Chomsky Canceled, Eisenhower Stays: How the Left’s Cancellation Criteria Hurts Them

Bruce E. Levine

 August 12, 2026

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Photograph Source: Department of the Interior. National Park Service. National Capital Parks. – Public Domain

What sins can and cannot be forgiven?

Earlier this year, the organization Americans Who Tell the Truth (AWTT) announced, “Taking Down Noam Chomsky’s Portrait,” literally canceling Noam Chomsky from its portrait gallery. This is no surprise. It is a surprise that AWTT deems Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA coup-approval sins to be forgivable, and he remains worthy of an AWTT portrait. Furthermore, AWTT inconsistently applies its “Chomsky cancellation criteria” by continuing to display portraits of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Mark Twain; and AWTT gives the Left’s harshest indicter of Chomsky, Chris Hedges, a pass for his very different sins, and his portrait remains.

AWTT is a nonprofit organization founded in the wake of the Bush/Cheney administration’s lies about the reasons for attacking Iraq. AWTT’s website states that “The organization is dedicated to promoting civic engagement, social justice, democracy, and environmental stewardship” and its “portraits and narratives highlight citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness.”

Earlier in 2026 in CounterPunch, I detailed Noam Chomsky’s personal failings with regards to sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein (“Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky, Sexual Predator Associations, and Legacy Twists”), and I will return to what is fact versus conjecture. But even the most damning speculation about Chomsky’s state of mind does not rise to the disgracefully damaging orchestrations and actions by Eisenhower, whose portrait AWTT maintains.

Apparently, Eisenhower gets his portrait because of one truth that he uttered in his January 1961 farewell address, warning against the influence of the military-industrial complex, however, while in office, Eisenhower unleashed CIA coups against democratically elected governments.

As most CounterPunch readers know, Eisenhower approved the coup in Iran in which the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed from power and replaced by the Shah. In 1953, Eisenhower gave presidential approval for Operation Ajax, the very first CIA coup. That coup led to the dictatorship by the Shah, which ultimately led to the 1979 Iranian revolution, followed by an oppressive theocracy. All this suffering can be traced back to the CIA coup which Eisenhower approved.

Eisenhower also approved of the first CIA coup in Latin America in Guatemala in 1954 (the U.S. had intervened in Latin America many times before 1954, but those earlier interventions were not CIA-orchestrated coups). Similar to Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz wanted Guatemalans rather than foreign corporations to benefit from their own country’s wealth, and Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow Arbenz. And then in 1959, before he left office, Eisenhower approved the CIA plan to invade Cuba. Thanks to Eisenhower, CIA coups against democratically elected governments around the world that were unfriendly to U.S. corporations were normalized in U.S. foreign policy.

Now compare Eisenhower’s sins to those of Noam Chomsky.

The facts tell us that Chomsky had a stupid and embarrassing friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. However, neither AWTT nor even Chomsky’s harshest critics such as Chris Hedges accuse Chomsky of himself being a sexual predator.

As I note in the earlier CounterPunch article, just as Malcolm X’s biographer Manning Marable tells us that Malcolm X should have known that Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam—who the African American Historical Society reports “impregnated seven women, including several of his teenaged secretaries, and fathered thirteen children outside of his marriage”—was a sexual predator and a monster, Noam Chomsky should have known that Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator and a monster. However, in contrast to what Marable and many of us conclude about Malcolm X—who I am happy to see AWTT also celebrates as a truth teller—Chris Hedges concludes that Chomsky not only should have known the truth of Epstein, but he did know and “he did not care”; however, this is speculation, not fact, about Chomsky’s state of mind.

Hedges himself is celebrated in the AWTT portrait gallery, despite the fact that in the New Republic in 2014, journalist Christopher Ketcham documents Hedges’s plagiarism (“The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer Winner. Lefty Hero. Plagiarist.”). Five days after this exposé was published, the New Republic published Hedges’s response to Ketcham’s charges, which were followed by Ketcham’s and the New Republic’s disputations of Hedges’s response. As far as I know, none of the parties have filed libel suits; however, from this exchange, if I were on the jury, I would find Hedges not only guilty of plagiarism but dishonest in his attacks on Ketcham and the New Republic.

AWTT also celebrates Muhammad Ali—whom I greatly admire as a truth teller. However, worse than Chomsky, Ali maintained his relationship with sexual predator Elijah Muhammad after the ugly realities of Elijah Muhammad were publicly exposed by Malcolm X; and then Ali abandoned his friend Malcolm X after Malcolm X was driven out of the Nation of Islam, an abandonment for which Ali ultimately stated he regretted.

Given the AWTT’s rationale for the cancellation of Chomsky, it is also curious that it celebrates Mark Twain who had, as Linda Simon in the Paris Review described in 2017, a “disturbing passion for collecting young girls”—age ten to sixteen whom Twain called his “angelfish.” This passion is further detailed in Ron Chernow’s 2025 biography of Twain in which Chernow concludes, “Twain pursued teenage girls with a strange passion that, while it always remained chaste, is likely to cause extreme discomfort nowadays. . . . What made the angelfish obsession so disturbing was the strange intensity of his involvement with the girls.”

Neither Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Mark Twain, nor Noam Chomsky have been accused of being sexual predators, and they, along with Chris Hedges, can all be celebrated as “truth tellers” in many areas. However, all are personally flawed, as are damn near all human beings; as all human beings have emotional and ego needs that can result in embarrassing errors in judgment.

Why does the cancellation criteria of AWTT—and much of the Left—trouble me? I have seen how the criteria of a specific type of personal failing that is inconsistently applied while ignoring horrific policies and actions—as in the case of Eisenhower—has diminished the number of Left activists. I’ve talked with many young people who greatly value social and economic justice but tell me that they avoid public life and activism rather than subjecting themselves to Left cancellation humiliation for a poor judgment in their personal life. In simplest terms, they are reluctant to join a team that is so unforgiving for personal failings and which is inconsistently and unfairly punitive. The resulting shrinking Left activism has been useful for the Right, authoritarianism, and Trump insanity, which have been met by relatively weak resistance. And so an already unjust and dehumanized society has grown increasingly more so.

Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (2022). His Web site is brucelevine.net

D.C. Under Siege: One Year of Military Occupation

Olivia DiNucci

 August 12, 2026

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Image by Brendan Beale.

One year ago, the Trump administration brought 800 National Guard troops to occupy the streets of Washington, D.C., part of the “Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” There are now approximately 5,000 troops from 15 states deployed here, with some officially moved in and set to stay through 2029.

This does not include the alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies swarming our neighborhoods across the city, from ICE to the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, Park Police, and more.

The National Guard can be found meandering around metro stations, museums, and grocery stores there for mere posture. Despite crime being down before they were deployed here. A new analysis from the Center for American Progress found the Guard deployment has not had a measurable impact on violent crime. They are not even trained in “civilian policing,” and are unable to make actual arrests.

“This was never about reducing crime, especially not violent crime,” said Chandler Hall, who wrote the study. “This has been a show of force without any evidence to bear that it’s actually working.”

The cost of the Guard is estimated at $3 million a day, with some troops said to make close to $9,000 a month, including salary, lodging, and food per diem. It is hard to track the multi-year total in billions of dollars as the administration is far from transparent with the process.

The wasteful spending from the Department of War is unsurprising. Despite the Pentagon never passing an audit, the Department of War’s proposed budget is record-breaking at $1.5 trillion for one year and does not include the recent billions for the Iran war and additional billions to Israel to further the genocide in Gaza and ongoing destruction in Lebanon.

Some of the reasoning for more troops in D.C. was for the Freedom 250 nationalism events, beginning with a UFC fight, State Fair, and 4th of July festivities, all of which were disastrous, from cancellations, evacuations, and heat strokes to stage parts falling, nearly killing performers. The millions of dollars that went into these spectacles strained the local community. On July 4, my friend Nicky, a 71-year-old EMT, worked an 18-hour double shift for $27 an hour while constant military flyovers cost over $1.2 million.

Karen Degraphenreid, a veteran of the US Air Force as a Major of 10 years, got involved with Free DC when the military occupation in D.C. began. She describes her reflections from her time overseas to experiencing the guard takeover here at home.

“Washington is the only place in the country where more than 700,000 American citizens can have troops deployed to their streets by leaders they have no voting representation in choosing. We pay federal taxes, serve in the military, and fulfill every obligation of citizenship, yet Congress can override our local government and impose decisions that fundamentally reshape life in our city. That reality forced me to reconsider what ‘protection’ actually means,” she said.

“Many of my neighbors never asked for soldiers outside their neighborhoods. Many openly opposed their presence. To them, the deployment did not feel like reassurance. It felt like a federal government exercising power over a city that has long been denied full democratic self-government.

And that realization led me to a question I had never seriously asked during my years in uniform.

If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities? When we said we were bringing security and stability, did they experience it as protection? Or did they see armed strangers exercising power over places that belonged to them?”

Karen is also a member of Common Defense, which holds trainings for veterans to verbally confront the National Guard. Other veterans are speaking out to encourage their fellows and active-duty members to do the same. Groups like About Face have been welcoming anti-war veterans to become more organized for years, many of whom were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are actively opposed to the genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran.

At a press conference commemorating one year of the occupation, Luke Filomena, a registered nurse with National Nurses United, expressed the imperialist boomerang we are all witnessing

“I’ve seen this administration and every administration prior instead choose to spend hundreds of billions, now trillions of dollars, yearly, to go towards countless amounts of death and destruction through endless imperialist wars overseas and the funding and arming of a genocide in Gaza. I’ve been forced to watch as hospitals filled with patients and fellow healthcare workers, as well as schools filled with children, are indiscriminately bombed in Gaza and in Iran, and as the U.S. blockade of Cuba leaves hospitals without fuel and supplies to power lifesaving medical equipment and provide care for their patients.

Over the past year, under the Trump regime, we’re now seeing the imperialist boomerang come back, with its sights locked on the black, brown, and immigrant communities here in D.C.; those who I see each day at the bedside,” Filomena explained.

It’s one thing to be aware of connecting the dots, and it’s another to act on it. D.C. has been public about its opposition to the military takeover of the city. When the occupation first launched, we disrupted Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s photo op at Shake Shack in Union Station. A month later, Trump and almost his entire cabinet went out to dinner at a restaurant near the White House, and we disrupted it, chanting “Free DC, Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.” We later drowned out a public appearance by Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and hundreds of National Guard at Malcolm X Park.

Opportunities to confront the administration are rarer than daily encounters with the Guard. The same week budget cuts to SNAP were being discussed in Congress, I asked a group of troops, who often appear to be aimlessly wandering our neighborhoods in groups of four, if people in their communities would be hit by this. I’ve asked them if they know their neighbors and what services they could use and be funded versus them being deployed here to hang outside of a convenience store. When the forest fires created thick smoke across D.C., I asked why they were here and not putting out the fires.

In these conversations, they almost always nod their head and reach for their pamphlet, telling me and others who confront them to contact their supervisor. They come from states from Mississippi to Michigan, and there have been state-by-state campaigns to get the guard to go home. Many of them are here voluntarily, not simply “following orders” as we are led to believe.

While we have 800 military bases abroad, the war economy is inescapable for most people within the United States as well. The predatory trap the military-industrial complex has on young people of color or those in poverty means they are heavily recruited to join the various branches of the military. The increased amount of data centers across the country is also making the war economy ever more apparent.

But the state can’t use the excuse of job creation anymore. The Climate and Communities Institute shows us that employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades, from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred despite Pentagon budgets rising 22 percent over the same period (not accounting for inflation costs). The alternative is a care economy, a system of paid and unpaid labor, services, and relationships that support human health, well-being, and daily life, that moves away from dirty, violent jobs that rely on weapons manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry.

We cannot normalize troops on our streets. But we must address the roots that cause normalization. We’ve been taught to salute combat veterans for their service no matter their history, discounts for military personnel, and TV shows and Hollywood movies glorifying lower-level cadets to high-ranking commanders. While militarized superheroes are a common staple in U.S. popular culture, teachers are buying their own school supplies for their classrooms, social workers have overwhelming caseloads, EMT’s are working overtime while underpaid, and many veterans are unhoused or waitlisted at the VA.

