Still insanely claiming they're arresting "the worst of the worst" gardeners, roofers, abuelas and taco-makers - and eager to spend their shiny new billions on more rag-tag thugs to meet their quotas - ICE Barbie et al have launched a new recruitment campaign asserting, "Your country is calling you (to) defend the homeland," a phrase surely inadvertently carrying a crisp whiff of blood-and-soil Nazism. Ditto - right? - an Uncle Sam raging of an America "invaded by criminals and predators - we need YOU to get them out."

Of course the urgent call for 10,000 more racist goons with anger issues and zero oversight to boost our flourishing new "sado-populism" comes alongside all the regime's other, once-unimaginable "weird shit": The celebration of deadly coal: "She is the moment," say wut?; Florida's half-mast tribute to "shitheel" Hulk Hogan, "Donald Trump with muscles and a mustache"; the once-reputable Smithsonian lamely bowing to North-Korea-style pressure to remove evidence of former guy's impeachments; Press Barbie squawking it's "well past time" he get "the Noble Peace Prize"; and his new "Marie-Antoinette-on-steroids" move to turn the White House into a "tacky golf motel" cum brothel with a $200 million vulgar golden ballroom even though we can't afford veterans' health care, to feed hungry kids, to save HIV patients etc because, duh, "For me not thee, Part 1 million."

Amidst these atrocities - and facing a random, frenzied, Goebbels mandate to make 3,000 arrests a day and “save America” - ICE continues to hunt down defenseless, largely innocent brown people who came to this country to do all the lousy, low-wage jobs here that native-born Americans don't want to do. The passage of Trump's big ghastly bill has ominously ramped up that effort, with ICE's budget swelling from $8 billion to $28 billion and over $4 billion allocated to hire up to 10,000 more thugs. ICE, meanwhile, somehow still clings to the fantastical, self-serving claim their "brave" officers are targeting "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens"; in a recent post, they boasted they just arrested five bad guys, failing to mention the other, vicious, 2,995 dry-wallers, house-painters, farmworkers, dishwashers, landscapers and child-care workers they daily save us from.

On Planet Earth, injustices abound. The over 200, mostly innocent Venezuelans flamboyantly, illegally disappeared to an El Salvadoran gulag - then quietly returned to their country - say they endured months of torture and abuse. Across the country and mostly notably in California during this "Summer of ICE," roving bands of masked goons in tactical gear continue to hunt down immigrants at work sites, markets, courtrooms with escalating violence and an unacknowledged "shattering of norms." Men and women beaten up, grabbed in the street, torn from crying kids, dragged from their cars after thugs blithely opt to "smash their fucking windows." People hauled away by anonymous fascists to parts unknown, forced to leave behind their cars, keys, phones, pets, lawnmowers still running, their lives precipitously imploded in minutes.

It's everywhere - residents of Rochester NY saw 17 cars of hooligans arrive at a popular neighborhood Asian market to drag off a handful of scared workers, residents in Maine's small tourist town of Wells are protesting their police becoming the only ones in Maine cooperating with ICE - as is its economic impact, which experts unequivocally declare disastrous. Fewer bodies, less production, empty assembly lines, less revenue, crops rotting, great swathes of the work force at construction sites, factories, restaurants, nursing homes have suddenly vanished. In Omaha, Nebraska, a once-thriving meat-packing plant lost most of its work force; its production dropped 70%. And no, Medicaid recipients or the "proverbial 29-year-old living in his mother's basement" doesn't want the meat-packing jobs, thanks. So much winning.

Now, with head thug Tom Homan vowing to "flood the zone" with $4 billion more and 10,000 new slots, just think of the wins. Citing its "mission to protect America from cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety," its new recruitment campaign seeks to "attract the next generation of law enforcement professionals to find, arrest, and remove criminal illegal aliens" at "a defining moment in our nation’s history." Arguing "your skills, your experience, and your courage have never been more essential," DHS offers multiple tantalizing incentives to sweeten the fascistic pot: Up to a $50K signing bonus, a 25% Pay LEAP for Special Agents, Enhanced Retirement Benefits and even student-loan forgiveness, though Trump trashed Biden's efforts to forgive student loan debts as a “vile” publicity stunt and swiftly ended those “anti-American" efforts.

ICE says it is looking for "law enforcement personnel who aspire to the highest standards of performance, professionalism and leadership." Its gigs include "Deportation Officer. For the enforcers. For the brave. For those who fight to keep America safe." "Criminal Investigator. For the protectors. For the analytical. For those who seek the truth." And "General Attorney. For the closers. For the resolute. For those who represent the USA." Its materials and posters have a nice totalitarian tinge, from Uncle Sam intoning, "America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out," and the imperative, "Your
Country needs you. Join the fight to deport criminal illegal aliens from the U.S." Most striking is their creepy baseline command and accompanying rhetoric, reminiscent of 1930s Berlin: "Defend The Homeland. Join ICE today."

