Tag Archives: news

#CounterSpin: #MumiaAbuJamal on Media and Power (Transcript)

Posted on by toddpanther

October 7, 2025

‘There’s No Space in the American Landscape Where the Shadow of the Prison Doesn’t Fall’:  
CounterSpin interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal on media and power

Janine Jackson

This week on CounterSpin: With some 2 million people in prison, jail or detention centers, the US is a world leader in incarceration. Ever more people disappear behind bars every day, many for highly contestable and contested reasons. But despite age-old rhetoric about prison as “rehabilitation,” US journalists say—through their work—that if any of the criminal legal systems in this country decide to punish you, that’s proof enough that you should never be heard from again. With some exceptions for celebrity, corporate journalists seem absolutely OK with silencing the huge numbers of disproportionately Black and brown people in prison. It’s a choice that impoverishes conversation about prison policy, about public safety, and about shared humanity.

There are reporters and outlets paying attention—and willing to navigate the serious barriers the prison system presents. One such outlet is Prison Radio, actually a multimedia production studio, that works to include the voices of incarcerated people in public debate.

It’s thanks to them that we have the opportunity to speak with journalist, author and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer showcased failures in the legal system, yes, but also exposed flagrant flaws in corporate media’s storytelling around crime and punishment and race and power.

Janine Jackson: When our guest turned 71 in April, his organized advocates acknowledged the day with mobilizations around how US constitutional law is “weaponized to repress dissent and create political prisoners,” with public discussion about activism on campuses around Palestine, and about the importance of public protest and brave speech.

The 1982 conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal for the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner followed a trial marked by prosecutorial and police misconduct, purported witness testimony that was shifting and suborned, discriminatory jury selection, and irresponsible and frankly biased media coverage, which hasn’t changed much over years of court appeals and continued revelations. It was and continues to be clear that, for powers that be, including in the elite press, it is important not only to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal behind bars, but to keep him quiet.

It hasn’t worked. Despite more than four decades in prison, our guest has not ceased to speak up and speak out, on a range of concerns well beyond his own story, with the support of advocates around the world. He joins us now. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Thank you for inviting me.

JJ: Well, you never know what folks are learning for the first time. So I just wanted to start with noting that you are a journalist. Mumia, listeners should know, was a radio reporter at various Philly stations. He was head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

I sometimes think, once you’re a witness and a storyteller, you can’t turn that off, even if you become the subject of the story. Certainly you have never really stopped doing what you started out to do, have you?

MAJ: I have not. I guess old habits die hard.

JJ: So you’ve continued to listen and report and to speak from whatever position you’re in, because a journalist is what you are, yeah?

MAJ: Yeah. But in a cultural sense, I think of myself as a griot, probably a progressive griot, but a griot nonetheless. In African culture, griots were the people who remembered the history of the tribe, and, really, they served the prince in power, but they served the tribe as well. And there’s an old tradition that’s talked about in Senegal that when a griot dies, you don’t lay him in the ground. You bury him vertically in a tree, so that he and his stories are remembered.

I think about telling the stories of a different kind of tribe here in America, a tribe of rebels, a tribe of people who struggle, a tribe of the poor and the oppressed, because those are the stories that rarely get heard and get reported in much of the world.

JJ: That leads me directly to what I just saw on Wikipedia, which said:

From 1979 to 1981, he worked at National Public Radio affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news.

And, yeah, it gives me a giggle. And I think that while news media has, in important and life-altering ways, gotten much worse since then, there is, in some places, anyway, a growing recognition that objectivity is a myth, and a harmful one, and that we are all enriched by reporters who can bring their whole selves to the job.

MAJ: If you’re not bringing your whole self to the job, you’re not doing the job. And I think that this whole objectivity myth began when the art of journalism—I won’t call it a science—but the art of journalism was professionalized.

And before that, of course, the media was a very political entity. I remember reading in a history book, it might’ve been Howard Zinn or something like that, a New York newspaper called the New York Caucasian. I mean, think about that. Papers were printed by unions and churches and other kinds of groups, and it was reflective of the people who printed it, not the people who paid them, because journalism was more of a work that people loved doing than a quote unquote “profession.”

Howard Zinn warned us about the dangers of professional distance in many fields. As an historian, of course, Howard Zinn learned history, not when he earned his PhD at Columbia, but when he was teaching at a Black college during the civil rights years, and he was teaching pre-law, something like that, and he was telling people at the school about how the Constitution protected them, and they had certain rights. They said, “Excuse me, Professor Zinn, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you have the right to do this and do that.” They said, “We don’t have the right to vote down here.” He said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “We go to the voting office, they will beat us up.” He said, “Who will beat you up?” They said, “The cops and everybody else.”

So Howard Zinn followed his students to the voting place, and he sat and he just looked, and he learned something that he had never learned in college—and this was Atlanta, of all places—that when people tried to register to vote, they were refused. They had these ridiculous tests they gave them, and if they did not walk away, they would be beaten and locked up.

And so Howard Zinn learned that which the profession did not teach him, that history isn’t always written in these documents or in books. They’re lived by people, and we have to pay attention to how people live in the real world to tell their stories.

JJ: What I get from that story is that an article can tell you the law says this, and that’s not the same thing as telling you how the law is lived out in various people’s lives.

And we have a journalist right now, there are many, but I will just say Mario Guevara, who apparently has an Emmy award, but it’s not enough to prevent his having been detained for over a hundred days now, for the work of live streaming law enforcement activity, including ICE raids. So we have a journalist doing what a lot of other journalists would say is what they’re supposed to do, and he’s been detained.

So when people hear generically about “journalism is under attack,” well, no, it isn’t all journalism that’s under attack. It’s a particular kind of witnessing.

MAJ: That’s actually true, but also think about, in this era, in this time, and I’m speaking right now about the, shall we call it the Kimmel affair, and how everybody is talking about First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The case you described is the unfreedom of the press, where a journalist is captured and caged for telling stories and streaming stories about government repression. Who do you think gives a damn about the Constitution, the government or the people?

JJ: Let me ask you, continuing with media, I think people read the data point, “Oh, 2 million people incarcerated in the US,” more and more every day being put in detention centers, and they’re shut away from families and friends, by procedure, by distance, but also shut out of public debate and conversation.

And I think there’s a feeling that this is a cost to those people who are imprisoned, but there’s less recognition that there’s a cost for everyone when we don’t get to hear from this ever-expanding and various group of voices. And I think journalists who buy into, wittingly or not, the idea of “out of sight, out of mind”—they’re serving someone, they’re serving something, by excluding the voices of the incarcerated in our public conversation.

