“I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy’ [AOC and the interviewer laugh] … especially during Covid … I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had -- that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I’m grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they’re campaigning on in this moment.

Mamdani followed a few days later.

Sometimes what you believe in can change. I know there are some for whom they still believe in that. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners.

Derecka Purnell wrote in the Guardian, “Seeing progressive politicians move away from their earlier feelings poses a question about what they’re moving toward.” Mamdani and AOC did not move toward a comparable, much less more progressive, position; they moved to the Right. Neither offered an explanation. Mamdani’s “Sometimes what you believe in can change” is a truism that doesn’t explain why he changed his position. AOC’s 152 words didn’t come anywhere near an explanation.

AOC didn’t mention the tens of millions of people, mostly young and Black-led, who, in response to the televised murder of George Floyd, rose up in 2020 — her “Woke 1” period — for whom “defund the police” was not “rhetoric” (AOC’s word). Police killed around 240 Black people that year; by 2025, the number was around 300. “Defund the police” might not poll as well now as it did in 2020, but the content of the demand is just as relevant.

Natasha Lennard, writing at the Intercept, was pointed in her response:

If Ocasio-Cortez is running for president, or even just the Senate, treating the serious and significant intervention and event that was the 2020 uprisings as “crazy,” like it was an overreaching social-media furor, would be an appalling campaign orientation and an unacceptable erasure of historic Black struggle.

AOC, Lennard wrote, was not criticizing liberal Democrats who turned “woke” into an excuse for inaction; she was punching down at the organizers and activists who put their bodies on the line and who suffered the police violence they were protesting.

(Purnell’s article and Lennard’s article should be read in full.)

Abolitionism arose out of the experience of radical Black feminists such as Angela Davis, Beth Richie, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, among others. Wilson Gilmore, one of the founding theoreticians and strategists of the abolition movement, has written that abolitionism is not about the absence of police, but about the presence of those conditions that make policing unnecessary. Books have been written about the concept and practice of abolition (see, for example, here and here and here). Activists around the country are struggling to create workable alternatives to police-centered “safety.” AOC reduced this worldview to a three-word slogan, “defund the police,” and tossed it aside as if it was a quaint idea that arose in the early 2020s, and not a theory and praxis that has been decades in the making.

AOC told CBS: “I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime [during Woke 1] …” Why is it fundamentally different? Policing, mass incarceration, and mass surveillance don’t prevent crime; they protect private property, suppress dissent, and enforce white supremacy. The goal must be abolition. We call for cutting military aid to Israel and the military budget as a whole, eliminating subsidies to corporations, and taxing the rich, to fund social programs. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, state and local police department budgets alone total almost $180 billion annually. Why is cutting the police budget for the same reason off-limits? Why is “abolish ICE” acceptable but not “defund the police”? (Perhaps “abolish ICE,” a quintessential abolitionist demand, is also “woke”?)

If “defund the police” is not a useful or practical slogan, then the responsibility of the Left is to develop other ways of talking about abolitionism. Purnell describes how abolition activists adapt their messaging and tactics to local conditions. AOC and Mamdani have options: The federal government provides funding for equipment, training, technology, etc., and also provides surplus military equipment to local police departments. AOC could introduce, and Mamdani could support, legislation that redirects funding from those programs to local programs that actually improve community safety. Chipping away at the political and legal walls that protect police from accountability is another option: Since 2019, New York City has spent $800 million to settle legal cases of police misconduct.

Developing constituent support for an abolitionist agenda creates the political space for elected officials to take on difficult issues. But it is also the Left’s responsibility to hold to account elected officials who are in office only because of the coalitions that powered their election campaigns. Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News spoke about Mamdani and AOC’s backtracking on this issue. From the moment they win elections, progressive and Left electeds are under pressure to move to the Right, because their constituencies are politically broader than the people who elected them, and because the temptation of individual power (access, money, ambition, higher office, popularity) can be at odds with the collective politics they brought with them.

“[D]o not laugh off the political demands of those who put you in office,” Purnell warned.

For all of what their constituents, canvassers and staffers did as part of a fight on our behalf, is it worth treating years-long radical, Black and multiracial pursuits of freedom as mere pandemic pandemonium? No, it’s not. But more than what we are called by any of them is what we continue to call ourselves. Our own histories, convictions and clarity, not politicians, lead the way.

Eshman, a liberal Zionist, begins his essay with, “I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.” He writes, “I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern,” and quotes Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America: “[El-Sayed] must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”

Eshman then asks five questions:

• “You said, ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?” (Eshman was referencing El-Sayed’s response to the attack on a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue.)

• “Is there any circumstance [in which] you would vote to send military aid to Israel?”

• “How would you work toward a two-state solution?”

• “Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?”

• “Which do you care more about, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?”

He ends by saying, “There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety.”

In spite of stating that El-Sayed’s views on Israel are not the main concern, three of Eshman’s five questions are about El-Sayed’s views on Israel.

I won’t respond directly to Eshman’s questions, although I have addressed some of them in previous newsletters. I want to discuss what Eshman doesn’t say and how he frames his argument.

Although Eshman agrees that “a lot is at stake in this election,” he doesn’t specify what those stakes are, and he doesn’t indicate whether American Jews have concerns other than for “their own safety.”

Specificity is important, especially when confronting the Right’s drive toward fascism. Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, is explicit in his denunciation of El-Sayed: “The safety and security of Jews and the Jewish state should now become the priority when we decide whom to vote for … All other issues become secondary during this era of rising Jew-hatred.” For Klein, as for many other Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish), “Jew-hatred” includes criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Following El-Sayed’s victory, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Democratic Majority for Israel condemned him for his positions on Israel and Zionism but said nothing about his populist platform that resonated with nearly half of Michigan’s Democratic primary voters. The JDCA’s Halie Soifer was blunt: “We’re only supporting candidates who share the values of Jewish voters.”

AIPAC spent more than $30 million to defeat El-Sayed in the primary. Jacob Kornbluh wrote at the Forward,

[AIPAC’s] super PAC, United Democracy Project, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Republican Mike Rogers against El-Sayed. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.

In other words, some Democratic donors will bankroll a white MAGA acolyte to prevent a Muslim progressive from winning in November. They will have company: The ZOA’s Morton Klein said: “American Jews and others must shed their fears of falsely being called ‘Islamophobic’ and relentlessly and cogently condemn this radical Muslim’s and others’ non-stop bigotry and irrational hatred against Jews.”

Here are five questions for Eshman:

• Who poses an existential threat to American Jews — Abdul El-Sayed or Donald Trump? Trump has state power, including the organs of state violence. He also commands a movement bankrolled by billionaires and corporate executives (Jewish and non-Jewish), with networks of think tanks, tax-exempt non-profits, Christian Zionist churches, and fascist paramilitaries. He used his armed vigilantes to attempt a deadly coup on January 6, 2021 and then pardoned them last year.

Trump is using state power to:

• stock his administration with fascists;

• brutalize, imprison, deport, and kill immigrants and citizens;

• deprive 4 million people of food stamps;

• foment antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and white supremacy;

• cut taxes on the 1%, which takes $4.5 trillion out of the federal budget over the next decade;

• ban trans kids from playing sports;

• rewrite U.S. history in the image of white Christian nationalism;

• start a war with Iran, invade Venezuela, and strangle Cuba;

• undermine the rule of law;

• gut the Voting Rights Act;

• rescind environmental and public health regulations;

• increase the military budget to nearly $1.5 trillion;

• attack academic freedom and free speech; and

• support Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

El-Sayed has no such power, and won’t, even if he becomes senator. The movement backing him has no such power. Eshman says that El-Sayed’s “rhetoric endanger[s] the lives of constituents,” but doesn’t provide proof of a causal connection between something El-Sayed said and an antisemitic act, violent or otherwise.

• If El-Sayed doesn’t answer your questions to your satisfaction, will you urge Jews not to vote for him, or to vote for Rep. Mike Rogers, or not to vote at all?

• Do you see “Jewish safety” as disconnected from the fight to stop MAGA, to save and expand democracy?

• Why does Jewish safety not include affordable rents, lower gas and food prices, universal health care, and canceling student debt?

• Can Jews achieve safety separately from (or at the expense of) other minority groups achieving safety? Trump and the Republicans have cowered universities into dismantling their DEI programs for Black and other minority students and women while forcing these universities to institute special programs for Jewish students.

Kornbluh makes a good point:

Michigan remains a politically divided state, and Republican Mike Rogers — who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024 — held a small lead versus El-Sayed in several polls conducted before Tuesday’s primary. El-Sayed has no guarantee of winning the general election.

So what is the responsibility of American Jews, and especially Jews in Michigan? The main Zionist organizations have written off El-Sayed because his positions conflict with “the values of Jewish voters,” even though many Jews, including liberal Zionists, campaigned and voted for him. As far as these organizations are concerned, El-Sayed is a “radical Muslim” with an “irrational hatred against Jews,” and they will not support him against the MAGA candidate. Eshman says that El-Sayed’s positions conflict with the values of “too many American Jews,” and El-Sayed has to answer to them if he wants their support. Both positions place “the values of Jewish voters” in opposition to the imperative for an anti-fascist movement capable of stopping MAGA. Both positions manifest the Jewish supremacy at the heart of Zionism: that “Jewish values” — or more precisely, the values of some Jewish Zionist voters — take priority over the values that working people share.

I’m not arguing for suppressing differences in favor of a lofty goal; in any case, that is neither possible nor warranted. I am arguing that the struggle against fascism is in everyone’s interest — “everyone” being the historical, actual, and potential victims of fascism — regardless of differences on other issues. The midterm elections are one of the focal points in this confrontation with MAGA. The goal has to be to elect Democrats (including as many progressive and Left candidates as possible) and oust Republicans. This will require a massive turnout on November 3. In other words, Jews should support, and Jewish Michaganders should vote for, Abdul El-Sayed.

We walked along the crowded street
and argued over what I’d said.
She asked me to apologize
for hurting her. I shook my head.
Did I act out of fear or pride
when I said what I said aloud?
Her face grew sad, she kissed my cheek,
and turned and vanished in the crowd.

From time to time I think I hear
her laughter dancing in the air.
Alas, it’s but a feeling, like 
the comfort of a favorite chair.
For want of her, my life has been
o’ershadowed by this one regret.
But I will find her, though my years
pursue me like an unpaid debt.

