Beyond mining: Oklahoma bets on refining to anchor US critical minerals supply chain

Amanda Stutt | March 6, 2026 | 

AI-generated stock image by KarpenArt Studio.

As the United States races to secure supplies of critical minerals, much of the policy discussion has focused on opening new mines. But industry leaders say the bigger bottleneck lies further down the value chain: refining, processing and manufacturing.

In Oklahoma, state officials believe they have found an opportunity in that gap.

Rather than positioning itself as a mining jurisdiction, the state is building a strategy around processing critical minerals into usable industrial materials — aluminum, rare earth magnets and batteries essential to aerospace, defense and advanced manufacturing. 

A series of early-stage proposed investments and federal funding programs are now converging around that vision.

The goal is to plug Oklahoma into the middle of the domestic supply chain as the United States works to reduce dependence on overseas processing from China.

“Here in Oklahoma we’re not actually doing the mining of these minerals,” Jay Shidler, Advanced Technology Project Manager at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce told MINING.com in an interview. “It’s around the refining and the production side — being part of the supply chain that turns these materials into finished products.”

“One of the things we’re really focused on is strengthening domestic supply chains and not being dependent on other countries for these materials,” Shidler said. 

The “missing middle” of the supply chain

For decades, the US gradually ceded much of the world’s mineral processing capacity to other countries. China built a dominant position refining rare earths and producing permanent magnets, key components used in everything from electric vehicles to defense systems.

As geopolitical tensions have grown and supply chain vulnerabilities have become more apparent, Washington has shifted its attention toward rebuilding domestic capacity.

Federal incentives, including funding tied to the CHIPS and Science Act and other industrial policy initiatives, have begun encouraging companies to establish processing and manufacturing facilities inside the US.

Industry analysts increasingly describe this stage of the value chain as the “missing middle” — the industrial infrastructure that connects raw materials to finished products.

Oklahoma’s pitch to investors centers on filling that gap.

The state’s strategy emphasizes refining, magnet manufacturing, recycling and smelting rather than primary mineral extraction. 

Shidler said the approach aligns with broader national priorities around onshoring supply chains and supporting defense manufacturing.

A $4 billion aluminum bet

The most prominent project tied to Oklahoma’s emerging strategy is a proposed aluminum smelter from Emirates Global Aluminium.

The company announced plans to invest roughly $4 billion in a facility near Tulsa at the Port of Inola, a logistics hub that offers barge access for bulk materials moving through the U.S. inland waterway system.

Construction has been forecast to begin as early as 2026.

If completed, the plant would represent one of the largest aluminum investments in the US in decades.

Aluminum remains a critical industrial metal for aerospace, defense and transportation applications. However, the number of operating U.S. smelters has declined significantly over the past several decades due to high energy costs and global competition.

Power and location advantages

In Oklahoma, the combination of wind generation and natural gas resources gives the state a structural advantage, Shidler said. 

The State produces roughly 65% more energy than it consumes, according to state figures, with a significant portion of that supply coming from wind power. It’s also a major producer of natural gas.

Those energy resources translate into relatively low electricity costs — a critical consideration for aluminum smelting and other heavy industrial processes.

Location also plays a role in the state’s pitch.

The Port of Inola, where the proposed EGA smelter would be located, is often described as the furthest inland ice-free port in the United States. Through the McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, the port connects to the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, allowing raw materials to move inland by barge.

Combined with Oklahoma’s central location in the United States, the infrastructure allows materials to move relatively efficiently to manufacturing hubs across the country.

Rare earth magnets and national security

Another pillar of Oklahoma’s critical minerals strategy involves rare earth magnets — a technology that has become increasingly important for defense systems and advanced manufacturing.

USA Rare Earth is developing a vertically integrated rare earth magnet manufacturing facility in the State. The company is building a magnet manufacturing facility in Stillwater,  a project that has received roughly $1.6 billion in funding from the Department of Commerce and from the private sector.

Permanent magnets made from rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium are essential components in electric motors, precision guidance systems, wind turbines and a range of other technologies.

Yet global magnet production remains heavily concentrated in China.

The United States currently has limited domestic capacity to manufacture these magnets at scale, making them a key focus of industrial policy efforts.

Building that capability inside the country is seen as an important step toward securing supply chains for both civilian industries and defense systems. 

Stardust Power (NASDAQ: SDST)  in February joined the Cornerstone Consortium to Support U.S. Critical Minerals and Industrial Base Resilience. 

Stardust is advancing development of its lithium refinery in Muskogee,  with major engineering work completed and key permits secured, Stardust Managing Director, Oklahoma, John Riesenberg told MINING.com. 

The project has secured a major offtake agreement with Sumitomo, and established multiple feedstock supply partnerships, Riesenberg said, adding that construction is expected to lead to commercial production roughly 24 months after initial construction begins. 

said they are actively working to attract companies across the supply chain — from refining and recycling to component manufacturing.

Defense and aerospace demand

Another reason Oklahoma believes it can sustain such a cluster lies in its existing aerospace and defense industries,  Oklahoma Department of Commerce officials said. 

Aerospace and defense is already the state’s second-largest and fastest-growing industrial sector. Oklahoma hosts five military installations, including Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.

Tinker is widely considered the largest maintenance, repair and overhaul facility in the world, supporting aircraft and equipment used by the U.S. military.

The broader context for Oklahoma’s efforts is the evolution of the United States’ critical minerals strategy, Shidler noted. 

Five years ago, much of the discussion centered on restarting domestic mining operations after decades of decline, but that conversation has expanded rapidly. 

Policy makers increasingly recognize that mining alone cannot solve supply chain vulnerabilities. Without refining, processing and manufacturing capacity, raw materials must still be sent overseas to become usable products.

That realization has shifted attention toward building industrial capacity across the entire value chain.

Whether Oklahoma ultimately becomes a major processing hub remains to be seen. But the projects now being proposed suggest that the next phase of America’s critical minerals strategy may be less about digging new mines — and more about rebuilding the industrial infrastructure needed to turn those minerals into finished materials.

