The friend, having heard me speak admiringly of the real James R. Hoffa, apparently thought I’d think this latest portrayal of the labor leader was really cool. I didn’t. Thought it was worse than Nicholson’s.

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My reaction to Scorsese’s The Irishman

It’s entertaining—a kind of silly reunion of the (now very old) best-known gangster actors of the ‘70s and ‘80s, with a classic Scorsese-type story and score.

Unfortunately, the portrayal of Hoffa—the most important and powerful figure in the story—is played by Al Pacino as a hot-headed nitwit who just can’t seem to grasp that a corrupt union boss out of northern New Jersey outranks him.

Anyone who has met, read about, or seen photos and films of James R. Hoffa (especially the films of him in Senate hearings standing up against the Ivy-League-educated Robert and John Kennedy) would know that while he had the dress (they got the white socks with a suit) and haircut of a working-class Midwesterner, he was a fearless, sharp, and quick-witted leader of (at the time) the largest and most powerful labor union in America.

While the 79-year-old Pacino played him as an out-of-shape old guy with man-boobs and a raspy, low New York accent, the real-life, squeaky-voiced Hoffa was actually vigorous and physically fit through his forties and into his early sixties (even more so when he got out of jail, where he maintained a disciplined fitness regimen) before he disappeared.

Homages and tropes

While I enjoyed the music and some of the old gangster genre references and movie homages (the homophobic “fairy named Ferrie” pun—not a real Bufalino quote, just Pesci reprising his JFK role), the misrepresentation of Hoffa and the irresponsible tropes about the mob and important labor movement figures were a spoiler for me.

Could have at least cast the right actors—it still would have sucked.

One last thing: matching physical appearances is not always essential and never entirely possible in a historical drama or biographical film (Anthony Hopkins’s tremendous portrayal in Oliver Stone’s Nixon is a good example of why it’s not). But I couldn’t help thinking that the actor who might have helped a Hoffaphile like me better enjoy the movie would have been Stephen Graham as Hoffa.1

Instead, Scorsese cast Graham as the mobbed-up New Jersey union leader, Tony Provenzano. Graham would’ve been perfect for Hoffa—right size, shape, and voice pitch—and he knows how to do a Midwestern accent, even though the character Capone (whom he played in Boardwalk Empire) was from NYC. But even if they got the look, accent, and attitude right, the story is still a ridiculous and insulting portrayal of an important, complex, and powerful labor leader of a major American labor organization.

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A hundred and thirty-six years ago, the founder of the American Federation of Labor was asked, “What does labor want?” What he didn’t say was “Give us more jobs.” Samuel Gompers, hardly a radical unionist1, gave an answer that sounds radical today. He said: “We want more schoolhouses and fewer jails; more books and fewer arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood [and womanhood] more noble… and more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

Aside from the antiquated gender stereotypes,2 this kind of compelling description of labor’s vision for the American worker from 1890 is urgently needed today if we are to meaningfully respond to unrestrained technology, widening inequality, and the unbridled corporate power that is destroying the middle class and crushing the poor.

Organized labor of the 1890s was reacting to traumatic technological changes that were displacing tens of thousands of workers. In 1886, the Haymarket strike in Chicago (the first American May Day) demanded an eight-hour day to remedy the layoffs blamed on the labor-saving innovation of the McCormick reaper.3

Despite the subsequent arrests, sham charges, and the state execution of four of the strike organizers,4 the labor movement saw a resurgence as it unified and embraced the global battle cry of the eight-hour day. Two years later, the Eight-Hour Law of 1892 established the first mandatory eight-hour workday for federal government workers.

By the early part of the 20th century, automation and labor-saving technology—with the advent of electrically powered machines and the assembly line—were promising unparalleled efficiency, mass production, and enormous profits. It also threatened to displace hundreds of thousands of workers and cripple organized labor’s bargaining power. Instead, agitation and strikes for less work and more pay were now powered by more radical unions and the inclusion of Black workers and sophisticated leaders like A. Philip Randolph. Randolph leveraged the rapid acceleration of innovation and industrial expansion during and leading up to the two world wars for jobs and freedom, demanding less work, not more. “Negroes have too much work already,” Randolph declared in a 1919 column in the Messenger. “What we want,” he wrote, “is less work and more wages, with more leisure for study and recreation.” 5

The result of this labor militancy and the call for leisure time was a growing middle class and a labor movement more multiracial, more powerful, and more appealing to a growing immigrant, poor white, and Black proletariat seeking not more work, but freedom. Freedom from oppression, freedom from exploitation, and freedom from drudgery. In 1890, millions of American workers were working 100 hours a week. By 1940, the 40-hour workweek had become the law of the land.6 It was arch-capitalist Henry Ford, of all people, now sounding like Gompers and Randolph, who said, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.”

But today, the AFL‑CIO (the successor to the American Federation of Labor) sounds to the right of Mr. Ford on the issue of leisure. The Federation doesn’t call for more time off and a more meaningful and fulfilling life; it calls for MORE DAMN WORK! “We help people acquire valuable skills and job readiness for the 21st-century economy,” they declare on their website, sounding like a cheap for-profit technical school scam. “In fact, we operate the largest training network outside the U.S. military…advance legislation to create good jobs [and] fight for keeping good jobs at home.” Jobs! Jobs and more jobs! Seems to be their motto.

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I can’t imagine a more depressing, repellent, and uninspiring rallying cry. I also can’t imagine a better way for the labor movement to stay on the defensive and keep looking powerless and feckless in the face of enormous profits driven by huge technical innovations that seem completely out of their control or beyond their comprehension. “Give us good jobs,” they demand as jobs are evaporating along with what little bargaining power and market leverage they still think they have.

Why did the labor movement abandon its historic role of demanding that the benefits of technology and innovation be shared by the entire society, especially those doing the work?

Today, the enormous surpluses produced by technological innovations are simply plowed into massive profits and stratospheric wealth for the already rich—the owners and employers (including CEOs, innovators, and stockholders). None has gone to the working class in the last 40 years. What doesn’t go directly to the rich goes to the absurdly ballooned, useless, and nonproductive sectors such as finance, insurance, advertising, lobbying, real estate speculation, and war. No one is talking about why and how the rest of us can and should be getting our share.

It can’t be because labor‑saving technology has slowed down or even leveled off. Advances in automation of manufacturing, travel, and communication have only increased exponentially since World War II. And it’s not that we didn’t know or see it coming. Thirty‑one years ago, Jeremy Rifkin wrote The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post‑Market Era. He documented how massive technological changes were accelerating fast and warned of the huge impact on our economy and society. A year later, William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, further warning that deindustrialization—especially in the manufacturing centers that had been destinations for the Black working class during the Great Migration—was creating desolate, deindustrialized ghettos populated by an obsolete and unwanted workforce.

Enter the late 20th and 21st centuries with the microprocessor, industrial robotics, the internet revolution, and now artificial intelligence. Instead of a clear-eyed economic analysis and response to these developments in the context of the history of innovation, labor, and society, we’re rendered paralyzed. Rather than demanding a share of the surplus time created and the goods produced, we act terrified by the specter of a dystopian future where humans are subjugated by big electronic brains and their robot overseers. Newsflash: Our new masters will not be robots. It will still be the rich. But the rich and powerful will just be richer and more powerful.

Some have tried to resist change, like the United Food and Commercial Workers, by “denouncing” the “automation...sweeping across the grocery industry.” But these anemic efforts are ultimately overwhelmed by the march of progress—and the convenience of the self-checkout grocery line and online shopping. More recently, the Teamsters and the Longshoremen unions have pushed back against self-driving trucks and loading machines. Some liberals have paternalistically pushed for a guaranteed basic income (GBI) —something Elon Musk now supports, which should be enough to make it suspect. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand the dangerous consequences of having no economic power—and thus no value—in a capitalist society.

Is this really the best we’ve got to offer?

Today, we see nothing like the radical movements of the past that unified and galvanized poor, working, and middle-class people across racial and geographic lines to imagine a future of shared prosperity where automation, technology, and innovation are embraced as a means to a better life and a happier and healthier society. These are not utopian, far-fetched ideas. They are the ideas that were espoused by both radical and conservative labor leaders and eventually embraced by elements of the political establishment and ultimately acquiesced to by employers and the titans of capital nearly a century ago.

They included shorter working hours and more pay; earlier retirement and more holidays and time off; and more social investments in education, childcare, and health, as well as transportation and even entertainment and culture. It brought about major public investments in community infrastructure for better water, sewer, streets, schools, and sidewalks, as well as modern electrical and communication systems, recreation, and parks. What was being demanded (and in many cases realized) was that the huge surpluses created by new labor-saving technologies and automation get plowed—not into making the rich richer, but into making life better and more meaningful—and even happier—for everyone. We are certainly not hearing anything like that from today’s labor movement or any of our political leaders in the so-called left.

If anything, we have become even more accustomed to accepting the ruling class arrangements that reward “innovation” and “risk-taking entrepreneurialism” with huge dividends that leave the rest of us losers behind to compete in an atomized, dead-end “gig economy”. Worse, many of us have been lulled into an acquiescence of a doomsday-like future where there are no expectations for economic security, let alone prosperity and happiness for our children or for future generations. Meanwhile, the union leaders chant, “Jobs, jobs, jobs!”

What happened?

There are several reasons the labor movement lost its role and prophetic voice around the sharing of the benefits of innovation and technology that are worth examining.

1. The rate and the speed of automation itself began to weaken and destabilize organized labor faster than it could challenge the inequality created by it. In many industries, layoffs resulting from automation were happening well before deindustrialization and the large-scale offshoring that came with free trade agreements of the 80s and 90s. Not coincidentally, this happened most dramatically in the manufacturing industries originally organized by the more radical and more multiracial unions, especially the CIO affiliates.7 For many Black workers, who came north—or descended from those who came north—with the Great Migration, they were the last hired and first fired as assembly line jobs became obsolete.

2. The widening racial divides (both spatial and industrial) that Wilson wrote about. Despite a lot of rhetoric, the labor movement largely abandoned its strategic power alliance with the civil rights movement after the King assassination. The retreat from fighting for integration in jobs, neighborhoods, and schools helped facilitate a growing and deeply harmful divide in wealth accumulation and future opportunity between white union members and their Black counterparts, who were denied the many social gains, including federally backed home loans and being redlined out of neighborhoods with appreciating home values and good schools. The labor movement’s silence and, in some cases, complicity in such discrimination helped to create the opening breach for the employer class to fully exploit and further divide the working class and weaken the labor movement.

3. The right-wing backlash after World War II and self-purging within the labor movement demanded by its allies in the Democratic Party as the price of admission to becoming respectable “labor statesmen.” The ouster of the most militant unions and the blackballing of socialist and communist organizers, rank-and-file leaders, and officers was a self-inflicted wound that left the movement in the hands of people with little imagination, ambition, vision, or backbone.

I’m sure there are other reasons scholars and experts can point out.8 Labor leaders love to blame the string of anti-union laws, starting with Taft-Hartley, for their decline. But the labor movement must understand how and why it became vulnerable to these attacks in the first place—attacks that were only compounded decade after decade, making it and the working class more susceptible to years of relentless assaults.

What can be done?

Projecting a vision for a better life and putting a value on leisure time and social investments in family, community, individual development, and happiness may seem to some like an abstract, vague, or trivial aspiration, but it isn’t, and it never has been. Labor has always been about the commodification and exploitation of time, and the role of organized labor is to get it back. Aristotle said, “The end of labor is to gain leisure,”9 and Karl Marx envisioned a more just society where “the saving of labor time” (through automation and technology) equals an increase of free time...for the full development of the individual,” and ultimately for the whole society to achieve “its greatest productive power.”

The pursuit of time is neither abstract nor vague; the policies we need to advance to recapture our stolen time are real, measurable, concrete, and winnable, but it’s also a powerful battle cry and an inspiring and unifying vision. Much more inspiring than “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!”

The policies to win back our time are not unlike the ones advanced in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1940s, and many that are being fought for and won by workers around the world.

• A shorter work week (and that doesn’t mean you go home and zoom). In the Netherlands, the workweek is 29.5–31.3 hours per week. In Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, it’s between 25.5 and 27.5 hours. Belgium, Iceland, the UK, Portugal, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia, and Canada have implemented or are piloting a four-day workweek.

• Earlier retirement. The current retirement age in China is 60 for men, 55 for women in white-collar work, and 50 for women factory workers. India, South Africa, and Turkey all have a retirement age of 60. Women in Turkey can retire at 57.

• More time off. More vacations, holidays, sick days, and maternity leave can and should be demanded as mandatory and promoted as a normalized national standard. In the United States, all paid leave is left entirely at the discretion of employers. Not so the rest of the world. You get 28 paid days off in the United Kingdom; 26 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Italy; and 25 in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The United States is the outlier and at the very bottom globally. In fact, the country we are at war with, Iran, offers more total paid days off than any other in the world, with 53 days per year. Maybe that’s why their “regime” is considered an “existential threat.”

• We should demand and promote greater acceptance of seasonal work, but with annual salaries. Many outdoor buildings, trade unions, and teachers already have this but must fight to keep it. We should support them and demand versions of it for more of us. The “August shutdown” is still common in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, encouraged and reinforced by hot weather, tradition, and national labor laws. 10

These might seem ridiculously unattainable—especially with the same or more pay—considering the weakness of the labor movement and right-wing backlash we are experiencing in our politics. But the labor movement will never regain its power, galvanize a following, attract needed allies and change the political culture if it doesn’t have a vision worth fighting for.

That means we need to change our mindset from “this is pie in the sky” to “we deserve this.” In fact, we deserve more pay as well as less work. I’d also argue that we need to re-embrace the value of the single-income household as a sustainable way to support a family. Men and women, spouses and partners, can take turns sharing work/care responsibilities over days or over decades. Both parents should be able to work, but they should not be forced to. Not all the time at least. Jobs for young adults and teenagers are a great experience to gain skills, learn responsibility, and enjoy some economic freedom. But teenagers and young adult children in a household should not have to go to work to support a family.

Who will lead us?

Perhaps the new fear of AI and robotization and the specter of a complete loss of economic (and thus political) power will spur the labor movement to revisit its past and reinvent itself again as a champion not of work and drudgery but of purpose, meaning, self-development, and community. But it probably won’t.

Maybe the younger generation, like my daughters, will lead us. They are not just looking for security and stability but meaning and community, and even spiritual and cultural fulfillment. They are not just horrified by the prospect of a life of rising prices, stagnant pay and student debt (if they went to college or even greater insecurity if they have no degree) but they despair of empty consumerism and meaningless work in a society that seems increasingly decadent, disconnected, degenerate, and callous.

Perhaps the new emerging socialist left, inspired by Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and now Zohran Mamdani. But they would need to get more serious about cultivating broad working-class appeal and realize the enormous responsibility and opportunity they have as the only viable left-wing alternative for the anti-establishment and anti-elite anger and outrage.

Maybe it will be a new Black-led civil rights and labor movement. Black leaders in the past were not simply cheerleaders for the eight-hour day. They were the originators and architects of a demand, and what became a national and global campaign. Not only A. Philip Randolph, but also Lucy Parsons,11 a founder of the IWW and organizer of the Haymarket strike, or Dorothy Bolden, who organized the Black domestic workers who were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act and the 40 hour week law.