And when we meet, I’ll hold her hands
and ask her if she thinks of me.
She’ll smile and kiss me on the cheek
and promise that we’ll always be
together. We’ll become as one;
and talk of flowers, books, and dreams;
and make love on green, sun-bathed hills;
and fish for Time in crystal streams.

I ask you to stand with us now, and every day that follows. City Hall will not be able to deliver on our own. And while we will encourage New Yorkers to demand more from those with the great privilege of serving them, we will encourage you to demand more of yourselves as well.

The movement we began over a year ago did not end with our victory on Election Night. It will not end this afternoon. It lives on with every battle we will fight, together; every blizzard and flood we withstand, together; every moment of fiscal challenge we overcome with ambition, not austerity, together; every way we pursue change in working peoples’ interests, rather than at their expense, together.

Eleven days before the November 4 election, Mamdani had had enough of the vile Islamophobia of his opponents — former N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Eric Adams. In an angry, emotional speech, Mamdani told them, eloquently, to go fuck themselves. “We know that in less than two weeks,” he said,

we will say goodbye to a disgraced former governor and our current indicted mayor. The bigger question is whether we are willing to say goodbye to something much larger. It is whether we are willing to say goodbye to anti-Muslim sentiment that has grown so endemic in our city that when we hear it, we know not whether the words were said by a Republican or by a Democrat, we know only that it was spoken in the language of the politics of this city. In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement… And while it would be easy to say that this is not who we are as a city, we know the truth: This is who we have allowed ourselves to become.

Honestly, though, I wanted him to win and to make the city affordable so I can visit my granddaughter, Maggie, more often. She lives in Long Island City, 1,300 miles away from me here in Miami.

Mamdani’s speech on Friday, July 3, marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was disappointing.

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His anniversary speech had none of the fervor of his previous speeches, in which he called for solidarity in struggle. The speech also contained phrases that would have been more at home in a junior high school social studies textbook, phrases that lack explanatory power:

• “The greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.”

• “America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”

• “You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.”

• “Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time.”

But what concerned me more was not what Mamdani said, but what he didn’t say: he mentioned Native people once (“Lenape dugouts crossed these currents”) and made two tangential references to slavery.

He described the men who signed the Declaration of Independence as “a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers.” Forty one of the 56 men who signed the Declaration were slave owners. More than half of the signers were involved in military campaigns against Native peoples or in developing settler-colonial policy.

He spoke eloquently about working people and their struggles​​ to create spaces for themselves against the opposition of the wealthy, the monopolies, and the government, and about immigrants (including his parents) who came because they “saw an opportunity to begin anew.” “Travelers weary from long journeys” saw many things when they entered the harbor, including “men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage.” That was one of the slavery references.

In the first paragraph of the speech, he describes Henry Hudson and Giovanni da Verrazzano as “explorers.” They were that, but they were exploring someone else’s land, including by using violence, for their own purposes, which had nothing to do with the rights or welfare of the people they encountered. Verrazano stopped at a couple of places on the East Coast.

At [what is now] Cape Fear, North Carolina, he encountered an old woman, two infants, a child and a young woman. He later wrote: “We took a child from the old woman to bring into France, and were about to take the young woman, who was very beautiful and of tall stature, but we could not for the great outcries that she made.”

Hudson and his crew captured and killed Native Americans during their 1609 voyage up the river that would later be named after him.

A few paragraphs later, Mamdani talked about George Washington and the confrontation with the British in Brooklyn. I wrote in the last newsletter about the genocidal pogrom Washington ordered against the Iroquois in 1779.

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Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and a writer and activist, said on her Substack,

[Washington’s] goal was to make the people starve. The Continental Army burned Haudenosaunee villages and destroyed over 11 million pounds of corn. In one early massacre, militiamen speared children with bayonets. The campaign was successful. Some historians estimate over half the population died.

The Iroquois had a name for Washington — “Town Destroyer” — a name they also bestowed on George’s great-grandfather, John Washington. The slave-owning “Father of our Country” even used the Iroquois epithet when referring to himself.

Washington referred to himself as “Conotocaurious” in a letter he wrote to Andrew Montour dated October 10, 1755, in which he tried to manipulate the Oneida to resettle on the Potomac:

“Recommend me kindly to our good friend Monacatootha, and others; tell them how happy it would make Conotocaurious to have an opportunity of taking them by the hand at Fort Cumberland, and how glad he would be to treat them as brothers of our Great King beyond the waters.”

Nagle says that the Haudenosaunee massacre was not an outlier during the Revolutionary War:

Anti-Indigenous sentiment was so high that even peaceful or allied Indigenous communities were not safe. One of those communities was a group of converted Christians called Gnadenhutten. A militia from Pennsylvania invaded their town, tied the congregation up, prepared two killing houses, and then one by one, executed the church members and scalped and burned their bodies.

According to Wikipedia:

Before murdering them, the American soldiers “dragged the women and girls out into the snow and systematically raped them.”

History.com provides more detail:

On March 8, 1782, 160 Pennsylvania militiamen murder 96 Christian Indians — 39 children, 29 women and 28 men — by hammering their skulls with mallets from behind as they kneel unarmed, praying and singing, in their Moravian Mission at Gnadenhutten in the Ohio Country.

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New York City opened an official slave market in 1711 on Wall Street between Pearl and Water Streets, at what was then the waterfront on the East River. Thousands of slaves were sold there by 1762, when the market was closed, but enslaved men, women, and children continued to be bought and sold.

Although slavery was formally abolished in the state on July 4, 1827,

New York’s shameful history of discrimination, racism, rigid segregation, and anti-black violence continued. By the 1850s, the city was dominating the illegal international slave trade to the American South, Brazil, and Cuba. New York benefited much from slavery and the slave trade: southern cotton and sugar sailed to Europe from its harbor. Banks, insurance companies — among them Aetna, JP Morgan Chase, and New York Life — and lawyers made a brisk business with slaveholders and slave ship owners. Traders and builders outfitted slave ships.

Wall Street owes its origins and spectacular growth to the interconnections between class exploitation of workers, financial speculation on land (and natural resources) stolen from Indigenous people, and slavery and the superexploitation of Black labor. Whence Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and New York City’s affordability crisis.

If the mayor were giving a campaign speech, or a policy speech with a particular historical angle, these omissions might be understandable. But this was a speech about the sesquicentennial anniversary of the founding of the republic and its meaning for us today. To omit reference to the origins of our country in the theft of Native land and the enslavement of Black Africans — and to resistance by Native people and Black people — is shocking. Mamdani’s forceful denunciation of the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, makes perplexing his silence in this speech about the genocide against Indigenous and Black people.

These aspects of our history are foundational. They are stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence:

He [King George III] has excited domestic insurrections [of enslaved Black people] amongst us, and has endeavoured 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.

White supremacy is the ideological justification for the genocide against Indigenous people and the superexploitation of Black labor which, along with class exploitation, remain the inherent, unresolved contradictions of U.S. capitalism. These contradictions provide the springboard for U.S. imperialism’s rampage across the world. The competing narratives over the meaning of July 4 — compare Mamdani’s speech with Donald Trump’s speech the same day — and the history of people’s struggles more generally, are manifestations of these internal contradictions.

Mamdani ended his speech by referring to “ideals that for the first time had a name: America,” the “ideals upon which our nation was built,” and that we are a “nation working each day toward the perfection in which it was conceived.” The latter is an unfortunate construction: this nation was not perfectly conceived, and working people, not the nation, struggle every day to make their lives better.

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Nations are not ideals or ideas existing in the minds of people, although the ruling class promotes that interpretation as a way of manufacturing consent for its actions. How many times have we heard: “This is not who we are”; “Hate has no place here”; “Make America Great Again”; “What happened to America?”; “This is not the America I want to live in”; “We are better than this.” A nation does not exist as an idea outside of time, class, race, gender, national origin, sexuality, history, and politics. “Nation” as a concept has always been contested, and that contestation manifests capitalism’s inherent contradictions. Nations are what nations do, and nations do a lot of bad stuff, which is why we can only hope that our descendants figure out a way to live together that doesn’t involve building borders between “us” and “them,” however those pronouns are defined. My solidarity is not with this nation, but with working people of all nations.

This is not a history lesson. I would not presume to school the mayor. Mamdani and his team know this history. But they missed an opportunity to present a narrative that sharpens our understanding of why we are where we are today: The roads we have travelled for (more than) 250 years, and the paths we forge in the future, lead back to the decision to found a white supremacist republic based on class exploitation, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. The progress working and oppressed people have made — progress that has been hard won and has to be won over and over — has been in opposition to, not in spite of, that decision.

If I were still living in New York City last year, I would have voted for Mamdani on every day of early voting and again on Election Day. I choked up when the results came in on the night of November 4. A family member wrote, “It may not be his best [speech] but the work he’s doing is magnificent.” Yes. I desperately want him, his team, and his coalition to succeed. So I can spend more time with Maggie.

URGENT!

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, was kidnapped by Israeli forces on December 28, 2024. Since then Israeli prison authorities have tortured him repeatedly.

Lara Kilani writes in “The Call,”

The latest report on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s state of health is deeply alarming and has escalated global calls for his release. The Palestinian pediatrician and neonatologist who was the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza reportedly told his attorney that he was in lethal danger during their latest visit. This came following his transfer to Rakefet, an interrogation facility within Nitzan Prison named to indicate its location underground. Dr. Abu Safiya said, “This is the last time you will see me… They brought me here to kill me. I do not see myself leaving here alive. This is the end.”

Kilani’s article explains the context in which Israeli prison authorities are torturing Dr. Abu Safiya and thousands of other Palestinian prisoners, and the complicity of Israeli health professionals in the dehumanization.

Please contact your elected officials to demand Dr. Abu Safiya’s immediate release, and share this message.

This past Thursday, June 25, was the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass, which our history textbooks refer to as the Battle of Little Bighorn, where an alliance of more than 6,000 Indigenous people, including 2,000 warriors, overwhelmed George Armstrong Custer and his 700 men. Custer led his 7th Cavalry into Little Bighorn to solve the “Indian problem” once and for all, just in time for the 150th anniversary of the country the following week. He and nearly 270 of his men didn’t survive; between 60 and 100 Native warriors died that day.

