Stephen F. Eisenman
October 10, 2025
Sue Coe, Terrible things are happening outside, 2025. Courtesy, the artist.
“First they came”
I always scoffed at “First They Came,” the often quoted, 1946 poem by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. There are several versions of it, but the best-known starts “First they came for the communists/And I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” Each of the following three verses names another target — socialists, trade unionists and Jews, until concluding: “Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.”
The poem suggests, wrongly, that “they” – the unmentioned Nazis – targeted everyone, not just communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews. (Niemöller should have added to the list queers, Roma, Slavs, and the disabled.) In fact, the Nazi regime made great efforts to placate the broad, middle and lower-middle class populace and increase its size. Nazism was aggressively pro-natalist, rewarding families that had many children, so long as they were the right kind. In addition, the secret Lebensborn (“fount of life”) program, established by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, supported unwed, supposedly “Aryan” mothers through their pregnancies and distributed the children to similarly racially elite, SS parents. The goals of these initiatives were eugenicist and militarist: the creation of a racially superior population and enough soldiers to forge and sustain a thousand-year Reich.
The Nazis, in other words, knew very well who they wanted to imprison or kill and who they wanted to protect or nurture, and the idea that they would inevitably “come for” someone not on their targeted list is mistaken. Niemöller’s poem is harmful because it suggests that anyone could be a victim of fascism when in fact only some are; protecting those in danger requires solidarity and entails risk. To the pastor’s credit, he openly opposed Nazification of the Protestant Church and was consequently cast into Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps. Much later, long after the Nazi defeat, pastor Niemöller was active in the anti-Vietnam War and anti-nuclear movements. His poem is therefore belied by his own life; he understood very well who were and who were not the likely victims of fascism and embraced the role of anti-fascist or “antifa” to use the shorthand beloved of Reichkanzler Trump, Reichsmarschall Hegseth, and Reichsministers Miller, Bondi, Patel, Holman, Noem, and Kennedy.
Carefully selected targets
Until about two weeks ago, the Trump administration carefully followed the script of “First They Came.” One by one, it targeted groups and individuals who might challenge the kleptocratic, neofascist state, confident that it could do so without significant resistance. First it was the special counsels and ombudsmen who policed federal agencies for corruption. Then it was the U.S. Attorneys and prosecutors whose job is to ensure that federal laws are faithfully executed, and violators punished. Following that, was the regulatory state. Even junior employees were fired if they worked for agencies – including EPA, Education, Justice, Treasury, HUD, Interior, and HHS – who might object to privatization, deregulation, and sleaze.
Then came the attacks on individuals and institutions of civil society. University presidents were dressed down by Republicans at congressional show trials. (It didn’t help that these leaders conceded error of which they were innocent.) Around a dozen college and university presidents have resigned in the face of administration, congressional Republican, or state Republican pressure. Other universities were forced to accept limitations on their institutional freedom or make cash payments (aka bribes) to continue to receive federal grants. Columbia coughed up $200 million. Many colleges and universities pro-actively limited student and faculty free-speech rights in the hope of avoiding government or conservative trustee sanction.
Law firms too have been targeted. Despite court rulings consistently affirming the right of attorneys to choose their own clients without fear of federal retribution, at least eight major firms – most notably Paul Weiss — acceded to Trump’s demands that they pay money or provide pro bono services in exchange for continuing access to lucrative U.S. government contracts. Other civil society organizations, including non-profits focused on women’s health, the environment, civil rights, immigration law, and fair housing, have had grants cancelled or awards rescinded. Many have changed their rhetoric and programs so as not to attract Trump administration ire. Entertainment companies and sports franchises have also bowed to Trumpian pressure to change programming or limit outreach to targeted communities, especially immigrants. The German word for such a coordinated pressure campaign, first used in 1933, is Gleichschaltung: bringing all institutions of state and civil society into conformity with Nazi ideology and practice.
By attacking each group — universities, law firms, non-profits, media companies — separately and in succession, the Trump administration has succeeded in keeping them isolated, unable to marshal the solidarity and collective strength available to them. To be sure, many of the richest and most powerful corporate heads and tech entrepreneurs – Elon Musk at Tesla, Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sam Altman at Open AI, Tim Cook at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Peter Thiel, and others – have welcomed Trump’s strong-armed interventions. They support technocratic Caesarism – rule by one or several tech and finance billionaires beholden to no one, and believe Trump is sympathetic to their goal, despite the president’s claim to speak for a broad, working-class MAGA base. Indeed, low-income Republicans have been assaulted by tariffs, elimination of green energy subsidies, and soon, cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, but their congressional representatives have registered no protest. They remain fully in Trump’s thrall. Small business leaders and professionals, harmed by the president’s tariff, deregulation, and immigration policies, have similarly remained quiet out of fear of reprisal.