Maybe Black workers and leaders will again take the lead. After all, they remain demographically the most disproportionately working-class group in our society, one hundred and sixty-one years since abolition. Maybe that’s why they are the most class-conscious, the most pro-labor, and the least enamored with the glorious spoils of capitalism. Perhaps it’s their shared history that keeps them more grounded in the reality that exploited labor is stolen time and stolen life. And they are more attuned to the danger of being totally powerless, even in the wake of labor-saving revolutions like the cotton gin.

The development of the cotton gin perhaps exemplifies better than any other innovation how technology without agency has, and never will, lead to workers sharing in its labor-saving and surplus-producing benefits. Its introduction in 1793 increased the processing of cotton by 5,000%, but its harvesting still required backbreaking manual labor. Obviously, not a fraction of the enormous profits from the new technology went to better pay and working conditions for the massive new pool of Southern Black labor. Instead, it went to power, proliferate, prolong, and protect one of the most brutal and immoral aristocracies and forced-labor economies in human history.12

Workers should also be alarmed by the vision put forth by today’s soulless aristocracy that would see the poorest of the working class dependent on some kind of guaranteed income scheme determined and permitted by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and George Soros. All now agree that it would be good and right to have millions of people sustained, just enough, to keep scrolling through social media; buying stuff; sometimes voting; and not working until they need someone to deliver some Uber Eats—but otherwise being completely obsolete and powerless. Not too many people seem alarmed right now. In fact, some Black mayors are hailing this as the answer to the racial wealth gap and the realization of King’s dream.13

But the consequences of complete and total powerlessness and obsolescence are quite dangerous. Loïc Wacquant (who studied under William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago), in his work The Ghetto-Prison Symbiosis, gives us what I think is a terrifying but valid historical analysis of what happens to a group of people in America who have never been fully wanted but are now no longer needed. It’s not good.14

Randolph said essentially the same thing, but half a century earlier. Prophetically, he warned that as automation began displacing workers in manufacturing, and as discrimination persisted in nearly all other trades, Black workers would “wind up not only as unskilled and unemployed, if not unemployable, but as the forgotten slum proletariat in the black ghettos of the great metropolitan centers of the country, existing within the grey shadows of a hopeless hope.”

The main message here is that it was never technology alone that created freedom and free time—too often it was used to further oppress, exploit, and even enslave. And as individuals alone, we are powerless to extract its benefits or protect ourselves from its tyranny. It always has, and always will, take power, agitation, organization, and a focused and sustained fight.

I think it will take all these forces. An increasingly Black-led15, civil rights-focused labor movement; the emerging and growing new socialist left as it matures, grows, and becomes more sophisticated and serious about power; and the millions of alienated individuals, especially young people, seeking meaning, community, and time to enjoy life.

There was a song workers sang at the first Mayday demonstration for an eight-hour day: “We want to feel the sunshine. And we want to smell the flowers. We’re sure that God has willed it.”

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As you read it, the authors appear to possess a vague awareness of the contradictions and silly hypocrisy embedded in this piece, yet they forge ahead with unwavering smugness and seriousness. All I can surmise is that their intense disdain for Trump and their desperation to see him gone allow them to justify their arguments through self-deceptive rationalizations and fantasies. In their mind’s eye, they superimpose Pete Buttigieg’s, Gavin Newsom’s, Josh Shapiro’s, or Gretchen Whitmer’s head on Mr. Magyar’s body and imagine one of them valiantly vanquishing the orange villain (and his legion of MAGA) as Magyar defeated Mr. Orbán. If this argument sounds stupid…it’s because it is.

Essentially, they are praising the ascendancy of a right-wing populist nationalist who came to power by being even more populist and more nationalist than the incumbent he toppled; he may be even more right-wing—or he may just be better at being right-wing. But the liberal New York Times wants us to apply his approach—of a better right wing—here in the States. “It is easy enough to imagine an American version of this strategy,” they gush with childlike naivete.

After they list their usual denunciations and crimes of Mr. Trump—” His populism is fake,” they sternly declare—they then go on to school us on how we can learn some valuable but difficult lessons from Magyar’s election. Mr. Magyar, they write, “identifies as center-right” and “won partly by avoiding the social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters.”

First of all, what the hell do they mean by “he identifies as”? Isn’t that relatively new vernacular for gender identity more typically used to describe transgender and non-binary people, such as “he identifies as gay,” “he identifies as cis,” or “a trans man”? Do the crack journalists at the New York Times have some insider knowledge that the right-wing populist who just got elected in Hungary is really a closet liberal—(”Oh, please, please secretly be one of us”)—or is this just wishful thinking? It’s probably the latter.

And then the New York Times—with zero self-awareness—warns us to avoid the “elitists” who’ve been known to alienate “many voters.” Maybe they finally learned that being talked down to by upper-class know-it-alls might actually repel some voters. But alas, it is not the imperious snobbery that turns off the easily triggered low-information voter; it is the “social progressivism” that they claim “dominates elite left-leaning circles.”

Then, well into the last third of the column, they list how this guy, Magyar, is even more right-wing and more white supremacist than the guy he just beat, especially his stance on immigration. They write that he has called for “even tighter restrictions than the current government”; they say he will “keep a border fence,” “repeal a guest-worker program,” and “allow no guest workers from outside the European Union.” I guess guest workers are acceptable as long as they’re white. The Times is not happy about these policies but can overlook them as some kind of sophisticated political triangulation.

For each of his somewhat problematic stances, the Times includes a caveat or an excuse. “Immigration,” they write, “is vital to electability in many [European] countries. “ They validate Magyar and his party’s argument that immigrants “drive down wages” and “cause social problems” by schooling us that in Europe, “unlike in the United States, crime rates among immigrants…tend to be higher than among native citizens.”

But of course, the most problematic for the New York Times editorial board was his refusal “to attend a Pride march in Budapest.” The Times was more understanding: “He declined,” they said, and then explained how his skipping the gay march was actually a high-level strategy and not just lowbrow bigotry. He was making it “harder,” they said “for Mr. Orbán to paint him as captive to LGBTQ activists.” So he’s not a homophobe or even playing to them; he’s a political savant playing 3D chess. And he may not even be a real nationalist; according to the Times, he only “portrayed himself as a nationalist.” I guess that’s similar to how he presents himself, or is he a ‘they’?”

It reminds me of how the Western media (along with Trump and senators in both parties) tried to rehabilitate the wanted ISIS terrorist Abu Mohammed al-Jolani just to fit into their new narrative and neocon fantasy once he took power in Syria.

Once the New York Times editorial board establishes that the right-wing Mr. Magyar isn’t such a bad fellow after all (maybe not even really right-wing), they lecture us on how Democrats can and must beat Mr. Trump and Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism using Magyar’s right-wing strategy as their model. They tell us that they have “documented” how Democrats “have won tough races” by “rejecting far-left positions on crime, immigration, and other subjects.” Then they name Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as examples of this approach.

Bill Clinton famously did more to remake the Democratic Party into an anti-union, anti-worker party of Wall Street than any Democratic leader in modern times; he is hardly populist. Obama, my former community organizing colleague, who ran as a populist to the left of and against the Clintons, is also not the guy they describe.

If anyone is the American version of the Magyar-like leader they are describing—a former loyalist to the sitting strongman, who eventually broke with him and then ran against him as a younger, better, more competent, and more sophisticated version of a right-wing populist nationalist—it is Joe Kent, the former head of counterintelligence who just resigned in protest over the war on Iran; maybe Tucker Carlson; possibly Marjorie Taylor Greene; but more probably, it’s the guy Trump sent to Hungary to try to save Orbán in a display of subordinate humiliation.

J.D. Vance is the favored candidate to continue the populist movement post-Trump if he can navigate the White House dysfunction and crises of the next two years without going down with the ship that Trump continues to sink. Vance will be the choice of the populist wing of the MAGA movement1 if he is able to carefully distance himself from Trump, especially around foreign policy. If he’s lucky, Trump will keep doing it for him. 2

What the New York Times editorial board is really doing here is giving us a preview of how the liberal establishment is preparing us for the “anyone but Trump” move to the right—or what they call the “center”—in 2028. There is absolutely no evidence that centrist Democrats are the answer to right-wing populism. If anything, it’s the opposite. The Trump phenomenon was born out of anger and frustration with the two-party pro-war, pro-Wall Street establishment, just like Obama’s insurgency in 2008 and Sanders near wins in 2016.

Trump is now betraying his most dedicated and faithful voters and turning violently on his staunchest defenders and influential opinion-makers because he has succumbed to the same warmongering, big donors, and corporate interests that he claimed he was running against. Why on earth would Trump selling out his voters to the establishment make voters want someone more establishment?

By 2028, the country will be well primed for the next wave of political insurgency, if not a revolt—especially if the Democrats taking over the House in 2027 have no agenda but to resist or defeat Trump, and especially if inequality continues to soar and war continues to be stoked across the globe. The question isn’t whether there will be a populist wave but whether it will be on the right or the left, and if its both which one will be more compelling.

Maybe they are just presenting as elite, out-of-touch liberals, but I think the New York Times editorial board’s obsession with the idea of a “centrist” is really a reflection of their own elitism and their fealty to and shared interests with the elites of this country and the West in general. 3

If there is a model for defeating Trump and his movement, it is not coming from Europe or from the two former intelligence officers who won the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia last year. The biggest breakthrough and biggest insurgent wave election of 2025 was in New York City, where an avowed anti-war socialist beat the enormously powerful ruling Democratic establishment at the fortress of global finance and the seat of international capitalism.

If you want to beat Trump and Trumpism, it will take a movement that unites the multiracial working and middle classes of this nation around a shared vision for peace and a direct assault—not on affordability, but on greed and inequality.

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Then, well into the last third of the column, they list how this guy, Magyar, is even more right-wing and more white supremacist than the guy he just beat, especially his stance on immigration. They wrote that he is called for “even tighter restrictions than the current government"; they say he will “keep a border fence,” “repeal a guest-worker program," and “allow no guest workers from outside the European Union.” Guest workers are acceptable as long as they're white. The Times is not happy about these policies but can overlook them as some kind of sophisticated political triangulation.

For each of his somewhat problematic stances, the Times includes a caveat or an excuse. “Immigration,” they write, “is vital to electability in many [European] countries. They give credibility to Magyar and his party’s argument that immigrants “drive down wages” and “cause social problems” by schooling us: that in Europe, "unlike in the United States, crime rates among immigrants…tend to be higher than among native citizens.”

But of course, the most disapointting for the New York Times editorial board was his refusal “to attend a Pride march in Budapest.” The Times was more understanding; "He declined,” they said and then explained how his skipping the gay march was actually a high-level strategy and not just lowbrow bigotry. He was making it “harder for Mr. Orban to paint him as captive to L.G.B.T.Q. activists.” So he’s not a homophobe or even playing to them; he’s a political savant playing 3D chess.

And he may not even be a real nationalist; according to the Times, he only “portrayed himself as a nationalist.” I guess that’s similar to how “he presents” himself, or is he a “they”?

It reminds me of how the Western media (along with Trump and senators in both parties) tried to rehabilitate the wanted ISIS terrorist Abu Mohammed al-Jolani just to fit into their new narrative and neocon fantasy once he took power in Syria.

Obama and Clinton?

Once the New York Times editorial board establishes that the right-wing Mr. Magyar ain’t so bad a fellow after all (maybe not even really right-wing), they then lecture us on how Democrats can and must beat Mr. Trump and Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism using Magyar’s right-wing strategy as their model. They tell us that they have “documented” how Democrats “have won tough races" by “rejecting far-left positions on crime, immigration, and other subjects.” Then they name Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as examples of this approach. Now I’m no fan of Bill Clinton’s politics. He famously did more to remake the Democratic Party into an anti-union, anti-worker party of Wall Street than any Democratic leader in modern times; he is hardly populist. Obama, my former community organizing colleague, who ran and won as a leftist populist to the left of and against the Clintons, is also not the guy they describe.

If anyone is the American version of the Magayr-like leader they are describing—a former loyalist to the sitting strongman, who eventually broke with him and then ran against him as a younger, better, more competent, and more sophisticated version of a right-wing populist nationalist—it is Joe Kent, the former head of counterintelligence who just resigned in protest over the war on Iran; maybe Tucker Carlson; possibly Marjarie Taylor Greene; but more probably, it’s the guy Trump sent to Hungary to try to save Orban in a display of subordinate humiliation.

J.D. Vance is the favored candidate to continue the populist movement post-Trump if he can navigate the White House dysfunction and crises of the next two years without going down with the ship that Trump continues to sink. Vance will be the choice of the populist wing of the MAGA movement if he is able to carefully distance himself from Trump, especially around foreign policy. If he’s lucky, Trump will keep doing it for him, as he did when he told reporters in early March that he and the vice president were "philosophically a little bit different” about the war.

Expect Marco Rubio to be the choice of the establishment, donors, and neocons.

What the New York Times editorial board is really doing here is giving us a preview of how the liberal establishment is preparing us for the “anyone but Trump” move to the right—or what they call the “center”—in 2028. There is absolutely no evidence that centrist Democrats are the answer to right-wing populism. If anything, it’s the opposite. The Trump phenomenon was born out of anger and frustration with the two-party pro-war, pro-Wall Street establishment, just like Obama’s insurgency in 2008 and Sanders's near wins in 2016. Trump is betraying his most dedicated and faithful voters and turning violently on his staunchest defenders and influential opinion-makers because he has succumbed to the same warmongering, big donors, and corporate interests that he claimed he was running against. Why on earth would Trump selling out to the establishment make voters want someone more established?

By 2028, the country will be primed for the next wave of political insurgency. especially if the Democrats taking over the House in 2027 have no agenda but to resist, stop, or defeat Trump and especially if ineqylaity continues ot soar and war continue to flare up acorss the globe. The questiion isnt weather there will be a polulist wave its wheather it will be on the right, the left or both. and which will be more compeling.

The New York Times editorial board’s obession with the idea of a “centrist” is a refelction of thier own eleitsim and thier fielty to and shared interests with the elites of this country and the west in general. Of perhaps they are just presenting as elistist.

The biggest breakthourh election of 2025 was not the former intelligence officer governors’ victory in New Jersey and Virgina it was in New York City, where an avowed anti-war socialist beat the powerful ruling democratic estabsihment of that city. If you want to beat Trump and Trumpism we need a movement that will unite the multi-racial working and middle class of this nation around a shared vision for peace and direct assult (not on affordablity) but on in equality.

I attended a No Kings march in South Jersey two weekends ago. I’m not a fan of unfocused protests that have no clear demands and way too many grievances. But I was interested in seeing how the “resistance” looked and sounded now that the country is in a full-blown war.

During the last rally in October 2025, the U.S. was only bombing fishing boats off Venezuela; Trump’s “12-day war” on Iran had “ended”; and the Gaza genocide had slowed to about five children killed a day, instead of 250 Palestinians murdered while Biden was president—so, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that stopping, ending, or preventing war was not among the dozens of complaints and crimes listed on signs, chanted by crowds, or denounced in speeches. 1

But at the latest No Kings gathering on March 28, we were a full month into a global conflict started by the United States and Israel in which we killed the political and spiritual leader of Iran, along with his daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law, and over 160 schoolchildren on the first day. If that wasn’t enough, for nearly three months, the head of state of another sovereign nation, Venezuela, has been locked up with his wife in a federal prison in Brooklyn after having been kidnapped by our military. And a brutal blockade of Cuba was strangling the socialist island, accompanied by a promise that it would be “next.”

