YouTube Removed Hundreds of Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations to Comply With Trump Sanctions

“YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” said a spokesperson for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose channel was deleted.

A young Palestinian man holds a cat while sitting on an Israeli rocket in the street in Gaza City, Palestine, on October 30, 2025.
(Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Nov 05, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

In compliance with a Trump administration effort to punish critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, YouTube has deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian rights groups, wiping several hundred videos documenting Israeli human rights violations in the process.

According to The Intercept, the video hosting website, owned by Google, quietly removed the accounts of three groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in October.
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These are the same three groups that the State Department hit with sanctions in September because they helped to bring evidence before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The court would issue arrest warrants for the pair in 2024.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that the groups were sanctioned because they “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”

YouTube deleted the groups’ channels, as well as their entire archives, which contained over 700 videos that documented acts of brutality by the Israeli military against Palestinians.



According to The Intercept, these included an investigative report about the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, the military’s destruction of Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who’d survived Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Google confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the videos to comply with the State Department sanctions.

“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.

Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was “outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view.”

YouTube’s censorship of content deemed too supportive of Palestinians predates President Donald Trump’s return to power. In 2024, officials at YouTube and other social media companies were found to have cooperated through secretive back channels with a group of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector to remove content critical of Israel.

Following news of the three human rights groups losing their channels, documentarian and journalist Robert Inlakesh wrote on social media that in 2024, YouTube removed his channel without warning, deleting all his content, including several documentaries he’d produced in the occupied territories.

“YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account,” he said. “No community guidelines were violated, and three separate excuses were given to me. Then Google deleted my email and won’t respond to appeals.”

Groups sanctioned by the US for supporting the ICC have previously received preliminary injunctions in two cases, in which courts said the State Department violated their First Amendment rights.

But even with the sanctions in place, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said there was little legal reason for YouTube to capitulate.

“It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions,” she said. “Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”

Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that YouTube has not made it clear what policies his group’s channel violated.

“YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people, especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on October 7,” he said.

“By doing this,” he added, “YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims.”

Journalists’ Unions Condemn Condé Nast’s Gutting of Teen Vogue

“As the rest of Condé remained silent or hemmed and hawed over atrocities in Gaza, Teen Vogue printed some of the best analysis and reporting on Palestine in the country,” said one journalist.

THEY WERE THIS GENERATIONS MS. MAGAZINE


Teen Vogue politics editor Lex McMenamin speaks onstage during Teen Vogue Summit 2024 at Nya Studios on November 23, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

(Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Teen Vogue)

Julia Conley
Nov 04, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

As praise poured in for Teen Vogue following Condé Nast’s Monday announcement that the youth-focused magazine would be folded into Vogue.com and key staffers credited with driving the publication’s incisive political coverage were being laid off, unions representing Condé Nast journalists condemned the decision to gut the award-winning magazine.

The consolidation of the two brands “is clearly designed to blunt the award-winning magazine’s insightful journalism at a time when it is needed the most,” said Condé United and its parent union, the NewsGuild of New York, in a statement.




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Condé Nast announced Monday that Teen Vogue‘s editor in chief, Versha Sharma, was stepping down. The company said the publication, which ceased its print edition in 2017 and became online-only, would remain “a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission,” but admirers of the magazine expressed doubt that it would continue its in-depth coverage of reproductive rights, racial justice, and progressive political candidates as the politics team was dissolved.

“I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers on other sections, and today is my last day,” said politics editor Lex McMenamin. “To my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.”

The unions also said no reporters or editors would be explicitly covering politics any longer.

Sharma helped push the 22-year-old publication toward political coverage with a focus on human rights and engaging young readers on issues like climate action and Israel’s US-backed war in Gaza.

“From interviewing [New York mayoral candidate] Zohran Mamdani on the campaign trail to catching up with Greta Thunberg fresh out of her detention in an Israeli prison to breaking down the lessons that Black Lives Matter taught protestors, Teen Vogue has been considered a platform for young progressives inside the glossy confines of Condé Nast,” wrote Danya Issawi at The Cut.

Recent coverage from the magazine included a dispatch from Esraa Abo Qamar, a young woman living in Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, about the Israel Defense Forces’ destruction of schools there; an article linking the US government’s support for Israel’s starvation of people in Gaza to the Trump administration’s cuts to federal food assistance; and Jewish protesters demanding that US companies divest from Israel.

The unions said six of its members, “most of whom are BIPOC women or trans,” were being laid off, including McMenamin.

They added that Condé Nast’s announcement included no acknowledgment of “the coverage that has earned Teen Vogue massive readership and wide praise from across the journalism industry.”


“Gone are the incisive and artful depictions of young people from the Asian and Latina women photographers laid off today,” said the unions. “Gone, from the lauded politics section, is the work that made possible the blockbuster cover of [billionaire CEO Elon Musk’s daughter] Vivian Wilson, one of Condé Nast’s top-performing stories of the year, coordinated by the singular trans staffer laid off today.”

