets. You don’t have to shout. You don’t have to carry a sign. People are being conditioned to be uncomfortable with making a statement in the name of humanity, even though humanity is suffering in real time in front of us. Look at Gaza. For me, there’s no way to frame the argument that can justify that. There’s just no way. There’s too many bodies, there’s too many dead people. There’s too much evidence that the human suffering that is happening over there right now in front of the world needs not to be happening.

Marc Steiner:

It needs not to be happening. [I’ll] tell [you] what just popped through my head as you were saying that, a couple things. One was the Vietnam War where millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered, North, South, all over. And we didn’t call that a genocide. We called that a slaughter. And then I was thinking as you were speaking about… I speak at synagogues sometimes about why we as Jews have to oppose what Israel’s doing to Gaza.

Dwayne Booth:

And I’ve gone to synagogues and seen those talks. That’s also what I’m [crosstalk] —

Marc Steiner:

They’re very difficult talks to have people just…

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

Because it’s an emotional issue as much as it’s a —

Dwayne Booth:

Exactly.

Marc Steiner:

— Logical and political issue. And so, when I look at your work, again, it engenders conversation. It makes you think it’s not just his little typical political cartoon. It’s like you sink yourself into your cartoons like an actor sinks himself into a part. That’s what I felt looking at your work.

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny because just hearing you say that, it’s true that quite often I forget about my cartoons soon after I do them because I’m already onto the next one. And I’ve done searches for things and found my cartoons that I’ve forgotten. I have no memory of doing them [Steiner laughs]. Some of them I don’t even get, and I literally have to call my older brother and say, what was I trying to say with this? He’s very good at remembering what I was trying to say and can decipher my cartoons for me.

But yeah, it is a form of meditation. If you look at the work that I do, again, if you’re going to stick with a piece of art for hours, you have to be able to sustain your focus on it. So I meditate while I’m doing it and see if it feels true to my emotional reaction to what’s going on, then I post it.

Marc Steiner:

So lemme ask you this question. So think of one of your most recent cartoons, I dunno which one, I’ll let you think of it since I don’t know what your most recent cartoon is, and it’s about Gaza and Israel and this moment. Describe it and what you went through to create it.

Dwayne Booth:

One of the most recent ones that I did was, as the death toll continued to climb, and I think it was right after Trump started to talk about how beautiful he’s going to make Gaza once we take over. The normalizing of that, and even the attempts to make it a sexy strategy, hit me so hard that my approach to that was, OK, well what would that look like? What would the attempt to normalize that amount of human suffering, what would that look like?

Well, it sounds like a travel poster that is going to invite people to the new Gaza. So I decided to do a travel poster riffing off of an old Italian vintage come to Italy poster, just like a Vespa. Let’s get a Vespa in there and a sexy couple. Now, I don’t want to render something that has Gaza completely Trumpified already. We’ve seen what that looks like. Let’s, OK, satire. But let’s talk about, let’s visualize what that would look like right now moving towards that. So I have this young couple on a Vespa coming down a giant mountain of skulls, heading to the beach. And out in the beach there’s some Israeli warships. And it’s rendered, at a glance, to be very gleeful, but then you start to notice the details of it and the attempt to normalize, again, an ocean of skulls, [and] nobody’s recognizing the fact that these are a slaughtered population. So that’s what I thought.

And so, again, sometimes what you want to do is you want to say, alright, this is an ugly truth that’s being promoted as something that is beautiful, I’m going to show you what that looks like as something that’s been beautified. And the reaction, of course, is just like, oh my God, this hits harder than if I showed the gore, in the same way that if you go back to Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”, right? He published that anonymously. And he also, it’s very interesting because it’s about what do we do with the poor, bedraggled Irish people? We make them refuse for the needs of the British. We will cook the children, kill some of the grownups, make belts, make wallets, all of these things to feed the gentry of the British.

What’s very interesting about that is he sustained the irony of that all the way through. You don’t have the sense, he did not turn it into parody or burlesque or wild craziness. He presented it as a solution to the problem. Now, if you look at that, it actually makes business sense. It would actually solve the problem — Minus all the horror of killing babies and killing a bunch of people. It makes good business sense.

Now, if you look at that and you see that as a parallel to what is justified by big business and corporations now, it happens every single day. It’s been completely normalized. Look what’s going on with the environment. Look at the Rust Belt across this country. All of that stuff is rendered in service of profit and economics the same way that “Modest Proposal” was, and people have been conditioned to see it as normal and ignore the human suffering.

Marc Steiner:

I’m curious. The first one is, where’s that latest cartoon published?

Dwayne Booth:

I actually gave it to Hedges for one of his columns, and then I posted it and people wanted prints. I’ve sold prints of it. And it was also in the paper that comes out of Washington that Ralph Nader does… Gosh, what’s it called? The Capitol…

Marc Steiner:

I should know this

Dwayne Booth:

Myself. I should know this too, because I’ve been doing cartoons for them for a few years now.

Marc Steiner:

Capitol Hill Citizen.

Dwayne Booth:

That’s it. See, I missed the word “hill”. Thank God.

Marc Steiner:

Capitol Hill Citizen.

Dwayne Booth:

Which is a great newspaper. And it gives me the opportunity to see my stuff on physical paper again, which looks gorgeous to me. I’d rather —

Marc Steiner:

Now that you’ve described the cartoon, I saw it this morning as I was getting ready for this conversation. I didn’t know whether it was the latest one you’ve done.

Now that you were facing what we face here, both in Gaza and with Trump and these neofascists in charge of the country, your brain must be full of how you portray this. I just want you to talk a bit about, both creatively and substantively, how you approach this moment when we are literally facing down a neofascist power taking over our country and about to destroy our democracy. People think that’s hyperbole, you’re being crazy. But we’re not.

Dwayne Booth:

No, it’s happening.

Marc Steiner:

And if you, as I was, a civil rights worker in the South, you saw what it was like to live under tyranny, under an authoritarian dictatorship if you were not white. I can feel the entire country tumbling in at this moment. So tell me how you think about that and how you approach it with your work.

Dwayne Booth:

It’s an interesting time because, in many ways, my work is quadrupled. Partly because it’s just what I’ve always done, but the other part is I don’t see this profession stepping up to the challenge at all. I don’t see any single-panel cartoonists who are hitting the Israel Gaza issue nearly as hard as I am.

Marc Steiner:

No, they’re not.

Dwayne Booth:

No. And I see a lot also, of the attacks on Trump. And again, it always strikes me as, how would the Democratic Party render a cartoon? That’s what I see out there. And it’s too soft. It is just way too soft. So as I increase my output, I feel the light getting brighter and brighter on me, which makes me feel more and more unsafe inside this society because yes, they’re targeting people who are not citizens, but what’s next? We all know the poem.

But at the same time, I feel like it’s a responsibility that I have, and I’m sure that you probably have this same sense of responsibility. Speaking up, talking out loud, even though it’s on my nervous system, it is grinding me down in a way that is new.

But that said, my numbers of people who are coming to me are increasing. I’m actually starting a substack so I can have my own conversations with people and so forth, because we have got to increase this megaphone. We just have to.

In fact, one thing that was interesting is just this last October I was invited to speak at a cartooning conference in Montreal. And the whole reason to have me up there and to talk about it was was from the perspective of the people, the organizers, I was the only American cartoonist who was cartooning about Gaza.

Marc Steiner:

Really?

Dwayne Booth:

Yeah. And I’d had conversations, remember, that there’s some cartoonists who are doing some things that, again, are just a little bit too polite. Because if we’re looking at this thing and we do think that this is a genocide, you can’t pull your punches. And so, in fact, when this stuff had happened with me initially with the Washington Free Beacon, I reached out.

There’s another colleague I have who’s a cartoonist, whose name is Andy Singer, and he and I have been in communication over the years, and he’s somewhat fearless on this issue. He and I were talking, and we came up with this idea, let’s publish a book that has cartoonists who, over the last many decades, have had a problem criticizing Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic.

We sent it out to our colleagues and other international cartoonists and so forth. We found two, Matt Wuerker and Ted Rall, who were willing to participate in this project. I had a number of conversations with others who just contacted me privately and said, I can’t do it because I’ll lose my job. I can’t do it because I’ll be targeted and I’m too afraid. I can’t get close to this subject, my editor won’t let me do it, so I can’t do it. International cartoonists, different idea, a whole different approach, sending me stuff. I can tell my story. I’ve been jailed. I’ve been beaten up for this kind of work. And so it became a very interesting thing.

Again, the United States is, by and large, it’s an extremely privileged society. And yet, when it comes to issues like this, it demonstrates the most cowardice because we’ve been made to be way too sensitive about our own discomfort to advance the cause of humanity and justice, love, all of those things because we’ve seen that there is a penalty for doing that, and we do not want to give up certain creature comforts. We don’t want to be called something that we are not, and we need to be uncomfortable. In many ways we have to break soft rules. We have to chain ourself to fences and then make it an inconvenience to be pulled from those fences.

Marc Steiner:

This has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you being here today and for all the work that you do. And I think that we’re at this moment where the reason that many of us who are part of Jewish Voices for Peace and other organizations is to say those voices are critical in saying this is wrong and has to end now. And I appreciate the power of the work you do. It’s just amazing. And we encourage everybody, we’ll be linking to your work so people can see it and consume it. And I hope we have a conversation together in the future.

Dwayne Booth:

Thanks. I agree. Thanks a lot, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

Good to have you sliding through Baltimore.

Dwayne Booth:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, let me thank Dwayne Booth, also known as Mr. Fish, for joining us today here for this powerful and honest conversation. We will link to his work when we post this episode. You want to check that out.

And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for working on her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.

So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has openly vowed to pour $100 million into campaigns to defeat progressive representatives like Cori Bush who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian, “after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza… AIPAC pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support [Wesley] Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.” After Bush was unseated in August, she vowed to keep fighting for justice, and she put AIPAC on notice: “AIPAC,” she told supporters, “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with the former Congresswoman and key member of “The Squad” to discuss her re-election loss, the undue influence of organizations like AIPAC on our democracy, and Bush’s plan for fighting back.

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara, Rosette Sewali
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  We’re here at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting held in downtown Baltimore, and I am honored to be sitting here with Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just gave an incredible speech at the closing plenary.

Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining me. I know we only have a limited time here, and I wanted to ask, first and foremost, for our viewers out there who saw your re-election campaign be thwarted by $8.5 million from AIPAC, amidst other things, what would you say to folks out there who just see the results of that election and think, oh, well, she lost fair and square. What’s really going on underneath that?

Cori Bush:  Well, thank you for the question. First of all, there was no fair, there was no square. There was deceit, manipulation, lies, misinformation, racism, bigotry, hatred, vitriol, and it was all OK. There was nothing that was off limits as long as AIPAC got the result that they wanted. They didn’t care about how it ripped apart our community, how all of the years of organizing, so much of it was disrupted, and some of those bonds that people created, it completely shattered. They didn’t care about that. They don’t care about that.

They don’t care that I’m the same person that some of those folks marched with out on the streets of Ferguson during the uprising in 2014 and 2015. They don’t care that I am the one who protested the ending of the eviction moratorium in 2021 as a freshman out on the steps of the US Capitol to make sure that 11 million people weren’t about to be evicted from their homes when the government could have done something about it. They didn’t care about that. They wanted to discredit me because in discrediting someone that the people trust, then it pulls power not only from that person that they trust, but it pulls power from the people. So [the] over $8 million that they put in, plus those that they were working with, it roughly ended up being around $15 million, between $15 to $20 million, which is the numbers that we’ve seen.

And I just want to make this point. To use racism against me, to distort my face on mailers to make me look like an animal, to use lies about my family or me. The thing is this: if you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it for the right reason, why can’t you just use truth? I have no problem with people running against each other. We’re able to do that. That’s how I won my race. I ran against someone I thought was ineffective. I felt like I could do more. I spoke about what I would do and how I felt I could do it. I spoke about my past and who I wanted to be as a member of Congress. The people believed it because the people saw me as that person, and I won.

Around $1.4 million. It took me that much money to unseat a 20-year incumbent whose father was in the seat for 32 years. So 52 years worth of a machine. I spent around $1.4 million to unseat. I won that race with over 4,700 votes. AIPAC and the groups that they were working with, they spent around $15 million. The person only won by less than 7,000 votes. So it took basically $15 million, 15 times the amount of money to unseat me that it took me to unseat someone who had a 52-year family legacy. So that was the depth of the deceit that they had to use.

And I’ll say this, never once did they say anything about Israel or Palestine. Never once did they use that in ads. Now, in front of people, they would call me antisemitic. People would say, well, what did she do? Oh, well, [inaudible]. I don’t have anything to show you. But what they would use in the ads was, oh, she’s mean to Joe Biden. She wants kids to drink contaminated water from lead pipes. Those were the things that they used against me.

And because it flooded the media, our local media so heavily because of the amount of money, because you will see four or five ads from my opponent and then only one ad from me, the people started to believe and they were wondering, well, why does he have so much money? Well, why does it…?

So that’s what it looked like, and that’s how they were able to deceive the community to make them think, oh, well, then maybe something is going on that we don’t understand. And then they also made people feel like, well, I’m confused, so maybe I’ll just stay home.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to ask another follow-up question on that because, of course, you and other members of the Squad are representative of a grassroots hope coming from a lot of the folks that we talk to and interview on a weekly basis. This is a hope over the past 10 years that there was still a possibility of making progressive change through electoral politics.

What would you say to folks right now who are feeling despondent, and after seeing AIPAC still, amidst all of that, unseat you, unseat Jamaal Bowman, the richest man in the world buying his way into our government right now, what would you say to folks who feel like we don’t have enough to take on their money?

Cori Bush:  Well, that’s what they want us to believe. They want us to fall into this place of feeling overwhelmed, believing the chaos. They want us to stop fighting. They want us to think that… Well, they want us to live in this place of fatigue. That’s why they keep ramming this train our way. But we can’t allow that to happen because what they understand is it’s actually the people who have the power. That’s why they have to do so much and push so hard and spend so much money because they understand that it’s really us who has the power. We just have to acknowledge it and understand it and figure out how to properly use our power to fight against this.

And so, yes, I was unseated, Jamaal Bowman was unseated, and I know that we know that they’re coming for more in 2026 and beyond. But the thing is, the movement is never one person or never a few people. Yes, we were working for more progressive change, and that’s an issue right now. But the other part of that is we need our actual elected officials who claim to be progressive, to actually be that. We need that, or stop saying that you are, because then you’re making people feel this way because they’re looking like, oh, these are our people, but what’s going on? Why aren’t they pushing? Why aren’t they fighting for this change?

So we need people to be your authentic self in this moment because the people are falling away from the Democratic Party because they feel the hypocrisy. People are saying, I don’t understand why you’re not fighting hard enough. You said this man is a fascist, he’s a racist, he’s a white supremacist, he’s authoritarian, he’s a dictator. He’s all of these things, but you’re not meeting the moment. You’re not meeting the threat with the proper opposition to it.

But when they also see that some of these same folks who are supposed to be our “leaders” take money from groups like AIPAC who are primarily funded by Republicans or who also endorse insurrectionist members of Congress, or people who supported insurrectionists, at least we feel, then the people are like, well, why should I believe and trust in you?

Also, if you are cool with allowing a genocide to happen on our watch in our lifetime with our tax dollars, if you are OK with that, then what is your red line? Because, apparently, death and destruction of thousands of people, it’s not.

So who are you? Is this the party of human rights and civil rights? Is this the party of equality and equity and peace? Is this that party? It is absolutely not if there is no no real opposition to what we’re seeing right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And just a final question. When you lost your reelection and you gave this rousing speech that you brought back into your speech today, you told AIPAC, “I’m coming to tear down your kingdom.” I wanted to ask, in closing here with the last minute I’ve got you, what does that mean? What does that look like? And for folks out there watching who want to see that, who want this undue money and influence out of our politics, what is it going to take to tear down that kingdom?

Cori Bush:  So one thing I won’t do is give all the secrets away. So I can’t give all of the… But what I will say is part of it is this, part of it is being here with the people. So Jewish Voice for Peace has 100% been a supporter of mine. And this didn’t just start after Oct. 7. We’ve been working with folks with JVP for years. This is not anything new, and we’ll continue to do that work.

But the fact that they continue to organize, other groups are organizing and calling out the name AIPAC. There are experts working on why there is this loophole that allows for AIPAC to do some of the lobbying they do. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I’m going to continue to do that work.

But the stuff that is more forward-facing, I’m going to continue to organize. I’m going to continue to make sure that people know. The PAC United Democracy Project is… We need people to understand the connection between them and AIPAC. So that’s where the money is going to flow from. It’s going to flow from UDP. We need people to know DMFI and know some of these other names, but we also need people to know that, in your local community, there are PACs being formed that are basically a smaller AIPAC, and their whole purpose is to try to be ambiguous, and so you won’t know that this is who they are. It is just like, oh, it’s this group that has all of this money that’s coming against this elected official that’s speaking out against the genocide. But they have all of this money, and so maybe they’re good. We want people to know. So educating people around the country as well.

I’m not going to stop fighting because AIPAC came for me. The thing is this: AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me. AIPAC didn’t position me, so they can deposition me. The thing is, I got there because the people put me there, but I was there for a purpose and a mission. So that’s the other part. So I knew while I was there in Congress that I was on a timer. I knew that I was only there for a purpose, for a mission. I knew that there was this urgency on the inside of me.

One thing that I would say to people all the time is I felt this weeping. Only inside of me, I always felt like crying. It never stopped, 24 hours a day. And it’s the thing that kept me moving fast. Like, OK, I got to do this. I got to do that. People in Congress will say, she’s championed all of these different areas. Why is she doing so much? That was why. I didn’t know that I would only be there four years, but I needed to get the work done, and I needed to be true to what I said, who I said I would be.

But also, I needed to be what I needed. That’s what I had to be what I needed when I was unhoused, when I was hungry, when I was abused, and all of the things. I needed that. I needed what my grandmother needed when she taught me that you never look a white woman in her face because of what she went through, the experience in Mississippi growing up, and my ancestors before her through chattel slavery. I needed to be what they needed. And I’ll never stop doing that because the thing is, it’s not about me, it’s who God created me to be. And that’s just everything for me, and so I’m not afraid.

A notorious federal prison in Dublin, CA, was closed in 2024 after years of complaints of rampant and systematic sexual abuse, medical neglect, and human rights violations. Now, the Trump administration is pushing to reopen the facility as an ICE detention center, but an interfaith coalition of community members and human rights advocates are fighting to keep the facility closed.

Edited by: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

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

Speaker 1:

The Dublin City Council and Representative DeSaulnier, as well as Representative Zoe Loughran, we would like everyone to join them in opposing the opening of FCI Dublin as an ICE detention center.

Speaker 2:

On April 16th, faith leaders and activists gathered outside of a federal correctional institute, Dublin, a site of horrific abuse, neglect, and state-sanctioned violence, calling for the facility’s permanent closure and to reject a plan to use it as an immigration detention center. That’s from a statement released by Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. The statement further details that countless people incarcerated at FCI Dublin survived being sexually abused by the Bureau of Prison staff and faced inhumane conditions, retaliation and medical neglect, and that now ICE appears to be moving forward with converting FCI Dublin from a BOP facility to an ICE facility, despite congressional opposition, its abusive history and dangerously dilapidated infrastructure.

Speaker 3:

Led an amazing campaign to organize to shut that prison down. We want to honor their dreams that this harm not be continued and perpetuated on other people and other communities. So this is why we’re preventing, here to prevent ICE from reopening Dublin as a detention facility.

Speaker 2:

Immigrants incarcerated at Dublin who are not citizens were specifically targeted by BOP staff who threatened to turn them over to immigration and customs enforcement, or made false promises that in exchange for sex, they could help them stay in the United States. In 2023, the Real News spoke with organizer Erin Neff of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners about the lawsuit filed on behalf of incarcerated women who were experiencing abuse at the prison.

Erin Neff:

In the case of Dublin, just to give it an historical context, 30 years ago there was a horrific incident of abuse upon many people, and there was a big case and a big settlement, and it is heartbreaking to see that 30 years later, the same thing is happening. And what it exposes is a culture of turning a blind eye to this abuse. There’s cooperation, there’s cover-up. It’s very difficult to report, let alone confidentially report. So in recent times, what you’re seeing are people being abused who are undocumented. So first of all, they’re being targeted because the staff knows that they are people who are going to be deported. So there’s an exposure there. They are threatened that if they say anything, they’ll be deported. So these people are people who’ve been here maybe their entire lives, all of their families here, they’re being retaliated against by putting in isolation. They are getting strip searched. It goes on and on. They’re being deprived of medical care, of mental health care.

Speaker 2:

At the recent vigil, outside the gates of FCI Dublin, Reverend Victoria Rue read a statement by Anna, a survivor of FCI Dublin.

Rev. Victoria Rue:

Like so many other immigrant women, I was sexually abused by an officer at FCI Dublin. After I was finally free from the hell of FCI Dublin, I was taken to another hell, an ICE detention center. The conditions at the detention center were terrible. I saw so much suffering. After months and months, I finally won my freedom. I am finally home with my children and trying to heal from the U.S. Government, from what the U.S. Government did to me. When I saw on the news that they wanted to reopen FCI Dublin for immigration detention, my heart fell. That prison is toxic and full of the pain of so many people. I pray that it is demolished, given back to the birds that live on the land there.

Speaker 2:

There was also testimony from Ulises Pena-Lopez, who is currently incarcerated in ICE detention. According to the Santa Clara rapid response team, early on February 21st, as Ulises was getting ready to leave his home, ICE agents showed up and forcibly arrested him, disregarding his rights and his health. Despite Ulises invoking his right to remain silent, to speak with a lawyer and to not exit his vehicle with without seeing a warrant, ICE officers responded with violence, smashing his car window with a baton and dragging him out of his vehicle. Without receiving proper medical care, Ulises was released into ICE custody and is currently being held at the Golden State Annex Detention Center in McFarland, California.

Ulises Pena-Lopez:

It fills me with strength, encouragement, joy, knowing that we are not alone. That you are standing in front of us, that you are our voice and I know and I feel that you’ll never leave us. God bless all of you. Physically, I feel like half of my body is numb, my foot, my right hand. I’m losing vision in my right eye and my face without mobility. Psychologically, I feel like I’m having pauses. They detected my medical and psychological condition as serious and they’re giving me treatment. I can’t sleep. When I call someone or whatever I need, I’m scared. I tremble. I start to sweat. My heart races because of everything they did to me; because of the way we’re not supposed to possess medication in here. If you want two painkillers, you have to submit a request. If you have to put in the request, it usually takes two or three days to be approved.

Speaker 2:

This comes from the statement of Ulises’s campaign and his supporters. They are calling and sending emails to Congress members Ro Khanna and Alex Padilla to demand ICE to release Ulises from the Golden State Annex ICE Detention Center in McFarland and provide access to medical care, treatment and medications.

Ulises Pena-Lopez:

I want to tell you that despite what ICE did to me, when they beat me in front of my wife, in front of my daughter, and they took me to an alley, they continued to beat me. They performed CPR on me to revive me. After they called the ambulance, they still had the audacity to send the ambulance bills to my wife, not once but twice, saying that she is responsible and has to pay for these bills for what they did to me.

Speaker 2:

The list of demands issued by the organizations Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice includes: honor and uplift survivors of FCI Dublin; demolish and permanently close the FCI Dublin; reject all forms of ICE detention in Dublin and the ongoing terror and criminalization of immigrant communities; return and transform the land to meet community needs and reaffirm that places of worship and religious observance should remain sensitive locations free from the reach of immigration enforcement.

Speaker 7:

Just to close, we know that if Dublin is reopened as an ICE detention center, if people are once again caged in those empty buildings across the street, abuse and neglect will continue. As Dublin survivors have said so many times, the horrors that happened at Dublin are not unique. Abuse is baked into our prison system. Everywhere there are cages, there is violence. In BOP, in ICE in the Santa Rita jail across the street. What is unique about FCI Dublin is that survivors of this violence came together and they organized and they spoke out and they made themselves heard. Dublin survivors shut for years to shut that prison down and they won and it must stay closed forever.

In Baltimore, Maryland, thousands took to the streets on May 1—from students to seniors, teachers to transit workers—united by a shared demand for hope, justice, and a future not shaped by billionaire greed. Marchers opposed the Trump administration’s policies targeting public programs, labor rights, and immigrant communities—and expressed solidarity with Gaza.

Pre/Post-Production: Jaisal Noor

Transcript

The transcript for this video is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.

Pete Seeger

Folk musician

Banjo player

Singer of songs of unity

He sang songs of joy 

He sang for the unions

For the workers and the downtrodden. 

He sang songs for change

Civil Rights songs. Folk songs.

He sang for the people 

And he also served his country

In the US military—a corporal during World War 2

Fighting Hitler, the Nazis, and the Fascists

And when he came home, he founded the Weavers

A folk music quartet, which rocketed to the top of the charts.

They sang for the unions. 

They sang for social justice and progressive politics

Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunts in Washington.

Hundreds of actors, artists, and musicians were blacklisted across the country.

That included the Weavers. They called them subversives.

They were watched by the FBI.

And they folded.

McCarthy dragged Pete Seeger in to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

He refused to answer. 

But was found guilty of contempt of court.

He was banned from playing on television and over the radio.

He was banned from performing almost anywhere.

But he played on. 

Performing for kids.

Performing in festivals.

He taught people to play the banjo. 

He recorded instruction videos and song books. 

He worked as a music teacher in schools and summer camps.

He traveled from university to university across the country 

Singing despite the protests from conservatives 

Because of the blacklist.

They said he was Un-American.

But he was more American than anyone.

Reviving the songs of old 

Re-singing the music that rang from the porches of weatherbeaten homes across the hillsides of America.

He recorded folk album after album.

He helped to transform “We Shall Overcome” into a civil rights anthem. He sang it on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. 

He helped to inspire the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. 

And he continued to play and sing throughout his life. 

His music and his legacy plays on.

Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919. 

He died at the age of 94, in 2014.

This is episode 28 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Resources:

Here is a great 2007 PBS documentary about Pete Seeger’s life. It’s called “The Power of Song”:

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Apr. 30, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi is free on bail after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release.

It’s the first order mandating the release of a student detained by the Trump administration. The New York Times called his release “a defeat” for the administration’s “widening crackdown against student protesters.”

“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Judge Geoffrey Crawford at an April 30 hearing. “Mr. Mahdawi, I will order you released.”

Crawford also compared Trump’s crackdown to the Red Scare and said that period of history wasn’t one that people should be proud of.

“For anybody who is doubting justice, this is a light of hope and faith in the justice system in America,” Mahdawi told a crowd outside the courthouse after his release. “We are witnessing the fight for justice in America, which means a true democracy, and the fight for justice for Palestinians, which means that both liberation are interconnected, because no one of us is free unless we all are.”

“I am saying it clear and loud,” he added. “To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.”

“Today’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a victory for Mohsen who gets to walk free today out of this court,” said Shezza Abboushi Dallal, one of Mahdawi’s lawyers. “And it is also a victory for everyone else in this country invested in the very ability to dissent, who want to be able to speak out for the causes that they feel a moral imperative to lend their voices to and want to do that without fear that they will be abducted by masked men.”

Mahdawi, a permanent U.S. resident and green card holder for the past decade, was arrested by immigration officials on April 14 during his naturalization interview to become a United States citizen.

According to a recent legal brief from Mahdawi’s attorneys, the citizenship appointment had been a trap, as ICE agents intended to ambush the Columbia student and send him to a detention facility in Louisiana, where the Trump administration is holding Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

A judge blocked Trump from transferring Mahdawi out Vermont before agents could transport him.

A court filing submitted in the case by the Justice Department included a letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming that Mahdawi’s presence in the United States could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process.

Earlier this month, Vermont Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) visited Mahdawi at the ICE detention center where he was being held.

“I am centered, I am clear, I am grounded, and I don’t want you to worry about me,” Mahdawi told Welch. “I want you to continue working for the democracy of this country and for humanity. The war must stop.”

It’s been called the most influential protest you’ve never heard about. 

50,000 people in the streets

Descended on Washington

Day after day of nonviolent protests

Blockading roads 

Shutting down streets

Standing up for one cause: End the war in Vietnam. 

The year was 1971. The height of the war overseas.

Anti-war activists and groups, such as the May Day Collective said they would shut down Washington to demand that the troops be sent home.

That is what president Richard Nixon had promised to do when he took office, but he had only expanded operations in Vietnam.

The name of the protests was a play on words. They would take place around May 1, May Day. 

But the word mayday also means “emergency” or “crisis.”

The first days of protests began in mid-April 

With an occupation of the National Mall by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

There were marches.

Big marches. Half a million people in the streets.

“Good evening… Marching behind flags and banners and picket signs demanding peace now, at least 200,000 anti-war protesters jammed the streets of Washington today in what was probably the biggest peace demonstration to be held since they began six years ago.”

Tent camps.

The protesters promised to disrupt activity in the city, make it impossible for politics and business to carry on as usual.

To stop government workers from getting to their jobs.

Their slogan: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”

Richard Nixon responded with force. 

20,000 police officers, National Guard, US Marines, paratroopers and the calvary. 

One person who participated described it: “As protesters roamed downtown DC, dodging huge tear-gas barrages, they created small barricades, left disabled cars in roadways, or temporarily blocked intersections with mobile sit-ins.”

It was the quote, “Asymmetrical warfare of a guerilla force against a standing army. It was nearly impossible to defend against small decentralized bands who could shift on a dime, tie up police or troops at one spot, and then get to another place before the authorities could adjust.”

“Incredibly, the Supreme Court became involved in the camping permits. the capitol became a stage for guerrilla theater. Labor leaders and suburban mothers marched behind the leadership of hardcore anti-war activists. And thge final stages brought confrontation and vandalism in the name of peace… Every part of Washington seemed to be touched by some aspect of the intense three weeks.” 

But the police cracked down, making arrests, like the city, and the country, had never seen. 

7,000 people arrested in just one day—May 3. 

12,000 people arrested in total that week. 

It was and continues to be the largest mass arrest in the history of the United States.

Amid the dragnet, reporters and non-protesters were also ripped from the streets and locked up.

Protesters filled jails beyond capacity. People were detained in makeshift open-air prisons and in sporting arenas: The Washington Coliseum. The practice field for RFK Stadium.

They were held in deplorable conditions, often without much food, water, or bedding.

And in the end, years later, only a handful of people were convicted. 

The ACLU brought class action lawsuits.

Juries and judges awarded millions to thousands of those who were detained. 

They said their rights to free speech and due process had been violated. 

They said the arrests were unconstitutional.

Even Congress said the police and the federal government were in the wrong.

The US government’s use of preemptive mass arrests has continued as a means to clear streets, regardless if anything illegal has taken place…

…But so have the protests. 

50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, today, people are standing up in defense of Palestine. 

And they, too, have been targeted and detained, without doing anything wrong. For only exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

And so long as there is injustice, so long as the United States is fueling violence and war abroad, there will be people in the streets.

People who will stand up. 

People who will resist. 

Like those who descended on Washington five decades ago.

On May Day 1971. 

With one demand:

“If the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government.” 

This is episode 27 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

You can check out this excellent short documentary film about the protests:

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman covered the 50th anniversary of the protests and arrests in 2021:

The Trump administration continues to escalate its authoritarian assault on higher education, free speech, and political dissent—and university administrators and state government officials are willingly aiding that assault. On the morning of April 23, at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. “According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items,” Michael Arria reports at Mondoweiss. “Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers from the University of Michigan and Columbia University about how they and their unions are fighting back against ICE abductions, FBI raids, and top-down political repression, all while trying to carry on with their day-to-day work.

Panelists include: Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO); Ember McCoy, a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank-and-file member of GEO and the TAHRIR Coalition; Jessie Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank-and-file member of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC); and Conlan Olson, a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia and a member of the SWC bargaining committee.

Additional links/info:

• Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), University of Michigan website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• TAHRIR Coalition UMich X page
• Legal Fund of Michigan Students for Palestine
• GEO Worker Solidarity Fund
• GEO Press Release: FBI and police raid homes of pro-Palestine activists, including a GEO member
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “FBI and police raid homes of Palestine activists in Michigan”
• Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette, “Harvard files lawsuit against Trump administration”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our ongoing coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. Things have continued to escalate since we published our episodes earlier in April where I first interviewed Todd Wolfson in Chen Akua of the American Association of University Professors, and then interviewed graduate student workers at Columbia University, Ali Wong and Caitlyn Liss. Now many since then have praised the development of Harvard University standing up and challenging Trump’s attacks in a public statement titled, upholding Our Values, defending Our University.

Harvard’s president Alan m Garber wrote Dear members of the Harvard Community. Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11th letter was sent by mistake. Other statements and their actions suggest otherwise doubling down on the letters, sweeping and intrusive demands which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university. The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 5 0 1 C3 tax exempt status. These actions have stark real life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.

Now at the same time at the University of Michigan, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies raided multiple homes of student activists connected to Gaza solidarity protests as Michael Aria reports at Monde Weiss. On the morning of April 23rd, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan. According to the group, students allied for Freedom and Equality or safe agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained but eventually released to rear coalition. A student led movement calling for divestment from Israel said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid. A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the Office of Michigan.

Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nestle introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protestors involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that members of University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nestle to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight Regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nestle’s campaigns after the regents called for action. Nestle took the cases over from local district attorney Ellie Savitt, an extremely rare move as local prosecutors typically handle such cases. Listen, as we’ve been saying repeatedly on this show and across the Real news, the battle on and over are institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided.

And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students, staff, campus communities, and the public writ large. And today we are very grateful to be joined by four guests who are on the front lines of that fight. We’re joined today by Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees organization or GEO, which full disclosure is my old union. Ember McCoy is also joining us. Ember is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank and file member of GEO and the Tare Coalition. And we are also joined today by Jesse Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia.

We are also joined by Conlin Olson, a PhD student in computer science at Columbia, and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Student Workers of Columbia, Lavinia Ember, Jesse Conlin. Thank you all so much for joining us today, especially amidst this terrifying reality that we all find ourselves in. I wanted to just jump right in and start there because since we have y’all and you are new voices in this ongoing coverage that we’re trying to do of these authoritarian attacks on higher ed, I wanted to start by just going around the table and asking if y’all could briefly introduce yourselves and tell us about what your life and work have been like these past few weeks and months as all of this Orwellian nightmare has been unfolding.

Lavinia:

Yeah. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, max for putting this together. So by and large, my life just continues to revolve around research. I’m actually on an NSF fellowship and that means that I basically spend all of my time in the office doing research. That being said, over the past couple of months, especially sort of in the context of organizing, a lot of what I and other grad workers at the University of Michigan have been working on is safety planning and mutual aid efforts related to immigration. And then of course in the past couple of weeks there’s been sort of this really alarming, as you said, escalation in repression by the state government of pro-Palestine protestors. So recently a lot of organizing work has also been related to that, but just to personalize it, the people who are affected by this repression, our friends, they’re coworkers and it’s just been extremely scary recently even just sort of trying to navigate being on campus in this really kind of tense political environment.

Ember McCoy:

So for me, this is kind a continuation of the organizing that I’ve been doing throughout the PhD and before I was vice president of the grad union during our 2023 strike, and there was a lot of infrastructure that we built and organizing models that we’ve changed, that we’ve talked about. Even I think on this podcast leading into the strike, which I think then we got a contract in September of 2023 and then pretty much right away ended up transitioning our work to be very focused on Palestine Pro Palestine organizing in collaboration with undergrad students after October 7th, which I think is really important for some of the infrastructure we built and organizing models we built, thinking about how we’ve been able to transition from labor organizing to pro-Palestine organizing to ICE organizing and all the way back around and in between. On a personal level, this week, Monday morning, I had a meeting with my advisor.

I told him, I promised him I was going to lock in. I was like, I’m going to do it. I need to finish. By August, two hours later, I found out my NSF grant was terminated. I study environmental justice, I have a doctoral dissertation research grant, and then I spent Tuesday trying to do paperwork around that. And Monday morning I woke up to my friend’s houses being rated by the FBI and safe to say, I’ve not worked on my dissertation the rest of the week. So yeah, I think it’s just important like Lavinia said, to think about how, I don’t know, we’re all operating in this space of navigating, trying to continue thinking about our work and the obligations we have as workers for students at the University of Michigan. It is finals week, so the raids happen Wednesdays finals started Thursday. And also not only continuing the fight for pre Palestine, but also making sure our comrades are okay and that they’re safe.

Jessie Rubin:

Hi everyone. It’s really nice to meet you Lavinia and Ember, and thank you so much Max for inviting us to be a part of this. My name is Jessie and I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia in the music department and also a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia. I guess to start off with the more personal side with my own research, I guess I’m lucky in that my research has not been threatened with funding cuts the same way that embers has been, and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Ember much love and solidarity to you, but my research does engage Palestine. I researched the Palestine Solidarity movement in Ireland and this past year has definitely been a whirlwind of being scared that I could get in trouble even for just talking about my own research on campus, scared that if I share my research with my students, that might be grounds for discipline.

So it’s definitely been this large existential fight of trying to write my dissertation and write it well while also feeling like Columbia doesn’t want me to be doing the dissertation that I am doing. At the same time, I’ve been really invigorated and motivated through working with my fellow union members. I’m a member of our communications committee, which has obviously taken off a ton in the past few months with social media, internal communications and press, and figuring out how we as a union can sort of express our demands to a broader audience in America and around the globe. I’m also a member of our political education and solidarity committee, and that has been really moving, I mean really exciting to see how different members of our community and also the broader union work with other groups on campus through mutual aid efforts, through actions, through all sorts of activity to fight against this attack on higher ed. And lastly, I also joined our Palestine working group last year. Our union passed a BDS resolution, which then sort of necessitated the formation of our working group. And our working group has been working to think about what Palestine might look like in our upcoming bargaining. We are just entering bargaining and Conlin who’s here with us today can probably talk more about what that’s been looking like as they’re a member of our bargaining team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should also be remembered from listeners from our previous episode with members of Student workers of Columbia. Don’t forget that the university expelled and functionally fired Grant Minor, the former president of Student Workers of Columbia, right before bargaining sessions opened with the university.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, that’s right. This is Conlin. Like Jesse said, I’m a member of the bargaining committee at Student Workers of Columbia. I’m also a PhD student in computer science. I study algorithmic fairness and data privacy, which are sort of terrifyingly relevant right now. And in addition to our current contract campaign, just on a day-to-day organizing level, and we’re all really trying hard to build the left and build the labor movement among tech workers and STEM workers, which is an uphill battle, but I think is really important work. And I think there is a lot of potential for solidarity and labor power in those areas, even if at Columbia right now they feel under organized.

And in our contract campaign, we are currently, we have contract articles ready. We have a comprehensive health and safety article that includes protections for international students. We have articles about keeping federal law enforcement off our campus. And of course we have all the usual articles that you would see in a union contract. We have a non-discrimination and harassment article that provides real recourse in a way that we don’t have right now. And so we are ready to bargain and we have our unit standing behind us and the university really has refused to meet us in good faith. As Max said, they’ve fired our president and then we still brought our president because he’s still our president to bargaining. And the next time we went to schedule a bargaining session, they declared him persona non grata from campus. And so we said, well, we can’t meet you on campus because we need our president. Here’s a zoom link. And Columbia, of course refused to show up on Zoom. So we are frustrated. We are ready to bargain. We have the power, we have the contract articles and the universities refusing to meet us. So we are building a powerful campaign to ask them to meet us and to try to get them to the table and work on reaching a fair contract for all of our workers. Yeah, I think that’s most of my day-to-day these days is working on our contract campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I just want to say speaking only for myself and full disclosure, I am a former GEO member at the University of Michigan. I got my PhDs there as well, and I remember after already leaving the university to come work at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I was still a BD, meaning I hadn’t fully finished my dissertation and defended it. Then COD hit in 2020 and our university was doing the same thing of amidst this chaotic nightmare that we were all living through. My professors and administrators were saying, Hey, finish that dissertation. And I think I rightly said, I rightly expressed what many of us were feeling, which was, Hey man, I’ve earned that goddamn thing at this point. Just give me the degree. I can’t imagine how y’all are still trying to write and defend your dissertations amidst these funding cuts amidst when the future of higher education itself is in doubt. So I would just say for myself and for no one else, just give PhD candidates their goddamn doctorates at this point, man, what are you doing? But anyway, ember Lavinia, I want to go to y’all and ask if you could help us break down the FBI and police raids out there in Ann Arbor Ypsilanti all around the University of Michigan. Can you tell us more about what happened, how the people who were detained are doing, how folks on campus are responding and just where the hell things stand now?