Interview

Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish the Police


“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism.

By George Yancy , 

Truthout

PublishedFebruary 26, 2026

A protester holds a sign reading "Black Lives Matter Fuera ICE. 2 Struggles 1 Fight."

Sarah-Ji via Flickr

Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.

In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, it’s not surprising that ICE has begun drawing even more frequent comparison to Hitler’s fascist Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

As I’ve borne witness to these tragedies, I’ve often thought about how Black people meet this moment with an already-acute sense of what it means to live and die under the U.S.’s fascistic logics. For Black people, there were no killers in brown shirts, but there were plenty of killers in white sheets sanctioned through the support, encouragement, and participation of white law enforcement officers. The depth and complexity of what I’m feeling and thinking about this brutal historical resonance cries out for clarity and truth-telling. It is for this reason that I reached out to Robin D. G. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and author of several renowned books, including his newest and forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life.

George Yancy: Robin, it is always an honor. As you said to Amy Goodman, “Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time.” The point here is that this isn’t new. And we mustn’t forget. In The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen write, “On December 17, 1951, the US Civil Rights Congress, headed by Communist attorney William Patterson, presented a 240-page petition to the United Nations general assembly, entitled ‘We Charge Genocide.’” The charge of genocide was necessary, as it continues to be, because of the terror of anti-Blackness in this country, a form of terror that renders Black life fundamentally precarious and vulnerable to the forces of gratuitous state violence. I often fail to find the discourse to frame the ongoing history of anti-Blackness in this country. We’re not just talking about anti-Black beliefs and attitudes; it’s anti-Black fascism. I would like for you to talk about how war is an apt concept for critically thinking about the meaning and reality of anti-Blackness in the past and in the present.

Robin D. G. Kelley: Absolutely! No question! Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism, which as you acknowledged, not only precedes the so-called “classical” fascism in Italy and Germany, but for Hitler and the Third Reich, a model for the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg laws. By the way, Robyn Maynard, a brilliant scholar/organizer, has an essay coming out in the Boston Review that maps out the history of anti-Blackness in U.S. immigration policies.

“Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism.”

To your question, there are so many examples. Beginning in the present, we must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population, Africans. It didn’t matter that the vast majority were U.S. citizens. Trump denigrated the entire community as “garbage” and declared: “I don’t want them in our country.” If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.

Let’s also remember that the core anti-immigrant dog whistle that both Trump and JD Vance exploited in the run-up to the elections targeted Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who had temporary protected status. The racist lies that Haitians were eating their (white) neighbors’ dogs (a literal dog whistle!) was strategic and, apparently, it worked.


“We must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population.”

But we can’t put all of this on Trump. Besides the long, long history of political, economic, military, and discursive war against the Haitian people, I can never erase the image of Haitian asylum seekers who had taken shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, being violently herded and brutalized by ICE agents on horses, as if they were fugitive slaves. It was the Biden-Harris administration, let’s not forget, that denied Haitians asylum and deported them in record numbers. More Haitians were deported under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their first few weeks in office than under Trump during his entire first term. Now, some might argue that Biden and Harris expanded the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which grants “parole” to eligible migrants waiting for visas (dig the carceral language), but all this means is that they were granted temporary protections that forced them into low-wage, precarious work since their status was contingent on having a job, any job.

Let’s come back to the present. We all learned of the horrific murder of 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. here in Southern California on New Year’s Eve. In case readers don’t know the story, Porter stepped outside his apartment and did what a lot of people do: fired off a few celebratory rounds from his rifle into the sky. Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent who had recently moved into the same complex, wasn’t having it, so he put on his tactical gear, grabbed his weapons, went outside without identifying himself, and fatally shot Porter. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] officers dispatched to the scene never asked Palacios to surrender his weapon, never gave him a sobriety test, didn’t investigate anything, really. The Department of Homeland Security’s liar-in-chief, Tricia McLaughlin, spun the incident as a “brave officer” taking out an “active shooter” after an exchange of gunfire. It just wasn’t true; every eyewitness confirmed there was no “exchange” of fire or hostilities. It was murder.


“If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.”

This happened a week before Renee Nicole Good’s death, and yet Porter’s name is not mentioned among the martyrs of the anti-ICE resistance, except when Black folks complain about it. Not to take anything away from the extraordinary sacrifice made by Good and Pretti, but Porter was not white and he was not killed in the act of trying to stop ICE and protect his neighbors. Whereas Porter, much like George Floyd, was rendered a victim whose worthiness was constantly called into question, Good and Pretti were martyrs with whom it is impossible not to empathize.

Porter’s family and friends were pressed to do what Black families always do when they lose a loved one to state violence: reclaim his character by showing that he was a loving, doting father who called his mother every day, worked hard, and made everyone laugh. They had to make him human, to inform the (white) world that his life had as much value as that of Good and Pretti. It’s tired and should be unnecessary, and to her credit, even Renee Good’s sister, Annie Ganger, felt the need to remind people that the violence that took her sister’s life “isn’t new” and that it was unfair that “the way someone looks garners more or less attention. And I’m so sorry that this is the reality.” Meanwhile, the “brave” ICE agent (whose name the LAPD initially refused to release), it turned out, had a reputation for anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, [allegations of perpetrating] child abuse, and had once showed up at a youth sporting event armed.


“The movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional.”

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t simply that Keith Porter needs to be acknowledged but rather the violence that stole him from his family not only “isn’t new,” it is routine. As a Black man who was native to Compton, California, he had an invisible target on his back. He knew what it is like to live in a police state. Premature death at the hands of armed agents of the state is merely a hazard of being Black in America. This is why the movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional, insisting that they are part of a larger matrix of state violence encompassing all law enforcement and the military. It’s not enough to “abolish ICE”; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety. With regards to Keith Porter, of course randomly shooting a gun in the air is not safe and should not be permitted, but we have to address the reasons he even owns a gun. He and so many other folks like him just don’t feel safe, and U.S. settler culture is rooted in violence as a first response and guns as the chief instrument of violence. Police simply don’t help. Abolition requires changing the culture, not just eliminating the instruments of the culture.

