Build a Majority for Palestine

By Norman Finkelstein

May 10, 2024

Source: Jacobin




Holocaust scholar and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein expresses his support for the student protests, insisting on the importance of free speech and uniting the majority of Americans around solidarity with Gaza.

On April 21, 2024, Holocaust scholar and prominent pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein visited the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Finkelstein expressed his support and admiration for the student protesters, urging them to focus on bringing in the widest possible constituency into the Palestine solidarity movement and insisting on the vital importance of free speech and academic freedom for the Palestinian cause. We reprint his remarks here; the transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I don’t want to claim any kind of expertise, and I have to always be careful of appearing to be condescending or patronizing, or [claiming to be] all-wise in these matters. I would simply say, based on my experience, the most important things are organization, leadership, and having clear objectives.

Clear objectives means basically two things. One is slogans that are going to unite and not divide. In my youth, when I was your age, I was what was called back in the day a “Maoist” — a follower of Chairman Mao in China. One of the slogans that was famously associated with him was “Unite the many to defeat the few.”

That means, at any juncture in the political struggle, you have to figure out how you can unite the many and isolate the few with a clear objective in mind. Obviously, you don’t want to unite the many with a goal or objective that is not your objective. You have to figure out, having your objective in mind, what is the slogan that will work the best to unite the many and defeat the few?

I was gratified that the movement as a whole, shortly after October 7, spontaneously and intuitively grasped, in my opinion, the right slogan: “Cease-fire now!” Some of you might think, in retrospect, what was so brilliant about that slogan? Wasn’t it obvious?

But in fact political slogans are never obvious. There are all sorts of routes and paths and byways that people can go down that are destructive to the movement. It wasn’t a leadership decision, I don’t think; it was a spontaneous, intuitive sense by the protesters that the right slogan at this moment is “Cease-fire now.”

I would also say, in my opinion, the slogans have to be as clear as possible, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, which can be exploited to discredit a movement. If you take the history of struggle, there was the famous slogan going back to the late 1800s, “The eight-hour working day.” It was a clear slogan.

More recent, in your own living memory — for all the disappointments, in my opinion, of the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy — one of the geniuses of his candidacy, because he had forty or fifty years of experience on the Left, [was the slogan] “Medicare for all.” You might think, what’s so smart about that slogan? He knew that he could reach 80 percent of Americans with that slogan. He knew that “Abolish student debt” and “Free college tuition” would resonate with a large part of his potential constituency.

He didn’t go beyond what was possible at that particular moment. I do think he reached what we might call “the political limit.” The limit at that point in his candidacy was probably jobs for all, public works programs, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, abolish student debt, and free college tuition. Those were the right slogans. It may seem trivial, but it really is not. It takes a lot of hard work and sensitivity to the constituency that you’re trying to reach to figure out the right slogans.
Free Gaza, Free Speech

My own view is that some of the slogans of the current movement don’t work. The future belongs to you guys and not to me, and I’m a strong believer in democracy. You have to decide for yourselves. But in my view, you have to pick the slogans which are not ambiguous, leaving no wiggle room for misinterpretation, and which have the biggest likelihood at a given political moment of reaching the largest number of people. That’s my political experience.

I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech” — that should be the slogan. Because I think, on a college campus, people have a real problem defending the repression of speech.

In recent years, because of the emergence of the identity-politics, cancel-culture ambiance on college campuses, the whole issue of free speech and academic freedom has become severely clouded. I have opposed any restrictions on free speech, and I oppose the identity-politics cancel culture on the grounds of preserving free speech.

I’ll say — not as a point of pride or egotism or to say “I told you so,” but just as a factual matter — in the last book I wrote, I explicitly said that if you use the standard of hurt feelings as a ground to stifle or repress speech, when Palestinians protest this, that, or the other, Israeli students are going to use the claim of hurt feelings, pained emotions, and that whole language and vocabulary, which is so easily turned against those who have been using it in the name of their own cause.

That was a disaster waiting to happen. I wrote about it because I knew what would happen, though obviously I could not have predicted the scale after October 7. But it was perfectly obvious what was going to happen.

In my opinion, the most powerful weapon you have is the weapon of truth and justice. You should never create a situation where you can be silenced on the grounds of feelings and emotions. If you listened to [Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s] remarks, it was all about hurt feelings, feeling afraid. That whole language has completely corrupted the notion of free speech and academic freedom.

You now have that experience, and hopefully going forward that language and those concepts will be jettisoned from a movement that describes itself as belonging to a leftist tradition. It’s a complete catastrophe when that language infiltrates leftist discourse, as you are seeing now.

I’m going to be candid with you, and I don’t make any claim to infallibility — I’m simply stating based on my own experience in politics: I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your being manipulatively misunderstood.

But when I was hearing that this slogan causes pain, anguish, fear, I have to ask myself a simple question. What does the slogan “We support the IDF” convey? The Israel Defense Forces, right now, is a genocidal army. Why are you allowed to have public support at this moment for a genocidal state and a genocidal army?

The language doesn’t seem as provocative — “We support the IDF.” But the content is ten thousand times more offensive and more outrageous to any, so to speak, civilized mind and civilized heart than the “From the river to the sea” slogan. The only reason there is an argument about that slogan — even though, as I said, I disagree with it, but that’s a separate matter whether I agree or disagree — is because we have legitimized this notion that hurt feelings are grounds for stifling speech. That to me is totally unacceptable; it’s wholly alien to the notion of academic freedom.

Some of you might say, that’s a bourgeois notion, it’s socially constructed, and all that other crap. I don’t believe that at all. You read the most eloquent defenses of unhindered, untrammeled freedom of speech by people like Rosa Luxemburg, who was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary individual and an extraordinary revolutionary. But being both did not mean she would accept any curbs on the principle of free speech, for two reasons.

Number one, no radical movement can make any kind of progress unless it has clarity about its goals and clarity about what it might be doing that’s wrong. You’re always engaging in course corrections. Everybody makes mistakes. Unless you have free speech, you don’t know what you’re doing that’s wrong.

