A couple days ago, I got my first hard copy of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, the book I had the honor of co-authoring with the inimitable Naomi Klein. It’s always an exciting and slightly surreal moment to hold the finished object you’ve been working on for so long in your hands.

No book emerges from a vacuum. Indeed, part of the pleasure of thinking and writing—even about a topic as dark as End Times Fascism—is the opportunity to deeply engage and build on the work of other authors and scholars. This project gave us an excuse to read and revisit the work of many thinkers and journalists we admire, not all of whom get referenced in the final text.

As a result, Naomi and I thought it would be worthwhile to compile an End Times Fascism reading list, or the beginnings of one.

Publication day is September 15, which means you’ll have to wait a few weeks to read our book. (Here’s our obligatory plea for pre-orders, which are essential to a book’s success.) But you can read all of the excellent titles and articles below right now, without delay.

As you may have surmised by now, end times fascism is our name for the survivalist, supremacist fever that now grips the contemporary far right. A far right that has given up on the prospect of a shared future and instead embraced versions of bunkered survival in our era of accelerating catastrophes.

Our analysis focuses on the three strands that make up this unprecedented apocalyptic alliance:

1. The religious end timers who want to accelerate Armageddon in the middle east so the messiah will arrive. 2. The tech end timers, determined to incinerate our world to build their AI data centers and digital gods. 3. And the ethno-nationalist end timers, busy prepping for collapse by hoarding resources and fortressing the border.

The reading list that follows is by no means a complete list of sources, and it does not address the much broader topic of fascist history and ideology, though it goes without saying that a great many excellent and essential works exist on that topic. Instead, we wanted to lift up just some of the texts (and one podcast) that we found particularly useful as we explored various aspects of these reactionary tendencies and the bunkered mentality that unites them.

This list is far from exhaustive. There are many other excellent resources that we don’t have space to recommend and there’s also much more to our book, including a positive vision of an anti-fascist earth-bound politics. Maybe we’ll even do a Fighting End Times Fascism reading list next. But first we need to understand the treacherous forces we’re up against, and any one of these texts are good places to start.

BUNKER ONE: The Religious End Timers

Daniel G. Hummel, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations

Tal Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

Matthew Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy

Across the Divide podcast

BUNKER TWO: The Tech End Timers

Timnit Gebru and , “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” First Monday

Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan, “Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth,” boundary 2

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

BUNKER THREE: The Ethno-Nationalist End Timers

, “Between the Fires in Los Angeles and Fascism in America,” Hammer & Hope

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis

Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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That image was followed by a sensational link to a Daily Mail piece claiming that during El-Sayed’s stint as executive director of the Detroit Health Department, Detroit’s Animal Control was a “slaughterhouse,” euthanizing thousands of homeless cats and dogs. Memes with variations of this claim have been spreading like wildfire through MAGA networks, inciting countless angry (and extremely racist) responses. On August 14^th the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) issued a press release touting the launch of “‘Dogs Against Abdul’ to Defeat El-Sayed in November.” Spencer Pratt jumped on the bandwagon: “Abdul El-Sayed ran a ‘slaughterhouse’ that killed 4,000+ kittens and dogs. Sounds familiar, LA? This is just what communists do. I don’t trust ANYONE who hates dogs. #1 tell of a psychopath is abusing animals.”

To be clear, the charge is bogus. To quote Snopes, the ultimate Internet-myth debunking site: “Public evidence shows that while these allegations were loosely based on actual complaints about conditions at the shelter, El-Sayed wasn’t yet in charge of Detroit Animal Control when the complaints first surfaced. Rather, he inherited the shelter’s problems when animal control was moved from the police department’s control to the health department’s in late 2015.” Local reporting confirms that the situation improved on El-Sayed’s watch, with the city’s euthanasia rates falling from 74% in 2015 to approximately 35% two years later.

Of course the Republican party doesn’t care about facts. And we saw plenty of liberals online respond by pointing this out, as well as the utter hypocrisy. Remember Cricket, the dog Kristi Noem boasted of shooting and killing? Or what about all the dead animals pictured in glamour shots of the Trump sons on their big-budget safaris?

The double standards are indeed glaring and galling. But we’re also convinced that pointing them out is far too simplistic a response. (And besides, when has highlighting Republican hypocrisy actually gotten us anywhere?)