Larger goals
Trump’s dismantling of democracy has been methodical and effective and has served his primary goal: self-aggrandizement. But the president’s most influential courtiers, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and J.D. Vance as well as the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute, have other ambitions, broadly consonant with the fascism of interwar Europe. Their goals are to:
1) Purify the body politic by the deportation or exclusion of non-whites.
2) Embed Christian nationalist ideology in government and educational institutions.
3) Broadcast and promote American exceptionalism.
4) Reject feminism, invigorate patriarchy, and denounce non-binary models of gender.
5) Insulate or protect the corporate elite from regulation, taxation, and organized labor.
6) End competitive elections. Vance whisperer Curtis Yarvin supports a monarchy. Marco Rubio’s former Director of Policy Planning, Michael Anton, prefers a Caesar.
7) Destroy the disinterested, professional, government bureaucracy, and slash spending on health, food, education, housing and environmental protection.
8) Revive the American empire by alignment with Russia (a racial comrade) and antagonism to China (a racial foe).
9) Buttress the Leadership cult: Trump als Führer. (This is Trump’s personal favorite.)
10) Welcome environmental catastrophe. Umberto Eco wrote: “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to death.”
Anybody who opposes these ten goals is anti-fascist or antifa; they are enemies of the regime.
Coordination interruptus
Buoyed by success, the Trump administration decided to press its advantage; Niemöller’s final stage of political capture — “then they came for me/And there was no one left” — is the order of the day. Having begun the work of Gleichschaltung mere months ago, the Trump regime now wants to foreclose democracy altogether — if not for a thousand years, at least beyond the 2026 midterm elections.
But the necessary work of coordination remains unfinished. Unlike Germany in 1933-34, the administration lacks SA or SS enforcers. ICE, FBI, and other federal forces – abusive and violent as they are — remain constrained by custom and law. The judicial branch of government is not yet fully co-opted, as indicated by the succession of lower court rulings barring immigrant expulsions, executive branch dismissals, and placement of federal troops in cities. While many of these decisions have been reversed by the Supreme Court, every defeat – even temporary — exposes administration weakness and invites resistance. Legislative opposition exists too, just not from Republicans. Democrats in Congress may be feckless, but they are large in number. Their size has prevented Trump from passing anything like the Enabling Act of 1933 that provided Hitler an easy glide path to authoritarianism. Civil society organizations, including wealthy, liberal-left foundations are also still functioning. Counter-hegemonic non-profits remain active and, in some cases, more energized than before. Most colleges and universities, and most law firms have not (so far) yielded to Trump’s threats.
While the mass media have long been colonized by conservative and even fascist provocateurs – Steve Banon, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Candace Owen, Jesse Wattters, Joe Rogan and many others – their reach is less extensive than it seems. Even the biggest outlet is small by historical standards. At the height of its popularity in the early 1960s, Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News” had 30 million viewers, or about 15% of the U.S. population. Today, Fox’s most popular conservative talk show, “The Five” has 3.5 million viewers, or just 1% of the population. Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast has 85,000 listeners per month. (Counterpunch has more than five times that number of monthly readers.) So far, the right has been unable to dismantle the left ecosystem of magazines, podcasts, and broadcasts. Mainstream TV hosts Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest may not be very “left,” but they are certainly oppositional. Colbert and Kimmel each have about 2 million nightly viewers. Given this ideologically fractured environment, the question arises: Has Trump’s effort at fascist coordination reached its apogee, and will it now begin to recede? Is this a case of coordination interruptus?
Whither NSPM-7?
On September 25, 2025, the White House issued a memorandum, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”. The document falsely asserts that there has been a dramatic upsurge in “violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.” The directive goes on to state: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” A previous Executive Order designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such group exists, and there is no legal category “domestic terrorist organization.”