The dark history of the term "homeland" precedes by years, even centuries, George Bush's Department of Homeland Security, and even the newly introduced, distinctly Germanic "homeland" - no longer "fatherland" - that Hitler fervently vowed to defend at 1934's famous Nuremberg rally. Hitler's Nazi Germany was a messy concoction of "blood and soil" loyalty, a racial identity that tied the German people to their land, mixed with the "semi-tribal passion" of 1920s Zionists for Israel as a Jewish homeland, mixed with ancient, occult, German paganism and spirituality that glorified Aryans' supposed racial superiority and their origins in mythical earlier civilizations. After World War ll, the notion of a lofty "homeland" for an invented "German race" "all but disappeared from German vernacular...People were ashamed to use a word that stood for such terrible things."

Now, in Trump's America, it's back. "Your country is calling you to serve at ICE," said an unrepentant ICE Barbie in a statement. "Together, we must defend the homeland." Along with Trump and Uncle Sam, a dolled-up Noem appears on campaign posters reportedly heading to college campuses and job fairs to rally racist, unemployed goons with a cruel streak. Weirdly, then she took off for Argentina, many miles from the homeland she's allegedly paid to secure, to do some yee-haw cowgirl cosplay, post videos of herself riding horses - "No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle" - praise President Milei for his border security and promise to consider easing visa rules for his citizens. Observers were miffed to be funding a vacation for "MAGA Cult Barbie Dog Killer" - with ewww her illicit boyfriend Corey Lewandowski yet - but figured she has "ancestors of the 3rd Reich living there."

Still, the coming expansion of ICE is universally expected to be "a colossal shitshow." Local law enforcement are pissed ICE's offer to pay triple what they make will empty out and wreak havoc on local police departments. ICE's minimal requirements - B.A. "OR Combination of Education and Experience" ("Majored in gooning with a minor in glass-smashing"), driver's license, drug and fitness test, firearm proficiency - means ranks already packed with thugs, dregs, criminals, Proud Boys, white supremacists, insurrectionists, bullies drunk on power and former cops too racist or violent to keep a job will lower criteria to stuff innocent people into unmarked white vans to, "Help Wanted: Heartless Villains For Destruction of Democracy, Criminal Record Required." As to student loan forgiveness: "Most ICE inbreds didn't finish high school - these are the people who stole other kids' lunches."

Thanks to the ravages of DOGE and a tumbling economy, ICE added a special webpage for former government workers, calling on them to "RETURN TO MISSION (among) the courageous men and women of ICE." To date, the site shows openings in 21 locations, from California to D.C; maybe, muses one hopeful patriot, "The labor pool of vicious, obese racists is only so large." Others decry "$50K in blood money to sell your soul" or warn of a "short-term grift with Abu Ghraib-style bullshit" after which Repubs will "throw you under the bus when the reckoning comes (at) the next Nuremberg Trials." Some consider sabotage - "We'll call ourselves 'NICE' - but figure they'd be outed "the first day you have to put your knee on a pregnant woman's neck." Besides, "You cannot dismantle the master's house using the master's tools." The most common question: "Are the brownshirts and armbands free?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Israel: after 19 months of non-stop genocide where do you stand Mr Cooper?

ku.tnemailrapnull@pm.repooc.nhoj

Dear Mr Cooper,

In your communications to me in February and October last year some remarks were misleading and sounded as if penned by Israel’s propaganda scribblers in Tel Aviv. Given your journalistic background it was hoped you would sniff out and reject such disinformation. With the situation in Gaza now so horrific a more considered reply would be welcome, please, from our representative at Westminster.

• You said: “Israel has suffered the worst terror attack in its history at the hands of Hamas.”

But you omitted the context. In the 23 years prior to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Why overlook this? 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, were held in Israeli jails on that fateful day. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’ (B’Tselem figures). October 7 was therefore a retaliation against extreme provocation. Or were we expecting the Palestinians to take all that lying down?

Evidence is now emerging that the IDF inflicted many of the casualties on their own people that day in order to provide a pretext for their long-planned genocidal assault.

Early in the genocide JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, described the situation leading up to October 7 rather well:

The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence…. For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation….

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians’ homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes orchards, and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.

• You said: “I support Israel’s right to defend itself, in line with international humanitarian law.”

The UN itself has made it clear that “Israel cannot claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies”, and many law experts have said the same.

On the other hand the Palestinians’ right to resist is confirmed in UN Resolution 3246 which calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subject to colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation, and to assist them in their struggle, and reaffirms the Palestinians’ right to use “all available means, including armed struggle” in their fight for freedom.

Furthermore UN Resolution 37/43 gives them an unquestionable right, in their struggle for liberation, to “eliminate the threat posed by Israel by all available means including armed struggle”. And as China reminded everyone at the ICJ, “armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism”.

• You said “There is no moral equivalence between Hamas and the democratically elected Government of Israel.”

How right you are! Under international law Palestinians have an inalienable right to self-determination. They properly elected Hamas under international scrutiny in 2006, at the last permitted election. Hamas are the lawful and legitimate rulers in Gaza.

