The Challenge in Facing 4 July in the United States

By Bill Fletcher Jr

July 6, 2026

Source: AlterInter

Illustration from R. G. Horton’s pro-Confederate propaganda "history" of the American Civil War

There has been something almost surreal in President Donald Trump’s efforts to both whitewash US history as well as make 4 July a celebration of his own delusional greatness. There is little that can be done about the latter, but for all progressive forces, there is certainly something that must be done regarding the efforts towards the former.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall leave aside Trump’s 3 July speech about the alleged threat of “communism.” Instead, we shall focus on the problem of history.

The challenge in the United States is that we are taught to be suspicious of history, if not hate it. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace myth. Though this may sound strange, if not implausible, it makes perfect sense when one understands the USA as having resulted from a settler-colony. Think about it for a moment. A factually accurate history of the origins of the United States would read something like this:

In 1607, a group of English colonists invaded a territory in what is now known as ‘Virginia,’ a territory occupied for thousands of years by an indigenous population, and began a process of seizing land and people, spreading disease and introducing slavery.

There is nothing in that statement that can be challenged. The problem, of course, is that such a telling is not a wonderful way to start a narrative about the greatness of one’s country. More importantly, the actual history of a settler-colony is one that always questions the moral legitimacy of the state established as a result of the colonization process. This challenge or question acts as a perpetual nightmare for the resulting state and those who support it, whether such support is passive or active.

Thus, “July 4th” is complicated by both the contradictory nature of the 1775-1783 war of independence, as well as due to being a part and parcel of a longer and equally contradictory history of what came to be the United States. It is this that Trump and his MAGA minions wish to suppress and, both literally and figuratively, whitewash.

The reality of US history is the actuality of contradiction. There are really two histories of the United States, each having its own respective subsets. And it is these two histories that are irreconcilable, even when they may agree on certain specific facts. There is the history of the United States from the standpoint of those who have sought to construct a capitalist state, in effect a white supremacist, male supremacist imperial state. Separately, there is the history of the USA from the standpoint of the subaltern classes and groups, a history of class struggle; a history of the struggles against white supremacist national oppression; a history of the struggles against patriarchy/male supremacy; a history of the struggles against the capitalist degradation of the environment; a history of solidarity with oppressed populations in other parts of the planet.

These irreconcilable histories—that of the ruling groups vs those of the subaltern classes—are what we find at stake when we are asked to celebrate 4 July. Do we uphold the rhetoric of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we dig deeper and unpack their attack on Native Americans and their fury with King George III for the Proclamation of 1763, halting colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountain range? Do we turn a blind eye to the signatories’ repudiation of the British King for attempting to turn the settlers into “slaves,” when the settlers overwhelmingly embraced slavery? Can we, in other words, remove myth, and grasp the facts and currents of history in order to understand the circumstances and actions that have led us to where we find ourselves today, both domestically and internationally? Can we utilize history, to be blunt, in order to grasp the roots of rightwing populism and neofascism in the USA and, perhaps, get a sense how to utilize the history produced by the subaltern classes against the tyrants?

Those are the questions with which I leave the reader on this, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist and international solidarity activist in the USA. He is a cofounder of standing4democracy.org and can be followed @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com.

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Bill Fletcher Jr

Bill Fletcher Jr (born 1954) has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

No Holiday for the Indentured

By Philip A Farruggio

July 5, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Alexandra Curtis/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

Well, the propaganda they sell us like soda water is that ‘ We are a free country and everyone has the opportunities to succeed in life.’ Ok, and since we are immersed as a nation in the quicksand of non unionism ( less than 7 % of private sector workers are in unions) many working stiffs have become 21st Century Indentured Servants. In feudal times the indentured servant had to work for the boss just to stay above water financially. You lose a week or two of work due to illness and you’re up the creek. Gone!

Let’s take one example this writer found by chance today. This is what it means to be an indentured servant on the  250th anniversary of America: The retail clerk with a broken wrist. I will call her ‘ Ms T ‘ working for her 15th year at the place earning $10.50 per hour with no benefits etc. She said she fell at home, the one she rents for her family at $1800 a month in town. Had to rush to the ER, has NO insurance ( she said even ObamaCare wanted $ 300 a month with a one year wait for real coverage. Between the ER and then being admitted as a patient they charged her $20k, with her wrist surgery costing $50k ( believe it or not). Obviously she asked for some charity from the hospital and surgeon’s billing, and they will be getting back to her with an answer. The woman is 59 and to put it bluntly ‘ Up the creek!’ Is this what our founding fathers anticipated or is this simply the way it always was and is?