People who know me know I’m pretty cynical about establishment Democrats, resistance liberals, and ‘woke’ progressives. Still, I have to say I was astonished that there was no change in the messaging or the messengers (it was nearly all white) from six months ago. I saw not one sign saying, “No war on Iran.” I heard not one chant calling for “hands off Cuba.” I heard not one speech demanding the U.S. “free Maduro” or a call to “boycott the apartheid state of Israel.”

I saw many calls to “abolish ICE” and “impeach Trump.” But most of it was just garbled and contradictory stuff about him being a king, or an oligarch, or Hitler himself. I was relieved to see he was no longer being called a communist. 23

So why does any of this matter? And why am I not just praising the marchers (excusing their oversights) and joining in the chorus of “Dump Trump”? It doesn’t matter, or it shouldn’t, but I’m afraid that the marchers’—who are really mostly Democratic activists—blind spot on war is more than just an oversight. It’s a reflection of the Democratic Party’s own ambivalence and culpability over Trump’s latest international murderous rampage.

Let’s start with the complicity of the Democratic Party leadership in proudly boasting that their senators joined the Republicans to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. 4 They didn’t just reluctantly vote for him; they heaped praise on him. Some of the same sons-of-bitches that are now denouncing him were singing high holy hosannas over him just last year. Senator Cory Booker, according to one report, 5“could hardly contain his enthusiasm about his colleague.” ‘Marco Rubio is my friend,’ Booker said. ‘He is principled. He has an understanding of foreign policy’s nuances and complexities.’” Peacenik Tim Kaine was ecstatic. “I was particularly happy that he was nominated” and “particularly gratified because he cares about the Americas”. At the hearing (wearing his goofy glasses on his forehead for the maximum stupid look to go along with his words), Senator Kaine told Rubio, “I’m very, very happy that you’re being nominated.”

And it’s not just that some of them or most of them voted for him. They all did. Yes, even Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and Raphael Warnock. All of them. And you can’t say it was just performative, or customary to vote to confirm the president’s nomination. This was the only one that got unanimous support. They blocked over 100 other nominations. Apparently, Bernie—the fucking leftist—was much more concerned with the “threat” posed by former leftist Tulsi Gabbard and environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom had been lambasted by their former Democratic colleagues for not being sufficiently pro-war.

So why am I raging on Marco Rubio and blaming Democrats for his installation? Why not talk about Christian nationalist crusader Pete Hegseth—they pulled out all the stops to stop him—or Roy Cohn impersonator Stephen Miller? These guys are certainly amateur fascists, but they’re going to be roadkill when this administration is over (before or after 2029), along with Trump himself. Rubio, on the other hand, is truly dangerous, along with scumbags like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell (yes, he is still there).

It was well known that Rubio was the choice for V.P. of his main bankrollers and reluctant Trump backers, especially Paul Singer of Elliott Capital.6 Singer, known as the world’s most ruthless vulture capitalist for making billions crippling Latin American countries, he is also an ally of Netanyahu and just acquired Citgo, the state oil company of Venezuela, illegally seized by the United States. 7

And let’s not forget that, as reckless and transparently infantile as Trump has been in his latest surrender to the war-wing of his party, the Democrats’ record of subservience to those same neocon forces inside and outside of their party isn’t much better.

In 2021, a month after the last troops were withdrawn from the failed (but highly profitable) 20-year Afghan war, Biden ramped up weapons support and announced a NATO-like alliance for Ukraine8 as a deliberate provocation leading to a five-year standoff in a new proxy war with the world’s largest nuclear power. And by the fall of 2023, Biden and nearly all Democrats in Congress showed an even more feckless and sickening fealty to their pro-Israeli war-wing in funding, enabling, and defending one of the most brazen televised mass slaughters of innocent civilians in history.

And how many times have Democrats goaded Trump for not being adequately pro-war? In his first term, for all of Trump’s transgressions and depravities, the Democrats found nothing better to impeach him for than the mortal sin of delaying arms shipments to Ukraine, calling him “soft on Putin.”

In 2018, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who is now trying to position himself as an antiwar Democrat, actually called on Trump to invade Venezuela, tweeting that the president should make the “case for intervention in Venezuela,” saying, “Getting rid of Maduro is good for the United States.”

Last year, Murphy, along with Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, went on something of an apology tour, seeking absolution for their now-regretted vote to confirm Marco Rubio.9 But their public self-flagellation had more to do with how rude Trump was to Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office than anything having to do with Rubio revealing his true regime-change proclivities and his deep ties to the interventionist donor wing. If anything, they were mad at him for not being pro-war enough when it comes to the dreaded Putin.

Now Murphy—who also shares a proclivity for the cheap-looking comb-over with both Rubio and Netanyahu—recently chided Trump on his ceasefire deal. Again, taking to Twitter (or X) to proclaim he is stunned and heartbroken that “Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz” and “an anti-American regime is in power and emboldened.”

What Democrats like Murphy are doing is dangerous. It should be clear by now just how malleable Trump is and how easily he can be manipulated by flattery or goaded into war by challenging his manhood. Hopefully, Trump won’t let Democratic leaders (or Republican neocons) tease him back to the brink and break the ceasefire that their buddy Netanyahu is working overtime to undermine.

Hopefully, Trump’s anti-Neocon wing, represented by Vice President Vance, will make progress in Pakistan this weekend if the peace efforts are not sabotaged by the Rubio-Lindsey Graham war-wing or by Bibi Netanyahu. J.D. better watch his back. Israel has a habit of dropping bombs on anyone who might make a deal to end its endless wars.

But if we get through the next few weeks without Armageddon, what will the Democrats do? They had a chance to force Senate Republicans to vote up or down on a war powers resolution on March 5. If their caucus had held together, they would have gotten it through with the help of two Republican defectors.10 That opportunity was missed. Now they are back again, but this week House Democrats used a procedure called “unanimous consent” to push a new war vote that had a built-in self-destruct button—any member can kill it just by objecting, without having to vote against the war. 11

The real opportunity for Democrats will be to block any and all spending requests for the latest war (no matter how much it’s scaled down now) as well as the $1.5 trillion he’s asking for the Pentagon. Last year, 115 House and 27 Senate Democrats voted to give Trump the record one trillion dollars he’s now using to fund the wars they are acting so upset about.

Democrats have a chance to retake power in the House and possibly the Senate on a powerful wave that is more than just an incoherent “no kings, we hate Trump” agenda. The American people have never been so against foreign interventions or so sick and tired of the warmongers in both parties. And Americans are done with the used-car-salesman creeps Netanyahu and Zelenskyy demanding billions of our tax dollars to feed their killing machines, and keep the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

Peace isn’t just the one issue that can unite Democrats; it’s the one issue (not ICE or calling someone a king or Hitler) that divides Trump’s base. The defections in Trump world over his betrayal—regularly dismissed by mainstream media and Democrats—can no longer be ignored. Even the New York Times realizes it.12

If the Democrats led by Hakeem Jeffries are not prepared to accept this historic opportunity to ride the peace train into power and split the right, let’s hope and work for a new antiwar movement on the left. If neither happens, let’s not act so dumbfounded when the populist right, along with their libertarian allies and some anti-war Democrats, reemerge with a post-Trump “America First” message that will again defeat out-of-touch Democrats, establishment Republicans, and a feckless, anemic left.

That’s how Obama defeated Hillary and McCain in 2008, but it’s also how Trump (in large part) vanquished Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio in 2016. And that’s why we are in this mess today.

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I must admit to being less proud watching the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, meeting with Donald Trump this morning in the Oval Office—let me correct myself. Martin is called the Irish Taoiseach.

The Taoiseach (pronounced TEE-shukh) is the Irish language word for “chieftain” or “leader.” It’s been their title for head of state since their 1937 constitution. But Irish, as a language, has experienced something of a revival in recent years, as pride in a culture and in a language that was once banned and suppressed by the British government and loyalists has grown. 1

I have zero familiarity, let alone fluency, with the Irish language. I’ve only known the Gaelic “slainte” for drinking way too much Guinness, and my parents had a doormat with “Fáilte” (for “welcome”). But when I watched the Taoiseach acting like one of those Fáilte doormats reacting to Trump and trying to defend Ireland’s position on the U.S.’s medieval attack on Iran, I ran out of words.

These Irish adjectives (and one noun) seem to describe better what I saw and heard than anything I could find in my thesaurus:

• Lústarach / Ag lústaráil (adj/v.): A lústarach person is a sycophant, and “ag lústaráil” means to be acting in an obsequious or fawning manner, often used in the context of flattering a superior.

• Sclábhánta (adj.): Servile, slavish, or acting in a demeaning way (literally from “sclábhaí”sclábhaí”—slave).

• Stríocach (adj.): Submissive, disposed to yield, or bowing down to authority.

• Uiríseal (adj.): Humble or submissive.

• Táthaire (n.): A hanger-on, a toady, a scrounger, or a cheeky person.

It was particularly sickening to watch him pathetically call for diplomacy and peace while affirming Trump’s murderous campaign, calling Iran (not the US) a “rogue state” and “sponsor of terrorism." He made no mention of the school children killed by the United States or the genocidal role of Israel, despite Ireland’s formal intervention in support of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 2

It was pretty much the same hypocritical pablum we hear coming out of the mouths of the mainstream media and most liberal Democrats, denouncing the guy in the Oval Office that they all hate, but then spewing the same neocon bullshit he uses to justify his latest war. With enemies like that, who needs fiends? 3

I found it more humorous than offensive that Trump misgendered the president, Catherine Connolly of Ireland. When a reporter called out, “The Irish president has said your war against Iran is illegal and an attack on international law,” 4 the American president replied. “Look, he’s lucky I exist. That’s all I can say.”

Maybe “he” is lucky he exists. We’ll see how this all plays out, but the election of Socialist Catherine Connolly, who was swept into office in a landslide despite being viciously attacked for her unequivocal support for the Palestinian people and victims of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, has only strengthened my pride in being an American of Irish descent. Sláinte.

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In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a mysterious character warns the populist Roman dictator to ‘beware the ides of March.’ He dismisses the soothsayer as a crank and walks mindlessly into the Senate, where he’s stabbed to death by his enemies and some he thought were his friends. Et tu?

Lately, even some in the mainstream media, despite years of portraying Trump’s voters as mindless, cult-like followers, have noticed the potentially fatal fracturing of his electoral coalition.

The cracks in his base have been described many times before, but they were mostly simplistic caricatures around the Epstein files, Nick Fuentes, or Tucker Carlson versus lunatic Laura Loomer, as if his MAGA critics were just a bunch of antisemites who are more racist than Trump.

In November, CNN did a typically condescending piece called ‘The key issues that are suddenly dividing MAGA.’ In it, they list in order of importance ‘Epstein files,’ ‘Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes/antisemitism/Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories,’ ‘tariffs,’ ‘H1-B visas,’ and ‘the ballroom.’ They give ‘Trump’s foreign focus’ a minor mention at the end, but the word ‘war’ never appears anywhere in the article.

But since his murderous and reckless attack on Iran, the fissures within the MAGA world have become impossible to ignore. Some are now admitting that Trump’s complete betrayal of his core campaign promise—to keep the US out of war—is a primary reason for the rupture.

On March 6, Bloomberg News wrote, ‘MAGA Is Split: Trump Digs in on Iran War, Divides Loyalists.’ Warning that the ‘Iran war has emerged as a grave political vulnerability for Republicans ahead of a midterm election...’

What’s really going on here is that Trump has completely capitulated to the neocon warmongering wing of the Republican Party led in the Senate by decaying but still malignant Mitch McConnell, charlatan Tom Cotton, and the despicable Lindsey Graham. And in doing so, he’s sold out a large portion of his voters, especially many of the younger voters he won over in the last election. On a recent episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room, Curt Mills, of the American Conservative, called Trump’s war on Iran ‘an open betrayal of the base,’ asking, ‘What Bush-era neocon is not for this today? Find me one.’

But unfortunately, that wing of the Republican Party is closely aligned with the interventionist wing of the Democratic Party. Despite the public charades and name-calling, they, too, are ‘for this.’ I’ll point out that the only member of Trump’s cabinet to be approved overwhelmingly by every single Democratic senator, including Bernie Sanders, was Marco Rubio. Rubio, the neocon plant bankrolled by anti-Trump right-wing vulture capitalist Paul Singer and Netanyahu lover Miriam Adelson, is now ascendant and will soon be touted as the heir apparent and successor to Trump in 2028—and not J.D. Vance.

The late Marxist writer Michael Parenti, in his counternarrative to Shakespeare’s version, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, describes the assassins not as noble patriots but as wealthy elites and greedy aristocrats. They killed Caesar not to protect democracy from an autocrat but to restore and protect their privileges that were being undermined and threatened by a populist and traitor to his class.

In Trump’s case, at least for now, it’s his populist base that is turning on him as he surrenders his presidency to greedy warmongering oligarchs and their bloodthirsty ghouls in the Senate, Pentagon, State Department, and CIA.

Unlike Caesar, Trump has survived every effort by the ruling elite to destroy him. What we are seeing today is Trump’s own self-destruction as he abandons his voters and turns on his libertarian and anti-war conservative supporters. When he goes down, those voters, elected leaders, and influencers will not go away. So long as we have a desperate and dying capitalist system dependent on perpetual war and rising inequality, we will have a tumultuous and dangerous political force on the right.

Until a viable, coherent left emerges—one that is fundamentally anti-war, unapologetically populist, and capable of uniting a multiracial working-class electorate—the anti-establishment right will remain a resilient and resurgent force. The last time such a force existed on the left was the Rainbow Coalition, led by the late Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who was buried last weekend. Its absence today is our political crisis.

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As we prepare to leave another October in this era of intense political polarization, social turmoil, and unprecedented wealth inequality, we should resist the pull of culture wars and the performative responses devised and propagated by those who do not share our interests and profit from a further divided and weakened working class.

The end of October also brings us less than a week away from another critical election, particularly in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia, where there will likely be more upsets for the Democratic Party and the establishment media, still reeling from the 2024 election. They can’t seem to grasp how voters can choose a socialist in New York while a very similar demographic mix of voters is bringing a conservative Republican well within striking distance of winning over the “blue state” of New Jersey.

The party’s now almost total reliance on its donor class, its affluent white voters and volunteers, and its experts and consultants, seems to have rendered it unable to say anything with any credibility relevant to working-class voters and their interests. So, it inevitably falls back on tired old identity politics and performative symbolism, or the denigration of a group of voters they haven’t yet entirely driven away.

The ongoing controversy about Columbus Day does not have to be another unfortunate example of this if we put its history and founding into its proper context. And if we are serious about trying to rebuild multi-racial working-class power in this country, we should use the story of its origins to explore ways to promote solidarity and not division.

It’s well documented but not widely known that Columbus Day and the many myths associated with Christopher Columbus as the embodiment of Italian American pride had their roots in the bloody, racist lynching of eleven Italian American immigrants in 1891.

The selection of Columbus as a symbol of Italian heritage did not arise naturally from the Italian immigrant laboring classes. It was chosen as a day of celebration—originally called “Discovery Day”—when international outrage erupted after the killings of the Italian nationals wrongly accused of murdering the chief of police of New Orleans.

The president at the time, Benjamin Harrison, was desperately trying to quell both the domestic backlash and international condemnation over the incident as he was heading into a close election against his rival, Grover Cleveland, who would become the first president—until Donald J. Trump—to retake the White House after previously serving a single term before (like Trump) narrowly losing reelection.