Israel is not the Western-style democracy it pretends to be. It is a deeply unpleasant ethnocracy with recently enacted discriminatory nation-state laws to emphasise its apartheid ‘bottom line’. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, an Israeli human rights organization, has documented entrenched discrimination and socioeconomic differences in “land, urban planning, housing, infrastructure, economic development, and education.”

• You said: “Leaving Hamas in power in Gaza would be a permanent roadblock to a two-state solution…..A sustainable ceasefire must mean that Hamas is no longer there, able to threaten Israel.”

The US and UK have no right to attempt coercive regime change. Besides, Israel has been a fatal threat to Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) since well before Hamas was even founded.

Sections 16 and 20 of Hamas’s 2017 Charter are in tune with international law while the Israeli government pursues policies that definitely are not.

(s.16) “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.

(s.20) “Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

The correct and lawful way to deal with the threat posed by Hamas is (and always has been) by requiring Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, theft of Palestinian resources, and destruction of Palestinian heritage.

• You said: “I support all steps to bring about a negotiated settlement leading to a safe and secure Israel living alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state, based on 1967 borders.”

Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination. Under international law it’s their basic right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The UK disrespects that, otherwise we would long ago have recognised Palestinian statehood along with the vast majority of nations that have already done so. And why is only Israel allowed to be “safe and secure”?

Britain’s refusal to recognise Palestine is disgraceful. We promised the Palestinian Arabs independence in 1915 in return for their help in defeating the Turks but reneged in 1917 (in favour of the shameful Balfour Declaration). We should have granted Palestine provisional independence in 1923 in accordance with our responsibilities under the League of Nations Mandate Agreement, but didn’t. In 1947 the UN Partition Plan allocated the Palestinians a measly portion of their own homeland and, without consulting them, handed the lion’s share to incomer Jews with no ancestral connection to it… thanks in large part to the Balfour betrayal.

The following year Britain walked away from its mandate responsibilities leaving Palestinians at the mercy of Israel’s vicious plan for annexing the Holy Land by military force – “from the river to the sea” – which they’ve pursued relentlessly ever since in defiance of international and humanitarian law, bringing terror, misery, wholesale destruction and ruination to the Palestinians. And now genocide.

Today Britain still refuses to recognise Palestinian independence although 138 other UN member states do.

• You said: “Settler violence and the demolition of Palestinian homes is intolerable, and I expect to see Ministers firmly raising these issues with the Israeli Government, and taking robust action where necessary.”

The Israeli regime has long ignored representations on such issues, so where is the “robust action” you speak of?

According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, “The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence…. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.”

Law expert Ralph Wilde provides this opinion:

There is no right under international law to maintain the occupation pending a peace agreement, or for creating ‘facts on the ground’ that might give Israel advantages in relation to such an agreement, or as a means of coercing the Palestinian people into agreeing on a situation they would not accept otherwise.

Implanting settlers in the hope of eventually acquiring territory is a violation of occupation law by Israel and a war crime on the part of the individuals involved. And it is a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the sovereignty of another state and a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; also a violation of Israel’s obligations in the international law on the use of force. Ending these violations involves immediate removal of the settlers and the settlements from occupied land and an immediate end to Israel’s exercise of control, including its use of military force….

• You said: “The UK is doing everything it can to get more aid in and open more crossings, and we played a leading role in securing the passage of UN Security Council resolution 2720, which made clear the urgent demand for expanded humanitarian access.”

That went well, didn’t it? It’s sickening how Westminster still won’t accept the truth – that Israel is a depraved and repulsive regime, devoid of humanity, and we should not be supporting it in any way, shape or form.

For decades before October 7 Israel’s illegal control over the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza and military aggression, ethnic cleansing, restrictions on movement of goods and people, dispossession of prime lands, theft of Palestine’s key resources and destruction of its economy have bordered on slow-motion genocide.

And now the International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent, it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”.

The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – which it readily applies to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favoured-nation privileges, trade deals, scientific/security collaboration, and cessation of arms supplies. In Israel’s case the British Government, far from using its available deterrent means, has militarily assisted Israel in its genocide.

So let’s remind ourselves of the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023 which arrived at the UK Government with important warnings regarding breaches of international law — for example:

⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.

⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.

The Department for Business and Trade (whose committee I believe you now sit on) dismissed a petition calling for all licences for arms to Israel to be revoked. Their excuse was that “we rigorously assess every application on a case-by-case basis against strict assessment criteria, the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria (or SELC)…. The SELC provide a thorough risk assessment framework for export licence applications and require us to think hard about the impact of providing equipment and its capabilities. We will not license the export of equipment where to do so would be inconsistent with the SELC.”

But they didn’t explain how Israel managed to satisfy those “strict assessment criteria” and survive such a “rigorous” process. Were we supposed to take it all on trust? There are 8 criteria and, on reading them, any reasonably informed person might conclude that Israel fails to satisfy at least 5.

• You said: “In the longer term, I will continue to support the UK’s long held-position, that there should be a credible and irreversible pathway towards a two-state solution of Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security for both nations and the wider region.”