Today, we have an article in The New Republic exploring a troubling phenomenon: How Republicans are beginning to talk about animal welfare and gaining new allies—and potentially new voters—as a result. We worry we’re seeing the next iteration of a new kind of MAHA: an unlikely alliance around a set of issues that have long been progressive-coded and that the right is now angling for. Remember how a few years ago, it was almost impossible to imagine crunchy moms who hate Monsanto becoming a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition? But it happened. And we’re concerned it could happen again with animal lovers.

When we previewed the article on a recent episode of Aaron’s podcast, Fighting Fascism, some listeners, predictably, went straight to Republican hypocrisy. Only rubes could believe the right could care about animals. Once again, that’s too easy. As we show in the piece, reality is more complicated. Some high profile MAGA politicians and influencers are positioning themselves as the defenders of (some) animals, particularly in regard to animal testing, which the Trump administration appears to be taking real steps to roll back. As we write in our piece:

“A movement is gaining momentum on the far right. In addition to launching a ‘strike force’ to crack down on puppy mills and dogfights, the Trump administration is working to rein in animal experimentation. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the world’s foremost funder of biomedical research, has dedicated $87 million to the development of animal-free research methods, and the Food and Drug Administration has published a strategic road map to phase out animal testing. Kennedy has met with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, about the possibility of turning NIH-backed primate research centers into animal sanctuaries—a possibility the NIH has reportedly followed up on. Tomi Lahren, along with fellow influencers Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich and Republican officials including Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, all worked to defeat the Save Our Bacon Act, a misleadingly named bill being pushed by the pork industry that would have preempted state-level welfare protections that provide gestating sows a tiny bit of room to move.”

One of the scariest things about this is the prospect of the MAGA right yoking concern for animals to racism and xenophobia—hardly a novel development in the history of fascism. (The Nazis famously passed far-reaching animal welfare laws.) Vance was being a cynical, racist demagogue when he lied about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio, and the same goes for the NRSC and its ostensible pro-dog smears against El-Sayed.

But these ploys only work because millions of ordinary Americans do care about animals. And they should.

The right is reaching these folks because the liberal and left opposition has left a vacuum. One animal rights activist we quoted put it this way: “It’s difficult to watch animal rights folks accept this embrace from the right, but at this point I honestly can’t blame them. If you tell people to fuck off enough times, they’re gonna fuck off. And that’s what the left has been doing to animal rights activists for decades.”

As we argue in the piece, it would be an ethical and tactical blunder to let MAGA uncontestedly lay claim to the compassion that so many feel toward animals. For the sake of the non-human animals we share this world with—and just as much for the sake of our democracy and all the human rights under assault by MAGA—it’s time to change course.

Pointing out the right’s hypocrisy on animals isn’t and will never be an effective response. What we need, instead, is a politics that speaks to people’s sincere concern for vulnerable creatures by actually working to decrease their needless suffering.

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I’ve been slacking on H&H my editorial duties given that I’ve been all in writing End Times Fascism (out September 15!), but I contributed something short to a forum called “How is Zohran Mamdani Doing?”

All the contributions are worthwhile and thought provoking, so I won’t pick favorites — but offers some particularly grounded, constructive, and incisive criticism. (“I like the mayor. I think he’s a lovely human being. And our libraries also need funding. We need to be able to say many things at the same time.”) I also appreciate my friend and fellow H&H editor Chenjerai Kumanyika posing the urgent question of whether we are building the grassroots power required to help make Mamdani’s working class agenda viable.

You can read my piece, about the potent combination of radical vision and competence, in full below or at the H&H site.

The Democrats Fear a Left-Winger Who Governs Well

In late May, there was some reporting on Project 2029, the Democratic Party’s supposed answer to the now notorious Project 2025. Tellingly, the think tankers behind the initiative gave an exclusive sneak preview to The Bulwark, the conservative media outlet guided by erstwhile never-Trump Republicans.

Where Project 2025 laid out brazen attacks on the administrative state designed to advance the cause of hyper-capitalist Christian nationalism, Project 2029 proudly touted four milquetoast priorities: break up utility monopolies; improve child-care options; protect kids from the internet; and cut down on the “annoyance economy” (think spam calls and surprise fees). The MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem, in an assessment that was both accurate and far too kind, called it “shockingly timid.”

A powerful flank of the Democratic Party and the associated Washington blob wants nothing more than for Project 2029–style proposals to be seen as both visionary and pragmatic — and at the far end of what Democratic voters should believe is desirable and achievable (“bigger and bolder than what people have been offered before,” to quote the Project 2029 team’s delusional description).