Memorandum NSPM-7 then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (established in 1980 and led by the FBI) to investigate and prosecute political violence and its institutional or individual funders, as well as identify “any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.” Poor writing masks the author’s intentions here, but the memorandum proceeds to designate troubling “indicia”:
“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The vagueness of the targeting is breathtaking; it would be hard to find anybody who isn’t hostile – sometimes or always — to “traditional American values on family, religion and morality.” Isn’t that the topic of conversation or at least the undercurrent at most family dinner tables?
Though the memorandum doesn’t specifically target Democrats, Trump, Miller and others have elsewhere called them “vermin,” “an enemy within”, “gnats” and the “party of hate, evil and Satan.” Simply being a Democrat thus makes you a subject for investigation. About 45 million people in the U.S. are registered Democrats. (37 million are Republicans.) Kamala Harris gained 75 million votes; Biden got 81 million in 2020. Are we all antifa now?
With the federal government shutdown, prices rising, employment falling, health insurance set to increase (in many cases double) for millions of Americans, a recession likely, and an enemies list as large as half the U.S. population, Trump may finally succeed in forging solidarity among his enemies, thereby creating the very bogey he imagined, a genuine antifa movement. And if that happens, there will be an army of people ready to “speak out for me.”
Great American anti-fascists
The following is a list of famous or notable anti-fascists, or antifas. They are not all radicals, socialists, liberals, or even Democrats — but they are anti-fascist. Trump would sic ICE on them if he could. Feel free to add names to the list and send them to me:
Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Aaron Burr (not for shooting Hamilton), William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Henry Ward Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Walcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Margaret Fuller, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George S. Patton, 2.5 million U.S. troops in the European theatre of war in World War II, Clifford Odets, Eleonor Roosevelt, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Robert Ryan, Lillian Hellman, Henry Fonda, the Marx brothers, Meyer Schapiro, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Sinatra (for a while), Woodie Guthrie, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Benjamin Spock, Allen Ginsberg, William Kunstler, Louis Armstong, Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, Angela Davis, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Gil Scott-Heron, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Max Roach, Mahalia Jackson, Stanley Kubrick, Zero Mostel, Norman Lear, Spike Lee, Jane Fonda, LeBron James, Billie Eilish, Tom Hanks, AOC, Jamelle Bouie, Joaquin Phoenix, Bernie…
October 10, 2025
Sue Coe, Terrible things are happening outside, 2025. Courtesy, the artist.
“First they came”
I always scoffed at “First They Came,” the often quoted, 1946 poem by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. There are several versions of it, but the best-known starts “First they came for the communists/And I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” Each of the following three verses names another target — socialists, trade unionists and Jews, until concluding: “Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.”
The poem suggests, wrongly, that “they” – the unmentioned Nazis – targeted everyone, not just communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews. (Niemöller should have added to the list queers, Roma, Slavs, and the disabled.) In fact, the Nazi regime made great efforts to placate the broad, middle and lower-middle class populace and increase its size. Nazism was aggressively pro-natalist, rewarding families that had many children, so long as they were the right kind. In addition, the secret Lebensborn (“fount of life”) program, established by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, supported unwed, supposedly “Aryan” mothers through their pregnancies and distributed the children to similarly racially elite, SS parents. The goals of these initiatives were eugenicist and militarist: the creation of a racially superior population and enough soldiers to forge and sustain a thousand-year Reich.
The Nazis, in other words, knew very well who they wanted to imprison or kill and who they wanted to protect or nurture, and the idea that they would inevitably “come for” someone not on their targeted list is mistaken. Niemöller’s poem is harmful because it suggests that anyone could be a victim of fascism when in fact only some are; protecting those in danger requires solidarity and entails risk. To the pastor’s credit, he openly opposed Nazification of the Protestant Church and was consequently cast into Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps. Much later, long after the Nazi defeat, pastor Niemöller was active in the anti-Vietnam War and anti-nuclear movements. His poem is therefore belied by his own life; he understood very well who were and who were not the likely victims of fascism and embraced the role of anti-fascist or “antifa” to use the shorthand beloved of Reichkanzler Trump, Reichsmarschall Hegseth, and Reichsministers Miller, Bondi, Patel, Holman, Noem, and Kennedy.