Assuming that war is an apt concept, what does this mean in terms of how we ought to respond? I ask you this question with sincerity. There are those who will say, “Oh, Yancy must believe in armed struggle on the streets of America.” This would be a non sequitur. There is too much of my mother’s Christian sensibilities in me to hold this position. Indeed, I try, I struggle, to manifest agape (the sense of unconditional neighborly love) toward all human beings. But I love my children as you love your daughter. Indeed, for me, that love refuses a form of hospitality that facilitates their harm. I can’t possibly stand by when the Brownshirts come hammering at the door with fascistic bloodlust in their eyes. Here I’m reminded of Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die.” Toward the end he writes:

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

I appreciate your invocation of Claude McKay. As you know, that poem is almost always cited as an expression of the so-called New Negro, the spirit of defiance that suddenly erupts in the wake of World War I and the “Red Summer” of 1919. But this is a misnomer since Black communities had been practicing armed self-defense since they were dragged to these shores. Armed self-defense is the tradition; nonviolent civil disobedience is the rupture, the break with the past. The historical record is clear and unambiguous, as we’ve seen in the writings (memoirs and scholarship) of Robert and Mabel Williams, Akinyele Umoja, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Kellie Carter Jackson, Lance Hill, Jasmin Young, Nicholas Johnson, Simon Wendt, and many others. These writers have shown us, time and time again, that African Americans have a very long and surprisingly successful tradition of armed self-defense against mob violence. Armed self-defense has saved countless lives.


“It’s not enough to ‘abolish ICE’; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety.”

To be fair, militant nonviolent civil disobedience also courageously faces “the murderous, cowardly pack” and is undeniably “fighting back.” But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first impulse to keep a pistol by his bedside during the Montgomery bus boycott to protect his family against organized, state-sanctioned mob violence made perfect sense. You can’t win the racist mob or the brownshirts over with love, certainly not in the midst of war. This is why I find those commercials featuring an ICE agent who comes home to his kids and has his conscience suddenly pricked by a child’s query so frustrating, naïve, and ineffectual. If conscience mattered, the faces and screams of the people they brutalized, the lives they took, and the loved ones who had to bear witness would have convinced most of these dudes to quit their jobs long ago.

This kind of terror is not new; ICE and Border Patrol agents have been behaving like this for decades. Stephen Miller didn’t have to tell them what to do. Restraint must come before reeducation and redemption, and imposing restraint is impossible without consequences and accountability. As Dr. King said repeatedly in various speeches, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”

War is certainly an apt concept here. It is how I frame the assault on Black people in my forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. As I write in the book, “Policing is war by another name…. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has turned many Black neighborhoods into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture.” But as the anthropologist Orisanmi Burton put it in his book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, this is not a war we chose. He refers to sites of incarceration as “sites of counter-war,” which can be extended to virtually all Black and Black-led resistance to injustice, mob rule, criminalization, state violence, exploitation, and the very conditions that make Black people vulnerable to premature death. This counter-war holds out the possibility of freeing everyone, including those recruited to maintain systems of domination.

That said, I think the debate over whether we’re ready to go to war is a false debate because we’re already at war. We were at war before Trump came into office, before the neoliberal turn, before Jim Crow, before all of that. It begins with the kidnapping and trafficking of our African ancestors, and the violent dispossession of our Indigenous ancestors. Both processes fall under the category of genocide. John Brown was right to call American slavery “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.” These wars are fundamentally about turning flesh and earth into property, and whole peoples into combatants and commodities.


“Revolutionary pessimism is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed ‘anticipatory optimism’ — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail.”

We have to consider the centuries of continuous, protracted war. Once we acknowledge the reality of protracted war and counter-war, then we have to stretch our definition of “armed struggle.” In this asymmetrical war, guns are not the only weapons. Arson has been a weapon of the enslaved in their own counter-war against Christians holding them in bondage. Minneapolis is where they burned down the police station. Civil resistance has taken on so many forms that don’t fall neatly under traditional categories of “violence” or nonviolence, and have revealed the wide arsenal of “arms” people have deployed in struggle.

Again, in Making a Killing, which is as much if not more about collective resistance (counter-war) than acts of state violence (war), I write about rebellion in Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, New York, and elsewhere, and building on the work of Akinyele Umoja, who wrote We Will Shoot Back, I chart the tradition of armed self-defense in Mississippi in light of the police-perpetrated killing of Jonathan Sanders in 2015. Once we acknowledge the long war and redefine armed struggle, we’ll recognize that we’re already in it. We have to figure out what to do, how to strategize, and what it means when casualties of war are white people — which, of course, is not a new thing. It’s a rare thing and ebbs and flows, depending on the extent to which white people see this as their fight.

Your book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was published in 2002. That was 24 years ago. For many, it is no doubt hard to dream, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. There are times when I try to fall asleep at night and I become obsessed with a singular nightmare: the creation of private militias that have state approval to throw me in jail for writing something or for refusing to embrace Trump’s fascism or our having this discussion. I see hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity. I see so many people being disappeared. I see American-style gulags. I see the complete disregard and overthrow of the Constitution where there are no checks and balances, where there is no longer a two-party system, where due process is nonexistent, and there are literally no exits out of this country. I see my neighbor turning me in because I expressed hatred toward white supremacy and shouted, “Love First!” over “America First!” In this case, perhaps all of those who care about freedom, community, their neighbors, and the importance of democracy “will find out,” as Trump said about Chicago, “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I believe in the power of movements, but Trump is malicious and I have no doubt that he would, if given the opportunity (perhaps I should say, when given the opportunity), unleash the full might of the Department of War on us. How do we continue to dream, Robin, to have freedom dreams, when the U.S. continues to amplify the reality of dystopic nightmares?