The U.S. Congress declared war 11 times since the War of 1812, but not once against a Native nation or confederation. According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. intervened militarily hundreds of times in more than 80 countries between 1798 and 2023. However, the CRS does not include any of the Indian Wars between 1775 and 1890, during which time the United States slaughtered millions of Native Americans and stole more than 1.5 billion acres of land. (Estimates of the pre-Columbian Native American population range from 2 million to 18 million. The 1890 census recorded fewer than 250,000 people.)

U.S. settler-colonial policy toward Indigenous nations was made explicit in our Declaration of Independence, which singled out “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Nick Estes, an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an associate professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, explains,

This initial framing designates Indigenous nations as traitorous and terroristic savages, their existence on the frontier posing an imminent threat and an obstacle to westward expansion. An enemy defined in such a manner required constant fighting to ensure the safety of invading settlers.

In his book, Our History is the Future, Estes describes how that policy remains a cornerstone of the settler-colonial project, and how Indigenous resistance has adapted over time.

Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and a writer and activist, worked with Estes and Native scholars Maggie Blackhawk, Ned Blackhawk, and Phil Deloria, and a crack technical team, to produce the First America podcast, just in time to counter the sanitized self-congratulatory Independence Day narrative in which Native peoples are incidental, if not invisible.

Over three episodes, Nagle and her team explore how Indian policy at the time of the American Revolution has left its imprint on current struggles. Here’s a summary of each episode:

Episode 1: “We’ve all been told the American Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But that’s not what the Declaration of Independence says. According to our founders, in their own words, what they were most upset about was Native Americans. How did we all miss that? Rebecca sits down with historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) to talk about how hunger for Indigenous land drove the Revolution. Welcome to First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment was 250 years in the making.”

Episode 2: “Did you know that when colonists threw tea into the Boston Harbor they dressed up like Native Americans? Rebecca goes to Boston with historian Phil Deloria (Dakota descent) to try and understand Americans’ obsession with playing Indian. In the early republic, pretending to be Indian symbolized freedom and helped the colonists form a new, national identity. From boyscouts, to new agers, to sports fans, the American tradition of white people dressing up like Natives never went away.”

Episode 3: “The American Revolution wasn’t just a fight for liberty. It was also a sprawling conflict with Indigenous nations over who would control the continent of North America. And to stake out their claim, the United States was willing to commit genocide. Rebecca talks to Maggie Blackhawk (Ojibwe) about how our country’s early treatment of Native Americans is the root of authoritarianism in the United States.”

The first episode was released on June 22. In my opinion as a professional hydrogeologist, it is excellent. Episode 2 drops on June 29 and Episode 3 on July 6.

Speaking of merciless savages…

I remember this Andy Capp cartoon strip from years ago:

Andy’s explanation sounds a lot like U.S. foreign policy, starting with the colonists’ approach toward Indigenous nations. You can’t reason with “merciless savages.” You have to kill them. Indigenous resistance was met with genocide, which has taken the form of massacres, enslavement, destruction of crops and livestock, enforced starvation, sexual violence, intentional spreading of disease, razing villages, torture, kidnapping children, suppressing language and culture, driving people off their land, turning them into refugees, and forcing them into concentration camps.

This became the U.S. military’s doctrine of “total war.” Here are a couple of examples:

In May 1779, during the American Revolution, Gen. George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to attack members of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy who were allied with the British. “The immediate objects,” Washington wrote,

are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin the crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more…

The following September, Sullivan reported to Washington,

The town was beautifully situated … where the most extensive fields of corn were, and every kind of vegetable that can be conceived. The whole army was immediately engaged in destroying the crops. The corn was collected and burned in houses and kilns, that the enemy might not reap the least advantage from it … I am well persuaded, that, except one … there is not a single town left in the country of the five nations.

Gen. Phillip Henry Sheridan began his military career in 1853 “fighting Indians along the Rio Grande in Texas.” In February 1868, according to the National Park Service,

Sheridan assumed command of the Department of Missouri and became responsible for enforcing the peace among the hostile Plains Indian tribes. He implemented the “Total War” strategy in the winter campaign of 1868-1869 against the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche. Sheridan recalled Custer early from his suspension to lead the campaign, which was successful in driving the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations. Sheridan’s standing orders to Custer were, “To kill all the warriors, capture all the women and children, destroy all camps and material goods, and kill all the ponies.”

Since World War II, “hit them back first” has been used to justify U.S. intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran, to name a few. The “enemies” are narco-terrorists, regular terrorists, communists, Muslims, religious fanatics, ayatollahs, Arabs, dictators.

The comprehensive and methodical destruction of Indigenous society on this continent found its echo in Vietnam, where the U.S. military dropped 5 million tons of bombs and 400,000 tons of napalm, sprayed 11 million gallons of Agent Orange, destroyed 10,000 villages, forced Vietnamese into 3,000 concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”), and killed and wounded millions. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States killed hundreds of thousands of people, turned millions into refugees, and destroyed hospitals, schools, drinking water and sewage systems, and the electrical grid.

Israel uses the same approach: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Jewish News Service International Policy Summit last Monday,

We changed Israel’s security doctrine. We initiate. We attack. We surprise. And we attack those enemies that seek our destruction, that seek to kill us. We attack them before they have a chance to do so.

If you know Hebrew: “Ha’ba lehorgecha, hashkem lehorgo.” Kill them first.

Or Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, who said at the same meeting:

We’re surrounded by a bunch of people that want to murder us. They want to murder us. And if we don’t defend ourselves, these barbarians will come in and hack us with axes and kill all Israelis if it’s possible from their perspective.

You can’t reason with terrorists, religious fanatics, Muslims, ayatollahs, Arabs, Jew-haters. You have to kill them. The only way for “us” to be safe is to kill “them.”

The Zionist project needs enemies — Palestinians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis — to justify its expansion and to cement its regional hegemony. (There’s talk in Israel of adding Turks and Qataris to the list.)

Resistance is proof of hatred of Jews. This is ideological cover for genocide. Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine sounds a lot like the U.S. military’s concept of “total war.”

The doctrine was revealed publicly by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who was head of the Northern Command in 2006, and who has been deputy chief of staff of the so-called Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Israeli army, since 2013. After an entire southern suburb of Beirut, known as the Dahiya, had been devastated from the air by troops under his command using two-thousand-pound bombs and other similar ordnance, Eisenkot explicitly laid out what this doctrine entailed in 2008. He stated: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. . . . We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. . . . This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Think Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, 2023. Think southern Lebanon since March. Israel responds to any kind of Indigenous resistance with overwhelming — what Eisenkot calls “disproportionate” — force. And, by the way, using “disproportionate force” and treating “civilian villages” as “military bases” constitute war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

That I miss you
is not enough.

I loved you because…

…You ate snow crabs
with such delight,
and swooned over
Marc Anthony.

…You melted in
my embrace when
I whispered, “You
fit in my arms.”

…You held me to
your breast when I
sought respite from
the storm within.

…You smiled and touched
my cheek when, in
self-doubt, I asked, 
“Do you love me?”

You were my home,
my harbor. Our
tomorrow was
a promise kept.

But then you left.

I came undone.
Death creates a
void we can’t fill
with memories.

This emptiness
has swallowed Time.
Tomorrow has
lost its color.

I am unmoored
and adrift, with
nowhere to rest
a tired heart.

That I miss you
is not enough.

In response to the Civil Rights Movement, 1963-64

“The city of Birmingham has been under siege from outside agitators led by Martin Luther King. This bunch has done what they wanted to do, stir up trouble among whites and negro citizens.” — Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor

“We have never had a problem in the South except in a few very isolated instances and these have been the result of outside agitators.” — Alabama Gov. George Wallace

In response to Columbia University graduate students organizing a union, 2018

“The effort by the United Auto Workers to unionize graduate and undergraduate students who serve as teaching and research assistants elicits strong views in and outside our community for understandable reasons. At stake, from the perspective of those seeking to establish a union, are promises of higher compensation and improved benefits. Others among us are deeply concerned about what it means to have an outside party involved in what are ultimately academic and intellectual judgments by faculty members.” — Provost John Coatsworth

In response to the Black Lives Matter Uprising, 2020

“In recent days, our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, or, arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters [sic], Antifa and others.” — Pres. Donald Trump

“At some demonstrations, there are extremist agitators who are hijacking the protests to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.” — U.S. Attorney General William Barr

“I think our best estimate right now that I heard is about 20 percent, is what we think are Minnesotans, and about 80 percent are outside.” — Gov. Tim Walz

In response to the Columbia University Gaza Encampment, 2024

“People who peacefully protest for an issue, they’re not throwing bottles [and] chairs. And so we know that we have acknowledged and saw across the country there are people who come [who] have nothing to do with the issue, and they want to aggravate.” — former New York City Mayor Eric Adams

In response to anti-ICE demonstrations, 2026

“The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly defended its use of the chemicals, asserting its agents aren’t to blame. The fault, a spokesperson said, lies with ‘agitators’ in the crowds and parents who put their children in harm’s way.”

The meaning of solidarity:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963

The tail and the dog

This is not the headline you want to use if you’re trying to prove a point.

Since the June 2025 U.S.-Israel war against Iran, and especially after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran again this past February, a lot of discussion has emerged about whether the Israeli tail is wagging the U.S. dog.

Mitchell Bard, the writer under that unfortunate headline, argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t bamboozle Trump into going to war because Trump is his own man and decides for himself.

Trump is many things — impulsive, stubborn, transactional — but he is not passive. He governs by instinct. He fires advisers who disagree with him. He reverses policy midstream if it suits him. He openly brags about making decisions “from the gut.” … The [U.S.-Israeli war on Iran] has united the right and left in viewing Trump as a potted plant.

Consider a few Trump decisions that frustrated the [Israeli] prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu]: insisting on ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon; forcing Netanyahu to apologize to the emir of Qatar after the failed assassination attempt; threatening all U.S. support if Israel annexed the West Bank; forcing Israel to recall its planes after declaring a ceasefire with Iran last June; and imposing higher tariffs on Israel.

These are the actions of a president making his own choices — sometimes at Israel’s expense. Yet some supporters refuse to hold Trump responsible for decisions undermining Israel’s security.

The proof that Trump “makes his own choices,” according to Bard, is that some of Trump’s choices have been anti-Israel. I’ll come back to this assertion in a bit.

Other analysts point to the influence of the Israel lobby (writ large — Israel, Zionist and Christian Zionist organizations, think tanks, PACs and Super PACs, the Democratic and Republican establishment, defense and tech contractors) on U.S. foreign policy. That lobby’s influence is orders of magnitude greater than the lobby for any other foreign country, maybe even greater than all other foreign-country lobbies combined. This is a huge problem in our political system.

But the Israel lobby’s power derives from the role that Israel plays as a proxy for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, in the first place, but also around the world. The key word here is “proxy.” As long as Israel is useful to U.S. strategic interests, the Israel lobby has free reign in Washington, D.C. The disgusting philosemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism underpinning the work of the lobby has provided ideological and political cover for decades of unimaginable violence and death.

U.S. interests and Israeli interests generally, but not always, align. That is inevitable. How that plays out in this moment is uncertain. Trump is toying with a ceasefire with Iran because of the worldwide economic catastrophe he and Netanyahu created and because our midterm elections loom. The MAGA coalition is splitting between Israel-firsters and America-firsters. Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire with anybody, but can’t continue rampaging without U.S. support (and, in the case of Iran, without U.S. troops), so Israel and its lobby are doing whatever they can to derail even the possibility of a ceasefire.

Only the U.S. can rein Israel in. Only a change in government policy will force the U.S. to rein Israel in. Our job is to force that change.

Hunger is about more than food

Two recent articles illustrate how hunger at home is linked to hunger abroad, especially in the Global South. The first article appeared on NPR:

A survey released Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found higher levels of food insecurity this year than during the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus outbreak sparked double-digit unemployment.

The New York Fed survey from February found that nationwide, 10% of families reported missing meals for lack of food and nearly 16% relied on food donations. Among families earning less than $50,000 a year, rates of food insecurity were about twice as high, with nearly 20% forced to skip meals or go without.

By comparison, in 2020 just 4% of households reported missing meals, including less than 7% of families earning less than $50,000 a year.

On top of which, 4 million people will receive reduced benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because the Trump administration cut $187 billion as part of their Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump signed into law in January. (That $187 billion will go toward tax cuts for the oligarchy.)

The Fed conducted the survey before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, which has already caused global food prices to rise (and to continue to rise into next year).

The second article appeared in Follow the Money:

Investors have bet billions of dollars on food prices rising as a result of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran — positioning to profit from a conflict predicted to squeeze farmers worldwide and push tens of millions more people into severe hunger.

Hedge funds and institutional asset managers nearly doubled their investments in key agricultural commodities — maize, soy and wheat — on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) between late February and the end of April, Follow the Money found.

About $8.6 billion was invested in agricultural futures contracts over that period, bringing total net positions on the CME — one of the world’s biggest commodities markets — to more than $18 billion.

The situation is even more critical in places such as Gaza, where Israel has been starving 2 million Palestinians for 967 days, and in Sudan, where 20 million Sudanese face acute hunger because of a three-year-long brutal civil war.

Time for some jokes

(From subscriber Gordon Glick): A man climbs Mt. Sinai to get closer to God. When he gets to the top, he asks God, “What does a million years mean to you?” God answers, “A minute.” The man asks, “What does a million dollars mean to you?” And God answers, “A penny.” The man thinks it over, then asks, “Can I have a penny?” God answers, “In a minute.”

(One of my favorites): A grasshopper walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, we have a drink named after you!” The grasshopper says, “You have a drink named ‘Harry’?”

(Also one of my favorites): On his way to work, Yussel [not his real name], the shtetl’s tinkerer, butters a thick slice of bread. As he walks down the road and is about to take his first bite, the bread falls out of his hand and lands on the ground, buttered-side up. Yussel is astounded. “How can this be that I, a poor tinkerer, should be so lucky that my slice of bread falls on the ground, buttered-side up?” He picks up the bread and walks quickly to the rabbi’s home and knocks on the door. The rabbi opens the door.

“Gut morgn, Rabbi.”

“Gut morgn, Yussel,” the rabbi replies, looking at the dirty piece of bread.

Yussel recounts the events, from slicing and buttering the bread, to walking down the road, to the bread falling on the ground. “How can this be, Rabbi, that I, a poor tinkerer, should be so lucky that my slice of bread falls on the ground, buttered-side up?”

The rabbi looks at the bread and then at the tinkerer. “Yussel,” he says, “you buttered the wrong side of the bread.”

And now, some of my world-famous dad jokes

Here are a few from past newsletters:

If Charles Dickens were a pornographer, what would have been the name of his novel?
Answer: A Sale of Two Titties

What would be the title of a movie about:

     …sarcastic dinosaurs?
     Answer: Jurassic Snark

     …a poet peeing?
     Answer: A Tinkle in Rhyme

     …people who are scared of math?
      Answer: The Fear of All Sums

What is the definition of "perverse"?
Answer: How poets get paid.

The urge to create dad jokes seemed to grow as I passed from middle to old age, like the urge to wear polyester shorts with knee-high compression socks. My two daughters have suffered my process stoically, and I thought of them when I came across this heart-rending testimony of dad joke survivors:

The Nakba was not an event, it is a process. Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean have been living in Israel’s panopticon of military occupation, an apartheid legal system, surveillance, incarceration, torture, checkpoints, physical violence, home demolition, and land theft for 78 years. The U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is the latest phase: more than 70,000 dead (those who have been identified, but tens of thousands more are buried under the rubble), more than 170,000 injured, 2 million ethnically cleansed and turned into internal refugees, thousands kidnapped into Israeli jails, 140 square miles turned into a wasteland, the largest number of child amputees in the world…. The Israeli military occupies around 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and has no plans to leave.

Israel and its fascist settler militias, with U.S. support, are rampaging through the West Bank, killing, burning, beating, and jailing Palestinians and driving them out of their homes and villages — more than 1,200 killed since October 2023, thousands incarcerated, more than 1,200 homes demolished, around 40 communities emptied…. Israel continues to annex Palestinian land.

On the occasion of this Nakba anniversary, Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, Executive Director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, wrote:

For 42 years, I lived in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. Palestinians who have lived in the camps don’t need a special day to remember or be reminded of [the] Nakba: the Nakba rests deep inside us. It is part of who we are. When I was a child, the Nakba was present in every aspect of our daily life: the tents, the muddy, narrow alleys, the tiny United Nations rooms, the collective punishment, the fences and walls, the checkpoints. Waiting in line to use the bathroom, waiting in line to get food parcels from the United Nations, and, of course, waiting to return back to our villages. Yes, the Nakba is a part of who we are.

Palestinians in Gaza today are living the accumulation of all 78 years of Nakba by Israeli settler colonialism. We are witnessing genocide, but we are also learning something about the strength in collective purpose. Every aspect of Palestinians’ daily life in Gaza educates us about human survival and steadfastness. There are over two million people displaced in Gaza right now. And in each tent, no matter how many times they have been displaced, there are families who return over and over again to their destroyed homes, determined to remain steadfast on their land.

In fact, throughout Palestine, today there is an ongoing, daily Nakba. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers, organized into gangs and supported by the military, are attacking and occupying farms, schools, and homes while confiscating more land; indiscriminately killing Palestinian men, women, and children. Since October 2023, more than 30,000 refugees from three camps in the West Bank: Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem have been displaced as most of their camps are destroyed. And 900 checkpoints and gates, keeping children from their schools, farmers from their fields, patients from the hospital. In Lebanon, there are Lebanese and Palestinian refugees who have been displaced many times as a result of the escalating Israeli attacks over the last few years.

Commemorating the Nakba is a time for Palestinians everywhere — in Gaza; in refugee camps in the West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan; in 48 Palestine; in the diaspora — to honor their struggle, their martyrs, strengthen their sumud, their hope for the future. Now, in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, tens of millions of peoples around the world join in commemorating the Nakba, including you as you take action and stand in solidarity with Palestine.

We have done so much, and yet it is not enough. We must use the lessons we have learned from the people in Gaza as our compass to take more action and do everything in our power to stop this genocide. The solution to the Palestinian cause is very clear — it takes us straight back to the Nakba. The fact that Palestinian refugees still hold the keys of their destroyed houses represents their commitment to return to their homes and their land. This is the only possible road to Palestinian freedom.

Palestinian refugees hate refugee camps, including me. No power in this world can erase the horrific memories that live inside of every refugee. While we hate the camps, we love the collective spirit of the people inside the camps. We grew up with this spirit. It shaped who we are and we breathe it every day. This spirit leads us as we further our struggle to return back to our homes and villages. It sustains our people in Gaza and throughout Palestine. This is why, no matter the extremism of Israeli settler colonialism and its supporters, they will never be able to take this spirit away from us. Generation after generation, from 1948 until we return together to a free Palestine.

“We have done so much, and yet it is not enough.” Those words hurt inside me. What we have done — what I have done — is not enough. The genocide continues. So must we. The Nakba must end. None of us is free until all of us are free.

Here is a poem, “Think of Others,” by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet.

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
  (do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
  (do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
  (those who are nursed by clouds.)
As you return home, to your home, think of others
  (do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
  (those who have no place to sleep).
As you liberate yourself with metaphors, think of others
  (those who have lost the right to speak).
And as you think of others far away, think of yourself
  (say, “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

*The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy and Zochrot offer many resources for learning about the Nakba.

After his dismissal, Dad found a job teaching physics at Patterson High School in Baltimore. But on May 20, 1948, City Councilman Walter P. Muth, a local Joseph McCarthy, introduced a resolution calling for the School Board to investigate whether Dad was a “Communist,” citing his firing from Aberdeen “in the interest of national security.”

Dad fought to keep his job, and he had a lot of — sometimes rowdy — help. The Baltimore Sun reported that at a May 24 public meeting of the Council Committee on Ways and Means to discuss Muth’s resolution,

Police rushed to the City Council chamber … as would-be participants in a committee hearing protested with shouts and threats their lack of opportunity to testify on a proposal to investigate whether a public-school teacher is a Communist.

But the anticommunist onslaught was overwhelming. After enduring six months of relentless fear-mongering, Dad resigned on October 31. In a letter to Dr. William H. Lemmel, superintendent of public instruction, picked up by the Baltimore Sun on November 6, he wrote:

I have resigned because of the callous and vindictive attitude of school officials contributing to the state of anxiety in which I worked, so demoralizing me as to make it impossible to continue on the job and remain effective as a teacher.