The same ambition-curbing agenda is visible in the recent “Promise to America” pledge proposed by a handful of Democratic congressional representatives: Aspiring party candidates should promise to be “capitalist,” “responsible,” “mainstream,” and “proud of America.” According to The Washington Post, the pledge is a “direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt” and the rising popularity of Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, who are described as successfully capturing the “party’s energy and activism.”

You read that right. Democratic politicians seeking to win office are being advised to denounce the policy priorities of the political figures most effectively tapping into the party’s energy and activism.

Mamdani, however, is doing much more than just fostering grassroots enthusiasm and engagement, in part because he occupies a very different position than his Washington counterparts. Even as the number of leftists in Congress slowly climbs, they remain a small minority within a party that doesn’t control a single branch of government. Given this lopsided balance of power, left elected officials in Congress and the Senate are mostly limited to messaging bills and other rearguard actions. All of that’s valuable, but it can fuel the centrist critique that the left wing of the party is focused on allegedly pie-in-the-sky ideas (Medicare for All, a federal data center moratorium, abolishing ICE) rather than the practical mechanics of day-to-day governance.

As mayor of New York City, Mamdani occupies a unique and powerful role. His decisions immediately impact the lives of 8.5 million people, and his position gives him a national bully pulpit. Every day he’s in office, Mamdani challenges the subtext of Project 2029 and the “Promise to America” pledge: that ordinary people need to keep lowering their expectations of government, that big changes that actually help working people are impossible, and that democratic socialists are impractical idealists (or worse).

Those milquetoast Project 2029 proposals? Mamdani is working on them and much more. He’s cracking down on the so-called annoyance economy with actions on junk fees and difficult-to-cancel subscriptions and improving child care by implementing free public options (promoted with humorous and heartwarming videos to boot). Meanwhile, he refuses to let go of more ambitious goals, including freezing the rent, taxing the rich and abolishing billionaires, and holding war criminals accountable.

Mamdani, of course, is not perfect. No politician is or ever will be, and the public will have to hold him to account like any other leader. Instead of posing as a messiah, he’s offering a model. Every modest victory he racks up — each pothole filled and corporate landlord or abusive boss fined — busts the myth that triangulating technocrats is the safe and pragmatic political option.

Corporate Democrats would have us believe that socialists can’t be trusted with the levers of power because they don’t know how to govern realistically or effectively. But these centrists don’t actually fear bad government. After all, their policies appear scrupulously designed to perpetuate the quotidian catastrophe we’re all living under. What centrists truly fear is a left-winger who governs well. That’s the terrifying threat Mamdani poses to the status quo — and the massive opportunity his administration presents for all of those who want to transform it.

Organizer Saul Levin and I decided to weigh in, writing in The Guardian, to make the case for the strategic utility of an anti-data center strategy. Here’s part of our piece:

Fortunately for all of us, an unlikely and unruly coalition has emerged to resist the AI takeover by taking aim at the industry’s core infrastructure. In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition. By all measures, 2026 is shaping up to be an even bigger year for the AI resistance.

In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?

From rural North Carolina to suburban Virginia to the foothills and farmlands of New Mexico and Oregon, ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through datacenter deals at a breathtaking clip, often behind a veil of secrecy enforced by NDAs. In deep red Indiana, more than 10 counties have enacted moratoriums or temporary bans on new AI datacenters; the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma recently passed a moratorium for their territory; and across New Jersey, project after project has been cancelled due to local fury about the raw deals on offer.

And yet instead of lending their support to the cause, people who should be allies are using their platforms to issue misguided critiques.

Consider a recent piece in Jacobin by the academic Holly Buck, which painted the anti-datacenter movement as an elitist “dead end” that will only succeed in denying poor people the benefits of AI tools. Though published in a leading socialist magazine, Buck’s article sounded remarkably like a recent Washington Post op-ed by two executives from the Trump-aligned surveillance technology giant Palantir, which argued that slowing down or stopping datacenters would only hurt the working class: “The surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite is to block the infrastructure that would make it cheap for everyone else.”

These kinds of arguments are becoming distressingly commonplace despite their shaky and condescending logic. Fundamentally, liberal criticisms of the anti-datacenter movement reflect a lack of understanding about how these fights are playing out and how grassroots organizing and power-building works. (Meanwhile, if Palantir’s leadership actually cared about economic justice, they wouldn’t be advocating for a technology their CEO believes will unleash “deep societal upheavals”.)