Imagine if that store clerk belonged to a union and had the same Medicare that I have. She would still owe money, and without a supplemental plan, at least 20% of said bills would be her concern. Is this what we should be celebrating on July 4th? You can take all the fireworks and hot dogs and burgers and stuff em until those in power act like working stiffs and not the indentured servants of the super rich! As my late great union organizing  pal Walt DeYoung put it : ‘Nuff Said’.Email

Philip A Farruggio

Philip A Farruggio is a free lance columnist, host of a radio interview show and lifelong Anti War Activist. He is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, Class of '74. He has a blog on the itstheempirestupid.com website produced by Chuck Gregory. You can find Philip's work on many sites such as Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Nation of Change and Muck Rack.

The Plot to Ruin America

Nick Estes

 July 7, 2026

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land. But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota. That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth-making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas.

Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025. The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative. That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump

The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.


“I’m glad to say that I am not a ‘Marxist,’ given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves,” said Karl Marx in the conversation imagined by the author.
(Image: AI-generated)


Norman Solomon
Jul 06, 2026

Common Dreams

The following invented interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.

Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.

NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.

KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”

NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.

KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots. Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat. As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”

NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.

KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.

NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”

KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.

NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.

KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.

NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.

KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class. On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”

NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?

KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.” And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”

NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.

KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.

NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.

KM: That’s because it’s always true.

Fascist Trump Plays the Communist Card

Of course advocating for core progressive issues like universal healthcare is not being a commie, but the president is throwing the commie label at the wall to see  if it sticks.


Robert Reich
Jul 06, 2026

Inequality.org


Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.

So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?

He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.

It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.

McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.

During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).

I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.

So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert Reich
Robert Reich is professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former US secretary of labor. His latest book is the No.
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European Parliament to Debate Spyware After ‘Brazen Targeting’ of EU Lawmaker Who Probed Pegasus

Civil society groups and experts said that “the EU must act now to defend independent oversight, protect fundamental rights, and ensure that spyware abuse in Europe is met with accountability, not impunity.”


Stelios Kouloglou, then a member of the European Parliament from Greece, arrived for a meeting with the police commissioner in Valletta, Malta on December 3, 2019.
(Photo by Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 06, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The European Parliament narrowly voted Monday to hold a debate on spyware after recent revelations that the phone of Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek journalist and former member of the European Parliament, “was repeatedly hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus” while he sat on the body’s committee investigating abuses of the technology.

The vote came amid a fresh wave of calls for action. Elina Castillo Jiménez, advocacy and policy adviser for Amnesty International’s Security Lab, said in a Monday statement that “the brazen targeting of someone in his position underlines how inadequate the current system is, and is yet another wake-up call that the protections that were put in place to prevent this kind of abuse are still not being implemented in Europe.”

“Three years ago, the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee, on which Stelios Kouloglou sat, issued clear and detailed recommendations for how to close the gaps that allow this abuse to continue. We are still waiting for implementation. Delaying it sends the wrong message about impunity in the surveillance industry.”

Castillo Jiménez argued that “European leaders must find the political will needed to protect people from spyware abuse. An independent and impartial investigation into this attack, together with a roadmap for implementing PEGA recommendations, is urgently needed. If an elected member of parliament is not safe from unlawful surveillance, then no one is.”



Amnesty was also part of a Monday joint statement with individual experts and organizations including Access Now, Center for Democracy and Technology Europe, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and more, calling out the European Union for failing “to deliver a meaningful, EU-wide response to the proliferation and abuse of commercial spyware.”

Global calls for restrictions on surveillance technology have mounted since the Pegasus Project—an international media consortium led by the media nonprofit Forbidden Stories, with tech assistance from Amnesty—published a 2021 exposé of the Israeli firm’s software that was developed to secretly infiltrate mobile phones.

Kouloglou, who left the European Parliament two years ago, was appointed to serve as a substitute member of its PEGA Committee on March 24, 2022. That October, his Apple iPhone was infected with the spyware, according to research released Friday by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada.

The first documented hacking occurred while Kouloglou was at a hospital, where he was visited by Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis—who, as the Citizen Lab explained, “has worked closely on mercenary spyware issues in Greece, has testified to the PEGA committee, and was himself targeted with Intellexa’s Predator spyware.”