Carefully selected targets
Until about two weeks ago, the Trump administration carefully followed the script of “First They Came.” One by one, it targeted groups and individuals who might challenge the kleptocratic, neofascist state, confident that it could do so without significant resistance. First it was the special counsels and ombudsmen who policed federal agencies for corruption. Then it was the U.S. Attorneys and prosecutors whose job is to ensure that federal laws are faithfully executed, and violators punished. Following that, was the regulatory state. Even junior employees were fired if they worked for agencies – including EPA, Education, Justice, Treasury, HUD, Interior, and HHS – who might object to privatization, deregulation, and sleaze.
Then came the attacks on individuals and institutions of civil society. University presidents were dressed down by Republicans at congressional show trials. (It didn’t help that these leaders conceded error of which they were innocent.) Around a dozen college and university presidents have resigned in the face of administration, congressional Republican, or state Republican pressure. Other universities were forced to accept limitations on their institutional freedom or make cash payments (aka bribes) to continue to receive federal grants. Columbia coughed up $200 million. Many colleges and universities pro-actively limited student and faculty free-speech rights in the hope of avoiding government or conservative trustee sanction.
Law firms too have been targeted. Despite court rulings consistently affirming the right of attorneys to choose their own clients without fear of federal retribution, at least eight major firms – most notably Paul Weiss — acceded to Trump’s demands that they pay money or provide pro bono services in exchange for continuing access to lucrative U.S. government contracts. Other civil society organizations, including non-profits focused on women’s health, the environment, civil rights, immigration law, and fair housing, have had grants cancelled or awards rescinded. Many have changed their rhetoric and programs so as not to attract Trump administration ire. Entertainment companies and sports franchises have also bowed to Trumpian pressure to change programming or limit outreach to targeted communities, especially immigrants. The German word for such a coordinated pressure campaign, first used in 1933, is Gleichschaltung: bringing all institutions of state and civil society into conformity with Nazi ideology and practice.
By attacking each group — universities, law firms, non-profits, media companies — separately and in succession, the Trump administration has succeeded in keeping them isolated, unable to marshal the solidarity and collective strength available to them. To be sure, many of the richest and most powerful corporate heads and tech entrepreneurs – Elon Musk at Tesla, Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sam Altman at Open AI, Tim Cook at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Peter Thiel, and others – have welcomed Trump’s strong-armed interventions. They support technocratic Caesarism – rule by one or several tech and finance billionaires beholden to no one, and believe Trump is sympathetic to their goal, despite the president’s claim to speak for a broad, working-class MAGA base. Indeed, low-income Republicans have been assaulted by tariffs, elimination of green energy subsidies, and soon, cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, but their congressional representatives have registered no protest. They remain fully in Trump’s thrall. Small business leaders and professionals, harmed by the president’s tariff, deregulation, and immigration policies, have similarly remained quiet out of fear of reprisal.
Larger goals
Trump’s dismantling of democracy has been methodical and effective and has served his primary goal: self-aggrandizement. But the president’s most influential courtiers, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and J.D. Vance as well as the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute, have other ambitions, broadly consonant with the fascism of interwar Europe. Their goals are to:
1) Purify the body politic by the deportation or exclusion of non-whites.
2) Embed Christian nationalist ideology in government and educational institutions.
3) Broadcast and promote American exceptionalism.
4) Reject feminism, invigorate patriarchy, and denounce non-binary models of gender.
5) Insulate or protect the corporate elite from regulation, taxation, and organized labor.
6) End competitive elections. Vance whisperer Curtis Yarvin supports a monarchy. Marco Rubio’s former Director of Policy Planning, Michael Anton, prefers a Caesar.
7) Destroy the disinterested, professional, government bureaucracy, and slash spending on health, food, education, housing and environmental protection.
8) Revive the American empire by alignment with Russia (a racial comrade) and antagonism to China (a racial foe).
9) Buttress the Leadership cult: Trump als Führer. (This is Trump’s personal favorite.)
10) Welcome environmental catastrophe. Umberto Eco wrote: “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to death.”
Anybody who opposes these ten goals is anti-fascist or antifa; they are enemies of the regime.
Coordination interruptus
Buoyed by success, the Trump administration decided to press its advantage; Niemöller’s final stage of political capture — “then they came for me/And there was no one left” — is the order of the day. Having begun the work of Gleichschaltung mere months ago, the Trump regime now wants to foreclose democracy altogether — if not for a thousand years, at least beyond the 2026 midterm elections.
