In just the first week of this year, at least 18 journalists were assaulted or harassed while covering alleged election irregularities and violence in Bangladesh. Then, in early February, journalists in Pakistan were hindered from covering elections by a wave of violence, widespread internet blackouts, and mobile-network suspensions. In March, journalists in Turkey had been shot at and banned from observing local elections, despite their legal right to do so.

It was a worrying, but not especially surprising, start to this “super election year.” With half the world’s population casting ballots, independent reporting on the candidates and the issues is essential. Yet attacks on the media are rising, even in more mature democracies. In the United States, Donald Trump’s return as a candidate has brought back fresh memories of January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol, lunged at journalists and destroyed their cameras, and scribbled “Murder the media” on the doors.

Such examples are illustrative of a broader problem. From the U.S. to India, hard-won freedoms and rights are being eroded. In 2023, the V-Dem Institute, which monitors democracy around the world, published a report warning that the progress made toward democratization since 1989 is being reversed. The authors identify increased attacks on journalists as a leading indicator of autocratization: “Aspects of freedom of expression and the media are the ones ‘wannabe dictators’ attack the most and often first.”

Independent, professional journalism—both local and national—is even more important now that misinformation and disinformation are flooding into the public domain.

There is no doubt that threats to journalists are on the rise, and not just in countries where independent media is always a target. Over the past three years, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented near-record numbers of journalists (and even top media executives) behind bars, including in supposed democracies such as Guatemala, and in places that once enjoyed relatively high levels of personal and political freedom, such as Hong Kong.

Journalist killings are at their highest levels in almost a decade. In 2022, the American investigative journalist Jeff German was stabbed outside his home in Las Vegas, and a politician whom German had reported on is now awaiting trial for the murder. From Washington and Westminster to Buenos Aires and Budapest, journalists who cover politics receive death threats daily and are increasingly vulnerable to being targeted at political rallies and protests.

According to a 2021 UNESCO report, three-quarters of women journalists surveyed had experienced online hate, harassment, or threats of violence. Among the most likely triggers for such abuse was reporting on “politics and elections.” Women and those from marginalized communities bear the brunt of this anti-media harassment online, and the vitriol frequently spills over into real-world violence.

The consequences of this disturbing trend are not limited to the media. Attacks on journalists harm us all. Journalists perform the public’s due diligence on candidates, probing their professional records, the veracity of their claims, and the credibility of their promises. By reporting on policy achievements and failures, they help corroborate—or contradict—a candidate’s official narrative, exposing lies and smear campaigns for what they are. They also provide practical information about voting processes, and monitor for electoral irregularities and campaign-finance violations. Without such information, there can be no democracy, but rather what V-Dem calls “electoral autocracy,” where elections are empty rituals.

Independent reporting is also crucial for holding accountable those already in power. It was old-fashioned, pound-the-pavement reporting that exposed New York Republican congressman George Santos’ falsified biography, ultimately leading to his ejection from Congress (not to mention criminal charges). It was the news media that aired recordings of Peru’s secret-police chief, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, bribing judges and politicians—revelations that would lead to the downfall of President Alberto Fujimori. And it was independent reporting on “Partygate” that ultimately forced Boris Johnson out as prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Independent, professional journalism—both local and national—is even more important now that misinformation and disinformation are flooding into the public domain. A recent report by The Associated Press finds that artificial intelligence is “supercharging” the spread of election lies through deepfake images and audio that is impossible to distinguish from authentic recordings. Similarly, a study released in March by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found that disinformation had increased fourfold (compared to 2022) ahead of recent elections across the continent.

Independent news media are essential to counter this technology-driven trend. Consider Taiwan’s election earlier this year. Although lies flooded online channels throughout the campaign, studies suggest that much of the disinformation was defused by the combined efforts of local media, election authorities, and fact checkers, all of whom deliberately focused on building trust and furnishing voters with what they needed to make an informed, meaningful choice.

We now need to heed these lessons and watch carefully for warning signs. If this year is a litmus test for democracy around the world, a pre-indicator will be how the media are treated. We will have to remain vigilant in defending a free and independent press, and in championing a vibrant and curious local media. If we don’t, you can be certain that the erosion of freedoms will not stop with us.

He’s a funny little chap: a sharp dresser with a sleek grey jacket, a white waistcoat, red shorts, and a small grey crest for a hat. With his shiny black eyes and stubby black beak, he’s quite the looker. Like the chihuahua of the bird world, the tufted titmouse has no idea he’s tiny. He swaggers right up to the feeder, shouldering bigger birds out of the way.

A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known a tufted titmouse from a downy woodpecker. (We have those, too, along with red-bellied woodpeckers, who really should have been named for their bright orange mohawks). This spring I decided to get to know my feathered neighbors with whom I’m sharing an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So I turned up last Saturday for a Birding 101 class, where I learned, among other things, how to make binoculars work effectively while still wearing glasses.

Along with scholasticide, Gaza is living through an ecocide, a vastly sped-up version of the one our species seems hell-bent on spreading across the planet.

At Birding 101, I met around 15 birders (and proto-birders like me) whose ages skewed toward my (ancient!) end of the scale. Not all were old, however, or white; we were a motley bunch. Among us was a man my age with such acute and educated hearing that he (like many birders) identified species by call as we walked. I asked him if, when he hears a bird he knows, he also sees it in his mind.

“It’s funny you should ask,” he responded. “I once spent almost a year in a hospital, being treated for cancer. I lost every sense but my hearing and got used to listening instead of looking. So, yes, I see them when I hear them.”

Human-Bird Connections

I’m not expecting to convince everyone who reads this to grab a pair of binoculars and start scanning the treetops, but it’s worth thinking a bit about those tiny dinosaurs and their connections to us human beings. They have a surprising range of abilities, from using tools and solving complicated puzzles to exhibiting variations in regional cultures. My bird-listening friend was telling me about how the song sparrows in Maine begin their trills with the same four notes as the ones here in Cape Cod, but what follows is completely different, as if they’re speaking another dialect. Some birds cooperate with humans by hunting with us. Others, like Alex, the world-famous grey parrot, have learned to decode words in our language, recognize shapes and colors, and even count as high as six. (If you’d like to know more, take a look at The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman.)

We owe a lot to birds. Many of us eat them, or at least their eggs. In fact, the more I know about chickens, in particular, the harder it becomes to countenance the way they’re “farmed” in this country, whether for their meat or their eggs. Most chickens destined for dinner plates are raised by farmers contracted to big chicken brands like Tyson or super-stores like Walmart and Costco. They live surrounded by their own feces and, as The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has written, over the last half-century, they’ve been bred to grow extremely fast and unnaturally large (more than four times as big as the average broiler in 1957):

The chickens grow enormous breasts, because that’s the meat consumers want, so the birds’ legs sometimes splay or collapse. Some topple onto their backs and then can’t get up. Others spend so much time on their bellies that they sometimes suffer angry, bloody rashes called ammonia burns; these are a poultry version of bed sores.

Those factory farms threaten not only chickens but many mammals, including humans, because they provide an incubation site for bird flus that can cross the species barrier.

Birding in Gaza

Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird culture than I am make a distinction between birdwatchers—anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a few local species like the handsome rock dove, better known as a pigeon—and birders, people who devote time (and often money) to the practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely maintain a birding life list of every species they’ve spotted.

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago. They began posting their pictures on social media, eventually visiting marshlands and other sites of vibrant bird activity in the Gaza Strip. They’re not trained biologists, but their work documenting the birds of Gaza was crucial to the publication of that territory’s first bird checklist in 2023.

If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation—and now the full-scale war that has killed more than 34,000 people, 72% of them women and children, and damaged or destroyed 62% of all housing—Gaza would be ideal for birding. Like much of the Middle East, the territory lies under one of the world’s great flyways for millions of migrating birds. Its Mediterranean coast attracts shorebirds. Wadi Gaza, a river-fed ravine and floodplain that snakes its way across the middle of Gaza, is home to more than 100 bird species, as well as rare amphibians and other riparian creatures. In other words, that strip of land is a birder’s paradise.

Or it would be a paradise, except that, as the Daily Beast reported a year ago (long before the current war began):

Being a bird-watcher in Gaza means facing endless restrictions. Israel controls Gaza’s territorial waters, airspace, and the movement of people and goods, except at the border with Egypt. Most Palestinians who grew up in Gaza since the closure imposed in 2007, when Hamas seized control from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, have never left the 25-by-7-mile strip.

Gazan birders encounter other barriers, as well. Even if they can afford to buy binoculars or cameras with telephoto lenses, the Israeli government views such equipment as having “dual use” potential (that is, possibly serving military as well as civilian purposes) and so makes those items very difficult to acquire. It took the Sirdahs, for example, five months of wrangling and various permission documents simply to get their birding equipment into Gaza.

Getting equipment in was hard enough, but getting out of Gaza, for any reason, has become nearly impossible for its Palestinian residents. Along with most of its 2.3 million inhabitants, the sisters simply couldn’t leave the territory, even before the present nightmare, to attend birding conferences, visit exhibitions of their photography, or receive awards for their work. They were imprisoned on a strip of land that’s about the size of the island in Massachusetts where I’ve been watching birds lately. When I try to imagine life in Gaza today, I sometimes think about what it would be like to shove a couple of million people into this tiny place, chase them with bombs and missiles from one end of it to the other, and then start all over again, as Israel seems to be about to do in the southern Gazan city of Rafah with its million-plus refugees.

Wiping Out Knowledge, and Knowledge Workers

The Sirdahs collaborated on their bird checklist project with Abdel Fattah Rabou, a much-honored professor of environmental studies at the Islamic University of Gaza. Rabou himself has devoted many years to the study and conservation of birds and other wildlife in Gaza. The Islamic University of Gaza was one of the first institutional targets of the current war. It was bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces on October 11, 2023. Since then, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the project of wiping out Gaza’s extensive repositories of knowledge and sites of learning has essentially been completed:

The destruction of Gaza’s universities began with the bombing of the Islamic University in the first week of the war and continued with airstrikes on Al-Azhar University on November 4. Since then, all of Gaza’s academic institutions have been destroyed, as well as many schools, libraries, archives, and other educational institutions.

Indeed, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights has observed that “with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’” U.N. experts report:

After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured—with numbers growing each day. At least 60% of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza, was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.

I wanted to know whether Professor Rabou was among those 95 university faculty killed so far in the Gaza war, so I did what those of us with Internet access do these days: I googled him and found his Facebook page. He is, it turns out, still living and still posting, most recently about the desperate conditions—illness, pollution, sewage rash—experienced by refugees in temporary shelter centers near him. A few days earlier, he’d uploaded a more personal photograph: a plastic bag of white stuff, inscribed with blue Arabic lettering. “The first drop of rain,” he wrote, “Alhamdulillah [thank God], the first bag of flour enters my house in months as a help.”

The Sirdah twins, too, still remain alive, and they continue to post on their Instagram account.

Along with scholasticide, Gaza is living through an ecocide, a vastly sped-up version of the one our species seems hell-bent on spreading across the planet. As The Guardian reports, Gaza has lost almost half its tree cover and farmland, with much of the latter “reduced to packed earth.” And the news only gets worse: “[S]oil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.” Gaza has become, and could remain for years to come, essentially unlivable. And yet millions of people must try to live there. At what point, one wonders, do the “-cides”—scholastic-, eco-, and the rest—add up to genocide?

Birds of Gaza

Gaza’s wild birds aren’t the only birds in Gaza. Caged songbirds can evidently still be bought in markets, and some of Rafah’s desperate inhabitants seek them out, hoping their music will mask the sounds of war. Voice of America recounts the story of a woman evacuee from northern Gaza who, halfway through her journey south, realized that she’d left her birds behind. She returned to rescue her caged avian friends, displaying a deep and tender affection for her winged companions. However, Professor Rabou is less sanguine about the practice. “As a people under occupation,” he says, “we shouldn’t put birds in cages.”

“Birds of Gaza” also happens to be the name of an international art project created to remember the individual children killed in the war. The premise is simple: Children around the world choose a specific child who has died and draw, paint, or fabricate a bird in his or her honor. Participants can choose from, God help us, a database of over 6,500 children who have died in Gaza since last October, then upload photos of their creations to the Birds of Gaza website. From Great Britain to South Africa to Japan, children have been doing just that.