Washington, D.C. does not need occupation; it needs fair representation. We don’t need billions of dollars going towards policing our neighbors and militarization of our streets to make our communities safer – we need housing, education, healthcare, and a commitment to climate justice for true national security. In the meantime, we have only seen our community grow stronger to protect each other–more trainings, skill-sharing, documenting, court support, fundraising, and more. Every day we are supporting each other by radically building community through getting to know our neighbors more deeply in real life.

Olivia is CODEPINK’s DC Coordinator, who seeks to build and bridge connections from issues to people. She came to this work after living and working abroad as an experiential learning facilitator with college students. She is active in arts and creative communities, direct action, and building out more local to global solidarity in DC through deepening and weaving relationships.

 

Ukraine hits Russia with hundreds of drones, Moscow warns even bigger missile salvos on the way

Kyiv launched more than 450 drones at 16 Russian regions overnight on August 10, striking a major petrochemical complex and an oil refinery in Tatarstan, as Russia signalled plans to more than double the size of its missile barrages. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 11, 2026

Ukraine launched a barrage of more than 450 drones against Russia overnight on August 10, targeting 16 regions and occupied Crimea in one of its deepest and broadest strikes of the war, as Moscow's own military signalled it plans to sharply scale up the missile salvos it fires at Ukraine in return.

The tit-for-tat missile war continues to steadily escalate as both combatants attempt to criple the other’s economy. The drones struck the Nizhnekamsk industrial hub in Tatarstan - some 1,300 km from the Ukrainian border and home to one of Russia's largest petrochemical complexes - hitting the Taneco refinery and the Nizhnekamskneftekhim (NKNK) synthetic rubber plant, Kyiv Independent reported. Tatarstan officials said the strikes killed at least 12 people and injured 39; Russia's defence ministry claimed it intercepted 456 drones overnight.

A separate strike hit the central gas fractionation unit at the ZapSibNeftekhim petrochemical plant in Tyumen region, more than 2,000 km from the border - which converts liquid gas mixtures into petrochemical feedstock - Ukraine's General Staff said, Kyiv Independent reported separately. A fire was also reported at a Russian oil refinery more than 6,000 km from Ukraine, underlining how far Ukraine's long-range drone campaign against Russia's war-economy energy infrastructure now reaches.

The campaign continues to hit civilian retail infrastructure alongside energy targets: drones struck a Wildberries logistics terminal covering 156,000 square metres in Novaya Usman, Voronezh region, in the latest of some 20 strikes in two weeks on the retailer's warehouse network. Staff were evacuated and no casualties were reported, the company's press service said.

The scale of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign is now colliding with Russia's own missile escalation. Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told the Associated Press that Russia can currently fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic missiles and is working to more than double that to 200, without giving a timeline. Russia fired a total of 900 cruise and ballistic missiles at Ukraine in 2025, but has since massively ramped up its missile production capacity  - doubling the output and production is currently running up to 40% above target, according to the Russian press.

Brovdi called the planned expansion one of Ukraine's most exposed vulnerabilities, given Kyiv's shortage of interceptors for the Patriot systems that are its only defence against ballistic missiles - a shortfall IntelliNews has reported has left Kyiv scouring global stockpiles for replacements.

Ukrainian military intelligence separately says a North Korean ballistic missile unit has taken up positions in Russia's Voronezh region, near Ukraine's Luhansk border, with six launchers and around 120 KN-23/KN-24 missiles; Russian forces have already received roughly 40 of them, according to intelligence spokesperson Andrii Cherniak. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Moscow is also seeking a further 30,000 North Korean troops, deepening a military partnership Kyiv fears will keep growing as Russia's own missile-production lines struggle to keep pace with the war's demands  that has left Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy souring the world, looking for more.

Together, the two trends - Ukraine's drones reaching ever deeper into Russian territory, and Russia moving to more than double its own missile-salvo capacity while leaning further on North Korean ballistic missiles – have fuelled an escalating, mutually reinforcing campaign against each side's war-supporting infrastructure, with neither side yet showing signs of pulling back.