I feel you. I also know we’ve been through worse. A “private militia” (read: mob and police) with “state approval to throw me in jail for writing something” or challenging the status quo by, say, trying to vote, or “hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity,” and “American-style gulags” (keeping in mind how many gulags were actually modeled on U.S. convict labor camps) — and now we’re talking about Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans, Louisiana (1900), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and, as you and I discussed at length back in 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). We have been here. But I understand that to say what’s happening now has happened before, sometimes worse, gives us little comfort.

I do want to make a case for the value of “freedom dreams” in times like these. I’m always reminding readers that what I called the Black radical imagination is not wishful thinking, not an escape from reality, not some kind of dream state conjured and nurtured independent of the day-to-day struggles on the ground. The main point of the book is that the radical visions animating social movements are forged in collective resistance and a critical, clear-eyed analysis of the social order. In fact, in the 20th-anniversary edition which came out in 2022, I underscore this point, writing, “The book does not prioritize ‘freedom dreams’ to the exclusion of ‘fascist nightmares.’ If anything, I show that freedom dreams are born of fascist nightmares, or, better yet, born against fascist nightmares.” The context in which I wrote it, the early Bush years, was decidedly an era of dystopic nightmares: a wave of police killings, culminating in the massive response to the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerating neoliberalism, and so forth. Moreover, the movements I explore imagined freedom in the darkest of times: Black Exodus out of an Egyptland of lynching, disfranchisement, new forms of slavery, and segregation; Black embrace of socialist revolution at the height of fascism, global economic crisis, and anti-communism; and Black radical feminism in a moment of heightened sexual violence, femicide, carceral expansion, and an increasingly masculinist Black freedom movement.

In other words, all of these movements were fueled not by false optimism but by a deep understanding of the death-dealing structures of gendered racial capitalism. Freedom dreaming, as it were, is not a luxury; our survival as a people depends on envisioning a radically different future for all and fighting to bring it into existence. The fight or the struggle is precisely how visions of the future are forged, clarified, revised, or discarded.

I just mentioned the power of movements. Coming back to Freedom Dreams, you argue that that there is more that is needed to fight for freedom than organized protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes, and slowdowns. For you, surrealism is also necessary. You write, “Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality (which is like rationalization, the same word they use for improving capitalist production and limiting people’s needs).” When I read that passage again, I thought of the power of poiesis — that sense of creation or that sense of bringing something that is radically new into being. Speak to how surrealism continues to inform your understanding of liberation and perhaps even hope amid so much fear, pain, anger, and perhaps, like for me, nightmarishness.

Really great question, one I continued to ponder after writing Freedom Dreams. A critical argument I make in that chapter and elsewhere is that the Africans across the diaspora had been practicing or living surrealism long before Europeans named it. I gave examples, one being the blues. I left it undeveloped in the book, but since then have been thinking about the blues alongside Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, the brilliant geographer Clyde Woods, and French surrealist whom I don’t mention in Freedom Dreams, Pierre Naville. The blues, not just as music but epistemology, can be defined as a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity — or, in your words, so much fear, pain, anger, and nightmarishness. True, rising nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, neoliberalism, and the relative weakness of contemporary mass movements offers little reassurance that a liberated future is on the horizon. But the blues, as with the Black radical imagination, resists fatalism and inevitability. It demands and narrates action.


“We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders.”

This is where I find Pierre Naville helpful. A founding member of the Paris Surrealist group and one of the first to join the Communist Party, in 1926 he published a pamphlet titled “The Revolution and Intellectuals,” which argued, among other things, that pessimism was not a reason for despair, withdrawal, melancholy, or bitterness. What he called the “richness of a genuine pessimism” (which he traced to Hegel’s philosophy and “Marx’s revolutionary method”) requires action and must take political form. Naville’s revolutionary pessimism was a critique of the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of capitalism. It was also a critique of the “shallow optimism” of social democrats who believed that they could eventually vote their way into creating a socialist commonwealth. His revolutionary pessimism was not fatalistic resignation or an obsession with the “decline” of elites or nations or Western civilization. Rather, it was a call for collective revolutionary action by, and on behalf of, the oppressed classes. Revolutions are not inevitable, nor do they correspond with particular objective conditions. People just don’t have the luxury to wait for the “right conditions.” Instead, movements must interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe, by any means necessary. It is not enough to “hope,” we must be determined.

Revolutionary pessimism, therefore, is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism” — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail. I am hesitant to say “win” because, as I’ve written elsewhere, assessing movements only in terms of wins and losses obscures the power of movements to inform and transform us. Here is the power of poiesis, of making new worlds and new relationships — not from nothing but from love — rather than reforming or bandaging old systems. So we come full circle. It is not enough to be anti-capitalist and/or anti-prisons and police, to beat back a half-millennium of catastrophe. We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore once told an interviewer, “Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something…. Abolition is a theory of change, it’s a theory of social life. It’s about making things.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

 

China and Russia Plan to Hold a Naval Exercise With Iran in February

File image courtesy Nejada

Published Feb 1, 2026 5:15 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

The commander of the regular Iranian navy (Nedaja) Rear Admiral Shahram Irani has announced that Iran will once again host Chinese and Russian naval vessels in Exercise Maritime Security Belt 2026, to be held in the northern Indian Ocean in late February.  There have been no confirmatory announcements as yet from the Chinese and Russians, but the Iranians will be anxious to secure their participation again in this annual exercise, needing the reassurance of having allies alongside at a time of high tension.

The Chinese participants can be expected to be drawn from the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)’s Djibouti-based 48th Flotilla, made up of the Type 052DL guided-missile destroyer Tangshan (D122), the Type 054A guided-missile frigate Daqing (F576) and the Type 903A replenishment ship Taihu (K889). 

The Russian contingent is likely to consist of the Russian Udaloy Class frigate RFS Marshal Shaposhnikov (F543), still in the region having participated in the DIMDEX 2026 defense exhibition held January 19-20 in Port Hamad, Qatar. The Marshal Shaposhnikov is being supported by the Boris Chilikin Class oiler Boris Butoma (IMO 8842557). Potentially, the Steregushchiy Class corvette Stoykiy (F545) could either supplement or replace these vessels, as it too is still in the region, having participated in Exercise Will for Peace 2026 off Cape Town.