Did you know that Gaza—well, Palestine—even has a national bird? The Palestine sunbird is a gorgeous creature, crowned in iridescent green and blue, and sporting a curved beak perfect for extracting nectar from plants. The West Bank Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar designed a postage stamp celebrating the sunbird. “This bird is a symbol of freedom and movement,” he says. “It can fly anywhere.”

Birding for a Better World

Back in the United States, the Feminist Bird Club (with chapters across North America and Europe) is committed to making birding accessible to everyone, especially people who may not have had safe access to the outdoors in the past. “There is no reason why we can’t celebrate birds and support our most cherished beliefs in equity and justice at the same time,” they say. “For us, it’s not either/or.” Last year they published Birding for a Better World, a book about how people can genuinely connect with beings—avian and human—whose lives are very different from theirs. They sponsor a monthly virtual Birders for Palestine action hour, in which participants can learn what they can do to support the people of Palestine, including their birders.

As I watch a scrum of brilliant yellow goldfinches scrabbling for a perch on the bird feeder in my yard, knowing that, on this beautiful little island, I’m about as safe as a person can be, I think about the horrors going on half a world away, paid for, at least in part, with my taxes. Indeed, Congress just approved billions more dollars in direct military aid for Israel, even as the State Department released its 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. As The Jerusalem Post reports, in the section on Israel, the report documents “more than a dozen types of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detention, conflict-related sexual violence or punishment, and the punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative.”

Somehow, it’s cheering to imagine that, in spite of everything, there are still a few people birding in a devastated Gaza.

Even before the wholesale destruction of Gaza, the message from the major media was that Democrats as a group are suffering from a potentially fatal case of Bidenitis. Most Democrats, the narrative goes, will end up voting for Joe Biden’s reelection to keep Trump out of the White House, but they won’t like it. These unhappy Democrats feel trapped, forced to vote for a candidate for whom they have no enthusiasm. And there are many such Democrats. It’s easy, however, to overlook the fact there are also many Democrats for whom Joe Biden is much more than the lesser of two evils. People like me who, if not exactly enthusiastic supporters, have nevertheless been staunch supporters.

We believe he’s earned our support. We don’t care that he’s old, that he sometimes picks the wrong word when speaking, or that he’s not a particularly dynamic speaker. What we have cared about is his success in pushing forward long-promised (mostly) progressive policy goals. Things like investing billions of dollars in the fight against global warming, finally doing something about our deteriorating infrastructure, and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Progressives have been talking about these things for decades. But it was Joe Biden who, despite having only a tiny Democratic majority in Congress, made them more than talking points.

None of these advances were perfect from a progressive viewpoint, but advances they unquestionably were. Joe Biden’s legislative record easily outshines any other president since Lyndon Johnson.

While the overwhelming majority of progressives who are angered over Gaza will ultimately vote for Biden in order to prevent the horror of a second Trump term, inevitably some won’t.

Then on October 7, 2023, the world shook. Hamas launched its brutal incursion into Israel quickly followed by Israeli’s brutal attacks on Gaza. Suddenly, many staunch Biden supporters found themselves painfully confronted with a very different Joe Biden from the one they thought they knew — a president whose loyalty to Israel, or more likely his loyalty to a mirage of an Israel that may once have existed but is now long gone, led him to not only overlook what can only be described as crimes against humanity by Israel, but to also make the United States a participant in those crimes. And, yes, Hamas has committed crimes against humanity of its own, horrible ones, but that one war crime doesn’t justify another is a truism that shouldn’t need to be spoken. Also, we are sending arms to Israel, not to Hamas.

That the United States shares responsibility for the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza is beyond debate. As far as we know, no American soldier has personally pulled the trigger of a gun in Gaza, dropped a bomb there, or stopped delivery of food to its starving civilian population. But America has watched as Israel, in what was supposed to be a war against Hamas alone, not all of Gaza, has done all of these things while slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, including thousands of children. Israel has also made it clear that even if starving the entire population of Gaza isn’t their goal, it also isn’t something that bothers them terribly. Indeed, according to polls, a solid majority of Israelis oppose allowing food and medical aid into Gaza, widespread famine be damned.

And for far too long not only did our president fail to take concrete action in opposition to this slaughter. He failed to even speak out against it. Suddenly, Joe Biden’s famous empathy started to seem awfully selective.

In fairness, President Biden did eventually get around to criticizing Israel’s actions. He strongly urged the Israelis to take steps to protect civilians. There even appears to be some evidence that pressure from Biden helped to reduce Israel’s cruelty to the population of Gaza in some small ways. Yet when Benjamin Netanyahu’s response was in most respects to tell President Biden to buzz off, Biden continued to send Israel guns and bombs which they could use in committing the same wrongful actions, thereby making all Americans complicit in these actions. And every day children continue to die as a result of Israeli attacks.

Are long-term Biden supporters likely to withhold their votes from him to protest Gaza? Of course not. Keeping Donald Trump out of the White House in the 2024 election is the one overriding priority of this election. As so many others have pointed out, the survival of our democracy depends on this. And even if that weren’t true, is there any doubt Joe Biden will be a far better president than Donald Trump? For that matter, does anyone seriously believe the people of Gaza would do better in a Trump presidency?

But while most Democrats will still support Joe Biden in the upcoming election, for many of us a sense of betrayal will live on. And this includes what could easily become an unintended betrayal of American democracy itself.

The terrifying thing is this is almost certainly destined to be another close election, with every vote, at least in battleground states, potentially decisive. While the overwhelming majority of progressives who are angered over Gaza will ultimately vote for Biden, inevitably some won’t. And those few votes (or non-votes) could easily put Donald Trump back in the White House, with all that would mean.

And if that occurs, it will mean that Joe Biden chose to bet the future of American democracy on catering to the whims of Benjamin Netanyahu, a brutal, right-wing, authoritarian thug, and then lost that bet.

If that does happen, he will be remembered for nothing else.

Today is World Press Freedom Day, a day that recognizes the journalists worldwide who expose wrongdoing, challenge power and seek the truth. Since mid-April, student-run news outlets have been carrying the banner of press freedom as they cover the often brutal police crackdowns against pro-Palestinian encampments set up to protest what students consider to be genocide happening in Gaza.

If coverage of the crackdowns results in any Pulitzers, the awards should go to cub reporters like those at Columbia University’s student-run radio station WKCR, and not to those members of the corporate press who’ve relied more on their virtual Rolodexes of official sources than on the sort of shoe-leather reporting that gets closer to revealing what’s actually happening on college campuses.

Beginning with Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, school administrators have called in police to conduct sweeps at dozens of protest encampments nationwide. Many of these university officials have aligned themselves with the law-enforcement claim that “outside agitators” who are not members of the student population are leading the campus protests.

On World Press Freedom Day, it’s worth asking what makes a free press free.

This false characterization is designed to cast students as mere pawns in some larger scheme, and not as engaged members of a well-organized, student-run movement that seeks to compel their schools to divest any financial support from a state that’s perpetrating atrocities in Gaza that have killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Grooming the press

Unfortunately, many in the media establishment have also aligned their reporting and commentary with the views of administrators and law enforcement.

Prior to police involvement, most of the student protests were peaceful — though there were reported instances of antisemitism that must be universally condemned. The violence at Columbia only started once Shafik ignored Columbia students and faculty and opened campus gates to a heavily militarized police force.

Shafik’s disastrous decision sparked a wider backlash. Student protesters built new encampments — or expanded existing ones — on campuses across the country. This in turn drew front-page media attention to the movement. Through the distorted lens of many mainstream outlets, though, it’s the students who are on the attack.

On April 22, The Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed in which political commentator Steven Stalinsky claims that Hamas is coordinating and “grooming” student activists for acts of terrorism.

ABC News and Fox Television’s New York City affiliate portrayed the mass arrests the week of April 29 as a “clash” between protesters and police when most available footage clearly shows law enforcement as the aggressors.

One New York Times piece framed the spread of student encampments as a “contagious” disease. “The piece focused largely on why demonstrations have been so prevalent in America but not overseas, yet failed to mention the fact that the U.S. is Israel’s most powerful and generous supporter,” writes The New Republic’s Alex Shephard. “That would seem highly relevant.” Reporters could help their readers better understand the protests by covering the complicated money trail that links the investments of heavily endowed universities like Columbia and UCLA to a military-industrial complex that arms repressive regimes worldwide.

In an overly commercialized media system, the press is not as free as it claims to be.

The Washington Post’s Laura Wagner wrote a piece about student protesters giving the professional press a “cold shoulder.” Wagner mentioned that students “felt that their protests are not being covered fairly,” but did not follow up with examples of unfair coverage or offer much further analysis.

While professional journalists can be dogged in their reporting on other commercial sectors, they tend to shy away from criticism of their own.

Meanwhile, student reporters with Columbia’s WKCR spent hours on April 30 and into the early hours of May 1 wading into the protests to livestream the escalation of the NYPD presence on campus. The brutal reality of the crackdown that followed unfolded before their cameras. “[W]e’re all very dedicated to our coverage,” WKCR’s Sarah Barlyn told Mother Jones. "It’s hard to sleep when we know that we have a job to report on what’s going on.”

Eventually, police ordered WKCR reporters to get off campus. “Frankly, no one is left to document what’s happening,” one reporter responded on air.

Indeed. Many journalists working for professional media outlets were instead attending press conferences convened by NYPD officials and Mayor Eric Adams. The media were told that the protests had been “co-opted by professional outside agitators” who are not Columbia students. Their subsequent reporting followed this talking point. Many portrayed one 63-year-old civil-disobedience trainer as a puppet master, downplaying students as the legitimate organizers of protest encampments.

The un-free press

It may seem off to criticize the press on World Press Freedom Day. Today, we should be celebrating the essential role a free press plays in giving the public the information it needs to exercise democratic power. Ideally, to paraphrase Chicago Evening Post journalist Finley Peter Dunne, this freedom allows the press “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

But in an overly commercialized media system, the press is not as free as it claims to be.

The escalating authoritarianism we’re witnessing in the crackdown on college campuses is, in part, a byproduct of a media system that fails to hold powerful interests accountable for the lies they tell. U.S. media firms of most every type need to make money via advertising. When commercial outcomes dictate your success, catering to wealth and power matters more than keeping that same power in check. As a result, commercial media view the world through a corporate scrim, and shy away from any reporting that “afflicts the comfortable” too much, and that potentially undercuts their bottom lines.

To foster a public-interest media system that promotes democracy and gives voice to dissenting views, we must create public structures to support the production of noncommercial news and information.

Systemic failures in commercial media coverage of protests have helped normalize ideas about police violence against dissenting voices. Our media system is supposed to act as a counterweight to and not an enabler of such suppression.

A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania found that countries with the most financial support for noncommercial media per capita had the highest levels of public knowledge about and engagement in democracy. According to the study, noncommercial media also feature more diverse news coverage, potentially diminishing commercial media’s ability to dictate public discourse on a given issue.

To foster a public-interest media system that promotes democracy and gives voice to dissenting views, we must create public structures to support the production of noncommercial news and information. We must let a thousand WKCRs — and other noncommercial outlets — bloom, including those that actually pay reporters a living wage.

While this approach doesn’t pretend to answer all of the questions about the media’s role in service of democracy, it recognizes that a strong independent noncommercial media system can serve as a major bulwark against democracy-destabilizing forces.

On World Press Freedom Day, it’s worth asking what makes a free press free. We have the young reporters at WKCR to thank for helping show us the answer.

Wednesday’s Senate Budget Committee hearings were wrapping up as I wrote this; they marked one more important step in the decades-long effort to hold Big Oil accountable for the fact that it is wrecking the one planet we’ve got.

The ostensible purpose of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) hearing, and one it effectively accomplished, was to get on the record a boatload of documents showing that the oil companies and their trade groups continue to lie about climate change. Many of the documents were obtained by the House Oversight Committee in the last Congress, back when it was controlled by Democrats—that’s why the first witness was Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), there to describe the trove of new papers and tapes demonstrating the industry’s ongoing fecklessness.