MAJ: Well, yeah, they’re excluding not just the imprisoned, who, as you said, are in the millions in the United States, but also they’re excluded from thinking about what it means to be truly American, because this is part of that. There is no space in the American landscape where the shadow of the prison doesn’t fall.

And that’s because it is so huge. It is so vast that it impacts those within and without, because everybody in prison has someone on the outside of prison that loves them or they love: their children, their mates, their parents, you name it. And that shadow falls on all of those people. There are stories that can enrich our understanding of what it means to be human by allowing people in this condition to be heard as full human beings.

JJ: And I blame media a lot. I mean, I’m a media critic, but I also, as a media reader—media disappear people, as well as the state disappears them. Suddenly they move into another column, and are no longer worth hearing from. And I don’t know that people understand how much we lose when that happens, and how much media are feeding into this oppressive regime by underscoring the idea that once people go behind bars, we don’t even need to think about them at all anymore.

MAJ: We call the media the Fourth Estate, don’t we? But it’s an estate of what?

JJ: Right? For whom?

MAJ: The estate is part of the state. It’s not part of the people. And as long as people think in those terms, those elevated and false terms, then it’s difficult for them to relate in a human way to people who are in a distressed situation.

And you can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power. I am reminded of, I think it was in the book Into the Buzzsaw that I read years ago; it was about forbidden stories that reporters got fired for, all around the spectrum. I mean, Fox News stations, all kinds of newspapers and whatnot. But the real key is that when people began telling stories that their editors and their bosses didn’t like, well, they got disappeared. By that I mean, of course, they got fired or threatened with firing.

But one of the things that really touched me in this context was that a reporter was talking about how journalists could never say that the president, for example, was lying. And they said, “Well, why not?” And people from the audience were like, “Why don’t you say that?” “Well, we are taught and we’re trained never to say that.” Well, then what if you hear him, and he’s lying, you just act like you don’t hear him? You’re just carrying his lies. That’s the relationship between the media and power. I think that began to crack around the time of the Bush years. But look where we’re at right now. We’re in a whole new world.

JJ: Just rocketing into the past, just rocketing backwards past so many gains that we thought we had made. And I remember that conversation well, and when the audience started saying, “What do you mean you can’t say the president’s lying?” the reporters said, “Well, we think it’s more powerful to say the president’s statements did not comport with information as we have it…” They had this kind of painful, tortured thing that they told themselves was somehow more impactful. So there’s a culture inside newsrooms that gives them, like, 12 degrees of difference between themselves and the truth.

But we know that other folks know what we know, are as irritated and disgusted and seeing through the emperor and his no clothes as we have. And so we have independent media growing up. And I just wonder, when you see the media landscape, do you see hope in these independent journalistic outfits that are coming up? Do you see Black-owned, some of them Black-centered, journalistic organizations sprouting up? Is that a source of hope?

MAJ: I think it can be. But the real question is, how will the sandwich taste once everything comes together? And when I think of a great journalist, I think of somebody like Chris Hedges, who was asked to join the New York Times. He didn’t go the regular route, where most reporters kind of prayed for an opportunity to write for a paper like the Times. He was in seminary, and he began hearing about El Salvador, and he went down there and he saw things and he began writing about it, and people were reading his stuff, and the Times came and said, “Boy, you’re a great writer. Can you write some articles for us?” And he was like, “OK, yeah, why not?”

Of course, all of that changed around the time of, I think it was 9/11 and the Iraq War. And Chris did a speech, and he got up and he talked with people and he was telling them, saying, “Listen, do not let these politicians use your fear to get you involved in a war.” And people began singing “God Bless America” and yelling at him, because they didn’t want to hear it. And it was almost like Chris was seeing which way the wind would blow.

And he got threatened by his editors, like, “Oh, that’s one strike against you, buddy.” I mean, he could care less. Again, he didn’t, like, run and get the job. They ran after him, because of the clarity and power of his writing.

JJ: But then that clarity and power was just what they didn’t want, actually, to hear.

MAJ: Exactly. Well, I think the scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò hit the mark when he said it’s “elite capture.” He had been captured by the Times, and they had a tiger by the tail. And Chris really could care less because, in the new media world, he writes online, and probably is more read today than he was when he was at the Times.

JJ: Absolutely, and that’s kind of where we’re at, where folks who want to do reporting, who want to witness, but who are not willing to accept the constraints of corporate news media, we haven’t quite built the structures for those folks to have a platform, for those folks to be heard from. So we’re kind of in transition, in terms of media structures. But I do believe that, in terms of audience, more people are recognizing the failures and the flaws and the constraints of the major news media, and are at least looking for something else.

MAJ: I think they’re hungry for something else, because here’s the real deal: People who are young people, they don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch TV, because that media is alien to them. So, unfortunately, they might read news updates that someone has assembled, used media sources to assemble, but they don’t go to those original media sources, because they have no trust in those media sources. So they find out using other means.

But we’re, I think, on the cusp of creating citizen journalists, where, given the technology that now exists, everybody is a journalist. Because they have the potential to use their phones and broadcast to, really, uncounted numbers of people, to tell their stories and to get their word out, and to contact them and to give them insight into the world that they see, and not the world that the media want to project.

You remember George Floyd; it was a 17-year-old girl who was witnessing that, and when she livestreamed it, the world tuned in, and was transformed by that moment. So that’s just a taste of what journalism can do, when it’s at the right place at the right time.

JJ: And I thank you for that, and I think the corollary to the citizen journalism, and to people understanding that they can create their own news and witness and share, I think there is also an understanding that folks, when they’re watching the TV news, or they’re reading the paper, they also maybe are bringing more critical thinking to that, and recognizing that they don’t need to just swallow everything that’s in the New York Times. Am I being over-hopeful there?

MAJ: No, I think you’re absolutely correct. I think that’s part of that youthful vibration that turns kids off the newspaper or the local broadcast or even the national broadcast. I mean, I know quite a few young people who simply don’t watch TV. That’s an alien communications device to them.

JJ: Well, I could talk to you a lot, but I don’t want to take too much of your time. I want to ask you, certainly, before we close, to say anything that you want to say to a listenership of media critical folks. But I would ask—I read a quote from you recently that you said you’ve never felt alone. And I think that is gratifying, and probably surprising for people to hear, because many people, many people walking freely through the streets, are feeling very alone right now, really oppressively alone, for all kinds of reasons. And it might seem a weird question, but in September 2025, where are you finding hope? What are you looking to?