Rear Admiral Irani also has announced that the 103rd Flotilla, also fresh from Will for Peace 2026, is to exercise with an undisclosed partner before returning to Bandar Abbas. The 103rd Flotilla consists of the Bayandor Class corvette IRINS Naghdi (F82) and the Nedaja’s forward base ship IRINS Makran (K441), supported by the IRGC Navy’s converted oil tanker, IRIS Shahid Mahdavi (L110-3).

While elements of the Nedaja are away from home, the business of confronting President Trump’s armada appears to rest with the IRGC Navy. On January 30, the US Central Command warned the IRGC Navy not to use a naval exercise due to start on January 31 as an excuse to overfly, point weapons or maintain collision courses with US Navy vessels.

US naval forces in the region are made up principally of the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), with its Arleigh Burke Class guided-missile destroyers USS Spruance (DDG-111), USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG-121), with logistics support from USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE-7).  This carrier strike group (CSG) is supplementing the Bahrain-based Arleigh Burke Class guided-missile destroyers USS Mitscher (DDG-57) and USS McFaul (DDG-74), and three Independence Class littoral combat ships optimized for mine countermeasure missions, namely USS Tulsa (LCS-16), USS Canberra (LCS-30) and USS Santa Barbara (LCS-32), with logistic support from USNS Henry J Kaiser (T-AO-187). 

This force has recently been supplemented by a further Arleigh Burke Class guided-missile destroyer, USS Delbert D. Black (DDG-119), which is believed to be in the northern Red Sea. Thick cloud has covered the US Naval Support Facility at Diego Garcia in recent days, so it is not possible to ascertain if air reinforcements have arrived in theater.

The IRGC Navy issued a statement on January 31 via Tasnim that its commander, Commodore Alireza Tangsiri, had not been killed in an unexplained blast at a residential flat in Bandar Abbas. The statement implied that the blast had been caused by a gas explosion, although local residents have said that the area is not served with natural gas connections.

IRGC Navy commander Commodore Alireza Tangsiri (Iranian Defence / Tasnim)

This Tribal News Agency Shows How to Defend a Free Press at the Grassroots

As Trump erodes press freedoms, the resurgence of Mvskoke Media offers lessons on how to protect independent media.

By Dan Ross ,

Truthout

January 10, 2026

Angel Ellis speaking at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival in Poland, 2023, where the documentary Bad Press was screened. Millennium Docs Against Gravity

To say press freedoms in the U.S. have taken a knock during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term would be a gross understatement.

Perhaps the most glaring example is the Department of Defense’s new policy requiring journalists covering the Pentagon to sign a pledge promising not to use any information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized. But the Trump administration’s attacks on a free press have also included other tactics, like the effort to dismantle Freedom of Information Act processes across federal departments.

The administration’s explicit attempts at censorship work alongside the more insidious ways in which press freedoms are eroded, like the right-wing capture of legacy media institutions and social media platforms by ideologues and billionaires.

“To be clear, all presidents and all elected officials have always objected to their coverage,” David Loy, legal director with the First Amendment Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to promote and protect press freedoms, told Truthout. “But the Trump administration has mounted unprecedented attacks on freedom of the press.”

These attacks on press freedoms don’t stop at the federal level, however; they are also being inflicted by local governments seeking to undermine already-embattled local media. In Northern California’s Shasta County, for example, the region’s registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, singled out a local media outlet for exclusion on a press release distribution list after the publication had reported on serious questions about his proposed changes to the electoral process.

It hasn’t been all bad news, with the courts remaining a vital bulwark against such attacks.

In November, Marion County in Kansas agreed to offer an apology and pay a $3 million settlement to end a lawsuit stemming from police raids on the small Marion County Record newsroom and two homes in August of 2023, including that of Record vice president and associate publisher, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died of a heart attack the following day. The raids were precipitated by a news tip the Record had received about the driving record of a local restaurant owner who was applying for a liquor license. The police chief alleged incorrectly that the paper had illegally accessed these records.

In October, a California district court judge sided with the Los Angeles Press Club in striking down an attempt by the Los Angeles Police Department to lessen use-of-force restrictions against journalists covering protests across the city.

Against this backdrop, the small and scrappy news outlet that serves the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma — the fourth-largest federally recognized tribal nation in the U.S. — offers a stark lesson of what happens when cherished press freedoms are lost altogether, as well as a blueprint for how to restore and protect these important civic checks and balances.

The Fight for a Free Press

Just over four years ago, Muscogee voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the nation’s free and independent press, along with a stable funding source for Mvskoke Media, a tribal news agency. It’s the first tribal nation to tweak their constitution to cement and secure an independent press in this manner.

The road to that moment was a long and rocky one, characterized by corruption in high office, a small newsroom hamstrung by government censorship, and a community forced to reckon with the potential loss of a key mechanism for holding their leaders accountable. The story is documented in the roller-coaster 2023 documentary Bad Press by filmmakers Joe Peeler and Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, the latter a member of the Muscogee Nation and a former editor of Mvskoke Media.

“Part of being a good journalism outlet is always advocating for press freedom and the First Amendment rights of our citizens,” said current Mvskoke Media Director Angel Ellis. “And now, we are in better shape to do that advocacy work and deliver the news as we should.”

The nation has been served by a monthly newspaper since 1970, The Mvskoke News, which is now housed at Mvskoke Media, an editorial and creative outlet. The nation’s journalists had already built a reputation for holding its leaders’ feet to the fire. But not everyone appreciated this public accounting, especially those in charge.

Ellis broke a major government corruption story in 2011 about the misuse of tribal gaming funds. It won her an award from the Native American Journalists Association, but Ellis’s department manager fired her for insubordination shortly after this coverage went to print.

A few years later, in 2015, the Muscogee Creek Nation passed a law codifying its free press, in the process protecting the work of the journalists Ellis had left behind. At the time, it was one of just a handful of tribal nations to have enacted such a law. Even today, only about 11 of the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes are protected by some sort of press freedom, either by a law written into their books or by a court ruling defending that nation’s independent news coverage, said Ellis.