Why the longer term? Why not now? If Palestinian statehood had been recognised at the proper time (in 1923, or at least by 1948 when Israeli statehood was ‘accepted’) these unspeakable atrocities would never have happened.

QME and Plan Dalet

These are the never-mentioned driving forces behind the evil that poisons the Holy Land.

In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME). It ensures the apartheid regime always has the upper hand over it neighbours. This is central to US Middle East policy and guarantees the region is kept at or near boiling point and ripe for exploitation.

Sadly the UK has superglued itself to America’s cynical partnership with Israel for ‘security’ and other dubious reasons.

Plan D, or Plan Dalet, is the Zionist terror blueprint for their brutal takeover of the Palestinian homeland written 77 years ago. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency and later to become the first president of ‘New Israel’. .

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed ahead of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there to prevent it. As Plan D shows, “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) has always been a key part of the Zionists’ scheme, and Ben-Gurion reminded his military commanders that the prime aim of Plan D was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The Deir Yassin massacre signalled the beginning of a deliberate programme to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming Holocaust survivors and other Jews. In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized Lydda, shot up the town and drove out the population. They massacred 426 men, women, and children. 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque. The remainder were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest. Israel’s great hero Moshe Dayan was responsible.

By 1949 the Zionists had seized nearly 80 percent of Palestine, provoking the resistance backlash we still see today. The knock-on effects have created around 6 million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN plus an estimated 1 million others worldwide.

Israel Lobby

Considering Britain’s obligations towards the Holy Land since WW1, would you please let me know what you and your colleagues are now doing to stop this appalling extermination of the Palestinian people? And I do mean action not empty words. And would you please explain why Conservative Friends of Israel, which works to promote and support Israel in Parliament and at every level of the Party and claims 80% of Conservative MPs as signed-up members, are allowed to flourish at Westminster?.

MPs who put themselves under the influence of an aggressive foreign military power are surely in flagrant breach of the principles of public life (aka the Nolan Principles) which are written into MPs’ code of conduct and the ministerial code.

Being a Friend of Israel, of course, means embracing the terror on which the state of Israel was built, approving the dispossession of the innocent and the oppression of the powerless, and applauding the discriminatory laws against non-Jews who resisted being ejected and inconveniently remain in their homeland.

It means aligning oneself with the vile mindset that abducts civilians — including children — and imprisons and tortures them without trial, imposes hundreds of military checkpoints, severely restricts the movement of people and goods, and interferes with Palestinian life at every level.

And it means giving the thumbs-up to Israeli gunboats shooting up Palestinian fishermen in their own territorial waters, the strangulation of the West Bank’s economy, the cruel 19-year blockade on Gaza and the bloodbaths inflicted on the tiny enclave’s packed population. Also the religious war that humiliates the Holy Land’s Muslims and Christians and prevents them visiting their holy places.

I prefer to think that you know all this but must be mindful that the Israel lobby have Conservative Central Office in their pocket.

Stuart Littlewood

8 May 2025

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

BAP denounces this escalation of state repression and the targeting of Musa by the state, CBP, and collaborating agencies. We call on all of our fellow revolutionary, radical, and progressive organizations and comrades to heighten our capabilities and our work to respond to the ongoing escalatory attacks of the U.S. state and its allies. We also understand that we must view this targeted attack in connection with the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, the repression of pro-Palestine advocacy and all forms of radical organization, the decades-long war on the Cuban people, and the abduction of immigrants from our communities and universities. We must connect the various forms of repression that are ongoing and focus our organizing on building the power and proactive strategies to oppose these attacks on our people, our communities, and our movements.

As Musa recounts, this targeting was not random and is not unique, “[t]his experience is part of a broader pattern. Across administrations, CBP and DHS have operated as politically weaponized agencies to escalate surveillance, harassment, and criminalization of individuals involved in movements for justice. Now, we’re witnessing a dangerous heightening of this weaponization… While the repression of immigrants and foreign students is rightly drawing public attention, [Musa’s] experience reveals that U.S.-born citizens, especially Black and Muslim ones, are also targets.”

As we have always said in BAP, there is a constant and brutal war being waged against Africans/Black people in the U.S. and globally, which is an extension of the war on all the colonized peoples, working classes, and oppressed masses of the globe through imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and in this case specifically, state violence. In the U.S., the state, in obedience to the white supremacist capitalist ruling class, has long been at active war with radical organizers and activists, immigrants, and anyone who does not conform to the requirements of the empire. Under the current administration, the state is escalating its aggression against these groups and more to terrorize non-citizens, repress radical activism, and compel others into silence.

In response to this ongoing escalation, we emphasize Musa’s words of caution to the radical movement:  “Be strategic, brave, and smart in equal measures. Protect one another, because no part of this system nor what is to come is designed to protect us.” In this time of escalating repression, our call is for principled unity against all forms of imperialism, state violence, and oppression domestically and globally.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s second term began, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem joined Trump in taking steps to intimidate leakers and news outlets that have covered him and his administration unfavorably. We’re documenting her efforts in this regularly updated report.