MAJ: I do find it in young people who are more open and more receptive, not just to stories, but to struggles. And I think that the gift of repression is that it wakes people up. I mean, people are seeing things that haven’t been seen in this country for years, and it’s waking people up. And so once you’re awake, it’s kind of hard to go back to sleep. And think about this: To the right wing, the worst thing you can be is woke. So that suggests that they want everybody to go to sleep. So wake up, be woke.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of many titles, including Writing on the Wall, Faith of Our Fathers, Murder Incorporated and 1995’s Live from Death Row, translated now into at least seven languages. Mumia Abu-Jamal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MAJ: Thank you, and thank CounterSpin. It has been a pleasure.

FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.

********

Janine Jackson
Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library). Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research.

What’s FAIR?
FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. We expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information.

*************

Contact:
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201
New York, NY 10001

Tel: 212-633-6700

#BreakingTheSoundBarrier Column: 20 Years Later, the Lessons of #HurricaneKatrina Go Unheeded

Posted on by toddpanther

Weekly Column

August 28, 2025

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005, breaching New Orleans’ protective levees, unleashing unprecedented destruction. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history, killing over 1,800 people, mostly poor residents of New Orleans’ historic Black neighborhoods. Katrina was also the US’ costliest natural disaster, causing over $160 billion in damage. Katrina’s deadly waters long ago receded, but in their wake, with worsening climate change, the vital lessons of Katrina have gone unheeded. Indeed, President Donald Trump, by flaunting genuine risks, is aggressively courting disaster.

Take Trump’s attack on FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a statement released by the White House in May, FEMA was lumped with a slew of federal agencies that, the statement reads, represent “the weaponized rot in our Federal Government.” Targeted agencies included the EPA, the IRS, and the NIH. The document accuses FEMA of being “wasteful and woke,” engaged in “official training to indoctrinate ‘intersectionality’ and ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts’ over disaster prevention and response, culminating in aid workers being directed to skip the homes of President Trump’s supporters in the wake of a disaster.”

As with most of Trump’s pronouncements, these accusations are presented without any evidence.

The bulk of FEMA’s functions, according to Trump, would be delegated to the states. Of course, hurricanes and other natural disasters don’t recognize state lines, and no state could single-handedly respond to a disaster of the scale of Hurricane Katrina. Such a response requires collective action, marshalling resources from across the country to save lives in the impacted region, to recover the dead, and to rebuild.

Indicative of Trump’s contempt for FEMA was his appointment of David Richardson, a former Marine with no experience in disaster recovery, as acting head of the agency. Upon his arrival at FEMA, Richardson reportedly shocked staffers by saying he was unaware the US has a hurricane season.

A group of current and past FEMA workers published a letter, called The Katrina Declaration, that they sent to a Trump-appointed FEMA review council and to Congress.

The letter opens, “Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator. Decisions made by [David Richardson and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem] hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management.”

Close to 200 current and former FEMA workers signed the letter. Most of the current FEMA employees signed anonymously to avoid retaliation. At least 21 of those who did sign their names have been placed on administrative leave.

Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA spokesperson under President Biden, explained why he signed the declaration, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“I would call this letter to Congress, unfortunately, a cry for help. The agency has been badly damaged by this administration. They’ve fired a third of the permanent workforce. They’ve cut trainings. They have installed a person at the top of the agency who has no experience.”

Edwards also criticized the White House’s reassignment of FEMA staff and funding to assist in Trump’s mass deportation program:

FEMA’s mission is very clear: to help people before, during and after disaster. Any single dollar that isn’t being spent to help people with that mission is a failure to the American people. That money should not be going to build immigration detention centers. They should not be sending FEMA personnel, which they are doing, to help on-board new ICE agents.”

From the denial of climate science, to the gutting of FEMA, to the militarization of American cities with Marines and the National Guard, it seems clear that those in control at the White House have chosen to ignore the devastating lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

One person who did learn hard lessons then is Malik Rahim, a longtime resident of the Algiers neighborhood in New Orleans. A co-founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panthers, Rahim organized a grassroots mutual aid effort immediately after Katrina, called Common Ground Relief.

Democracy Now! recently caught up with him, inside the New Orleans Convention Center, which served as a shelter of last resort for as many as 30,000 desperate city residents during Katrina. When asked about those stranded there, the FEMA director at the time, Michael Brown, famously replied that he was unaware of the dire conditions there.

Those now running roughshod over FEMA should heed Malik Rahim’s wise words, as the US blunders through another hurricane season:

“The sad part about it, it could happen today. Déjà vu is alive and well here, because if a hurricane were to happen right now, we are ill-prepared for it, the same way we were ill-prepared 20 years ago.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

#DemocracyNow! “Breaking The Sound Barrier” Weekly Column: The Ominous ICE Arrest of #NewarkMayorRasBaraka #RasBaraka

Posted on by toddpanther

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The march to authoritarianism in the US accelerated on May 9th with another arrest of an elected official by the Trump administration. Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, had accompanied a Congressional delegation to Delaney Hall, a private prison run by GEO Corporation under contract to ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The delegation included Congressmembers Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez, Jr., all Democrats representing districts that include or are near Newark. They went to the East coast’s largest migrant jail to conduct oversight as authorized by law.

They were allowed to pass through the gate, along with Mayor Baraka. There they waited for over an hour. Baraka was told to leave, which he did, moving outside the gate to public property. His subsequent unprovoked arrest was a shocking abuse of federal police power, another clear instance of President Donald Trump and his enablers trying to seize power and crush dissent.

Mayor Baraka was held by ICE for five hours then released, charged with trespass. He is no stranger at the gates of Delaney Hall, as he explained days after his arrest on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“I actually go there every day…I go at 7 a.m. with fire code officials, UCC [Uniform Construction Code] officials, health inspectors, to get in, as it is our right to inspect the facility for them to apply for a certificate of occupancy. We’re in court with GEO right now, because they’re defying city ordinances.”

GEO rapidly ramped up operations at the 1,000-bed jail in order to serve as a major hub for Trump’s mass deportations. Newark sued GEO on April 1st, alleging it “blatantly continues to violate City ordinances and regulations.”

Baraka recounted his arrest:

“When the special agent in charge, Patel [Ricky Patel, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations, Newark] showed up, he escalated the situation. The Congresspeople tried to reason with him, surrounded me inside, and finally got him to agree for me to leave. I left, on the other side of the fence…They arrested me, and the congresspeople and other bystanders tried to shield me from being arrested.”