As easily as a law can get passed, however, it can just as easily be rolled back.

In 2017, Mvskoke Media investigated the tribal council speaker, Lucian Tiger III, for sexual misconduct, in an explosive story that rattled the tribal nation. The newsroom received warnings from within the government that council members wanted to nuke the nation’s free press law to gag reporters. The following year, they did. The council voted 7-6 to repeal the law. Tiger was the decisive tie-breaker.

The vote dissolved the paper’s editorial board and gave council members the ability to edit and approve stories. Many of Mvskoke Media’s reporters — whose digital communications were suddenly open for scrutiny by government leadership — resigned, appalled at being professionally handcuffed. Ellis, who had been rehired in 2018, just before the repeal of the law, was one of the few who stayed on.

In 2019, the tribal council passed another bill somewhat restoring the Mvskoke Media’s press independence. But it was far from perfect. And the newsroom’s ability to check power remained limited under a law that could once again be revoked.

In a democracy where governmental authority isn’t properly held accountable, elections are among its most corruptible parts. After the tribal attorney general called the elections later that year “fatally flawed,” the Muscogee Creek Nation Supreme Court nullified the results and called for a redo, finding the election board’s handling of ballots opened the door to tampering.

If the wheels of democracy were to spin unimpeded, an independent free press was vital. A constitutional amendment would cement it in stone. Come the elections of 2021, Muscogee citizens got their chance to weigh in.

In the lead up to the vote, the Mvskoke Media championed the amendment, with Ellis, a heavy-smoking, straight-talking force of nature, its loudest bullhorn. Part of that role required convincing community members of its necessity, some of whom believed Mvskoke Media’s journalists were just scared of losing their livelihoods.

“I didn’t argue with them. I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re a news organization. And news organizations are run by people who do the job and people need to be paid,’” said Ellis, describing “hundreds and hundreds of hours of outreach speaking candidly one-on-one” with the community.

“We got really transparent with the public and showed them how we operated and what those funding revenue streams looked like and how they were being administered by our department. It felt risky to expose all of our funding streams and our financials,” said Ellis. “We did that so that they understood exactly how those public funds were being spent.”

Her work paid off in September 2021, when the Muscogee Creek Nation voted for the free press constitutional amendment by a whopping 76 percent. Its passage came with immediate tangible effects, for both Mvskoke Media and the Muscogee Creek Nation as a whole. Since then, “democracy has been carried out in a very cohesive and boring manner,” said Ellis.
Since the Constitutional Amendment

The constitutional amendment built a firewall between Mvskoke Media and government officials. So far, it’s held firm. “There’s nothing threatening coming down the pipeline, but we don’t want to rest on our laurels,” said Ellis.

As part of that proactive approach, Ellis has found the publication independent legal counsel. They’ve also moved the newsroom’s headquarters from one owned by the Creek Nation to an independent location in Tulsa.

“If they ever wanted to come and shut our doors, they could have,” said Ellis, about the impetus behind the location change.

Another vulnerability came from the fact the newsroom’s IT services ran through the tribe. “Are they reading our emails? Were they able to shut us down in terms of our digital electronic functions?” said Ellis, replaying some of her fears. In response, the organization has adopted its own independent IT system.

All of this has cost money, which brings up another remarkable evolution of Mvskoke Media: funding.

Although the newsroom still receives statutory funding, about 60 percent of its money now comes from merchandizing: think sweatshirts, hoodies, and t-shirts. Mvskoke Media operates two brick-and-mortar gift shops, and while it doesn’t have a commercial printing press, it has printers perfectly suited for commercial business cards, flyers, and brochures.

“In the midst of all of the upheaval we were experiencing, a lot of the citizens were really behind us and we started selling t-shirts that were culturally branded,” said Ellis, explaining the genesis of the idea. “We started out with about $10,000 worth of just t-shirts. We sold them. And everything we sold, we put right back into it. And now, we’ve grown that into over half a million dollars of revenue.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Before the free press law was repealed in 2018, the Mvskoke Media newsroom employed 12 people. “As we sit today, I only have five,” said Ellis. “I’m desperately trying to rebuild capacity. When you lose 90 years-worth of experience in a newsroom, it’s damn near impossible to replace that.”

Ellis has taken her story to newsrooms large and small around the U.S. imparting words of hard-earned wisdom. One of her pieces of advice is to embrace public criticism. For the Mvskoke Media, a frequent critique, Ellis explained, surrounds the sort of coverage the community can feel paints the tribe in a negative light.

Another is to eschew the old profit-driven funding model built around advertising. “I’ve trained some very prestigious newsrooms and my message is always this: ‘Indigenize your process and get away from the capitalism,’” said Ellis, who explained that while the Mvskoke Media still accepts advertising dollars, it’s far from a central focus of their revenue-building efforts. “Your bottom line will improve if you live in service to your community.”

“It’s always in the nature of power to resist accountability,” said Loy, offering a reminder that press freedoms need eternal vigilance. “Free speech begins at home. It’s just as vitally important that free speech and a free press be defended at the grassroots.”

Ellis, meanwhile, can now start to look back on years of frustration, fear, and no small amount of hard work with the sense of a job well done. “To see progress and to be able to provide an example of a success story for our industry that doesn’t have a ton of reasons to celebrate right now, it feels very, very good,” she said. “It’s very gratifying work.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Dan Ross
Dan Ross is a journalist whose work has appeared in Truthout, The Guardian, FairWarning, Newsweek, YES! Magazine, Salon, AlterNet, Vice and a number of other publications. He is based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @1danross.

Bible-belt state refuses to share 'crucial' info on measles outbreaks

Paul Monies,

 Oklahoma Watch
January 5, 2026 


A child after being vaccinated. (Shutterstock)

Outbreaks of measles and whooping cough in Oklahoma have led to calls for greater transparency from the Oklahoma State Department of Health as the state stands alone in only sharing measles cases on a statewide basis.