The following March, as Kouloglou left Athens for Brussels, his phone was again infected with Pegasus. The lab noted that the second hacking happened as he and Koukakis were making tentative plans to meet over WhatsApp, “the PEGA Committee was engaged in intense discussions related to the final drafting process,” and PEGA Rapporteur MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld was in Greece with another committee delegation that questioned Greek officials on the country’s scandal involving other spyware.

The forensic analysis also found that “Kouloglou received multiple Apple threat notifications about targeting with mercenary spyware on three occasions: March 2, 2023, August 29, 2023, and April 10, 2024,” the lab said. “It is important to note that threat notifications from Apple and other companies are not real-time alerts. They are typically sent to users in batches, often months or more after targeting takes place. Kouloglou reports to us that he did not recall receiving the Apple notifications we observed.”

The Citizen Lab acknowledged that “we have no indications that this hacking was the work of the Greek government,” though it does appear to be the same operator who targeted seven Russian- and Belarusian-speaking independent journalists and opposition activists based in Europe, whose experiences were detailed in its May 2024 joint report with Access Now.

Although there were some known cases of MEPs being targeted with Pegasus before the European Parliament’s panel was created, the lab stressed, “this is the first time a member of the PEGA Committee has been publicly identified as a victim” of this particular spyware while serving on it.



Reuters reported that while NSO did not respond to requests for comment, Apple said the vulnerability referred to in the Citizen Lab report has been patched. The European Parliament told the news outlet that its spyware screening tools had been available to all lawmakers since 2022 and its information technology security services “constantly monitor cybersecurity threats as well as potential cyberattacks against its working environment.”

However, that’s not enough for critics like In ‘t Veld, who is also no longer an MEP and pointed out to Politico that hundreds of politicians, including European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, have been targeted by various tech.

“If attempts to target the phone of the president of the European Parliament, or members of the European Commission, does not trigger sufficient reaction, [and] is not enough to break the deadlock, then what is?” she asked

The coalition of groups and tech experts similarly said in their Monday statement: “These incidents all point to a structural failure to adequately and seriously respond to the spyware crisis in Europe. This latest revelation should be treated as a rule of law emergency, threatening the very foundations of our society.”

“Europe cannot continue moving from scandal to scandal without consequence. The targeting of a member of the European Parliament involved in investigating spyware abuse should mark a turning point,” the coalition said. “The EU must act now to defend independent oversight, protect fundamental rights, and ensure that spyware abuse in Europe is met with accountability, not impunity.”

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the lab, told The Guardian last week that “this case is the ultimate irony of Europe’s spyware crisis. Someone on the very committee tasked with investigating Pegasus gets infected by it. And what has happened since? The parliament looks the other way when new European spyware abuses emerge.”

“I can tell you how the next chapter will go: more hacked parliamentarians,” he warned. “In fact, I suspect there are members voting and attending high-level meetings with no idea that their phone has been turned into a spy in their pocket.”

Scott-Railton welcomed Monday’s vote to hold a debate later this week, and listed some key questions on social media:



In addition to urging investigations by European Union institutions, the Citizen Lab recommended that other members and their staff immediately seek forensic screening of their devices, exercise vigilance for state-sponsored attack warnings, and enable Lockdown mode on iPhones and Advanced Protect for Android.

Trump deal to build foreign-owned refinery on the brink of failure in deep-red state

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts at the end of the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 24, 2026. REUTERS KEVIN LAMARQUE

Janelle Stecklein,

Oklahoma Voice

July 06, 2026

President Donald Trump’s dream of opening a massive, foreign-owned aluminum smelter in Oklahoma is in jeopardy.

Ironically, the Republican leader’s plan to erect an enormous, superheated, pollution-producing, industrial complex in a rural area isn’t imploding because of his usual perceived enemies: the liberal, radical left.

His plan is on the brink of failure, this time, because of fellow Republicans.

It turns out Trump, his hired hands in Washington and partners in the United Arab Emirates may have underestimated Oklahomans. They can be a stubborn lot, with a strong desire to be good stewards of the environment and a pungent dislike of federal and state officials insisting that they know what’s best for them.

Oklahomans first learned in May 2025 that our own Republican leader, Gov. Kevin Stitt, had inked a deal with Emirates Global Aluminum to place the smelter in Inola, a town of about 2,000 people located about 25 miles east of Tulsa.

We also learned then that Oklahoma taxpayers would be on the hook for providing about $255 million in incentives. We later discovered that the federal government had issued a $500 million grant to help with construction costs, and the UAE company is also expecting to receive $735 million more in other tax exemptions and offsets.