Ember McCoy:

And you did a really thorough job covering the timeline of what happened on Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday between six and 9:00 AM the FBI, along with Michigan State police and local police officers in the three different cities and University of Michigan police conducted a coordinated raid in unmarked vehicles at the home of homes of multiple University of Michigan pro-Palestine activists. And I think that’s very important to name because the attorney general who a democrat who signed these warrants that have no probable cause is saying that in their press release that the raids don’t have anything to do with University of Michigan campus activism, and they don’t have anything to do with the encampments, but the people whose home berated are prominent pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. So trying to say those things aren’t connected is not at all, and there’s no charges, right? There’s no charges that has happened for these folks whose homes have been rated. And so it’s just a crazy situation to say the least. I would say people are doing as well as they can be. Some of their immediate thoughts were like, I need to figure out my finals and I no longer have my devices or access to my university meme Michigan accounts because of duo two factor authentication.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the organizing of course is still continuing. Another big thing that’s happened. I guess to scale out a little bit, what happened Wednesday is just another thing that has happened in this year long campaign where the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is really targeting University of Michigan activists Ann Arbor activists for pro-Palestine free speech. So as you alluded to, there are 11 people facing felony charges from the Attorney general related to the encampment raid. There’s another four people facing charges as a result of a die-in that we did in the fall. And so that is also all still ongoing and very much a part of this. So there’s almost 40 different activists that they’re targeting across these different attacks. And we actually had Thursday, we had a court date coincidentally for the encampment 11, and it was the intention of it was to file a motion to ask the judge to recuse Dana Nessel, the Attorney General.

She has already had to recuse herself from a different case due to perceived Islamic Islamic phobic bias. And she’s a prominent Zionist in the state. And so our argument is kind of like if she’s had to recuse herself from that case, she should also have to recuse herself from this case. They would fall under similar intent. However, when we were at that court case, one of the encampment 11 also was accused of violating his bond. So as a part of their bond, they’re not allowed to be on campus unless for class or for work, though most of them have been fired from their jobs at this point. And he was accused of being, he was surveilled on campus 20 minutes after his class ended and he was walking through and stopped allegedly to say hi to friends. So he was sent to jail for four days right then and there.

The judge and the prosecutor originally said they were trying to put him in jail for 10 days, but they didn’t want him to miss his graduation and wax poetic about how they didn’t want his parents to have to miss his graduation. So instead, they sent him to jail for four days and he got out Sunday morning. And so yeah, it’s been a lot, right? There’s all these different things that are happening, but I think the organizing still continues. People are very mobilized. People are probably more agitated than they were before. And after this, a bunch of us are heading to a rally at Dana Nestle’s office in Lansing. So I would say that it definitely hasn’t curtailed the movement for a free Palestine and the movement for free speech broadly in the state of Michigan. That was long-winded, but lots going on.

Lavinia:

That was such a great summary, Amber. Great. Yeah. I also just want to add that there has been a lot of repression on campus that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges or legal actions. Instead, it’s stuff like, for instance, one of my friends was pulled into a disciplinary meeting because he sent a mass email about Palestine or there have been many instances of police deploying pepper spray on campus against protesters. So there’s also just kind of this general climate of fear, which is reinforced in many different contexts on campus, specifically surrounding Palestine.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Conlin. Jesse, I wanted to bring you in here because as we discussed in the recent episode with two other members of your union, Trump’s administration really set the template for this broader assault on higher ed by first going after Columbia. So what is your message to workers and students on other campuses like Michigan who are facing similar attacks? What can we learn from Columbia that may help people at other universities be better prepared for what’s coming?

Jessie Rubin:

Great question. First and foremost, I would say the biggest takeaway is that we help us. It’s us who take care of each other. We can’t expect the university or the administration to protect the most vulnerable among us to protect our international students, to protect our research. It’s us who has to create the infrastructure to keep us safe. For example, it was the union that provided the most robust know your rights trainings and detailed information to support international students on our campus. While the university has pretty much stayed silent and offered completely hollow support, I mean, we saw this with our fellow union member, Ron Boston, who had her visa revoked for totally no reason at all, and the university immediately dis-enrolled her from her program and from her housing. So it’s really clear that the university does not have our safety as a top priority. And if anything, I mean the university’s response to the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re not just capitulating, but they are active collaborators. And I would say that we can expect the same from other universities. And through their collaboration with the Trump administration, through their appeasement, we haven’t gotten anything. Columbia has gone above and beyond here, and even still our programs are getting hit with funding cuts and this continued federal overreach.

Conlan Olson:

And I think this lesson that appeasement gets us, nothing also has a parallel lesson for activists. So as a union, as activists, we can’t just sit this tight or wait this out, we can’t stay quiet in order to survive. And I really feel that if we start appeasing or hedging our bets, we’re going to lose our values and just get beat one step at a time. And this is why our union has really not backed down from fighting for Ranjani, why we’ve not backed down from fighting for a grant minor. And it’s why we’re fighting for such a strong contract with really unprecedented articles to protect non-citizens, to keep cops off our campus, to provide for parents to ensure financial transparency and justice in Columbia’s financial investments. And of course, to get paid a living wage. I think as a union, we could have backed down or softened our position, but I really think this would’ve meant losing before we even start.

We are labor unionists. We are people fighting for justice. If we start backing off, we’re just going to get beat one step at a time. And I do think that our activism is starting to work. So yesterday, Columbia, for the first time named Mah Halil and most of madi for the first time in public communications, and they offered slightly more support for non-citizens. And so to be clear, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that they’re not doing more and really despicable that they’re only now naming those people by name. But we are starting to see the needle moved because of activist campaigns by our union, both to pressure the university and to just provide, as Jesse said, know your rights training and outreach to students on our campus.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ember, Lavinia, I wanted to bring you all back in as well and ask if you had any kind of thoughts or messages to folks at Columbia or people on other campuses right now. I mean, of course this looks differently depending on what state people are in and what university they’re at. But I guess for folks out there who are listening to this and preparing for what may happen on their campuses, did you have any sort of messages you wanted to let folks know?

Lavinia:

Yeah, so I kind of want to echo Jesse’s point that really we keep us safe. Many of these university administrations I think historically are intransigent in their negotiations with students. So for instance, with go, we had a 2022 to 2023 bargaining cycle where the university didn’t really budget all. And I think that in some way sort of set the precedent for what’s happening now, but I think we know in general, sort of the incentive structures for these academic institutions are really not set up to support what protects grad workers or students or really people who are just in the community. So that’s why things like safety planning or for instance within NGEO, we have an immigration hotline, those sort of community infrastructures are so important. So I just really want to advocate for thinking about how you as a community can support each other, especially in the face of new or more exaggerated threats from the government and the university.

Ember McCoy:

And if I could just add quickly too, I think one, I want to name that part of the reason we were so prepared this week is because we are following the footsteps of Columbia and our Columbia comrades. We’ve been able to do similar safety planning and set up these hotlines because we witnessed first the horrors that happened to you all. And I think that’s really important to be able to directly connect with you all which we had been previously, and to help other people do the same. And as Livinia mentioned, the reason we knew the raids were happening at 6:00 AM on Wednesday is because one of the people called our hotline called our ice hotline and our ICE hotline as Jail support hotline and we’re able to get people out because that’s an infrastructure that they knew about to try to suddenly get people’s attention.

And another one of the homes we knew they were being rated because we have a group in collaboration with community partners where there’s an ice watch group and people put in the group chat that there was FBI staging nearby, and then they watched people raid someone’s homes. And that brought out tons of people immediately to the scene. And so those infrastructures, many of them were actually for ice, and there was not ice in collaboration in the FBI raid. But I think it’s really important how those infrastructures which build off each other originally were able to protect us and us safe on Wednesday.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Gang, I wanted to sort of talk about the signs of life that we’re seeing. And y’all mentioned some on your campuses, like amidst all of this darkness and repression, and as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks around the country, a lot of folks that I’ve talked to in higher ed have been really galvanized by seeing the news that Harvard of all places is fighting Donald Trump’s attacks. It may not be perfect, but it’s something right. And I wanted to ask if there are more efforts that you’re seeing on your campus or other campuses that are giving you hope right now?

Conlan Olson:

I just want to say, so I happen to be a Harvard alum also, and I don’t want to be too down here, but I think that the way that we should think about Harvard’s efforts are really what Max called them, which is just a sign of life. I don’t have that much faith in our institutions. I appreciate the Big 10 movement and that we need a diversity of tactics here. But we should also keep in mind that yesterday Harvard renamed its diversity office and cut all of its affinity graduation celebrations in response to pressure from the federal government. Harvard remains invested in Israeli genocide and continues to suppress student protest. They fired the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies last month. And so while I appreciate this sort of sign of life, I really feel that our institutions are not going to save us.

And so these days looking for inspiration, I’m far more inspired by activist movements by students, staff, professors, community members. So for example, yesterday just the same day that Harvard canceled these affinity graduation celebrations, students responded committing to holding their own, and we’re still seeing student protests, we’re seeing increasing faculty support for student protests, which is really important to me. We’re seeing mutual aid projects. We’re seeing legal movements to fight against visa ramifications. And so I think these places really from the ground up and from activism by the people at these universities are much more the things that are inspiring me these days.

Jessie Rubin:

I completely agree with Conland that it’s been so heartwarming to see the power of student movements, the power of working people movements on our campuses. It’s been heartwarming to see encampments starting to pop up again around the country even though the stakes are much higher than they’ve been than ever. Students are putting their bodies on the line, they’re risking expulsion, they’re risking arrest, they’re risking physical injury. And it’s really clear that no matter how hard our administrations try to stamp out dissent, including by expelling core organizers, that students keep coming out in and greater force and developing new tools to keep each other safe. And we see that this student pressure works. Just a few days ago, MIT was forced to cut ties with Elbit systems after a targeted campaign by a BDS group on campus. EL I is an Israeli arms company and has been a target in many BDS campaigns across the globe.

Ember McCoy:

Yeah, one thing I similarly, I similarly don’t want to be a downer, but one thing I think for us that’s been really present on my mind at least this week is the importance of also making connections between not just what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the targeting of pro-Palestine activists, but what Democrat elected officials are doing in the state of Michigan to help support that. Dana Nessel, who is our attorney general is there’s all these articles and things and she’s coming out being like, oh, she’s a big anti-Trump democrat. She’s taking an aggressive approach to these ICE and these lawsuits. But at the same time, she sent Trump’s FBI to our houses on Wednesday, and she’s continuing to prosecute our free speech in a way that is really important to connect the criminalization of international students or international community members who are then that platform is then going to be able to be used, potentially could be used to by Trump’s administration.

And so there’s all these really important connections that I think need to be made. And for me, obviously what the Trump administration is doing is horrible, but it’s also really, really important that to name that this did not start or end with the Trump administration and it’s being actively facilitated by democratic elected officials across the United States. But I think one thing that’s a bright spot is I do think that activists at the University of Michigan and in our community are doing a really good job of trying to name that and to have really concrete political education for our community members. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which our community showed up for us on Wednesday and the rest of the week and the ways in which people were able to galvanize around us and act quickly and kind of test our infrastructures as successful in that way.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think the threats to academic freedom through things like grant withholding or threatening DEI offices or what have you, are I think waking up faculty in particular to sort the broader power structures which govern universities. And those power structures frequently don’t include faculty. So a lot of them are, I think being, I wouldn’t say radicalized, but awakened to the kind of undemocratic nature of these institutions and specifically how they can threaten their students. I mean, I know especially as PhD students, we do tend to work closely with a lot of faculty. And I think there is sort of an inspiring change happening there as well.

Ember McCoy:

One additional thing about Harvard is I would say I agree with everything Conlin said, and the University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country. We now have a 20 billion endowment. It’s $3 billion more than it was in 2023 when we were doing our strike. And part of I think why Harvard is able to make the statement so that they can around resisting Trump’s funding is because they have the resources to do so, and a lot of institutions do not. University of Michigan is one that absolutely does. And so I do think it helps us try to leverage that argument that what is the 20 billion endowment for if it’s not for right now, why are we just immediately bending the knee to the Trump administration, especially on a campus that is known to have a long legacy of anti-war divestment and all of these other really important things.

And two weeks ago, I think it was time is nothing right now, but we got an email from President Ono saying that the NIH is requiring that institutions who get grants from the NIH certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And this was a new thing, do not have BDS campaigns, that they’re not divesting from Israel, which is not only obviously one of the main demands of the TER Coalition, but has also been a demand that students on campus that geo has taken stand for decades for over 20 years at the University of Michigan. And so seeing that all being facilitated is really, really scary, and I think it’s really frustrating that the University of Michigan administration is doing what they’re doing. So I think for me, there’s just a little teeny glimmer of hope to be able to use that as leverage more than anything.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as we’ve mentioned on this call and in previous episodes, I mean the Trump administration is using multiple things to justify these attacks, including the notion that universities are just overrun with woke ideology embodied in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, trans student athletes participating in sports. But really the tip of this authoritarian spear has been the charge that this administration is protecting campuses from a scourge of antisemitism that is rampant across institutions of higher education around the country. And of course, like plenty of university administrations have gone along with that framing and have even adopted policies that accept the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, including Harvard. And so I wanted to just ask y’all, if you had a chance to talk to people out there who are buying this, what is the reality on campuses? Are they overrun with antisemitism and wokeness the way people are being told? What do you want people to know about the reality on campus versus what they’re hearing from the White House and on Fox News and stuff?

Jessie Rubin:

Yeah, I mean, I can start by answering as an anti-Zionist Jew, I would say that the schools are of course not overrun by antisemitism, but instead we’re seeing growing mass movements that are anti genocide movements, that are Palestine liberation movements, and that is by no means antisemitic. And on top of that, these new definitions of antisemitism that are getting adopted on campuses actually make me feel less safe. They completely invalidate my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew and say that my religion or my culture is somehow at odds with my politics.

Ember McCoy:

I mean, I would just echo what Jesse said. I think that’s something we’re definitely being accused of, right at the University of Michigan, like you said, the elected officials are Zionists, right? And so they’re weaponizing this argument of antisemitism on campus and while also persecuting and charging anti-Zionist Jews with felony charges for speaking out for pro-Palestine. I think for those listening really all, it seems so simple, but I feel like it’s just you have to really listen to the people who are part of these movements and look as who’s a part of it. Because I think, as Jesse said, it’s really an intergenerational interfaith group that have shared politics. And it’s really important to understand that distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that is being inflated in really, really terrifying ways.

Conlan Olson:

And I would just say the encampments, especially last spring and now again this spring and student movements really community spaces and spaces where people are taking care of each other, and that is what it feels like being in campus activism these days. I feel cared for by my comrades and the people I organize with. And I think that when we say solidarity, it’s not just a political statement, it’s also something that we really feel. And so yeah, I would invite people worried about antisemitism or other divisive ideologies on college campuses to just listen to the students who feel cared for and who are doing the work to care for each other.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think one thing that was really wonderful, at least about the encampment at U of M is that there were lots of people who I think did have this misconception that there was some relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then upon visiting the encampment and seeing the kind of solidarity that was being displayed there, they sort of potentially were a bit disabused of that notion. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of why the encampments in particular were so threatening to university administrations and Zionist officials, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Lavinia, Ember, Jesse Conlin, there’s so much more that we could talk about here. But with the final minutes that I have, I wanted to focus in on the fact that y’all are unions and union members, and this is a show about and for workers. And I wanted to round things off by sort of talking about what role unions and collective labor power have to play in this terrifying moment. How can graduate student unions like yours and other unions like faculty unions and unions representing staff workers on campuses, what can labor organizations do to work together to fight this?

Jessie Rubin:

Sure. Thank you for your question. The first thing that I want to say is as workers, the most powerful tool that we have is our labor, and we have the power to withhold labor. We have to remember that we’re not just bystanders who the Trump administration can cross with no consequences. Graduate students, we produce their research that saves lives in human health. We write books that shape American life and we invent the things that America is so proud of. We also teach undergraduates, the university would just simply not run without its graduate students. So a strike poses a threat that simply cannot be ignored.

Conlan Olson:

And in addition to our work in higher education, the whole point is that we believe in solidarity, and that includes solidarity across sectors and across borders. And of course, mobilizing in this way is a huge task, but we’re seeing really inspiring work. For example, UIW Labor for Palestine is a coalition of workers in manufacturing to legal services to higher education, all fighting together against investment in Israeli genocide. And so I think that cross sectoral organizing both between grad students and other unions on campuses, but even unions, not on campuses at all, is really important. And I think working to connect people is a huge part of the work that needs to be done now.

Ember McCoy:

So I think we already little mentioned a little bit at the University of Michigan, what we built during our strike and the organizing model and the networks and community that we built at that time has directly supported our pro-Palestine activism and our ICE organizing and the combination of the two through things like safety planning department meetings, and then literally being the institutions that have resources to do things like set up a hotline or to have bodies that are mobilized and already connected to each other. And so a lot of it is, I don’t feel that we’re even reinventing the real wheel right now, right? It’s like unions are this space where this collective organizing and this solidarity and financial and physical and legal resources already exist. And so we should absolutely be leveraging those to protect ourselves and our comrades. And at the University of Michigan, I know this is not the case everywhere, including Columbia, but until two weeks ago anyways, there hadn’t been a unionized staff member who was fired. So while undergrad research assistants were getting hiring bands and being fired from their jobs, they’re not unionized, grad workers were not being fired. And I think a lot of that is in part because we have an incredibly strong contract. And it would’ve been really hard to fire someone who was a graduate teaching instructor last two weeks ago. There was a full-time staff member who was fired for something or for allegedly participating in a protest that happened before she was even hired or applied to the job.

She is a part of our new United Staff University staff United Union. Is that right? Vidia? Did I? Yeah, I think it’s university. Okay. Yeah. So she’s a part of our university staff, United Union. They don’t have a contract yet though. So she is in a position where she has people that can start to try to fight for her, but then they don’t have a contract. And so I think also for workers who are not yet unionized, this is a really critical time to be able to use that type of institution to protect workers because we are seeing it work in many places.

Conlan Olson:

And just to build on that, I think one troubling pattern that we’ve seen recently is people who are nervous to sign a union card because they’re worried about retaliation for being involved with labor organizing. And just to start, I think that fear is totally understandable, and I don’t think it’s silly or invalid, but I also think that we need to remember that people are far safer in a union than they are without a union. And so in addition to our power to withhold labor, we’re also just a group of people who keep each other safe. So we have mutual aid collectives, we run campaigns to defend each other, like the one that we’re running for Rani. And so lying low is just not going to work, especially in this political moment. And so yeah, I really want people to remember that unions keep you safe.

Lavinia:

I think empirically there has been sort of a duality in the organizing conversations that we’re having for GEO as well where people both see how dangerous the situation is right now and want to be involved, but at the same time, especially if they’re not a citizen, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable exposing themselves, I guess. So I think one thing that’s just important in general for unions right now is providing avenues for people who are in that situation to get involved and contribute, even if that’s not necessarily going to the media or speaking out in a very public way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the last couple minutes that we have here, I wanted to end on that note and just acknowledge the reality that this podcast is going to be listened to by students, grad students, faculty, non university affiliated folks who are terrified right now, people who are self-censoring, people who are going back in their Facebook feeds and Instagram feeds and deleting past posts because they’re terrified of the government surveilling them and scrubbing them. And people are worried about getting abducted on the street by agents of the state losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their research. This is a very terrifying moment, and the more filled with terror we are, the more immobilized we are and the easier we are to control. So I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any final messages to folks out there on your campus or beyond your campus who are feeling this way, what would you say to them about ways they could get involved in this effort to fight back or any sort of parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with before we break?