You can read the rest here

Other people have issued excellent responses as well, including in The New Republic and on his Substack. I recommend checking them out.

The discussion was moderated by CBC IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed as part of a “Conversations” series, aimed at “bringing together important minds to meet and reflect on crucial topics of the moment.”

CBC just posted the conversation in full and you can listen here.

Dr. Bengio, who is regarded as one of the “godfathers” of AI, sounded the alarm about the risks of super-intelligence and even a potential AI dictatorship. If nothing else, it was fascinating to get to speak with someone deeply involved in the creation of this technology who is profoundly terrified of what he helped create.

Cory took a very different view, arguing that after the inevitable crash AI will be more like a plug-in and GPUs will be cheap and abundant. My perspective on the impacts and fall out of a potential crash don’t align with Cory’s (I see more consolidation and inequality after the fact, and think AI could still rise phoenix-like from the ashes in damaging ways), but I do agree with him on a lot, including the fact that tech companies and bosses are hyping AI to screw workers and enrich the oligarchs. I recommend this piece in the Guardian, which touches on some of his arguments on the panel and also teases his forthcoming book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

Dr. Bengio, for what it’s worth, very much emphasizes the twisted financial imperatives that are now driving the development of AI, and potentially driving it (and all of us) off the rails. There was a general consensus on the panel that you can’t separate the risks of this tech from the economic incentives shaping the field.

If anything, the exchange reinforced my sense that we can put too much weight on debating technological hypotheticals — what AI’s capabilities will be or won’t be in X time frame — when the underlying political economy is what we need to be focused on and where we might find the most common ground. I have my own predictions and views about the nature of the tech (I cannot stand the phrase “superintelligence” and don’t think we’re on the brink of it). But the problem is that we get a bit stuck in that groove, with the AI folks making wild claims and then skeptics debunking them…and at a certain point it’s not that interesting or productive.

As part of the process of writing End Times Fascism with Naomi Klein (pre-order now!) I got a chance to think a bit more deeply about AI. My view is that the most strategic thing to do is focus on policies that will hold up and serve ordinary people’s interest in a range of possible scenarios, including if AI stalls out, if it speeds up, or if it exponentially takes off. I’m dubious of the latter scenario, but ready to make common cause with folks who see things differently — assuming we can agree on potentially constructive responses.

Strong privacy regulations. Renewable energy not dirty gas and coal. Robust labor rights and a jobs guarantee. A strong social safety net. Investing in human led science and research. Serious controls of deep fakes and limits on human impersonation in general. Meaningful anti-trust rules. Fines with real teeth for companies that violate said regulations.

I could go on. But you should just listen to the episode, which touches and this and a lot more.

++++

PS: In case you missed it, I reviewed Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident for the New York Times — which might have some lessons for how we combat AI.

As I finished Beckerman’s rousing manual, I couldn’t shake another thought: We need dissidents, yes, but we also desperately need discipline and vision. The book offers some tantalizing accounts of collective rebellion, including the fight for abolition in the United States and the struggle against communism in 1980s Poland that started among trade unionists. But more could have fruitfully been said about the push and pull between dissidents and social movements, or between the commands of private conscience and the outreach and compromises required to make lasting change. Beckerman shows how to sound the moral alarm, which is an important first step. What comes next — the steps required to forge durable coalitions and win specific democratic reforms — is harder and on this front Beckerman is more conflicted.

Throughout this book, we have shown that there is a tradition of transformative solidarity rooted in ancient thought that evolved through the modern era into the present day. We use the concept of “tradition” intentionally. A tradition is a conversation that extends over time, an orientation that is characterized by a set of values or principles, and that seeks to inculcate those values in future gen­erations. Traditions function by training adherents in the kinds of values and practices that help strengthen Rousseau’s social spirit and that sustain us and our movements over the long term.

Traditions help cultivate what philosophers, going back to Aris­totle, describe as “virtues,” a concept useful in reframing the rela­tionship between how we live and the politics to which we aspire. Virtues are values put into action. We learn virtue by trying, and sometimes failing, to act virtuously and by cultivating moral hab­its, which are neither spontaneous nor innate.

We don’t often talk about virtues these days. But while the term has a slightly dated ring, the emphasis on conscious action—on choice and habit—aligns with our understanding of solidarity as both a principle and a practice. We should not shy away from this: after all, there is no “neutral” baseline for society to revert to, no “natural” social order.