It was probably clear to Dad that he wouldn’t be able to find another job in Baltimore, not after more than two years of very public character assassination. A year or so later, he moved to New York City, where he met my mom, so thank you, Councilman Muth.

We found in our family archive a draft of a speech that Dad intended to give. I referenced it in the previous newsletter. We haven’t determined whether he made the presentation, which is addressed to “Mr. Chairman, and Ladies & Gentlemen,” or who he was addressing. We know he wrote it after the 1947-1948 school year because he refers to “the end of the term last June.” (The last day of school was June 18.) He also wrote, “I don’t know yet whether I am to teach again next term.” The 1948-1949 school year began on September 8, so Dad probably wrote this piece during the summer.

We are looking into the possibility that Dad gave this speech at the Maryland Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions in August 1948; we found a reference in an article in the Baltimore Sun on September 6, 1948, but the article doesn’t quote from his talk.

This document offers a brief, ground-level perspective of the impact of the Second Red Scare on one politically conscious worker over three years. His experience reminds us of our disposability and precarity in a system that would prefer to have labor power without the laborer. Dad didn’t like to talk about himself or to be the center of attention. I imagine all the attention was difficult for him. I wish he had been more personal in telling his story, but this speech had a political objective. He tried hard to make his experience not about himself, to place his struggle within the political and the collective, but frustration and sadness are ever-present currents that sometimes overwhelm his political narrative, especially when he writes about his students. His words explain why I’m still trying to make him proud.

Mr. Chairman, and Ladies & Gentlemen,

I was given the opportunity once before to tell my story to a large audience. That was two years ago when I. F. Stone of the newspaper PM interviewed four other persons and myself who had been separated from government service at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The PM story appeared as a series of articles, starting with a front-page headline reading: “Portrait of an Army Witch Hunt.”

Briefly, that story goes something like this: After coming to Baltimore from Chicago, I accepted the first employment offered to me, which was at Aberdeen Proving Ground in January 1941. I worked there throughout the war. Proving Ground officials obtained a deferment for me on the grounds that my occupation was vital to the war effort. I did not ask for deferment. In fact, I requested a number of times that I be released so that I might go into the Army. These requests were always turned down.

My work as an ordnance engineer involved the testing of all types of field artillery, from 37mm guns to the 240mm howitzer. My efficiency ratings were always very good or excellent. I presume that I was investigated at least once during my five and a half years at the Proving Ground, and no question of my loyalty was ever raised during the war.

After the close of the war — one year after V-E Day and one year after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt — I was called into headquarters and told that I was fired. When I protested the summary procedure and asked for reasons, I was told that the action was being carried out under Public Law 808. This was an emergency wartime measure which gave the Secretaries of War and Navy the power to dismiss their employees “in the interests of national security.” The law also states that a full statement of charges will be presented to such a dismissed employee. The full statement of charges given to me was as follows: “You are suspected of being a communist.”

The identical procedure was carried out over the course of two or three days in the case of four other employees. A strange coincidence developed: all five of us were leading officers of the local union, United Public Workers of America, [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. I was the president of [Local 250]; the others were the grievance chairman, membership chairman, secretary, and so on.

Our national union protested immediately and engaged the law firm of Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas. Certain basic demands were made: that we be given an open hearing before an impartial tribunal, that we be represented by counsel, that we be confronted with evidence, and that we be allowed to cross-examine witnesses. All of these fundamental rights were denied to us. Instead, each of us was given a “star chamber” hearing in the office of the Commanding [Brigadier] General [Alfred B. Quinton, Jr.] of the Proving Ground. Flanked by two other officers, he questioned us individually. We were not allowed counsel, we were not presented with any evidence, and no witnesses confronted us. We were merely asked a great number of questions, including the “$64 question,”1 to which each of us replied in the negative.

I have the transcriptions of those so-called hearings. I was asked about my religion and questioned about the things I read. I was asked why I do not subscribe to Reader’s Digest. I was asked if I had ever heard about the First, Second, and Third Internationals. Some of us were questioned at length about our membership in a tenants council and in a consumers cooperative buying club.

The questions also indicated that our mail had been observed. They were suspicious about PM and In Fact, to which some of us subscribed. After some stupid and grueling questions, one of the five was asked if he didn’t think that In Fact was agitational and stirred people’s emotions to dangerous levels. His answer was, “I don’t get particularly excited about it.” Another question was, “Why do you suppose this George Seldes writes and publishes In Fact?” The answer: “In order to make a living, I guess.”

[At this point, Dad writes in pencil: “Interrupted in the course of one stupid question to be informed that Fritz Kuhn was a Nazi and not a communist; the General shamefacedly changed the subject, remarking ‘Oh, he’s only a Nazi’!” For context, see “Give us the names of all your Jews”.]

We answered these inane personal questions because we wanted to cooperate in the hope that there was some sense to the procedures. But we were wrong. In the midst of these stupidities, we challenged them to produce evidence of our disloyalty and to give us fair and open hearings. But, of course, all of these things were denied to us. As a matter of fact, the general very blandly announced to some of us that while ordinarily a man is considered innocent until proven guilty, in the present circumstances we were guilty and it was up to us to prove ourselves innocent. As a result of my personal experience, I have come to understand why the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the $64 question. You cannot satisfy or argue facts with witch hunters.

Our appeals went to the Secretary of War [Robert P. Patterson]. Philip Murray [President of the CIO] appealed to him; Arthur Garfield Hays [co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and longtime civil rights lawyer] appealed; and numbers of other individuals and organizations did likewise. Our union’s national president [Abram Flaxer] condemned the firings as a trumped-up spy scare intended to smash the local union and create hysteria. On the eve of the congressional hearings regarding whether there should be military or civilian control of atomic energy, the local did, in fact, fold up.2 Shortly afterward, the Secretary of War upheld the dismissals. To this day, we have never been given a fair hearing.

The general very blandly announced to some of us that while ordinarily a man is considered innocent until proven guilty, in the present circumstances we were guilty and it was up to us to prove ourselves innocent.

I. F. Stone made a further point in his articles. Although we had not charged the War Department with anti-Semitism, Mr. Stone pointed to the fascist thinking in the department when he revealed that the five who were dismissed were the only Jewish members of a twelve-man union executive committee.

This, briefly, is my “disloyal, subversive” background upon which a publicity-seeking councilman drew recently to advance his political aspirations. Some of the others were even more “subversive” than I was. One of my dismissed fellow unionists [Abraham Kotelchuck], a physicist, had developed a frequency-modulated device for measurement of the blast of large blockbuster bombs. The electronic meter was patented by the department and is probably in use today. Another [Irving Spector], with ten years of government service, had developed a signal eliminator for use in radio sound equipment and meteorology measurements. He had received the top War Department award for this development. He was a veteran, back from the Navy only one week when he was fired.

My alleged disloyalty, which was never proved, was splashed once more across the newspapers by the councilman’s sensational exposé, like other innocent victims now being pilloried by a congressional investigation. I had been teaching science for about one and a half years when my “infiltration” into the public schools was discovered. The councilman didn’t bother to investigate my competency, my training, or my effectiveness as a teacher. If he were sincerely interested in the welfare of school children, he would have done so. But he was interested in something different.

The news broke suddenly and shockingly upon me that night. Tomorrow was another school day. How could I face the children? What whispering would go on among the rest of the faculty? Would I be fired again?

I went to school as usual the next day and taught. My heart pounded and my voice probably shook. I consulted with school system officials, and they gave me encouragement. The faculty was splendid. But most of all, in the days that followed until the end of the term last June, an unfailing source of constant inspiration to me was the attitude of my pupils. Many expressed their support and encouragement — even some kids who knew they were failing. At no time was there any heckling; despite being warned to expect incidents, there were none. The children were more than adult in their desire to understand.

“To a swell teacher, Mr. Spector. We thank you for all you have done for us, and we do hope that you will pardon us for all our offenses. We do hope that we can be the best of friends.”

Shortly afterward, on the last day of the term, one of my science classes presented a letter to me. It was addressed “To a swell teacher, Mr. Spector,” and it said: “We thank you for all you have done for us, and we do hope that you will pardon us for all our offenses. We do hope that we can be the best of friends.” It was signed by all the girls. The boys probably thought it was too sloppy or sentimental. That last day, my 9A homeroom class, whom I had known for one and a half years, nearly made me break down when they presented me with a gift.

During most of those days, when the school board was supposed to be considering my fate and Councilman Muth was shouting that he would do it again and again, I kept wondering: what, deep down inside, was the effect of all this on the kids? I wondered if the esteemed councilman realized what he was doing to them. Some of them had questioned other teachers about the meaning of communism. The statement of one boy was reported to me as follows: “What if he is a communist? I’m a Polack. So what?” They are rough kids at that school, but I’ll never forget them.

I don’t know yet whether I am to teach again next term. I don’t know if the children have forgotten or if they will ask questions. If they do, I could not give them a straight answer. Could I say that, in my opinion, this attack on me is no isolated event? That it is a direct result of the drive for monopoly control of the country and for war? That this drive is reflected in spy scares timed to distract attention from real needs such as housing, price control, and civil rights? That it is reflected in a drive to stamp out all opposition to this war program, to stamp out all liberal thought, and to label all organizations and individuals who oppose that program as subversive?

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I was removed from government service because I was the president of a local union whose actions in the interests of federal workers — Negro and white — are considered subversive by those who are instituting thought control. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that my employment is in jeopardy again today because I am active in the Progressive Party and in the movement to elect the man who leads the fight against war, depression, and discrimination. I helped organize the PCA ward clubs in the 4th district. For a long time, I was chairman of the leading ward club in the city. I am proud of the fact that the ward club I helped build was instrumental in bringing about the nomination of a Negro for Congress — I refer to the nomination of Dr. [John E. T.] Camper by the Progressive Party. All of my spare time goes into this kind of activity because I happen to believe that working for the future is one of the few things that make life worthwhile. I will not give up that activity.

I happen to believe that working for the future is one of the few things that make life worthwhile. I will not give up that activity.

I believe that any human being has a right to employment for which he is trained and which he can perform satisfactorily. I taught science objectively and I tried to make it a living thing, a vehicle for the search for truth. I stressed scientific method and accuracy. I tried to impress young minds with the importance of a free search for facts and an unbiased interpretation of those facts. I cooperated with the proposals of the administration with regard to their intercultural program. I spent one period in each class giving the scientific evidence to support the idea of equality of races, religions, and nationalities.