Infectious disease and public health experts said the timely sharing of cases with the public can help communities mitigate the spread of disease.

Dr. George Monks, a Tulsa dermatologist and former president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, has been trying for months to get the state Health Department to share more data. He’s employed social media cajoling, open records requests and complaints to the attorney general’s public access counselor, to no avail.

“This data is crucial for Oklahoma families to make informed decisions about their health, whether it be vaccine choice or avoiding high-risk areas,” Monks said. “Withholding that county-level measles data could delay the community response, especially since it is so contagious.”

To date, Oklahoma has recorded 17 cases of measles in 2025. Nationally, the United States has had the highest number of measles cases in three decades. More than 800 of the 2,000 U.S. cases this year came in Texas back in the spring, although South Carolina is dealing with a current outbreak.

Measles is a highly contagious, airborne virus with symptoms including rashes, high fevers, coughs, runny nose and red, watery eyes. The virus spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It can linger for up to two hours in a room after exposure.

Monks first requested measles case data by county in March, along with agency communications with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a measles outbreak in Oklahoma. The state Health Department provided some email correspondence with CDC, but it cited a section of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, in declining to release county measles data. Monks shared his requests and responses with Oklahoma Watch.

In its Oct. 30 letter siding with the state Health Department, the attorney general’s office said the agency’s response was reasonable and noted its website has statistical information related to measles and potential public exposure.

“Based on the information available to me at this time, I conclude that OSDH has a good-faith legal basis to deny access to the records sought by Dr. Monks,” wrote Anthony Sykes, the attorney general's public access counselor.

Oklahoma is the only state not providing measles cases by county or on a regional level, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. They published a study in September in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, detailing their efforts to develop the U.S. Measles Tracker.

Kansas only withholds county-level measles data if the cases are fewer than five, the researchers noted. Tennessee, Utah and Iowa provide regional case data, but not by county.

“Single measles cases often represent the leading edge of potential outbreaks, making their rapid identification crucial for public health response,” the researchers said in a supplemental paper describing their methodology. “Geographic specificity, even for small case counts, enables public health officials to implement targeted contact tracing and exposure notifications.

“Many state health departments routinely report individual measles cases in public communications, press releases, and exposure notifications, establishing precedent that individual case disclosure serves legitimate public health purposes.”

Oklahoma used to disclose county-level measles cases as recently as 2019, during the last major measles outbreak. Media reports from that outbreak show measles in Okmulgee County.

In an emailed response to questions from Oklahoma Watch, the state Health Department said its public data is sufficient to inform local communities of potential exposure to measles.

It provides overall case counts, vaccination status, age range, median age of cases and any public exposure settings identified through investigation of a measles case.

“Identified exposure locations are what pose a risk of spread to the public, and the county of residence may not always reflect the population or communities that may be at risk during a public health investigation,” the agency said.

The state Health Department didn’t directly address questions on how other states are able to report county measles data. The agency said it continues to rely on its interpretation of federal HIPAA laws and Oklahoma’s public health code in not releasing county-level measles data.


“Accordingly, OSDH has the discretion to determine the manner in which statistical communicable disease data may be released to the public to the extent that such release is in compliance with de-identification and disclosure requirements of HIPAA,” the department said in the email.

Echoes of COVID

The debate over how and when to share infection data echoes those in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oklahoma was slow to share community-level infection data. Even then, it provided county-level case information.

In those first few months of the pandemic, Oklahoma Watch requested de-identified COVID-19 data from the state Health Department, including by city and ZIP code. Officials initially denied the request based on federal and state privacy laws, although those laws include exemptions to allow de-identified data. As the pandemic escalated, state health officials eventually provided localized data for COVID infections on an online data dashboard.

The state Health Department said it used a risk-based approach to reporting COVID-19 cases to make recommendations around public gatherings and school closures.

“The only way to implement such a system was to report ZIP code-level data,” the department said. “For measles, using exact public setting location and time provides individuals the information necessary to communicate the risk to the public. Again, it’s all about risk and managing it in such a way as to balance the public’s need to know with our obligation to protect an individual’s health information.”

The state Health Department sent out potential measles exposure alerts earlier this year. The alerts included the addresses of stores and restaurants an infected person had visited.

Oklahoma public health officials withholding of county-level measles data contrasts with the state’s tracking for West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease. The state Health Department’s infectious disease website includes the number of cases and county of incidence for that virus.

“I don’t get it,” Monks said. “They’re citing these privacy concerns (for measles), but there’s no patient data assigned to this. It’s all just aggregate data. I don’t get how they can come down on one side and then a different side based on the infectious disease.”

The state Health Department said decisions about releasing county-level data are made based on a number of factors, including overall case count, population of the county and case investigation impact.


“For some diseases, like West Nile, it is important that the public is aware of the geographic location of the case to communicate the risk of disease to the public,” the agency said. “The majority of diseases publicly reported on our website are stratified by their respective region, rather than county-level, to help protect patient privacy, while still providing the public with a geographic distribution of disease burden.”

Monks continues to request disease data from the Health Department. He’s asked for more information about pertussis, commonly called whooping cough, and tuberculosis.

“This is a really important time to get this data out to the public,” Monks said. “In Oklahoma, this is the worst whooping cough outbreak in 70 years and the worst measles outbreak we’ve had in 35 years.”

Monks said it's a policy decision, not necessarily a public health decision, to withhold detailed data about respiratory disease outbreaks. Monks, who describes himself as a Reagan Republican, suspects some state leaders don’t want to raise the ire of the federal Health and Human Services Department under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic.

“From the Republican standpoint, some have taken this position that this is a political football, and they really want to get away from pro-vaccinations and pro-science, especially in a primary,” Monks said.

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Flu season peak exposes missed COVID-19 lessons

By Dr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

January 4, 2026

Numerous European nations have scrapped mask-wearing rules even as Covid cases have surged - © TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP Johan NILSSON

Three leading public health and social psychology experts have warned that many countries, including the UK, are failing to apply vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic as influenza cases surge. In the UK, hospitals are facing mounting winter pressures.

Similarly, the U.S. has seen the number of influenza cases climb significantly in December, coming after the most severe flu season since 2018. There have been an estimated 7.5 million influenza cases and 81,000 hospitalizations (as of the end of December 2025).

The three experts have written to the British Medical Journal. They are Professors Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews), Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), and Stephen Griffin (University of Leeds). The three academics argue that simple, proven measures of vaccination, isolation, and ventilation are being neglected, leaving the public vulnerable as flu spreads.

The experts call for a layered approach to infection control, combining vaccination, isolation, ventilation, masks, and hygiene.

“There are important differences in who and how flu hits,” says Professor Griffin in a statement sent to Digital Journal. “But we trivialise those differences at our peril. The lessons we learnt during COVID still apply.”

However, uptake of the flu vaccine remains poor. By late November, only 40% of under‑65s at risk had received the jab, compared to 70% of over‑65s, pregnant women, and young children.

“Vaccines aren’t perfect, but at scale they keep schools open and hospitals coping,” Griffin adds.


Both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend yearly vaccination for nearly all people over the age of six months, especially those at high risk.

The flu jab works by injecting each individual with a tiny amount of an inactive flu virus. In response to this, the body’s immune system makes proteins called antibodies to help fight what it thinks is an infection.

Isolation is another key factor. Many workers cannot afford to stay home when sick. UK statutory sick pay remains under £120 a week, far below Germany’s eight weeks of full salary.

“Telling people to isolate is a suggestion, not a practical response, unless government support is provided,” explains McKee.

Ventilation is the third pillar. Despite calls for investment in clean air systems in schools, offices, and public buildings, little has changed.

“We hoped COVID would make clean air central to the 21st century as clean water was to the 20th. That hope has failed,” clarifies Reicher.

The experts stress that winter pressures demand more than individual responsibility. Governments must institute support measures that make it possible for people to do the right thing.

“The challenge isn’t knowing what to do,” Reicher concludes. “It’s making it possible for everyone to do it. Governments must act to support responsible behaviour, or schools will close, hospitals will be overwhelmed, and lives will be lost.”

The supporting article ‘Vaccinate, Isolate, Ventilate: will we ever learn the lessons from COVID?’ is published in the in the British Medical Journal (free to view)

No, We Can’t Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence

Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.


Emergency personnel work the scene, block off several buildings, and establish a crime scene security cordon at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Saturday, December 13, 2025, after a mass shooting that killed two people and wounded eight others.
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Robert C. Koehler
Dec 21, 2025

Common Dreams

I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,

On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.

So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?

Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.

Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.

But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.

And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.

And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.

As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”

And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).

All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”

Flush ‘em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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Opinion - Trump wrongly inflicts collective punishment for shootings on millions

A. Scott Bolden, 

opinion contributor
Sun, December 21, 2025 


Collective punishment is a hateful and unjust practice that has been used by bigots throughout history to harm entire groups of people for the actions or alleged actions of a few individuals. President Trump is now cruelly imposing collective punishment on millions of people around the world in response to deadly shootings in Washington, at Brown University and near MIT.

Following the attack on two National Guard members near the White House in November, Trump imposed new restrictions to keep people from 39 countries out of the U.S.

An Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces murder and other charges in the attack that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and gravely wounded guardsman Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

After a December shooting attack at Brown University left two students dead and nine wounded, followed by the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, Trump suspended a diversity lottery program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually to enable people from countries (primarily in Africa) with few citizens in the U.S. to immigrate to America.

Portuguese immigrant Claudio Neves Valente, whom authorities said was responsible for shooting the Brown students and the MIT professor, was found dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 18.

No one other than Lakanwal and Valente is believed by authorities to have been involved in the shootings.

Trump’s collective punishment of millions people for the alleged actions of two immigrants makes no sense

Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was born in Louisiana. Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was born in upstate New York. By Trump’s faulty logic, the millions of people living in Louisiana and New York should have been collectively punished following those heinous crimes.

Numerous studies dating back to 1870 have found that immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. A Cato Institute study published in September found that among people born in 1990, “native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33.”

The overwhelming majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. are grateful for the opportunity and want to work hard, play by the rules and achieve the American Dream. About 52 million immigrants live in the U.S., including about 14 million who are unauthorized, and together they make up 19 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Pew Research Center reported in August.

Trump — whose mother, paternal grandparents and two of his wives all came to the U.S. from Europe — has spent years demonizing other immigrants, especially those from non-European nations. The shootings of National Guard members, Brown students and the MIT professor gave Trump just the excuse he needed to justify intensifying his anti-immigrant campaign.

The president has attacked nonwhite immigrants from Somalia and other countries with particular fury. He recently compared allowing Somali immigrants into the U.S. to taking “garbage into our country” and denounced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a U.S. citizen who is a legal Somali immigrant. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” Trump said. “Her friends are garbage.” He later falsely stated that she’s “here illegally” and said “we ought to get her the hell out.”

Trump’s bigoted characterization of human beings as subhuman garbage is dangerous and reminiscent of the way Adolf Hitler dehumanized Jews by referring to them as rats, lice, cockroaches, vultures and other animals. In the same way, enslavers of Africans in the United States considered them subhuman animals who could be owned like cattle or horses.

Categorizing people as subhuman means it is fine to deprive them of human rights and inflict unlimited collective punishment on them — up to and including murder.

Leaders around the world have scapegoated racial, religious, ethnic and other minorities since ancient times — collectively punishing vast numbers of people. Black Americans have been frequent targets.

For example, in 1921, a Black man in Tulsa, Okla., was falsely accused of attempting to rape a white female elevator operator. Whites then rioted in a Black neighborhood and in a horrific case of collective punishment killed up to 300 Black residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, looting and burning them in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I’m well aware that xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of prejudice remain an ugly reality in America and around the world, used by the haters among us to justify all sorts of collective punishment. But until Trump came onto the political scene, I never imagined that a president of the United States would publicly embrace evil and immoral hatreds in the 21st century. Sadly, Trump has proven me wrong.

A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.