Our behavior and sensibilities are constantly being shaped (and often manipulated) by the social and economic context in which we find ourselves. We are formed by both the state and the market as they currently exist; we are imprinted by public policies and employment opportunities, by schools and media and consumer trends. If democracy is something we care about, it is incumbent upon us as concerned citizens to develop the virtues that can help make solidarity real.

What are the virtues that cultivate and accompany solidarity? Inspired by Aristotle, we offer a few here, to begin.

First and foremost, solidarity requires justice. As we dis­cussed in chapter 1, solidarity is originally an ancient Roman financial term that referred to mutual indebtedness and mutual obligation. Justice involves the recognition of debts that have accrued over time, and the duty to pay back those to whom we owe our existence by investing in the future and those yet to come. In ancient Egypt, justice was represented by the goddess Ma’at. Funerary hieroglyphics depict an indi­vidual’s heart being weighed against the feather of Ma’at to determine whether the person is allowed to pass into the after­life. But this measurement was not an attempt to tally up an exact calculation of debts and credits; rather, it was to judge whether a person had participated in creating a harmonious social order. Justice was meant to create harmony, in the same way that payment of social debts should be oriented toward repair. Sometimes, this means forgiving debts that cannot be paid, a kind of forbearance or forgiveness that prioritizes the health of a community beyond a strict exchange. The solidar­ity we hope for does not engage in protracted rounds of ven­geance, but instead leaves room for reparation, reconciliation, and transformation.

Solidarity requires commitment. As we’ve acknowledged, solidarity can emerge in moments of incredible peril, during floods and fires, shootings and hateful attacks. This kind of impulsive, unplanned solidarity is often fleeting; it subsides when the immediate threat recedes. In contrast, transforma­tive solidarity is not spontaneous but consciously cultivated. It requires commitment, and commitment as we understand it has two dimensions: depth and duration. The radical social transformation required to rebalance power between regular people and elites cannot be achieved overnight—it unfolds on the scale of lifetimes and eras, not years or even decades.

Many of the thinkers and organizers we most admire and have written about in these pages took the baton from pre­ceding generations before passing it to rising ones—they dedicated much of their limited time on earth to fighting for justice and helping others do the same. These people are the marathon runners of solidarity. But solidarity can also play out on a shorter timescale. We need people to sprint, to seize the opportunity and take a side at a critical juncture: standing up for a colleague, signing a union card, endorsing an insur­gent candidate, redirecting resources to organizers, support­ing refugees, engaging in civil disobedience, bailing people out of jail. Depth and duration is what makes these relatively brief acts different from the superficial and performative expressions of approval or enthusiasm that too often pass for solidarity today. Transformative solidarity is not a tweet or a yard sign. It is not casual, it is often inconvenient, and the outcomes can be unpredictable, which brings us to the next virtue.

Solidarity requires courage. Solidarity always contains an element of risk, whether it is the solidarity state attempting to distribute risk equitably among a population or individu­als taking risks to fight injustice. During the Standing Rock protests, hundreds of Water Protectors were arrested and charged. Five were sent to federal prison, and a good num­ber of people were seriously wounded when police and private security forces attacked. In September 2019, two women from the Catholic Worker house in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to these developments with an act of solidarity with those who now—and future generations who will—depend on the lakes and rivers imperiled by greed. Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya admitted to using oxyacetylene cutting torches to pierce through exposed, empty steel valves up and down the pipeline, which succeeded in delaying its comple­tion. Prosecutors imposed “terrorism enhancement” charges to increase the length of sentences for the women in hopes of deterring others from following in their footsteps.

As we have seen, solidarity can take many forms, from the seemingly simple act of paying attention to profound demon­strations of bravery and self-sacrifice. Expressions of solidar­ity do not have to be dramatic and high-stakes. But even the most benign and nonviolent acts of compassion and resistance can become dangerous confrontations with authority. His­tory shows that when regular people build enough power to challenge elite domination, they often find themselves under threat—this is what happened in Atlanta during the campaign to stop the urban forest-destroying police training facility known as Cop City. In 2023, after charging protesters under anti-terrorism stat­utes, the state of Georgia indicted sixty-one activists on rack­eteering charges, singling out the organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, an informal group that provided bail support to arrestees. The 109-page indictment lambasts the idea of “social solidarity” as one of the dangerous values promoted by the Cop City movement. Or consider the 2024 crackdowns on the Palestine “solidarity encampments” on campuses across North America. Students and faculty were beaten and arrested and even suspended or fired for peaceful demonstrations against the occupation and obliteration of Gaza.