Lavinia:

I think doubt is a wonderful time to plug in. So for people who maybe previously hadn’t been thinking about unions especially as sort of an important part of their lives or thought, oh, the union on my campus is just doing whatever it needs to do, but I don’t necessarily need to have any personal involvement in their activities, I think right now is when we need all hands on deck given the level of political repression that’s happening. And also just to maybe bring in that old Martin Eller quote about first they came for the communist and I did not speak up because I was not a communist, et cetera. I think it’s also just really important to emphasize that I don’t think any of this is going to stop here. And even within the context of pro-Palestine organizing at the university, it is basically escalated in terms of the severity of the legal charges that are being brought. Obviously bringing in the FB is kind of really crazy, et cetera. So I don’t think that this is going to stop here or there’s any reason to assume that if you are not taking action right now, that means that you’re going to be safe ultimately. Yeah,

Ember McCoy:

And I think I would add, like many of us had said in the call, I think it’s very clear that we keep each other safe. The institutions that we’ve built, the organizing communities that we’ve built are very much actively keeping each other safe. And I think we’re seeing that in many different ways. And it’s important to acknowledge that and see that we’re much stronger fighting together as a part of these networks than that we are alone.

Conlan Olson:

I think as a closing thought, I also just want to say I think it’s really essential that we expand our view beyond just higher education. And so let me say why I think that’s true. So people know about Mahmud and Mosen and Ru Mesa, but I also want people to know about Alfredo Juarez, also known as Lelo, who’s a worker and labor organizer with the Independent Farm Workers Union in Washington state. And Lelo was kidnapped by ice from his car on his way to work in the tulip fields about a month ago. He’s an incredibly powerful labor organizer. He’s known especially for his ability to organize his fellow indigenous mixed deco speaking workers, and he was targeted by the state for this organizing. I think it’s important to keep this in mind and to learn from campaigns that are going on elsewhere and also to contribute to them.

And also I want people to remember that it’s not all dark. And so one story that was really inspiring to me recently was that in early April, a mother and her three young children living in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario and upstate New York were taken by ice. And in response, the town, which keep in mind is a predominantly Republican voting town, turned out a thousand out of 1300 people in the town to a rally, and the family’s free now. And so we’re all labor organizers. Turning out a thousand out of 1300 people is some seriously impressive organizing. And I think learning from these lessons and keeping these victories in mind is really important. Not only as just an intellectual exercise, but also solidarity is something that we do every day. So it’s for example, why we fight for divestment from genocide. It’s why we do mutual aid. It’s why we engage with the neighborhoods that our universities are in. It’s why we don’t just defend our comrades who are highly educated, who have high earning potential, but we also defend our comrades who are taken, whose names we don’t even know yet. And so I just think expanding our view beyond just higher education is both a source of wisdom and something that we can learn from and also a source of hope for me

Jessie Rubin:

Really beautifully said Conlin. And I just want to add that expanding our view beyond higher education also includes the communities that our campuses reside on. I mean, I’m coming from a Columbia perspective where my university is consistently displacing people in Harlem who have been there for decades in this project of expanding Columbia’s campus continues to this day, and it’s something that we must fight back against. It’s really important that we protect our neighbors, not just on campus but also off campus. It’s important that we get to know our neighbors, that we are truly fully members of our greater community.

Ember McCoy:

If folks listening are interested in supporting us here at the University of Michigan, and I hope our Columbia colleagues can do the same, we have a legal slash mutual aid fund for our comrades who are facing charges and who are rated by the FBI. It is Bitly, BIT ly slash legal fund, and that is all lowercase, which matters. And we’re also happy to take solidarity statements and Columbia SWC did a great one for us and we’re happy to do the same. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Ember McCoy and Lavinia from the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization and Jessie Rubin and Conlan Olson from Student Workers of Columbia University. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 29, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that his country’s “old relationship with the United States… is over” after leading his Liberal Party to victory in Monday’s federal election, a contest that came amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s destructive trade war and threats to forcibly annex Canada.

“As I have been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats,” Carney, a former central banker who succeeded Justin Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister last month, said after he was projected the winner of Monday’s election.

On the day of the contest, Trump reiterated his desire to make Canada “the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America.”

“President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us,” Carney said Monday. “That will never, ever happen.”

Carney: President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, ever happen pic.twitter.com/dUEI0YGSM2

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 29, 2025

It’s not yet clear whether the Liberal Party will secure enough seats for a parliamentary majority, but its victory Monday was seen as a stunning comeback after the party appeared to be spiraling toward defeat under Trudeau’s leadership.

Pierre Poilievre, the head of Canada’s Conservative Party, looked for much of the past year to be “cruising to one of the largest majority governments in Canada’s history,” The Washington Post noted.

But on Monday, Poilievre—who was embraced by Trump allies, including mega-billionaire Elon Musk—lost his parliamentary seat to his Liberal opponent, Bruce Fanjoy.

Vox‘s Zack Beauchamp wrote Tuesday that “Trump has single-handedly created the greatest surge of nationalist anti-Americanism in Canada’s history as an independent country,” pointing to a recent survey showing that “61% of Canadians are currently boycotting American-made goods.”

“Trump’s aggressive economic policy isn’t, as he claimed, making America Great or respected again. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect: turning longtime allies into places where campaigning against American leadership is a winning strategy,” Beauchamp added. “If we are indeed witnessing the beginning of the end of the American-led world order, the history books will likely record April 28, 2025, as a notable date—one where even America’s closest ally started eying the geopolitical exits.”

A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.”

In this installment of The Real News Network podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of scholars about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks we’re seeing play out today, and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight them. Panelists include:

• Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education, and a member of the American Association of University Professors national committee on academic freedom and tenure. Schrecker is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including: The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
• David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, host of the podcast Speaking Out of Place, and author of several books, including: Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back; The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
• Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Wald is an editor of Against the Current and Science & Society, he serves as a member of the academic council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and he is the author of a trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina Press: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade; and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News and it’s so great to have you all with us. Higher education looks very different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education during the first Trump administration just a few short years ago. As you have heard from the harrowing interviews that we’ve published at the Real News interviews with faculty members, graduate students and union representatives, a dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities under the second Trump administration fear of ice agents snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight student visas revoked on mass overnight funding cuts that have upended countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure, self-censorship online and in the classroom, students expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, an all out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by police, internet vigilantes and even university administrators.

Now, when you go digging into the darker parts of American history to find comparisons to the bleak situation we find ourselves in now, one of the obvious periods that stands out is that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist red scare in the 1950s. In her canonical book, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the universities historian Ellen Schreker writes the following, the academy’s enforcement of McCarthyism had silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and snuffed out all meaningful opposition to the official version of the Cold War. When by the late fifties the hearings and dismissals tapered off. It was not because they encountered resistance, but because they were no longer necessary, all was quiet on the academic front. In another era, perhaps Schreker also writes, the academy might not have cooperated so readily, but the 1950s was the period when the nation’s, colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent upon and responsive toward the federal government, the academic communities collaboration with McCarthyism was part of that process.

My friends, we now find ourselves in another era and we are going to find out if colleges and universities will take the path they didn’t travel in the 1950s or if we’re going to continue down the horrifying path that we are currently on. Today we’re going to talk about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on an effort to remake higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks that we’re seeing play out today and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight it to help us navigate this hairy terrain. I am truly honored to be joined by three esteemed guests. First, we are joined by Ellen Schreker herself. Professor Schreker is a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American Higher Education, and she’s a member of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

She’s the author of numerous irreplaceable books including her most recent work, which she co-edited called The Right to Learn, resisting the Right Wing Attack on Academic Freedom and other Titles Like The Lost Promise American Universities in the 1960s, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the Universities, and many are the Crimes McCarthyism in America. We are also joined by Professor David Plumal Liu Louise Hewlett Nixon professor in comparative literature at Stanford University. David is the author of several books including his most recent one, speaking out of Place, getting Our Political Voices Back. He is also the host of the podcast speaking out of place which everyone should listen to. And lastly, we are joined by Professor Alan Walt. Alan is an editor of Against the Current and Science and Society. He’s the h Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Wald is the author of a vital trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina press about writers and communism in the United States, and he serves as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and full disclosure here, I myself am a former student of Allen’s, but he really kicked my butt in grad school, so trust me when I say I don’t think you guys have to worry about any special treatment here. David Ellen Allen, thank you all so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I truly appreciate it and I wanted to just kind of dive right in and ask if we could go around the table and start where we are here and now from your vantage points, how would you describe and assess what’s happening to higher education in America right now? Would you describe this as fascism, McCarthyism, an authoritarian takeover or something else? And does it even matter what we call it at this point?

Ellen Schrecker:

We can call it all of the above and then some or as my favorite sign at the first really big demonstration I was at I guess about two weeks ago, make dystopia fiction again. That’s where we are, and I used to get all sort of into, was it McCarthyism? Of course, it’s not just one man, it’s not even just Trump, although he seems to have a sort of lock on authoritarianism of a certain what shall we say, manic type. But it’s the difference between what I’ve been studying for the past 40 years, I guess if not longer, is that now everything is at play during the McCarthy period, and I do use the term McCarthyism just because it’s sort of specifically located in the anti-communist red scare of the Early Cold War. We could call it the home front of the Cold War if you wanted, just focused on individual communists, their past, their refusal to collaborate with that iteration of political oppression. And today it’s much broader. What the Trump administration is doing is focusing completely on everything that has to do with higher education as well as pretty much everything that has to do with everything else. I mean, this administration is worse than anything I’ve ever seen as a historian or studied. The closest that it comes to really is the rollback of the Civil War, the rollback against reconstruction when people were being shot by the dozens, and we haven’t gotten that blood thirsty, but I’m scared to death.

Alan Wald:

There are two points that I want to make. First of all, as Ellen very effectively pointed out, we’re now in this kind of broad spectrum crisis every single day, everything’s happening all at once. It’s hard to get a fix on what the most important thing to me from my perspective and my experience, you can’t lose sight of what precipitated the current situation. Would it begin, and I referred to it as the antisemitism scare. It’s an obvious comparison to the red skin, but there’s a pretext for what’s going on today, and that started several a while back like October, 2023. That’s when the real assault on student rights and academic freedom began and was started under the Biden Harris administration that is Democrats as well as Republicans. They targeted pro-Palestinian speech in action with this exaggerated claim. They were claiming that there was an epidemic of antisemitism rampant on the campuses.

You hear those two terms over and over epidemic rampant, and they said it was an epidemic that was endangering the safety of Jewish students. Of course, Jewish students were in the vanguard. Now we’re not talking about a small number of real anti-Semitic acts. Those could have occurred if there were real anti-Semitic acts I’m against. I want to oppose ’em if we can accurately identify them. But what was happening was this kind of bonkers exaggeration, a conflation of militant anti-Israel and anti-Zionist critique, which it can be vulgar or sometimes simplistic and sometimes not very helpful, but it’s not antisemitism. And it became a kind of smokescreen anti antisemitism now that Trump administration is using to attack all these other things because it worked. I mean, for a while they were trying to use critical race theory and so on, but this antisemitism and for various reasons we can discuss that was a better smear.

Now the other question you raised that I’ll try to tackle briefly is just this, is it fascism? I’ve been in study groups where we go back and forth about this. Are we talking about fascism as a rigorous theoretical economic concept or is this fascism thing and a rhetorical advice because we want to sound the alarm or is it just an epithet? Everybody’s a fascist. Reagan was a fascist, Johnson was a Goldwater, everybody. And what does it mean if you call somebody a fascist? What does that imply in terms of your action? Joe Biden did not do any great favors when he called Trump a fascist. Then he smiles and hands the guy, the keys to the White House. Is that what you do when there’s real fascism? Some people would say that that kind of obscures the situation. So we have to be careful about these terms.

I don’t think rhetorical overkill will help things. But on the other hand, there is the resemblance to classical fascism and what’s going on in terms of a mass movement right wing, the usurp of political powers and so on. At the same time as I understand that there is a fascist aspect, this, and maybe it’s a kind of new fascism post fascism on the edge of fascism, probably it’s more like or band’s dictatorship over Hungary where he used economic coercion to undermine the universities, undermine the press, undermine everything. But one thing about this fascism cry, if we go back to McCarthyism, and Ellen knows this better than I do, they left and especially the communist movement said that was fascism. They said it was one minute to midnight and the communists, they did what you do when you think it’s fascism. They sent a layer of people underground.

They sent a whole leadership underground because that’s what you do when you’re facing fascism. And it looked bad. 1954, they had executed the Rosenbergs, they had the leadership of the party and a lot of the secondary leadership were in prison. Lots of people were being fired, terrible things were going on. And yet in 1955 in December, in the deep South, which is where things were much worse, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred under fascism supposedly September 19, I mean December, 1955. And in September 57, the Little Rock nine stood up and went to a school and faced down a mob and so on. And in 1960, the sit-in movement began. This is just shortly after we supposedly had fascism, and then of course 1961 of Freedom Rides 1964, the Berkeley free spoof free speech. We know this because some of us, we lived through all that. So if that had really been fascism as people were saying, then why did it disappear in this matter? And it was just a small number of people at first who fought against it. So we have to be careful about using that term fascism. I think it’s good to look at the comparison and gird ourselves, but we shouldn’t get too hysterical and think all us lost start leaving the country like certain professors at Yale have done. We have to gird ourselves through a tough fight. And there are a lot of ways we could wage this fight, which I’m sure we’ll get into in a future discussion.

David Palumbo-Liu:

Yeah, I mean, I would just say in terms of fascism, we think we can all agree to bracket it and refer to it because there are certainly fascistic elements in it. And the classic definition, or one classic definition, I suppose there are lots, a fascism is the collusion of the business in political classes. And you can see that precisely in Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, the intense privatization of everything in education, not just education, but any kind of public good. That’s the primary aim that Musk is driving for. And for Bannon, its immigrants. I mean, it’s a very racialized attack, feeding off America’s pretty natural racism and the attacks on brown and black people. And I’m thinking, I’m here for the list of, I’m here as a substitute, a last minute substitute for Cherise Bird and Stelli, and I urge everybody to read her book Black Scare Red Scare because she puts these two facets together historically beautifully.

But I think that’s this powerful conversions of these two things. And when it comes to universities, the fact that they’re attacking the funding, which is public funding, is emblematic of what we’re up against. And so that’s where I think I would like to respond to the fashion what we’re up against. It is massive. The other thing I would add simply because I’m here in Silicon Valley is techno fascism. We are dealing with an entirely different mediascape. So thank God for the Real News Network. It is all US alternative media. It is an incredibly important instrument in the fight against the mainstream media and Trump’s absolute mastery of playing that. So I think we have to understand the technological changes that have occurred to make the battle both more challenging, but also offer us different kinds of instruments.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, there’s so much to think about in just these opening responses from you all, and I want to dig deeper into the historical roots of this moment. But before I do, I just wanted to go back around the table really quick and ask if you guys could just tell us a little bit about what this looks like from your vantage point. What are you and your colleagues, your students, your former students feeling right now? I mean, David, we had you on during the student encampment movement last year, Alan, I was organizing in Ann Arbor during the last Trump administration. Things have, the vibe has shifted as my generation says. So can you tell us a little bit of just what this all looks like from your sides of the academy right now?

Ellen Schrecker:

I’ve been retired now for, I think it’s 12 years. And so my normal was a campus that is very different from all other campuses in the United States. It’s an orthodox Jewish institution whose sort of cultural, what shall we say, politics is that of the Zionist, right? So I could not do any organizing on my campus, not because I was afraid of being fired or anything like that, but I just never would’ve had any students in my classes. So that was that. But what I’m seeing now is absolutely amazing. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, they are really out for blood, but on the same time, the pushback is amazing. During McCarthyism, there was no student activity whatsoever, or if there was, it was secret. And I think there was some, and it was secret. And then all of a sudden the civil rights movement sort of burst into full flower.

And there was a realization, I mean I do agree with Alan on this, that the civil rights movement ended McCarthyism, no question about it. All of a sudden the political establishment had to deal with real problems, not fake communist subversion. So hopefully the moment will shift and people will begin to think about civil liberties and constitutional freedom and free speech just like the good old days of the 1950s. But it’s still very, very scary and it shows you that we are living and have been living longer than we knew with a very powerful state. And I think I’ll leave it there

Alan Wald:

In regard to anti-Zionist activity, it’s kind of an amazing development. I came to University of Michigan in 1975. I was involved then in the Palestine Human Rights Committee, all three of us. And it was a terrible struggle. We couldn’t even get Noam Chomsky permission to speak on the campus when sponsored by departments. We had to use other means and so on. So to see a massive, relatively large anti-Zionist movement is inspiring and it is fed by a new generation of Jews that is unlike my generation. There was a generation of young people who were thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionism after the 67 war throughout the late last century whose eyes were opened mostly by operation cast led and the events in Gaza in the early 20th century. And now they’re angry that they were lied to and they’re kind of the backbone. I mean, of course there are Palestinians and other students involved, but an important element are Jewish students who realized that they were deceived about what’s going on in the Middle East.

So that’s good. There’s also a big upsurge of faculty activism in areas not seen before. As Ellen has documented, the a UP was not very nice during the 1950s. It kind of disappeared. A UP is terrific today. I mean, I dunno might have something to do with the departure of Kerry Nelson, but the new president is wonderful and the chapter here is vital and vibrant. And also the faculty senate at University of Michigan, which was pretty dormant during my time of activist politics, is now playing a terrific role, has a terrific leadership, but it’s not much around Palestine, I have to say. That’s why I’m worried about that issue getting pushed aside. They’re very upset about what happened with DEI, diversity and equity and inclusion here at University of Michigan because just overnight without any real threat from the government, they just dropped it and pretty much forced out the director who’s now moving on to another position.

And so people are upset about that issue and the procedure used and they’re upset about the other threats, although we haven’t actually had the removal of faculty from programs like they did at Harvard’s one. But the Palestine issue is not that central. And some of the things related to it, like the new excessive surveillance, which I guess Maximilian didn’t experience, but there are cameras everywhere now on campus. I mean, you can’t do a thing without being photographed. People are upset about that. Those kinds of issues are mobilizing people, but I am worried about somebody being put under the bus and a compromise being made around Palestine rights and Palestine speech.

David Palumbo-Liu:

I’m going to take the liberty of answering the question in rather a fuller form because I might have to leave. So I want to get some of these points and sort of picks up on what Alan said. But to answer your question directly, max, how is it like at Stanford? Well, the Harvard statement gave everybody a shot of courage and it was great. I fully support it. However, I find it very deficient in all sorts of ways, even while admiring it. I’ll tell you a short anecdote to illustrate what I’m talking about. We had a focus group in the faculty senate and I was sitting next to this person from the med school and she said, well, yes, it’s horrible. Everybody’s talking about their grants being taken away. That’s the real surgeons of a lot of faculty activities. My grants have been taken away, so she said five of my grants were taken away, but two got replaced after I went through this application process.

So maybe that’s the new norm. And I said, well, only in baseball is batting 400 a good thing. And she said, well, I’m in ear, nose, throat, whatever. Thank God I’m not in gynecology or obstetrics. Then I’d really be in my grants. And I said, well, I teach race and ethnicity. What are you going to say about me not even be able to give a class much less? So I said to her, think of this as structural, not particular. It’s a structural attempt to take over, not just the university, but everything public. And that’s something I think we really need to drive home to folks, is that unless we see all these struggles interconnected, and that’s one of the big problems with the university is it’s not that we’re woke, it’s that we’re removed. We are not connected to human beings anymore. We’re connected to our, too much of us and our ones are connected to research.

And Ellen mentioned Jennifer Ruth, who’s a strong ally of mine. The day of action was amazing. This was a national day of action that was put on by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. And it combined not only labor unions, but K through 12. And it had a vision of what we could do that far exceeded the, I will say it, selfishness of some of our elite colleagues in our elite schools who are just there to keep the money rolling. All they want is to reset the clock before Trump sort of mythical time that things were fine, but it was fine for them. And if they don’t understand exactly what Alan said and what we all think, if we can’t protect the most vulnerable of us, then we are leaving a gaping hole in the structure so that protect all of us. And so we can’t throw Palestinians, immigrants, undocumented folks, queer throat folks to the machine saying, well, we will appease you with these things and this is what happens under fascism. So I really want to encourage people to look, check out khi, check out the new reinvigorated a UP, thank God that it has partnered with a FT. These are the kinds of things that I think, if not save us, at least give us a sense of comradeship that we are doing something together that can be productive at whatever scale.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to go back around the table and hopefully we can get back to you, David, before you have to hop off for your next class. But we already started getting into this in the first round of questions, but I wanted to go a bit deeper and ask, when it comes to the state and non-state actors converging to attack the institutions and the very foundations of higher education, what historical precedents would you compare our current moment to, right? I mean, it doesn’t have to just be McCarthyism, but even if it is, what aspects of McCarthyism or what other periods do you want to point listeners to? And also what historical antecedents have laid the groundwork for the current assault on higher ed? So Ellen, let’s start again with you and go back around the table.

Ellen Schrecker:

Okay, well, the main thing about McCarthyism, which is sort of a classic case of collaboration of mainstream institutions with official red baiters at the time, now it’s official, what is it? Defenders of the Jews, thank you very much. It’s that collaboration. McCarthyism did it very cleverly. I don’t think they intended it, but they had sort of McCarthy as their straw man. He was up there, he was a drunk, he was out of control. He was making charges against innocent people. And so they would say, oh, McCarthyism is dreadful. And then fire three tenured professors, and we are seeing that, or we were up until, if you can believe it, Harvard, I have three Harvard degrees. I want you to know, and I thought I loved every minute of it and thought I got such a lousy education. You can’t believe it. But that’s beside the point. That’s not what you go to school for anyhow. You go to school to stay out of the job market as long as you possibly can. But anyhow, what we saw throughout McCarthyism throughout the 1960s, throughout going way back to the beginning of the 20th century, is that your private institutions are collaborating with the forces of what will be called political repression.

Political repression would not succeed in the United States without the collaboration of mainstream establishment institutions, the corporations. I’ve been starting to have bad dreams about Jamie Diamond Dimon the head of Citi Corp that he’s coming after me next and they’re going to close out my credit cards and there I’ll be standing in line in the homeless areas. But what we’re seeing is and have been seeing and is the American form of political repression, is that collaboration between mainstream institutions, including the mainstream media, Hollywood certainly going along with depriving the American population of access to information they need. I mean, that’s one of our functions as a force for resistance is to give people the intellectual ammunition to fight back. And I think everybody else here would probably agree.

Alan Wald:

My view is that in the 20th century there’s always been this collaboration, but it had a lot to do with foreign policy. As I remember the World War I period when they fired professors from Columbia and other colleges is because they were anti-war against the first World war. And during the Little Red Scare, 1939 or 41, it was because of the hit Hitler Stalin pack to the beginning of World War I and so on, which the communists were opposed to US intervention and the allies and so on. Then during the McCarthy period, again, it was reinforcing US foreign policy in the Cold War and during the Vietnam period when professors were fired, Bruce Franklin and other people were persecuted. Again, it was US foreign policy and now today around the assault on Gaza and support of the Israeli state, and again, it’s US foreign policy. So I see that as a very consistent factor and at every stage, community groups, businesses, and eventually the universities found some way to collaborate in a process even in the red skier, which I think is the most obvious comparison.

The government didn’t do the well, government fired it. It had its own subversive investigation in the government, and they fired a lot of people and forced a lot of people to quietly resign. That’s very similar to the situation today. But in terms of the faculty and other places, they counted on the universities to do the firing. They didn’t send many people to jail. They sent Chandler Davis to jail because of the contempt of Congress, but the others were fired by the university and the public schools and businesses blacklisted them and so on. So there was this kind of collaboration that went all the way. And of course they counted on the private sector to jump in certain areas and do their dirty work. All those are red channels. Those were private investigators. That wasn’t the government. The government may have fed them names, but today of course, we have Canary mission and we have other organizations that blacklist people and publicize their names and so on. And of course we have these massive email campaigns against universities having speakers like Maura Stein, if she goes to speak somewhere about being fired, thousands of emails will suddenly appear and they’ll try to cancel or some way change the venue of her speaking and so on. So this kind of pattern of interventions is pretty much consistent and it pretty consistently involves the state working with universities and businesses.

David Palumbo-Liu:

Yeah. Well, I think that you asked be at the beginning where you asked us all what’s going on campuses and what’s really striking a lot of fear of course is ice. And I think back to the Palmer raids, the Palmer raids, which were sort of the beginning of the justice Department acting as criminals and the whole idea of during the red summer, for example, and Max, this whole stop cop city, the Rico case being pressed against the protestors, right? This imaginary notion that they were all conniving together like mafia when the actual mafia is in the White House itself. So I think the whole capture of the Justice Department by the fascist state is what’s going to be one of the most formidable things because, and we’re pressing our universities, there are laws about where ice can go and where not, but they’re turning. They’re not making any public statements.

Some universities are giving sort of surreptitious, covert good legal advice to people who are getting their measles roped. But this is what’s appalling to me. No university leaders are really coming out and saying, no, dad, God damnit, this is illegal. I mean, they’re not speaking truth, and that’s what makes the whole enterprise shaky and vulnerable to assault. The more you push back, the Japanese called it, well with the trade wars, it’s extortion. You don’t pay an extortionist. Columbia tried it and failed miserably, and yet other are lining up saying, well, maybe in our case it’ll be different. And that’s sort of the definition of crazy when you keep on doing the same thing expecting a different result.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that takes my mind to the antecedent question, right? Because we’ve mentioned the new leadership of the American Association of University professors. I myself just interviewed President Todd Wolfson on our podcast working people, and he talked about this, how the decades long process of corporatization and neoliberal about which you have all written, and Ellen’s written an entire book about this subject, multiple books in fact. But Todd pointed to how that process over the past four decades has contributed to making universities uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that they’re facing now, which is a bit different from the situation described in Ellen’s book about McCarthyism and higher education that I quoted in the introduction where Ellen, you mentioned that in the fifties this was a period where colleges and universities were becoming more dependent on the federal government, and so they were more vulnerable to the top down like power moves of the federal government at that time. So I just wanted to ask what that looks like now in the year of our Lord 2025 when I ask about antecedents. What are the sort of changes to the very structure of higher education that have led to universities capitulating to the Trump administration, like David was just saying, or not defending their students, not defending academic freedom as vigorously as we would expect them to?

Ellen Schrecker:

Well, we could start with the backlash against the student movement of the sixties, which was orchestrated in large part by certain right wing groups, within groups of billionaires and right-wing think tanks and groups of libertarian, sort of pundit types that are now becoming fairly well known within the academic community before they were operating secretly. Now, they can’t quite keep everything secret because a lot of smart people have been writing about this, and especially the key work here that I always push is Nancy McLean’s book Democracy and Chains, which really sort of chronicles the rise of these right wings, think tanks that are creating scenarios for how you take over a university and destroy it. And also of course, how you take over a legal system and destroy it and how you take over a political system and destroy it often through the use of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I mean, we are talking about very big rich people, many of them, shall we say in the oil industry. I mean, they’re protecting their interests and they’re doing a very good job of that. I have the feeling that Elon Musk just sort of sticks a intravenous needle into the federal Treasury and withdraws however much money he wants. That is always the image I have of how he’s operating. And so the federal government is incredibly important here in a way that it wasn’t in the 1950s, in the 1950s, they were just throwing money at higher education. This is a period that’s been called by many historians, the golden age of American higher education. Well, it was in a certain sense, but they sold their soul at the same time to McCarthyism. So we’re always looking at these amazing contradictions and trying to figure out, okay, what’s their next step?

Rather than thinking about what should be their next step? How do we fight back? How do we can’t go back to a golden age? There was no golden age. Let’s start there and say, how can we get something that is going to support a democratic system of higher education for everybody in America and then go on. We’re not. But unfortunately for the past 40 or 50 years, they’ve just been backpedaling. These higher education establishment has been seeding ground to the forces of ignorance, and now we’re stuck with having to fight back. And luckily we are fighting back, even if not necessarily in a way that we love, because seeding an awful lot of ground.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the few minutes I have left with y’all, I want to talk about the fight back, and I want to ask y’all like what lessons we can draw from our own history, both the victories and the losses about what we’re really facing and how we can effectively fight it, and also what will happen, what will our universities and society look like if we don’t fight now?

David Palumbo-Liu:

Okay, so I’ll say add my two minutes and pick up actually from what Ellen said, because yes, it was the reaction to the student protest movements in the sixties that for one thing made student loans unforgivable. That was Congress’s little knife in the gut. But remember the trilateral commission that Samuel Huntington headed, and he actually published this scree called There’s Too much Democracy. And to answer Max’s point, my recommendation is to restore a sense of what democracy should look like. And that’s the only way to do that is not to stay in our ivory towers, but to draw the resources for democracy and instill the capacity for action in everybody and make it possible for everybody to see that nobody is immune from this. This is tearing down the common trust that we have with each other and substituting this oligarchy that is beyond scale. Thank you so much for having me on. I’ll let you continue your conversations, but it’s been such an honor and a pleasure to be with Ellen. And Ellen and Max, I’ll see you a bit.

Alan Wald:

Okay. Look, first of all, I think that Ellen’s making a good point about the no golden age. It’s not if the universities were terrific defenders of student rights during the 1960s. I was at Berkeley. I mean, when I arrived at Berkeley, the National Guard was occupying the city. It was not a very nice atmosphere. And even here at University of Michigan, I was involved in a 15 year struggle to stop divestment in South Africa and get a degree for Nelson Mandela, 15 years. It took us of constant protests and trying to get to the regents meeting which they would ban us from, or they’d move to secret locations and have a million excuses. Oh, we can’t give a degree to Mandela in prison. We don’t give it to prisoners. Of course, eventually they gave in and they did give it to him, but it took 15 years.

And I mentioned already the problem with Palestine rights on the campus arguing for that was hell. So it’s not been perfect. I mean, now they’re invoking all kinds of new rules and regulations about time and place and bullhorn use of a bullhorn that they didn’t have before, or at least they weren’t punishing people before. So it wasn’t so great. And in terms of university repression, yes, it’s much worse for the Palestine protestors for some other groups, eil their protestors, they seem to get away with all kinds of things. But in terms of responses, first of all, everybody is saying, we need unity. We can’t give in. If we give in, it’s like putting blood in the water. The sharks come after you even more. And I apologize to these sharks who are offended by comparison with the Trump administration. But yeah, so we all agree on that, but I am concerned about them giving in on this IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Everybody’s praising Harvard, wonderful, wonderful, but Harvard already agreed to that horrible definition and they set a precedent, and that’s going to happen at a lot of places. And that is the wedge that’s going to cut out free speech and free discussion. If you don’t know this definition, the International Holocaust Nce Association that’s being promoted by Congress and supported by the Trump administration and I think will become the law of the land for Adeem. You should look at it carefully because of the 11 definitions of antisemitism. Seven, refer to Israel. Now, anybody who does research on antisemitism and the US knows that most antisemitism is young men who get it from social media. They get these conspiracy theories and so on. There is very little antisemitism on the left. The left is involved in criticizing Israeli state racism. But in addition, these 11 no-nos for defining antisemitism say that if you call the Israeli state racist, you’re an antisemite and antisemitism is not on the campus.

So instead of refuting that claim that Israel is a racist state, which it seems that way, especially with their law saying that only Jews have self-determination and not Palestinians, and they have 60 or so laws on the books against Palestinians and Apartheid and so on, instead of trying to refute that argument, they’re just trying to suppress it. And they’re also trying to suppress any comparisons with Nazi Germany. Now, that’s not something that I myself do a lot, but you can’t have scholarship without serious comparisons. And there’s certainly good arguments that there are comparisons to be made. So they’re trying to silence these things instead of refuting them in intellectual debate. And once they do that and get that institutionalized, that’ll lead to a lot of other things. So we have to draw a line, and I think that’s one of the things we got to draw a line on the IHRA definition.

Ellen Schrecker:

I couldn’t agree with you more, but it’s really hard when I get up to talk to sort of stick it in there and make sure that I say, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, this has to stop. But at the same time, I know there are people who maybe aren’t aware of Gaza. It’s too horrible. You can’t look at it or something. I don’t know. It’s a very hard issue to deal with because I know that people will stop listening to you. How do you talk to, you make alliances with people who don’t want to hear what you say when you have to make alliances with those people. I don’t know how to do it yet. I’m learning, but I’m curious. I would like to discuss that issue and probably argue with you about it a bit.

Alan Wald:

Well, I’m not sure where the argument is. I think that the pro-Palestinian rights movement has to be more disciplined. I much support what Jewish Voice for Peace does. That’s why I join them. I think that they’re focusing on Stop the genocide. Jews don’t do it in our name. That’s great. Some of the other groups that march around waving flags that people don’t understand the difference between a Palestinian flag and a Hamas flag. So they’re told it’s Hamas flag and they believe it, or they use slogans that are incomprehensible or mean different things. Or

Ellen Schrecker:

If

Alan Wald:

You put a bus sticker on somebody’s house because you want to show that that administrator’s a Nazi, people know that the Nazi sign is something that’s used to intimidate Jews. So it’s confusing. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that needs to be cleaned up. I think it’s just a minority that’s not acting in a way that says, what will convince people before you do something, what is going to win people over? So there are debates about where to draw the line. For example, Peter Byard, he came here to speak recently and he said, I believe it’s genocide, but if I use the word genocide, people, they’ll shut up. They won’t listen to me. They’ll put their hands over their ears. So I describe all the things that amount to genocide, but I don’t use the term maybe in some audiences you have to do that. Solidarity is not just showing your anger and showing your support, it’s also figuring out how to help people. In this case, we have to build a mass movement to get the Zionist state and the United States off the backs of the Palestinians so that they’re free to determine their own future and their own kind of leadership, which I hope will be a democratic and secular one, not a conservative right wing religious one like Hamas. But we have to get the US and the Israeli state off their backs first. And that means building a mass movement.

Ellen Schrecker:

I have been waking up in the morning reading the New York Times much too closely and feeling incredibly depressed, and recently I am somewhat less depressed. I can go right to my computer and start writing something. I can feel that maybe it’s going to make a difference because I’m seeing much more fight back against political repression that I, as a historian, and I’m speaking as a historian, never saw in the past in a similar situation. And I think that I used to sort of say, well, we must fight. We must have solidarity. But I’d never said, I have hope, and now I do have hope. I think we are on the upswing, that the forces of ignorance are now shooting at each other and shooting themselves in the foot and are beginning to really understand that they’re not going to win because nobody what they want. And that’s as simple as that. Thank you.

Alan Wald:

I don’t think I can add much, but one mistake Trump is making is he is attacking so many different sections of the society that we have the basis for a majority against him. I mean, he is firing all these people. He is screwing up the economy. He’s taking away healthcare. I mean, it’s not just the universities. So there’s an objective basis for a majority toe against him. We just have to find a way to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to thank all of our brilliant guests today, professor Ellen Schreker, professor Allen Wald, and Professor David Pumba Liu for this vital conversation. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. Before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now, we’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. So please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

In the midst of a nationwide campaign to restructure their board and a contentious fight at the bargaining table, the members of the REI Union were dismayed to learn that REI’s culture of union busting and worker exploitation extended deep into their supply chain. Released in December 2024, a comprehensive report compiled instances of reported human rights and labor abuses at multiple Southeast Asian and Central American factories that REI contracted with. Workers at REI’s US retailers, represented by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), are resolved to make lasting change at the popular co-op, both at the bargaining table and within the board room, and the report’s release underscores the importance of that fight. 

‘Beneath REI’s Green Sheen’: Bombshell report exposes human rights abuses in REI’s supply chain

In early December, a report on REI’s relationships with their suppliers rocked the outdoor world. Students for International Labor Solidarity (SILS) teamed up with researchers at UMass-Amherst’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Labor Center to dig into REI’s relationships with factories along their supply chain. The resulting report, ‘Beneath REI’s Green Sheen,’ pulled the bulk of its information from publicly available documents, international reporting, and worker interviews to form a clearer picture of the conditions that international workers labor under in the factories that REI has contracted with. The report found that REI’s use of co-op language “serves to bolster its brand image as a socially and ecologically-minded democratic organization, and helps to mask its corporate ownership structure,” and that “REI’s partnerships for “responsible sourcing and fair labor” offer minimal public transparency and lack enforceable obligations on REI to address identified violations.”

In El Salvador in 2017, union workers were fired en masse after a legal increase in the country’s minimum wage was implemented at Textiles Opico, a garment manufacturer that REI has contracted with for over a decade. According to the report, SITRASACOSI, the Salvadoran garment union, alleged that “union members were targeted in part to punish them for pressing management to fulfill its labor rights obligations,” which was independently investigated and found to have merit by the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor. In the wake of those findings, Textiles Opico reportedly refused to reinstate the fired workers until international pressure pushed the factory to remedy the situation. According to independent labor monitor Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), REI did nothing to contribute to the international pressure campaign, and as of December 2024, continues to buy from the factory.

In Taiwan, migrant workers at Giant Manufacturing, which supplied bicycles to REI from 2021 to 2024, were ensnared in expensive recruitment schemes, where they were required to pay exorbitant fees to recruiters in order to secure employment. As a result, many workers were forced to take out high interest loans, leaving them in severe debt. In order to pay those debts, and in some cases pay monthly fees to labor brokers, workers were obliged to work extreme overtime hours and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary dormitories on factory grounds. As the report suggests, “these abuses amount to at least five indicators of forced labor: abuse of vulnerability, intimidation and threats, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime.” The report also finds that although REI no longer contracts with Giant Manufacturing, the brand maintained a relationship with the factory at the same time that workers were testifying about their appalling work and living conditions.

The report also elaborates on a number of other cases, including: workers who were disciplined by being forced to sit outdoors on searing concrete in triple digit heat; using short-term contract schemes to deny workers legally protected bargaining rights; discrimination and intimidation against migrant workers; weaponizing the courts against union organizers; and discriminatory firings of union workers at various REI suppliers across primarily Southeast Asia and Central America.

REI’s messaging states that it adheres to a comprehensive internal code of conduct relating to its partnerships with factories farther down the supply chain. The tenets laid forth in its Factory Code of Conduct include such items as “Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining,” where employers respect the legal rights of employees to form unions and collectively bargain; “Voluntary Employment,” where employers will not use forced labor in any form in their factories; and harassment policies which state that employers that they work with “will not use physical or psychological disciplinary tactics” upon their workforce. Researchers found that REI contracted with factories in multiple countries over a period of over 10 years where conditions did not meet those standards. 

Additionally, researchers found that REI “does not prioritize long-term relationships with its suppliers,” preferring instead to switch out suppliers dozens of times over less than a decade, “potentially impacting as many as 100,000 workers.” As the report suggests, frequent supplier hopping “is the opposite of a sustainable approach to supply chain management.”

“It is extraordinary that our limited research identified so many violations at REI supplier factories, especially when workers are generally terrified to report publicly on rights violations they experience for fear of being retaliated against by their employer,” the report said. “It is therefore reasonable to assume that the violations described in this report are only a very small portion of the actual extent of labor abuses in REI’s global supply chain.”

In the report’s conclusion, researchers underscored the gravity of the situation regarding REI’s relationship with their suppliers. “Ultimately, we found a yawning gap between REI’s pretensions to social responsibility and the evidence provided by the workers who make its outdoor gear,” the report said. “Unless REI takes immediate and meaningful action to address these failings, its claims of social responsibility will continue to ring hollow.”