Read about how Trump’s appointees and allies in Congress are striving to chill reporting, revoke funding, censor critical coverage and more here.

This article was first published on March 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Image by Hany Osman.

The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.

In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.

What’s more, alongside such brute displays of force, there have been congressional inquisitions into constitutionally protected speech; federal investigations into the movement for divestment; and students suspended, evicted, and expelled, not to speak of faculty disciplined or simply dismissed.

Welcome to Repress U., class of 2024: a homeland security campus for the ages.

But don’t think it all only happened this spring. In reality, it’s an edifice that’s been decades in the making, spanning the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administrations. Some years ago, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a step-by-step guide to how the original homeland security campus was created. Let me now offer an updated manual on the workings of Repress U. in a newly oppressive era.

Consider the building of just such a homeland security campus a seven-step process. Here they are, one by one.

Step 1. Target the movement for divestment.

As a start, unconditional government support for the state of Israel triggered a growing movement of student dissent. That, in turn, came to focus on the imperial entanglements and institutional investments of this country’s institutions of higher learning. Yet, instead of negotiating in good faith, university administrators have, with a few exceptions, responded by threatening and even inviting state violence on campus.

Nor, in a number of cases, did this offensive against the student left start, or end, at the campus gates. For instance, a targeted campaign against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) kicked off in October, when the State University System of Florida, working with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, announced that “based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism… the student chapters must be deactivated.”

Private universities would soon join in with their own public displays of intolerance. Brandeis, Rutgers, George Washington, and Harvard all imposed similar sanctions on student groups. Columbia broke new ground by suspending not only SJP but also Jewish Voice for Peace after its student chapter held “an unauthorized event… that included threatening rhetoric.”

Over the course of the academic year, the student movement has been elevated, at least rhetorically speaking, to the level of a national security threat — one which has figured prominently in White House briefings and House Republican hearings. And by far the greater part of the threatening rhetoric overheard in recent weeks has been directed not by the movement, but at the movement.

“We have a clear message,” said House Committee on Education and Labor Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) in announcing the latest round of congressional inquisitions. “American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back. No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined.” Held on May 23rd, the hearings were an exercise in twenty-first-century McCarthyism, with House Republicans going on the warpath against “radicalized students” and “so-called university leaders.”

President Biden, when speaking of the student movement, has struck a hardly less belligerent tone, declaring that “vandalism, trespassing… shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest” and that “order must prevail.”

Step 2. Censor pro-Palestinian speech.

For all the talk of free speech and the right to protest, pro-Palestinian advocacy and antiwar activism have, in these last months, come to represent a notable exception to the rule. From the words of commencement speakers to the expressive acts of student occupiers, outright censorship has become the order of the day.

Take the case of Asna Tabassum, a graduating senior scheduled to give this month’s valedictorian address at the University of Southern California. When, on social media, Tabassum dared link to a page denouncing “racist settler-colonial ideology,” she was subjected to an organized smear campaign and ultimately barred from speaking at commencement.

Across the country, the cancellations have piled up. The Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd was banned from speaking at the University of Vermont. The artist Samia Halaby saw her first American retrospective cancelled by the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. And a group of Jewish students seeking to screen a film critical of Israel were denied space at the University of Pennsylvania.

Again, the trail of repression leads all the way back to Washington, D.C. Over the course of the past year, since the White House released its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have shown an increasingly active interest in policing what can and can’t be said on campus.

According to the latest White House fact sheet, dated May 7th, “FBI and DHS have taken steps to expand and deepen engagements with campus law enforcement and others.” Such “engagement” has been evident for all to see in the recent crackdowns on campuses like Columbia’s, where the administration bragged, in a leaked internal memo, about “coordinating with the FBI.”

Step 3. Punish student protest.

It was not enough, however, for certain university administrators to ban Students for Justice in Palestine or censor pro-Palestinian speech. It was also imperative that they make students pay. The punishments have varied, ranging from interim suspensions to permanent expulsions to evictions from campus housing. What they have in common is a logic of retribution for even distinctly nonviolent student protests.

It became common practice for administrations to demand that students leave their on-campus encampments or be barred from graduating. In Harvard’s case, the Corporation went ahead and struck 13 pro-Palestinian students from the rolls anyway, just days before commencement.

Expulsions have also proliferated in the wake of the occupation of administration buildings, from Columbia’s Hamilton Hall to Vanderbilt’s Kirkland Hall. In justifying the expulsions, Vanderbilt’s chancellor helpfully explained, “My point of view had nothing to do with free speech.”

Last but not least, student dissidents have been the victims of doxxing, with their names and faces prominently displayed under the banner of “Leading Antisemites” on billboards in public places and on websites belonging to a far-right organization, Accuracy in Media. The group was recently revealed to be bankrolled to the tune of nearly $1.9 million by top Republican megadonors.

Step 4. Discipline faculty dissent.

Students have not been the only targets of such repression. They have been joined by faculty and other employees of colleges and universities, who have also faced disciplinary action for standing up for the rights of Palestinians. By one count, more than 50 faculty members have been arrested, while hundreds more have been disciplined by their employers.

The backlash began last fall with the suspension of two educators at the University of Arizona, then ramped up with the summary firing of two teaching assistants at the University of Texas at Austin. Their offenses? Sharing mental health resources with Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students, who had specifically requested them in the wake of October 7th.

Further controversy attended the suspension of a tenured political science professor, Abdulkader Sinno, at Indiana University following an “unauthorized event” held by the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (which Sinno advised). Then came the removal of a noted Palestinian-American artist and activist, Amin Husain, from his adjunct position at New York University.

The University of Florida, for its part, circulated a directive threatening that “employees will be… separated from employment” should they be “found responsible for engaging in prohibited activities,” including “disruption,” indoor demonstrations, or outdoor encampments.

And Washington University in St. Louis, in April, placed six employees on leave after they were accused of participating in a Gaza solidarity protest and allowing “unauthorized persons” onto campus. That same day, another Palestinian-American professor, Steve Tamari, of Southern Illinois University, had nine ribs fractured and one of his hands broken while exercising his right to film the police.

Step 5. Lock the community out, but let the vigilantes in.

In the face of sustained student protest, universities have converted themselves into heavily guarded, gated communities, each with its private security force, and each with its own laws to enforce. “Harvard Yard will be closed today,” read a typical text, in bold red letters hanging from Johnston Gate. “Harvard affiliates must produce their ID card when requested.”

Other schools have responded to the encampments with a new architecture of control, extending from the metal barricades erected around George Washington’s University Yard to the plywood walls now surrounding New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still others, like Columbia, went as far as to cancel their major commencement ceremonies, given “security concerns.”

At the same time, the private firms entrusted with the public’s safety on college campuses have failed to intervene to keep far-right agitators out. Instead, as seen at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, they have allowed vigilante violence to run wild.

At UCLA, on the night of April 30th, a gang of anti-Palestinian militants, wearing white masks and bearing blunt instruments and incendiary devices, were permitted to terrorize the school’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment for more than three hours before public officials felt compelled to take action. At least 16 serious injuries were reported. Not one of the attackers was detained.

“At first, I couldn’t understand why,” reported one eyewitness to the bloodshed. “But an hour in, and then two hours in, and then three hours in, it just reached the point where I was like, ‘UCLA knows this is happening, and they don’t care enough to protect their students.’”

“I thought I was going to die,” recalled another. “I thought I’d never see my family again.”

Step 6. Call the cops. Incite a riot.

Again and again, administrators have turned to the baton-wielding arm of the law to sweep Gaza solidarity encampments off school grounds. In calling the riot squads out on their own students, they have launched the most wide-reaching crackdown on campus protest in more than half a century, with some 3,000 arrests and still counting.

The military-style raid on Columbia’s Morningside campus, on April 30th, was just one case in point. It was one I watched unfold with my own eyes a few paces from occupied Hamilton Hall (or “Hind’s Hall“). It started with a group of students linking arms and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and ended with 112 arrests and one gunshot fired from an officer’s Glock 19.

First, I watched three drones surveil the protesters from above, while a veritable army of beat cops, clad in riot gear, surrounded them on all sides. Next, I saw paramilitary squads with names like Emergency Service Unit and Strategic Response Group, backed by an armored BearCat, stage an invasion of the Columbia campus, while their counterparts laid siege to nearby City College.

In the end, law enforcement unleashed a full “use-of-force continuum” on students and workers, including that live bullet that “unintentionally” discharged from a sergeant’s service weapon “into the office they were attempting to gain access to.” Said one officer to another: “Thought we fucking shot someone.”

And Columbia was but the tip of the spear. A similar pattern has played out on campuses across the country. At Emory University, a Gaza solidarity camp was met with stun guns and rubber bullets; at Indiana and Ohio State universities, the police response included snipers on the rooftops of campus buildings; and at the University of Texas, gun-toting troopers enforced Governor Greg Abbott’s directive that “no encampments will be allowed.”

Step 7. Wage information warfare.

In most, if not all, American cities and college towns with such protests, the police, pundits, and elected officials alike have doubled down on their defense of Repress U., while vilifying the student movement in the media. In doing so, they’ve engaged in the kinds of “coordinated information activities” typical of a classical counterinsurgency campaign.

It began with House Republicans like Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who dubbed the student protesters a “pro-Hamas mob,” and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who called them “lawless agitators and radicals.” Donald Trump took it a step further, claiming that “many of them aren’t even students, and many of them come from foreign countries. Thousands and thousands are from foreign countries… I’m like, ‘Where did these people come from?’”

Novel conspiracy theories, blaming the outbreak of campus protests on groups ranging from Hamas to Antifa (or even Jewish billionaire George Soros), have reverberated across the echo chambers of the right. But the agitprop didn’t stop at the far-right fringe. Democratic officials have since taken it up, too, with New York Mayor Eric Adams leading the charge: “What should have been a peaceful protest has been coopted by professional outside agitators.”