Courage is required because the enemies of transformative solidarity have proven themselves, time and again, willing to persecute and imprison, and even murder and massacre, in order to maintain power, profit, and control—and to prevent us from distributing risk in a humane and sustainable way.

Finally, solidarity requires humility and curiosity. Humility is a recognition of one’s own incompleteness and an openness to the insights of others. It requires listening and learning—in other words, curiosity, which is not only the awareness of one’s own inevitable fallibility, but the active desire to expand one’s understanding nevertheless. History unfolds around us and we are all fundamentally limited in knowledge and power. But we are rarely encouraged in mod­ern life to face this fact. Instead, we move fast and forget quickly. We are taught simplistic, comforting “just so” stories and distracted or dissuaded from looking deeper—to attempt a truthful accounting of the past or to imagine very different possibilities for the future. The virtues of humility and curi­osity counteract these foibles, and in doing so make us more empathetic, alert, and ultimately, more strategic. Humility is deeply connected to our situatedness in time, and the fact that we represent only one small part of a much longer and still evolving story that no one person can fully comprehend.

While transformative solidarity is unabashedly radical—in the sense that it aims to get at the root causes of our social problems—cultivating humility and curiosity guards against rigidity and self-righteousness, dogmatic tendencies that have destroyed many social movements and inflicted harm on a range of scales, from splintering local groups and coalitions to the epochal tragedy of the Stalinist purges. Transformative solidarity is a collective experiment, one undertaken without guarantees. Mistakes will inevitably be made; movements are never perfect. But when we are open to learning from our errors and willing to try again, failing is often better than not trying at all. The virtues of humility and curiosity can help us navigate ambiguity without taking comfort in false certainty. But they also increase our odds of success because they enable us to connect with others as equals and build the multiracial, multigenerational, multi-geographic movements we need.

A Leap of Faith

Choosing transformative solidarity, we admit, is not an entirely rational choice: there is no guarantee that organizing work will be successful—in fact, the odds are that any given movement won’t succeed. Transformative solidarity always entails a leap of faith, a faith that is very different from the unquestioning obedience of fundamentalist doctrine or political dogmatism. This leap is not about propping up a messiah or invoking a promised land, be it a heavenly kingdom or a post-revolutionary utopia. Instead, it is about believing in other people. “Faith is an element of solidarity,” labor advocate Thomas Geoghegan emphasized when we spoke. “You have to believe that other people are going to be there for you.”

The fighting faith of solidarity is grounded in the recognition that we are all sacred, that we need each other to survive, and that we cannot rely on a subset of elites to rule over or protect us. This faith resembles that which sits at the heart of the concept of democ­racy, which entrusts regular people with practicing self-government. The fighting faith of solidarity means believing in other people and our collective capacities to learn, to reason, to be kind, to find solu­tions, and to act responsibly and ethically, even, or especially, in times of crisis.

The solidaristic, internationalist, and sustainable world order we desperately need must be built virtue by virtue, relationship by relationship, struggle by struggle, day by day. Constructing a bigger Us—one large and powerful enough to overcome the myriad obstacles in our way—is a hopeful and imaginative act: curious about other people, open to change, and determined to bring new possibilities into being. We can continue to worship the false idols that enrich the few and uphold structures that deepen suffering and hasten ecological destruction—or we can instead direct our attention and commit our actions to the communities and relationships to which we literally owe our lives. The costs of greed and division are apparent. Solidar­ity is the only thing that can save us.

A lot is happening with student debt at the moment. Here is what we think you need to know.

Trump is planning to restart interest for everyone in SAVE.

Donald Trump and Linda McMahon want to financially harm the nearly eight million people who are in the SAVE forbearance by restarting student debt interest on August 1. What this means in the real world is that the typical student debtor will see their balance increase by $3,500 a year (roughly $300 a month). Do you have an extra $3,500 just laying around? Probably not.

Trump and McMahon are claiming the courts are forcing them to resume interest. That is not true. They are choosing to hurt people because they want to hurt people. This is class war, pure and simple.

It is possible that the courts might step in and reinstate the interest freeze. This is by no means guaranteed, but it is a possibility. We should know if this possibility will happen or not sometime in August.