Number two, the truth is not an enemy to oppressed peoples, and it’s certainly not an enemy to the people of Gaza. So we should maximize our commitment to free speech so as to maximize the dissemination of what’s true about what’s happening in Gaza — and not allow any excuse for repressing that truth.
What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

You’re doing ten thousand things right, and it’s deeply moving what you’ve achieved and accomplished, and the fact that many of you are putting your futures on the line is very impressive. I remember during the anti–Vietnam War movement, there were young people who wanted to go to medical school — and if you got arrested, you weren’t going to medical school. Many people struggled with the choice between getting arrested for the cause. It wasn’t an abstract cause — by the end of the war, the estimate was that between two and three million Vietnamese had been killed. It was an unfolding horror show every day.

People struggled with whether they would risk their entire futures. Many of you come from backgrounds where it was a real struggle to get to where you are today, to Columbia University. So I deeply respect your courage, your conviction, and every opportunity I have I acknowledge the incredible conviction and tenacity of your generation, which in many ways is more impressive than my own, for the reason that, in my generation, you can’t deny that an aspect of the antiwar movement was the fact that the draft lay on a lot of people. You could get the student deferment for the four years that you’re in college, but once the deferment passed, there was a good chance you were going over there and you were coming back in a body bag.

So there was an element of self-concern. Whereas you young people, you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the world. That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply inspiring.

With that as an introduction, to return to my initial remarks: I said any movement has to ask itself: What is its goal? What is its objective? What is it trying to achieve? A few years ago, “From the river to the sea” was a slogan of the movement. I remember in the 1970s, one of the slogans was, “Everyone should know, we support the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]” — which was not an easy slogan to shout on Fifth Avenue in the 1970s. I vividly recall looking at the rooftops and waiting for a sniper to dispatch me to eternity at an early age.

However, there’s a very big difference when you’re essentially a political cult and you can shout any slogan that you like, because it has no public repercussions or reverberations. You’re essentially talking to yourself. You’re setting up a table on campus, giving out literature for Palestine; you might get five people who are interested. There’s a big difference between that situation and the situation you’re in today, where you have a very large constituency that you could potentially and realistically reach.

You have to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message. I understand that sometimes a slogan is one that gives spirit to those who are involved in the movement. Then you have to figure out the right balance between the spirit that you want to inspire in your movement and the audience or the constituency out there that’s not part of the movement that you want to reach.

I believe one has to exercise — not in a conservative sense, but a radical sense — in a moment like this, maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?

Norman Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1987. He is the author of many books that have been translated into 60 foreign editions, including THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, GAZA: An inquest into its martyrdom, and most recently, I ACCUSE! Herewith a proof beyond reasonable doubt that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda whitewashed Israel. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It: Politically Incorrect Thoughts on Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom In the year 2020, Norman Finkelstein was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world.

Campus Protests Are Fighting Militarism and Corporatization at Home and Abroad

By Henry A. Giroux

May 10, 2024

Source: TruthOut


April 24, 2024 - Texas State Troopers are violently dispersing a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on the campus grounds of University of Texas at Austin. | Image credit: @RyanChandlerTV

Student protesters know the fight for Palestinian freedom requires resisting militarization and fascism at home.

The long-simmering crisis over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has reached a breaking point. Campus protests in solidarity with Gaza have erupted across North America, spanning at least 45 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico. Similar demonstrations have surged across Europe, including in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Additionally, expressions of moral outrage and solidarity have erupted in Central and South American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Cuba, as well as in Asia (including India, Indonesia and Japan), the Middle East (including Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Yemen), Africa (including South Africa and Tunisia), Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. Many faculty have protested alongside their students, and on May 8 a group of professors at The New School in New York City erected the U.S.’s first faculty encampment in solidarity with Gaza, signaling the growing momentum of the movement.

Meanwhile “Hands Off Rafah” rallies have drawn thousands into the streets, while a global day of mass protest is being planned for May 11.

No longer ripped from history, decontextualized, banished from public discourse and relegated to the sphere of silent questions and neglected connections, the horrors Palestinians have faced and are facing are writ large in all their brutality.
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Meanwhile, politics, collective agency and mass student resistance are being reimagined as supposedly democratic societies across the globe have embraced fascist responses to mass resistance. In the midst of the current protest movement, the historical, political, economic and cultural framing mechanisms that connect the current repression on campuses and the struggle for Palestinian rights have become more visible. What has also become more visible is the long history of the politics of disposability, a rising culture of violence against those considered other, and the transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporate power.

What must be extremely threatening to the far right and corporate media alike is that student protesters and their allies are clear about the connections between the issues of academic freedom, police violence, colonialism and human rights that they are raising — they are refusing to let these issues be separated in a fragmented, isolated, ahistorical and induvial fashion. In the manner of German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, the student protests are blasting “open the continuum of history,” rethinking it with fire.

While the issues of academic freedom, Palestinian rights, and the scourge of militarism and war are crucial issues for the students, they are not disconnected from the blight of neoliberalism and racialized state violence as fundamental elements of oppression. Hence, what the protests signify in the broader sense are new insights, new framing mechanisms, and a critical interrogation of history in order to avoid the protests and their call for a radical democracy from being spectacularized, depoliticized and torn from the history.

With the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, students are courageously protesting the indiscriminate and massive killing of women, children and civilians by the Israeli government — with more than 35,000 killed thus far. The student protests have called for a permanent ceasefire, recognition of a secure state for the Palestinian people and for universities to disinvest from industries that produce weapons of war, particularly for Israel. The protests have struck a nerve and awakened the need for rethinking the role of higher education in a time of tyranny and war.

University administrators, liberal and far fight politicians, the corporate media and right-wing billionaires have responded by disingenuously condemning the protests as “antisemitic,” claiming that the protests are the work of “outside agitators,” and those in charge have supressed student resistance with militarized force.