But the hearing also sent a deeper signal—which is that the power balance, at least as long as Democrats remain in power, is slowly shifting against what was long the country’s most powerful industry.

All the skirmishing that really matters is about gas—it’s the one thing the industry relies on to blunt the rise of its mortal foe, actual clean energy in the form of wind, solar, and batteries.

Raskin, for instance, told the tragicomical story of ExxonMobil’s efforts to promote itself as an algae company—including literally spending half as much money on ads as on research before scrapping the whole program as impossible. (You can read my account of this fiasco here).

But then Raskin went much further, explaining the far more serious deception around natural gas that’s at the heart of Big Oil’s current efforts to prolong the energy transition.

Natural gas, he said, “isn’t green and it isn’t clean.” Indeed, explained Whitehouse, the industry’s master plan is to “disguise natural gas as renewable, to lock their fossil fuels into our energy future.”

This is an incredibly important point for senior Democrats to be making, because natural gas has always been the Democratic vice. Coal was obviously filthy, but natural gas, when you burn it, produces half as much carbon. Therefore it became the Democratic pathway to reducing emissions while not really offending the fossil fuel industry. Go back and look at former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses—nearly every one contains a paean to the rise of fracked gas.

Sadly, of course, scientists soon found that natural gas production leaked large quantities of methane, which both Raskin and Whitehouse took pains to point traps 80 times more heat than CO2. Now that we know that, it becomes clear that the efforts to replace coal with gas barely reduced America’s total greenhouse gas emissions at all.

The fossil fuel industry desperately wants to lock in more dependence on fracked gas while they still can—that’s why they reacted with such white-hot anger to the Biden administration’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export facilities earlier this year. But the hope raised by today’s hearing is that—if President Joe Biden wins re-election—that pause may become permanent, and the expansion of natural gas will finally be halted, recognized for the deep peril that it is. All the skirmishing that really matters is about gas—it’s the one thing the industry relies on to blunt the rise of its mortal foe, actual clean energy in the form of wind, solar, and batteries. And since California this spring is decisively showing that a modern economy can support itself on that trinity, the battle is growing ever more desperate for Big Oil. So far the Biden administration has been far more focused on aiding clean energy than hindering the dirty stuff (and yet more good news on that front this week). But we’re getting to the point where it may be politically possible to actually take on the bad guys.

Indeed, the hearing also gave some hints to a couple of possible end games.

When he had his turn to “ask questions,” Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen used his senatorial privilege to deliver a little tutorial on the Polluter Pays climate superfund bill that I’ve been writing about recently. “If you broke it, you pay for it,” he said—and then cited the essentially impossible cost of protecting Maryland, with its 7,000 miles of inlets and bays, from sea-level rise. “It’s the tragedy of the commons,” Raskin said. “Big oil profits from using the sky, they’re the ones who’ve profited from it, but they’re not asked to pay the costs of climate destabilization.” A carbon tax would have been a straightforward way to make them pay those costs, but Big Oil has made sure it could never get through Congress—so this effort, at the state level, might do the trick, exerting enough pressure to make them reach a deal.

Or maybe it will come through a slightly different route. The panel of experts that followed Raskin had the indefatigable Geoff Supran, now a professor at the University of Miami, to follow up on the climate deception angle. But it also had Sharon Eubanks, who led much of the tobacco litigation for the Department of Justice, forcing the settlement that has driven cigarette smoking to the margins of our society. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked her the key question: Should the Department of Justice consider using the RICO statutes to hold Big Oil accountable? Yes it should, she said.

Again, this is a signal of what a second-term Biden administration might be willing and able to accomplish. The Democrats are unlikely to hold the Senate—this kind of hearing might be on the House side next year, with Whitehouse heading over to be a witness—but if the White House itself remains in Biden’s hands then, freed of reelection pressures, he may be ready to move.

Especially since the Republicans have… not much. Louisiana’s John Kennedy, increasingly the Senate point man for the hydrocarbon industry, tried to embarrass Raskin with a bunch of questions about boreal forest fires—wouldn’t their carbon emissions somehow overwhelm any efforts to cut back on fossil fuels? Happily Whitehouse had the data on hand to show that against coal, oil, and gas burning forests remain a small source of emissions, and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley pointed out the real issue: The reason boreal forests are on fire is precisely because we keep heating up the planet. Wisconsin’s low-wattage Ron Johnson wanted to talk about some climate declaration signed by “scientists” that says global warming isn’t a threat; “Yeah, whatev” was essentially Raskin’s reply. The defense of fossil fuels at this point is intellectually impossible, and the ever-hotter temperatures will provide a political opening.

But that only matters if there’s someone there to seize the opening. If the Republicans win the fall elections, the fossil fuel strategy will have prevailed.

The mass protests at dozens of U.S. universities cannot be reduced to a stifling and misleading conversation about antisemitism.

Thousands of American students across the country are not protesting, risking their own futures and very safety, because of some pathological hate for the Jewish people. They are doing so in a complete rejection of, and justifiable outrage over, the mass killing carried out by the state of Israel against defenseless Palestinians in Gaza.

They are angry because the bloodbath in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7, is fully funded and backed by the U.S. government.

Young Americans, who are not beholden to the self-interests or historical and spiritual illusions of previous generations, are declaring that “enough is enough.”

These mass protests began at Columbia University on April 17 before covering all of U.S. geography, from New York to Texas and from North Carolina to California.

The protests are being compared, in terms of their nature and intensity, to the anti-war protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s.

While the comparison is apt, it is critical to note the ethnic diversity and social inclusiveness in the current protests. On many campuses, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Black, Native American, and white students are standing shoulder to shoulder with their Palestinian peers in a unified stance against the war.

None of them is motivated by fear that they could be drafted to fight in Gaza, as was, indeed, the case for many American students during the Vietnam War era. Instead, they are united around a clear set of priorities: ending the war, ending U.S. support of Israel, ending their universities’ direct investment in Israel, and the recognition of their right to protest. This is not idealism, but humanity at its finest moments.

Despite mass arrests, starting at Columbia, and the direct violence against peaceful protesters everywhere, the movement has only grown stronger.

On the other side, U.S. politicians, starting with President Joe Biden, accused the protesters of antisemitism, without engaging with any of their reasonable, and globally-supported, demands.

Once again, the Democratic and Republican establishments stood together in blind support for Israel.

Biden condemned the “antisemitic protests,” describing them as “reprehensible and dangerous.”

A few days later, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-La.), visited the university under tight security, using language that is hardly suitable for a country which claims to embrace democracy and respect freedom of expression and right of assembly.

“We just can’t allow this kind of hatred and antisemitism to flourish on our campuses,” he said, adding: “I am here today joining my colleagues, and calling on President (Minouche) Shafik to resign if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.”

Shafik, however, was already on board, as she was the one who had called for the New York Police Department to crack down on the protesters, falsely accusing them of antisemitism.

U.S. mainstream media has helped contribute to the confusion and misinformation regarding the reasons behind the protests.

The Wall Street Journal, once more, allowed writers such as Steven Stalinsky to smear young justice activists for daring to criticize Israel’s horrendous genocide in Gaza.

“Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others are grooming activists in the U.S. and across the West,” he alleged, thus, once more taking a critical conversation about U.S. support of genocide into bizarre and unsubstantiated directions.

U.S. establishment writers may wish to continue to fool themselves and their readers, but the truth is that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas “recruiters” are active in Ivy League U.S. universities, where young people are often groomed to become leaders in government and large corporations.

All such distractions are meant to avoid the undeniable shift in American society, one that promises a long-term paradigm shift in popular views of Israel and Palestine.

For years prior to the current war, Americans have been changing their opinions on Israel, and their country’s so-called “special relationship” with Tel Aviv.

Young Democrats have led the trend, which can also be observed among independents and, to some extent, young Republicans.

A statement that asserts that “sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis” would have been unthinkable in the past. But it is the new normal, and latest opinion polls regarding the subject, along with Biden’s dwindling approval ratings, continue to attest to this fact.

The older generations of American politicians, who have built and sustained careers based on their unconditional support for Israel, are overwhelmed by the new reality. Their language is confused and riddled with falsehoods. Yet, they are willing to go as far as defaming a whole generation of their own people—the future leaders of America—to satisfy the demands of the Israeli government.

In a televised statement on April 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the protesters as “antisemitic mobs” who “have taken over leading universities,” alleging that the peaceful protesters are calling “for the annihilation of Israel.” His words should have outraged all Americans, regardless of their politics and ideology. Instead, more U.S. politicians began parroting Netanyahu’s words.

But political opportunism shall generate a blowback effect, not just in the distant future, but in the coming weeks and months, especially in the run-up to the presidential elections.

Millions of Americans are clearly fed up, with war, with their government’s allegiance to a foreign country, to militarism, to police violence, to the unprecedented restrictions on freedom of speech in the U.S., and more.

Young Americans, who are not beholden to the self-interests or historical and spiritual illusions of previous generations, are declaring that “enough is enough.” They are doing more than chanting, and rising in unison, demanding answers, moral and legal accountability, and an immediate end to the war.

Now that the U.S. government has taken no action, in fact continues to feed the Israeli war machine in its onslaught against millions of Palestinians, these brave students are acting themselves. This is certainly an awe-inspiring, watershed moment in the history of the United States.

Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway.

Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but they are loud and they are not Columbia students. They’ve been coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side, equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas, and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.

For those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one.

Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

The Real Story on Campus

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside—the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18—are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too.

Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.

The Right Seizes and Distorts the Narrative

Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread antisemitism to take eyes off the astronomical death toll in Gaza—more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than 14,500 of them children—while fretting about the safety of Jewish students instead.

The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously, and we have methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness.”

The real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.

Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too. Some students even reported they were sprayed with a mace-like material, possibly manufactured by the Israeli military, and that, as a result, several protesters had to go to the hospital. My own students told me they have been targeted with hate mail and threats over social media. I even saw a doxxing truck sponsored by the far-right group Accuracy in Media driving around the Columbia neighborhood bearing photographs of Muslim students, naming them and calling them terrorists. Again, it’s important to note that most of the harassers have been outsiders, not students.

No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.

Then came the Republican hearings.

The Congressional Hearings

Having watched the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania stumble and fall in the face of MAGA Representative Elise Stefanik’s bullying accusations of antisemitism in December, Columbia President Shafik did all she could to avoid a similar fate when it was her turn. But when she submitted to four hours of McCarthyite-style questioning in Congress on April 17—one Republican even asked if there were Republicans among the faculty—Shafik cringed, evaded, and caved.

“I agree with you” was her most frequent phrase. She never pushed back against the characterization of the Columbia campus by Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx and Stefanik as riddled with antisemitism. She never stood up for the integrity of our faculty and students or for the fact that we’re a campus full of remarkable scholars and artists perfectly capable of governing ourselves. She never even pointed out that who we suspend, fire, or hire is none of Congress’ business. Instead, she broke all our university rules by agreeing to investigate and fire members of our own faculty and to call in the police when she deemed it necessary.

The very day after the hearings, that’s exactly what she did.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza was never even mentioned.

A Pandora’s Box

Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote outraged opinion pieces condemning Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest students, more students than ever joined the protests all over the country.

Then, on April 24, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some kind of terrible riot had gone on here. Standing at the top of the steps in front of the grand facade of Low Library, a century-old building meant to symbolize learning and reason, and surrounded by heckling students, Johnson declared that some Jewish students had told him of “heinous acts of bigotry,” characterized the protesters as “endorsed by Hamas,” and called for Shafik to resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to the chaos.”

“What chaos?” said an undergraduate standing next to me on the steps as we listened.

“He’s saying a bunch of 20-year-old American college students are in cahoots with Hamas?” another asked incredulously.

Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole, not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too.

Johnson then escalated the threats, claiming the National Guard might be called in and that Congress might even revoke federal funding if universities couldn’t keep such protests under control.

I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.” These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly, “We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.” Designated faculty and students stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging media. But nobody and nothing was out of control.

The Weaponization of Antisemitism

Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole, not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too, including President Joe Biden and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, not to speak of New York Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat. They have all publicly condemned the supposedly rampant antisemitism on campus without, it seems, bothering to check their facts.