Katie Nguyen, national organizer for SILS and co-author of the report, explained the importance of the research, saying, “We knew that there was this ongoing union fight with REI, and so we wanted to connect our two struggles of ‘what are workers facing in REI’s global supply chain and how can we act in solidarity with US retail workers who are also organizing on [sic] REI?’” SILS’s primary focus is mobilizing students to organize in solidarity with garment workers in the global garment industry. 

Nguyen drew attention to REI’s messaging around environmental sustainability and conscious consumer culture as a key factor in shining more of a spotlight on the brand’s production. “Any time a brand promotes itself as sustainable and really progressive, that raises flags about whether that’s really a reality, especially as you go deeper into the supply chain and it gets farther away from a US or Western consumer base.” 

Upon learning of the abuses suffered by workers in REI’s supply chain, US workers were shocked. “I’m extremely concerned and dismayed and horrified that I work for a company that has this sort of public face where we want everyone to get access to the natural world or outdoor life, when there are people that they effectively employ who are living in squalor and intimidation of losing their livelihood at all times–this sort of fly-by-night factory usage, where they bounce from facility to facility to get the lower rates for production of fast fashion garments,” said Andy Trebing, worker at one of REI’s Chicago locations.

Upending the Board, with a Vote

As the board campaign swings into its final weeks, workers have split their focus with ongoing contract negotiations across their 11 unionized shops. REI refused to negotiate at a national table, so workers are forced to bargain shop by shop. According to Megan Shan, bargaining committee member for the Durham, North Carolina, shop, proposals are similar across the board and bargaining has been coordinated via national calls in order to present a united front to the company. “For all of our union stores, and probably the non-union stores too, we have a lot of the same issues regarding scheduling, hours, safety,” she said. “It’s all pretty universal.” Workers hope that REI’s new CEO, Mary Beth Laughton, will be more willing to work with them in securing a contract.

For some union workers, who have struggled for years to win a first contract, the board campaign embodies an earnest effort to engage in international solidarity with fellow workers who are experiencing the same exploitation farther down the supply chain. “We all as workers came to REI because we believe in the values that they claim publicly, and we do want to hold them accountable,” Shan said, “So I think it’s up to us to raise our voices in this fight.”

REI is a consumer co-op, meaning that any consumer can pay a one-time membership fee to join. Members are then able to elect a governing board, who are responsible for decision-making for the brand. According to REI’s own board website, “REI’s board is legally responsible for the overall direction of the affairs and the performance of REI. The board carries out this legal responsibility by establishing broad policy and ensuring REI management is operating within the framework of these policy guidelines.” 

Years of union busting at their US locations and the increasingly corporate structure of the board led union workers from REI stores across the United States to seek out candidates who might bring a better voice to the board’s current corporate makeup. As Davie Jamieson reported for HuffPost in January 2025, “Allegations that REI is no longer a co-op in spirit predate the union campaign by at least a couple of decades. A 2003 Seattle Weekly story portrayed a profit-driven and opaque corporation that wouldn’t divulge its then-chief executive’s compensation. “Who Owns REI?” the story asked. “It can’t be the members.” (REI now makes executive pay public. [Former CEO Eric] Artz made $2.7 million in 2023 and topped $4 million in previous years.)”

According to REI’s bylaws, any member in good standing can submit an application to be nominated for their governing board. Co-op members will then vote for the nominee that they believe will govern the co-op effectively. The position requires significant business and management experience, but according to the board website, “all self-nominated candidates are considered during the selection process.” Ahead of this year’s board election, union members approached Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno to submit an application for the ballot. Both candidates work in the environmental justice movement, with experience running large climate-focused nonprofits. Gebre is the former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO and current chief program officer at Greenpeace.

Moreno is the executive director of 350 Seattle, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to the struggle for climate justice. Their organizing has focused on what Moreno calls “‘No’ Fights” and “‘Yes’ Fights,” where organizers have waged campaigns against increased fossil fuel infrastructure (pipelines, for instance), as well as worked within communities to create more green initiatives, as well as advocating for the Green New Deal. When the union approached Moreno with an idea to run for REI’s board, she was enthusiastic. “They’re like, ‘Shemona, we have an idea, this great idea. Would you be interested? We think you’d be great,’ and my response was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’d love to! I didn’t know that was an option, but I’m totally down to do it!’”

After they verified her membership as still valid, Moreno put together the application to the board and submitted the materials before the deadline. For weeks, Moreno didn’t hear anything back from the board. It wasn’t until she began doing press interviews about her candidacy that she was notified that she never submitted an application, despite having screenshots of the application being submitted before the deadline. “I was kind of shocked by that,” she said. “I thought for sure they would just kind of respond like ‘well, you don’t meet our qualifications; you don’t have enough business experience,’— I thought that would be the way they would go, but to straight out lie was pretty shocking for me.”

Ultimately, the candidates that REI submitted to their membership did not include any of the proposed nominees that were backed by the union. In response, the union waged a national campaign to urge members to vote “Withhold” on the proposed slate in hopes of sending a message that the current makeup of the board is too corporate and has strayed too far from the values that the co-op purports to embody (To give a sense of just how corporate the board has become, one need only look at the resumes of their current members: Chairman of United Airlines, former exec at Nike, former Exxon-Mobile marketing director, to name a few). The publication of UMass Amherst’s report added extra urgency to the campaign.

REI’s official social media channels are inundated with comments from members who are outraged at the board’s treatment of US retail workers and workers abroad, as well as their endorsement (and subsequent retraction of said endorsement) of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has stated publicly that he would like to strip the national parks of their resources in order to increase energy production in the US, and oversaw the firing of thousands of National Park Service employees. 

For Trebing, international solidarity with workers is an indelible part of the package. “I feel like the moment you know that someone else is being exploited and you don’t do something about it, or try to do something about it, you’re complicit,” he said. “I think if we are to honor the work and sacrifice that organizers have done before us in trying to protect the working class here and across the globe—if we don’t honor that, then why are we doing any of this?” 

The voting period for the board will conclude on May 1.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 25, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Federal agents arrested a sitting Wisconsin judge on Friday, accusing her of helping an undocumented immigrant evade arrest after he appeared in her courtroom last week, FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media.

In a since-deleted post, Patel said the FBI arrested 65-year-old Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan “on charges of obstruction.”

“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse… allowing the subject—an illegal alien—to evade arrest,” Patel wrote. “Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”

It is unclear why Patel deleted the post. U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson Brady McCarron and multiple Milwaukee County judges confirmed Dugan’s arrest, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. McCarron said Dugan is facing two federal felony counts: obstruction and concealing an individual.

The Journal Sentinel reported that Dugan “appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen C. Dries during a brief hearing in a packed courtroom at the federal courthouse” and “made no public comments during the brief hearing.”

Dugan’s attorney, Craig Mastantuono, told the court that “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest,” which “was not made in the interest of public safety.”

The FBI had reportedly been investigating allegations that Dugan helped the undocumented man avoid arrest by letting him hide in her chambers.

Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) said in a statement Wednesday that “several witnesses report that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] did not present a warrant before entering the courtroom and it is not clear whether ICE ever possessed or presented a judicial warrant, generally required for agents to access non-public spaces like Judge Dugan’s chambers.”

Clancy continued:

I commend Judge Hannah Dugan’s defense of due process by preventing ICE from shamefully using her courtroom as an ad hoc holding area for deportations. We cannot have a functional legal system if people are justifiably afraid to show up for legal proceedings, especially when ICE agents have already repeatedly grabbed people off the street in retaliation for speech and free association, without even obtaining the proper warrants.

While the facts in this case are still unfolding, it’s clear that actions like Judge Dugan’s are what is required for democracy to survive the Trump regime. She used her position of power and privilege to protect someone from an agency that has repeatedly, flagrantly abused its own power. If enough of us act similarly, and strategically, we can stand with our neighbors and build a better world together.

Prominent Milwaukee defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Franklyn Gimbel called Dugan’s arrest “very, very outrageous.”

“First and foremost, I know—as a former federal prosecutor and as a defense lawyer for decades—that a person who is a judge, who has a residence who has no problem being found, should not be arrested, if you will, like some common criminal,” Gimbel told the Journal Sentinel.

“And I’m shocked and surprised that the U.S. Attorney’s office or the FBI would not have invited her to show up and accept process if they’re going to charge her with a crime,” he added.

Julius Kim, another former prosecutor-turned defense lawyer, said on the social media site X that “practicing in Milwaukee, I know Judge Hannah Dugan well. She’s a good judge, and this entire situation demonstrates how the Trump administration’s policies are heading for a direct collision course with the judiciary.”

“That being said, given the FBI director’s tweet (since deleted), they are going to try to politicize this situation to the max,” Kim added. “That sounds an awful lot like weaponizing the DOJ, doesn’t it?”

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) was among the groups that condemned Dugan’s arrest.

“This arrest is an escalation in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to dismantle the rule of law and consolidate power,” NWLC director of nominations and democracy Alison Gill said in a statement. “These aggressive attacks on judges are dangerous.”

“President [Donald] Trump has repeatedly shown contempt for the courts and our Constitution, refusing to accept their authority, defying court orders, and encouraging public criticism of due process,” Gill added. “The FBI’s apparent decision to make an example of Judge Dugan is part of a broader and deeply alarming agenda to silence dissent, incite fear, and erode the very institutions that protect our rights. The Trump administration’s lawlessness is a threat to everyone in this country.”

Responding to Dugan’s arrest, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said on the social media site Bluesky: “The Trump admin has arrested a judge in Milwaukee. This is a red alert moment. We must all rise up against it.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 23, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

The Trump administration has not only sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran megaprison due to an “administrative error” and so far refused to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the United States, but also shared on social media the home address of his family in Maryland, forcing them to relocate.

The news that Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and her children were “moved to a safe house by supporters” after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X a 2021 order of protection petition that Vasquez Sura filed but soon abandoned was reported early Tuesday by The Washington Post.

“I don’t feel safe when the government posts my address, the house where my family lives, for everyone to see, especially when this case has gone viral and people have all sorts of opinions,” said Vasquez Sura. “So, this is definitely a bit terrifying. I’m scared for my kids.”

A DHS spokesperson did not respond Monday to a request for a comment about not redacting the family’s address, according to the newspaper’s lengthy story about Vasquez Sura—who shares a 5-year-old nonverbal, autistic son with Abrego Garcia and has a 9-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter from a previous relationship that was abusive.

On Wednesday, The New Republic published a short article highlighting the safe house detail and noting that “the government has not commented on the decision to leave the family’s address in the document it posted online,” sparking a fresh wave of outrage over the Trump administration endangering the family.

“The Trump administration doxxed an American citizen, endangering her and her children,” MSNBC contributor Rotimi Adeoye wrote on X Wednesday. “This is completely unacceptable and flat-out wrong.”

Several others responded on the social media platform Bluesky.

“These fascists didn’t stop at abducting Abrego Garcia, they’ve now doxxed his wife, forcing her into hiding,” said Dean Preston, the leader of a renters’ rights organization. “The Trump administration is terrorizing this family. Speak up, show up, resist.”

Jonathan Cohn, political director for the group Progressive Mass, similarly declared, “The Trump administration is terrorizing this woman.”

Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst for the Project On Government Oversight’s Constitution Project, openly wondered “if publishing Abrego Garcia and his wife’s home address violates federal or (particularly) Maryland laws.”

“Definitely unconscionable and further demonstration of bad faith/intimidation,” Hawkins added.

While Abrego Garcia’s family seeks refuge in a U.S. safe house, he remains behind bars in his native El Salvador—despite the Supreme Court order from earlier this month and an immigration judge’s 2019 decision that was supposed to prevent his deportation. Multiple congressional Democrats have flown to the country in recent days to support demands for his freedom.

“I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for bitcoin and crypto,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2021. In 2024, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Texas “wears the crown as the bitcoin mining capital of the world.” But in small towns like Granbury, TX, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’ crypto boom. Granbury’s 300-megawatt bitcoin mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent over 20,000 computers from overheating. Many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town—and that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. In this episode of Working People, we speak with four residents of Granbury living near the Marathon bitcoin mine: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, Nick Browning, and Virginia Browning.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘I had to move away from everything that I ever had’: Chemically exposed residents of East Palestine, OH, and Conyers, GA, have been left behind”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘This is murder!’: Industrially poisoned South Baltimore residents march on state capitol, demand help from Gov. Moore”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Steve Mellon, & Mike Balonek, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are beginning a new investigation in our ongoing series where we speak with working-class people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. As you know from listening to the voices and stories in this series, sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that harm and even threaten life itself.

Sacrifice zones, as ghoulish of a term as that is, they can look a lot of different ways, and the sources of toxic pollution or environmental devastation don’t all look the same, either. It can look like the mushroom cloud that exploded from the derailed Norfolk Southern bomb train in the sleepy rust belt town of East Palestine, Ohio. It can look like the black coal dust covering the windows and porches and the wheezing lungs of urban residents like here in South Baltimore.

It can also sound different. And as we’ll discuss in today’s episode, sound itself and the entity producing it, intense, relentless, torturous noise can be the main thing that’s actually hurting people. And that’s what Andrew R. Chow, a technology correspondent for TIME magazine, found in the town of Granbury, Texas, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth.

“On an evening in December 2023,” Chow writes, “43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas, and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. ‘It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,’ she says. ‘That pain was worse than childbirth.’

“Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a ‘red beam behind her eardrums.’ 

“It didn’t occur to Sarah that symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing their symptoms, but they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area — And was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

“The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor — ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo — says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.”

So you guys should definitely read this excellent piece by Andrew Chow in TIME, and you should watch the companion video report, both of which we’ve linked to in the show notes. And I want to thank brother Andrew for helping me to connect with our guests today, who are all residents of Granbury themselves and who have all been affected by the massive 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation near their homes.

Now, the mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers from overheating there. Many residents have said that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town.

In a statement to NBC News for a report that they did six months ago on the Bitcoin mine, Marathon said what companies, frankly, always say when I’m investigating stories like these: that they are doing nothing wrong, that they’re the best of corporate neighbors, that they’re abiding by existing laws, and that there’s no proof they’re the ones causing harm to the community.

“Since [Marathon] took operational control of the data center in April 2024,” the company said, “we have gone above and beyond what is required in a well-established industrial zone to ensure our facility is best in industry, including engaging third-party experts to evaluate sound levels and investing millions of dollars to reduce the perceived loudness of the facility. As a result, all levels measured around the facility are well below state and county law sound limits. There is no established link, medical or otherwise, between [Marathon’s] operations and the ailments that are being alleged,” the company stated.

So with all of that upfront, let’s do what we do best and take you right to the front lines of the struggle and get the story firsthand from the people who are living it. I am so grateful to be joined today by our four guests. Danny Lakey is a resident of Granbury, and he joins us today along with Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, all long-time residents of Granbury.

Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really wish we were connecting under better circumstances, but I’m really, really grateful to all of you for joining us and sharing your stories with us. And I wanted to start by asking if we could go around the table and have y’all tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do and what your life was like before this Bitcoin mine came to your town.

Danny Lakey:  So I’m Danny Lakey. I’m originally from Arlington, which is east of Fort Worth, and it’s about an hour and 10 minutes from where I live now. I am the newest Granbury resident. My wife and I, four years ago, sold everything we had, wanted to move out to the country, get someplace where it was quiet and get away from the big city. Little did I know that it would be louder where I live now than where I came from. So in the middle of 8 million people in the DFW metroplex, I had about a third the noise that I have in an area where I’ve got 30 people within 200 acres, 300 acres. You can’t imagine what it is.

I will admit, because they want to say that they’re not violating any state laws. That’s a lie. Texas has a nuisance law that says if somebody does anything that hinders you from using your property as you intended to use it, which in my case was a retirement place for me and my wife to enjoy life, they’ve taken that from us. That is a violation of state law. So when they say that they’re not in violation of any laws, they’re not — But that’s a civil law. They are not currently in violation of any state laws, but the state laws are inefficient in Texas, anything under 85 decibels — In most cities [it’s] limited to about 40 decibels, to put it in that perspective. Airports are regulated to 65 decibels during the day, if you want to know how high the threshold is for us on the noise violations. And they’ve gotten very, very close, and we have readings where they’ve exceeded it. But we’ve not been able to prove it in court, so they can say they’re not in violation of criminal law. When they say they’re not in violation of state law, they are misleading people.

Nick Browning:  Well, when we came here, that’s what we wanted to do. We sold our place in Santa Fe, Texas right out of Galveston because this was nice and quiet out here. They moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on them, and they moved. That thing is right across, the Bitcoin mine is right across the street from my property, and I’ve had decibels, 83 on my front porch, and sometimes at night I’ve had more than 83. And a vacuum cleaner’s only 55, and who in the world is going to go to sleep with a vacuum cleaner running all night long in their house? And that’s what it’s like.

I’ve been in and out of the hospital with all kinds of problems. I never had a problem before — And they think I’m old, but I’m seasoned. We’re not old. And my wife has been in and out of the hospital. They said it was a brain tumor, but, as it turned out, it was not a tumor. All the stuff was sent to the University of Michigan, and they still don’t know what it is. It’s not a tumor, it’s not cancer. And a month or so after I had her there the first time, we had to go back again and stay another five days.

So they are lying. They put a wall up, but that sound goes right over top of that wall. And a sound expert said, if you live right beside that wall, it wouldn’t bother you as bad. Well, we don’t live beside that wall. So they’re trying to get in good with Granbury. They furnished money for the 4th of July fireworks, and they furnished money for the parades, and this and that, and they gave the sheriff’s department a big barbecue. But they’re trash. They’re not good neighbors at all. And Constellation, the fire plant, is not either.

Virginia Browning:  Out here where we are, we’re in the middle of the country. We have wild animals every place, and we enjoy every one of them. Even the coyotes we don’t mind because we know where we live, but they have ran away the birds, all the animals. We don’t even have snakes. So you can see how the sound is destroying the environment out here with the little animals.

Besides our health, our health is terrible right now, but it is what it is at the moment. We can’t do too much about it. We’re fighting it. Everybody out here is fighting it. But big corporations, they seem to be able to just get their way and we are left behind in the rubble of everything, but we don’t like it. We came out here, our children lived here. We wanted to be here with our children and our grandchildren and grandchildren, but we don’t get that peace anymore. So it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable. And when we have to go in and out of the hospital all the time, doctors all the time, that’s an invasion on us too.

Nick Browning:  There’s a big water line that comes from Lake Granbury all the way to the Constellation power plant. And that steam, they take that water and they make steam to turn those turbines. Well, when they put some of that steam up in the air, it has all kinds of chemicals in it. It has lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, a mist of acid and everything. Well, some of the water that they send over the top and to go back through their [inaudible] fans and stuff, they condense that steam back to water, and they have a holding pond. That water goes in that holding pond. And then from there, when they get so much, it’s dumped into the Brazos River. Well, that Brazos River comes right around. It comes right back to Lake Granbury again, where there’s already been a content… They did a sample and there was lead content in there, but they don’t want that to get out.

So eventually, if they keep on doing what they’re doing now, Lake Granbury won’t be a good lake at all to fish in. You won’t be able to eat the fish because they’ll have lead content in it and they’ll have a mercury content in it, but they don’t want nobody to know any of that. They keep all that hush.

Karen Pearson:  So just to dovetail a little bit off of what mom and dad have said, being out here for me, and to have to watch what they go through is extremely stressful too. I know that oftentimes at night they don’t sleep. Their bedroom is upstairs, and so that noise just penetrates their bedroom at night. So that makes their days rough. Cognitively, it causes issues, the stress of every day, day in and day out task when you’re tired and you don’t have sleep, and then it’s so fragmented or interrupted throughout many days, it causes a lot of stress and wear and tear on them emotionally, and also their physical health.

Part of what I wanted to do in their last part of their life… They’ll say they’re seasoned, and they are. They’re very seasoned and very independent, as much as they can be. But over the last two and a half years, their independence has definitely declined. And so then I come in as some of their being their caregiver for different things. It makes it very difficult to watch what they go through because this is not what they intended for the second part of their life.