Today, we might call what President Harrison did racial pandering, since Italians at the time were disparaged, exploited, and discriminated against by the dominant white and mostly Protestant society. Some historians have contended that Italians in America at the time were not yet considered “white.” Even so, the small but rising number of Italian voters in cities like New York (where the first Columbus commemoration took place in 1892) and sympathetic white (and Black) voters who were appalled by lynchings could still tip a very close election. But Harrison’s symbolic pandering did not prevent the former president from retaking the White House—something worth noting today.

The other lessons of the New Orleans lynching and the performance-over-structural response from the American president provide us with several seemingly contradictory lessons. Some Blacks saw the domestic response and international moral outrage at the extrajudicial killings as another glaring example of the double standard when compared to the silence, inaction, and even celebration over the mob lynchings of thousands of Black Americans—public murders that often included spectacle and torture.

Ida B. Wells, who shared the outrage over the double standard, also saw it as an opportunity for solidarity and greater exposure of the anti-lynching cause. In her 1892 pamphlet, Wells wrote: “The United States is the only nation on earth that confesses itself powerless to protect its subjects within its own borders... The same spirit that perpetuated the massacre of the Italians in New Orleans... is the same that lynches Negroes.”

Clearly, Ida Wells didn’t think a holiday bestowed upon Italian Americans was the answer to Italian immigrants being lynched, and it certainly did nothing to stop the slaughter of Black Americans, any more than a holiday for Black Americans today is a substitute for real structural reforms to remedy discrimination, segregation, and inequality.

Black Americans can take some gratification in the fact that what many consider to be their national hero and day of ethnic or racial pride was not handed to them by a white ruling elite or even good-hearted liberals trying to appease. African American leaders demanded, fought for, and won Dr. Martin Luther King Day. And it’s highly unlikely the radical preacher, whom Hoover’s FBI labeled the nation’s “most dangerous Negro,” would have been the choice of a President Ronald Reagan or Senators Strom Thurman, Jesse Helms, or even a young Joe Biden. Moreover, the holiday named for Dr. King was conceived as—and has thus become—a national holiday for all Americans to take pride in.

Italian Americans have every right to have pride in their national heritage and their rich cultural and ethnic traditions. Let’s be clear, we should be disturbed that we still celebrate so flawed a figure, but all Americans have undergone well over a century of sustained propaganda from nursery school on that this Genoa-born Spanish mercenary turned conquistador of the Caribbean somehow “discovered” a continent already discovered and populated by its soon-to-be exterminated indigenous inhabitants.

None of this is to say we should not correct the mistakes of the past, even if they are only statues and holidays. Who we choose as our heroes matters, symbols matter, and our history matters. In the tradition of the Black church and the American civil rights community, these otherwise superficial considerations are valued, observed, and preserved but in the service of advancing social, economic, and racial justice, or what Dr. King called the “Beloved Community.”

Nor should we excuse incidents and acts or even attitudes of racism embraced or perpetuated by the many European Americans who became infected with the idea that acceptance and assimilation in America must come at the expense and subjugation of Black Americans. But that was never all immigrants or all Italians. Throughout our history, Italian immigrants and their descendants were at the front lines of forming and leading radical labor unions and the fight against fascism here and abroad; some, like Father James Groppi, marched with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.

If we are committed to building multi-racial working-class power, we cannot afford to alienate a whole group of people who are still largely in the working and middle classes, especially a group that represents perhaps the largest self-identified national ancestry in the state, like New Jersey. That doesn’t mean we ignore double standards, hypocrisy, or historical mistakes; it means we educate, and we organize to build unity and power through love, agitation, and action. And it means we demand substantive policy that expands opportunity and reduces inequality—not symbols, words, holidays, and statues.

While the likely winner of the New York mayoral race made headlines by taking a clear stand against Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, the establishment Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia have said little about foreign policy, even though both are running as saber-rattling, tough-on-defense candidates—one is a former naval intelligence officer, and one is an actual CIA agent. And while we might think what goes on in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or other “shithole” continents and regions is irrelevant to a governor’s race, we should keep in mind how our unconditional support for Israel played out in the last national election in places like Michigan (and Paterson, New Jersey).

As Democrats are railing on about the government shutdown and Trump’s latest outrages, like knocking down the East Wing of the White House, Little Marco Rubio is picking off innocent people in fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea. He and scumbags like Lindsey Graham, with little to no opposition from the Democrats, are hoping to steer Trump into a new and disastrous regime change invasion on the same landmass that the first European, Christopher Columbus, invaded in August 1498. A year later, it was named Venezuela, meaning Little Venice, by another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci.

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“We had just spent hundreds of dollars at a local establishment only to have police officers march in and confront us like criminals,” said Minister Renaldo Pearson, executive minister at Fountain Baptist Church. “They escorted us to the sidewalk, where they accused us of violating the township’s no-knock ordinance.”

Earlier in the evening, the group of mostly church members and area clergy dropped off letters at two homes listed as the official addresses of both the Democratic and Republican candidates for township committee, including Mayor Annette Romano, Deputy Mayor Michael Cohen, the current school board president, Kris Heinrichs, and his running mate for township committee, Jamie Serruto.

Millburn does indeed have a “do not knock” rule in which residents can have their homes on a no solicitation list. However, that rule has clear exceptions for constitutionally protected free speech.

The ordinance states, “Non-commercial, religious, and/or political canvassers and solicitors protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution are permitted to perform those activities from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and weekends. These groups, such as political campaigners or religious advocacy groups, are not bound by the rules stated in the township’s Do Not Knock Ordinance.”

“We were completely within our rights to knock on doors,” said Minister Pearson. “We have a right to knock on the door just like your politicians and candidates do, and we certainly have a right to knock on doors advertised on the campaign website as the main location of a political campaign,” said Pearson, “yet we were detained by the police on the orders of Mr. Zaltsman.” Alex Zaltsman, former Millburn School Board president, who ran for Township Committee last year backed by the Millburn Republican Committee, is the resident of the address listed for Serruto & Heinrichs for Township Committee. The address has since been scrubbed from their website.

Rev. Francois, who began the protest after Millburn schools rejected his 5-year-old son for living outside the district, said, “People like Mr. Zaltsman want to make decisions about public policy, advocate for exclusionary housing and schools, use their home address to collect political campaign contributions, and then try to have people arrested for practicing democracy. Mr. Zaltsman and Milburn should be ashamed of themselves for trampling on and violating the civil rights of clergy, senior citizens, and community leaders. The aggressive and threatening demeanor and approach of the Millburn police officers was traumatizing, completely unwarranted, and legally unjustified, if not in itself illegal. Millburn has shown its true colors in the way it ignores a civil rights group and tries to intimidate them into silence and exhaustion.”

What they do not understand is that we are not intimidated; we are offended. We are not discouraged; we are indignant, and the only thing we are tired of, in the words of Rosa Parks, is being “tired of giving in.” We will keep coming back to Millburn until we get the attention that this critical and vital issue deserves from the leadership in Millburn and those who represent Millburn in the state legislature.

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Protests were sparked on August 21 when Millburn refused to register the son of a prominent Black minister. The group has since marched on the school district offices and hand-delivered a letter to the home of the school board president, who is a Republican candidate for township committee.

“We were thrilled to learn of the Paper Mill Playhouse’s performance of a racially integrated production of Bull Durham,” said the Rev. Dr. Willie D. Francois III, Senior Pastor of Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, whose son was denied the application. “Nonetheless, we remain unambiguously dismayed, outraged, and frustrated that Millburn Township and the school district continue to act more like Bull Connor when it comes to excluding Black and brown students from their schools.”

The crowd of mostly African American demonstrators chanted, sang civil rights spirituals, spoke to theatergoers, and handed out a handbill calling on patrons to contact the Millburn mayor, the school superintendent, and the school board president, urging them to meet with the group and agree to an integration plan for the district.

“Mayor Romano and the Board of Education leadership have appallingly ignored us since the school district refused to allow my 5-year-old son to attend kindergarten,” continued Francois, who is the chair of Building One New Jersey. “That’s why we went to the theater to exhibit our righteous discontent in solidarity with children harmed by how some communities hoard opportunity and resources.”

Pastor Francois and his son do not live in Millburn, but the group is challenging the district’s residency restriction and calling on Millburn to do more to diversify its classrooms.

A letter from Rev. Francois to the mayor and school district officials says, “Millburn’s residency restriction, coupled with its historic resistance to affordable housing, has resulted in Millburn becoming a racially and economically exclusionary school district in violation of state law that explicitly guarantees an adequate education free from racial segregation for all children.”

To remedy this,” the letter continues, “Millburn must become a choice district and use the tools afforded it by the State of New Jersey with the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program to implement an integration plan as we have outlined in the letter to the Millburn School Board.”

The group declared it will return with a larger crowd. “We will not give up,” said the Rev. Derrick R. Dumas, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Linden and moderator of the Middlesex Central Baptist Association of New Jersey. “We will keep coming back until the town, school district, and state leaders who are responsible for the horrific condition of our segregated schools take us and our demands seriously.”

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You can contact Elise Phillips Margulis, the Millburn/Short Hill Editor for TAPinto at margulis@tapinto.net to ask why they took down this story.

Photos by Jade Wicker

Millburn, NJ, August 27, 2025

Over 50 church members and activists descended on the Millburn Board of Education Building on Wednesday morning, demanding justice for the son of a prominent area pastor and calling on the Millburn Board of Education to take immediate steps to desegregate their schools.

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The group Building One America, along with its local affiliate Building One New Jersey, which organized the demonstration, has been advocating for “meaningful, transformative but realistic legislative solutions to the lethal crisis of school segregation.” The organization has a history of employing direct action and controversial tactics. The Rev. Dr. Willie D. Francois III, the leader of Building One New Jersey and Senior Pastor of Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, attempted to register his 5-year-old son for kindergarten on August 6th. “I came seeking an opportunity, but they cut me off at the threshold. Instead of walking me through an application,” said Rev. Francois, “they walked me out the door.”

The demonstrators, who included students, churchgoers, and about a dozen clergy from across the state, sang civil rights spirituals and chanted slogans against segregation while waiting for a promised meeting with the superintendent. After nearly an hour and a brief but fruitless encounter with the superintendent, the group caravaned to the home of the school board president, Kris Heinrichs.

“The treatment we endured at the Millburn Schools administration building was deeply disrespectful, demeaning, and degrading,” said Rev. Francois. “We were denied entry to a public building for a district that’s received $10 million in unjustifiable state aid since 2022 and rakes in over $10 million a year from a regional mall that does not enforce a residency rule when taking my money.” “Instead,” said Francois, “we were told to move our people to an ‘outdoor staging area’ like we were a bunch of performers.” “They gave us no option but to leave there and hand-deliver our message directly to the school board president at his home.”

About 20 cars lined up outside the home of Mr. Heinrichs in the posh Short Hills neighborhood of Millburn while a delegation of students led by Francois knocked on the door and delivered a letter. Heinrichs did not come to the door, but Jamie Serruto, Heinrichs' running mate for the township committee, rushed to the scene in a BMW jeep and could be seen running back and forth across the residential enclave's plush lawns, filming the protesters with his phone, while the Millburn police looked on.

Heinrichs, who was on the November ballot for the Millburn school board, abruptly joined the race for township committee last month as the Republican candidate, mysteriously replacing Puja Trivedi Parikh, who had prevailed in the June primary.

The letter, hand-delivered to Heinrichs and copied to the rest of the board members, the township committee, local candidates, and legislators calls on the board to "agree to become a Choice School district, to develop a Choice school plan...with the explicit aim of making Millburn more reflective of the racial and economic mix of its region, county, and the state...prioritizing students coming from segregated high-poverty districts." It calls on Hendrichs and the board to address the group's proposal at its next meeting on September 8.

Zachary Chineme, a Millburn resident and graduate of Millburn High School, said he found the experience “vindicating.” “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stopped by the police,” he said. “Growing up Black in Millburn makes you feel like maybe there’s something wrong with you. This experience revealed how purposeful and deliberate the system of exclusion is here and how determined they all are to maintain the status quo.”

The Rev. Rhonda Hart, an AME pastor from South Jersey and a leader of Building One New Jersey, said she felt “fulfilled” by being part of the group’s protest. “Millburn’s resistance to integration is sustained by the same structures used across the state, where kids are separated and one group is deeply disadvantaged while others reap the benefits.” “This must end,” said Hart, "and Millburn can be the model.”

“This is not just about my son; it’s about the thousands of children locked out of high-performing schools and condemned to high-poverty districts that are struggling academically,” said Francois. “For too long, we have blamed the students, their parents, teachers, and administrators in the poorest and segregated districts for this crisis, while the opportunity-hoarding and exclusionary practices of districts like Millburn go unchallenged. Today we changed that."

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This article was first published by the online local news publication TAPinto on Friday, August 29, at 9:22 PM ET; an hour later it had been removed with no explanation.

You can contact Elise Phillips Margulis, the Millburn/Short Hill Editor for TAPinto at margulis@tapinto.net to ask why they took down this story.

On June 28, 2025, Zohran Mamdani, flush from his stunning upset over the establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo, fled to Harlem to stand with Rev. Al Sharpton, who praised his courage in deciding “to come to the Black community.” A week later, Mamdani's allies threatened New York City’s most powerful Black elected official, U.S. House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, with a primary challenge from the left. 1

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Sanders's visit to Sharpton nine years ago did little to secure him Black voters (and it probably unnecessarily hurt him with whites). But more damaging than naively playing to Sharpton’s ego and the charade that he is the “gatekeeper” to the Black world is that he failed to appreciate the critical importance of the Black vote fully and to understand the historic role of Black institutions and networks in building and sustaining Black political power as an essential and indispensable part of the multiracial working class.

Mamdani is at risk of making the same terrible mistake. Back in March, I wrote an essay arguing that Bernie and AOC will not stop Trump with their “Overwhelmingly White 'Stop the Oligarchy' Tour.” In it, I relayed a story from John Bracey, the late preeminent African American scholar, who shared a jail cell in 1962 with then University of Chicago student and budding socialist Bernie Sanders after they were both arrested protesting segregation on the university campus. "Bernie," Bracey challenged his comrade, who was babbling on about the class struggle, "how are you going to have a damn revolution without Black people? This is America!"

For 60 years Sanders somehow ignored Professor Bracey’s prescient warning, treating the Black vote like it was just any other part of the broader working class—sometimes a very inconvenient and annoying add-on—that he had to pay attention to from time to time with surrogates, slogans, and often botched or awkward appeals to what he or his advisors thought were “Black issues.”

Bracey’s agitation to Sanders was not just about the math, although that’s part of it—you can’t build a winning working-class majority without Black voters—it’s about organized power. There is no other group in America that is organized and networked like Black Americans. Despite the assaults, setbacks, and harms of racism over the decades and centuries, including poverty, mass incarceration, segregated education, and the pogroms, expulsions, and diaspora (known as the Great Migration), Black Americans have remained more connected through churches, labor unions, fraternities, sororities, HBCU networks, civil rights organizations, and local political organizations and family linkages than any other group of Americans.2

The phrase “Black people are not a monolith” is such an overused cliché that it should make us wonder what we are trying to convince ourselves of. Are we perplexed and concerned that Black voters suffer from mindless groupthink when they swing in powerful and decisive waves toward a Barack Obama or away from a Bernie Sanders? Or is it something else? Are we confused and threatened by a deference to Black leadership, a willingness to trust in Black institutions, and a political culture—born out of a history of white betrayals—that values the safety, advantages, and opportunities of collective power over isolation cloaked as individualism?