Meanwhile, Trump and McMahon are trying to incentivize people to switch to a different repayment plan and resume repaying their student loans. This probably won’t help most people, and in fact, may make them worse off.

We can’t give legal or financial advice, and everyone who can do so should talk to a professional about their individual situation. But what we can do is call out propaganda pretending to carry advantages that it does not carry. And that is exactly what the administration is putting out about switching payment plans.

Here’s what we think. For people who are close to cancellation under PSLF or IDR, there may be good reasons to switch plans. Otherwise it’s hard to see any reason to switch at this time.

Switching plans will also cause interest to accrue. Plus, the monthly payments may go up, along with harsher consequences for missing payments.

For people concerned about accruing interest, it’s always possible to make a payment while in the SAVE forbearance, and without risking delinquency or default if payments are uneven. For example, someone in SAVE forbearance could make interest-only payments to stop their balance from growing—no plan switch required. The only downside is that any payments made during the SAVE forbearance won’t count towards PSLF or IDR, so another option would be to save your money and prepare for when the SAVE forbearance eventually ends and everyone will be forced out.

Congress just got rid of the SAVE plan for good — and at some point between now and 2028 everyone will have to switch to a different plan, but not yet. For the time being, everyone in SAVE is in forbearance so you might as well use this time to protect yourself and plan for the future.

Trump and McMahon also want to push people into the arms of private student lenders. Here’s something we can say definitively: It is essentially always a bad idea to refinance your federal student loans into private loans because you are giving up governmental protections, including the possibility of cancellation. We’re not delusional about these grim times under a Trump administration, but the fight for full cancellation continues — and when future victories come, anyone who refinanced with a private lender will be left out of federal government relief.

Trump wants to take away PSLF from everyone who doesn’t bend the knee.

Congress created Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and made it very clear who qualifies: anyone who works a public service job for a 501(c)3 non-profit or the government. That’s what the law says and it is crystal clear. But Trump doesn’t like that some non-profits defend the rights of immigrants, or fight for trans kids, or try to stop genocides. Trump wants the Department of Education to violate the law by stripping PSLF from these organizations. He also wants to strip PSLF from any employee who works in a city with a mayor who doesn’t collaborate with ICE’s kidnapping and deportation pogrom.

The Department of Education just wrapped up a negotiated rulemaking committee to make these changes to PSLF. Soon there will be an opportunity for the public to make comments on these changes. Stay tuned. We will let you know as soon as that public comment period opens up. We should flood the zone.

The Supreme Court says that the President can’t cancel student debt but can cancel the Department of Education.

The way our democracy is supposed to work is that Congress — and Congress alone — writes the laws, and Congress created the Department of Education and mandated it provide certain functions. But Trump wants to close it down in violation of the law and of Congress. He’s doing so in stages of mass firings so severe that the Department of Education will no longer be able to reliably provide the functions Congress mandated. The lower courts upheld the law and reversed those firings. But this past week, the Supreme Court gave a greenlight to Trump to keep shutting down the Department of Education. They didn’t explain themselves, because they can’t explain why this is legal — because it is illegal.

This move was so egregious that even milquetoast mainstream pundits are allowing themselves to say out loud and in print that we are in a constitutional crisis. In a weird way this is progress. The Supreme Court is relieving itself to be completely illegitimate.

The people who will feel this ruling most directly are current high school students who want to apply for college. The Department of Education and our financial aid system have always been deeply broken, but now its basic functioning is at risk. FAFSA applications are less likely to be processed in time. The financial aid that students and schools are expecting to reliably be there might not come in time. The real world consequences are that if you aren’t rich, your ability to go to school is at risk, and eventually departments and entire schools will close down if students and funding dry up.

The solutions are clear, even if it won’t be easy to win them. We need to fully fund public colleges and universities, eliminating all federal student loans. We need College For All. It’s the only solution that actually works.

This is a long-term fight. If you are not already a dues paying member of the Debt Collective consider joining today. We need everyone.

In solidarity,

The Debt Collective

The devil is literally in these details. As we write, “This is not a budget bill, it is a debt and deportation bill—and one built on the fascist foundation laid by the Heritage Foundation’s now-notorious Project 2025.” It’s sinister stuff aimed at shrinking and resegregating education in this country and exerting control over ordinary people’s bodies and minds.

Even if it’s an uphill fight, we’re organizing against these cuts. There will be an action co-hosted by the Debt Collective and other allies in Washington DC on June 25, which I encourage people to look into and, ideally, attend. It’s called “Kill the Bill Before it Kills us All.” I wish I felt that was hyperbolic.