The journalists added that the publisher’s leadership “owes us—and Teen Vogue‘s readership—answers” about the decision to slash the boundary-pushing magazine’s staff. “We will get those answers. And we fight for our rights as workers with a collective bargaining agreement as we fight for the work we do, and the people we do it for.”

Emily Bloch, a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and a former Teen Vogue staffer, said the consolidation of the magazine is likely “more than an absorption and clearly a full shift from the publication’s DNA,” and noted that the decision was announced the day before New Yorkers head to the polls to vote for mayor in a nationally-watched, historic election in which Mamdani has been leading in polls.

“Laying off the entire politics team a day before the NYC election is heinous and a knife in the back to a brand that has solidified its importance for youth,” said Bloch. “Devastating... It’s been a force for youth culture and politics since [President Donald] Trump’s first term. This is a major loss.”

100+ Democrats Urge Trump to Improve US-Mexico-Canada Trade Deal

WE CALL IT THE CMUSA OR NAFTATOO

“We are united in our view that the agreement enacted in 2020 has failed to deliver improvements for American workers, family farmers, and communities nationwide.”


Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—seen here—and Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.) are leading a letter urging President Donald Trump to strengthen the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to protect American workers, families, and communities.
(Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Nov 03, 2025
C0MMON DREAMS

A group of more than 100 congressional Democrats on Monday called on President Donald Trump to use the opportunity presented by the mandatory review of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement “to make significant and necessary improvements to the pact” that will benefit American workers and families.

“In 2020, some of us supported USMCA, some opposed it, and some were not in Congress,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Trump led by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.). “Today, we are united in our view that the agreement enacted in 2020 has failed to deliver improvements for American workers, family farmers, and communities nationwide.”

The USMCA replaced the highly controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was enacted during the administration of then-Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1994 after being signed by former Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The more recent agreement contains a mandatory six-year review.

As the lawmakers’ letter notes:
Since enactment of the USMCA, multinational corporations have continued to use the threat of offshoring as leverage wielded against workers standing up for dignity on the job and a share of the profits generated by their hard work—and far too often, enabled by our trade deals, companies have acted on these threats. The US trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has significantly increased, and surging USMCA imports have undermined American workers and farmers and firms in the auto, steel, aerospace, and other sectors. Under the current USMCA rules, this ongoing damage is likely to worsen: Since USMCA, Chinese companies have increased their investment in manufacturing in Mexico to skirt US trade enforcement sanctions against unfair Chinese imports of products like electric vehicles and to take advantage of Mexico’s duty-free access to the US consumer market under the USMCA.

These disappointing results contrast with your claims at the time of the USMCA’s launch, when you promised Americans that the pact would remedy the NAFTA trade deficit, bring “jobs pouring into the United States,” and be “an especially great victory for our farmers.”

Those farmers are facing numerous troubles, not least of which are devastating tariffs resulting from Trump’s trade war with much of the world. In order to strengthen the USMCA to protect them and others, the lawmakers recommend measures including but not limited to boosting labor enforcement and stopping offshoring, building a real “Buy North American” supply chain, and standing up for family farmers.

“The USMCA must... be retooled to ensure it works for family farmers and rural communities,” the letter states. “Under the 2020 USMCA, big agriculture corporations have raked in enormous profits while family farmers and working people in rural communities suffered.”

“We believe that an agreement that includes the improvements that we note in this letter” will “ensure the USMCA delivers real benefits for American workers, farmers, and businesses, [and] can enjoy wide bipartisan support,” the lawmakers concluded.

Protesters at 100+ Campuses Tell Trump ‘Hands Off Higher Ed!’

“We’re not only out to defeat Trump, but to also win a vision for affordability, security, and freedom for our generation—both in higher education, and in our democracy,” said one student organizer.


Students at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina joined nationwide protests against President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education on November 7, 2025.
(Photo: Sunrise Movement/X)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 07, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


Students and professors at over 100 universities across the United States on Friday joined protests against President Donald Trump’s sweeping assault on higher education, including a federal funding compact that critics call “extortion.”

Crafted in part by billionaire financier Marc Rowan, Trump’s Compact for Excellence in Higher Education was initially presented to a short list of prestigious schools but later offered to other institutions as a way to restore or gain priority access to federal funding.




100+ US Campus Protests to Call Out Trump Attacks and Unaffordable Education


The compact requires signatories to commit to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” while also targeting trans student-athletes and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

“The attacks on higher ed are attacks on truth, freedom, and our future. We’re organizing to protect campuses as spaces for learning, not control—for liberation, not censorship,” said Brianni Davillier, a student organizer with Public Citizen, which is among the advocacy groups and labor unions supporting the Students Rise Up movement behind Friday’s demonstrations.