Supporters tout the project as being the largest economic investment in state history. They say it represents $4 billion pumped into Oklahoma by Emirates Global Aluminum that will create over 1,000 jobs. It’s also apparently part of President Donald Trump’s broader $200 billion economic deal with the United Arab Emirates.

In exchange for over $1 billion in incentives, about 600,000 tons of aluminum would be produced in Inola each year. Supporters of the facility, which include state House and Senate leaders, say it would double the amount of aluminum produced in the U.S.


The problem appears to be that no one considered whether residents of Inola – which earned the nickname “Hay Capital of the World” courtesy of the Bluestem Prairie grass harvested in the area for cattle – would want to put a gigantic, superheated facility in their backyard.

As residents have learned more about Trump’s plan, it’s clear that they’re getting increasingly aggravated at the federal government and this company who wants to upset their way of life.

Aluminum smelters require a high amount of energy to turn aluminium oxide, a crystalline powder most commonly known as alumina, into aluminum metal. Supporters contend while the process utilizes a ton of energy, it doesn’t generate much solid waste.

But the country’s existing smelters – constructed more than half a century ago – have been found to produce heat-trapping greenhouse gases, some of which remain in the atmosphere for 50,000 years.

Residents in the Inola area worry about the potential impact of the facility’s emissions on plants and animals. A growing number don’t want it unless or until they receive written assurances that would stand up in court — from the company and federal government — that it’s safe.

Is it any surprise that neither the UAE business nor U.S. leaders seem willing to give them that peace of mind on paper, despite insisting that it’s perfectly safe?

Inola residents are rightfully expressing their anxieties in a proper way — during the town’s permitting process. Last week, hundreds of residents attended a meeting to urge local leaders to pause the approval process for the smelter. Town leaders issued a 60-day moratorium on the permitting process, KOSU reported.


Getting a win on the project is so important to the Trump administration, KOSU reported, that Trump penned a letter urging town leaders to support it.

The president’s missive was read aloud at the meeting.

In response, someone shouted that Trump should build it at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson even showed up at the town meeting to try to convince residents that the plant will use the latest and greatest technology that ensures “emissions will not leave the plant.” The U.S. Senate confirmed Robertson’s appointment in October. She leads the Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Mineral and Energy Innovation.


Amid angry rumblings from the audience, KOSU reported, Robertson imprudently told a roomful of people who overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024: “All right. I guess it’s not as friendly here as where I came from.”

Let’s be clear about one thing. Oklahomans are traditionally very friendly people — until they’re faced with federal political appointees who roll in and insist they know what’s best for them. If Robertson really wanted to convince Inola the smelter is safe, she could insist the company sign an affidavit swearing that “emissions will not leave the plant,” as she claims.

The company behind this project isn’t doing Trump any favors either.

Who in their right mind sends town leaders a letter threatening to sue an entire town for millions of dollars in damages as a project is going through our governing process?


Rather than work to alleviate concerns, KOSU reported that Oklahoma Primary Aluminum, a U.S. subsidiary of Emirates Global Aluminum, did just that. Primary Aluminum owns 40% of the stake in the company. Dubai-based Emirates Global, which is 7,000 miles away, holds the majority stake.

Just days before that clash in Inola, Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond separately issued a rare challenge to Trump’s policy ambitions, suing to block the project’s construction. He argues it will severely pollute Inola and other communities in the region. He also has concerns that the Dubai company owns the majority stake in the project.

Trump responded by ranting on TruthSocial that Drummond is a “Dumocrat,” and that Oklahoma’s attorney general “wants to dethrone a magnificent, Job producing, desperately needed Aluminum Plant that will be one of the best projects ever conceived or built in the Great State of Oklahoma.”

Trump unsurprisingly has endorsed Drummond’s Republican gubernatorial opponent Mike Mazzei, who has suddenly come out in support of this project.

Oklahoma is not a dictatorship where out-of-state and out-of-country officials can force us to bow to their whims.

And our state shouldn’t be spending our hard-earned taxpayer dollars backing a company that – rather than work to build consensus – is further sowing division by threatening to use litigation as a cudgel to get their way

Ours is a state that embraces democratic processes. That includes local governance and the ability of local residents to decide what they want their community to be, regardless of what deals are inked at the state and federal level on their behalf.

Trump and the leaders of the smelting company would do well to remember that.

‘Corruption, Plain and Simple’: Trump Brags About Being Soft on Crypto Industry

“The Trump family has made over $5 BILLION in corrupt crypto deals,” said Rep. Greg Casar. “Now Trump is openly bragging that his government won’t investigate cryptocurrency-related crimes.”