Given the weekend’s bellicose developments, we’ll have to work on connecting this war on working people at home to wars abroad. But we know the basic message. Activists have been saying the same thing forever, and it’s still true. There’s always money for bombs. We need to invest in life.

I won’t post the full article — please go read it — but here are some choice graphs.

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Contemporary Republicans are even more brazen. Consider a recent report released by the Heritage Foundation that recommends terminating higher education “subsidies” and student loan cancellation in order to “increase the married birthrate.” What does this goulash mean in plain English? Widespread access to college has enabled women to envision lives beyond childrearing; restricting access will increase fertility rates. Conservative power players are more than willing to cast the country into a scientific dark age in their quest to shore up traditional worldviews, outmoded hierarchies, and concentrated wealth.

The reconciliation bill threatens to supercharge their oligarchic cause. Rising costs will reinforce the perception that education is the domain of an out-of-touch elite, prompting many to abandon or abort their academic dreams, which will resegregate broad swaths of society. The threat of mounting debt will discourage people from studying their passions or pursuing careers in public service, steering them instead toward the private sector or the military. It will weaken the general bargaining position of workers, who will be less able to use education as a path of upward mobility, while making the labor force more docile; workers burdened by debt are less likely to strike. By funneling student debtors’ ballooning payments into Wall Street coffers and regressive tax cuts, it will ensure that social and economic disparities become more entrenched.

And it will shrink our horizons. At their best, colleges and universities are not just places where people get trained in a skill or earn a degree; they enable people to grapple with bigger questions—to find out who they are, to unlock what they want to be and do, to discover how the world is made, and to dream how it could be remade differently. This is why authoritarians find education so threatening, and why the reconciliation bill must be understood as a strike against our freedom to question, learn, and choose our fates. Even, or especially, when that process challenges authority.

The TL;DR is this — the overhaul of the student lending system being proposed is not about fiscal responsibility (ha!), it’s about social control. It’s a brazen attack on freedom.

As a kind of lead up to that piece, I recommend listening to the new episode of The Dig podcast, which I guest-hosted. It was recorded a while ago, so doesn’t talk about the killer bill, but it does explore how we got here in some edifying depth.

Guests included Chenjerai Kumanyika, Ryann Joan Liebenthal, and .

https://thedigradio.com/podcast/student-debt-w-ryann-liebenthal-chenjerai-kumanyika-mike-pierce/

Here’s the set up:

Today, student debt in the United States stands at nearly $1.8 trillion dollars. This episode goes deep on how this came to be and why the decision to make student loans the dominant mode of paying for college was a huge mistake. Instead of properly socializing higher education, policy-makers constructed a complex system of government-subsidized student lending, with disastrous consequences for borrowers and society as a whole.

Our guests trace how this happened, going back to the New Deal era’s GI Bill, which catalyzed the federal government’s tendency to provide financial aid – then mainly grants – to individual students rather than generously funding public colleges and universities. Later, the Higher Education Act of 1965 made student loans a cornerstone of educational policy. By the time Cold War era gave way to the Reagan counter-revolution, politicians in both parties promoted borrowing as the means by which young people could access education and, allegedly, upward mobility, causing student debt to metastasize. After the crash of 2008, the Obama administration staved off a collapse of the student loan market by moving student lending in-house, initiating the system of direct lending that we have today – an arrangement that has effectively turned the Department of Education into a massive bank.

With Trump in office a second time, we're just waking up to what it means for a hostile federal government to be one of the biggest creditors in the world. After this interview was recorded, the Trump administration announced its plan to unleash the full force of the government’s collection apparatus on struggling student debtors. Experts estimate that 1-in-12 adults, or 21 million people nationwide, will be directly harmed by the administration’ actions in the student loan market – but the ripple effects will be much wider as families are plunged into poverty and working class people avoid higher education out of legitimate fears of a future dragged down by unpayable debt. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are poised to change the existing federal student loan apparatus in ways that will push borrowers into even more predatory, private lending markets.

As this episode details, rightwing attacks on student loan cancellation and the student loan system more broadly are key prongs of the far right’s intensifying war on education. In order to effectively combat this authoritarian agenda, we need to understand how we got here – and why the student loan system cannot be fixed, only abolished. The only effective solution to the crisis of higher education is to finally make college free for everyone.