I was given a great part in the first part of my life by my parents, and part of my goal was to give them the best quality of life in their second part. That’s not happening out here. Like mom said, a lot of the wildlife has gone away. That’s something that they enjoy every day, is to feed the birds and the deer and different things out here, take off on the golf cart and go feed. But that’s becoming less and less.

So many other things as far as their health. Dad with respiratory issues. Going back to mom’s, the complications of the brain issue. It is true there’s not a lot of data, not a lot of research out there, bnd so they fall back on that. But the odd thing is that while they say we might can prove that they’re causing this harm, there’s so many people in the area that are having many of the same similar things going on. And here’s my question back is while we might not can prove it, but you can’t prove that it’s not either.

And to mom’s issue, that biopsy, I saw a 1.3 centimeter creature in her brain. It was there. And they did a brain biopsy, and the University of Michigan could not — It wasn’t cancer, thank God — It doesn’t have the cell tissue of a tumor, it didn’t have the cell tissue of a mass. And then back in December — That was in July of this last year — December of this year, she had another episode. And the tumors, that creature, whatever it was, it’s gone. So it’s not there. But now the doctor is saying, but there was seizure activity in her brain. We don’t have seizures in our family, and my mom has never had a seizure in her life.

And then in our community, we have had a little child that started having unexpected seizures, and they had to move out of the area. So there’s just so many, they’re not coincidences. There’s so many things that are going on around here that are impacting our community, and we are trying to stand up and fight, again, big companies as best we can with what we have.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could tell that story a bit more about how things have unfolded in your lives from the time that you first heard about this Bitcoin mine to now. When did you start sensing that something was deeply wrong here?

Danny Lakey:  Well, I think for me, and probably for most of us, we started hearing some things late 2023, November, December, and it was getting louder, it was intermittent. We saw what was going up over at the plant. Everybody was debating on, is it batteries? Nobody really knew what it was. And then somebody finally took a picture and said it’s Bitcoin, and then showed another mine from another area of the same type of machine. So then we knew what it was and we started paying a little more direct attention to where the noise was coming from because up until then, we just thought that the electric plant that had never had a noise problem was having these crazy fluctuations and didn’t know what to think about it.

It continued to get worse. The Brownings say that they registered 82 on their property, or 80, higher than 82 on their property. The highest I’ve ever gotten is 82. The day it was 82, I was walking in my backyard, and I just looked at the plant, and I’m like, what in the heck is that? And then I felt like I got punched in the chest. For the next two days I had a heart arrhythmia and I was having some issues with my heart. I work in the medical field, and so I have doctors that I can call at a whim. I called my PCP and he said no — Because my wife was like, he needs to go to the hospital. And my PCP said, no, I think this is sound related.

Basically, judging from my history, I’d only had that once before I got a steroid injection and found out that I’m allergic to steroids. And so an allergic reaction to a steroid caused that heart palpitation. But when I had my heart checked out then, my heart is in perfect condition. So this was way out of the ordinary and it was completely from the sound. And that day I registered 82 decibels on my property, and you could actually feel the ground shake.

My wife started having blackouts. She wrecked her car six times in four months, lost her job, wasn’t able to work. She’s still not working, which has been about seven months now, just because of all the issues that it’s caused her within her body.

The strangest thing for me is, on any given day, if you just want to see something funny, just take me to any public place or whatever. Let me sit for about 10 minutes, and I’ll fall asleep. And it doesn’t matter if I just woke up, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, when it is, I can fall asleep within 10 minutes because I don’t ever sleep. I used to sleep through the night, through trains, dogs, it didn’t matter. Nothing was waking me up. And now I’m up two, three times a night. I don’t sleep well at all.

You don’t understand what kind of an impact that has on you, the constant barrage of noise. But if you look at work rules from any OSHA, if you’re exposed to certain amount of noise levels, the louder it is, the shorter time of exposure, and the longer time of exposure, the longer you have to be away from it. Well, we exceed all of that on a daily basis, 24/7, and unfortunately we can’t get away from it. And because of what’s going on, they’ve plummeted our property value so much I can no longer get from our property what I put in it. And that’s just ridiculous.

Nick Browning:  We noticed it in 2022 and 2023 and right on up till today. I’ve never in my life had any heart trouble and I started having high blood pressure. So I went to her doctor because she has a pacemaker, and her doctor told me there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with my heart, but I take high blood pressure medicine every night that he gave me. And a lot of the doctors around here, they don’t want to get involved in none of this stuff. But it’s done a number on us.

And not only us, all of our neighbors [are] the same way. We got neighbors around here, people you wouldn’t believe that had a heart trouble. And I’ve been in a hospital, I had to go to the emergency room one time with my ears, give me a ear infection. I’ve been in the hospital twice for flu. They said flu and pneumonia. So man, it’s been something else. And we’re not the only ones around here. There’s people all around us in this area.

There’s a school about three or four miles over from us, and even they’ve had kids in school. It affects their hearing and art and everything else. And it’s really done a number on us. They say they’re not doing anything but they’re lying. It is.

Karen Pearson:  Like what Danny said, we heard noises, couldn’t identify exactly what it was. And at first too, when you hear something like that and you think it might be the gas plant, that’s a bit alarming too because we weren’t sure if something was about to blow up, take off or what. So then as time continues to progress, and if the wind changes, it blows from the south, or nighttime it’s louder than daytime, there’s so many different factors that cause the noise to ramp up more than others — And really depending on where you’re sitting in reference to the facility, too, and what portion of the mines that they have going at the time.

But once we started realizing that it was actually coming from the mine, we were a bit surprised that they were allowed to even come into the area without us even knowing what was going on. None of us had been notified publicly that anything was going to take place, or they were going to be expanding to a Bitcoin mine company. We had no idea. All of a sudden it’s just upon us, and then we are having to deal with what’s happening.

And then at that point, it was more about we started noticing people getting sick, and then we started getting sick in our own homes. And I work from home, so I’m here 24/7. And over the last year and a half, I’ve seen decline in my dad’s hearing. Again, all these things that have started to come about. And then when you start hearing about your neighbor having some of the same stuff that you’re having, again, it’s not a coincidence. There’s too many people out here just within a couple mile radius that’s all experiencing some of the same stuff.

You know, the best thing about all this, we didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. I didn’t know Danny, I didn’t know Cheryl, I didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. This has brought the community together very rapidly for us to join together. Because, I shared this earlier with you, it’s like environmental euthanasia. We’re all out here in this together. We hear when one person, one of our friends had a pulmonary embolism and he was fine. When things like that start happening or if we don’t hear from somebody in a few days, we’re like, OK, is everybody OK? We hear ambulance come down the road, we’re texting each other. Hey, is that going to your house? We never had to do that before. We are now on such hypervigilant alert about things. Fire trucks go by. Is there anything going on out at the plant? Again, we can’t live peacefully anymore. They’ve invaded that peace, and we all stay just hypervigilant all the time. And like Danny said, you don’t sleep. So the community out here is like a war zone, is what I also equate it to. And you never know what bomb’s going to go off next.

Virginia Browning:  I was just going to say when she said you don’t know what bomb’s going to go off next, and we know it’s going to go off and it’s going to hit one of our friends, even [if] the ones we don’t know personally. But the thing of it is when we speak, when we’re talking to you, we’re talking for all of us out here. Our voice is what you hear, but we’re speaking for them too. So it’s not just a few of us. It’s all of us. And we don’t know how to get out of this. It is just like she said, it’s a war zone, and we don’t have any kind of backup, and that’s what we want. We want backup, and then we want it cleared out.

Nick Browning:  Another thing we have is she and I are retired. We live on a fixed income, and we’re not the only ones. There’s a lot of retired people out here. They try to say that this is an industrial area, it’s not an industrial area, it’s home sites. That’s it. There’s no industrial area out here. But they moved in on top of us anyway. And when they got people coming out here to work on that plant, they shut that plant down. They’re not even running with those people working inside there. And another thing, when they find out if there’s a reporter or something coming, I don’t know where they get their information, but they’ll shut down. They won’t be running. But it’s extremely loud over at Danny’s house. It’s louder at this house than it is at our house. I don’t know if they live down in the valley.

And then we also have a whole bunch of Spanish people that live across the road from it. They live right next to that thing. And some of them have been getting sick, but they won’t say anything because they scared they’ll get in trouble because I don’t know if they’re legal or illegal, but they’ve been here for 30-some years so they’re my neighbors.

And when we first started feeding all the — I feed the deer, the squirrels, the animals. Starting off, I had anywhere from eight to 10 squirrels. Well, I had one squirrel left today. I don’t have any squirrels, and only just a few deer, and just about everything else is gone. There’s just very few animals around here. But when they find out a news reporter or somebody’s coming, they’ll shut down for two or three days and some of the animals have come back. But still no snakes, no, the bird population is way down. And I’ve been feeding them every day for the last 25 years out of here. And it’s just not happening. They’re just, they’re ruining everything.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I cannot help but hear the echoes of other sacrifice zones and other working-class residents who have been poisoned, polluted, abandoned, and are dealing with different circumstances, but very similar situations to what you guys are dealing with. It’s harrowing how similar these stories sound, and it’s so mind blowing how different the causes can be.

But I’ve heard from so many residents who live near concentrated animal feeding operations, chickens, cows. And they look at that and they know that the waste that these animals are producing and being housed in these massive lagoons and being sprayed over their neighbor’s farmlands, they can see that that’s all getting into their water.

The folks here in South Baltimore, I’ve seen the uncovered coal cars, car after car after car for miles on these CSX trains not covered, and the wind is just blowing this toxic coal dust all over the place. I’ve seen residents wipe it off their windows. And yet all the while they’re being told, oh, how do you know it’s coal? It’s not us. That could be any kind of black dust. Oh, you have respiratory problems? It’s probably because you smoked a cigarette two decades ago. The burden is always put on the residents, and it’s never put on the big, fat, obvious polluters at the center of these stories. It’s just maddening to hear another community going through something like this.

But I think one thing I wanted to ask about is when I’m talking to folks in these other areas and the industries involved, there’s always something that they can at least grasp about those industries. Like, OK, coal, yeah, it’s dirty, but we need it for energy and metallurgical processes. The chicken CAFO down the street, yeah, it’s gross and dirty, but people gotta eat chickens. I’ve heard these kinds of things. I wanted to ask, as you and your other neighbors started realizing what was happening in your town, what did you think all of this was for? Did you know anything about Bitcoin? What is it like to know that you’re going through all this for something like Bitcoin mining?

Danny Lakey:  That was a pretty hard pill for me to swallow at the beginning. It’s really rough because all it is is it’s profiting a corporation — And, obviously, the people who are in Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin mining people, they’re processing transactions. They’re doing data calculations at phenomenal rates and encoding and [decoding] and encrypting. It’s crazy. But that’s how they’re making their money. So it is just to enrich a corporation. Has no play on anything else.

It was more disheartening in Texas, obviously Texas is, we like to be the wild Wild West and we don’t want anybody bothering with our land and let us do our thing, but that’s if it doesn’t encroach on other people. And this does. And then the Bitcoin mining is part of Greg Abbott’s grand plan to get enough power to cover the state anytime we have peak issues, so we don’t have one of the snow issues like we had a few years back, that’s part of his plan. If they bring in the Bitcoin mines that drive the power, then they build more power plants that get to sell their power on a regular basis, but then they have more power on the grid for when there’s an emergency.

So I understand the process, but to do that, you have opened up a state that doesn’t have any regulations on this, so now they can move in. In Texas, if you are not in an incorporated city of some kind, there are no regulations. And so they don’t have any regulations. They don’t have to ask permission.

It’s why they say that they are in an industrial zone. They’re not in an industrial zone. They’re on a piece of property owned by the electric plant, and every square inch that borders that electric plant is either residential, farmland, agricultural, or used for cows or goats. It is an agricultural or a residential piece of property, every inch of it. And then they want to say, oh, it’s in a well-known industrial area. No, it’s on the grounds of an electric plant and you’re there so you don’t have to pay distribution fees to power running through somebody’s power lines to get to you and you can buy it by the gigawatt on the open market in Texas.

It was very disheartening because you’re no longer fighting the Bitcoin company, you’re fighting Greg Abbott’s master plan. And then we found out it was data centers now, which does AI, and they’re tying AI into our national defense. So now we’re fighting the federal government, the state government, and these stupid mining companies.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Do they say it’s going to bring jobs and economic stimulus or what? What is it that they’re actually… What are they doing besides using a shit ton of water — Pardon my French — And creating a shit ton of sound pollution right next to your homes and generating a shit ton of money for people who are not you?

Danny Lakey:  Well, and now with the more power, they’re about to build a third power plant, which is going to generate more air pollution. So we have water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, so we got the good trifecta going on. They also recently built a solar farm, and as great as good energy is, that heats the air up around it and it’s killing all the birds. So we’ve got increased temperature, increased air pollution, increased noise pollution, and increased water pollution. And what we’re getting out of it is about $8 million a year to the Granbury school districts. And when we appeal to Granbury and ask them to do it because we’re in the county, they have made it very clear we are not part of Granbury.

Virginia Browning:  The day that we read in the newspaper that all of this out here didn’t concern Granbury because we were not in the Granbury city limits, that was a slap in the face. They let us know we’re out here by ourselves, and they really don’t care about, Granbury doesn’t care about the country around the city. They don’t care about the part of Hood County that doesn’t say Granbury city limits. They just don’t care. And that’s where we are. We are out here floundering by ourselves. It’s like you’re in the boat in the middle of the ocean with no oars. That’s what we feel like.

Karen Pearson:  Danny says it a little more elegant than what we can as far as, I guess, some of the stuff that I think that the people in Texas are not really realizing. We have had so much ridicule and people saying that we’re just doing this because we want money and this and that. We’re doing this because we want our peace, but we’re also doing this because for future generations. And also in Texas, like what he mentioned, the Bitcoin plants are buying kilowatts at very, very low cost per kilowatt, saving it up, and then when the grid starts weakening and there needs to be more, they then go to the Bitcoin companies and buy it back from them at the consumer’s expense. We are the ones that have to pay for that extra kilowatts or whatever that they’re selling back.

Why is it that these companies who — And again, they’re not contributing to jobs in the area, they’re not contributing to the local economy out here where they’re located. I beg to differ that, I bet not even five of their employees even live here in Granbury or Hood County.

So all at our expense, they’re making money. The people in Texas are buying the electricity back at probably double or better rates whenever the grid goes down. And that’s what I don’t think people understand. It’s almost like the great Ponzi scheme is what it seems like.

It’s people like you that get the word out for us. That’s been what has helped us tremendously in this fight. Like mom said, we’re out here floundering all on our own, all together, sick as some of us are, trying to just be heard and give us our peace back.

Nick Browning:  They’re not allowed in China. They were run out of China, and so why did they come to Texas? It’s just a scheme is all it is, and we’re sick and tired of it. I don’t know what we can do about it. But they keep saying that they’re not harming us, but they are, every one of them. I think that people in town, their palms were padded and that’s why they said we’re not part of Granbury. We’re out here in Hood County out in the country out on our own. It’s a scheme. It’s just a scheme. That’s it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now I wanted to ask you guys with just the last few minutes that we have together — And again, this will not be the only time we cover this story, I promise y’all we are going to do follow-ups and I want to get y’all on panels with folks that we’ve spoken to from other areas of the country where they’re dealing with industrial pollution or other awful things that have upended their lives. So we promise everyone listening that we are going to stay on this story.

But with the time we have left in this episode, I wanted to ask if you guys could bring us up to speed on where things stand now and what, if anything, is being done to address your concerns. Have you gotten any help from local officials? Is that help coming from local organizations, community-led groups? What is being done and what needs to be done to help you guys get out of this hell that you’re living in?

Danny Lakey:  Well, we’ve had some help. We have a couple of county commissioners that are on our side that have helped us out. They helped get a study, but all we could get was about $6,000, so it was a very small study. We were glad to have it, but you need a bigger sound study in a bigger area than what you can do with six grand and we wouldn’t have been able to get any more out of it. So we were glad to get that.

We’ve gotten a lot of help from national media, some international media, and anybody that wants to come out and talk to us. We really, really, really appreciate people putting eyes on it because that’s about the only place we’re going to get some help.

We’re not going to get it from our county judge, kind of holds all the cards. He gets his little party paid for by people. Senator Birdwell, who is our state senator, he’s of no help. I had a 45-minute conversation trying to get them to not give a grant to the electric plant to expand the electric planning larger, and I thought he was on our side, and then 45 minutes later he voted against us. So he is not help. Our local congresswoman, she is not of any help.

We are getting some help out of Somervell County, which is our neighboring county, because they are impacted too. And everybody down in Somervell has been very, very helpful. So we want to put that out. There’s a lady by the name of Cheryl Shedden who is the driver of our bus. She lives a little bit closer to the plant than I do, so she gets it even worse than I do. And she’s been here quite a while. She is the leader of our ring. She keeps everybody motivated. So you gotta give a shout out to Cheryl for all the work she’s done.

We’ve got some good news. We’ve been in enough contact with people for litigation about various different things. One, we were fighting to get an injunction to try to get Marathon to stop the noise, bury it, put a building over it, move it out, I don’t care, but just stop the noise. You can do all the Bitcoin mining you want over there, I don’t care, but stop killing me with the noise. Earthjustice came on board to help us with that suit, and that is in progress right now, and we’re very grateful to them because they’re doing that free of charge. And so they heard about us and offered us our services.

We started a nonprofit called Protect Hood County. We had to do that because of litigation. They needed a leadership group. They needed a name. And so we got a 501(c)(3) status. We are currently trying to raise $5,000 to fight building a third power plant. Like I said, the state granted them money to build it. We were able to get enough people and enough written documents to where it’s the first time in the state of Texas that an air permit was not issued to a gas power plant. So they held off on issuing the permit, which made them forfeit their grant.

Now they’re going to reapply. And the permit has not been [inaudible]. It’s just going through a hearing process. We’ve got a meeting coming up with the state, and if we survive that, then we have to go in front of a judge and plead our case for a final ruling on it. We’ve had quotes from 25 to $75,000 when we finally found an attorney that says, if you get there, I’ll take it for five grand and get you in there.

But none of us are independently wealthy. I mean, we may have some land, but land in Texas is not expensive, and these are our retirement homes. We’re not sitting on millions and millions of dollars. I think the Bitcoin mine’s worth about 5 or $6 billion, and the electric company’s worth about $60 or $70 billion. So they’ve got some deep pockets and we’re having to fight ’em. But we did get that injunction to hold off on the air permit, which was a huge win. And we’re hoping that we have a meeting with Marathon, and we’re hoping we can have a little bit of a win before the end of the month.

But anything anybody can do, if you just want to read about it, you can go to protecthoodcounty.com. There’s a lot of information on it. Like I said, we have a 501(c)(3) status that, if anybody wants to help donate, we can’t thank you enough.

Again, other communities, other states, other areas are going to be fighting this because it’s no longer Bitcoin. It’s now data centers. And the federal government is leaking the power of AI as to how we’re going to fight China in the future and they want to stay ahead of ’em. And we have to have power to do it, we’ve got to have it all over the country.

So these things are not going away, and we need some fight to get some regulation on it. Let’s find a happy way to do it. It was mentioned before that China kicked them out, their data centers, they’re bearing in the South Sea because it cools ’em. And of course there’s no noise down there. So they’re burying them down in the ocean and then running the power to it, to their AI centers are coming back. I’m not saying we go that extreme, but there’s got to be a compromise in ruining all of our lives, and killing us slowly is not the answer.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was powerfully put. And Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to just toss it to you to round us out. I think Danny really underlined the most important point here. When I talk to people about why we do this coverage on this show, because for years, and even still, we talk to union workers. We talk to people organizing their workplaces. We talk to people in non-union shops about their lives and their jobs. It’s a show by and for working-class people.