Demonstrators hold up mock cryptocurrency during the “America is Not for Sale” rally against President Donald Trump’s crypto dealings at the Trump National Golf Club on May 22, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Public Citizen)

Brad Reed
Jul 06, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump on Monday boasted about how lax his administration has been in pursuing investigations into the cryptocurrency industry.

Speaking at the White House, Trump attacked former President Joe Biden’s administration for prosecuting cryptocurrency industry figures for a wide variety of crimes related to money laundering and fraud.

“They were very violently against [the crypto industry],” Trump said. “They were putting people in jail. What they were doing to the crypto world, it was horrible. It’s amazing that it survived that onslaught, it was a weaponization of government.”

Trump then explained how he drew support from the industry by coming out in favor of it during the 2024 presidential campaign, adding that “every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I said, ‘You’re lucky I’m president.’”



During his second term, Trump has not only taken a hands-off approach to the crypto industry, but also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023.

This pardon drew allegations of corruption given that Binance has been a major financial booster of World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by the Trump family that has added billions of dollars to their total wealth.

Even as Trump has personally raked in money from selling his own memecoin, many of his supporters who invested in it have lost significant sums of money.

A Sunday report in The New York Times revealed that nearly 1 million people who invested in the Trump memecoin have recorded losses totaling $3.8 billion since its launch in 2025.

As the Times noted, “Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down” because he “collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, ripped the president for openly boasting about going easy on the industry that he’s personally profiting from.

“The Trump family has made over $5 BILLION in corrupt crypto deals,” Casar wrote in a social media post. “Now Trump is openly bragging that his government won’t investigate cryptocurrency-related crimes. Corruption, plain and simple.”

Stephen Moore stumped on live TV as CNN host rattles off list of Trump corruption

Trump-loving economics expert Stephen Moore (Photo: Screen capture)

Sarah K. Burris

July 06, 2026 

ALTERNET

Far-right economics expert and ally of President Donald Trump Stephen Moore, was momentarily stumped when he went up against CNN host Jim Sciutto on Monday.

As Sciutto reporter, a bombshell report published Monday revealed that investors of Trump's cryptocurrency lost $3.8 billion while Trump raked in profits. It's a 98 percent drop in the value.

Moore acknowledged that losing that much value is certainly not a good thing, but that he knows "people" who have "gotten really, really rich off of crypto." Trump, in particular, made approximately $1.1 billion off of crypto ventures, according to his financial disclosure.

But Sciutto asked about the ethics and allegations of corruption as well. "But what's different about it?" Sciutto asked. "He's not just any other person. He's the president of the United States with an enormous political following. People bought it because of him, right? And if you or I started a meme coin, we wouldn't get that many people to invest and be able to walk away with $500 million in fees. Is that not taking advantage of the office?"

Moore dismissed it, saying that people "wanted to believe in these coins" and that Trump was acting "in good faith." Trump, he claimed, truly believed it would be a "good investment." For him, it was.

That's when Sciutto asked about all of the other ventures that Trump has profited from in the past year.

"Here's the thing, though. If this [were] isolated, you could say it was one bad investment. But you have the president and his sons investing in companies that have government business before them. You have a lot of questions about President Trump making trades prior to or connected to decisions he made that benefit those companies," the host said. "It's not just one bad crypto bet for for the majority of people, it's a question of profiting from the office."

Moore demanded an example, but Sciutto called his bluff. He cited the billion-dollar mining deal in Kazakhstan. The project was being pushed by Trump's administration while his sons were pressing the same project, with the family poised to profit.

It created a glaring conflict of interest as public power was being used to help along a deal that ultimately enriched the president's businesses. The timeline also looks bad, as Trump's sons got involved as it was starting to advance, making it appear that access and influence were being used to help the family profit. Ethics rules and anti-corruption laws are supposed to bar this kind of self-dealing, a TIME analysis explained.

But Moore claimed that Trump had nothing to do with his sons' businesses because he's too busy being president and their companies are a "big industry."

"It's a multibillion-dollar industry. I would separate out what the Trump industries are doing versus what President Trump is doing in the Oval Office," Moore said.

Moore asserted Trump isn't benefiting at all from his presidency.

"He's not he's not using his position to get rich off of these investments these investments, in my opinion," Moore said.

"In your opinion," Sciutto repeated.

The nearly 1,000-page financial disclosure shows that he has increased his wealth by at least $2 billion since taking office.