Homeland Security later issued a press release falsely claiming that “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez, Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack.” Acting US Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers, falsely claimed on X that Mayor Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark…NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin expanded on the lies, telling CNN Saturday, “There will likely be more arrests coming. We actually have body-camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer.”

Congressmember Bonnie Watson-Coleman, who is an 80-year-old cancer survivor, rejected the government’s allegations, saying on Democracy Now!,

“There was no body-slamming. The Department of Homeland Security or the representatives from the administration are doing what they do consistently, and that is to lie and to deflect and to try to create legitimacy for illegitimate things that they are doing.”

So, in addition to arresting an elected city mayor, the Trump administration is now threatening to arrest sitting members of Congress. This makes even more alarming a pronouncement by Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, hours before Baraka’s arrest:

“The Constitution is clear…that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. It’s an option we’re actively looking at.”

Habeas corpus is the right of those detained to demand the government justify their imprisonment in court or be freed.

Mayor Baraka, who is running for governor and is campaigning for the June 10th Democratic primary, appeared in federal court on Thursday, pleading not guilty to trespass. Alina Habba demanded a full trial, despite the mountain of exculpatory evidence.

The prosecution of Mayor Ras Baraka, like the prosecution of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin, accused of helping an immigrant avoid arrest by ICE agents, and the threatened arrest of members of Congress – all portend a frightening escalation in Trump’s drive to authoritarianism.

Several blocks from the Newark courthouse is Harriet Tubman Square, where in 2023 Mayor Baraka unveiled a memorial to the great Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist, who escaped slavery and returned again and again to lead others to freedom. Newark has a long history of resistance to oppression, as President Trump and his enablers are about to find out.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

#RollingStone: 100 Actions That Define #PresidentDonaldTrump’s #DonaldTrump’s Horrifying #First100Days #PresidentTrumpFirst100Days in Office

Posted on by toddpanther

The president and his administration have waged a corrupt, chaotic, and cruel assault on the United States and its people

By Tim Dickinson, Ryan Bort

April 29, 2025

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 15: U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a presentation ceremony for the Commander-in-Chief Trophy to the U.S. Naval Academy in the East Room of the White House on April 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Commander-in-Chief Trophy is awarded to the winner of the American college football series among the teams of the U.S. Military Academy (Army Black Knights), the U.S. Naval Academy (Navy Midshipmen), and the U.S. Air Force Academy (Air Force Falcons). (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Donald Trump in the White House on April 15, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Win McNamee/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s first 100 days have been the most chaotic and consequential in modern political memory. He has wielded the presidency like a king, seeking to bend America (and, far less successfully, the world) to his will. The result has been about what you’d expect from the first convicted felon and twice-impeached insurrectionist to return to the White House: a reckless campaign of overreach and lawlessness that has strained the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and American democracy itself.

Trump has emerged with few legislative accomplishments — the fewest in a president’s first 100 days, in fact, since the 1950s. They include a short-term spending bill and a law named for murder victim Laken Riley that strips immigrants of due-process rights — both enabled by Democrats. But as he’s taken a hatchet to the government, empowering Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s largest political benefactor, to decimate the federal bureaucracy, eliminating entire agencies, slashing and demoralizing others, while hoovering up Americans’ personal data for as yet unclear (but surely not benign) purposes.

Trump’s 100 days are consequential, but not politically successful. At the 100 day mark he’s the least popular president in some 80 years. His chaotic and nasty style of governance has sent his approvals into the toilet. He now finds himself under water even on his signature issue immigration. Trump has spent the days leading up to the milestone melting down over his polling.

It hasn’t been all bad, though. He did move to get rid of the penny.

Below we survey 100 of the most terrifying, corrupt, and otherwise absurd actions that Trump and his administration have taken since he was inaugurated on Jan. 20.