Meanwhile, MAGA Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht posted on X that “Columbia has been taken over by radical Pro-Hamas protesters.”

Back in the real world, the right’s hysteria over such supposed antisemitism hasn’t really been about protecting Jews at all, as many faculty members (including us Jewish ones) have written and spoken about. Rather, the right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country Christian, conservative, straight, and white—not to mention their urge to suppress support of Palestinian autonomy.

When Students Don’t Feel Safe

My students tell me they feel perfectly safe on campus. They may not like some of the chants they sometimes hear. I myself have caught a few that chilled me as a Jew. I’ve also heard chants that sicken me on behalf of my Muslim friends. But those have been rare. And campus is a place where everyone should be free to debate, disagree, express their opinions, listen, and learn. We have to remember that free speech does not mean speech we agree with.

No, where my students do not feel safe is out on Broadway, where extremists on both sides gather. They don’t feel safe when the false narratives of Republican politicians draw far-right angry mobs to the campus gates, something that is happening just as I’m writing this piece. Most of all, they don’t feel safe when police arrive on campus with guns in their holsters and zip-ties hanging from their belts.

I stood and watched that day the police came. Four huge drones hovered overhead, along with those eternally buzzing helicopters. Dozens of police buses were lined up on West 114th Street on the south side of campus as if prepared to deal with some massive, violent riot. Then, in came the police, some in riot gear, to tie the hands of more than 100 students behind their backs and march them onto police buses.

Not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this debate, so are the student protesters’ demands.

Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones who attend Barnard were locked out of their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague downstairs. “Nobody told our parents that we were being evicted,” she told me in my lobby.

Faculty Response

Many faculty were so shocked by these events that on Monday, April 22, some 300 of us gathered on the steps of Low Library, holding up signs that said, “Hands Off Our Students” and “End Student Suspensions Now.” Several professors gave impassioned speeches praising those students for their courage, demanding that academic freedom be protected, and castigating Shafik for throwing us all under the bus.

Still, Gaza was not mentioned. It seemed as if the genocide occurring there was disappearing in the fog.

“I’m worried that the message of our protest is getting lost,” that suspended student told me as we spoke in the lobby. “Everyone’s talking about academic freedom and police repression instead.”

Indeed, not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this debate, so are the student protesters’ demands, so let me reiterate them here:

• That Columbia divest of all investments that profit from Israel’s occupation and bombing of Palestine.
• That Columbia sever academic ties with its programs at Tel Aviv and other Israeli universities.
• That the policing of the campus be stopped immediately.
• That the university release a statement calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

The other day, on New York’s National Public Radio station, WNYC, I heard a caller who had been a campus protester in 1968 say something like, “It’s funny how the protesters of 50 years ago are always right, but the protesters of today are always wrong.” The people who demonstrated for civil rights then were demonized, beaten, even murdered, but they were right, he pointed out, as were the people who demonstrated against the Vietnam War. (I would say the same for those who protested against the Iraq War and for the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.)

One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side, too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.

Final Note: This piece was written before the president and trustees of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30, against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos show considerable police violence against the students. What happens next remains to be seen.

Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against U.S. college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism” Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill—also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more anti-zionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and anti-zionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates anti-zionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

Does antisemitism exist among [protesters]? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them—even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

Editor's Note: The following is a statement by the Congresswoman following her vote, alongside nearly 70 Democratic colleagues, against the Antisemitism Awareness Act on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.

As a Jewish woman, I’ve experienced antisemitism all my life. I’ve been called a kike while I was waiting for a drink at a bar when I was at college. I’ve heard too many ‘jokes’ to count about my frizzy hair and my big nose. I remember my classmates who thought it was funny to say people were ‘being Jewed’ when someone was being frugal.

Conflating free speech and hate crimes will not make Jewish students any safer.

I know the hatred and ignorance that lie behind all these comments, and how they can quickly escalate into violence—and I’m deeply concerned about the rise of antisemitism in San Diego and across the country.

But I do not believe that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism. I support Israel’s right to exist, but I also know many people who question whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state who are deeply connected to their Judaism.

Today, I voted against H.R. 6090, because it fails to effectively address the very real rise of antisemitism, all while defunding colleges and universities across the country and punishing many, if not all, of the non-violent protestors speaking out against the Israeli military’s conduct. Conflating free speech and hate crimes will not make Jewish students any safer. This bill would stifle First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly. And it would distract from real antisemitism and our efforts to address it.

Last week, something exciting happened: The Biden Administration announced the official launch of the American Climate Corps (in addition to rolling out $7 billion in federal grants for residential solar investments in low-income communities).

When a Climate Corps program was initially proposed by organizations like the Sunrise Movement and Congressional leaders like Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I remember thinking to myself, “Well that’s a lovely idea . . . but yeah right.” Reviving one of the most radical New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, to put thousands of young people to work decarbonizing the country? It sounded like a leftwing pipedream. But there was Biden last week, standing next to AOC to describe in concrete, practical terms how you can now apply for a job with the Corps. After five years of electoral organizing, civil disobedience, and legislative advocacy pushing this proposal, it was an announcement worth celebrating—at least for a moment— before diving back into the fight.

But for a segment of the online left, this was not a moment to celebrate. For them, given Biden's terrible Gaza policy, there was only one relevant takeaway from the event: AOC, by standing next to the president showed she was a “a pathetic, spineless coward,” as one representative tweet on X put it. Nevermind that AOC has been one of the most sustained and effective critics of Biden’s uncritical support for Israel's war; nevermind that she provided arguably the highest-profile definition of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as an “unfolding genocide”; nevermind, even, that she took the opportunity at that very Earth Day event to loudly praise campus protesters. For AOC’s haters on the left (and I think “haters” is the right word, versus, say, “critics”—while all politicians deserve accountability, the people I’m referencing here are not those offering constructive critiques of AOC), the rollout of a visionary Green New Deal program that she introduced, that would almost certainly not exist without her organizing and leadership, was just one more opportunity to call AOC a traitor to the progressive cause.

This left-wing AOC derangement syndrome has a lot to say both about the brand of politics that AOC’s haters represent and the role she occupies within our political system.

But first, it bears noting that, according to every piece of private polling I’ve seen, AOC haters comprise an extremely small slice of the American left. They may be very loud on their preferred stomping ground over on X, formerly Twitter, but they do not represent the vast majority of us. What they do represent, to a profoundly precise degree, is a particular strain of leftist politics that has been an obstacle to the goals of our movement for a very long time. Indeed, one’s stance on AOC may just be the most accurate diagnostic test we’ve got of what a supposed leftist is most interested in. Do they want to change the world, or to engage in in-group masturbatory preening? Do they want to win, or do they want to lose?

This left-wing AOC derangement syndrome has a lot to say both about AOC’s haters and the brand of politics they represent, and about AOC and the role she has taken on within our political system.

Much has been written about the proclivity of some on the left to valorize defeat—to, as my friend Sam Adler-Bell put it, “imagine there is some meaningful consolation in losing righteously.” But for those of us who take our progressive values seriously, securing a fairer world and a livable future is not just a social media talking point. It’s a necessity. In the oft-repeated words of Assata Shakur, it is not only “our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.”

Taking seriously one’s duty to win requires having a theory of change that is grounded in reality. Of course, different progressive organizers, movements, and elected officials can employ a range of varied yet equally valid visions for how we win. But to be grounded in reality means, at the very least, accepting that we live in a majoritarian democracy in which winning real change requires getting to 50% + 1. (It’s true that the authoritarian right has worked for decades to change this, to instantiate its will through the creation and maintenance of minoritarian structures, from Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression to the Federalist Society’s takeover of our courts. But that only means that, in those arenas, it’s necessary to build even broader majoritarian support to overcome and reverse those antidemocratic developments.)

That fact is not an invitation to fall back on David Shor-style “popularism,” a shallow strategy that takes for granted the immovability of the public and preemptively surrenders our ability to make bigger, more structural changes. Social movements can—and, indeed, must—shift the horizon of what’s possible. But you can’t accomplish that by retreating to your in-group lefty clubhouse, talking only to your small circle of current believers, and waiting for the world to magically change. It requires a disciplined focus on winning over persuadable people, growing our movement, engaging in coalition politics, and making once-radical propositions seem reasonable, even mundane. These are all things that AOC does incredibly well. And they’re the very same proclivities that her haters use to brand her an enemy of the cause.

Yet this approach to politics has been essential in helping the left win a series of progressive victories over the course of Biden’s first term. Indeed, in the last week alone, the administration has ordered power companies to cut pollution from coal plants, banned non-compete agreements for 40 million Americans, raised overtime wages for four million salaried workers, forced airlines to automatically offer refunds for canceled flights and poorly handled baggage, banned illegal junk fees in mortgage lending, and blocked a major corporate merger, among other significant actions.

While it’s understandable to feel that Democratic failures on Israel/Palestine overshadow accomplishments like these, they don't negate the concrete impact of such gains for millions of Americans, and they shouldn't erase the countless organizers who helped achieve these wins.

You’d need a persuasive argument for why our movements—for a livable future, unions for all, reproductive justice, and so much more—aren’t massively better off under Biden than Trump. I haven’t heard any such argument from AOC’s haters.

Of course, the most vitriolic attacks on AOC stem from her support for Biden’s reelection. But what is the alternative strategy? AOC has a clear theory of change for her position: “I think about what conditions do I want to be organizing under in the next four years . . . I would rather, even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump . . . I am taking [Trump’s threat to democracy] very seriously, because we will not be able to organize for any movement towards anything [under] the kind of authoritarianism that he threatens.” That’s a strong, empirically-rooted analysis. It’s possible to disagree with her position. But you’d need a persuasive argument for why our movements—for a livable future, unions for all, reproductive justice, and so much more—aren’t massively better off under Biden than Trump. I haven’t heard any such argument from AOC’s haters, or any competing, reality-based theories of change regarding the 2024 election. (To be clear, third parties don’t work in winner-take-all electoral systems, almost by definition. The only way a third party can win in a system like ours is by supplanting another party, which necessarily means it’s no longer a third party, just the other half of a structurally similar duopoly).

And I do not say this as a blind Biden partisan. I was involved in some of the very first conversations kicking off the initial “vote uncommitted” campaign in New Hampshire this year, and in my home state’s presidential primary last month I actively encouraged people to join me in voting uncommitted. These campaigns had a clear, strategic theory of change: to push Biden on Gaza now, prior to the general election, by demonstrating in the most difficult-to-ignore way that recreating his 2020 coalition will be much, much harder if he doesn’t change course. Unsurprisingly, AOC was the highest-profile politician in the country to make an argument in support of this movement—as she so often is.

Of course, I know that nothing written here has a chance of influencing any AOC haters; that group has made up its mind on the subject. This plea is for all the rest of us. Our movement needs to start calling out AOC derangement syndrome for what it is. It’s not just stupid. It’s not just cynical. It is, in actual fact, the perfect distillation of a strain of left politics that represents a betrayal of our cause. As progressives, we have a duty to win. Relentlessly tearing down one of our most effective leaders—someone who’s proven she is able to use both the legislative process and the bully pulpit to move us materially closer to the world we need and deserve—undermines our capacity to win. And that is unforgivable.

Oil companies knew since the 1950s that their product was causing catastrophic climate damage. The industry never supported the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, despite their many public statements to the contrary. Companies like BP and Shell understood the dangers of methane emissions from ‘natural’ gas, but marketed it as a clean energy solution anyways. Over the last decade, the industry has spent over $700 million on university research to promote a lasting role for fossil fuels in our energy future. ExxonMobil’s security chief is “tracking” climate activists’ whereabouts, while the American Petroleum Institute monitors their social media feeds.

Those are just some of the revelations from a 65-page report released by the Senate Budget committee ahead of a hearing on Wednesday into Big Oil disinformation. The report is the culmination of a three-year investigation into the industry’s “denial, disinformation, and doublespeak,” an inquiry which the industry tried to stymie at nearly every turn, withholding information, resisting subpoenas, and then swamping the committee with over 100,000 pages of meaningless documents.

Despite the industry’s efforts, the report is a damning portrayal of Big Oil’s decades-long crusade to simultaneously block meaningful climate action while extracting more government support for false solutions like ‘natural’ gas (aka methane) and carbon capture and sequestration. Over the course of thousands of emails, top executives, lobbyists, and PR advisors debate how to lobby against important regulations, greenwash the industry’s reputation, shape university research agendas, and mislead the public about the threat of fossil fuels.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t going to give it up willingly. Which means that the next phase of the effort to hold Big Oil accountable is going to have to pursue the industry with sharper teeth.

And that’s all from the content they were willing to share, which begs the question: what did they decide to redact? If these are the documents the industry felt best represent their harmless day-to-day operations, what sorts of bombshells are they covering up? The committee’s report reads like the flickering of a flashlight in a dark basement, giving us a snapshot of the subterranean world of Big Oil deception, while raising the question, what else hides in these dark corners?

Whatever it is, the fossil fuel industry isn’t going to give it up willingly. Which means that the next phase of the effort to hold Big Oil accountable is going to have to pursue the industry with sharper teeth.

At the federal level, that means getting the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into Big Oil disinformation. Twenty members of Congress have already sent a letter to DOJ urging such an investigation and after this week’s hearing and report, pressure will only grow. What’s needed now is for President Biden and the White House to throw their weight behind the idea. Congress can also pay their part by pursuing a more aggressive “make polluters pay” agenda, taking up bills like a windfall profits tax, which would go after Big Oil profiteering, and the Polluter Pays Climate Fund, which would make the industry pay their fair share to deal with climate damages.

At the city and state level, we need to see more lawsuits to prosecute the industry for climate damages and disinformation. Over 30 cities and states have already filed suit, but with thousands of communities already paying the costs of extreme weather, sea level rise and other climate impacts, we could see hundreds of new cases in the years to come. Lawsuits aren’t the only tool at our disposal: five states are now pursuing “climate superfund” bills that would make Big Oil pay for climate impacts by contributing to a fund based on their share of historic emissions. Vermont could pass its version as early as this summer.

Ultimately, the future of Big Oil accountability is up to us. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions on its efforts to lull us to sleep with fairy tales about ‘algae fuels’ or ‘natural’ gas. This week’s hearing was another wake up call to the reality of their deception and lies. Let’s not let it go to waste.

Do you remember President Biden's swift and strong response when pro-Israel extremists reportedly blasted the chemical weapon "skunk spray" on students peacefully protesting at Columbia University earlier this year? Do you remember how the White House condemned the attack, demanded accountability, and called on the school to protect students from such hate?

No? You don't remember? Of course you don't. Because none of it happened. President Biden didn't respond swiftly or strongly to the skunk spray attack. He didn't respond at all.

How about President Biden's response when a Texas man hurled racist slurs at a group of Palestinian Americans after a ceasefire protest at the University of Texas in Austin, ripped a Palestinian flagpole off their car, dragged one of them out of the backseat, and stabbed him?

Then again, the White House said nothing—even after our civil rights and advocacy organization directly alerted the White House about the incident.

The Biden administration's silence is nothing new.

Students honoring America's long tradition of peaceful civil disobedience deserve protection and respect, not smears and violence.

On Stanford University’s campus, a driver yelling "F—k you and your people" reportedly used his car to ram an Arab Muslim student attending a ceasefire protest, sending him to the hospital. No response from the White House.

At the University of Texas, pro-Israel extremists disrupted a Palestine Solidarity Committee meeting and hurled profanities at the attendees. No response.

In Arizona, Texas, Georgia, New York and other states, law enforcement agencies have brutalized students and even professors who attended peaceful protests against the genocide in Gaza. Again, no response.

Now contrast the White House's lack of response to violent actions motivated by anti-Palestinian hate with the White House's vocal response to inflammatory words that a small number of individuals have allegedly said at or near pro-ceasefire protests on college campuses.

“I condemn the antisemitic protests, that’s why I set up a program to deal with that,” the president said, broadly mischaracterizing the sit-ins led mostly by Jewish and Palestinian students.

In a statement marking Passover, Biden said, “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country.”

Just this week, the White House condemned protesters at Columbia for taking over Hamilton Hall—something students protesting the Vietnam War did, which the school now celebrates on its website—and curiously declared the use of a banner with the Arabic word "intifada" hate speech.

At the same time, the White House conveniently ignored the fact that most prominent banner displayed was "Hind's Hall," named after the 6-year-old girl murdered by Israeli forces while waiting for medics—also murdered—to save her.

Hypocrisy does not begin to describe the White House's inconsistency, which extends well beyond college campuses.

Last fall, the White House rushed to falsely claim that ceasefire protesters in Philadelphia were antisemitic for demonstrating outside a kosher restaurant—the protesters actually targeted the business because it held a fundraiser benefiting the IDF.

But the White House said nothing when protesters at November's March for Israel chanted genocidal slogans. On the contrary, a prominent Biden administration official spoke at the march, sharing the stage with notoriously anti-Muslim and antisemitic pastor John Hagee.

If President Biden is going to comment on every controversy that erupts at a protest or on a college campus, he must do so with moral consistency.

While the administration is quick to condemn any allegation of antisemitism at protests, whether verified or manufactured, the administration has repeatedly failed to condemn verified incidents of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia on college campuses (not to mention the antisemitism that pro-Israel extremists have directed at Jewish students advocating for a ceasefire, such as calling them "kapos.")

Singling out the remarks of unidentified bad actors at anti-genocide protests—some of whom may be agent provocateurs—was a transparent attempt to divert the conversation away from what Jewish, Palestinian, and other students are actually protesting for: divestment from the Israeli government and an end to the genocide.

Students honoring America's long tradition of peaceful civil disobedience deserve protection and respect, not smears and violence.

By instead validating slanders against pro-Palestinian protesters and downplaying anti-Palestinian racism on college campuses, the Biden administration has sent a signal that the hurt feelings of pro-war students who cannot tolerate hearing any criticism of the Israeli government are more worthy of attention than the violated rights and injured bodies of anti-war students.

The administration also gave law enforcement agencies and pro-Israel mobs cover to escalate their targeting of students, leading to horrific attacks on students at the University of California Los Angeles.

This inconsistency—this utter hypocrisy—must end. If President Biden is going to comment on every controversy that erupts at a protest or on a college campus, he must do so with moral consistency. He can start by condemning the ongoing efforts to defame and brutalize anti-genocide students before we see more attacks on protesters or, God forbid, a repeat of the Kent State massacre.

Just like during Vietnam, a young generation of students is on the right side of history. It's long past time for President Biden to join them.

Members of the United Auto Workers courageously fought corporate greed at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis last fall during the historic six-week Stand-Up Strike. Because of their determination and commitment, we won record contracts with the Big Three automakers.

After decades of falling behind, UAW autoworkers are finally moving forward again.

We made a lot of ambitious demands at the bargaining table. One in particular may not have gotten the same attention as the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments or the reopening of the Stellantis assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill. — but it could also prove transformational: We aligned our contracts to expire at midnight on April 30, 2028.

We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028, which is critically important for several reasons.

We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028.

The first is that, to reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender, and nationality.

May Day has its roots right here in the United States — in 1886, in the streets of Chicago, where workers were organizing and fighting for the 8-hour workday. This demand was met with brutal resistance by employers, who used both vicious mercenaries and the police to violently suppress mass protests led by unions. A bomb exploded in Chicago’s Haymarket Square during a clash between workers and police on May 4, 1886, killing several police officers and others.

The result was a sham trial, and seven labor leaders were sentenced to death.

The cause of those Haymarket Martyrs became the cause of the working class around the world, and May 1 became an international holiday commemorating the fight of workers everywhere to reclaim their time and the value of their labor.

Now, about 138 years later, May Day is celebrated as an official holiday in countries from Argentina to South Africa to Sweden to Hong Kong, just about everywhere — except its country of origin.

That’s not a coincidence. The billionaire class and their political lackeys have done everything they can to white out the true history of the working class in our country.

The billionaire class and their political lackeys have done everything they can to white out the true history of the working class in our country.

They want us to believe that corporate bosses gave workers decent wages, benefits and safer working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts. That justice and equality for people of color, for immigrants, for women and for queer communities were gifts benevolently handed down from above.

But we know the truth. Every law passed, every union formed and contract won — every improvement made at the workplace — has been won through the tireless sacrifice of the working class.

But if we are to truly reclaim the power and importance of May Day, then it can’t be through empty symbolism. It must be through action.

We wanted to ensure our contracts expired at midnight on April 30, 2028, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a rallying cry. We’ve asked other unions to join us in setting their contract expiration dates to May Day 2028 in hopes the labor movement can collectively aspire to building the power needed to change the world.

We form unions in our workplaces because we know we have far more power together than we do as individuals. What is true for workers in one workplace is true for workers across all workplaces. When unions organize together across industries and countries, our power is exponentially amplified. The fact is: without workers, the world stops running.

If working people are truly going to win on a massive scale — truly win healthcare as a human right, win pensions so everyone can retire with dignity, win an improved standard of living and more time off the clock so we can spend more of our time with our family and friends — then unions have to start thinking bigger.

I’ll give you an example.

We form unions in our workplaces because we know we have far more power together than we do as individuals. What is true for workers in one workplace is true for workers across all workplaces.

Last summer, during the lead-up to the contract expiration at the Big Three, I had the opportunity to meet with Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. During our conversation, he pledged that no trucks driven by Teamsters would deliver parts to struck Big Three facilities.

The power of UAW autoworkers withholding our labor during the Stand-Up Strike was massive. But with the Teamsters supporting our fight, refusing to deliver parts to Big Three facilities, we had even more power. It created another headache for the Detroit automakers. It created more pressure on the Big Three to settle.

Now, imagine that type of worker solidarity on a much bigger scale.

And because corporate greed doesn’t recognize borders, neither should our solidarity. In the UAW, we’ve seen firsthand how companies pit workers against one another. Workers in Michigan are pitted against workers in Alabama, workers in the United States are pitted against workers in Mexico, workers in North America are pitted against workers in South America.

It’s a simple game. Companies shift production — or threaten to shift production — to locations where the labor is cheaper, the environmental regulations more lax, and the tax cuts and subsidies are greater.

A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaire class’ race to the bottom. For the U.S. labor movement, that means grappling with some hard truths. Like the undeniable fact that it is impossible to protect American jobs while ignoring the plight of everyone else.

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There’s been talk about a “general strike” for as long as I’ve been alive. But that’s all it has been: talk.

If we are serious about building enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.

A general strike isn’t going to happen on a whim. It’s not going to happen over social media. A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement.

As working people, we must come together. We can no longer allow corporations, politicians and borders to divide us.

It’s time we reclaimed May Day for the working class.

That’s what our May Day contract expiration is all about.

Note: The following from The Daily Bruin editorial board was published in the early hours of May 1, 2024 amidst a violent attack by a right-wing mob on a student encampment on the UCLA campus calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and university divestment from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid.

It began with ear-piercing screams of wailing babies loudly emitting from speakers.

Counter-protesters tearing down the barricades. Laser pointers flashing into the encampment. People in masks waving strobe lights.

Tear gas. Pepper spray. Violent beatings.

Fireworks sparked at the border of the encampment, raining down on tents and the individuals inside.

At around 5 p.m. yesterday, Chancellor Gene Block sent an email to the UCLA student body claiming that security presence in the area had been increased. That was not visible in the midst of escalating violence. And even with the security present, there was no mediation far into the night.

UC President Michael Drake expressed support for Block’s decision to declare the encampment “unlawful” Tuesday evening, adding that action was needed when the safety of students was being threatened. And yet, in spite of official statements from the university and the UC, we witness little being done on the university’s part to ensure the protection of students who exercise their rights.

Mary Osako, vice chancellor of UCLA Strategic Communications, released a statement at 12:40 a.m. acknowledging the violence, adding that the fire department and medical personnel were involved.

“We are sickened by this senseless violence and it must end,” Osako said.

This came after a source in the encampment told the Daily Bruin that at least five protestors have been injured.

But for hours, UCLA administration stood by and watched as the violence escalated. LAPD did not arrive on the scene until slightly after 1 a.m. – once Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass sent them in for assistance at Block’s request.

Daily Bruin reporters on the scene were slapped and indirectly sprayed with irritants. Despite also being students, they were offered no protection.

The world is watching. As helicopters fly over Royce Hall, we have a question.

Will someone have to die on our campus tonight for you to intervene, Gene Block?

The blood would be on your hands.

In May 2009, Dr. Margaret Flowers, renowned single payer activist and humanist, was one of 13 single payer activists, doctors, and nurses arrested at one of the Senate Finance Committee meetings, chaired by then-Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), charged with reforming the U.S. health care system. The committee heard from 28 witnesses over two days representing major health care stakeholders. Missing from the lineup was even one witness in support of the obvious solution, single payer health care. As activists were hauled out of the hearing by police, one of them could be heard saying, “Why aren’t single payer activists at the table?”

Why indeed.

Then as now, single payer has been taken off the table, as evidenced by the recent 2025 Proposition Agenda released last week by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) to help energize the base of uninspired progressives and young voters to vote for President Joe Biden. Absent from the progressive blueprint are two items that surely excite progressive voters: Medicare for All and Gaza.

Even the 2019 agenda, as progressive Democrats faced the prospect of Trump’s reelection, mentioned "a truly universal system in the near future.” But in 2024, they seem to have abandoned even this paltry demand.

A timid health agenda that doesn’t call for bold action like national single payer, Medicare for All will keep voters home, away from the polls, where the Democrats need them.

Speaking to NBC News, the Chair of the CPC, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), preferred to include in the agenda “things that were populist and possible… and affected a huge number of people.”

Nothing could be more populist or affect more people than single payer, Medicare for All. A majority of Democrats (54%) favor a single national government program to provide health insurance, including 57% of Democrats under 30 and even 43% of moderate to conservative Democrats. The only thing that makes it not “possible” is Congress, not the will of the people.

There is little in the CPC health care agenda that will energize voters to storm the polls in November. Other than calling for the expansion of Medicare negotiation to cover all drugs for all Americans and capping drug prices to the average price in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (something that could easily be achieved under Medicare for All), the rest of the 2025 health care agenda is anemic at best.

Adding dental, hearing, and vision to Medicare, “cracking down on privatization of Medicare” without any specifics, or “shielding patients with medical debt from financial devastation by removing medical bills from credit reports” are cynical, incremental steps that will not rouse disaffected Democrats. A timid health agenda that doesn’t call for bold action like national single payer, Medicare for All will keep voters home, away from the polls, where the Democrats need them.

Then as now, our health care continues to accommodate for-profit players at the expense of our nation’s health. Even as the economic outlook for U.S. health insurance in 2024 is “neutral,” according to Fitch Ratings, the insurance industry is still expected to report in excess of $1.4 trillion in gross statutory income in 2023. After the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stuck to its guns and finalized a pay “cut” to Medicare Advantage plans (the private managed care plans for seniors on Medicare) in 2025, health insurance companies threatened to scale back benefits, hike premiums and reduce provider payments. No one, least of all officials at CMS, expects these insurance companies to scale back on profits to make up for the loss in revenue. Not in America. The “cut” the industry is moaning about is a payment rate increase of 3.7%, or more than $16 billion next year, but, because it is slightly lower than the rate hike they received in 2024, is considered a “cut” in the eyes of a greedy, profit-driven system that is overpaid by as much as $140 billion every year.

While progressive Democrats blame single payer as not being populist enough or politically possible, it is the corporate takeover of the political system through campaign contributions that has taken single payer off the table.

These insurance corporations are major campaign donors, the reason even progressive Democrats are timid about single payer. Over his 25-year career, the senator from Montana who kicked the activists out from the Senate hearing received $3.8 million in campaign contributions from the health sector, an average of $152,000 per year. Since 2019, health industry campaign contributions for the current Democrat chairing the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden (D-OR), have totaled $1.4 million, or $280,000 per year. A quick search of campaign contributions to Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, shows across the board consensus: the health care sector is generous with progressives as well.

While progressive Democrats blame single payer as not being populist enough or politically possible, it is the corporate takeover of the political system through campaign contributions that has taken single payer off the table. Blinded by corporate dollars, Democrats are unwilling to recognize the perverse and exceptional role of profit, which has captured our health care system, our elected officials, and the government agencies tasked with protecting the health of the nation.

It’s time to put national, single payer, Medicare for All on the table. We need a reinvigorated campaign, like the one that started in 2009, when activists, nurses, and doctors were arrested for demanding that single payer be on the table. We call for everyone to stand up and put the real solution, National Improved Medicare for All free from corporate profit, on the nation’s agenda.

We are facing a crisis at home and abroad. The voters that progressive Democrats want to attract through their agenda not only support national legislation for single payer but support a ceasefire in Gaza by wide margins. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants to excite the base, move young people to vote in November, it must have the courage to propose bold, popular policies that uplift and inspire us. Everyone, not just the young, will come out to vote for that.

May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886. May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the U.S. and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since U.S. capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.

Indeed, the U.S. has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most U.S. corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the U.S. has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.

The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the U.S. also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.

While May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking.

Social Darwinism first appeared in U.S. political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.

Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the U.S., which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in U.S. politics across time.

The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the U.S. and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.

In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in U.S. political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.

Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the U.S. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”

Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the U.S. labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the U.S. jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the U.S. were also recorded last year.

So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.

But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.

Sometimes in the morning with a cup of coffee I watch some of Morning Joe on MSNBC. I did on Monday (April 29) hearing Joe Scarborough’s condescending rant on college protests. On those today opposing Israel’s actions in the Gaza war, and on those earlier opposing the Vietnam war.

“Where are the adults!?” Scarborough asked after saying “it makes as much sense in 2024 having 18- and 19-year-olds running college campuses as in 1968, which is to say it doesn’t make any sense at all.” Any 18- and 19-year-olds protesting in 1968 and 2024 are not “adults” according to Scarborough, even though in 1968 they could be killed in Vietnam.

'Where are the adults?' Joe on continuing campus protests

Scarborough went on in his diatribe characterizing all so-labeled pro-Palestinian protestors as Jew-haters. His own brand of fearmongering as he blamed college administrators for, and I quote:

...letting their students and outside agitators run across the campus, shut down debate, scream whenever anybody tries to talk, reason to them, shout genocidal chants, hold up signs pointing to Jews saying Hamas’s next victims. Holding up signs talking about the “Final Solution.” Chanting constantly: “From the river to the sea”…Most of the students chanting it don’t understand that they are chanting genocidal comments.

Clearly Scarborough hasn’t read, or ignored, the article the day before in the Sunday Washington Post (available even earlier online) describing the experience of college students, in their own words, regarding today’s protests.

A 24-year-old Jewish student who talked to The Post reporters supported the protest at his school, UC-Berkeley, but with juggling two part-time jobs and coursework hadn’t joined the protest encampment there. But he said, his words, “things need to change in this drastic way to keep our eyes from averting away from what’s going on in Gaza” adding the “best way to do that is to mess up the status quo.” He rejected being a Jew meant automatic support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Of course, he doesn’t “want people to be hostages, either,” those taken by Hamas militants on October 7. But the children in Gaza also “don’t have any say in the fight,” so he has donated to funds supporting these Palestinian children.

As it is, Scarborough attributed antisemitism the dominant motive across today’s protest. His evidence? The fact protesters haven’t appeared concerned with known atrocities in other countries, mimicking Bill Maher’s related punchlines on Maher’s HBO show on April 26, Scarborough even showing a video clip where Maher asks why those protesting civilian deaths and starvation in Gaza today, in his words,

care so much about this particular cause? North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says Gays should be stoned to death because they, quote, ‘deserve it.’

On CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria on April 28, Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins had an answer for Maher (and Scarborough), saying:

I don't think that people think that Israel is unique example of evil in the world. I think what's special about it is it couldn't do what it's doing without the support of the United States. So students in the United States think we have a responsibility…I mean, the United States is not supporting North Korea…not supporting Syria...What's being done [in Gaza] is being done in my name as an American and…as a Jew.

Professor Robbins also said this about the phrase “From the river to the sea”:

So as I understand “From the river to the sea,” it means equal rights for all the people living between the river and the sea.

The role of the U.S. underlies protests today on the Gaza war as it motivated protests on the Vietnam war we participated in over 50 years ago. It was the U.S. engaged in the Vietnam carnage and drafting 18-year-old men to die there for a cause even their presidents knew privately was a losing cause. To needlessly die in Vietnam as civilians are needlessly dying in Gaza from bombings and starvation.

Here's how Professor Robbins characterized earlier pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in the discussion on CNN:

[Students] at Columbia, they have not shouted out slogans, chanted slogans in support of Hamas or the wanton destruction of civilian lives on October 7th…It's a little upsetting I think to everybody at Columbia that the mainstream media, as well as the politicians, have confused things that are chanted outside Columbia's gates with things that the Columbia protesters are saying…I haven't heard anything even remotely like that…that are being chanted outside the gates.

In her statement on April 29, Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche ”Shafik also said this: “External actors have contributed to creating a hostile environment…especially around our gates, that is unsafe for everyone.” Even Scarborough in his rant mentioned “outside agitators.”

In Vietnam anti-war protests there were isolated incidents of violence, but those didn’t represent the vast majority of protests. Similarly, in pro-Palestinian protests there may have been incidents of antisemitic remarks, and even occupying an administrative building as protestors did April 30 at Columbia University, but it’s an exaggeration (unfortunately, often purposefully so) to paint the majority of these protestors with that same brush.

Hyperbole concluding antisemitism is THE defining characteristic of students in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Now, on the other hand, antisemitism was quite evident in Charlottesville in 2017 when white supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us.“

Perhaps President Joe Biden could help end the pro-Palestinian demonstrations if he took a firmer stand against the genocidal conduct of the war in Gaza under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direction. Stopping delivery of U.S. military aid to Israel until Netanyahu changes course, for instance.

Instead of conditioning military aid, House Speaker Mike Johnson in his speech at Columbia University April 24, aside from speciously attributing all protesting students antisemitic, said if the protests could not be “contained quickly…there is an appropriate time for the National Guard…to bring order to these campuses.”

Remember Kent State? When National Guard killed four students on May 4, 1970 as students gathered to protest President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam war. Kent State University’s professors Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley provide a detailed account of events leading up to, during, and after the Guard opened fire with life rounds. Here is a segment of their account:

Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard. The closest student was Jeffrey Miller, who was shot in the mouth while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot, a distance of approximately 270 feet from the Guard. Allison Krause was in the Prentice Hall parking lot; she was 330 feet from the Guardsmen and was shot in the left side of her body. William Schroeder was 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when he was shot in the left side of his back. Sandra Scheuer was also about 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when a bullet pierced the left front side of her neck.

You’re reading right. The Guard killed students more than a football field away.

After Kent State, demonstrations exploded across campuses leading to hundreds of colleges to temporary close.

Now think about the Guard being called in to break up the crowded close quarters of encampments pro-Palestinian protesters constructed on campuses across the country. What could possibly go wrong? A lot.

Author's note: The following is the text of a speech delivered on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington on April 29, 2024 during a rally that called for the termination of Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and Provost Rahul Shrivastav after they brought heavily armed Indiana State Troopers—including snipers—onto the campus to violently repress peaceful protests. Over three days, on two separate occasions, the troopers violently dispersed crowds peacefully assembled in a free speech zone, pulling down a few harmless tents, and violently arresting over 50 students and faculty members, each of whom was banned from campus for at least a year, on threat of prosecution for felony trespass.

The Whitten administration must go.

On April 16, at a special General Meeting called by the Bloomington Faculty Council, the Bloomington faculty passed a vote of no confidence in President Whitten by a vote of 827-29—that's 93%. For Provost Shrivastav—who was installed by her and cannot be judged apart from her—the vote for no confidence was only 91%.

Both the meeting and the overwhelming vote of no confidence were unprecedented in my 37 years as an IU faculty member.

Barely a few minutes had passed before Whitten sent out an email bemoaning the challenges facing higher education and promising to “listen and learn,” and to “weigh the guidance from faculty council and the participation of the campus community through shared governance to achieve our collective vision of a thriving campus.”

A few minutes later, Quinn Buckner, the retired mediocre professional basketball player who now chairs IU’s Board of Trustees, declared: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees.”

President Whitten and Chair Buckner—surely peers when it comes to professional distinction and educational vision, or the lack thereof—may believe in each other.

But it must frankly be said: the faculty vote of no confidence in Whitten and her underlings did not signify a loss of confidence but a lack of confidence.

The Whitten administration was hired by a Board that overruled its own appointed search committee and that made no effort to consult with faculty. Whitten’s appointment was never authorized or even seriously considered by the faculty; Whitten has done nothing to earn the confidence of the faculty; and so Whitten has never had the confidence of the faculty.

But in recent months what had been a simple lack became something more—a strong and determined opposition by a broad range of faculty—across the intellectual, disciplinary, and political spectrum—who have come to consider the attitudes and the actions of the administration as not simply incompetent or confused or intellectually suspect or morally derelict or politically objectionable but downright dangerous.

For many of us, things began to crystallize when the Whitten administration made IUB the first major research university in the United States to suspend a tenured faculty member for doing what MAGA Rep. Jim Banks and other right-wing legislators declared verboten: serving as a supportive faculty advisor of the student-run Palestine Solidarity Committee. The administration then followed up by peremptorily and rudely canceling the long-planned major art exhibit of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby.

Across the country, pro-Palestinian rallies on campuses have generated controversy, and across the country, a political unholy alliance of far-right, Christian nationalist politicians—and, I am sorry to say, organizations like the ADL, AIPAC, and Hillel—have responded to the controversy by demanding that the protests be shut down on the specious grounds of “opposing antisemitism” and “protecting students.”

The presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and Cornell were called before MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s House Education and Workforce Committee to abase themselves, failed to be sufficiently humbled, and were denounced and subsequently cashiered. When Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik’s turn came, she bent the knee, promised to crack down on her campus, and then returned to upper Manhattan to do just that. Poor Pam Whitten has not—yet—merited an audience with Stefanik. And so she found her own way to get the validation she desires from those who matter most to her—call in the snipers.

The protest and encampment here are not perfect—no protest is. I do not personally agree with everything that is being said and done by the protesters. But the protests are peaceful, small by comparison to elsewhere, and off the beaten path, in a free speech zone, disrupting nothing. They are being conducted by students who sincerely care about a genuine human rights crisis and oppose war crimes and have every right to act on these concerns as they have done.

At the same time, the protests furnished the perfect opportunity for the Whitten administration to prove its mettle and to demonstrate its superiority to the leadership of the Ivy Leagues, which have apparently been insufficiently repressive.

Whereas those college presidents actually articulated ideas, however confused or craven, Whitten articulates no ideas.

Whereas those presidents typically used campus police or city police to suppress their students, Whitten brought in heavily armed and armored State Troopers, many in camouflaged battle gear, to suppress IU’s students and faculty, and to brutally arrest over 50 of them—of us. Last week there were armed snipers on the IMU roof, and scores of machine-gun toting troops taking control of the campus—at the behest of the very administration that punished or canceled other entirely peaceful events on the grounds of “public safety.”

It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.

It represents a clear and present danger to the safety of everyone on campus within range of the weapons; an equally clear and present danger to our constitutionally protected civil liberties; and a profound danger to the intellectual freedom and education that is at the heart of any serious university.

It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.

Last week Whitten turned the IUB campus into Putin’s Russia or Lukashenko’s Belarus or the Birmingham, Alabama ruled by so-called “Commissioner of Public Safety” Bull Connor in the 1960’s. All that was missing was the water cannons and the police dogs. Can these be next?

No, this is not about differences over 21st century educational policy. It is not about the challenges of administering a complex institution. It is not primarily about university procedures—and their blatant violation. At this point, it is not even about the requirements of free speech on campus.

It is about the decision to turn the campus into a mini-police state.

The Whitten administration has crossed many lines. That is why we voted no confidence. But the line that was crossed last week both culminates and exceeds all the others. And there is no going back.

Earlier last week we were invited by the Provost through the Dean to share ideas about how to move forward as a campus.

This is what I sent to our admirable and brave College Dean, and to the administration:

We are being asked to share suggestions regarding President Whitten and Provost Shrivastav, with the assurance that our comments will be kept confidential and anonymized.

The fact that this assurance has been given is symptomatic of the current situation on the campus: many colleagues feel afraid to say what they think, and for a very simple reason: the higher administration has recently behaved without regard for due process or principles of academic freedom, most notably in the suspension of our colleague, Professor Abdulkader Sinno.

What can the President and the Provost do?

They can very publicly state that they understand that they have lost the confidence of the faculty and also understand why, with specific reference to the things that have been widely discussed.

They can then immediately reverse their awful suspension of Professor Sinno; do whatever is necessary to reschedule the Samia Halaby exhibition; and publicly apologize for failing to offer the public support for Dr. Caitlin Bernard that she has long deserved.

They can then immediately open honest lines of communication with the BFC and with the leaders of the no confidence vote about ways of achieving some measure of confidence from the faculty.

Or they can look in the mirror, realize that they cannot credibly lead a university without the confidence of the faculty, and resign. Perhaps in their next positions they can do a better job of gaining and maintaining faculty confidence.

Alternatively, they can ignore all of the above suggestions, and pretend that they are serious academic leaders who can do whatever they want without regard to the collective voice of the faculty that has already been resoundingly expressed. This would appear to be the choice they have made. They can at least feel proud that Quinn Buckner, a formerly mediocre basketball player who is now a mediocre basketball announcer, thinks they are doing a great job.

That was then.

This is now.

I was mistaken last week. For there was another option: call in the troops.

Why?

Why?

Well, it seems clear that President Whitten fancies herself a leader. Not a thought leader. Not an educational leader.

A leader in the nationwide effort to be tough on the “crime” of speaking out.

A law and order university president.

The Spiro T. Agnew of American higher education.

And so she moved to attack almost everything that higher education stands for—with the exception of the economic boosterism and sports cheerleading that was the hallmark of her leadership until she decided to suspend academic freedom and call in the troops.

Whitten has proven that when the calls for crackdown come, she will crack down.

She will not resign. If she had any self-respect as an educational leader, the vote of no confidence would have led her to do anything but call in the troops.

And so she called in the troops. And by doing so, she showed utter contempt for the faculty who do the teaching here at this university and the students who are here to learn and grow and assume the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

We need to take back our university.

We need to persuade the Trustees—to demonstrate to them—that this administration can no longer govern, for it no longer has credibility, not simply here but throughout the country and the world. We must mobilize every one of our academic and professional and institutional connections to expose what this administration has done and how cynically it treats the things we value most.

A trustee is one to whom something of value is entrusted.

We need to try to get these Trustees to honor their trust to the teachers, students, staff, and graduate workers who together do the work of teaching and learning.

We need to use every legal means to defend our students, and ourselves, from repression and retribution.

And we need to simultaneously do the hard work of reinvigorating serious public discourse—about academic freedom, civic responsibility, and the value of serious disagreement about politics—on our campus.

There’s more. Bloomington is a college town. It has a proud history of social and political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. What this administration has done and is doing is a travesty of this entire community and everyone who is proud to live and work here.

Finally: what has been done here is part of a broad effort to attack higher education and political liberalism in the U.S. What we saw on Dunn Meadow last week when the troops descended is a microcosm of what a second Trump administration will mean, on our campuses, in our cities, at our borders. All of us—including the students whose rights we now proudly defend—should think hard about this.

There is much time to discuss and debate such things.

Now is the time to say and say again: the Whitten administration must go.

They fooled me completely.

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Donald Trump’s presidential immunity defense, I, an experienced lawyer and devout follower of legal developments, believed that the court had only accepted the case in order to buy time for Trump.

I was sure the right-wing justices—having ensured that the election overthrow prosecution would not go to trial until after November—would ultimately reject Trump’s outlandish claim that a president can commit crimes with impunity.

Wrong. At the oral argument of the case, the conservatives quietly embraced the notion that a president could face no criminal penalties even for ordering the assassination of a political rival or directing the military to stage a coup. They were unfazed by an argument that our president needed to enjoy the immunity of a king although the Constitution says not one word about immunity. And, in a mind-numbing reversal of reality, Justice Alito argued that presidential immunity was required so presidents could “leave office peacefully” and to avoid a cycle of events that “destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.”

How could a conservative majority, nominally dedicated to the rule of law, engage in such illogical contortions to evade the simple reality that Donald Trump is entitled to his day in court like everyone else, but is not entitled to special protection from the law?

Could the right-wing justices have failed to notice that the petitioner in this very case, Donald Trump, did not seek to “go off into peaceful retirement”? That instead he launched a vicious campaign of lies to reverse the election, based on election-fraud allegations found to be groundless in 60 cases?

Could they have forgotten that “the functioning of our country as a democracy” had in fact been “destabilized”—by the petitioner before their court, Donald Trump—when he wrongly persuaded tens of millions of followers that they had been cheated, and when the mob he had summoned to Washington invaded the Capitol to halt the peaceful transfer of power?

No one can seriously believe the actual events that brought the case before the Supreme Court matter less than Justice Alito’s upside down theory. No one can believe that granting immunity for the very crimes that had literally destabilized our functioning as a democracy could be the key to stabilizing American democracy and encouraging losing candidates to peacefully leave office.

In order to achieve these goals, they must maintain their right-wing majority for decades to come, even if that means accepting the threat of a fascist presidency under Donald Trump.

Why have the right-wing justices taken up such a laughable endeavor, embarrassing, really, if you consider how smart and well-educated they all are? How could a conservative majority, nominally dedicated to the rule of law, engage in such illogical contortions to evade the simple reality that Donald Trump is entitled to his day in court like everyone else, but is not entitled to special protection from the law?

The answer has nothing to do with constitutional law. The pretense was necessary because the Supreme Court’s conservative cabal sees reelecting Trump as critical to their long term mission, so critical that they are willing to turn the Supreme Court into a judicial version of the National Enquirer, “catching and killing” threats to Donald Trump’s interests regardless of what the Constitution says.

They are determined to do all they can to reelect Trump and save him from being convicted, not because they love him, but because they are determined to preserve their own continuing hegemony at the pinnacle of our legal system.

Conservatives have a solid six to three majority today. But Clarence Thomas is 75 years old and Samuel Alito is 74. Should ill health or death remove them in the next five years, a Democrat in the White House could create a liberal 5-4 majority, ending the conservative reign.

They are determined to do all they can to reelect Trump and save him from being convicted, not because they love him, but because they are determined to preserve their own continuing hegemony at the pinnacle of our legal system.

Right-wing justices have intervened before to boost their preferred candidate, with the evident purpose of ensuring a conservative Supreme Court majority for another generation. In the year 2000, with control of the White House turning on the cliff-hanger election in Florida, the Supreme Court stepped in and by a 5-4 vote ordered a recount to be halted while Republican George W. Bush was 537 votes ahead, delivering Florida and the presidency to Bush.

Not long after, Bush appointed two right-wing judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Those two have been crucial to enacting the conservative judicial agenda. They were necessary to the 5-4and 6-3 conservative majorities in Citizens United, enshrining the role of money in American politics, District of Columbia v. Heller, which invented a personal right to own guns, Shelby County v. Holder, eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade.

The conservative judges are not through imposing their vision on America. They intend to continue legislating from the bench to constrict women’s rights, protect the prerogatives of the gun lobby, limit voting rights, shield the fossil fuel industry from accountability, and above all guard the wealth and power of corporations and the super-rich.

In order to achieve these goals, they must maintain their right-wing majority for decades to come, even if that means accepting the threat of a fascist presidency under Donald Trump.

They haven’t gotten there yet. Democracy can prevail in the coming election, and Trump may yet face jury verdicts on the full range of crimes with which he has been charged. But in their nonsensical efforts to help Trump escape judgment, the corrupt rightists of our Supreme Court have confirmed the need to end their suzerainty.