'Fallen through the floor': CNN expert finds Trump taking one-two punch on world stage

Matthew Chapman
July 6, 2026 

RAW STORY


(Screengrab via CNN)

President Donald Trump is headed to meet with NATO allies in Turkey this week to try to strategize an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — but CNN data guru Harry Enten has some sobering numbers that should make Trump think twice about whether his presence will do much at all.

"How much sway does he have with the Ukrainian public?" anchor Sara Sidner asked him.

"What Trump is hoping is that he can, you know, put his finger on Volodymyr Zelenskyy and pressure him," said Enten. However, "look at this number. Net approval of U.S. leadership among Ukrainians."

When former President Joe Biden was at the helm, said Enten, "U.S. leadership was on the positive side of the ledger at +3 points," said Enten. "Look at how this number has absolutely fallen through the floor to now -72 points. That is a 75-point switcheroo in the wrong direction" — and, he said, it means Zelenskyy is unlikely to fear that rejecting Trump's potential demands to make concessions to Russia will damage his own standing with voters.

That's no surprise, Sidner argued. "Some of the comments that Trump has made, some of the niceties with Russia, and yelling at the president while they are in war has been a real problem for the Ukrainian people."

But that's not the only bad news for Trump in the data, said Enten — it turns out that voters in America don't have a lot of confidence in him to end Russia's war in Ukraine, either.

"Take a look here," said Enten. "U.S. trust in Trump, on the Russia-Ukraine war. Look at this number. Overall, it's fallen from 45 percent back when Trump was on the campaign trail to just 32 percent now." Worse, it's even fallen among Republicans, as "it was 81 percent two years ago. It is now just 60 percent."

The bottom line, said Enten, is that "Trump comes into any negotiations in a weakened state, given the domestic feelings in Russia and Ukraine and the domestic feelings here in the United States as well."

Trump was betrayed by world leaders he never should have trusted: analysis

(REUTERS)

Matthew Rozsa

July 06, 2026

ALTERNET

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has had a gradual falling out with President Donald Trump, motivated by everything from his belligerent rhetoric toward Europe to him falsely claiming that she had begged him for a photograph together. Now, according to an opinion piece by the editors at Newsweek, Trump is being widely betrayed by the international coalition of nationalists he has supported — and the break up was entirely predictable.

“Trump has sought to cohere a loose orbit of leaders, parties, conferences and media figures into a larger patriotic, sovereignist movement—one hostile to liberal internationalism and multilateral institutions, and one that is capable of winning seats in power,” Newsweek’s Editors wrote on Monday. “His own National Security Strategy encouraged America's European political allies to promote ‘unapologetic celebrations’ of national character, welcomed the growing influence of ‘patriotic European parties,’ and called for Europe to operate as a group of ‘aligned sovereign nations.’”

Listing various world leaders including “Poland's Karol Nawrocki. Hungary's Viktor Orbán. Argentina's Javier Milei. Spain's Santiago Abascal. Germany's Alice Weidel. France's Marine Le Pen. Colombia's Abelardo de la Espriella. The Netherlands' Geert Wilders,” Newsweek said the so-called Trump International has a fatal structural flaw — namely, that “it is fragile as politics because each member owes the home audience the same promise: Nobody abroad gets to tell us what to do. The peace shatters when two nationalists collide.”

The article then delved into detail about how Meloni has distanced herself from Trump because he has become increasingly unpopular among Italian nationalists.

“Meloni can cooperate with Trump on migration, defense spending and the EU,” Newsweek explained. “What she cannot do is accept the appearance of a patron-client relationship with Washington, or swallow personal insults that transmute into national ones. YouGov found in April that only 7 percent of Italians had a favorable view of Trump, while 86 percent had an unfavorable one.”

Newsweek anticipated that Trump’s upcoming meeting with Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would be consequential.

“The Ankara family photo will still be taken, smiles all around,” Newsweek wrote. “NATO's communiqués will still be signed, as they always are, even in turbulent times. Trump and Meloni may yet find more common ground on migration, defense and the EU that moves them past the current falling-out.”

They added, “If the summit delivers a genuine reset—and Rome quietly restores the kind of cooperation it withheld over Iran—the brotherhood's contradiction will look more manageable than it does today. But the feud has exposed the weakness inside Trump's preferred international coalition. He wants allies who speak the language of sovereignty, then bristles when they speak it back to him—even when he insulted them first.”

The editorial concluded that “Trump's brotherhood was always going to betray him because every member joined it for the same reason. Each came to defend a nation, and every nation eventually asks to be defended from its friends.”