In the Aberdeen case, we lost. The result of that defeat was the loyalty order and the witch hunts in the Federal Service in Baltimore. Now we have the opening wedge into a witch hunt in the schools. If we lose again, hundreds of teachers will be hounded out of the school system merely because they were once subscribers to PM, or because they were seen with people who were seen with other persons who were once seen talking to a person who someone else thinks is a communist.

America has long prided itself on its academic freedom. But where is that freedom now, when teachers are afraid to speak their minds, join unions, or sign up with the Progressive Party? Where is that freedom when teachers who engage in independent political action are thrown out?

I believe we can have that freedom again. I believe that in November, we can achieve freedom from fear by electing progressive congressmen and Henry A. Wallace.

Two of our recent Thoughts-letters were reposted on Portside:

and

In June 1946, Dad and Uncle Irving and three other APG workers — Abraham Kotelchuk, Phil Weiss and Rheabel Mendelsohn — were fired “in the interest of national security.” These were the early years of the Second Red Scare, which came to be known as the McCarthy Era. Weiss and Kotelchuck were physicists whose expertise and contributions prompted APG to repeatedly request occupational deferments. Mendelsohn was a statistician.

Dad was president of Local 250 of the United Public Workers of America, Uncle Irving chaired the grievance committee, Weiss chaired the organizing committee, Mendelsohn was the secretary of the local, and Kotelchuck chaired the education and legislative committee. (Yes, I, too, noticed the division of labor between the men and the woman.)

In March 1946, three months before the firings, the UPWA had asked APG for an 18.5-cent per hour raise. The UPWA saw the firing of the local’s leadership as part of an effort to weaken the union. They were right. Among the principal targets of the Second Red Scare were radical unions. The country was transitioning from a war economy and unions, which for the most part had pledged not to strike during the war, were demanding a bigger share of the pie. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required union leaders to sign loyalty (“I am not a communist”) oaths. The anticommunist crusade successfully purged many unions, including the UPWA, of their progressive and left leadership.

Dad and the other four union leaders were Jewish. Their victimization by the government seems less like a coincidence and more like antisemitism. Not the “let’s get these Jew commie bastards!” approach; more the “let’s get these commie bastards (and it would be a bonus if they were Jewish)!” Maybe it was too soon after the liberation of the Nazi death camps for foam-at-the-mouth antisemitism from government types. But I assume that, while it was compiling lists of disloyal undesirables, the government knew which ones were the Jews.

I.F. Stone, one of the premiere muckraking journalists from the 1940s through the 1980s, wrote the following in the January 27, 1947 issue of PM Daily in an article entitled “Portrait of an Army Witch Hunt”:

One aspect of this case which may or may not be indicative of how the military intelligence mind works is this: There were 12 members of the executive board of the Aberdeen local union. Five were Jews, and these are the five who were fired. None of the non-Jews was questioned or dismissed.

Stone gave an example of how the military intelligence mind works. Rheabel Mendelsohn wrote a report of her hearing before the APB commanding general and his staff:

“I said I had read that Fritz Kuhn [the leader of the fascist German American Bund] had been released [from prison].

“‘Fritz Kuhn,’ said the General, ‘is he a Communist, too?’

“‘No, sir,” I said, ‘he’s a Nazi.’”

“‘Oh,’ said the General, ‘he’s only a Nazi.’

“‘Only a Nazi?’ I inquired.

“‘Well, they’re almost as bad,’ said the General.”

Two well-known witchhunts of the era — the Hollywood Ten in the late 1940s and the Rosenberg case in the early 1950s — also involved Jewish victims. Ten Hollywood directors, producers, and writers were convicted and jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nine of them were Jewish. The Rosenberg case comprised Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (defendants), Mort Sobell (co-defendant), and David and Ruth Greenglass (prosecution witnesses). All Jewish. The Rosenbergs were found guilty of conspiracy to give the Soviet Union information about the U.S. atomic bomb and the Eisenhower administration killed them on June 19, 1953.

As far as I know (and that might not be saying much), in none of these three events did the victims or their defenders charge the government with singling them out as Jews.

We have in our family archive what appears to be a presentation Dad wrote in the Fall of 1948, more than two years after the firings. We haven’t determined whether he made the presentation, which is addressed to “Mr. Chairman, and Ladies & Gentlemen,” or whom he was addressing.

We know he wrote it in 1948 because he writes about the organized anticommunist campaign that drove him from his job as a high school physics teacher that year, and because he refers to the campaign of Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in the 1948 elections. He wrote,

I.F. Stone made a further point in his article. Although we had not charged anti-Semitism against the War Department, Mr. Stone pointed to the fascist thinking in the Department when he revealed that the five who were dismissed were the only Jewish members of a 12 man union executive committee.

Why didn’t the “Aberdeen Five,” the UPWA, the Communist Party of Maryland, and others who spoke up in defense, make that charge? Was it because they wanted to emphasize the need for collective resistance to the Red Scare? I don’t know.

In “Remembering the Rosenbergs,” I discuss how major Jewish organizations hung the Rosenbergs out to dry, to make clear to the state where their allegiance lay. And a poll taken by the American Jewish Committee showed just how virulent antisemitism was in 1950.

Trump to UPenn: “Give me the names of all your Jews.”

A federal judge ruled recently that the University of Pennsylvania “must turn over lists of Jewish employees as part of the Trump administration’s investigation into antisemitism on its campus.”

In spite of opposition from Jewish faculty and staff and the campus Chabad and Hillel chapters, U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert, wrote

Penn and other groups and associations the Court permitted to intervene significantly raised the dispute’s temperature by impliedly and even expressly comparing the [government’s] efforts to protect Jewish employees from antisemitism to the Holocaust and the Nazis’ compilation of lists of Jews… Such allegations are unfortunate and inappropriate.

Though ineptly worded, the [government’s] request had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way, as opposed to seeking information on all university employees, information on individuals in Penn’s Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace.

Is this a prelude to asking for the names of all Black people on campus who could have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace? Or all women, queers, or trans people? Probably not — that would be woke DEI and critical race theory stuff. How about the names of all workers on campus who could have experienced or witnessed inadequate wages, sexual harassment, or lack of health care?

Of course not. The state uses “the Jews” for its own interests. It projects a facade of philosemitism as cover for its assault on democracy at home and to justify its complicity in genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

And by treating Jews as worthy of special treatment, the state leaves them exposed: it forces universities to cut DEI programs while requiring them to fund “anti-antisemitism” programs; it criminalizes pro-Palestine political expression while boosting pro-Israel political expression; and it has a U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, but not, for example, for Islamophobia.

Antisemitism can’t be fought in alliance with a state that relies on antisemitism to protect its rule, any more than anti-Black racism can be fought in alliance with a state that is based on the superexploitation of Black labor and that produced slavery, apartheid, and entrenched segregation. Antisemitism has to be fought from below and against the state, in alliance with those struggling against all forms of racism and discrimination.

The frantic, fevered response to the growth of the Palestine solidarity movement, especially since October 7, resembles a Third Red Scare. The new tripwire is “Are you now or have you ever been critical of Israel?” The Zionist infrastructure — an interwoven fabric of legacy organizations, think tanks, the Jewish 1%, tax-exempt “charities,” and NGOs tied to the Israeli state — looks through every social-media post, behind every academic door, and inside every union, cultural institution, and left organization, for any criticism of the Israeli state, and turns its findings over to university administrators, corporate media, politicians and elected officials for economic retaliation, political persecution, deportation, incarceration, and physical intimidation.

This Zionist infrastructure is giving the state lists of names of people to persecute while the state is demanding lists of Jews “to protect” — the same state that will fight to the last Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab to protect its geostrategic interests in the Middle East. And in a twist of base irony, many of the people on the persecution lists are non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.

Why would the state protect Jews (the default assumption here is “white Jews”) if it doesn’t protect Black people (some of whom are Jews) or working people (some of whom are Jews) or trans people (some of whom are Jews)?

It won’t. I know this to be true because the state went after Dad and Uncle Irving.

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Then I asked myself why I was so shocked that a man — whom many on the left and in the progressive movement more broadly had looked to for leadership — had fallen so far short of our expectations. I had just published two Thoughts-letters criticizing Noam Chomsky for choosing Jeffrey Epstein’s friendship over Epstein’s victims and for not apologizing for the harm he (Chomsky) caused. (No evidence has implicated Chomsky directly in Epstein’s sex trafficking.) I should not have been shocked. Disappointed, angry — yes.

Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founded the UFW in 1966. The movement they helped build sparked a surge of Latino pride, generated a nationwide solidarity movement, and changed the working conditions of tens of thousands of farm workers. Many young people who were attracted to the farm workers’ struggle, and especially to the charismatic Chavez, went on to other struggles, including in the labor movement.

I was 13 years old in 1966 when the UFW called for a nationwide boycott of California table grapes and Mom and Dad explained to my sisters and me why we wouldn’t be eating grapes for a while. It was my first political campaign; I told my friends why they shouldn’t buy grapes. (Once in a while Mom found some Chilean grapes; I felt guilty eating them, but they were so good.)

Ana Murguia told the Times that Chavez began molesting her when she was 13 years old. Debra Rojas said he began molesting her when she was 12 and raped her when she was 15. The women said Chavez started grooming them when they were 8 or 9, and the abuse occurred between 1972 and 1977. Dolores Huerta told the newspaper that, during the 1960s and 1970s, Chavez raped her and abused her physically and emotionally.

“I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

I can’t imagine the strength it took for Huerta to make that decision. The families of the two girls were also silent. But if another union man — not Chavez — had been found to have been the sexual predator, would the response have been silence, to protect the movement?

Chavez positioned himself as the embodiment of the organization he led, and he made sure everyone understood that. He was feted and honored by elected officials, universities, unions, and NGOs, none of which, apparently, knew of his predations. With leadership and establishment respect came power, and misogyny is all about power. For Chavez, one of the perks of power was access to the bodies of girls and women.

In 1988 Chavez asked Esmerelda Lopez to travel with him on a speaking tour. The Times continues,

After an event in Michigan, he invited Ms. Lopez into his camper attached to a pickup truck. She said it was just the two of them in the small camper, and they sat next to the bed. At one point, she said, Mr. Chavez pointed to a street sign outside bearing his name and suggested that he could use his influence to get something named for her if she slept with him. She was 19, and he was 61.