At first glance, this appears to be part of the usual self-righteous, smug and repressive strategy of diversion and blame. But there are deeper forces at work in the ideological and militarized responses by most of the universities where the campus protests are taking place. University presidents under pressure from powerful far right politicians and billionaires are increasingly relying upon the police to deal with acts of civil disobedience by student protesters who have set up campus tents in opposition to “the U.S.-backed Israeli military offensive in Gaza.” As of May 5, 2024, over 2,400 people have been arrested by police. Students as well as faculty have been assaulted by the police, zip-tied, hauled into buses and criminally charged for standing up for their beliefs.

As Tim Dickinson points out in Rolling Stone, it is alarming to see “rooftop snipers and militarized police subduing protesters.” He further notes:


The behavior of law enforcement has — once again — shined a stark spotlight on police brutality and disregard for First Amendment rights protecting freedom of assembly, speech, and the press. As cops have gone ham on protesters, and engaged in dubious mass-arrests, they’ve also roughed up journalists and even smashed college professors to the ground.

This type of indiscriminate violence against peacefully protesting students and faculty echoes what one would expect in outright fascist regimes. Historian Rick Perlstein astutely observes that military-like responses to campus protests today would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. He highlights some of the most egregious abuses against faculty members, underscoring their significance. In a piece for The American Prospect he writes:


At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.

Much of the response is an attempt to punish students for addressing what one might call one of the crucial moral and political issues of our time: freedom for Palestinians to determine their own political fate. At the same time, the repression signals to students that when free speech begins to hold power accountable, there are severe consequences, extending from suspensions, expulsions, loss of future job opportunities and even to potential arrest.

In this case, it becomes clear that the basic values often attributed to higher education as a social good — extending from teaching students how to be critical, informed, socially responsible, compassionate and engaged citizens — are viewed with disdain and subordinated to the repressive values and notions of learning aligned with the corporate university. These include viewing the world through normalized template of market values, embracing a cutthroat notion of competitiveness, defining the worth of a degree through commercial interests, disdaining any mode of learning not tied to future financial gain and disregarding connections between knowledge from larger social issues. This is a pedagogy of capitalist cloning buttressed by the threat of state terrorism.

In light of the student protests and the repressive response, the university’s reactionary neoliberal values and the pedagogical practices that enforce them have revealed the hollowness of the university’s claim to free speech and academic freedom, on the one hand. The protests also underscore the extent to which higher education has been corporatized and militarized. It is important not to forget, as the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee points out, that powerful corporate elites have little regard for higher education as a critical institution and public good, and “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”

Moreover, this attack on higher education is not only ideological but also, as we see with the campus protests, relies on the repressive militaristic institutions of the punishing state. What is often missed in progressive analyses of the protest movements is the interconnection between the corporatization of higher education and the current efforts to militarize it through outright suppression by the police and other forces of state repression.

There is a long history of increasing neoliberal influence on higher education, its alliance with the military-industrial complex, and its willingness to accept huge amounts of financial support from corporations serving defense industries. In fact, as I noted in 2007 when I published The University in Chains-Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, former President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous critique of the military-industrial complex originally included the term “military-industrial-academic complex” — the latter term he was persuaded to drop before his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961.


Education is increasingly seen as a target for suppression, not only by the far right but also by both political parties.

Since Eisenhower’s speech, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the U.S. has become increasingly militarized and policed. On the domestic front, police violence has escalated dramatically, especially with the relentless killing of Black and Brown people, the most notorious and public examples including the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. At the same time, higher education has increasingly aligned itself with the national security state, becoming a site of commerce, research for the Pentagon and a training ground for staffing innumerable intelligence agencies.

Since the 1970s, a form of predatory neoliberal capitalism has waged war on the welfare state, public sphere and the common good. The new mode of governance argues that the market should govern the economy and all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates untrammeled self-interest, unchecked individualism, deregulation and privatization as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale, and the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism. We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social costs, while policies that produce racial cleansing, militarism and staggering levels of inequality have become the organizing features of everyday life.

Largely defined as a workstation for training global workers and increasingly in need of funding, higher education — as John Armitage writes in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies — easily assumed the role of a “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory.” As public schools increasingly model themselves after prisons, becoming shooting galleries due to the prevalence of guns and military weapons in the U.S., higher education has further boosted its unholy alliance with the defense and intelligence industries, which largely served dominant state, military and corporate interests.

Under an austerity-driven neoliberal project, education has defaulted on its willingness to cultivate critical citizens essential for a democratic public sphere. In a broader perspective, education is increasingly seen as a target for suppression, not only by the far right but also by both political parties. Their aim is to reduce it to a mere appendage of the corporate and defense industries while imposing pedagogies of repression and conformity.

The current assault on higher education exemplifies how market values erode the public good and destroy any viable sense of higher education as a democratic public sphere. Operated as a business, higher education prioritizes profits over fostering an education that nurtures an informed and creative citizenry, forsakes democracy as a guiding principle, and reshapes higher education through what Wendy Brown in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, describes as “vulgar forms of marketization.”

Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education. This transformation has corrupted their mission, making them all the more susceptible to aligning themselves with anti-democratic forces of militarization. Actions by universities to stifle student protests and employ oppressive elements of the national security state must be understood against this backdrop. Viewed as guardians of the market, as vehicles to produce compliant workers for the neoliberal order, higher education institutions transform into right-wing indoctrination centers, they establish such educational institutions that play a formidable role in the ongoing militarization of U.S. society. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, in the face of campus protests, school administrators were all too willing to stifle dissent and employ the police to shut down peaceful protests.

The merging of neoliberalism, militarism and a politics of indoctrination pose a dire threat to higher education, academic freedom and democracy itself. What must not be forgotten is that the campus protests signify more than a struggle for Palestinian rights and freedom; they also represent a fight to reclaim higher education as site of democratization, a public good and a crucial civic institution where student voices can be heard, and where the dynamics of critical thinking, dialogue, informed judgment and dissent can take place without fear of repression.

It is worth remembering Martin Luther King,Jr.’s words composed in 1963 in which he stated: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” In the spirit of King’s impassioned words, higher education offers a crucial civic space for dialogue, critique, historical memory, the affirmation of mutuality and social responsibility. It is a space where the death of those considered disposable can be made visible and challenged, where the stories of the ungrievable can be told, and politics and pedagogy become a form of moral witnessing and empowerment.

The fight for Palestinian freedom cannot be separated from the challenge of building a multiracial working-class movement struggle against neoliberal capitalism, confronting the militarization of higher education and beating back an emerging fascist politics both at home and abroad.



Henry A. Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

What Happens When Universities Engage, Rather than Arrest, Gaza Protesters?

By Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan 

May 12, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!




What if universities negotiated with students engaged in Gaza solidarity protests, instead of calling the police to violently arrest them? A mass movement opposing Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has spread like wildfire this Spring. Student organizers have issued demands ranging from university divestment from companies profiting from the war on Gaza and from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, to the creation of Palestinian studies programs, and more. In most cases, sadly, officials have responded with brute force, calling in police and destroying encampments. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the deployment of the National Guard, while New Jersey Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer wants to get the FBI involved, The Intercept reports. Thousands of students and faculty have been arrested so far this Spring, with several seriously injured.

“We set up for seven days,” Rafi Ash, a student at Brown University, said on the Democracy Now! news hour, describing Brown’s Gaza solidarity encampment. “Disciplinary threats…really did not sway students,”Rafi, part of Brown Jews for a Ceasefire Now, explained. “We were able to force them to the table on Monday of last week, and that led to a multi-day negotiation process…we were able to actually push to force a vote on divestment, that’s never happened before at Brown, something that we’ve been pushing for for a long time.”

For many Brown students, the war on Gaza hit home last Thanksgiving, when a white man shot Brown junior Hisham Awartani, along with his two close friends, all Palestinian Americans, while they were taking a walk near Hisham’s grandmother’s home in Burlington, Vermont. Hisham was paralyzed.

Students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, also successfully negotiated with their administration. The Evergreen community has its own painful connection to Gaza. Rachel Corrie was an Evergreen student in 2003 when she traveled to Rafah, in southern Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli military Caterpillar bulldozer on March 16th, 2003, while non-violently defending a Palestinian home from demolition.

Alex Marshall, a graduating Evergreen senior, explained on Democracy Now! how that history influenced negotiations:

“She’s been gone for 20 years, but her memory lives on amongst the student body… I’ve read her emails to her parents in multiple classes that I’ve taken at Evergreen.”

Through negotiations, Alex summarized, “we focused on divesting from companies that are profiting off of Israel’s occupation of Palestine…they also agreed to release a statement calling for a ceasefire and acknowledging the International Court of Justice’s genocide investigation.”

At Rutgers, New Jersey’s main public university, students also achieved a negotiated settlement.

“It was a four-day encampment. As a result of our collective efforts, we were able to have the Rutgers administration agree to commit to eight out of 10 demands,” Aseel, a Palestinian student at Rutgers-New Brunswick with family in Gaza, said on Democracy Now!, using only her first name for safety reasons.

“We demanded [Rutgers] divest from Israel, from Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism,” Aseel explained. “We did get an agreement to have a meeting with the Joint Committee on Investments, with the Board of Governors, with President Holloway, for divestment…we had been asking for a meeting for five years, and we finally got one.”

Calls for a ceasefire are mounting, pressuring the Biden administration. Sadly, any negotiated ceasefire will be too late for many Palestinians in Gaza, where the official death toll approaches 35,000.

“Nearly a hundred of my [family] members were martyred,” Aseel said. “I still have family left. I am still in contact with them. But they are all displaced. Our family home is basically destroyed…The Gaza that I once knew is essentially gone. But I am more than confident, along with my family, that we will return and that we will rebuild it.”

While many Jewish students have participated in the Gaza protests, mainstream media outlets focus on Jewish students who are opposed, saying the protests make them feel uncomfortable or threatened.

Frederick Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University, responded on Democracy Now!

“Many people feel that when they hear views that they deeply disagree with, that’s threatening to them. That’s not how universities operate. You are not entitled to be intellectually safe. You are entitled to be physically safe.” Brandeis was founded after World War II in the wake of the Holocaust, and named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, known for his advocacy of free speech. Universities, Lawrence said, “exist for the purposes of creating and discovering knowledge.”.

Additional negotiated settlements have been announced at Pitzer College, University of California–Riverside, Sacramento State and Middlebury College. All these examples should be studied closely by university administrators, before they call in the police with their batons, rubber bullets, tear gas and handcuffs.

University Leaders Are in the Wrong. Students and Faculty Won’t Back Down.

Campus activism for Palestinian liberation won’t be halted by university administrators’ lawless crackdowns.

By Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem

May 12, 2024
Source: Truthout


USC Pro-Palestine encampement

The student encampment movement is expanding as faculty find new ways to intensify participation and solidarity. Teachers across the country are providing an example of how the wider community concerned about ending the assault on Gaza can do more than stand on the sidelines of today’s solidarity movement.

On May 8, faculty at The New School in New York City initiated the first faculty encampment. That action was taken as a rejoinder to the authoritarian overreach and sheer violence that has been unleashed on student protesters — at The New School, Columbia, City University of New York (CUNY), University of Texas Austin, New York University and numerous other campuses.

Participants in this first faculty encampment, and professors nationwide, are facing arrest along with their students, as they protest shoulder to shoulder with them and as they surround students, forming faculty shields, to protect them from police brutality.

The global betrayal of Palestine has emboldened the Israeli regime that is mass murdering and starving Gaza. Students across the globe have bravely answered the call of justice; they do what their silent-thus-complicit world and university leaders could not or simply did not do. University students have taken the leadership baton and are at the forefront worldwide demanding an end to the siege and to the brutalization of Palestine that has gone on far too long. And they are not backing down.

Starting on April 18 at Columbia University, college students came together in protest, an uprising that spread like wildfire, in a few days yielding more than 80 encampments in the U.S. A week later, on April 25, CUNY students joined the fray, setting up a smartly defined encampment at City College (CCNY). Its philosophical foundation was the set of five demands that hark back to a 1969 encampment at CCNY that similarly deployed a five-demand strategy.

These demonstrations of student leadership have been met with violent responses at many schools, including mine. On April 30, CCNY’s president invited New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in to demolish all the good work students had done; they roughed them up, arrested them and are apparently imposing disciplinary punishments. The NYPD broke their teeth, broke their bones and pepper-sprayed them. Some emerged needing hospitalization, and all were terrorized and traumatized. Still, students of CUNY and the world carry on, holding out in established encampments, commencing new ones on additional campuses, and, at CUNY, carrying on the fight. After criminalizing the students, criminalizing peaceful assembly, criminalizing free speech, criminalizing the language of justice and criminalizing the student demands, now the university misrepresents them in media coverage and institutional correspondence. In damage control mode, it claims the encampment posed a threat.

In lockstep with extremist Republicans and the legion of Democrats in political power, including the governor of New York and New York City’s law-and-order mayor, the university clamps down on students in a perfectly synchronized waltz with Fox News: Peaceful protestors are now “campus terrorists,” and the encampments are described not as antiwar or pro-Gaza but are instead inaccurately framed as “antisemitic.”

The final one-two punch? President Joe Biden broke his silence by condemning the wrong constituency, censuring not the violence of administrators and state agents but — perhaps following the lead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the unarmed civilians who were attacked, our students.

On the contrary, the student encampments have not posed “threats” to public safety — but university administrators are treating them as such because they are a threat to the continuation of a status quo in which U.S. institutions act in complicity with Israel’s ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza.

One of the criticisms that CCNY President Vincent Boudreau used to justify the dismantling of CUNY’s encampment was the claim that children were present. Some participants in the encampment brought their kids, and in fact there was an “arts corner” set up for them where they played. Far from a rationale to gut the encampment, isn’t it good for kids, in a society founded on democratic citizenship, to be exposed to free assembly in action? In other false justifications for the crackdowns, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has blamed everyone from “outside agitators” (referencing in one instance a woman who turned out to be a retired teacher who was inspired by the encampment and had stopped by) to faculty, whom he accuses of “radically indoctrinating” students (a claim Fox News wasted no time capitalizing on). As The Nation has reported, Adams claims there is “a movement to radicalize young people … a global problem” in which “young people are being influenced” by individuals he calls “professionals,” which includes faculty. For some time, the right has accused college faculty of not being teachers but indoctrinators. It is an absurd position, one perfectly aligned with MAGA’s gag order phenomenon, anti-knowledge “value” system and ongoing assault on humanities education.

What we’re seeing today is a clear rift among university leadership between authoritarian-style administrators and those who are either simply respecting the right to free assembly and expression, as at Harvard, or who are entering into genuine negotiations with students on their political justice demands. We’ve seen good work in this regard at Pomona College, Rutgers, University of Minnesota, University of California Riverside and Evergreen State College, among others. Though these negotiations do raise concerns about student demands getting whitewashed or watered down, still, where democratic process has been engaged rather than militant crackdowns students appear energized and hopeful.

This university leadership schism posed was illustrated in a nine-hour “discrepancy” at CUNY: NYPD entered and cleared the CCNY encampment, started beating up and arresting students and faculty, nine hours before the end time declared by the university.

CUNY therefore did not give students who wanted or needed it time to disengage; as a result, those with health issues, medication needs and/or children got caught in the crossfire. In a letter to the encampment, the CUNY chancellor had stated that: “We have … resolved that the encampment has to be dismantled by the beginning of classes on Wednesday” May 1 (typically 8 am). As reported by numerous credible sources: NYPD entered “around 11 pm” the night before — students say it was closer to 10:40 — and “by 12:30” had entirely leveled the encampment. (In a Town Hall on May 7, President Boudreau defended the action saying that “for 15 minutes” after entering, the police warned students to leave. Except that 15 minutes was patently not enough time, in a large space filled with people and because students had been told they had until the following day. What there would have been is much confusion.) One might argue that this time “mix-up” would have ensured the administration’s ability to discipline, punish and make “examples” of those students; it could be said that this would have allowed for the creation of a false narrative of student congregations as a priori threatening; and that, it might be suggested, could have been used to instantiate a de facto outlawing of assembly, expression and activism on college campuses.

Were students intentionally imperiled? Was there a mix-up between the police, campus security and administrators? Whatever it was, those “dirty” nine hours significantly heighten university culpability and reveal the university itself as the true threat, a threat to its students.

The fix was apparently in. Meanwhile, on the other coast, another fix was in. The nine-hour peremptory attack at CUNY was analogized by a five-hour delay in urgently needed protection for students under attack by pro-Israel vigilantes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Students there came under vicious assault the same day CUNY’s did: Vigilantes battered encampment participants senseless, aiming to inflict serious harm and, in some instances, endangering lives. This attack has not been claimed by any group, and there has been no official determination of its affiliation. However, the New York Times reports that videos reveal that many wore “pro-Israel slogans on their clothing” and played “music, including Israel’s national anthem, a Hebrew children’s song and ‘Harbu Darbu,’ an Israeli song about the Israel Defense Forces’ campaign in Gaza.” That mob has been called “counter-protestors.” This is a misnomer for they were not a protest group at all but more like militia, more like the group that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Five long hours passed before the vigilantes’ attack on students was stopped. Footage clearly shows campus security watching students being attacked and doing nothing to protect them.

Was it a staged “performance” by private security designed to appear random? “As of Friday,” three days hence, “no arrests had been made.” Learning of it, did the college fail to act, hoping it would end the encampment — and does this explain the “dirty” five hours?

Nine hours. Five hours. With nationwide student arrests now exceeding 2,500, is what we’re seeing here the new corporate, capitalist structure of university leadership? Persecute, then prosecute students, ask questions later? Use tradecraft of the historical despot to avoid lawsuits? Pile on to flagrant suggestions that protesting ethnic cleansing is “terrorism” — or, in GOP Senate candidate Steve Garvey’s non-word, “pro-terrorism”? Say students are “anti-democratic,” thus “un-American” because they peacefully demonstrated against war crimes carried out using weapons provided by their government and funded by their tax dollars?

We haven’t seen fascism of this magnitude since Elia Kazan testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. We haven’t seen student suppression this intense or sweeping since the era of COINTELPRO and Kent State.

Universities are supposed to fight police brutality, not unleash it on students — students, who at institutions like CUNY, are majority BIPOC. CUNY and other universities must actively repair the harm they and the police they invited in did to students and faculty. They must genuinely negotiate with students on their demands, honor students’ rights to free expression and assembly going forward, push to expunge criminal charges and halt their disciplinary tactics.

Faculty have a key role to play in this struggle to bring an end to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, which is now advancing further south, into Rafah. University teachers are writing collectively signed letters and petitions to administrators, summoning them to respect students’ rights to assembly, expression and activism, insisting they enter into good faith negotiations on student demands. They are galvanizing support in still more ways — by following the lead of The New School protesters and establishing more faculty encampments, by holding rallies and press conferences as public shows of support for students facing repressive violence, demanding that they be protected from criminal charges and disciplinary tactics, and insisting that protesters’ constitutional and lawful rights be respected going forward.

Students are not backing down despite all they are facing. And the faculty, inspired and emboldened by them, will not back down. We will not fail to support their critical justice efforts however we can.

The turn of the 21st century saw a sea change in university leadership, a decline in the true agency of faculty governance together with the appointment of folks from outside academia in key positions — as provosts, college presidents, deans. Before then, administrative posts were routinely filled by faculty. It is time to return to that historical prototype. We are prepared to sit in chancellors’ offices, in presidents’ offices, to “run this town.” We won’t let our universities violently violate and duplicitously fool students. We won’t let schools disown students and leave them to be mercilessly beaten. Let’s revolutionize the university by imagining and building free universities for all run by their faculties. We can put ourselves forward, strategically, for those appointments. And, more immediately, we can follow the lead of faculty who are holding classes now outside the institutional architecture, at the encampments.

By acting in solidarity with our peace-making, justice-seeking students, and by joining them in protest as the New School faculty has done, we can move the U.S. to act to end the genocide that is underway in Gaza, and lay the groundwork for democratic, equitable, ethical education for all.

The Real Reason the US is Invading Haiti

The US is moving forward with its plans to invade Haiti by way of a UN-backed police force led by Kenya. The intervention was postponed after Haiti’s unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned in March but CARICOM's recent appointment of a 'transitional council' has revived the plans. Dr. Jemima Pierre, Professor of Global Race in the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia and a member of Black Alliance for Peace, discusses Haiti’s newest puppet leaders and why foreign intervention is not the solution to the deepening crisis in the country.

By Jemima Pierre, Eugene Puryear , Rania Khalek 

May 12, 2024

Source: Break Through News

Surprising Rising Seas “Must Reads”

by Robert Hunziker / May 10th, 2024

Sea levels are surging along the US coastline, exceeding 30-year expectations. Scientists are confused, concerned, searching for answers.

In that regard, an excellent new series by The Washington Post d/d April 29th, 2024, “Must Reads” is an eye-opening view into the impact of global warming in real time with real people and real images. For example, it’s a quick fix for anybody who doubts human-caused climate change influence on sea level rise. It’s real; it’s happening now; it should be required reading for America’s Congressional climate deniers.

And required reading for 50 million Americans who do not believe in climate change/global warming, according to a new University of Michigan study. Meanwhile a diametrically opposing viewpoint: “Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds.” (Source: “World’s Top Climate Scientists Expect Global Heating to Blast Past 1.5C Target”, The Guardian, May 8, 2024.)

As a prelude to the 2024 elections, it should be noted: “When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January 2021, he left behind a record of environmental roll backs unrivaled in U.S. History.” Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook will do more: “MAGA Republicans Have a 920-Page Plan to Make Climate Change Worse”, Heatmap News, February 15, 2024.

Here’s the opening tickler for the thought-provoking “Must Reads” series: “This past week, The Post published the first two pieces in a new series showcasing an alarming phenomenon confronting tens of millions of Americans from Texas to North Carolina: The ocean is rising across the South faster than almost anywhere. In some communities, roads increasingly are falling below the highest tides, leaving drivers stuck in repeated delays or forcing them to slog through salt water to reach homes, schools, work, and places of worship. Researchers and public officials fear that in certain places, rising waters could periodically cut off residents from essential services such as medical aid.”

A 2023 Scientific American article: “U.S. Seas Are Rising at Triple the Global Average” conforms to the inescapable conclusion of a need for sirens and flashing red lights to signal the dangers imbedded in Must Reads: “Sea levels have surged along the coastlines of the southeastern United States, new research finds — hitting some of their highest rates in more than a century… the effect on communities near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean already are being observed.”

Alarmingly, sea-level rise of the Southeast and the Gulf already exceed scientific models projected for the next 30 years, prompting a mad scramble by scientists looking for answers to why sea levels are 30 years ahead of schedule. Nobody is braced for this happening so fast.

“The recent Journal of Climate study suggested that the increase may be driven by changes in a warm-water current passing through the Gulf of Mexico. And these changes may in turn be fueled by a recent slowdown in a major Atlantic Ocean current, driven by human-caused climate change.” (Ibid.)

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -NOAA– high-tide flooding along the Gulf and East coasts has increased considerably: High-tide flooding days are up 400% in the Southeast and 1,100% in the Gulf since 2000. It’s no wonder that property insurance premiums are spiking, and shorelines are slipping. It’s real; it’s happening now.

Solutions: Adapt to Sea Levels and Mitigate CO2 to Avoid Worst-Case

What to do: According to Sönke Dangendorf, an expert in coastal engineering at Tulane University and lead author of the new study: “We need to prepare for that: we need to adapt.” (Ibid.)

A new study authored by Lily Roberts at State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, “Increase in West Antarctica Ice Sheet Melting Inevitable in 21st Century” d/d January 26, 2024, emphasizes the necessity for adaptation measures to combat sea level rise: “The new findings paint a grave picture for the state of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We may now have limited capacity to stop ice-shelf collapse in the region and prevent meters of global sea-level rise. Experts are warning that policymakers should consider adaptation to sea-level rise a primary concern, as the window to safeguard the ice sheet from irreversible damage has probably now passed…. This new research paints a more realistic picture for the fate of Antarctic ice shelves and highlights the necessity for continued mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the worst-case ocean warming scenario, as well as the urgent need for prioritization of adaptation to global sea-level rise.”

Adapting to rising sea levels entails moving physical structures away from coastal areas exposed to loss of shorelines and building massive sea walls, begging the all-important question of whether it’s already too late to stop, full stop, greenhouse gas CO2 emissions produced by oil and gas companies, which, in turn, causes global warming and sea level rise. What to do and how soon to do it is a nagging issue that requires immediate attention at the highest levels. Unless, of course, people simply don’t give a damn and let the chips fall where they may, aka: “avoidance coping.”

Furthermore, compounding the issue for the US, it’s not only the Southeastern and Gulf coasts, but also happening in Maine: “What were once distant projections on TV and in newspapers have now made it to the doorsteps of thousands of coastal residents in Maine: sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, with some areas in the state experiencing water levels eight inches higher than what they were in 1950. Estimates show that sea level rise will only continue to accelerate in coming decades.” (Source: “Manomet Awarded New Funding To Study Sea Level Rise Impacts On Maine’s Coastal Communities”, The Manomet Team, January 25, 2023).

Humanity is smack dab in the early stages of a man-made climate crisis that’s just now starting to strut its stuff in open public The question remains whether a self-induced climate crisis can be self-reduced, but in all honesty and by all appearances, world leadership prefers to continue playing Russian roulette with a single round of fossil fuels. CO2 emissions are 76% of greenhouse gases that cause overheating of the planet, and CO2’s primary source is oil and gas production, which clearly presents the dilemma of all dilemmas.

What to do? And when is it too late? And is it possible to live without oil and gas production?

Humanity did live without oil and gas production for thousands of years pre-Colonel Drake’s heralded discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 (world population 1.2 billion at the time) that set the stage for a new oil economy. Going forward, can an overcrowding 8.1 billion world civilization exist without oil and gas production, and more importantly, can 8.1B survive with it?

It’s notable that climate scientists say halting CO2 emissions will slow the rate of increase of planetary heat. Thus, things can be done to alleviate the impact of global warming so that it’s not as horribly bad as it is without any mitigation whatsoever. Less horrible is good.

Meanwhile… HOUSTON — “Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing, and policymakers should abandon the ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.” (Source: “Saudi Aramco CEO Says Energy Transition is Failing, World Should Abandon ‘Fantasy’ of Phasing Out Oil”, CNBC News, March 18, 2024).

Really? Seriously? Amin who?

Because international oil and gas interests plan on increasing production, by a lot, which is accepted by world leaders with open arms, there’s no stopping a sure-fire rapid rate of sea level never witnessed before. The Global Oil and Gas Tracker claims: “Fourfold Increase in New Oil and Gas Fields to Push Climate Further From 1.5°C Pathway”.

Assuming all-above plays out as described, meaning oil and gas producers pump full-blast like psychopaths with a death wish, the only option left is building massive sea walls, re-introducing medieval fortifications throughout the world, a throwback to the 5th-14th centuries when horse-drawn four-wheeled carts and walking were the modes of transportation, thereby establishing Net Zero once and for all.

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Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

A Sick, Dystopian System Worth Overthrowing

BY PAUL STREET

 MAY 10, 2024
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Image by Clay Banks.

Many friends and allies, especially younger ones, have been getting The Lecture from older Democratic Party relatives or friends – the Lesser Evil Lecture.

This year the lecture comes not only with the admonition to hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden to get a second term to block the fascist monster Trump but also with the insistence or at least request that you not join in protests of Biden’s funding, equipping, and political, military, and diplomatic protection of Israel’s mass murderous and genocidal seven-month war on the people of Gaza. The lecturers say, “don’t come to Chicago to rise up in anger and cause chaos over Biden’s Israel policy when the Democratic Party meets to re-coronate him as their presidential nominee this August.”

A version of the lecture recently came in the form of a Guardian column in which the senior progressive Democrat and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich expressed his discomfort with how young people protesting Israel’s criminal US-backed war tell him that “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” Reich also recalled how antiwar protests Chicago during the 1968 Democratic national convention helped elect the vicious authoritarian and racist right-wing Cambodia-bombing president Richard Nixon.

Reich instructs young Americans that “a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump” and that “Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil.”

Don’t get me wrong. Robert Reich may have written a book with the dumbest title of all time – Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (that’s like saying “saving cancer for the common good”) – but Reich is no dummy. He was one of the earliest US political commentators to properly and serious identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist back in 2016.

Trump is in fact worse than Biden when it comes to one policy after another. They are both mad dog killers but Trump is a mad dog killer with rabies. He leads a movement for the implementation of Christian white nationalist neo-fascist governance within the US. (I’ve spilled a lot of printer ink on how this is true).

And it’s NOT just about domestic politics and policy. Trump is more strongly behind Israel’s genocidal policies than Genocide Joe, sick as that sounds to say. He would never as president threaten to withhold bombs from the Israel Defense Forces, as Biden has just (sort of) done under pressure from protests at home and abroad. Trump would never have tried to warn Israel against going overboard in Gaza, as Biden did right after the October 7 Hamas attack. Consistent with his promise to re-impose a Muslim travel ban and his opposition to the immigration of any refugees from Gaza, Trump applauds the slaughter of Palestinian families. He’d be perfectly happy to see the civilian death in Gaza hit half a million or more.

So why will I not join Reich in lecturing young folks on the need to hold their noses and vote “for” Biden, and cool their protest jets?

Eight reasons.

First, Reich’s admonition to vote for Biden holds practical relevance in just six or seven contested states. Under the archaic Electoral College, presidential elections are absurdly determined in just a small handful of states. How young folks vote or don’t will not change the outcome in most US states.

Second, the progressive/left reasons for refusing to hold one’s nose for Biden go beyond his abhorrent and central complicity in the Crucifixion of Gaza. Other grounds for refusing to make the lesser evil ballot punch include his provocation and fueling of a deadly imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, his lame response to the Christian fascist war on abortion, his signing off on expanded eco-cidal oil and gas drilling, his failure to confront deadly capitalist food and rent inflation, his failure to order the prompt prosecution and incarceration of Adolph Trump, and his reckless military provocation of China.