At the Community College of Philadelphia, protesters stressed that “higher education research saves lives.” Duke University demonstrators carried signs that called for protecting academic freedom and transgender students. Roughly 10 miles away, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they unfurled a banner that read, “Stand for Students | Reject Trump’s Compact.”

Professors from multiple schools came together for a rally at Central Connecticut State University, according to Connecticut Post.

“The compact would require universities submit to a system of government surveillance and policing meant to abolish departments that the government disapproves of, promote certain viewpoints over others, restrict the ability of university employees to express themselves on any major issue of the day,” said James Bhandary-Alexander, a Yale Law School professor and member of the university’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) executive committee.

AAUP, also part of the coalition backing the protest movement, said on social media Friday: “Trump and Marc Rowan’s loyalty oath compact is [trash]!! Out with billionaires and authoritarians in higher ed! Our universities belong to the students and higher ed workers!”



Protesters urged their school leaders to not only reject Trump’s compact—which some universities have already publicly done—but also focus on other priorities of campus communities.

At the University of Kansas, provost Barbara Bichelmeyer confirmed last month to The University Daily Kansan that KU will not sign the compact. However, students still demonstrated on Friday.

“They did say ‘no’ but that’s like the bare minimum,” said Cameron Renne, a leader with the KU chapters of the Sunrise Movement and Young Democratic Socialists of America. “We’re hoping to get the administration to hear us and at least try to cooperate with us on some of our demands.”

According to The University Daily Kansan, “Renne said the groups are also pushing for divestment from fossil fuels, improvements in campus maintenance, and the removal of restrictions on gender ideology.”



Some schools have declined to sign on to the compact but reached separate agreements with the Trump administration. As the Guardian reported Friday:
At Brown University in Rhode Island—one of the first institutions to reach a settlement with the Trump administration earlier this year—passersby were invited to endorse a banner listing a series of demands by dipping their hands in paint and leaving their print, while a group of faculty members nearby lectured about the history of autocracy.

“Trump came to our community thinking we could be bullied out of our freedom,” said Simon Aron, a sophomore and co-president of Brown Rise Up. “He was wrong.”

Brown isn’t the only Ivy League school to strike a deal with Trump; so have Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, the alma mater of both Rowan and Trump. Cornell University followed suit on Friday amid nationwide demonstrations.

“November 7th is only the start,” said Kaden Ouimet, another student organizer with Public Citizen. “We’re building a movement of students, faculty, and campus workers to demand our colleges do not comply with the Trump regime, and its authoritarian campus compact.”

“We know that to fully take on autocracy, we have to take on the material conditions that gave rise to it,” the organizer added. “That is why we’re not only out to defeat Trump, but to also win a vision for affordability, security, and freedom for our generation—both in higher education, and in our democracy.”

Cornell Becomes Latest University to Submit to Trump’s ‘Extortion’ Over Student Protests

The government claimed that Cornell had violated civil rights law by allowing students to protest against Israel. Even though the agreement required the school to admit no wrongdoing, it still agreed to pay a $30 million fine.


People walk through the Cornell University campus on November 3, 2023, 

in Ithaca, New York.
(Photo by Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Nov 07, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Cornell University became the latest school to cave to demands from the Trump administration on Friday, inking a deal that would restore $250 million in unpaid research funds stripped by the federal government as part of its crusade against higher education and efforts to punish schools that allowed students to freely express pro-Palestine views.

Following a months-long investigation by the government for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Ivy League school agreed to pay a $30 million fine to the government, which claimed that Cornell had violated the law by not sufficiently cracking down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The administration accused the school of failing “to protect Jewish students.”



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In March, the Department of Education launched investigations into 60 major US universities, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon describing students’ peaceful demonstrations against Israel that had swept campuses the previous year as “relentless antisemitic eruptions.”

As The Guardian reported earlier this week, the civil rights investigation at Cornell had been spurred by a nonspecific, anonymous complaint that a professor “is supporting Hammas [sic] and their beliefs. He is literally brain washing students to hate and discriminate towards a certain religions [sic]–Jews.” The complaint demanded that the professor be “black listed” from teaching.

Following this complaint, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced an investigation into the school for “failing to respond to incidents of harassment.”

In a letter to the school community on Friday, Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the resolution made explicit that its agreement to pay out the lofty fine to the Trump administration was “not an admission of wrongdoing” by the university.

In addition to paying the fine, the school also had to set aside another $30 million to invest in “research programs that will directly benefit US farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency.”

And while Kotlikoff said he would refuse a deal that allowed the government to “dictate our institution’s policies,” the agreement requires the school to comply with several of the Trump administration’s ideological goals.

It agreed to restrict its use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and turn over data on the racial makeup of its student body to demonstrate that it is complying with the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action. It also agreed to train staff using a Justice Department memo ordering colleges to abandon “transgender-friendly” policies.

Cornell also agreed to “conduct annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry.” The school specifically agreed to query students about “whether they believe the changes Cornell has made since October of 2023,” when Israel launched a two-year genocide in response to Hamas attack, “have benefited the Cornell community.”