She said no. Lopez, Ana Murguia, and Debra Rojas are daughters of union organizers and officials who worked closely with Chavez.

“It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Ms. Lopez said. “The movement — that’s the hero.”

No more heroes. No more celebrities. No one who truly believes in freedom should want to be one, and none of us should look for one. No leader should be seen as — or believe himself to be — so important to a struggle that, to protect that struggle, his victims would keep silent about his wrongdoing.

I’m just getting around to responding to Eshman now.

“Here’s a stark fact,” he begins:

More people may have been killed in Sudan in just the past week than in Gaza in the past two years. And the main source for the weapons destroying the Black, non-Arab population in Darfur is the United Arab Emirates, one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East. So where are the American protesters?

So where are the protesters shouting at their representatives in town halls to suspend the recent $2 trillion investment agreement between the U.S. and UAE? Pushing sanctions against the UAE? Or demanding New York University shutter its Abu Dhabi campus?”

And by “American protesters” he means “American pro-Palestinian protesters,” as he subsequently makes clear.

My spidey-sense tingled. On its face, that’s a valid question to ask of everyone in a time of genocide. Why was he asking that question only of Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement? Was everyone else doing what he thought they should be doing? Was he?

Eshman explains:

A major reason American protesters have relentlessly focused their time and energy on Israel, they say [who are “they”?], is that the U.S. is Israel’s most significant ally, as well as an arms supplier to the IDF. There are real actions the U.S. could take to sway the course of events in Israel, so protesters aim to influence the U.S. government to do so.

But the U.S. has ties to conflicts all over the world, especially in Sudan, where a major American ally is helping supply the weapons of slaughter. The idea that its ability to pressure Israel is unique, and therefore worthy of unique focus, is misguided.

His argument becomes clearer: our government “has ties to conflicts all over the world,” but those pro-Palestinian types only pick on our ties to Israel.

The United States is, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The U.S.-Israel relationship is special because our government is complicit in the Gaza genocide. The United States has been providing weapons to client states (like the UAE) that funnel those weapons to third parties (like the RSF), all over the world and throughout history. In Palestine, however, it is supplying weapons to its client state (Israel) and participating directly in the Zionist project, of which the current war against Iran is the latest development.

“This is not an argument for whataboutism,” Eshman protests,

and none of this is to deflect attention from the injustices and suffering [he doesn’t call it a genocide] happening in the West Bank and Gaza. Everyone has a right to choose their battles. I don’t ask the Save the Whales people, “But what about the rainforest?”

But if someone is actively bombing the rainforest, today, as you read this — and your country is in bed with the bomb suppliers — then claiming to care about the planet and doing nothing is inexcusable.

Not only is our government supplying the bombs, but we are in bed with the bomber and we ourselves are bombing.

The people’s movements in this country have for well over a century exposed the links between the U.S. government and its violent client states and non-state actors. The Palestine solidarity movement is no exception.

Eshman continues, “And the go-to excuse, that Americans lack leverage and influence over the slaughter, is utter BS.”

Eshman doesn’t name those whom he claims use that excuse to justify their inaction regarding Darfur. He castigates the actor Javier Bardem and the model Bella Hadid for criticizing Israel and for not doing what he thinks they should be doing about Darfur, but he seems to assume they aren’t doing anything.

I have not heard anyone in the Palestine solidarity movement, which is led by Palestinians, even come close to being in the same ballpark on the same continent anywhere near that excuse. The movement has always been conscious to link the Palestinians’ struggle with other struggles, especially in the Global South.

For Eshman to say that it is “inexcusable” that Palestinians are indifferent to genocide in Darfur, is itself inexcusable. He is scolding Palestinians for their indifference to another genocide — again, with no proof. He is calling into question Palestinians’ motive in exposing the U.S.-Israeli genocide. He implies that because Israel is not responsible for the genocide in Darfur, Palestinians don’t care about it. In spite of his assurance that “this is not an argument about whataboutism,” it is just that. His essay is a variation of the Zionist argument that Palestinians level criticisms at Israel that they don’t level at other countries which, supposedly, proves that Palestinians are antisemitic.

Ms. Chomsky apologized that they were taken in by Epstein’s manipulations, which she attributed to “Noam’s overly trust[ing] nature.” Their friendship included, she said, gifts from Epstein, lunch at his ranch in New Mexico, dinners at his Manhattan townhouse, stayovers in his New York City apartment, a visit to his Paris apartment, as well as “social meetings, lunches, and dinners where Epstein was present.” Not mentioned is at least one trip in Epstein’s private jet. That’s a lot of friendship.

The Chomskys befriended Epstein in 2015, seven years after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. When asked about this in 2023, Chomsky replied, “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence… According to prevailing US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”

As Krishnan Kavita asked, “If working-class children had complained of being trafficked by a filthy rich CEO to do toxic and dangerous work, and the CEO got away with a rap on his knuckles, would Chomsky argue that he now had a clean slate?”

If Epstein had been convicted of sex trafficking, would he have a clean slate after he was released? What Chomsky elided in his response is the power imbalance: Epstein was not an individual who made an awful mistake; he was the embodiment of ruling-class power.

Ms. Chomsky’s explanation:

Noam’s initial public response [in 2023] to inquiries about Epstein failed to adequately acknowledge the gravity of Epstein’s crimes and the enduring pain of his victims, primarily because Noam took it as obvious that he condemned such crimes. [My emphasis.] However, a firm and explicit stance on such matters is always required.

Chomsky spent his entire academic and political life condemning the crimes of capitalism, obviously, firmly, and explicitly. Why did he treat Epstein’s crimes differently?

Ms. Chomsky referenced Noam’s February 2019 letter of support to Epstein, who complained about bad press coverage. This is the letter in which Noam decried “the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women.”

Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.

Noam’s criticism was never directed at the women’s movement; on the contrary, he has always supported gender equity and women’s rights. What happened was that Epstein took advantage of Noam’s public criticism towards what came to be known as “cancel culture” to present himself as a victim of it.

In their statement, the Chomskys apologize for being manipulated, for being too trusting, for not researching Epstein’s background, for their “lapse in judgment.” That’s fine. But arguing “if I had known” or “that’s not what I meant” or “that was taken out of context” or “everybody knows where I stand” is not self-criticism. Nothing in the files indicates that the Chomskys knew about Epstein’s sex trafficking, but they were part of a cabal that provided Epstein with legitimacy and elite cover under which girls and women were brutalized and dehumanized. If they didn’t know then, they know now. Indirectly, the Chomskys caused harm. They have yet to apologize for that.

Note: Chris Knight’s article, “The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle,” in Counterpunch, reveals the Chomsky who worked for the military and the Chomsky who fought against militarism. Nick Estes’ interview with Gabriel Rockhill, author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, explores the role of Left intellectuals, including Chomsky, in the Western academy and the role of that academy as a pillar of capitalism. Naomi Klein and Mehdi Hassan break down the real conspiracies behind Epstein and his elite circle.

Then I saw Noam Chomsky’s name in the files.

Chomsky has been a brilliant public intellectual on the Left for decades. He wrote many books on a wide range of subjects. I’ve heard people talk about the impact that a particular book had on their political education. I’ve read some of his articles and I’ve listened to him on webinars and YouTube and in interviews. He has taught generations of students and activists. And also me. I’d wager lots of those people are wondering how that person could be this person in the files.

Here’s an example of this person: In February 2019, eleven years after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a child for prostitution, Epstein asked Chomsky for advice on how to handle the snowballing negative publicity about his pedophile project. Chomsky commiserated with Epstein about “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and the public,” and added,

What the vultures dearly want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts -- which are impossible to answer (how do you prove that you are not a neo-Nazi who wants to kill the Jews, or a rapist, or whatever charge comes along?). That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder. [My emphasis.] For virtually everyone who sees any of this, the reaction will be “where there’s smoke there’s fire, maybe raging fire” (whatever the facts, which few will even think of investigating).

Chomsky wrote that email three months after the Miami Herald broke the story about a government coverup in Epstein’s 2008 trial and five months before the FBI arrested him on charges of sex trafficking minors. The shit had already hit the fan. Epstein’s victims were screaming for justice, but Chomsky dismissed them as “hysterical.” He actually used that word (or, rather, the noun form), which generations of self-entitled misogynists have used to dehumanize women and to present themselves as the victims. Chomsky chose Epstein’s friendship over Epstein’s victims.

I’ve been around the Left for almost six decades, including 20 years in the Communist Party, USA. I understand that we bring our ideological baggage with us on our political journeys and it’s hard to lighten the load along the way, unlearning all the stuff we didn’t even know we knew. That ideological struggle lasts a lifetime and is never finished. I can attest to that. But the first step is to understand what’s in the suitcase, those hierarchies of class, race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation that pit us against each other instead of against those who create and benefit from the hierarchies. Unlearning is a process, but along with unlearning comes accountability for the harm you cause. I have to believe that Chomsky knows this.

How could Chomsky hang out with Epstein who, even leaving aside the latter’s conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution, represented the worst aspects of a capitalist system Chomsky had inveighed against? Why would Chomsky agree to Epstein arranging a meeting with Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel, to discuss “Israel’s policies regarding Palestinian issues” when Chomsky knew those policies and had condemned them? Why would he use Epstein as a go-between to ask Steve Bannon for a meeting because they had “lots to talk about”? Why not debate them in the open, as he did with others so many times in the past? How did his meeting with Bannon advance the struggle for democracy and against fascism? How did his meeting with Barak advance the cause of Palestinian liberation?

Lots of questions and no answers. Maybe Chomsky was seduced by the easy access to power and the people who wield it: private jets, grabbing dinner in New York City, maybe a vacation on Epstein’s infamous Caribbean island, really important people treating you as really important and asking your opinion on really important matters.

Chomsky’s body of work stands on its own merits and will continue to teach the coming generations, but now there is an asterisk.

Chomsky suffered a severe stroke in 2023, which paralyzed his right side and significantly affected his ability to speak. He is recovering at home, where he turned 97 years old in December. I wish him well. Not because I want him to get better so I can yell “Epstein!” at him, but because I want him to get better. And maybe then he will hold himself accountable. A bi gezunt, Noam.

Dad joke

What is feudal society?

Answer: a bunch of people who argue all the time.