Within 24 hours of the raids on Columbia and CCNY, the New York Police Department had, in fact, produced its own live-action propaganda from the scene of the crime, concluding with these words of warning: “To any other individuals that wanna protest… If you’re thinking about setting up tents anyplace else… think again. We’ll come there. We’ll strike you. Take you to jail like we did over here.”

This is the future envisioned for America’s college campuses by the partisans of Repress U. It’s a future where what passes for “homeland security” takes precedence over higher learning, where order prevails over inquiry, and where counterinsurgency comes before community. Then again, the next generation — the one behind the “People’s University” protests — may well have other plans.

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

The post Creating an All-American Homeland Security Campus appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Gould-Wartofsky.

Novosti journalists have received dozens of insulting, hateful, intimidating, and threatening messages by email, letter, phone, social media comment section, and direct message since April, according to news reports and editor-in-chief Andrea Radak, who spoke with CPJ. Novosti is the most prominent Serbian minority language newspaper in Croatia and is based in the capital, Zagreb.

The wave of attacks began after the April parliamentary election, which brought Croatia’s nationalist right-wing party, Domovinski pokret (DP- Homeland Movement), into a coalition government. DP has campaigned to end state funding for Novosti, claiming the outlet fails to focus exclusively on minority issues.

Radak told CPJ that they filed a criminal complaint with the police and gave initial statements. As of Wednesday, the outlet has yet to receive an update on the investigation.

“Croatian authorities must investigate the dozens of threats received by journalists of the newspaper Novosti, hold the perpetrators to account, and ensure the safety of the outlet’s reporters,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “It is completely unacceptable to threaten journalists because of their work, and Croatian authorities must show that such actions have consequences. Ruling government coalition officials should encourage the work of journalists instead of discrediting them or threatening their funding.”

The messages included smears, insults, and indirect intimidation, such as championing Croatia’s fascist government during World War II, Radak told CPJ. They also included threats, such as saying those who conduct pro-Serbia reporting should be driven out of the country and warning that a second “Operation Storm” was coming — a reference to the strategic victory of the Croatian Army against the rebel Croatian Serbs, which helped the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbian paramilitaries during the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

One of Novosti’s investigative journalists who covers far-right nationalism and requested anonymity, citing safety concerns, received a letter with insults calling his mother a Chetnik — a reference to members of a Serbian nationalist guerilla force during World War II — threats that “we will get you,” and ending with an intimidating salute of the country’s pre-World War II fascist Ustasha regime: “For the homeland — ready.”

Radak told CPJ that similar messages were sent to the independent trade union Croatian Journalists’ Association, as many Novosti journalists are union members, and the union issued a May 14 statement defending the journalists.

In a May 16 editorial, Radak said that Novosti will continue reporting despite threats, verbal attacks, and accusations of being “anti-Croatian.”

CPJ emailed the press office of the Zagreb Police Department and the DP party for comment but did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

• Fighting continued today in Gaza as Israel pursued its war against Hamas militants.
• UN officials call for continued funding for Palestinian relief agency and for a halt to hostilities in Gaza.
• House Republicans push for impeachment vote of Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas.
• Justice Department officials warn of Chinese hacking network attacking critical US infrastructure.
• Big storm hits Bay Area, bringing heavy rain and wind.
• Governor Newsom backs ballot proposition to increase funding for homeless services and housing.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – January 31, 2024 House Republicans push for impeachment vote of Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• House Republicans move ahead with impeachment vote of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.
• Senate agrees to bipartisan foreign aid funding bill with border security added, House Speaker says its nonstarter.
• Trump allowed to remain on Illinois primary ballot.
• UN health officials urge donor nations to reconsider cutting funding to UNRWA.
• State water officials conduct second Sierra snowpack survey of the year.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – January 30, 2024 House Republicans move ahead with impeachment vote of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The post #17 – Leaks Reveal Homeland Security Plans to Regulate Disinformation Online appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

As a member of the Tibetan diaspora, Sengmo knew about the Chinese government’s campaign to assimilate ethnic minorities in the broader culture, including through the curriculum at boarding schools where students stay for weeks at a time. 

But it was only after witnessing firsthand how his elementary school-age relatives interacted with one another that he thought: “They will not be like us.”

For the government, that is doubtless the point. Under leader Xi Jinping, China has applied harsh tactics to promote party ideology over local traditions, cultures and religious practices. In the Tibet Autonomous Region and the southwestern Chinese provinces where many Tibetans live, that has meant prohibiting photographs of the Dalai Lama, pressuring monks to denounce the spiritual leader, and restricting communications with people outside of the area.

Though movement in and out of Tibetan areas remains as limited as ever, China's long-awaited loosening of COVID-related travel controls impelled Sengmo to make a rare trip home. Sengmo is a pseudonym to protect his family in Tibet from any retaliation from Chinese authorities.

Members of the diaspora granted travel visas told RFA that they were able for the first time in years to see how their homeland is changing. Given the importance of language to a culture, a linguistic move away from Tibetan among young students attending residential schools is among the most significant shifts returnees witnessed. 