The Trump administration has notably ordered schools to abide by a wide-ranging definition of “antisemitism” that not only punishes displays of bigotry against Jewish people, but also criticisms of Israel’s government and policies.


Cornell also agreed to seek out “experts on laws and regulations regarding sanctions enforcement, anti-money laundering, and prevention of terrorist financing,” suggesting that the school will be expected to discipline and investigate pro-Palestinian organizations on campus, which the administration has baselessly accused of “material support” for terrorism.

Cornell’s agreement with the administration comes as students at more than 100 campuses across the country have launched demonstrations against Trump’s efforts to coerce schools into signing his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” in exchange for priority federal funding and other “positive benefits.” Critics have described it as a “loyalty oath” and an “extortion agreement.”

Though several schools have declined to sign onto the compact, Cornell is not the first school to bend to the Trump administration’s demands to restart the flow of federal funding: Brown University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia have all cut similar deals.

Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, has argued that there was little basis for Cornell to be fined for civil rights violations.

“If the Trump administration had evidence that Cornell systemically discriminated against Jewish students in violation of Title VI, it wouldn’t let the university off the hook for a $30 million investment in research about AI, robotics, and farming,” Jaffer said. “But, of course, there’s no such evidence. The settlement only confirms what we already knew—that the Trump administration’s Title VI allegations were baseless and made in bad faith.”

“That doesn’t mean there weren’t antisemitic incidents on Cornell’s campus. There were. But there’s just no support for the notion that Cornell or other major American universities were indifferent to antisemitism,” he continued. “The problem wasn’t that universities were indifferent to antisemitism, but that they allowed trustees, advocacy groups, demagogues, etc. to pressure them into treating as ‘antisemitism’ all kinds of political expression and advocacy that was entirely legitimate.”

A report from the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which analyzed discrimination complaints sent to the Civil Rights Office found that “all but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters we have analyzed focus on speech critical of Israel; of these, 79% contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50% of complaints consist solely of such criticism.”

Though the payout was far less than the $200 million settlement Columbia agreed to pay earlier this year, Spencer Beswick, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell’s Humanities Scholars Program, wrote on social media that his university was guilty of “capitulation to extortion.”

Most Campus ‘Antisemitism’ Probes Target Criticism of Israel, Not Anti-Jewish Hate: Report

The report shows how a landmark civil rights law “is being cynically misused to squash political dissent and speech that advocates for the human rights of Palestinians,” said one AAUP leader.

George Washington University students hold a walkout at the National Mall as the institution’s president, Ellen Granberg, delivers her commencement address on May 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 06, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, pro-Israel and far-right advocacy groups have driven a surge of federal civil rights investigations conflating true antisemitism with university professors and students’ criticism of the US-backed Israeli government and its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.

That’s according to Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine, a report published this week by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

‘Solidarity as a Crime’: Report Details Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Protests Across West

“Our members, because of their expertise on the region, have long borne the brunt of allegations that falsely equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism,” MESA president Aslı Bâli said in a statement. “Complaints like these penalize scholars for teaching basic facts about the region.”

The report begins: “Over the past two years, the United States government has taken unprecedented steps to suppress campus speech—including scholarship, advocacy, and protest—opposing the state of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. This crackdown has paved the way for profound transformations in US colleges and universities.”

“A long-standing ‘Palestine exception’ to the First Amendment now threatens to give way to a new reality: Palestine is less an exception to academic freedom than it is a pretext for erasing the norm altogether, as part of an authoritarian assault on the autonomy of higher education and on the very idea of racial and gender equity,” the document warns.

The analysis comes as President Donald Trump continues his sweeping attack, aiming to shut down the Department of Education, deport foreign students critical of Israel, and bully campus leaders into signing an “extortion agreement” for federal funding.

“In effect, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is no longer being used to address racial discrimination in higher education,” Bâli told the Guardian, which first reported on the findings. “Instead, Title VI has been repurposed as part of the administration’s broader effort to remake higher education in line with its right-wing political and cultural agenda.”

AAUP and MESA found that “more investigations were opened in the last two months of 2023 (25) than in all previous years combined (24). Investigations broke record numbers in 2024 (39) and are on track to do so again in 2025 (38, as of September 30).”

“All but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters we have analyzed focus on speech critical of Israel; of these, 79% contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50% of complaints consist solely of such criticism,” the document states.

The report highlights that “the Biden administration opened more antisemitism probes against colleges and universities (65) than for all other types of racial harassment combined (38),” and “the Trump administration appears to have halted racial harassment investigations altogether.”

The federal probes “are producing a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of campus speech,” the report notes, with over 20 schools agreeing to share internal data on discrimination complaints with the government.

Examining Trump’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, the researchers found that the Department of Education “has continued to open very high numbers of antisemitism probes even as its staff has been slashed by the Trump administration,” and “in its high-profile campaigns against prestigious universities, the task force has systematically ignored the procedural requirements of Title VI, unlawfully cutting off vast sums of funding before any meaningful investigation, let alone findings.”

For at least 78% of the complaints examined by AAUP and MESA, pro-Israel and right-wing advocacy organizations—including those without any campus presence—served as complainants or represented them. Such groups have also been involved with private lawsuits intended to redefine antisemitism as including criticism of Israel and restrict such criticism at universities.

“Antisemitism lawsuits surged after October 7, 2023 (two filed before that date, 26 since),” according to the analysis. “No court has yet made a final judgment in favor of plaintiffs. In nine cases, Title VI claims have been dismissed, including on free speech grounds; nine lawsuits have settled, some of which resulted in even more draconian policy changes on campuses than government investigations.”



AAUP general counsel Veena Dubal said that “the findings in this report underscore how the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which passed in response to years of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial injustice—is being cynically misused to squash political dissent and speech that advocates for the human rights of Palestinians.”

“This is a perverse outcome,” Dubal declared, as AAUP prepares for Friday protests pressuring leaders at over 100 institutions to reject the president’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and make schooling more affordable.

As AAUP president Todd Wolfson said in a statement about the day of action earlier this week, “From attacks on academic freedom in the classroom to the defunding of lifesaving scientific research to surveilling and arresting peaceful student protesters, Trump’s higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities and our democracy.”

“We’re excited to help build a coalition of students and workers united in fighting back for a higher education system that is accessible and affordable for all and serves the common good,” he added. Other supporting groups include Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Gen-Z for Change, Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, March for Our Lives, and Sunrise Movement.

Trump's bluster just exposed this taxpayer-funded scheme to make his friends rich

Thom Hartmann
November 5, 2025

COMMON DREAMS


A fake $2020 bill featuring former President Donald Trump. 

Photo illustration: Christopher Sciacca/Shutterstock


Democrats won big in last night’s election, and it’s a great sign for the future of American democracy. Voters rejected racism, fear, and cruelty. They said in a loud and singular voice — overwhelmingly voting for moderate Democrats, progressive Democrats, and even a ballot initiative without a single person on the ballot — that they want their democracy back.

Nonetheless, Mike Johnson is still keeping the House on vacation and John Thune is still refusing to break a Senate filibuster and reopen the government. And, crucially, Trump is still refusing to fully fund SNAP/food stamps, even though he can easily put his hands on the money.

Yesterday’s New York Times’ podcast The Daily interviewed a group of West Virginians who’d lined up at a food bank because Trump had cut off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds. Many of them told their interviewer that they worked full-time jobs but still didn’t make enough money to feed their families.

Roughly a third of the people on SNAP, in fact, work a regular job, and 70 percent of them work full-time.

While Trump and the ghouls in his administration tried to cut off SNAP benefits (and are now threatening to cut off unemployment benefits if Democrats don’t relent and let them gut Obamacare), what this entire drama is really revealing is how what started out as programs to help the unemployed or disabled people have now become billion dollar subsidies for morbidly rich employers and their massive corporations.

When FDR created the food stamp program in 1938, it had three main purposes. The first was to generate Keynesian “from the bottom up” financial activity by giving government money to retailers, who would then circulate it in, and thus stimulate, local economies. The second was to provide a market for struggling farmers, millions of whom were then facing bankruptcy. And the third was to ameliorate hunger among America’s poor.

Today, the SNAP program still accomplishes the goals of helping out farmers, supporting local food stores, and reducing hunger among America’s poor, but about a third of the program has also become a way of insuring that America’s morbidly rich billionaires get even richer on the taxpayer’s dime.

And it’s not just SNAP: you could make the same argument for much of Medicaid and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (TANF times-out at 5 years).

As long as employers know that their employees can get SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF benefits even when they’re working full time, they’ll keep wages low and thus profits high. It’s really that simple.

With FDR‘s new deal, Democrats explicitly proclaimed that if you worked a full-time job you should be able to buy a house and raise a family.

Republicans, on the other hand, have argued since the 1930s that employers should have sole control over what paychecks they cut, even resisting the minimum wage. And now they’ve found a slick new way to exploit Democratic programs like SNAP and Medicaid to help employers further lower their payroll expenses.

Back in 1817, economist David Ricardo coined what he called the “Iron Law of Wages.” His point was that there’s a “marketplace” for labor and the price for labor — the wages paid — in that marketplace is determined by two main variables: actual take-home pay and the local cost of living.

Employers, in other words, carefully calibrate what they’ll pay people to meet (but not exceed) what their workers need to minimally meet the local cost of living. It’s why, for example, wages are higher in expensive cities and lower in cheaper rural areas.

Ricardo’s Iron Law is also why when taxes go down on working class people the effect is paradoxical: tax cuts will always, within a few years, cause corresponding wage cuts, while tax increases on working class people drive wages up.

“Taxes on wages will raise wages,” Ricardo wrote. “If the taxes, instead of being increased, were diminished, wages would fall.”

The reason is easy to understand: tax cuts mean more take-home pay, and when employers see that their workers are taking home more money than they need to live, they’ll lower wages to get back to where take-home pay was before the tax cut. On the other hand, if income taxes are increased employers will be forced to pay more so people’s take-home pay can once again cover the local cost of living.

We’ve even seen this work in real time. During the 1930s-1960s era, income taxes went up considerably on working class people to pay for WWII and digging America out of the Republican Great Depression; wages similarly went up. The years following Reagan’s, Bush Jr’s, and Trump’s tax cuts, however, each saw wages fall. (The same thing happened when income taxes fell after WWI and wages similarly dropped a year later.)

Which brings us to how SNAP, Medicare, and TANF have become Billionaire Protection Programs, helping them keep wages low and profits high.

Ricardo’s Iron Law works the same way with government benefits, although they largely didn’t exist in his time.

Employers know what people need to take home to meet the local cost of living, but when government subsidizes people’s food (SNAP), healthcare (Medicaid), and/or rent and utilities (TANF), employers also know that’s money they don’t have to pay out as wages.

Billionaires like the Walton Family, in other words, know that they can cut their employees’ wages by the same amount as the government subsidies that are available to those workers. Every penny of government benefits, under this GOP strategy, becomes a penny less that Walmart, for example, has to pay its people who qualify for benefits.

The one-third of SNAP recipients who are working, for example, are receiving around $3 billion a month in food support from the government; that’s $3 billion that employers can keep for themselves instead of having to pay out as wages.

Republicans love to pretend that these programs are purely designed for the truly needy (and that’s generally been the goal of Democrats who’ve created them), but they give away the game when they repeatedly — and almost always successfully — force work requirements into them.

Why, after all, would anybody put together a program to feed hungry people and then demand that, to get the full benefit, they had to have a job?

Shouldn’t every job pay enough — as Democrats have argued since the Minimum Wage was established in the 1930s — to prevent hunger? Shouldn’t people who work full-time make enough to cover healthcare, rent, and utilities?


The answer to this 50-year-long GOP scam isn’t to kill off these three programs, but, instead, to do the exact opposite of what Republicans are constantly demanding: eliminate eligibility for people working full-time jobs.

That way, employers will be forced to pay a living wage to their workers, rather than padding their bottom lines with workers’ food, medical, and rent subsidies financed by our tax dollars.

It’ll also increase pressure within state and local governments to raise minimum wages, another demonstrably positive outcome that Republicans and fat-cat billionaires hate.


Obviously, a change that radical would have to be phased in gradually and carefully, combined with increases in the Minimum Wage, so peoples lives are not disrupted.

But doing so would blow up the low-wage business model giant employers have been using for decades, converting government subsidies year-after-year into new yachts for their billionaire owners.

So, whenever you hear Republicans go on and on about the importance of “weeding out the welfare queens with work requirements,” know that what you’re really hearing is a variation on, “We want taxpayers to subsidize low-wage workers so the billionaires who fund our campaigns can buy another mansion or newspaper or TV network.”

Sometimes the biggest Republican scams are run right out in the open, right under our noses. It just takes a moment of reflection — and a simple insight from a 19th century economist — to see through them.

Hopefully the GOP’s attempt to increase Americans pain via SNAP denials will backfire and spark a much-needed conversation about how all this works. Last night’s elections are a good sign that we’re moving in that direction.

That can lead to remaking our work and welfare systems so they’ll once again benefit average people, instead of also subsidizing Trump’s plutocrat friends.

Major Collision or Fender Bender? Is MAGA Splitting over Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Neo-Nazis?

by Bill Berkowitz / November 6th, 2025

Will Tucker Carlson’s interview with far-right activist, Nick Fuentes, tear MAGA apart?

Did Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes ignite a full-blown MAGA civil war? Is the latest dust-up — over Israel and anti-Semitism — between powerful and popular conservative voices, another family feud or a marker of End Times MAGAism? Is it a head-on collision of merely a fender-bender? And, are rank-and-file MAGA supporters paying any attention to these inside-the-beltway gasbags?

While we’ve seen this show before — conservatives with fangs out for fellow conservatives — political observers want to know: Is the current dust up over anti-Semitism in the movement, a deal breaker, an all-out game-changing power struggle?

What’s really at stake isn’t just the movement’s flirtation with antisemitism, but who gets to define its future? Will it be  the nationalist, isolationist Carlson wing, or the older, neocon-aligned Shapiro faction.

It didn’t start with Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast, in which Fuentes excoriated Daily Wire founder, [and conservative podcaster] Ben Shapiro and made inflammatory, anti-Semitic remarks about “organized Jewry.” That interview, however, poured lighter fluid on an ongoing simmering fire.