When asked by an Australian journalist if Black Americans were “of one mind,” Paul Robeson replied, “We are of one mind on this: we want our freedom… We want to be full citizens, first class, not second.” In that same 1960 interview, Robeson said African Americans may be “the most organized people on the face of the earth,” citing the AME Church and other Black denominations as the bedrock of Black organization and unity. I don’t think anyone today would accuse Paul Robeson of groupthink, lacking in individuality, or being conservative. He was perhaps the most courageous and nonconforming cultural and political figure of his time. But somehow, he understood and valued what too many white progressives and even left-wing socialists cannot seem to comprehend or grasp about the importance of the Black working class—not as atomized, exploited members of the proletariat but as a power bloc that is both politically indispensable and the most consistently and reliably left-wing.

The charge that Blacks are not progressive (or not sufficiently progressive enough) is both laughable and offensive. The white liberal elite, who in recent years hijacked what we used to call the left in this country, need to take a good look at their stock portfolios before they go around judging who is and who isn’t progressive, especially when it comes to Blacks in America. African Americans as voters, leaders, workers, activists, and organizers have been the most consistently and reliably forward-thinking when it comes to racial, economic, and social justice, from healthcare to public education to labor solidarity. Even on foreign policy, Black voters and leaders have been out ahead of their white progressive peers in aligning with the oppressed and opposing unjust foreign wars.3 And for the white progressives who think Blacks are not quite as enlightened as they are on gender equality, actions (and power) can speak louder than words. The Black Caucus is more than 50% women today, well ahead of Congress as a whole and significantly ahead of the Democratic Caucus.

When white progressives and leftists agonize over the conundrum and try to solve the puzzle of a lack of Black support for Sanders or Mamdani, I fear they are looking for a Black version of themselves. One reason they might be failing is that Black Americans are disproportionately working class, while white leftists are disproportionately upper-middle class.

What impresses me most about Mamdani is that he is part of an organization—the Democratic Socialists of America. This sets him—and them—apart from most “progressive” groups that simply operate as a left/liberal subsection of the Democratic Party in two fundamental ways. One, they have an organizational and leadership structure that is distinct and independent of the Democratic Party (whose primary they just won). And two, they are socialists—unlike progressives, they bring a perspective about class and the harms of capitalism that is explicitly antagonistic to big business and challenges the power and privilege of the rich at a time of unprecedented and widening wealth inequality.

But this is what’s most frustrating about these leftists. You would think that, given their extensive reading of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and socialist history and theory, they’d understand and appreciate why socialists from Lenin to Dubois, from Claudia Jones to Fred Hampton, considered Black Americans the “vanguard of the proletariat.” This shouldn’t require a lot of deep thoughts or dialectical struggle sessions to grasp. Black Americans don’t have some immutable tendency toward revolution. But Blacks are the only Americans almost entirely and (so far) consistently relegated to a color-coded caste system in housing, schools, and low-wage jobs. The subjugation, economic exploitation, and political oppression that African Americans faced over the past 400 years may have given them two qualities over any other group that you'd think leftists would value and appreciate: solidarity and class consciousness.

If Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America want to win and govern as socialists, they will need a working-class power base to inform their policies and to advance and defend them. New York City Blacks are 20% of the population, but closer to 25% of the voters and close to half of the city’s working-class Democratic voters. White New Yorkers are the biggest voting bloc, but they are by no means homogenous politically or socioeconomically. 20% of white New Yorkers are millionaires compared to only 2-3% of Black New Yorkers. And 30% of white New Yorkers voted Republican in recent elections compared to 85 to 90% of Blacks who vote Democrat. It’s hard to say how these different slices of white New York will vote in November, but all strata of whites will likely divide themselves among three, maybe four, candidates.

Latino voters will be critically important, as will Asian voters, but anyone who knows New York knows that these census-designated groups represent many disparate populations with divergent political views and economic circumstances and come from many different national, cultural, and religious backgrounds and networks. Even Hispanics (who are as likely to be working class as Black New Yorkers) do not vote in as high numbers as African Americans and (like Asians) are voting more and more like white voters—unpredictable and not particularly progressive. But even if Mamdani wins without strong Black support, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. It will mean the most well-organized and dominant part of his power base will be largely made up of an activist class and not a solid, organized working class.

And it's entirely possible that if the establishment coalesces around Eric Adams, Mamdani could be in real trouble. Especially if they can clear the field of other candidates (including Curtis Sliwa). Adams is a cop, he’s the incumbent, he’s Black, and Trump likes him. The anti-Mamdani coalition will include cops and law-and-order white voters, vehemently pro-Israel voters, Staten Island Trump-loving whites, many of the rich (‘I’m progressive but don't want socialism’) white voters, landlords, and Wall Street-aligned voters. If Mamdani doesn't have strong support from the most reliable, powerful, and well-organized working-class constituencies, he will spend all his time pandering to racist whites, trying to allay the fears of rich people, and attempting to convince skeptical New Yorkers that he does not want to drive all the Israeli Jews into the sea.

There is one group of voters who will not be cowed by charges of antisemitism or demand that he “tone down” his left-wing rhetoric. Black voters have been hearing this garbage used against their leaders for decades. Rev. Jesse Jackson ran a powerful campaign (to the left of Bernie Sanders) in 1984 and 1988 that was ground down by charges of antisemitism, largely because he supported Palestinian rights.

It was Jesse's Rainbow Coalition of Black churches and labor unions the following year that turned out a powerful multiracial working-class vote in New York City, propelling David Dinkins to the mayor’s office and toppling the three-term incumbent Ed Koch. Dinkins, by the way, was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America 4 and comes from a long line of left-wing or left-leaning Black leaders in New York City, including Socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Communist Party members City Councilman Ben Davis and NAACP founder W.E.B. Dubois, all of whom were a part of the larger Black political ecosystem of New York City that was historically and heavily intertwined with Black churches, labor unions, civil rights organizations, and political clubs. Most of the clergy and leaders of these organizations would not have called themselves socialists - some would describe themselves as conservative - but they were leaders of Black organizations and, therefore, leaders of membership-controlled, working-class people-based organizations that cared about justice, civil rights, and economic opportunity.

Hakeem Jeffries is a part of that same Black power ecosystem of New York City. A son of the Black church (Cornerstone Baptist in Brooklyn) and deeply connected through family ties to Black institutions and networks. And in Washington, he is very much a product of the Congressional Black Caucus. White progressives can dismiss these connections as the “Democratic establishment,” but they are not, or if they are, they are the Black power part of an establishment that is distinct and enjoys a level of trust from their working-class Black voter base that progressives can only dream of having. Even labor unions do not command the same kind of fealty from their members that is still found today among Black networks and institutions.

There are many reasons to be disappointed in or frustrated at some of the positions Black members of Congress (including Jeffries) have taken to align themselves with the corporate and wealthy donor class that dominates the Democratic Party today. But attacking Hakeem Jeferiees was just stupid and frankly hypocritical, bordering on racism, especially as the DSA wing of Congress, namely AOC and Bernie, had no problem fully supporting Genocide Joe. 5

Mayor Dinkins did not govern as a socialist (which is why some white leftists today dismiss him as ‘just a liberal Democrat’). But he was constrained by the limitations of the power of his fragile coalition, which was under attack from his first days in office, crescendoing with relentless accusations (led by Rudy Giuliani) that he was anti-cop and anti-Semitic. Mamdani will have the same challenges, but New York’s demographics have changed since 1990, and he has an opportunity to build a more lasting coalition that can drive a working-class agenda. But he will only succeed if he prioritizes and shows some respect for (and even deference to) working-class organizations and their leaders, however flawed, compromised, or not meeting the ideological purity standards of some upper-class white leftists.

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As we leave behind another July 4th weekend, it seems like Independence Day has become a time for resistance liberals and cancel culture progressives to twist themselves into big mustard-covered pretzels reflecting on the hypocrisy of the founding fathers while at the same time warning us that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the democratic values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Take, for example, the queen of Substack, Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor who serves up a daily pablum on the same tired old theme—a soothing balm of historical anecdotes for liberals and progressives to assure themselves of their intellectual and moral superiority to the dangerous and ignorant MAGA voters.

In her July 3 post,1 she praises the “Declaration of Independence as an astonishingly radical document” written by a bunch of aristocratic colonial upstarts who “got around the sticky little problem” of slavery and racism and apparently didn’t even notice—“it never crossed their minds”—that they were disenfranchising all women along with non-white and landless males. Then she explains how over the next 250 years—with a few ups and downs—these oversights were all worked out as “Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.” But now—just as we were nearing the nadir of full participation and radical democratic inclusion—Ms. Cox Richardson says we face “a rebellion against our founding principles as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.”

I guess we had finally achieved the “more perfect union”—or maybe even Dr. King’s dream—when we were rudely interrupted by the orange menace. As if we didn’t have unprecedented levels of inequality, decades of endless wasteful wars, deepening segregation by race and poverty, declining wages, astronomically high and still rising healthcare and housing costs, and the hollowing out of the working and middle classes before the dreaded authoritarian rode down the golden escalator. Maybe the threat to democracy didn’t start with Trump. Maybe it started with elitist like Heather Cox Richardson, or maybe it started with guys she calls “the men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, … to defend the idea of human equality.”

Or maybe it’s time we let go of praising the founding fathers as infallible, wise, and prophetic great men since one could argue that it was their system of a fragmented and incoherent federal government that got us into this mess. One could even argue that the motivations of the colonist’s rebellion against King George planted the toxic seeds in this so-called democratic experiment that brought us to a level of unfettered and brutal capitalism and neo-colonial—often genocidal—militarism across the entire globe never before seen in human history.

The reasons for taking up arms against the King were certainly complicated and motivated by different interests and grievances across the 13 colonies, but there is no escaping the reality that a major motivation for the rebellious colonial aristocracy was that it chafed at the Crown’s restrictions against westward expansion, which (at least in the southern colonies) meant the expansion of slavery and the displacement and, in many cases, extermination of the indigenous population west of the Appalachian Mountains.

We need only to read the list of grievances against the King in the “astonishingly radical document” to find this clearly stated. In the second to last of the King’s “outrages” listed in the Declaration signed on July 4, they write that the King “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

These were not just some unfortunate antiquated prejudices that we should see in the context of the contemporary views of the time. These were direct references to two of the most powerful motivations for the colonists to “pledge” their “lives,” “fortunes,” and “sacred honor.” The preservation of slavery, westward white settler expansion, and the further removal or destruction of indigenous tribes.

The “insurrections” the founders are accusing the King of exciting are domestic slave rebellions. They are specifically referring to the Dunmore Proclamation. In 1775 Black slaves petitioned the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray—the Earl of Dunmore—to arm them and allow them to form a regiment against their enslavers. The formation of the Ethiopian Regiment of Black soldiers whose uniforms were emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves” “excited” Blacks all across Virginia to escape their enslavers and join Dunmore and the British cause. 2

From the point of view of the colonists, the King was not only ‘siding with the Blacks against us,’ but he was siding with the "savages." But it was the indigenous tribes, including the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Cherokee, and Creek, who made the call that they’d be better off with the Brits than the rebels. This was a no-brainer, as it was the British who so deeply offended the colonists by agreeing to a boundary—known as the Proclamation Line of 17633—that would halt any further westward expansion by settlers into “Indian territory.” 4

In fact, it was the policing of this boundary and the protecting of the native population from white settlers by the British that outraged the colonists, not just because the King was siding with the “savages” but because the colonists were being forced to pay for it. The dreaded Stamp Act, imposed by the Crown, was to raise the revenue needed to pay for the troops to protect the indigenous people west of the Appalachian Mountains from white settlers who would otherwise take their land and expand the slave economy. 5

None of this is to suggest that the British were somehow morally superior to the colonists. The British and other European colonial powers were the originators of the global drive for land, resources, and labor that resulted in slavery, extraction, and genocide. But our ambitious, industrious, and greedy colonial forebears, like the Boers in South Africa (1899-1902) and the Zionist settlers in Palestine (1930s to 1948), at some point decided to break with their British overlords, not to seek life and liberty for all but to expand freedom for themselves so they could take it away from others. In other words, the King (in the American’s perspective) was getting too soft on the Blacks and Indians… and he had to go. Gerald Horne—a much more interesting historian than defenders of the neoliberal order like Heather Cox Richardson—provides strong evidence that a primary trigger for the American Revolution was the Somerset case, believed to be a precedent-setting legal decision in England that would ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery in all the colonies.6

None of this, in my opinion, should discourage us from having a good time with family and friends on the 4th of July or even honoring the founding fathers and being patriotic, but let's put our founders and founding in perspective. There's nothing wrong with having national mythologies and legends or even depicting founders like Washington and Franklin as celestial figures.

Mythological characters, and even deities, don’t have to be held up as wise, moral, and righteous—most were pretty bad. Romulus killed his brother Remus, and King Arthur committed genocide. The Greek and Roman gods were awful, but we could discern some moral lesson from them or at least from their stories. George Washington's slave plantation butted right up against and ultimately violated the 1768 Proclamation Line—but he couldn’t tell a lie.

The sooner we recognize that all of us, in what we call "the West," are the products—not so much of a 250-year experiment in democracy as of a horrific 500-year experience of global conquest, labor exploitation, environmental destruction, and settler expansion—the sooner we can begin to redefine ourselves as a postcolonial, post-slave, post-genocidal, and hopefully post-capitalist multiracial society. Maybe then we can stop fucking up the rest of the world.

We need not tie ourselves in knots—or read ruling-class liberal hacks like Heather Cox Richardson—praising the genius of the founders and the near-infallibility of the founding documents just so we can declare Donald Trump a threat to their near-perfect system of democracy and his voters a crude and rude desecration of its holy sacred documents.

Maybe one reason the endless and boring “threat to our democracy” argument of the Biden and then Harris campaign didn’t catch on is because ordinary working people in this country (of all backgrounds) aren’t particularly impressed with just how well it’s working for them. I can assure you the people in Gaza and the West Bank being starved and killed—to make way for white settlers—aren't too impressed either. 7

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Two weekends ago we were treated to the bizarre and disturbing juxtaposition of a Democratic National Committee (DNC) having what looked like a pre-pubescent schoolyard brawl (replete with accusations of bullies, crybabies, tattletales, and quitters) while a lunatic was gunning down members of the Minnesota legislature—the colleagues and close friends of the DNC chair (and former Minnesota chair), who is the apparent target of the DNC playground bullies wrath.

We also were treated to the bizarre and disturbing juxtaposition of millions of “resistance” liberals and leftists (along with their Lincoln Project Republican buddies) screaming and yelling incoherent and pointless chants about a nonexistent king while Israel’s Netanyahu (King Herod), in cahoots with the bloodthirsty neocons in Washington, started a dangerous shooting war to egg on the Iranians and drag us into a disastrous new Middle Eastern debacle.

At the start of Bibi's insane and unprovoked air war against Iran, the New York Times ran a story on the furious debate and enormous divide within the Republican Party and the Trump movement between the psychopathic war-hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham and Reagan-era neocon war criminal Elliot Abrams versus the growing and determined anti-interventionist wing of the MAGA movement led by the likes of Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk.1

The Times, of course, dismissed these MAGA peaceniks as “isolationists.” Frankly, I’m thankful and relieved that there is a stubborn and tenacious bloc within Trump world that wants to stop him from sucking us into one more stupid, costly, and catastrophic regime change war. But I’m disgusted that our best hope for peace and resistance to war is the far right, and I’m dumbfounded as to why there is almost nothing of an anti-war movement on the left. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats would rather rail against imaginary kings and denounce impotent oligarchs and then turn on each other like little kids over nothing.