  1. Stages billionaire’s row at his inauguration — placing tech CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and other high-dollar donors in front of some of his Cabinet nominees.
  1. Demands an apology from the “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” bishop who implored him to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” during a sermon at the National Cathedral.
  1. Attempts to repeal birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution, by executive order. The move inspires a wave of lawsuits and is blocked by several federal judges. The Supreme Court is set to take up the issue in May.
  1. Deports hundreds of immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process, citing the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law infamously used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The move was made in defiance of a judge’s order.
  1. Calls for a judge’s impeachment in response to a judge’s order barring his deportations — earning a reprimand from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
  1. Admits it wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man without a criminal record — due to what it described as an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court unanimously orders the administration to “facilitate” his return. It is so far refusing to do so, claiming the high court didn’t say what it said.
  1. Mentions repeatedly how much he would “love” to illegally send American citizens to prison in El Salvador, even suggesting directly to the nation’s president, Nayib Bukele, that he’d like to rendition “homegrown” criminals during an Oval Office meeting.
  1. Deports U.S. citizen children. Those removed, along with undocumented parents, include a two-year-old, a four-year-old with metastatic cancer, and a 10-year-old with brain cancer who was stopped on the way to an emergency medical treatment.
  1. Says about the quest for mass deportations: “We cannot give everyone a trial.”
  1. Renames the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” (Also revives “Mount McKinley” as the name for the great Alaskan mountain, Denali.) 
Trump and the “Gulf of America” poster board he has kept on display in the Oval Office, on Feb. 25, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong/Getty Images
  1. Ousts the Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” (The move is later ruled unconstitutional.) The White House subsequently takes control of which reporters get access to press briefings, while the Justice Department revokes Biden-era protections for reporters.
  1. Spends Presidents’ Day weekend asserting he is allowed to break any law he wants. “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” Trump made sure to post to both Truth Social and X, driving home the point.
  1. Says he wouldn’t “100 percent” agree that the U.S. should be governed by laws, not men. 
  1. Pardons his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including those who assaulted cops. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers honcho sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy, and Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years, were also let off the hook.
  1. Ed Martin, Trump’s loyalist prosecutor in D.C., fires the Justice Department lawyers who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
  1. Issues an executive order expanding police state to “unleash high-impact local police forces,” equipped with spare weapons from the military, and guaranteed legal representation if they abuse the citizenry.
  1. Drops federal corruption charges against Eric Adams, while attempting to hold the New York City mayor by the short hairs as “an ever present partner,” under threat of future prosecution.
  1. Burns through four IRS interim commissioners as the administration seeks to gain control over personal taxpayer records to aid its deportation efforts and threatens to revoke tax exempt status of nonprofits Trump opposes.
  1. Thumbs his nose at constitutional term limits by repeatedly discussing a potential 2028 presidential run, as his family business even starts selling “Trump 2028” merch.
  1. Blocks the State Department from issuing passports marked with X to Americans who don’t fall on the gender binary.
  1. Attempts to ban trans soldiers from the military, implying they are dishonorable. A judge later blocks the order, writing that it was “soaked in animus.”
  1. Arrests a sitting judge in Wisconsin, allegedly for helping a migrant avoid being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
  1. Captures and seeks deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who condemned Israel’s violence toward Gaza at student protests, on the pretext that his presence in the U.S. is harming American foreign policy objectives. (Khalil missed the birth of his child while in custody.)
  1. Threatens to arrest and imprison pro-Gaza participants of “illegal protests” at American universities, First Amendment be damned.
  1. Detains Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder from Turkey studying at Tufts University, without charge, over her publication of a pro-Palestine op-ed.
  1. Shares an AI video on Truth Social imagining Gaza as a glitzy beach paradise with a lavish “Trump Gaza” hotel. (Trump previously pledged a U.S. takeover of Gaza, insisting: “We will own it.”)
Trump holds up a tariff chart on April 2, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
  1. Imposes sweeping tariffs on America’s trading partners, dubbing the move “Liberation Day,” and insisting America “IS HEALING” as the markets crash before hitting the golf course.
  1. Trump’s nonsensical tariff plan calls for import levies on the Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory that’s home to penguins, but none for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 
  1. Promotes a video on Truth Social about how he is “purposely crashing the stock market.”
  1. Tells Americans that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” hours before scaling back his tariffs, leading to accusations of market manipulation.
  1. Jacks up the tariff on Chinese goods to well over 100 percent, exacerbating a trade war that appears to have no end.
Pete Hegseth does damage control during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 21, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
  1. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts sensitive military attack plans in an unsecured Signal group chat that accidentally included a journalist.
  1. Hegseth messages the same attack plans to another unsecured Signal chat that included his wife.
  2. Fires multiple national security officials a day after right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer recommends their ouster in a meeting at the White House.
  1. Sides with Putin by calling Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky a “dictator” as he continues to fight Russia’s invasion.
Trump and J.D. Vance meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
  1. Berates Zelensky in the Oval Office, turning a meeting that was supposed to be about an economic agreement to help end the war into an intercontinental embarrassment (to the Kremlin’s delight).
  1. The Justice Department shuts down an anti-corruption task force that went after Russian oligarchs, including by seizing assets of those violating sanctions.
  1. Sells a “gold card” allowing a pathway to citizenship for just about anyone who can afford the $5 million price tag, including Russian oligarchs.
  1. Threatens to take Greenland with military force.
  1. Repeatedly pressures Canada to submit to becoming America’s “51st state,” subjecting the close ally to stiff tariffs and incessant bullying. 
  1. Skips honoring the return of four American soldiers killed in a training exercise in Lithuania to attend a golf tournament at his Doral resort in Florida.
  1. Issues executive orders cracking down on some of the nation’s biggest law firms, as retaliation for representing his political enemies. He has since mocked how some of these firms have bowed to his demands in order to skirt retribution.
  1. Wages a pressure campaign against higher-learning institutions, threatening to withhold funding unless they satisfy the administration’s demands. Some, like Columbia University, cave, while others, like Harvard, fight back.
  1. Signs an executive order to “eliminate” the Department of Education.
  1. Opens a snitch line for parents to rat out pro-diversity efforts in public education. The federal initiative is introduced in coordination with the extremist group Moms for Liberty.
  1. Says he might get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and later denies loyalist Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ request for disaster relief as the state struggles to recover from a series of tornadoes.
  1. Uselessly drains billions of gallons from California reservoirs in the Central Valley for a photo op, while lying that the water will help put out (already fully contained) Los Angeles wildfires.
  1. Suggests withholding federal wildfire aid from California unless the state satisfies a series of demands.
  1. Issues executive orders directing the Justice Department to investigate former Trump officials Miles Taylor for writing anonymously about his first administration, and Chris Krebs, a former Homeland Security official, for telling the truth about the 2020 election.
  1. Ends Secret Service security detail for loyalists-turned-critics — including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who face foreign death threats over their involvement in Trump’s assasination of a top Iranian general.
  1. Purges top staff of the National Archives in apparent payback for its connection to the criminal charges brought against Trump for absconding to Mar-a-Lago with boxes of classified presidential records.
  1. Instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue, the fundraising portal widely used by Democratic political campaigns. (WinRed, the GOP equivalent, is the subject of multiple consumer complaints and state-level investigations.)
  1. Fires a pardon attorney hours after she refused to sign off on restoring gun rights to Mel Gibson, the actor and friend of Trump who is subject to restrictions because of a domestic violence conviction.
  1. Shutters the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
  1. Allows Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gleefully fire tens of thousands of federal workers without any basis.
  1. Empowers DOGE to mine sensitive data the government holds on American citizens, from the Social Security Administration to the IRS, raising alarms about privacy and federal surveillance.
  1. Repeatedly attempts to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  1. Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance team up to rehire a staffer who once wrote, “I was racist before it was cool.” The staffer is part of a stable of problematic, inexperienced Musk acolytes aiding DOGE in the reckless teardown of federal agencies.
A member of the pharmacology department takes inventory of the last boxes of drugs delivered by the now-dismantled United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on April 1, 2025.LUIS TATO/AFP/Getty Images
  1. Pulls the plug on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), leaving aid workers and recipients in the lurch. The cuts are threatening tens of millions of lives.
  1. Slashes jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, while laying out plans to cut 80,000 more from the already short-staffed agency responsible for veteran health care and other services.
  1. Fires over a dozen inspectors general, who offer oversight of executive agencies and actually prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
  1. Musk admits DOGE “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention, before supposedly reinstating it.
  1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, fires thousands from the Centers for Disease Control, National Institute of Health, FDA, and other agencies responsible for the nation’s health and scientific research. The “bloodbath” pushes scientists to consider leaving America.
  1. RFK Jr. downplays the severity of a measles outbreak in Texas that led to the first death from the disease in a decade. “It’s not unusual to have measles outbreaks every year,” he insisted during a Cabinet meeting.
  1. RFK Jr. says he wants a “registry” of Americans living with autism. The administration said it’s ”not creating“ the database after intense backlash, but RFK Jr. still seems to be planning to determine what causes autism “by September.”
  1. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) slashes $1 billion that helped food banks and schools buy products from local farmers.
  1. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suspends milk inspections amid DOGE cuts, while the USDA pulls the plug on a program to monitor the nation’s raw chicken supply for salmonella.
  1. Announces a private dinner and White House tour for the largest investors in Trump’s personal cryptocurrency meme coin, which he launched just days before his inauguration.
  1. Pardons loyalist in Nevada who fraudulently used funds meant to honor a fallen police officer for plastic surgery.
Trump, Musk, and a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025 in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
  1. Turns the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom in order to pump up the stock price of Musk’s flagship company. Alleges that a boycott of Tesla is somehow “illegal,” while the Justice Department describes Tesla vandalism as “domestic terrorism.”
  1. Musk and DOGE slash the Federal Aviation Administration workforce. The cuts include air traffic control support staff.
  1. Baselessly blames a deadly mid-air collision of a military helicopter and a passenger jet on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
  1. Pushes a series of absurd lies and distortions to justify DOGE tearing apart the government, from claiming the U.S. spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza to lamenting millions spent “making mice transgender.”
  1. Orders a sweeping freeze of trillions in federal grants and spending, affecting programs including Meals on Wheels and Medicaid. Mostly rescinds it after getting smacked down in court — but keeps it in place for green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
  1. Pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, placing America alongside pariah nations Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries refusing to commit to coordinated reductions of greenhouse gases. 
  1. Places 31 core environmental regulations on the chopping block — including the “endangerment finding” that made carbon pollution subject to the Clean Air Act. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin brags of “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
  1. Dismisses the authors working on the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated overview of the impact of global warming on the United States.
  1. Fires hundreds of staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency responsible for weather monitoring.
  1. Guts the National Environmental Policy Act, one of the nation’s bedrock public health and environmental protection laws that the fossil fuel industry had been targeting for decades.
  1. Stages a MAGA takeover of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, declaring himself chairman of the venerated institution.
  1. The White House X account becomes dark and trollish, posting an “ASMR” video of deportees being shackled before a flight, as well as other memes mocking migrants. 
  1. Instructs the Department of Homeland Security to produce ads thanking him for closing the border. The DHS budgets up to $200 million for the campaign, exempting the money from DOGE review.
Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador.Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images
  1. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem poses for a ghoulish photo op inside of El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison, standing in front of a prison cell full of shirtless inmates with shaved heads.
  1. Rescinds Biden-era executive orders that would have dramatically lowered prescription drug prices.
  1. Backs legislation to abolish limits on bank overdraft fees, scrapping reforms that imposed a $5 cap.
  1. Issues an executive order banning collective bargaining at many federal agencies, insisting that union rights are a threat to national security.
  1. The Pentagon’s anti-diversity purge leads the Naval Academy to remove Maya Angelou from its library, while retaining Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Crewmembers of the Enola Gay, the American B-29 bomber which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, on a jeep in the first Army Day Parade since the end of the War, April 12, 1946.Keystone/Getty Images
  1. The Pentagon briefly blocks web pages and training materials dedicated to the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo codebreakers, Jackie Robinson, and Women Airforce Service Pilots (a.k.a. WASPs). It even flags the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan, as woke.
  1. Fires senior women military leaders from their posts at the Coast Guard, Navy, and Air Force, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Black man. 
  1. Orders a crackdown on supposed “anti-American ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, in particular at the National Museum of African American History and the Women’s History Museum.
  1. Rescinds a bedrock Civil Rights-era order from Lyndon B. Johnson barring discrimination among federal contractors. Trump later issues an executive order, dubbed “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” calling for the rescission of Civil Rights Act regulations.
  1. Spars with Maine’s governor at the White House over the state refusing to comply with an order barring trans athletes from participating in women’s sports. The Department of Education announces an investigation into Maine’s DOE later the same day.
  1. Tries to erase LGBTQ history by removing “T” and “Q” from the website for the Stonewall Inn National Monument, the site that birthed the modern LGBTQ movement, dismissing the leadership of trans icons like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
  1. Cuts thousands of jobs at the Forest Service and National Park Service, throwing the parks into chaos while elevating the risk for wildfires. 
  1. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy orders federal funding be prioritized to serve communities with high marriage and birth rates.
  1. Reclassifies millions of undocumented immigrants with Social Security numbers as dead, seeking to “terminate” their legal and financial lives. 
  1. Issues an executive order demanding a registry of sanctuary cities and states, which would be targeted for the “suspension or termination” of federal funding.
  1. Yanks ReproductiveRights.gov off the internet, while removing every mention of “abortion” from the Department of Health and Human Services website. 
  1. Pardons 23 anti-abortion activists convicted of crimes breaking into reproductive health centers, stealing fetal tissue, and accosting pregnant patients outside.
  1. Amid dismal polling preceding his 100th day in office, Trump calls pollsters “criminals” who should be “investigated.”