According to Kyle Tharp’s Chaotic Era Substack, “Fuentes and his continued criticism of U.S. support for Israel (calling fellow conservatives ‘Christian Zionists’ with a  ‘brain virus’) drew condemnation from prominent GOP figures and Israel hawks like Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, as well as from [popular conservative radio host Marc] Levin and Shapiro.

Tharp, whose timely newsletter is about politics, media, and online influence, noted that “The conservative fight over supporting Israel has been simmering all year, with top influencers like Carlson, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon bucking Republican orthodoxy on the issue. The shift reflects both declining support for Israel among younger MAGA supporters and a shift in audience demand in online MAGA media. The data shows that Carlson and Owens, in particular, are winning – having grown their following and clout significantly this year, while pro-Israel voices like Shapiro have seen their audience growth stall in 2025.”

“Republicans Denounce Tucker Carlson for Interview With Nick Fuentes, a White Supremacist” read the New York Times headline. The Bulwark, a consistently anti-Trump voice, called the interview “One of the Most Dangerous Interviews Ever in MAGA Media.” The Associated Press titled it report, “Controversy over Tucker Carlson interview reveals conservative movement’s conflict over antisemitism,” while the Wall Street Journal warned of “The New Right’s New Antisemites.”

Politico’s Samuel Benson reported that Shapiro, titled a response episode of his show “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America.” Shapiro blasted Carlson on Monday, calling him “’the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America,’ adding fuel to an incident that sparked a staff shakeup at the Heritage Institute.”

Benson noted that “The podcast episode was received differently by two bastions of conservative thought: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board condemned it, while Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended it, criticizing the ‘venomous coalition’ attempting to ‘cancel’ Carlson after the interview.”

According to Benson, “Carlson’s interview with Fuentes came on the heels of other high-profile incidents of antisemitism on the political right. Last month, a nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel withdrew his nomination after bragging of his ‘Nazi streak’ in a text message; days earlier, POLITICO reported on a leaked group chat of Young Republicans who praised Hitler and joked about the Holocaust. The same week, a Nazi symbol was discovered hanging in a GOP congressional office.”

Inquiring minds want to know: Will an increasingly distracted Donald Trump weigh in on this kerfuffle and can he demand, and achieve, a cease-fire? Or is the MAGA empire finally growing too unruly for its emperor?

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Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

From Strip Mall USA, to Gaza, to Venezuela: An Architecture of Lies

Empires constructed of mental microplastics, by Phil Rockstroh

November 4th, 2025

So begins the revolution in behalf of soul:

The world is primarily and always an aesthetic phenomenon with which our animal senses and innate reactions are attuned.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction

We tell white lies to avoid conflict or embarrassment. We tell ourselves wholly subjective tales in order to cope with crushing realities. Nations pull creation myths out of the ass of the nation’s collective unconscious. In the case of the Zionist ethnostate the (all too real) storyline has been banished, from the state’s inception, from the Israeli psyche.

What does it do to the collective soul of a nation whose crimes against humanity go without consequence? It goes without saying, they are prone to perpetrate ever increasing criminality until they suffer the consequences of their actions. To wit, Israel will never be capable of living in peace with those who they deem outsiders.

The worst aspects of the Zionist character have been rewarded e.g., as a militarist ethnostate that was created by acts of ethnic cleansing. Nations rise by believing their collective lies…that is, until said lies cause them to fall.

Israelis know the fact. The quiet part spoken aloud is evinced by their actions: They are leaving Israel em masse. Tel Aviv’s Ashkenazi elite dispatch their children to live abroad. They detest the religious zealot death cults arrayed as agents of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories.

The liberal elites of the Zionist state are mortified by the religious right. Why? The authoritarian lunatics are a glaring emblem of the true character of the state. Liberal Zionists shunt from their conscious minds the reality that they are complicit in the crimes by which the Zionist ethnostate was conceived and the awareness of the nation’s right-wing authoritarian death cultists are the inevitable embodiment of the state itself.

This is the unspoken consequence of Israel’s crimes against humanity; withal, an ugly minded citizenry dwelling in a nation in which its very psychical architecture is a litany of lies.

Untitled (1985; Poland) by Zdzislaw Beksinski

By repressing our reactions to the basic ugliness of simple details, like ceilings, by denying our annoyance and outrage, we actually encourage an unconsciousness that estranges and disorients the interior soul.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction

With Hillman’s insight in mind gaze upon the hideous, ad hoc, hyper-commercialized griftscape of the US: the nation’s collective mode of mind is manifested in the extant wasteland, and is embodied by the shambling, crass, decaying-before-our-eyes figure of Donald J. Trump.

The president’s brain has turned into rancid guacamole. Moreover, as an analog of the nation’s decline, Trump’s pronounced physical infirmities and florid mental decay have become a form of public spectacle.

Trump:

They have Jasmine Crockett — a low IQ person. AOC is low IQ. Have her pass the exams I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. They’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. The first couple questions are easy — a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe …

Donald Trump cannot cover up all signs of decay and decline by indulging in his Versailles-adjacent rampage of theWhite House’s structure and decor, all in an attempt to cover up his Dime Store-level, located in a decaying strip mall, brain.