I have spent the better part of the last 12 years writing about lies. My colleagues call it “disinformation,” and I generally do, too, but let’s call it for what it is: lying. During this stretch, I have written more than 200 articles and columns, and most of them were either about CEOs who lie, experts who lie, scientists who lie, attorneys general who lie, legislators who lie, or a president who lies. And I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill white lies. I’m talking about lies that have grave consequences for the future of the planet.

(I should add that I also wrote 65 columns featuring Q&As with scientists and experts who work for my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS. They don’t lie. They follow the science. The series is called “Ask a Scientist,” and the last one I wrote will run in mid-May.)

After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods; his predecessor, Rex Tillerson; and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil, and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

See No Evil

I wrote more columns about ExxonMobil and its top executives than any other major source of climate lies. Most of these pieces were about the company’s support for a seemingly independent network of anti-regulation, “free-market” nonprofits that spread falsehoods about the reality and seriousness of climate change. ExxonMobil spent at least $39 million on some 70 of these organizations from 1998 through 2020, more than any funder besides Charles Koch and his brother David, co-owner of Koch Industries until his death in 2019.

I first wrote about ExxonMobil in March 2013 after I saw the company’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, on the Charlie Rose talk show, who provided me with fodder for perhaps my favorite of two dozen ExxonMobil-related columns.

Rose asked Tillerson open-ended questions on a range of subjects, including climate change and national energy policy. And Rose did, at times, ask follow-up questions. But in nearly every instance, Rose listened politely, refrained from challenging Tillerson on the facts, and went on to his next question. So I decided to write a column in which I pretended to have been on the show alongside Tillerson, calling it “Rex & Me: The Charlie Rose Show You Should Have Seen Last Friday,” a nod to Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me.

ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.

The column featured excerpts from Rose and Tillerson’s hour-long conversation with comments I inserted as if I were sitting there in the studio rebutting Tillerson’s statements.

Rose first asked Tillerson about his take on global warming. Repeating his company’s long-standing talking point, Tillerson emphasized scientific uncertainty, despite the fact that Exxon’s own scientists had been warning management about “potentially catastrophic” human-caused global warming since at least 1977. “We have continued to study this issue for decades…,” he said. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around the climate, climate change, why it’s changing, what the principal drivers of climate change are.”

In my retelling of the show, I quickly pointed out that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had by then concluded that “most” of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950 was “very likely” due to the increase in human-made carbon emissions.

When Rose asked Tillerson if there is a link between extreme weather events and global warming, Tillerson told Rose that he had “seen no scientific studies to confirm [one].” In the original broadcast, Rose went on to another topic. But before he was able to do that in my imaginary scenario, I corrected the record. “There is, in fact, substantial scientific evidence that there’s a strong link between global warming and heat waves and coastal flooding from sea-level rise,” I said. “There’s also a strong link to heavy precipitation and drought, depending on the region and time of the year.”

Later in the hour, Tillerson told Rose that the federal government should end subsidies for renewable energy. “I mean, wind has received subsidies for more than 20 years now,” he said. “Maybe if we took the subsidy off and it was challenged and had to perform, people would take it to a new level.”

It was a bogus argument that fossil fuel proponents would repeat ad nauseum over the next 10 years, so when Rose failed to provide some needed context, I jumped in.

“Rex,” I interjected, “it’s bizarre that your top national energy priority is ending federal support for renewables… [W]hat about the oil and gas industry’s subsidies and tax breaks?” I then explained that, at the time, the oil and gas industry had been receiving an average of $4.86 billion (in 2010 dollars) in federal tax breaks and subsidies for nearly 100 years. “Renewables,” I added, “have gotten peanuts in comparison.”

Four years later, when Tillerson testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after former President Donald Trump nominated him to be his secretary of state, a senator asked him if he would pursue the Group of 20 pledge to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. His reply? “I’m not aware of anything the fossil fuel industry gets that I would characterize as a subsidy.”

Still Funding Lies After All These Years

Tillerson’s successor, Darren Woods, now 59, has carried on his company’s tradition of deceit. During an October 2021 hearing the House Oversight and Reform Committee held on the oil industry’s decades-long climate disinformation campaign, Woods—one of four oil company executives testifying that day—was asked if he would “commit right here to stop funding organizations that reject the science of climate change.”

“We do not support climate denial,” he replied. “We do not ask people to lobby for anything different than our publicly supported [climate] positions.”

The history of that lie bears retelling. For years, ExxonMobil executives have acknowledged climate change is happening—but not its cause—and insisted they want to be “part of the solution.” And since 2015, they have claimed that their company supports the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which was brokered that year. Why? ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.

The genesis of ExxonMobil’s brazen hypocrisy can be traced back to 2007. In January of that year, UCS released consultant (now UCS editorial director) Seth Shulman’s report, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science,” revealing that the company had spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks to launder its message. When asked by a Greenwire reporter a month later about the grantees identified in the UCS report, Kenneth Cohen, then ExxonMobil’s vice president of public affairs, said the company had stopped funding them. Hardly. In 2007 alone, the company gave $2 million to 37 denier groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Heartland Institute, and Manhattan Institute.

In July 2015, after UCS discovered that Exxon (before it merged with Mobil) was aware of the threat posed by climate change more than 30 years earlier and had been intentionally deceiving the public for decades, reporters contacted ExxonMobil spokesman Richard Keil for comment. One reporter asked him about ExxonMobil’s long history of funding climate change denier groups. “I’m here to talk to you about the present,” Keil said. “…We do not fund or support those who deny the reality of climate change.”

I wrote a column a week later dissecting Keil’s carefully crafted whopper. “Technically [Keil was correct], perhaps, because practically no one can say with a straight face that global warming isn’t happening anymore,” I wrote. “Most, if not all, of the people who used to deny the reality of climate change have morphed into climate science deniers. They now concede that climate change is real, but reject the scientific consensus that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is driving it. Likewise, they understate the potential consequences, contend that we can easily adapt to them, and fight government efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote renewable energy. ExxonMobil is still funding those folks, big time.”

By its own accounting, ExxonMobil has continued to fund those folks—albeit fewer of them—to this day. For at least a decade, the company has been listing its grantees in its annual World Giving Report, and beginning in 2015 I wrote a column every year citing how much it gave climate science denier groups the previous year until its 2021 report on its 2020 outlays, when it stopped listing grantees receiving less than $100,000. Previously, its reports included grants of $5,000 or more. That lack of transparency has made it impossible to discern exactly how much the company is still spending on climate disinformation, but nonetheless it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

My 2021 column on the company’s grants from 2020, “Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial,” ran two days before Woods and top executives from BP America, Chevron, and Shell testified before the House Oversight Committee. Despite Woods’s insistence at the hearing that his company does not support “climate denial” and does not ask its grantees to support anything other than its official climate-related pronouncements, three ExxonMobil grantees that received at least $100,000 in 2020 contradicted the company’s professed positions. They included a climate science-denying economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received more than $5 million from ExxonMobil since 1998; George Washington University’s anti-regulation Regulatory Studies Center, which opposed stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would significantly reduce carbon emissions; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which at the time dubiously called for “the increased use of natural gas” to “further progress” in addressing climate change.

Since I wrote that column, my last one on ExxonMobil’s annual grants, the company’s Worldwide Giving Report in 2022 indicated that in 2021, ExxonMobil contributed another $150,000 to AEI and $150,000 to the GWU Regulatory Studies Center. The company has yet to publish a report for its grantmaking in 2022, let alone 2023.

Things Go Worse With Koch

My other bête noire is the 88-year-old libertarian industrialist Charles Koch—the 22th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $67.6 billion—and his network of uber-rich friends and “free-market” think tanks and advocacy groups. From 1997 through 2020, Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $160 million to at least 90 groups to manufacture doubt about climate science and delay efforts to address global warming—four times more than even what ExxonMobil reportedly spent over the same time period.

Koch is a lot more doctrinaire than his current counterpart at ExxonMobil. Woods downplays the central role human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—plays in triggering climate change, but he has grudgingly conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.” Koch, by contrast, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and has questioned—with no evidence—the veracity of climate models, which studies have found to be quite accurate.

For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Over the last 12 years, I wrote eight columns on the Koch network’s escapades, including:

• Its attempt in 2012 to scare consumers about the cost of state renewable energy standards, which require utilities to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by increasing their use of wind and solar power. In fact, such standards have had a negligible effect on electricity prices and often save ratepayers money.

• Its effort in 2013 to kill the federal production tax credit for wind, when the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity and 100 other Koch network groups made the same disingenuous argument that Rex Tillerson made on the Charlie Rose show. “Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, “not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely.”

• Its 2018 campaign to kill a federal income tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, trotting out the same phony argument it made against wind tax breaks. The 18 Koch-funded groups that collaborated in the campaign, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and the Koch-founded American Energy Alliance and Americans for Prosperity, argued that the government shouldn’t subsidize any energy technologies, but confined their objections to tax breaks for clean energy alternatives, again falsely claiming—like Tillerson—that the oil and gas industry receives no subsidies.

But my favorite Koch column is my most recent one, “It’s Time for Charles Koch to Testify About His Climate Change Disinformation Campaign,” which ran in March 2022. I urged the House Oversight Committee to pull Koch in for questioning before it ended its investigation given the fact that he “is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall … combined.”

Unfortunately, the committee did not take my advice, but the column did give me the opportunity to report on the considerable amount Koch Industries’ political action committees (PACs) and employees spend on campaign contributions, how much the company spends on lobbying, and the fact at least 50 Koch network alumni landed key positions in the Trump administration. They included Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, and… Vice President Mike Pence, who led Trump’s transition team. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government—as well as by more than 60 executive branch staff from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation—the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental safeguards.

Is the Day of Reckoning Coming?

As I said at the beginning of this essay, the lies uttered and underwritten by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil executives—as well as their employees and PACs’ generous campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress—have had serious consequences.

Last year, the United States suffered an unprecedented number of climate change-related billion-dollar disasters, including record heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and floods, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 28 extreme weather events collectively caused nearly $93 billion in damage. Last year also was hottest in at least 173 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The annual temperature was 1.48°C (2.66°F) above the preindustrial average.

While the world is burning up, oil industry profits last year—while lower than in 2022—were still quite robust. The two U.S. oil giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, netted $36 billion and $21.3 billion respectively. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, one of the oil company executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee in October 2021, boasted that Chevron “returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas [in 2023] than any year in the company’s history.” Meanwhile, Koch Industries’ annual revenue was $115 billion last year, down slightly from $125 billion in 2022. (Because the company is privately held, it is not required to divulge profit data.)

Cities, counties, states, and U.S. territories are now taking steps to hold these and other fossil fuel companies, as well as their trade associations, accountable. So far, some 40 of them have filed 28 lawsuits in state and territory courts for fraud and damages. Chicago and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 30 miles north of Philadelphia, are the most recent municipalities to file a climate lawsuit. In both cases, the defendants include BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Philips 66, and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s biggest trade association.

ExxonMobil has been named as a defendant in all of the cases. To date, Koch Industries has been named in only one, filed by the state of Minnesota in June 2020. That lawsuit alleges that API, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries, which owns an oil refinery in the state, violated state consumer protection laws by misleading Minnesotans about the role fossil fuels play in causing the climate crisis.

As I pointed out in a column about Minnesota’s lawsuit, the state has a storied history when it comes to such litigation. It was one of the first states to sue the tobacco industry, and its lawsuit in the 1990s—the only one that made it to trial—resulted in a groundbreaking settlement of $6 billion over the first 25 years and $200 million annually thereafter. The case also pried 35 million pages of documents from tobacco company files revealing details of the industry’s campaign to sow doubt about the links between smoking and disease. As UCS pointed out in its 2007 exposé of ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaign, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used many of the same strategies and tactics.

U.S. climate litigation is only expected to grow this year, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the oil industry’s attempts to transfer climate lawsuits from state courts to federal courts, where industry lawyers believe they are more likely to prevail. If the lawsuits are ultimately successful, courts could order oil companies and their trade associations to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to impacted communities.

That eventuality, much like the deserved comeuppance the tobacco industry received, would be a just outcome. But even a huge payout wouldn’t begin to compensate for the damage already done by Koch and ExxonMobil lies.