And so some people will ask, well, why are you talking about a Bitcoin mine in rural Texas? And I’m like, well, who do you think are the people living around this place? They are our fellow workers. They are the people whose lives and ability to make a living are being upended by this. We haven’t even talked about what this is doing to the farmers who live around there or to anyone who’s trying to work the land around this Bitcoin mine and the way it’s impacting them.

But we’ve talked about how you all, as flesh and blood people, working people, retirees, how this is impacting you and your daily lives. So for everyone listening, just think about what it’s like to try to get through your day-to-day life, make a living while enduring this level of sound pollution, stress, and all the gaslighting that comes with it. That’s why we’re talking about it. Because this is wrong, and working people standing together is the only way that we’re going to get out of it.

I wanted to let you guys have the last word and ask if you had any final messages to the working people who listen to this show, the folks in other sacrifice zones who listen to this show, any final messages you wanted to send from out there in Granbury to the folks listening.

Karen Pearson:  We’re out here fighting for everyone, and there is a handful of us that are not giving up. We have big voices, and we have a lot of spunk in us. And like he said, Cheryl Shedden, she’s our rockstar team leader in all of this, and we’re motivated to stand toe to toe with them. We might not have the money for attorneys or whatever we would like to.

It’s kind of funny, those of us who, like Danny said, we own property and stuff, but they’re on a fixed income. I work 40 hours a week to make ends meet myself. And even when we are needing funds for small projects that we have to keep going with, I come to mom and dad and ask them, do you have $10? Mom will usually give me $20. I’m like, well, just give me $10. That’s all I need. She’s like, no, you just take this. Even on their fixed income, they still find it necessary to give into this because, again, mom’s been in the hospital several times and she still worries about her neighbor. She thinks there’s somebody else that’s worse off than what she is. So the sacrifices that we are all making to try to take care of each other is huge.

Like Danny said, go to the website, read on there, join, get on the mailing list. You can keep up with things there. We’re not attorneys, but you know what? We’re fighting this as if we are, there’s five of us that are going toe to toe up against this air permit and to try to, if we can’t block it, then we want to come in with some mediation and we want to put up some safeguards. We’re not stopping and we’re not giving up. And you can intimidate us as big as you want with your money or your corporation, but we’re not going to go away.

And I would say that to any community that’s fighting like we are. Stand up for your life because no one else is going to do it for you. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re standing up for our lives, the quality of our lives that we wanted and laid out for ourselves, and then also for the others who can’t fight for themselves. We’re not quitting and we’re not going away. So one way another, we’re going to keep plugging.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Even before the end of the ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli attacks on the West Bank were escalating in 2025. By Feb. 5, 70 Palestinians were reported killed this year alone. Anna Lippman, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, has traveled on numerous occasions to the West Bank from her home in Toronto, Canada, to stand with Palestinians defending their land from attacks by Israeli soldiers and armed settlers.

Most recently, Lippman was in the Masafer Yatta community in the occupied West Bank as Hamdan Ballal, Oscar-winning Palestinian director of the film No Other Land, was detained by Israeli forces after being attacked by armed Israeli settlers in that same community. Lippman joins The Marc Steiner Show for an in-depth discussion on her experiences on the ground in the West Bank, where attempted land grabs and expulsions of Palestinians are growing by the day.

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. It’s good to have you all with us as we continue to cover Palestine and Israel and hear from people throughout that struggle, and continue our series Not in Our Name — Jewish voices that oppose the occupation of Palestine and the oppression and repression of Palestinians by Israelis.

On March 24, co-director of the film No Other Land, Hamdan Bilal, was attacked by Israeli settlers and was badly injured — And while in the ambulance, he was attacked again. The Israeli police took him to an unknown location and, following an international outcry, he was released the next day.

Toronto resident Anna Lippman was in the area known as Masafer Yatta on the West Bank. While she was providing protective presence to Palestinians, Lippman, whois Jewish, was also attacked — Though not as severely — By Israeli settlers, and also was not arrested. Lippman spoke afterwards to the online media where she said what brings you back here is the people, meeting the people here, the children, the elders, the activists, the mothers, all of them, seeing the way that they continue to resist — Not just writing articles, but sharing their story through their everyday acts of resistance, continuing to be on their land, continuing their careers, their family lives, and the joy they find on their land and with their families, with their communities. It’s so beautiful. The hospitality they gave me as a Jewish person whose taxes and identity are used to kill their cousins, they welcome me into their home and feed me even though they have almost nothing.

Today we are joined by Anna Lippman. She’s a Toronto member of Independent Jewish Voices, and has long been showing up in solidarity with Palestinian people in opposition to Israel’s campaign of violence and displacement. And she opposes deeply, which we’ll talk about today, the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Now, she went to the West Bank to protect Palestinians and showed huge heart and courage in her time there. She’s the daughter of a Holocaust surviving family and takes that into her heart as well when it comes to fighting and supporting liberation of Palestinian people.

Anna, welcome. It’s good to have you with us.

Anna Lippman:  Thanks for having me.

Marc Steiner:  So many places to start, but let me just begin, if you could just talk a bit about your time on the West Bank: A, was that the first time you’ve been there? And B, how did that affect you? You went there already opposed to the occupation, but I’m very curious how that affected you when you were there.

Anna Lippman:  Yeah, so I’m actually currently in the West Bank.

Marc Steiner:  At this moment?

Anna Lippman:  At this moment, which is why my internet is still terrible. So I’ve been here for two months, and I’ll be here for another month. It’s actually my fourth time here doing protective presence work, using both my international and my Jewish privilege to try to mitigate the violence and the ethnic cleansing.

As a kid, I went to Israel a lot of times, but I had never been to the occupied Palestinian territories, the West Bank. And so going for my first time and seeing it, even though I had been doing this work for so long, it really made my resolve so much stronger because the things that you see here, it’s impossible to imagine. And the relationships that you make with the people here and then the violence that you witness upon them, it just breaks your heart.

Marc Steiner:  So let me jump into some things you just said because I think it’s important. For people listening to us today, where are you on the West Bank? Who are you staying with?

Anna Lippman:  I am in the region of Masafer Yatta, the South Hebron Hills, and I’m in the village of Susya, most famous for being the home of Academy Award-winning director Hamdan Bilal.

Marc Steiner:  So I assume then, if you’re there, you’re staying with Palestinian families?

Anna Lippman:  They’re hosting us in the village. They have basically a guest house in the middle of the village where we sleep and where basically, when we’re not sleeping, children either are playing with us [Steiner laughs] or people are coming to get us to respond to attacks.

Marc Steiner:  And who is the “we”?

Anna Lippman:  So I’m actually here with seven other Jewish activists. We’re part of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. There’s also several other non-Jewish activists. But for myself and for the people in this group, it’s really important for us to show up as Jews because, not [inaudible] show the world what it means to oppose the state and Zionism, but also so many Palestinians here have never met a Jew that doesn’t want to harm them. And so this, in many ways, is the work of doing that cultural exchange and helping people understand that this is a terrible thing that is happening, but it doesn’t represent all Jews.

Marc Steiner:  One thing you said, just to explore briefly for a moment together about the pain and terror the Jews and Israelis are foisting on Palestinians in this occupation and more. And I was reading about your work and who you are, and the idea that Jews, who suffered so much over thousands of years, who survived — And my family survived the Holocaust, the Cossack repressions in Eastern Poland, the inquisitions that took place. Everything that has happened to us as a people over the millennia, that we could then turn and do what we’re doing in Israel.

Anna Lippman:  Yes, I agree with you. And on the inside, I wonder the same way. Especially, like you, I’m the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She was in Auschwitz. To understand the way that that which happened before I was born impacts my life, I could never want to do this to someone else. But also, it’s the plain and sad truth that hurt people hurt people. And if Jews, we don’t deal with our trauma, if we’re able to let others exploit it for their imperial goals, then of course we’re seeing what’s happening in Israel.

Marc Steiner:  So I’m very curious what the response has been to you, first from the Israelis, but then the Palestinians. What has been your experience in what we might call Israel proper, for the moment, in terms of what you experience when people know who you are and why you’re there?

Anna Lippman:  To be honest, I don’t tell people within Israel proper who I am and why I’m there [Steiner laughs].

Marc Steiner:  I get it.

Anna Lippman:  [Crosstalk] I fear for my life.

Marc Steiner:  Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.

Anna Lippman:  And even in the West Bank, we have to be a little careful who we talk to about what we’re doing because there are many ways that these names get back to the Israeli government. It’s despicably easy for me to get away with this within Israel because I look very Ashkenazi. I look like everyone else. No one looks at me and blinks twice. And that’s why the Jews come to do this work is because we have these privileges and we might as well exploit them for something good.

Marc Steiner:  So let’s explore for a moment what that work is. When you say, we’ve said a number of times, you’re there doing this work, talk to people listening to us today about what this work is that you’re doing.

Anna Lippman:  So a lot of what we’re doing is documentation and accompaniment work. So, especially in Masafer Yatta, most of the people here are farmers and shepherds. They very much rely on the land. And so a key way for them to be able to remain here is to be able to take their flocks out, is to be able to harvest their crops. And so we literally just accompany them on their shepherding shifts, as they go to the grocery store, what have you, not only because Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals understand that you don’t want to act the same towards Palestinians in private that you do in front of an international. Because I’m getting this interview and Palestinians are not, so they don’t want us to tell the world what they’re doing to the Palestinians, what’s happening. And this is what we do when we bring our privilege here is we’re able to share it back out.

Marc Steiner:  In the process of your work over there, what has been your interaction with Israelis, with Jewish Israelis, about what you’re doing?

Anna Lippman:  Yeah, it’s been terrible. When the army comes, they give us quite a hard time despite us being Jewish. They call us anarchists. They say we are making chaos. A soldier told me the other day that I was here to make problems for the Jewish. And the settlers themselves, they’re even worse. The army will call us traitors, self-hating Jews, but the settlers will yell all kinds of profanities at us. They’ll chase us. I’ve been in multiple rock attacks.

Marc Steiner:  What does that mean?

Anna Lippman:  Groups of young settlers coming to throw rocks at the villages, the Palestinians, basically a stoning.

Marc Steiner:  In their minds a biblical stoning.

Anna Lippman:  Yes, of course.

Marc Steiner:  The vast majority of settlers in the West Bank are right-wing extremist, Orthodox Jews, is that right?

Anna Lippman:  Yeah. And the thing is that on the front lines of these more extremist settlements are mostly young men, like 15- to 20-year-olds that are sometimes called the Hilltop Youth, who are taken from bad homes, off the street, and brought to these settlements that are run by really right-wing fascist people that tell them, this is your land. You must protect it. You must shepherd. And if you see Palestinians, attack them before they attack you. And so who we mostly see is teenage boys, and that makes it a difficult dynamic to hate them.

Marc Steiner:  I understand. Let me take a step backwards here with you for just a minute because this is literally, I’ve been involved in this, in covering this, my entire life, almost. But what you’re describing now, what you just said about Israeli boys on these settlements attacking you and the Palestinians were brought there, were in trouble and brought to these… Talk a bit about that. Who are these kids? Where do they come from? What do you mean they were in trouble? It sounds like what — And I hate saying this — It sounds like what fascists did in Germany and Italy, taking youths off the street and turning them into stormtroopers.

Anna Lippman:  Yes, exactly. And it’s very similar here. Sometimes it’s rabbis, sometimes it’s just agricultural entrepreneurs. And they’ll go to places like Tel Aviv, like Jerusalem, like Be’er Sheva, places within 48, and they’ll tout their programs as helping at-risk youth and providing rehabilitation centers for at-risk youth. So these previously street youths are now productive members of society. They’re learning how to farm, they’re going to school.

And actually, because they’re touted this way, they get a lot of funding from places like the JNF that funds social service projects, from places like the Israeli government that funds rehabilitation for at-risk youth. But at the same time, there’s enough of a distance that the Israeli government can blame these youth for an attack. And then, through keeping an arm’s distance to them, they’re both supporting the youth to be there to do this ethnic cleansing, and they can blame the youth and say it’s not part of the state, it’s extrastate actors.

Marc Steiner:  So would it be fair to say, just to explore this for a moment — Then we can go on something else — But is it fair to say that these kids that are taken to these settlements, who are in trouble from the stuff they did in the streets, are kids who are what we call Mizrahim, that there are kids who are from Arab African descent in Israel. Would that be about right?

Anna Lippman:  Mostly not. Mostly they’re Ashkenazi. Sometimes they’re Mizrahi, but the vast majority of them are Ashkenazi. A lot of them are from places like Europe and Ukraine. A lot of them are just born and raised in Israel.

Marc Steiner:  That’s a pretty horrendous description. I think the world is not aware of what you’re describing at this moment. I think most people, I wasn’t, are not aware, and I stay on top of this. It’s something that is almost, it’s a frightening Orwellian step.

Anna Lippman:  It definitely is. And it’s been happening for quite a while. And not only is it terrible for the Palestinians, but it’s so exploitative [of] these young men.

Marc Steiner:  Yes, absolutely. I’m also curious, I’ve not been to the West Bank, but as a young person — I was a very young person — I was a Freedom Rider, and I was [on the] Eastern Shore, Maryland, Mississippi, Alabama. And it was terrifying. But you did it because it had to be done.

Anna Lippman:  Exactly.

Marc Steiner:  So I want to talk about you in that regard, what it’s like for you to live on the edge of that violence, protecting the human rights and liberation of Palestinians as a Jewish woman?

Anna Lippman:  It’s a lot. It’s very scary, and it’s not comfortable. I think a lot of times I feel like I’m on a three-month firefighting shift. You can never really put your guard completely down because things could go off at any minute and you’ll have to run out of the house and go stop this fire. And it really impacts the activists here because it’s a lot on your body, on your mind.

And then I see the Palestinians who live this every day, and I remember that I will go home to Netflix and Uber Eats, and they will not. This is where they live. And so I think, just like you said, this is what has to be done, even though it’s not my favorite thing to do, for sure.

Marc Steiner:  All right. So I guess you’ve been aware of all the crackdowns taking place in Canada, in Germany, across the globe, against Palestinians.

Anna Lippman:  Absolutely.

Marc Steiner:  So just to hear your thoughts and analysis of what all that means, this literally international crackdown, and it’s going to begin to happen in larger ways here in the United States as well with Donald Trump back in the White House.

Anna Lippman:  Absolutely, yeah. No, I totally agree. And Canada is not that far off from Trump. We don’t know who’s going to win this next election, and Canada is going quite right itself. And I think one thing I’ve always learned about Palestine is it’s sort of the moral center of the world. Everything that Israel does in Palestine, their militarization, their technology, their AI, they export it to the rest of the world. Police, [armies] from all over the world, go train with the IDF.

And so to me, [it’s] surprising to see the ways that this extreme crackdown is going global and is starting to impact people that perhaps thought they were a bit more safe. And I think that’s why everyone who feels strongly about this, who feels strongly about the right to speak up for what you believe in, needs to be saying no, needs to be standing up. Because if we don’t say this is too much, what student are they going to snatch off the streets next?

Marc Steiner:  And it sounds like, what I’ve seen written before and what you’re describing, people don’t realize this Western American and Israeli cooperation in testing out weaponry and more is a test run for oppression universally.

Anna Lippman:  Exactly, yes. And Israel does it very well. And other imperial settler colonial countries like Canada, they pay attention. They want to do it well too.

Marc Steiner:  So tell me a bit, for people listening to us in the time we have left, a bit about what your daily life and work is like there, what you’re experiencing firsthand as a young Jewish woman in the West Bank living with Palestinians and staring down right-wing settlers and the Israeli army.

Anna Lippman:  I think what, to me, is most noticeable about my day-to-day experience here is it’s so unpredictable that it’s impossible to plan a month ahead, and very difficult to plan two days ahead.

Marc Steiner:  Wow.

Anna Lippman:  We’ll wake up, we’ll go shepherding, we’ll be having a lovely time, and then suddenly a settler will come in their truck, try to run us over, and we’re taking footage of this, talking to lawyers, taking people to the police station to give testimony. And that’s your whole day. And sometimes we can be very lucky and we’ll just have a morning where things are great and we’ll get to hang out with the families and just chill. But even in those quiet times, there’s still tension because it’s so unpredictable that you never know what is coming or when. And every time that you continue to stay in your land, that you continue to call settlers out, they seek revenge. So just like the Palestinians here, I can’t really give you a day-to-day because the settlers don’t let us have that regularity and schedule.

Marc Steiner:  What do you mean by that?

Anna Lippman:  They keep us on our toes by intentionally being unpredictable, by telling us they’ll come back tonight, then not, but coming to attack three days later. So it’s very hard.

Marc Steiner:  As an activist in the midst of this, and more in the middle of it than most people are who might oppose what’s happening, because you’re there, physically there, putting your life on the line, how do you see it unfolding in the future? And where are the possibilities that we can actually find a road to peace where Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews live in that place together? Because in the end, for me, I have this poster on my wall — I’ve said this before on other shows — I have this poster on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968, and it’s a map of all of Palestine, and it has a Palestinian flag on one side and an Israeli flag on the other side, and it says “One state, two people, three faiths”. And that’s kind of been my mantra for a long time. So I’m asking you that question in that spirit because it almost feels impossible to attain.

Anna Lippman:  Yeah, I think that it has been really grim for the last two or so years, and it’s been really difficult to find hope. I think where I find hope is the fact that so many more people know about Palestine than they did in 2014, than they did in 2021. So for me, this gives me hope when I see a random person that’s not Jewish, that’s not Arab, who knows about Palestine and cares about the injustice there. I think the more we speak up, the more we ask our governments to hold the Israeli government accountable, the more that we will find actual peace.

But it’s also important to recognize that peace, true peace, means equality, humanity, and dignity for everyone from the river to the sea. And so we cannot have a state, two states, 12 states, I don’t care [Steiner laughs]. But if Palestinians don’t have the right to live in their land, to return to their ancestral land, to be as much of a society as an Israeli citizen is, there will never be peace because peace is not built on oppression.

Marc Steiner:  Anna Lippman, a couple of things here. First of all, I do want to say this to you, and I want everyone listening to us here at The Real News to know it, what you and others like you are doing at this moment takes, and the Yiddish word is chutzpah, takes a lot of heart and strength and bravery to stand up for what you’re doing. It’s not just carrying a placard around an embassy. You’re in the midst of it, saying, no, not in our name, this has to end.

And I do want to thank you for what you’re doing. I think your voice and the voices of others around you, along with Palestinians, is what we want to continue to hear more [of] on this program. And for one, I want to stay in touch, and I want to help work to bring more voices like yours on, but also to expand those voices and give people the opportunity and chance to do exactly what you are doing.

Anna Lippman:  Yes, I love that.

Marc Steiner:  That will change it.

Anna Lippman:  I think so. We gotta have hope, right?

Marc Steiner:  Yes, we do. Look, I’ll say this one last thing. I say this often. One of the scariest things for people in the South during Civil Rights, which you see all the white freedom workers, and among those, the majority of the white people who put their lives on the line in Civil Rights were Jews.

Anna Lippman:  Yes. This is our history, right?

Marc Steiner:  Yes. Right. So you’re carrying on a tradition, and you’re a brave human being, a brave woman. Let’s do stay in touch, and whatever stories we can tell together about your experience and others’ experiences and the experiences of the Palestinian lives that you touch and live with, we want to put on the air and do that.

Anna Lippman:  Yeah. That’s so great. Thank you so much for having me, and, really, for everything.

Marc Steiner:  Please stay safe and stay strong. Thank you.

Anna Lippman:  Thank you.

Marc Steiner:  Thank you once again to Anna Lippman for joining us today. And I want to reiterate what I said during our conversation. The bravery she and other young Jews are showing in Israel Palestine, living with Palestinians to say, we, as Jews, say not in our name, is literally putting their lives on the line, just as people did to end racial segregation in America. We will, I will, continue to highlight their work, and we’ll be hearing more from Anna Lippman, and other Anna Lippmans as well, as the voices of the Palestinians they work with put their lives on the line, and they’re there to stand with them.

Once again, thank you to Anna Lippman for joining us today. Thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, and producer, Rosette Sewali, for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.

Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you, Anna Lippman, for all the work you do and for joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.