From the US griftscape rises the president as grifter.

From Wounded Knee, My Lai, Fallujah, and slaughtered-at-sea Venezuelan fishermen…rise US mass shooters; from the true believer lunacy of 18th Century tent-revivalist, religious zealots…rise present day, authoritarian, gun-worshipping, counterfeit Christians convinced their right-wing interpretation and governmental enforcement of Biblical laws will cause a New Jerusalem to rise from the crushed-to-compost republic beneath the feet of their trooping legions of Christian-nationalist zealots.

depth is afforded by the surface, that is: the world is aesthetic presentation

[…]

To walk right by an ill-designed building, be served and accept poorly prepared food, put on your body a badly cut and badly sewn jacket, to say nothing of not hearing the birds, not noticing the twilight, is to ignore the world. This state of ignorance, this anesthesia is largely the modern human condition,
— James Hillman, City and Soul

On display at MAGA rallies and Christian-nationalist megachurches we are witness to staged spectacles in which beauty has been all but banished. In Trump’s White House assault on the senses — by being pummeled by crass — we are buffeted by the aesthetic equivalent of pussy-grabbing.

Grandeur is Beauty’s eternal dance with Time while grandiosity is but mental vapor in air.

Trump is acting as a vessel of God only if the god in question is the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics i.e., the ruling god of fascists e.g., “The Thousand-Year Reich” lasted a grand total of 12 years. The MAGA manifestation of end-stage empire embodies the permanence of Trump devoured Big Mac engendered flatulence.

Ugliness turns us inward, away from the world [while, conversely] “beauty…returns our longing to this world.”
— James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World

An example of the latter (“beauty…returns our longing to this world.”) Palace of Justice by Mecanoo, Córdoba, Spain

Soul flees when power besotted men evince an obsessive drive for total dominance over beauty. Moreover, there is a festering rot raging at the core of this vanity-blotted maniac as he revels over the destruction of the natural order of earthly conditions that allowed for the rise of — and is essential for maintaining human existence — on the planet:

“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

Are you feeling demoralized by the raging fuckwit forced upon us by the Empire Of Soul-Defying Fuckery? From the right we are slagged as a feckless “leftard” from the liberal class we are shunned for being a denizens of the “dirtbag left.”

First, in regard to the latter: Dirt holds nutrients that sustain life on land. No wonder the sterile of ideas/desiccated of mind liberacrats of the Democratic Party bandy the ad hominem at those of us who notice their fecklessness borne of corruption. Embrace the term. Their reeking status quo is the compost wherein a new political ecosystem can grow and flourish. The beauty of this world rises from the dirt of the breathing earth.

Regarding being perpetually pummeled into despair inflicted by feelings of powerlessness by the total dominance of capitalism and the soul-defying systems legion of rightwing bullyboy enforcers, from lowly, online rightist grifters and shitposters to ICE/militarized police state thuggery, James Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology counsels:

As long as we are caught in cycles of hope and despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.

Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through til it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants. So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.

So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.

Few things are uglier than a flagrant lie. For example, Zionist origin stories that erase the very existence of the Palestinian people; and the noxious mythos of Christian-nationalist that warps the figure of Jesus Christ into an emblem of hyper-authoritarian tyranny and fastbuck grifting; then there is, every hate-rancid word uttered by Steven Miller and the jingoist palaver spewed by Pete Hegseth.

Conversely, beauty broods like a dreaming seed in the hearts of those driven to risk calling out the false mythos churned out by domination-driven power. Hence we come upon the reason that resistance to violence waged against Gaza, Venezuela, and upon human beings slandered as “illegals” stands at the heart of things.

The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality. The world is now the subject of immense suffering, exhibiting acute and crass symptoms by means of which it defends itself against collapse.
— James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World

The Face of the City by Zdzislaw Beksinski

Speaking of manic defense:

We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning…
— Donald Trump

At present, lies of the authoritarian mind are the dominating force of US political life because they are the last barriers, albeit shoddy, of defense erected against the knowledge of their (self-inflicted) undoing.

Grandiosity becomes the stuff of dust. If there was an honest Christian or Tanakh-true Jew in their authoritarian klavern they would admonish their fellows thus:

“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” Ecclesiastes 1:2

“He that loveth silver [or cryptocurrency scams] shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase. This is also vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 5:10

In essence, the agendas of Trump and his gallery of hyper-obsequious, human testicle cozies, as well their schemes involving total dominance, are vapor in regard to the vastness of life. They will evaporate in the freedom of air.

In time, their obsessive, all-consuming agenda of total control and absolute power will be the very vehicle of their undoing.

In diametric opposition, the wounded dreams of the afflicted will create the living architecture of the order to come.

Linxia National Grand Theater by DUTS design, Gansu, China

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.