So, while Trump tacks back and forth between dropping bombs and calling for peace, Democrats go to war on themselves. It’s not that Republicans aren’t good at infighting, but their conflicts, since Tea Party radicals brought down House Majority Leader (and one-time Tea Party champion) Eric Cantor in 2014, have been about seizing and consolidating power and driving out or subordinating the establishment corporate wing of their party. While Trump was out of office and in exile at Mar-a-Lago, the populist forces and Trump loyalists essentially purged congressional and party leadership, even taking down a Speaker of the House and their party’s national chairperson. But whatever you think of these MAGAistas, their differences with McCarthy, McConnell, and McDaniel were about ideology and power—not personality. It may be contradictory and abhorrent, but these folks have an agenda, a purpose, and a set of demands—and one of those demands is ending the "forever wars." So what the hell are the Democrats fighting each other over?

The DNC’s Sandbox War - what’s it for?

The DNC factionalism seems to have no such weighty purposes as war and peace. Their current civil war was apparently triggered by the scolding of David Hogg by a tearful Ken Martin. Mr. Hogg, the outgoing DNC vice chair, was portrayed as some kind of progressive disruptor because he challenged incumbent Democrats in primaries. From what I can see, his ideological bonafides (other than gun control—he’s a survivor of the Parkland high school mass shooting) are that he just doesn't like old people—I've seen nothing from him on the mass slaughter in Gaza. The big fallout from Hogg’s expulsion is that Randi Weingarten, AFT president-for-life—and staunch Israel supporter—quit the DNC in protest, asking in her resignation letter, "…why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our community,” whatever that means. Maybe there is something more to this, but it looks like the Weingarten/Hogg side is mad that their choice for the national post, former Wisconsin Democratic chair Ben Wikler, got beat by Ken Martin2.

Like the 25-year-old Hogg, the 44-year-old Wikler is supposed to be more progressive than the 51-year-old Martin. But all I see is that Wikler gets along better with and raises more money from some of the Democratic Party's most influential and obnoxious billionaire oligarchs, including “centrist” megadonor Reid Hoffman3 and 91-year-old "global democracy spreader" George Soros.4 And Wikler was backed by establishment hacks like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. I also can’t help but notice this seems to be a largely white-on-white conflict. Even DNC stalwart and power broker Donna Brazile is staying out of the fray. “I’m not in it, and I don’t want to be in it.”

So while Democrats, progressives, and resistance liberals run around with stupid signs and chants (or make themselves the center of attention like the still obscure and unremarkable Senator Alex Padilla), and others are fighting over who's got the better billionaires, I'm forced to watch Steve Bannon's "War Room," the Tucker Carlson network, or listen to libertarian Dave Smith’s podcast to get the only accurate analysis, follow the only realistic resistance, and cheer on the only meaningful political counterbalance to the senate neocons, Fox News, and the Israeli lobby's enormous campaign to pressure Trump to intervene in and escalate a new Middle Eastern war.

The war to curry the king’s favor—to the bootlickers go the spoils.

The people who are having any impact on important domestic and foreign policy issues today are people who know that Trump is not a king and put time and energy into figuring out how to influence him. He has done some crazy shit and has tried to do a lot more, but he has been partly constrained by the courts and largely reined in by the political forces within his own coalition and by establishment forces in the Republican Party, including powerful business interests. It was not the dystopian image of burning robotaxis and federal troops confronting L.A. protesters that caused Trump to retreat (at least temporarily) from his mass deportation operation; it was the powerful growers and meat processing employers who argued for the continued free flow of cheap migrant labor to exploit. It was not Sanders and AOC's Stop the Anti-Oligarchy Tour that caused Musk's abrupt and humiliating banishment from the Trump royal court; it was the MAGA base that hated Musk and the rest of what they call the "technofeudalist tech bros”. Steve Bannon, who called Musk a "parasitic illegal immigrant," had been chiding DOGE since its creation to "cross the Potomac" and bring their "waste, fraud, and abuse" exposure to the Pentagon and start cutting the trillion-dollar military budget. When he didn’t, they went after him.

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Warmongers move to exploit the breach…before it closes.

It was in this chaotic and contradictory political marketplace, with disparate right-wing forces competing for the president's favor and whatever exists of an opposition "left" acting like a bunch of powerless and irrelevant idiots, that Netanyahu and the neocons saw the opportunity to start another war and force Trump into it. The Israelis had obviously been planning the logistics of their operation for a long time, and the real opportunity for open conflict with Iran started with Trump's childish tearing up of the nuclear agreement in 2018 (at Netanyahu's urging). But the recent political opening for the warmongers (and their urgency for them to act) came from Trump's adolescent instincts and juvenile motivations. After trashing Obama's signature foreign policy triumph seven years ago, Trump had signaled he was prepared to sign an almost identical agreement in 2025 with the Persians when Netanyahu launched the attack. Trump was never against the nuclear deal; he was against a deal he couldn't get credit for. He wanted a "do-over" and to get the praise and adulation that Obama got. Netanyahu’s unprovoked attack on Iran was really provoked by Trump’s threatening to make a deal with them and impose a peace.

Managing the baby king

The people driving the Trump train today (albeit in different directions) are the people who know not only is he no king, he’s a baby. He is a big baby that must be coddled, flattered, played with, and manipulated, including (maybe especially) when it comes to war and peace.

On June 13, Trump was blindsided by Israel’s surprise attack on Iran by Netanyahu and elements from within his own military. But to allow him to save face, he had to claim he was fully aware of and “greenlit” the operation. Even though he was furious that he got played by the neocons and the Israelis (and his dreams of a Nobel Prize may have been sabotaged), he had to break some toys (drop some of his own, bigger bombs) so he could hear his fake friends on Fox News and in the Senate Republicans sing his praises. Establishment Democrats, meanwhile, largely stayed on the sidelines despite the dangerously high stakes for the country and the world. Some joined the chorus of warmonger ass-kissing.

Only Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), was willing to say what needed to be said to prevent a wider war and try to achieve peace. He praised the right-wing populists for being more anti-war than the establishment leadership of his own party. When he was challenged by CNN's snide Kaitlan Collins, "So you’re saying you’re in agreement with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene? Khanna refused the bait and said, "On this issue, absolutely…"

But if Khanna, and what little exists of an anti-war and anti-Wall Street left, want to help working-class Americans and save the planet from cataclysmic world war, they're going to have to do more than align with the handful of Republican non-interventionists in Congress calling for the invocation of the war powers act. And good luck with that. Congress hasn't denied a president a military action since 1917 and hasn't used their power to declare war since World War II, despite hundreds of military interventions. 5And we have a better chance to get Trump to stand up to Netanyahu than a Congress (both parties) in the pocket of military contractors and the Israeli lobby.

As of this writing, Trump is very happy with himself as the tough but pragmatic peace-loving hero (and of course stable genius) who did what had to be done to end the fighting. One of the biggest threats to undoing his tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran is the Democrats in Congress, like Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) 6, and the anti-Trump news media determined to dump on and discredit his claims of a successful bombing mission. If we really want peace and an end to war, we should get fully behind Trump's latest self-delusion and assertion that he “totally obliterated” Iran's nuclear capability, and now it's time for everyone—especially Netanyahu—to shut the fuck up. Even Iran is going along with the managed charades. They know they are dealing with a dangerous but manipulatable baby. And they do not want to fight.

If we are ever to reclaim the populist mantle and rebuild a multiracial movement on the left that is anti-war and pro-working and middle class, we're going to need to stop all the stupid, ineffective, and powerless antics and name-calling that didn't work last time Trump occupied the White House, and we need to start acting like there is a big baby in that house and not Hitler or a king or Putin's puppet.

He's not a stupid baby, and he's not without some often outstanding political instincts. But his voters and the populist wing aren't stupid either, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, said in her angry tweet, “Trump is not a king, MAGA is not a cult.”7

Trump's voters didn't just fall in line behind his recent machinations after two weeks of whiplash from his erratic swings between peace and war. The grownups in the anti-interventionist wing (Bannon and most likely J. D. Vance) have been working overtime to hold the coalition together and manage the spin during the crisis. But the main reason they are staying with Trump, despite what was a clear betrayal, is that we’ve given them no place else to go. Offering to forge alliances with your enemies’ allies and appealing to their constituencies is not a moral compromise; it’s smart strategy and good tactics. It's how you split your enemies forces, it's how you build new alliances, and it's the best way to mitigate the damage and maybe even win some victories (especially when world war is being threatened) while you're building your own forces and organization.

In 1855, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." Unless we think we are morally superior to Frederick Douglass (and I know many Trump-hating liberals who do), we should be aligning ourselves with any conservative, libertarian, or populist who wants the same things we do, even if it's for the wrong reasons, including taxing the rich, breaking up monopolies, protecting workers and consumers, and resisting the neocon warmonger’s seemingly endless appetite for regime-change wars.

The recent Middle Eastern crisis revealed just how much most Americans—Independents, Democrats, and MAGA Republicans—are sick and tired of the blatant lies, the enormous waste, and the needless deaths caused by these ghouls over the last 50 years. It's why we should stop being so surprised when another insurgent candidate (whether a 78-year-old baby king or a 33-year-old socialist) breaks through the old, worn-out, and discredited establishment barricades with a message of peace, denunciation of war, and condemnation of war criminals.

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Candidate for New Jersey Governor Ras Baraka’s arrest at Trump’s Detention Center is more than a zoning conflict. It’s a challenge to the plundering, profiteering, and exploitation of poverty, war, and racism by a new and dangerous breed of mercenary capitalists.

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Last week the New York Times published an in-depth story about Erik Prince, 1 who recently secured a major contract with the government of Haiti to kill gang members. Prince is the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, the notorious for-profit mercenary army that gunned down 40 Iraqi civilians, massacring 17 in 2007.

On May 9, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested for trespassing at Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark. The mayor had been visiting the site, demanding a certificate of occupancy from the GEO Group, the for-profit prison corporation now running the center with a billion-dollar contract from the Trump administration. 2

The GEO Group and Erik Prince are part of a deranged but dangerous group of patristic, bottom-feeding mercenaries who have latched themselves onto MAGA world, seeking to curry favor in Trump’s royal court so they can further exploit misery, war, and poverty for more profit and power.

They are part of a larger movement of right-wing fanatics committed to the privatization and plundering of every public institution in our society, from war to poverty housing to education and now the drive for mass deportation. 3 It is not a coincidence that Erik Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, the anti-public education secretary of education under the first Donald Trump regime. 4 She jumped ship after January 6 and has been trying to claw her way back into Trump’s good graces ever since his restoration to power. Betsy joined the rats, leaving the sinking ship, while her brother Erik stayed on board just in case the ship of Trump was miraculously raised. As a billionaire activist and advocate for the privatization of public schools, she is part of the same grift as her brother, using the “disaster” of “failing schools” in segregated cities like Detroit as a pretext for their dismantling and plundering for parts and profit.

GEO Group, founded by Greek tycoon George C. Zoley, has been charged with running slave labor camps that pay prisoners as little as a dollar a day for forced labor. 5 As the largest for-profit prison system in the country, it operates in the United Kingdom and former British colonial holdings of Australia, South Africa, and the United States, where it runs 100 facilities. Its growth in market share, political influence, and enormous profits since its founding in the 1980s mirror the rise of mass incarceration in the United States following the “war on drugs” legislation and federal allocations. Prince’s operations leveraged and exploited the 9/11 mass psychosis, the “war on terror,” and the rise of the neocons during the Bush/Cheney years.

Anticipating and backing the restoration of Donald Trump, both GEO and Prince have been working overtime to fully exploit and leverage the latest lucrative business opportunity, the new anti-immigrant hysteria, “mass deportations”—a backlash to the mass migration of cheap labor into the United States and the deliberate destabilization of countries like Haiti.

The GEO Group was the first to propose and secure large contracts for immigrant detention centers across the country. Prince has been even more ambitious. He brokered the El Salvador relationship for Trump and initiated the idea of sending captured migrants to their prisons. But Prince has been proposing a major expansion of that program that would circumvent the law and create far-flung gulags and medieval dungeons run by foreign mercenaries. According to Prince's proposal to the Trump administration, 100,000 migrants would be transferred from holding camps—like the one in Newark—to El Salvador. But the prisons, in Prince’s plan, are to be on land ceded or sold to the United States as a kind of medieval penal colony where U.S. sovereignty would allow Trump to avoid the legal issues he is now facing with the courts. 6

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called out the "triple evils"—racism, poverty, and war—as America's three greatest and interconnected problems. But King also understood and wrote that the profit motive and greed were at the heart of all these problems when he said, "The underlying purpose (of racism, and in particular segregation) was to oppress and exploit" and not simply to keep people apart.

Liberals and progressives too often obsess over the immediate crisis, the newest celebrity oligarch, or the latest outrageous remark out of Trump’s mouth. Perhaps veteran Black political leaders like Ras Baraka and Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman—who was arrested with the mayor—are better able to see the forest through the trees (the real machinations behind the war on crime, the segregation of our schools, the endless wars, and now mass deportations) because of a shared history and familiarity with a long line of exploitative for-profit schemes— such as the forced-labor, convict leasing system that emerged after the Civil War.

About an hour before Mayor Baraka was arrested on May 9, I had the privilege of being with him as he addressed a civil rights conference I helped to organize with Rev. Willie D. Francois III at Seton Hall University—where he was joined by other candidates for New Jersey governor, Steve Sweeney and Mayor Fulop of Jersey City. Mayor Baraka spoke about the injustice of a segregated school system that isolates Black and brown students at high-poverty schools and then expects them to perform at the same level as the wealthiest white districts in the nation. “And when they don’t,” he said, “it’s the children, the parents, and the teachers who get blamed,” creating the perfect conditions for privatizers, profiteers, and plunderers like DeVos, Prince, and Zoley, who have made Dr. King’s triple evils of racism, war, and poverty not just a business opportunity but their business model.

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Candidate for New Jersey Governor Ras Baraka’s arrest at Trump’s Detention Center is more than a zoning conflict. It’s a challenge to the plundering, profiteering, and exploitation of poverty, war, and racism by a new and dangerous breed of mercenary capitalists.

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Last week the New York Times published an in-depth story about Erik Prince, 1 who recently secured a major contract with the government of Haiti to kill gang members. Prince is the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, the notorious for-profit mercenary army that gunned down 40 Iraqi civilians, massacring 17 in 2007.

On May 9, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested for trespassing at Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark. The mayor had been visiting the site, demanding a certificate of occupancy from the GEO Group, the for-profit prison corporation now running the center with a billion-dollar contract from the Trump administration. 2

The GEO Group and Erik Prince are part of a deranged but dangerous group of patristic, bottom-feeding mercenaries who have latched themselves onto MAGA world, seeking to curry favor in Trump’s royal court so they can further exploit misery, war, and poverty for more profit and power.

They are part of a larger movement of right-wing fanatics committed to the privatization and plundering of every public institution in our society, from war to poverty housing to education and now the drive for mass deportation. 3 It is not a coincidence that Erik Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, the anti-public education secretary of education under the first Donald Trump regime. 4 She jumped ship after January 6 and has been trying to claw her way back into Trump’s good graces ever since his restoration to power. Betsy joined the rats, leaving the sinking ship, while her brother Erik stayed on board just in case the ship of Trump was miraculously raised. As a billionaire activist and advocate for the privatization of public schools, she is part of the same grift as her brother, using the “disaster” of “failing schools” in segregated cities like Detroit as a pretext for their dismantling and plundering for parts and profit.