In this article:

#AmyGoodman #BreakingTheSoundBarrier Weekly Column: First They Came for #MahmoudKhalil

Posted on by toddpanther

First They Came for Mahmoud Khalil

Weekly Column

April 03, 2025

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The Trump administration’s nationwide roundup of international students accused of holding opinions it dislikes is picking up speed, sowing fear, separating families and driving people to go underground or out of the country. This targeting appeals to President Trump and his followers as it bolsters three pillars of the MAGA movement: It attacks universities, long reviled as a source of liberal power; it fuels the anti-immigrant fervor long promoted by people like Trump advisor Stephen Miller; thirdly, by targeting Palestinian solidarity activists on campus, it amplifies the false narrative that criticizing the state of Israel is antisemitic (even though many of the protesters are Jewish) enabling the attacks on academia while providing cover for Israel’s resumed ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

History teaches us that standing by silently as others are disappeared is a failed strategy, as the next person grabbed off the street by masked agents of the state may be you.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student until last December, was the first arrested, on March 8. He was a legal permanent resident of the United States, with a green card (now revoked). His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen who is about to give birth to their first child. Eight months pregnant, she filmed her husband’s arrest as she spoke to his lawyer on the phone. She tried to learn the identities of the arresting plainclothes agents as they dragged Mahmoud into an unmarked car.

Mahmoud joined in the Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University last spring, and was accepted by both the protesters and administration as a negotiator. He thus had a prominent public role in the first major protest encampment against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which sparked similar encampments nationwide. This is very likely why he was targeted for deportation. He has been held in an ICE jail in Jena, Louisiana, since March 9. A federal judge has blocked his deportation while his legal team fights for his release.