Third, the Lesser Evil habit is a disastrously slippery slope that has no clear limits as the whole US capitalist political and governance order moves ever more dangerously to the right. Is nothing out of Lesser Evil bounds? Many liberals and “progressives” seem ready to write the capitalist-imperialist Democrats a big blank check simply because they’re not the party of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump. Are there no red lines that the Weimar/Vichy Democrats must not pass without losing liberal and even “left” support? How about killing Single Payer health insurance, ripping up public family cash assistance, deregulating Wall Street, advancing racist mass incarceration, leading the charge for the corporate-globalist North American Free Trade Agreement, bombing Serbian civilians, and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through economic sanctions under Bill Clinton? How about re-murdering Single Payer, abandoning labor law reform, bailing out Great Recession-inflicting Wall Street overlords (while leaving working class Americans to drown), blowing up Libya, signing off on Guantanamo, giving George W. Bush a pass on torture, protecting a right wing fascist coup in Honduras, sponsoring and protecting an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, killing international binding climate emission agreements (in Copenhagen), crushing the Occupy Wall Street rebellion, lecturing Black people on respectable obedience, signing off on escalated North American oil and gas drilling (fracking included), setting new drone kill records, murdering US citizens with drones, rescuing the imperialist and corporatist warmonger Joe “We’d Have to Invent Israel if It Didn’t Already Exist” Biden from the ash heap of history, and more terrible to mention under Barack “The Empire’s New Clothes” Obama? How about fanning the flames of climate catastrophe, raising the threat of nuclear war to new levels, backing GENOCIDE in Gaza, and smearing peaceful anti-genocide protesters as violent antisemites under Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden?!

Seriously: are there no disqualifying red lines Democrats can cross in the view of the Lesser Evil lectures? At what point, if any, does the lesser evil become too evil?

Fourth, the horrific Democratic Party record partially related above, a reflection of the Democrats’ captivity and allegiance to US capitalism-imperialism, encouraged by lesser evilists’ absence of red lines, opens the electoral door to the Republi-fascist Party by demobilizing the Democrats’ voting base. The dismal Dems’ recurrent betrayal of their progressive-sounding campaign promises costs them millions of votes and helps create quasi-populist space for the Republi-fascists to exploit.

Fifth, the officially diverse and multicultural Dems’ captivity to concentrated capitalist wealth and power helps discredits and delegitimize not just the Democratic Party but “small d” democracy itself. That in turn encourages millions to embrace authoritarian white nationalist narratives on, and (fake) fascist “solutions” to, the numerous overlapping societal problems and crises that capitalism creates and that require big government response.

Sixth, I cannot in good faith encourage people to place their hopes for justice, equality, peace, environmental sanity, and popular sovereignty in voting under an electoral system like the one that reigns in the US. It is a savagely right-tilted Minority Rule regime in which the nation’s rightmost-/Reich-most regions, interests, and people are vastly overrepresented. This comes courtesy of the presidential Electoral College system, the absurdly malapportioned Senate, the undemocratically appointed Supreme Court, the gerrymandered US House and state legislatures, the excessive autonomous power of state governments (“states’ rights”), the absence of proportional representation, and the openly plutocratic and dark money campaign finance regime.

Seventh, as the Biden administration has shown, Democrats don’t really fight, much less crush fascism when they hold office. They conciliate it, keeping it alive with bipartisan compromises while fueling its fires and opening the door for its return to presidential power. So really, what’s the antifascist point of “vote blue no matter who”? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, we’d be in the last year of the first Trump administration right now. If Biden squeaks through for a second term, he’ll just be the kind of Weimar/Vichy POTUS who sets up a Republi-fascist presidential victory in 2028.

Meanwhile, regardless of which ruling class party or mix of ruling class parties holds sway in Washington, US capitalism-imperialism and the underlying world capitalist system are threatening the world with ever more imminent ecological and/or military destruction. Time is running out for us to save ourselves and decent lives/life on this planet with socialist revolution.

That’s my eighth reason for holding off on the lesser evil counsel this year. The clock on that shit has run out. I’m not going to vote-shame anybody for doing the Lesser Evil thing, especially if you live in a contested state. I get why many people will go there, actually, but you aren’t going to get Lesser Evil voting counsel from me at this point. It’s not how I want to focus folks’ energies at this stage of apocalyptic capitalism-imperialism.

The comedian Aamer Rahman said something powerful in London recently. He noted how white liberals are tensely saying this to Black and brown anti-genocide activists who can’t and won’t vote for Genocide Joe this year: “is that what you really want? You want Trump to come back? You want to Trump to win?…You think that’s a good idea? Cuz its’ your community that’s going to suffer if Trump comes back. People like you are going to suffer. What do you think of that?”

“What I want,” Rahman told his audience, “is for you to not lecture us on how to respond to a genocide you didn’t try to stop, okay? I think that a political system that ultimately makes you choose between genocidal dementia and cheeseburger-powered fake-tan Hitler is a system worth overthrowing, okay? Maybe that is the conclusion you should be coming to instead of lecturing Black and brown people on why they should worship the Democrats.”

Right on.

Even better are the words of on online friend the other day:

“We’re living in a sick, dystopian, Hunger Games world run by imperialists who are long past their use-by date and care nothing about humanity/planet. Look at the obscene Met Gala that took place the other night- celebrities, wealthy people dressed up in expensive clothing as the genocide in Gaza escalated. A ticket to that event was $75000. One woman’s dress was so complicated that she had to be carried up the steps into the building. Props to anti- genocide demonstrators who disrupted that event, making it clear to the world that it was an obscenity, in spite of violent police repression. Eric Adams, the pig mayor of NYC is the Black Guiliani- another pig who serves the interests of this system that needs to be dismantled and gotten rid of.”

Damn straight. That’s what I call telling it how it is.

We are long past revolution time. We need to catch up with our humanity and get serious cuz it’s like a couple German dudes wrote 176 years ago: its “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or the “common ruin of all.”

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).