GEO Group, founded by Greek tycoon George C. Zoley, has been charged with running slave labor camps that pay prisoners as little as a dollar a day for forced labor. 5 As the largest for-profit prison system in the country, it operates in the United Kingdom and former British colonial holdings of Australia, South Africa, and the United States, where it runs 100 facilities. Its growth in market share, political influence, and enormous profits since its founding in the 1980s mirror the rise of mass incarceration in the United States following the “war on drugs” legislation and federal allocations. Prince’s operations leveraged and exploited the 9/11 mass psychosis, the “war on terror,” and the rise of the neocons during the Bush/Cheney years.

Anticipating and backing the restoration of Donald Trump, both GEO and Prince have been working overtime to fully exploit and leverage the latest lucrative business opportunity, the new anti-immigrant hysteria, “mass deportations”—a backlash to the mass migration of cheap labor into the United States and the deliberate destabilization of countries like Haiti.

The GEO Group was the first to propose and secure large contracts for immigrant detention centers across the country. Prince has been even more ambitious. He brokered the El Salvador relationship for Trump and initiated the idea of sending captured migrants to their prisons. But Prince has been proposing a major expansion of that program that would circumvent the law and create far-flung gulags and medieval dungeons run by foreign mercenaries. According to Prince's proposal to the Trump administration, 100,000 migrants would be transferred from holding camps—like the one in Newark—to El Salvador. But the prisons, in Prince’s plan, are to be on land ceded or sold to the United States as a kind of medieval penal colony where U.S. sovereignty would allow Trump to avoid the legal issues he is now facing with the courts. 6

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called out the "triple evils"—racism, poverty, and war—as America's three greatest and interconnected problems. But King also understood and wrote that the profit motive and greed were at the heart of all these problems when he said, "The underlying purpose (of racism, and in particular segregation) was to oppress and exploit" and not simply to keep people apart.

Liberals and progressives too often obsess over the immediate crisis, the newest celebrity oligarch, or the latest outrageous remark out of Trump’s mouth. Perhaps veteran Black political leaders like Ras Baraka and Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman—who was arrested with the mayor—are better able to see the forest through the trees (the real machinations behind the war on crime, the segregation of our schools, the endless wars, and now mass deportations) because of a shared history and familiarity with a long line of exploitative for-profit schemes— such as the forced-labor, convict leasing system that emerged after the Civil War.

About an hour before Mayor Baraka was arrested on May 9, I had the privilege of being with him as he addressed a civil rights conference I helped to organize with Rev. Willie D. Francois III at Seton Hall University—where he was joined by other candidates for New Jersey governor, Steve Sweeney and Mayor Fulop of Jersey City. Mayor Baraka spoke about the injustice of a segregated school system that isolates Black and brown students at high-poverty schools and then expects them to perform at the same level as the wealthiest white districts in the nation. “And when they don’t,” he said, “it’s the children, the parents, and the teachers who get blamed,” creating the perfect conditions for privatizers, profiteers, and plunderers like DeVos, Prince, and Zoley, who have made Dr. King’s triple evils of racism, war, and poverty not just a business opportunity but their business model.

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I originally put a short version of this out a few weeks ago (with only one cartoon). This is longer and more detailed and includes three original drawings.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy came into office as a formers NAACP national board member who inherited one of the most segregated school districts in the nation. He was given a gift. A lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the segregated education that nearly half a million—mostly Black and brown children—were forced to receive in the state.

Unfortunately, he will leave office having squandered a golden opportunity to become a civil rights champion and a national leader. Because of his timidity, callousness, and hypocrisy, he will have betrayed another generation of children who will have to face the enormous obstacles and severely narrowed opportunities that correlate powerfully with racial segregation and poverty isolation from joblessness to violence to mass incarceration to diminished life expectancy.1

As a professed champion of civil rights, the right thing to do—morally and politically—would have been to admit liability on behalf of the state and immediately take bold steps to remedy the problem. Instead, Murphy hid. He tried to avoid it, ignore it, and make excuses for why he couldn't do anything about it. Throughout his entire first term, he resorted to the lame and cynical lie that he could not address—or even discuss—school segregation because of “ongoing litigation,” an excuse as transparent and brazen as Trump saying he can’t release his taxes because they are being audited. Probably his dumbest excuse was in 2021 when he said, "... this has been building for 402 years. It's not like a light switch you can turn on or off, but it's a long journey."

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Blaming slavery is always a convenient defense for white liberals who want to sound like some kind of champion while doing nothing but symbolic gestures and virtue signaling. 402 years is a long journey, but so is eight years of doing nothing about an illegal, destructive (and worsening) situation that he had the power to halt and reverse.

Hide, delay, then lie.

When all his feeble excuses ran out, and the suit advanced in the courts, he fought it. His administration battled the plaintiffs with as much vigor, viciousness, and creativity as any southern segregationist governor ever fought a school segregation lawsuit. Again, he lied, telling a compliant and unchallenging press that he was legally compelled to fight the plaintiffs: “We had no choice but to defend” school segregation in New Jersey. As “a constitutional matter, we are “required by law to defend.” It can’t be overstated how shameless and despicable a lie this is. Murphy, as governor, is required to defend the constitution, which outlaws segregated schools. He is hardly required to defend a clearly unconstitutional violation—a crime. He is supposed to oppose it and dismantle it. His administration threw every excuse, delay tactic, and bizarre argument to obscure, evade, and delay. Declaring in one brief to the court , “The entire education system in New Jersey would have to be razed to the ground and then rebuilt brick by brick — figuratively and most likely literally as well.”2

He dragged it out with obstinance, nonsense, and lies through his entire first term. A court finally ruled against the state, declaring in October of 2023 that it had “intentionally failed to remedy segregation.” By this time, Murphy had secured a second term and could have easily decided to pivot and to become the bold, courageous, even ambitious civil rights governor he still had a chance to show the nation he could be. He was now the chairman of the National Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association and was actively raising money and exploring a run for the presidency.3

But rather than demonstrate courage and leadership, he doubled down on cowardice and political timidity. His administration, now rebuked by the court, cynically entered into “talks” with the plaintiffs that he clearly had no intention of emerging from with a remedy. He continued to evade, avoid, and delay, leading the plaintiff’s lawyers on with the false hope of a settlement from a series of mediations now declared “secret” by a court-sanctioned gag order.

The gag order not only gave Murphy a renewed excuse for silence and inaction, but it also effectively removed any pressure or sense of responsibility from state legislators, some of whom had begun to show a modicum of backbone and had held hearings to consider a framework for a legislative remedy to reduce and reverse school segregation.4 Now, with the charade of “talks” and rumors of an impending settlement, all work in the legislature was shut down, and another generation of children was denied a chance to end the isolation and stigmatization of a segregated education.

Lawyers in love …with themselves.

It needs to be noted here that the attorneys for the plaintiffs5 bear a good deal of the blame for Murphy's eight years of foot-dragging. The lawyers, led by former New Jersey Supreme Court Judge Gary S. Stein, deserve enormous credit for filing the suit in the first place, forcing attention to the problem, and creating the potential for galvanizing a pro-civil rights constituency. But that’s where their contribution ends. Through their inflated sense of self-importance and gullibility, they provided Murphy with the cover and rationale for doing nothing while systematically sidelining and undermining any progress made outside of the court that would slow, stop, or reverse school segregation.

From the very beginning, even before the lawsuit was filed, Stein rejected and then sabotaged any involvement from the broader civil rights community, including Black clergy, labor unions, and experienced civil rights attorneys who tried to persuade him to work with a multiracial coalition of stakeholders and experienced legal and policy experts to pressure the legislature and governor to work for a meaningful statewide remedy while the case worked its way through the courts.

The attorneys stubbornly insisted on a purely legal strategy and backroom negotiations, naively and arrogantly believing the governor would see the light without the dirty business of applying political pressure—especially the kind that might involve ordinary people like parents, teachers, students, taxpayers, and voters. Even when it became clear the governor was going to dig in his heels and the case might take years (if not decades) to be resolved, they selfishly and destructively clung to the notion that only they should be allowed to have a say in how the schools should be desegregated—and it was becoming clear that this was something they had no idea how to do.6

America's most powerful governor falsely proclaims his powerlessness.

Despite the lawyers' arrogant and supercilious desire to keep everything under their control and in the dominion of the courts, Murphy had no such restrictions or limitations on his power.

He was not bound by a vow of silence; he was not limited constitutionally; he was not hemmed in by the legislature or constrained by the myth of home rule. Far from it. It’s well known that the New Jersey governorship is considered the most powerful in the United States. No one could have done more to address this shameful calamity at a statewide level than Governor Phil Murphy. He did not need a lawsuit to spur him into action, and he certainly lied when he claimed the lawsuit prevented him from doing or saying anything about school segregation. If anything, the lawsuit gave him ideal political cover and a powerful rationale to take action. He could have used the lawsuit, not as an excuse, but as justification for why he and his party’s legislative leadership needed to take the lead on addressing school segregation before the courts and lawyers imposed what would likely be a deeply unpopular, inadequate, and politically inept remedy.

Furthermore, he had enormous political goodwill and support to tackle this issue. He came into office with an electoral mandate from Black voters, he had key allies in the legislature, he had friends among the African American clergy from across the state, and he had experienced civil rights litigators and education experts from across the country, all offering to help him craft a desegregation plan that was meaningful as well as politically and legally viable. 7He essentially told them all to fuck off. He was too busy defending segregated schools and attending Black Lives Matter marches.

Murphy blew it. He had the politics, the people, and the mandate.

Murphy not only had the political cover, goodwill, and expertise to reverse school segregation, but his state had the demographics to make it work politically if he had an iota of imagination and courage. New Jersey schools today are deeply segregated—some of the most segregated in the country. 8But there are many schools that are not; in fact, there are more diverse school districts today than ever. According to the study9 that accompanied the lawsuit, less than 14% of students attend intensely segregated or “apartheid” schools in New Jersey. But it also points out that 25% of schools in New Jersey can be classified as “proportionate,” meaning while they may not be fully integrated, they are racially and economically diverse and have the potential to be powerful allies in building a remedy that integrates all our schools.

These relatively diverse districts include some well-known liberal bastions like Montclair, South Orange, and Maplewood. But there are many more middle- and working-class suburbs across the state that better mirror the demographic mix of their region, including politically powerful or pivotal places like Hamilton in Mercer County, Galloway in Atlantic, West Orange in Essex, and Woodbridge in Middlesex.

Another way to look at the potential Murphy had to build broad multi-racial support (and majority support in the legislature) is to look at the numbers of students who attend diverse (or proportionate) public school districts versus those at the extremes.

Nearly half of all white public school students attend schools that are diverse or in diverse districts. Half of all Black students and almost half of all Hispanic students also attend schools in these diverse districts. The problem is the other half of Black and brown kids are being segregated into poor districts, 10 and the other half of white kids are going to majority-white, affluent schools.11 This is bad policy, but the politics are on the side of integration.

A pro-integration remedy, if done right, would strengthen and reinforce the already diverse middle-class districts (even providing them property tax relief) while helping the poor districts become more diverse and compelling the most affluent white districts to become inclusive.

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What Murphy could have done if he had any real political courage.

If Murphy had an ounce of vision and real ambition, he’d see that the politics are aligned to do something bold and transformative while unifying and solidifying the traditional multiracial working-class base of his party. He would also know that it does not require “tearing down” and rebuilding anything “brick by brick.” Nearly all the tools needed to meaningfully desegregate New Jersey’s schools are already a part of the state’s legislative toolbox. Almost everything could be done by amending and strengthening existing laws and programs. 12

State aid to schools.

The twelve billion dollars now allocated for state aid to school districts has been up for review and renewal (as required by law). The formula that determines who gets what state aid can be strengthened to reward, incentivize, and help working- and middle-class districts to stay diverse while becoming more integrated.

Intradistrict School choice.

New Jersey already has an Intradistrict School Choice program that can be easily amended to support and promote mandated school integration by opening high-performing exclusionary districts to students now attending school in high-poverty segregated districts.

Magnet schools.

County vocational schools are already a model of integration in many New Jersey regions. County schools can be strengthened and expanded to act intentionally and deliberately as pro-integration regional magnet schools.

Stop segregating and mandate inclusion.

Of course, all these reforms would require an explicit commitment and mandate to desegregate all the public schools in every county in the state—especially the most affluent, low-poverty, and high-performing districts. So far Murphy hasn’t even stopped New Jersey schools from becoming more segregated. During his two terms, a record number of breakaway petitions (white schools wanting to separate from majority Black and brown regional schools) have been filed. And a “school consolidation” bill that cynically allows for (and provides grants for) more secessions was signed by Murphy in 2022. And charter schools, approved and funded by the state and local taxpayers, have been allowed to further segregate students without any scrutiny or oversight by the state.

Legacy versus pusillanimity

Lyndon B. Johnson understood that major social policies were more powerful and more likely to succeed legislatively when they were big, transformative, and publicly heralded rather than small, incremental, and inconspicuous. In 1963, after the Kennedy assassination, Johnson ordered his White House aides drafting what became his War on Poverty “to broaden their scope,” saying it “had to be big and bold and hit the whole nation with real impact.” No one’s ever accused Johnson of being a naïve, politically unsophisticated do-gooder. Lyndon Johnson may have been the most politically ruthless and personally ambitious elected leader in modern American history. Governor Murphy has shown himself to be the opposite. Timid, risk-averse, overcalculating, and shallow. His resistance to integration has not only left tens of thousands of children behind with cruelly narrowed life chances, but he’s also destroyed his own legacy and closed off any possibility for his own advancement.

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When we look honestly at the overwhelming obstacles that racial and economic segregation thrust in front of the least powerful people in our society, Murphy’s “brick by brick” metaphor begins to sound appropriate. Murphy was recently compared to Pharaoh of the Old Testament who refused to liberate the enslaved of ancient Egypt. 13 Pharaoh not only refused to let the Hebrews go, he punished them by forcing them to make bricks without straw. For nearly eight years, Murphy refused to lift a finger to break the opportunity-destroying bonds of school segregation, and like Pharaoh, he expects children who are forced to attend high-poverty failing schools to perform as well as students in some of the wealthiest and highest-performing districts in the country. Like expecting slaves to make bricks without straw.

The next governor must take a lesson from the tragedy of Murphy's failed governorship and view the challenge of school segregation not as a third rail - that must be resisted or slowly worked through the courts—but as a powerful political opportunity to do the right thing for children, for schools, for communities, and to be remembered as a bold and courageous civil rights governor.

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New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy came into office as a former NAACP national board member who inherited one of the most segregated school districts in the nation. He was given a gift. A lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the segregated education that nearly half a million—mostly Black and brown children—were forced to receive in the state.

As a professed champion of civil rights, the right thing to do would have been to acknowledge the validity of the charge and immediately take bold steps to remedy the problem. Instead, Murphy hid. He tried to avoid it, ignore it, and make excuses for why he couldn't do anything about it. Throughout his entire first term, he resorted to the lame and cynical lie that he could not address or even discuss the issues because of “ongoing litigation.” An excuse as transparent and contemptuous as Trump saying he can’t release his taxes because they are being audited. Probably his dumbest excuse was in 2021 when he said, "... this has been building for 402 years. It's not like a light switch you can turn on or off, but it's a long journey." Blaming slavery is always a convenient defense for white liberals who want to sound like some kind of champion while doing nothing but symbolic gestures and virtue signaling. 402 years is a long journey, but so is eight years of doing nothing about an illegal, appalling, destructive (and worsening) situation that you had the power to stop and reverse.