Days after his arrest, President Donald Trump threatened on his social media site, “This is the first arrest of many to come.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressing the press on March 27, claimed that at least 300 student visas had been revoked.

Names of those targeted have been surfacing day by day.

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia graduate student, left for Canada after her visa was revoked and agents came to her door. She wrote in an open letter, “With the rapidly escalating situation, the criminalization of free speech, and imminent travel bans, what has happened to me can happen to you. … We must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions.”

Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University and a citizen of both the U.K. and The Gambia, left the U.S. rather than risk deportation or imprisonment. Before leaving, he appeared on the Democracy Now! news hour, saying from an undisclosed location, “What we’re seeing now isn’t just a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech … but we’re seeing that any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the United States government or Trump’s administration, you can be liable for deportation.”

Those targeted include Columbia students Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the Occupied West Bank, and Yunseo Chung, a South Korean native and green card holder, who has been in the U.S. since she was 7 years old. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical doctor, was deported to Lebanon. Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University has been locked up by ICE, not for his activism, but likely because his wife, a U.S. citizen and thus not deportable, is an activist.

In one of the most disturbing incidents, Tufts University Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the street outside Boston by half a dozen masked ICE agents as she was walking to iftar with friends, to break the daily fast during Ramadan. The abduction, caught on a neighbor’s doorbell camera, was a chilling demonstration of the brutal tactics being used against this vulnerable population. The day after her arrest, over 1,000 people turned out to protest near Tufts, demanding her release.

Back at Columbia University, protests continue. On Wednesday, about a dozen Jewish students chained themselves to two campus gates. Aharon Dardik, an Israeli American student, speaking to Democracy Now!, explained why:

“We, as Jewish students … said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was amongst the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try to deport him.”

Among the signs they held was one that read, “First, they came for Mahmoud,” a reference to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous saying from Nazi Germany that ends, “and I said nothing … then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Four Black Male Radical Views Of The 2024 Presidential Election

Posted on by toddpanther
It is Movement Time

From this morning’s #DemocracyNow! :

We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,” Kelley says of the Harris campaign. He says the highly individualistic, neoliberal culture of the United States makes it difficult to organize along class lines and reject the appeal of authoritarians like Trump. “Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, have to protect each other.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kamala Harris has conceded to Donald Trump after the former president pulled off an overwhelming victory Tuesday to send him back to the White House. On Wednesday, Harris spoke at Howard University.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do. We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. And, America, we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Kamala Harris giving her concession speech on Wednesday.

The Democratic Party is in a state of crisis after Trump expanded his support across the country and Republicans also regained control of the Senate. Republicans may also keep control of the House.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders blasted the Democratic Party. In a statement, Sanders said, quote, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders said.

To talk more about Tuesday’s election, we’re joined by Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, who studies social movements. He’s author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

Professor Kelley, it’s great to have you back with us. If you can start off by talking about Donald Trump’s major victory, I mean, sweeping the country, actually winning the popular vote, as well as what looks like the Electoral College vote, Harris winning far fewer millions of votes than President Biden did in 2020? Though some Democrats, for example, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, polled much higher and won, she did not get those same votes. And end by talking about what Democratic Senator Sanders is saying, that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. Let’s begin with Senator Sanders. He’s absolutely right. The Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board. That’s true.

Now, when we think about 2024 compared to 2020, I’m not sure that Trump’s victory is so historic. Trump would have won in 2020 had it not been for the uprisings that emerged out of the George Floyd murder. The wind was behind the Democratic Party, even though the Democratic Party didn’t earn that wind. And so, I think that’s a factor.

The other factor is that the country is moving toward the right, and the working class, or working classes, feel really disaffected and abandoned. They feel abandoned, I believe, for a couple of reasons. One, because whatever the numbers said about the shifting economy, the fact of the matter is that people are still dealing with inflation, with joblessness, with insecurity. But the second thing — and this goes back to an article I published back in 2016 — we also have, you know, a deeply racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic nation. And that runs through. I mean, when you look at the demographics, white men consistently vote for Trump. White women, of course, it was a slight shift, but the shift wasn’t that radical. I mean, I don’t trust exit polls, but it’s amazing how many white women supported Trump. It’s amazing how much of the message of fascism actually did tap into a deep insecurity, a deep fear, and the fact that deportation is the dominant message that has drawn working people.

So I really want to talk about the question of class, which I think is most important. We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to go to former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, who we spoke to last week. She served as co-chair of independent Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

NINA TURNER: I think, over time, the Democratic Party lost its way in terms of just talking to working-class voters. And I mean from all identities, because sometimes when we say “working class,” people assume we’re just talking about white men. I’m talking about working-class people from all walks of life. And my state, you know, CAFTA, NAFTA, this happened over time. It didn’t just happen in one fell swoop. It happened over decade after decade after decade. But those trade deals definitely decimated Midwestern states like mine and really hurt a lot of workers.

And then working-class people from all backgrounds do not necessarily see themselves. They feel like elitism has taken over for both parties, but especially in the Democratic Party. And so, when you don’t see yourself in a party, you decide that you want to go another way.

And then, more recently — when I say “recently,” certainly over the almost four years — as people were suffering the effects of COVID, trying to — we were all trying to break out of it, inflation very high, the cost of groceries high, the cost of gas high, all of those material condition elements. The Democratic Party denied that, and they trotted out Bidenomics, and they turned their backs on people and made it seem as though the pain points that the big mamas and big papas were feeling were not necessarily real. You cannot do that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, that was Ohio state Senator Nina Turner. If you could respond to what she said and put it in the context of what you mentioned earlier, namely the absence of working-class cohesion, and what that meant for this election? And why, in fact, why do you think there is an absence of cohesion among the working class in the U.S.?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right. No, I think — I totally agree with what Nina Turner said. This is where we are right now.

The absence of cohesion has to do with the general — two things, I think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four decades.

And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity — the Boeing strike, for example — but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of solidarity — in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of cohesion.

But the other thing that I think is really important is this belief that if we — that we can one day become Trump. In other words, wealth, entrepreneurship, the striving for success, the fact that a lot of these Senate campaigns where seats were overturned, they were won by billionaires and millionaires, you know? I mean, that’s significant.

And one other thing I should add is that, you know, we could look at this at the presidential level; we could also look at it at the local level. I’m here in L.A. in what’s supposed to be the Left Coast, California, where we just had propositions that failed, a proposition to end forced prison labor, a proposition to raise the minimum wage, a proposition for rent control, you know, a proposition that actually — the one proposition that did win was one that will deeply criminalize and expand sentences for petty crimes. This is in L.A., you see? This is California.

So we’re moving toward the right. And somehow the right, for many people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trumps for the rest — for generations.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, it’s very interesting on the issue of prison labor and a ballot initiative there. When we were out in California interviewing prisoner firefighters who got a pittance a day, they were pushing for earlier release, but they didn’t get it often because it provided a prisoner labor force for the wildfires that plague California. But I wanted to ask you about the extremism of Trump, when he was talking about — or, you know, at the Madison Square Garden rally, of course, that Puerto Rico is an “island of garbage.” He would later called that whole rally a “lovefest,” you know, referring to women as the B-word, and, of course, how he deals with immigrants. But there’s a very interesting comment of writer Meg Indurti, who tweeted, “if you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for kamala harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him.” Can you comment on this? Robin Kelley, you talk a lot about the working class and the working poor. You also have written extensively about Gaza.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, one of the questions that came up, my students were posing this question to me the other day: What would have happened had the U.S. actually stopped supporting Israel, like in November or December of last year? What would have happened? I think the Democrats could have won. You know, we overestimate the power of the Israeli lobby, because in some ways Democrats are looking for dollars, not necessarily votes. And so, imagine what would have happened had there been this refusal to send arms to Israel. There would be no — the war would have ended. There wouldn’t be an escalation of the war. And part of the attraction of Trump, ironically, is this belief, this kind of — it’s kind of a myth, but still this belief that under Trump there were no wars. And so, here we have possibly three different wars going on at once under the Democrats. And you could see how that would generate some fear.

But to go back to the question of the extremism and elites, you know, toxic masculinity is a huge factor. The buildup coming from right-wing state legislatures to attack the curriculum, to attack DEI, to attack trans people at every single level, here we are dealing with an extremism that is actually palpable and that I could see how elites, some elites on the right, those who actually have drafted Project 2025, would support these policies. So, in some ways, what we keep calling fascism, which I agree is fascism, is pretty mainstream among the Project 2025 people, pretty mainstream among the MAGA Republicans. And the Republican Party is a MAGA party. Whatever the old bourgeoisie of the kind of older neoliberal order, whatever they think, they’re either going to go with the program or they’re going to do what they did, support Harris and Walz. And that didn’t work out for them.

So, I mean, I’m actually terrified by a future in which the kind of violence of the settler-colonial mentality, which was always there, has escalated and become normalized in a way. And let’s remember that the history of fascism is filled with supporters who themselves are targets of fascism. We have examples of that, you know, historically. So, you know, it’s hard — so we can’t just assume that because there’s an uptick in, say, the Latino vote in support for Trump, that somehow that’s an example of Trumpism’s multiculturalism, because it’s still white supremacy and patriarchy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Robin Kelley, I just want to go back for a second to the point that you made earlier about those ballot measures. Why do you think those ballot measures were rejected? How did they get on the ballot to begin with? And then, is that related at all to the fact that, you know, the Democrats have come under massive criticism for, after 2016, after the Clinton election, basically finding ways to blame everybody but themselves? Is there a risk that that’s going to happen again?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: Yes, I think there is a risk.

As far as the propositions, California is a conservative state. You know, it has been. It has produced some of the most conservative governors. It is the home of the origins of the John Birch Society. You know, this is a conservative state. So, it didn’t surprise me too much, although California is also a state that has, you know, had basically the biggest, for a long time, or at least second-largest prison population in the country. And so, some of these initiatives came from imprisoned people themselves, came from abolitionists. The struggle for a minimum wage came from an organized labor movement. But there’s still deep anti-immigrant sentiment here in California, deep anti-labor sentiment. And keep in mind that rent control has been consistently beat down since 1995. And why? Because some of the same elites who gave money to the Harris campaign are also absentee or venture capitalists who own a lot of property, and they’re trying to profit off of them.

The Democrats, I mean, you know, I don’t have an answer to that, except for the fact that we can’t keep relying on the Democratic Party. I mean, it’s been — it’s so bankrupt. I think what Ralph Nader said yesterday is absolutely true. We need something else. You know, if not a real third party, I think Reverend William Barber has an answer, and that is to build from the bottom up, to build from low-wage workers, because that’s the vast majority of the people. But we can’t do this until we actually think of ourselves as a community, a beloved community, as a class that struggles with each other against corporate interests.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will be speaking with Reverend Barber tomorrow, so people should tune in. And Ralph Nader’s comments on Democracy Now! just exploded yesterday, so people can check them out at democracynow.org. Robin D. G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with us, professor of history at UCLA who studies social movements, author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

A Public Mention of #LeonardPeltier Earlier Today

Posted on by toddpanther

Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective and a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

NICK TILSEN: ….The other thing that we’re calling upon is, you know, America’s longest-living Indigenous political prisoner in American history is a boarding school survivor, and his name is Leonard Peltier. And so, we’re calling upon President Biden for executive clemency for Leonard Peltier….

AMY GOODMAN: So, on the issue of Leonard Peltier, there is also another incredible connection, because Leonard Peltier was a survivor of the residential boarding schools, wasn’t he, Nick?

NICK TILSEN: Absolutely. You know, he was in the boarding schools, in — he was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, and —

AMY GOODMAN: In North Dakota?

NICK TILSEN: South Dakota. And so, he was in that boarding school, taken from his home. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted. And so, Leonard Peltier is part of that resistance. And so, it’s an incredibly reflective thing to think about, that America’s longest-living Indigenous political prisoner, who is incarcerated right now at the age of 80 years old in maximum-security prison, is actually a boarding school survivor. And so, that’s why, you know, if we want —

AMY GOODMAN: Imprisoned in Florida. I remember asking President Clinton on Election Day 2000 if he would consider granting clemency for Leonard Peltier, which he said he was weighing at the time. That was almost a quarter of a century ago.

NICK TILSEN: Yeah, that was almost a — I mean, and here we are now, you know? And so, we are continuing to push. We’d like to see, you know, executive clemency for Leonard Peltier. And I think that one of the ways that this can happen is that Biden can give executive clemency to Leonard Peltier by humanizing him and recognizing Leonard Peltier is a survivor of boarding schools. And he just apologized for the impact of boarding schools. And the freedom that Leonard Peltier was fighting for was to break free of those things that happened by the impact of boarding schools on Native communities and Indigenous communities. And so, this is a profound opportunity. And it’s a way — it’s a way for President Biden to take action, you know, in a huge issue that would impact throughout Indian Country.

–from today’s #DemocracyNow