But the necessary work of coordination remains unfinished. Unlike Germany in 1933-34, the administration lacks SA or SS enforcers. ICE, FBI, and other federal forces – abusive and violent as they are — remain constrained by custom and law. The judicial branch of government is not yet fully co-opted, as indicated by the succession of lower court rulings barring immigrant expulsions, executive branch dismissals, and placement of federal troops in cities. While many of these decisions have been reversed by the Supreme Court, every defeat – even temporary — exposes administration weakness and invites resistance. Legislative opposition exists too, just not from Republicans. Democrats in Congress may be feckless, but they are large in number. Their size has prevented Trump from passing anything like the Enabling Act of 1933 that provided Hitler an easy glide path to authoritarianism. Civil society organizations, including wealthy, liberal-left foundations are also still functioning. Counter-hegemonic non-profits remain active and, in some cases, more energized than before. Most colleges and universities, and most law firms have not (so far) yielded to Trump’s threats.
While the mass media have long been colonized by conservative and even fascist provocateurs – Steve Banon, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Candace Owen, Jesse Wattters, Joe Rogan and many others – their reach is less extensive than it seems. Even the biggest outlet is small by historical standards. At the height of its popularity in the early 1960s, Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News” had 30 million viewers, or about 15% of the U.S. population. Today, Fox’s most popular conservative talk show, “The Five” has 3.5 million viewers, or just 1% of the population. Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast has 85,000 listeners per month. (Counterpunch has more than five times that number of monthly readers.) So far, the right has been unable to dismantle the left ecosystem of magazines, podcasts, and broadcasts. Mainstream TV hosts Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest may not be very “left,” but they are certainly oppositional. Colbert and Kimmel each have about 2 million nightly viewers. Given this ideologically fractured environment, the question arises: Has Trump’s effort at fascist coordination reached its apogee, and will it now begin to recede? Is this a case of coordination interruptus?
Whither NSPM-7?
On September 25, 2025, the White House issued a memorandum, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”. The document falsely asserts that there has been a dramatic upsurge in “violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.” The directive goes on to state: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” A previous Executive Order designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such group exists, and there is no legal category “domestic terrorist organization.”
Memorandum NSPM-7 then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (established in 1980 and led by the FBI) to investigate and prosecute political violence and its institutional or individual funders, as well as identify “any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.” Poor writing masks the author’s intentions here, but the memorandum proceeds to designate troubling “indicia”:
“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The vagueness of the targeting is breathtaking; it would be hard to find anybody who isn’t hostile – sometimes or always — to “traditional American values on family, religion and morality.” Isn’t that the topic of conversation or at least the undercurrent at most family dinner tables?
Though the memorandum doesn’t specifically target Democrats, Trump, Miller and others have elsewhere called them “vermin,” “an enemy within”, “gnats” and the “party of hate, evil and Satan.” Simply being a Democrat thus makes you a subject for investigation. About 45 million people in the U.S. are registered Democrats. (37 million are Republicans.) Kamala Harris gained 75 million votes; Biden got 81 million in 2020. Are we all antifa now?
With the federal government shutdown, prices rising, employment falling, health insurance set to increase (in many cases double) for millions of Americans, a recession likely, and an enemies list as large as half the U.S. population, Trump may finally succeed in forging solidarity among his enemies, thereby creating the very bogey he imagined, a genuine antifa movement. And if that happens, there will be an army of people ready to “speak out for me.”
Great American anti-fascists
The following is a list of famous or notable anti-fascists, or antifas. They are not all radicals, socialists, liberals, or even Democrats — but they are anti-fascist. Trump would sic ICE on them if he could. Feel free to add names to the list and send them to me:
Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Aaron Burr (not for shooting Hamilton), William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Henry Ward Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Walcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Margaret Fuller, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George S. Patton, 2.5 million U.S. troops in the European theatre of war in World War II, Clifford Odets, Eleonor Roosevelt, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Robert Ryan, Lillian Hellman, Henry Fonda, the Marx brothers, Meyer Schapiro, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Sinatra (for a while), Woodie Guthrie, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Benjamin Spock, Allen Ginsberg, William Kunstler, Louis Armstong, Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, Angela Davis, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Gil Scott-Heron, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Max Roach, Mahalia Jackson, Stanley Kubrick, Zero Mostel, Norman Lear, Spike Lee, Jane Fonda, LeBron James, Billie Eilish, Tom Hanks, AOC, Jamelle Bouie, Joaquin Phoenix, Bernie…
Illustration by Sue Coe.
Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books). He is also co-founder and Director of Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu