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I urge you to read the whole column, which was published on Easter Sunday, comparing the Governor of New Jersey to Pharaoh in the story of Exodus. The governor, like Pharaoh, was not only deaf to the real-life damage school segregation does to children, communities, and families; he was also unable to see that his inaction and political cowardice have likely ended any chance of his political advancement and permanently marred his legacy.

Rev. Francois writes:

"It’s well known in political circles that Murphy eyes the presidency or, at least, some national role post-governorship. However, his political timidity, calculations, and dangerously cautious and transactional attitude for the past seven years have won him no meaningful political favors, gained him few friends, and done little to position him for the national stage…”

Francois points out that Trump is now more popular than the governor in his own state.

Murphy, unfortunately, is too typical of liberal Democrats today who’d rather pander on race than do anything meaningful about segregation, which still drives many, if not most, social and economic disparities, from wealth, incarceration rates, and education to health and even mortality.

Some people have suggested this is a harsh warning to the next governor. I hope they see it that way, but Murphy proved it will take more than strong words to compel leaders like him—especially ones who call themselves liberal or even progressive—to do anything meaningful about one of the few actual examples of a deeply harmful structure of systemic racism that they have the power (just not the will) to end.

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We will talk more about this at the next Summit for Civil Rights—a faith, labor, and civil rights conference we are holding on May 8 and 9 at Seton Hall University with a kickoff gathering at Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, NJ. You can go here for more information. If you'd like to attend, you can use the discount code Substakps (as in Paul Scully's substack) to get half off. If you can't make it, you can give a donation or sponsorship.

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Murphy failed us on school segregation. The next governor shouldn’t | Opinion

Published: Apr. 20, 2025, 11:30 a.m.

By Willie Dwayne Francois III

Passover commemorates ancient Hebrew emancipation from the system of Egyptian slavery, a policy that exploited labor and segregated an entire people. This Jewish holy day reaffirms a story of triumph over an intransigent ruler, who refused to listen until he was ultimately compelled by a power greater than his own. It offers a chilling reminder of why politicians should align themselves with justice-seeking movements. New Jersey children — nonwhite and working-class white — have long suffered from another form of bondage upheld by public policy and political malfeasance — school segregation.

For eight years, Gov. Phil Murphy has had the power, the mandate, and legal pretext to do something about it. Now, 129 years after the ruling in Plessey v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation nationally, and 71 years after Brown v. Board, which overturned the former, New Jersey carries the distinction as the sixth most racially segregated school system in the U.S. for Black students and the seventh most segregated for Latinx students. New Jersey is more segregated by school district than any state of the former confederacy except for Texas.

In 2018, plaintiffs sued the state and demanded that Murphy and the Legislature use the sweeping power he was entrusted with to remedy it.

As a descendant of slaves, I never cavalierly evoke the specter of the monstrousness of slavery. Speaking at a prominent synagogue in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “racial segregation — a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties...” “Segregation,” he continued, “is evil” because “it relegates persons to the status of things,” a treacherous imposition of what he elsewhere called “nobodiness.” Sinned against by the state, students and their families lie groaning, squeezed and contained in blighted pockets of inequality.

Building One New Jersey and the Coalition for Racial Inclusion (NJCURE), a group of experts, faith leaders, civil rights leaders, and elected leaders from across New Jersey, have been imploring Murphy, since he first came into office, to begin a meaningful dialogue about our legislative proposals to end the heinous and deeply harmful scourge of school segregation.

He refused. In a speech concerning race, religion, and segregation, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel posited, “Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.”

After only a single meeting early in his first term, Murphy froze us out, refusing any further discussion. He disingenuously declared ongoing litigation prevented him from even discussing the opportunity-or-poverty matter. Once heralded as the most progressive governor in the U.S., he used the despicable and dishonest tactic of framing a civil rights legal challenge as cover for doing nothing about civil rights.

Our coalition lacked the power of grim plagues or locusts to compel Gov. Murphy to act, so we launched a multi-year series of demonstrations and educational meetings with supportive legislators across the state to unharden the governor’s heart and free him to act. Again, he did nothing. Parents, educators, and civil rights leaders pressed him to withdraw from a scheduled appearance at the 2023 NAACP national convention in Atlantic City because of his glaring hypocrisy on civil rights. He revealed his political cowardice and moral bankruptcy by doing nothing with the power Black voters handed him. The governor and other Democrats have avoided working on this issue like one of the biblical plagues of Exodus without realizing segregation is a plague.

It’s well known in political circles that Murphy eyes the presidency or, at least, some national role post-governorship. However, his political timidity, calculations, and dangerously cautious and transactional attitude for the past seven years have won him no meaningful political favors, gained him few friends, and done little to position him for the national stage when our democracy and trusted federal civil rights infrastructure face daily gutting and stripping. A recent poll put Donald Trump ahead of Phil Murphy in his own state.

Murphy still has an opportunity to act after the court ruled that the state’s schools are unconstitutionally segregated and the mediation process failed. We do not expect this governor to show the temerity or the political acumen to do anything except continue to run out the clock or offer a weak and symbolic compromise. Tragically, it now falls to the next governor to take bold and meaningful action.

Some Republicans are already raising the issue, hoping to corner the Democratic nominee with it in the fall. To date, only one candidate, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, has committed to addressing this shameful problem, while the other candidates and media respond with blank stares.

Avoidance and denial will not make the issue go away, and it will not help a candidate look like the kind of leader our children, parents, taxpayers, and voters need to tackle a problem that is at the heart of many of our political, economic, and social divisions—even our outrageously high property taxes. Building One America has shown that racial segregation in schools has become a suburban issue, destabilizing communities while triggering middle-class flight and rising costs.

A remedy done right can and should be unifying.

Like Pharaoh, Gov. Murphy — or more likely his successor — will eventually realize you can’t buy off God — or God’s people — if a terrible wrong is not righted.

Willie Dwayne Francois III is the senior pastor of Fountain Baptist Church in Summit and associate professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He also serves as chair of the board of Building One New Jersey and the Summit for Civil Rights.

Go here to access the column on online

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2025/04/murphy-failed-us-on-school-segregation-the-next-governor-shouldnt-opinion.html

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I originally published this for St. Patrick's Day, but the Easter Rebellion that took place starting on Easter Monday, April 26, 1916, is maybe even a better time to remember.

I have another piece I am working on for the Summit for Civil Rights—a faith, labor, and civil rights conference we are holding on May 8 and 9 at Seton Hall University with a kickoff gathering at Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, NJ. You can go here for more information. The Substack will be about the historic relationship between the civil rights movement, the Black church, and Black labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph. Our special guest on May 8-9 is Claude Cummings, the new president (and first Black president) of CWA. If you'd like to attend, you can use the discount code Substakps (as in Paul Scully's substack) to get half off. If you can't make it, you can give a donation or sponsorship.

The easter rising went from April 24 to April 29 when the rebels surendered and 16 of their leaders were executed by firing squad bewteen May 3 and 12.

I’m going to extend a discount for paid subscriptions for that week of commemoration.

https://pmscully.substack.com/7d9961a2

Irish Anti-Colonial Pride on St. Patrick's Day

A good time to remember the powerful solidarity that once existed among the peoples of the world fighting for freedom and against imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I got pulled over by a big Irish cop somewhere in North Jersey, where I grew up. I was with my wife, and we had our baby daughter in the backseat (we had a playpen rigged up to go across the seats with front legs extended on the floor so the baby could just roll around while we drove).

As the officer got out of his car, we braced for the worst. Nothing about that car was legal. It was a big, beat-up old boat of a Dodge—it used to scrape along the brick walls between the two tenements when we parked it behind our building in the old Italian neighborhood on Pine Street in Montclair.

As the cop was walking over, he stopped to look at the back of the car. He might have been looking at the license plate—but it occurred to me that what might be worse for us than the old illegal car with this reactionary-looking cop was the collection of colorful bumper stickers I had plastered across the back bumper.

Each reflected an anti-colonial cause we’d become active in supporting, mostly by attending demonstrations and marches, sometimes concerts, in New York City at the United Nations or in Times Square, in Central Park, or in front of embassies and missions. We were very cool.

I remember those bumper stickers well. I read them for the last time just a few weeks later when we abandoned the car on the street after it caught on fire. That night I had to hop the fence at the pound where the car was towed to try to retrieve the playpen. Back then you could strip a car of any identifying tags or numbers. I think I failed to get the playpen, and there was no way to peel off and reuse bumper stickers.

One of the bumper stickers said “US out of El Salvador,” the other “Hands off Nicaragua,” a third “Free Nelson Mandela, and the last one said “Bobby Sands…free at last.” For those who aren’t familiar with Bobby Sands, he was 27 years old and one of the Irish freedom fighters jailed by the British, who went on a hunger strike along with his comrades to protest their treatment as common criminals and not political prisoners. They were confident Margaret Thatcher would give in to the intense international humanitarian pressure before anyone died. Unfortunately, they misjudged the Iron Lady’s bloodthirsty ruthlessness as ten young men starved themselves to death before the strike was called off.

As the big cop waddled over. I rolled down my window, and he just stood there and stared at me. I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to demand my license, registration, and insurance, two of which didn’t exist, and one had been revoked because of parking or speeding tickets—maybe both.

He just gave me a stern look but shook his fat head ever so slightly up and down (not back and forth as was the custom with older, more conservative white men when addressing a long-haired youngster in the 1970s). He looked at me, my wife, and the kid rolling around in the playpen and then just blurted out, “Bobby Sands…eh? Okay. You can go.” We thanked him very politely (as was the custom) and took off driving, very slowly.

I was reminded of this story a few weeks ago while talking to a labor leader in New Jersey about his journey to union activism and eventual leadership. I asked him why he became an organizer. He said, “Believe it or not, I started out as an Irish kid in Brooklyn protesting the British occupation of Northern Ireland.” I told him not only can I believe it, but it’s how I got started too.

We began to reminisce or lament and then grumble about how there was a time in which solidarity between the Irish Republican movement, the South African anti-apartheid movement, the Palestinian liberation movement, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Cuban revolution, the struggle for independence in Angola and Southwest Africa (later Namibia), and many other colonial or neo-colonial movements was bound together by a shared conviction for self-determination and freedom from colonialism, capitalist oppression, and imperialism. I told him I used to go to demonstrations in front of the British consulate with these old, pink-faced Irish guys displaying the rubber bullets that were used to disperse and sometimes blind and even kill young demonstrators. I would then head over to the South African consultant for another demonstration against apartheid and then maybe to the communist bookstore. The old Irish guys didn’t come to the bookstore or the other demonstrations. Like the cop (who knew about Bobby Sands but had no idea who Mandela was), their anti-imperialism didn’t go beyond the Emerald Island, but that was alright—I got out of a ticket.

On this St. Patrick’s Day, let’s remember and renew our shared commitment against oppression, exploitation, and imperialism and raise a glass to Bobby Sands and all those who came before him with a universal vision for freedom, peace, and justice.

Let's raise a glass to Roger Casement, the Irish diplomat who was radicalized by witnessing the horrors of King Leopold in the Congo. He was hung by the British for trying to deliver German rifles for the 1916 Easter uprising. Among his staunch defenders in the U.S. were Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois.

Let's raise a glass to Frederick Douglass, who traveled to Ireland in 1845 to raise money, build support, and promote solidarity between Irish freedom fighters and abolitionists in North America. He witnessed the great famine and became a lifelong friend and supporter of the cause of a free Ireland. He was only 27 when he made his first voyage to the British Isles, the same age as Bobby Sands.

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Two years later, after Douglass returned from Ireland, Irish American immigrant John Riley formed the St. Patrick's Battalion (or the el Batallón de San Patricio), made up of Irish (and other Catholic) immigrant laborers who defected to the other side in America’s war of conquest against Mexico (an unjust war, manufactured to capture new territory and expand slavery and the power of the slave economy). To this day, the 50 men hung in 1847 is the largest mass execution by the federal government in U.S. history.

Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were both fierce and courageous Irish American labor organizers. Flynn (called the Rebel Girl by the martyred songwriter Joe Hill) was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, which supported Irish freedom as part of its international solidarity with working-class people across the globe. James Larkin, the radical Irish labor organizer (and close associate of James Connolly, who would be executed after the 1916 uprising), would come to America and join forces with Flynn to help build a labor-based socialist movement in America.

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Later in the 20th century, anti-colonial movements were reawakened after the two world wars. In the 1960s, Irish resistance to British rule in the north of Ireland, inspired by Dr. King and the American Civil Rights movement, was met with increased violent repression, including the killing of 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Fellow anti-colonial Irish leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, forged strong ties of mutual solidarity and financial support with global freedom fighters, including the African National Congress, the Cuban revolution, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya.

This is why it is not surprising (but another point of Irish pride) that the Republic of Ireland joined South Africa in bringing Israel to the International Court of Justice for their genocidal war on the people of Gaza.

None of this is meant to obscure or excuse the stain of racism in the U.S. perpetrated by Irish Americans and other working-class white immigrant groups and their descendants who were infected with the idea of white supremacy or lured by the promise of privilege and the dangers of solidarity or intimacy with their Black peers and co-workers and neighbors. Frederick Douglass himself was struck by the sharp divergence between his positive experiences in Ireland and when he returned to face the racism of the U.S. “The Irish,” he said, “who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.”

Nor is it to draw some kind of moral equivalence between the history of Ireland and any other group or nation’s oppression and exploitation. Such comparisons are a waste of time. Douglass knew well the difference between the horrors and inhumanity of chattel slavery and the wrongs of labor exploitation or imperialist occupation. It didn't stop him from speaking out against all injustice and building solidarity with all oppressed people. W.E.B. Dubois, in describing the “human degradation" of "the white slums of Dublin," wrote that where human oppression exists, there the sympathy of all Black hearts must go.

Like Mahmoud Khalil arrested last week, Jim Larkin, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and many other trade unionist and socialist leaders, were arrested for opposing wars, but our government called it treason. Larkin and many other anti-war immigrants in the US were deported.

In the 70s and 80s, there were plenty of Irish Americans (some very conservative and deeply patriotic) who gave far more open support to the outlawed terrorist group called the IRA (or IRA aligned groups) than anything Khalil has said in support of Hamas or the Palestinian cause in general. But there were very few (there were some) who, like my cop friend, made any connection between Irish liberation and the liberation of other current or former European colonies in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Perhaps a good example of international solidarity and Irish pride to raise a parting glass to on St. Patrick's Day is Patrice Lumumba, the anticolonial leader of the Congo. It was the atrocities of the Congo’s Belgian colonizers five decades earlier that inspired Roger Casement to turn on the British rulers of Ireland. Lumumba, whose family was Catholic, was named for St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland and the expeller of invasive and dangerous foreign snakes.

After his overthrow and assassination orchestrated by the CIA, Fidel Castro sent an Argentinean of Irish descent, Che Guevara (Che Guevara Lynch), to support the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo now fighting a guerrilla war against the government of Sese Seko Mobutu, the U.S. installed dictator. Mobutu was finally overthrown in 1997 by Lumumba’s comrade Laurent Kabila. In the meantime, Lumumba’s children sought refuge in Dublin, Ireland, where his children and grandchildren still reside as citizens of Ireland and members of the African Irish diaspora.

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