Let’s start with a few quotes from some important figures in Israel’s history: Vladimir Jabotinsky was a leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, the pre-state forerunner of Israel’s current Likud Party; David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first Labor Party prime minister; Ehud Barak was Israel’s tenth prime minister (also Labor Party, and at the time of the 1996 quote, he was foreign minister); and Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister in 2016 and is the current Likud prime minister.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), 1923:

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

David Ben Gurion, 1937:

[A]fter the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.

The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.

Ehud Barak, Peace Through Strength, 1996:

We have no illusions. The dreams and aspirations of many in the Arab world have not changed. We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle, a place where different laws prevail.

We will not go back to the 1967 borders; most Israeli settlements will remain under Israeli control and no army other than the IDF will be deployed between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Benjamin Netanyahu, The Guardian, February 10, 2016:

In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts. At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one [at the southern border with Jordan] surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier.

The objective of the Zionist project has been clear from the beginning — the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians. Jabotinsky didn’t mince words; the project was colonization, which continues today in Gaza and the West Bank, and in the occupation of southern Lebanon and southwest Syria.

And underpinning this project is in-your-face anti-Palestinian racism. Jabotinsky’s essay, The Iron Wall, is filled with the kind of language about indigenous people you find in typical colonialist documents such as our Declaration of Independence.

The two-state dis-solution

It’s tough to say “goodbye.” Although Israel and the United States never intended the “two-state solution” to see the light of day (see previous item), lots of people, Zionist and otherwise, and lots of governments, continue to chant the mantra, hoping that no one will ask them to explain what it means IRL.

In December 2023 Brian Lehrer at WNYC radio interviewed Judi Rudoren, who was the editor-in-chief of The Forward. By that time Israel had killed 20,000 Palestinians (including 8,000 children) in Gaza. Lehrer remarked that “Israel has to stop or slow down somehow.” Rudoren responded,

We do need to keep in mind that the international laws of war are not based on what the total death toll is, they’re based on the proportionality of civilian casualties or collateral damage on each targeted attack, and it takes a long time to figure that out. It’s hard to see that in the fog of war.

The second thing I want to say is I do think that it’s on the international community to pressure, I think, the Palestinians and the Arab world to provide some alternatives that might work for Israel right now.

So it was up to the Palestinians to come up with a good reason for Israel to stop killing them. (Some months later Rudoren did come around to supporting a ceasefire. Maybe by then she had figured out the problems of proportionality and collateral damage.)

Lehrer then asked her about a one-state vs. a two-state solution. She seemed to fumble for an answer:

The one-state solution is Palestine. As you said, it’s not a Jewish state. I certainly understand why some Palestinians find that to be a fulfillment of their national aspirations, to have a state that would be majority Palestinian. I also understand ideologically why people who are very focused on civil rights and human rights and just oppose the idea of an ethnocracy and just think one person, one vote is the way to go, but it’s not Israel and it’s not a Jewish and democratic state. It’s a state much more like our own. We’re different people who have their own ethnicities and backgrounds, but there’ll be a melting pot and an elected democracy, et cetera. That’s not what Israel was founded to be in 1948. It was found [sic] to be a Jewish and democratic state.

If I can summarize: One state is not a Jewish state. Two states means one of them will be Jewish. Israel was founded as a Jewish state. So, two states.

But here’s the interesting part: “... people who are very focused on civil rights and human rights and just oppose the idea of an ethnocracy and just think one person, one vote is the way to go, but it’s not Israel and it’s not a Jewish and democratic state. It’s a state much more like our own. We’re different people who have their own ethnicities and backgrounds, but there’ll be a melting pot and an elected democracy, et cetera.” In other words, when you think of a democracy, you think of one person, one vote. But that can’t apply to Israel, because if everyone has one vote, and if Palestinian citizens of Israel become the majority, then they could vote to make Israel a not-Jewish state.

Which sounds like the Zionist version of the Great Replacement Theory.

We here in the U.S. could suggest some ways to guarantee a Jewish majority in Israel: make each Palestinian vote count as three-fifths of an Israeli’s vote, and as the Palestinians increase in numbers, reduce the ratio; require a poll tax; change from a parliamentary democracy to a republican democracy and then gerrymander the districts to dilute the Palestinian vote; or claim the vote was stolen and storm the Knesset. If all else fails, make everyone sing “Hatikva” before you allow them to vote. (It’s not discrimination if you’re making everyone sing the anthem.)

Or you prevent Palestinians who are refugees and their descendants from exercising their right of return. The 750,000 refugees from the 1948 Nakba came from land that is now within what is called Israel, which created more refugees when it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. (Somewhere around 80% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees.)

That seems the most likely reason why liberal Zionists and others support the two-state solution: it assumes that the refugees will either give up their right of return or they will be forced into the “Palestinian state.” By telling Palestinians where they could and couldn’t live, Israel would continue to be a Zionist settler project.

Now let’s look at Trump’s October 2025 Gaza “peace plan” and everything it says about the two-state solution:

While Gaza re-development advances and when the [Palestinian Authority] reform programme is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.

Yep, nothing. On purpose.

This paragraph is classic colonialist mentality. Israel and the United States will determine whether Gaza redevelopment has “advanced,” whether the PA has “reformed” “faithfully,” and whether unspecified “conditions” are in place, at which time Israel and the United States “may” determine a “credible pathway” to self-determination and statehood.

I could say that the Palestinians have not been consulted, which is true. But the more fundamental question is: Why do Palestinians have to meet any conditions? Why do Palestinians have to negotiate for their freedom, for their rights?

The answer is — they don’t. The first step is not for Palestinians to prove that Israel should remove its boot from their neck. The first step is for Israel to remove its boot. And it’s up to us to convince our government to stop sending boots.

Trump is erratic, deranged, egomaniacal, etc., etc., etc. He is also a fascist, as are the people behind him, the ones who constructed Project 2025. The invasion of Venezuela is not a change in U.S. policy toward Venezuela; it is a continuation of that policy. U.S. policy toward Venezuela has always been about oil; Trump is the first president to say so. He gathered the heads of major U.S. oil companies after the invasion and told them to resume their plunder. They didn’t say no; they said they can’t make any profit if they go in under the current conditions. Hint, hint: make the conditions better for us and we’ll jump in.

Violence and the threat of violence has always been a foundation of U.S. foreign policy, but it was shrouded in rhetoric about human rights, democracy, and freedom. Then the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza shredded the shroud. People around the world couldn’t unsee what their cellphones were showing them. Joe Biden and the Democrats hid behind slogans and lies and buried the “international rules-based order.” Gaza paved the way for Trump to nail the coffin shut in Venezuela.

Here’s a gem from the paper of record:

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Fascism is capitalism without the liberal mask.

Biden’s criminalization of Palestine solidarity plowed the ground from which Trump’s ICE minions rose. The criminalization targeted Brown people — Palestinians, other Arabs, Muslims — and expanded to encompass anyone who voiced opposition to the genocide. Trump criminalized Brown and Black immigrants; ICE is kidnapping, beating, and killing them, and brutalizing anyone who voices opposition.

And don’t look to the Democratic Party for principled opposition, not after they bloodied their hands in Gaza. Neither Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ statement nor Sen. Chuck Schumer’s statement condemned the U.S. invasion of Venezuela as a violation of international law and of the right of the people of Venezuela to self-determination because, well, Gaza. Both statements ignored the impunity with which Trump acted because, well, Gaza. Both statements framed the problem as one of process — the Trump administration didn’t consult Congress — and lack of planning for “the day after.” Which seems to imply that if Trump had consulted Congress and presented a “credible” plan, Jeffries and Schumer would have gone along, Venezuelan sovereignty be damned.

And here’s a shocker: The New York Times and the Washington Post knew about the invasion before it happened and agreed to sit on the news in the interest of “protecting the troops involved.” For which Rubio praised them warmly and publicly. Maybe if the editors had printed the news, the troops would not have been put in harm’s way.

ICE kills again

Since Trump came into office in January 2025, 31 people have died in ICE custody and five have died during kidnapping raids. The most recent victim was Renee Nicole Good, whom an ICE thug shot three times in the head while she was in her car in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Her murder sparked protests in many cities, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Houston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Seattle, New York, Oakland, Chicago, and Austin.

Since Trump unleashed his dogs last year, working people have turned out wherever ICE has turned up, as I wrote in the previous newsletter, “cursing the ICE mercenaries, swarming detention facilities, blowing whistles, fleeing tear gas, being beaten, feeding and supporting the victims.” However, the demonstrations this past week, and especially yesterday, were the first to take place simultaneously, sparked by Ms. Good’s murder.

I am inspired by the tens of thousands of people who yelled Ms. Good’s name in these demonstrations. I am concerned that the death of a white woman lit this fire of outrage, but not the deaths of Silverio Villegas González and Jaime Alanis (Mexico), Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez (Guatemala), and Josué Castro Rivera (Honduras), all of whom died during ICE raids in 2025.

Much has been written about the more than 170 citizens who have been detained by ICE. As far as I can tell, Ms. Good is the first U.S. citizen killed by ICE since January 2025. If Steven Miller and Kristi Noem have their way, Ms. Good will not be the last. Perhaps her citizenship status provoked the national reaction. If so, this would be a time for some reflection.

Citizenship has always been a precarious legal status. Trump doesn’t recognize that status; he wants to repeal the 14th Amendment so he can deport citizens. Since 2023, Israel has killed five Palestinian American citizens (Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, Mohammad Ahmed Mohammad Khdour, Amer Rabee, Sayfollah Musallet, and Khamis al-Ayyad) visiting family in the West Bank, and one Turkish-American citizen (Aysenur Ezgi Eygi) during a demonstration in the West Bank; Joe Biden didn’t blink. Barack Obama assassinated a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in 2011 because, he claimed, al-Awlaki had joined Al-Qaeda. Dwight Eisenhower took away Paul Robeson’s passport in 1950 because he didn’t like Robeson’s politics. The government routinely takes away the right to vote from citizens whom it incarcerates.

Citizenship status is a distinction without a difference in the resistance to fascism. Human rights are not predicated on one’s legal status. If we say, “You can’t detain them because they are citizens,” then we imply that ICE can detain others who are not. Democrats, predictably, are complaining about “wrongful detainment.” We don’t want to make ICE more efficient at not kidnapping citizens; we want to abolish it for everyone.