Sengmo said the courses at the boarding school his nieces and nephews attend are taught in Mandarin, with Tibetan instruction limited to one hour a week. The rest of his family still speaks their native language, but the children are away for two-week stretches, and he fears his relatives won’t have enough time to counteract the Chinese-heavy education provided by the school. Other sources said the Tibetan instruction was more frequent but still insufficient. 

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, defended the  boarding school system as a way to improve the educational opportunities for Tibet's scattered population. 

Students aren’t forced to attend, and parents can visit whenever they want, he said in an emailed statement. 

“Courses of traditional culture, such as Tibetan language and literature and folk dance, are widely available, traditional food unique to the Tibet Plateau is provided, and students are allowed to wear traditional dresses at these schools,” he said.

But a panel of experts advising the United Nations has said the instruction is heavily weighted toward the dominant Han culture. Roughly one million students attend the schools and risk an “erosion of their identity,” the group warned. 

An ugly legacy

Critics draw comparisons to past efforts to assimilate Indigenous cultures in the U.S. and Canada by forcing young children to learn English in remote schools that kept them from their families. 

Conditions there were often especially brutal, and former students have reported a variety of mental health issues, including problems with anxiety, depression and addiction. The boarding school policies in the United States lasted more than a century, finally ending in the 1970s.

Now the U.S. has emerged as one of the loudest opponents of China’s educational efforts. Last month, the State Department announced visa restrictions on unnamed Chinese officials involved with the “forced assimilation” boarding school program.

Gyal Lo, an educational sociologist and activist who has studied boarding schools in Tibetan areas of China, said the policy began to be applied to preschool-aged children in 2016. Now, three out of every four children in that age group attend a residential school, he said.

Among them are his young relatives back in Tibet. In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Gyal Lo wrote about how his brother had called him seven years ago to express his concern that his granddaughters – ages 4 and 5 at the time – were already beginning to reject Tibetan traditions. 

Gyal Lo said his brother’s family felt they had no choice. Not sending the young children to the school would shut them off from any educational opportunities and the family from government benefits. 

“The distance is already breaking out between the older generation and the younger generation,” Gyal Lo told RFA when asked for an update on his brother’s family. “They will no longer be able to share a common identity and values. We’re seeing the breaking of the home nest.”

He called the inclusion of preschool-aged children in boarding schools a threat to “Tibetan civilization.”

The language loss isn’t necessarily limited to residential schools. Lhamo said children aged 3 to 6 she met on a recent trip back spoke Chinese even though they returned home from school every day. When she addressed them in Tibetan they “looked confused and puzzled,” she said. Lhamo also asked to be identified by a pseudonym to avoid adding any scrutiny to her family back in Tibet.

The curriculum had changed too, she said. History textbooks her relatives read for school featured unflattering depictions of the U.S. as a global bully since the end of the Cold War, Lhamo said. 

Cameras everywhere

On his trip home, Sengmo said he noticed other changes too, apart from the classroom. 

Walking into his local monastery he had to be scanned by a facial recognition camera before he went in, a level of security he wasn’t used to. Inside he said he noticed fewer worshippers and less interaction between laypeople and monks, even though monasteries operate as the spiritual and cultural heart of many Tibetan communities. 

The sense of being watched was pervasive. “There were cameras everywhere,” he said. 

Sengmo blamed the increased surveillance for what he said was a greater level of circumspection among the friends and relatives he met with. Even behind closed doors, the Tibetans he met with appeared to be careful of what they said. 

“It used to be that you could talk about anything at home,” Sengmo said. In the future, it may not even be certain that everyone there will speak the same language.

Edited by Abby Seiff

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Tibetan and Jim Snyder for RFA Investigative.

As some families seek restitution for the suffering caused by former President Donald Trump's family separation policy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday acknowledged that nearly five years after the policy was first enforced, 998 children have yet to be reunited with their relatives.

On the two-year anniversary of the establishment of President Joe Biden's Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, the DHS said it has reunited more than 600 children who were taken from their families under Trump's so-called "zero tolerance" policy, which called for the prosecution of anyone who attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border without going through official immigration channels.

Many children were reunited through a court process before Biden took office, but of the nearly 4,000 children who were taken from their families and sent to locations across the country with recordkeeping about their identities and whereabouts that was "patchwork at best," according to DHS, roughly a quarter of them are still separated.

"This cruelty happened nearly five years ago," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service. "That's an unimaginably long time for children to go without their parents."

Many of the children who were separated arrived at the border from Central American countries, with their parents traveling to the border to seek asylum from violence and conflict—exercising a protected human right under international and domestic law.

The DHS noted that the number of families coming forward to identify themselves as having been forcibly separated continues to grow.

"We understand that our critical work is not finished," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. "We remain steadfast in our commitment to fulfill President Biden's pledge to reunify all children who were separated from their families under the 'zero tolerance' policy to the greatest extent possible, and we continue to work diligently to incorporate the foundational principle of family unity in our policies and operations."

"The real world human impact of the Trump administration's depravity still reverberates today."

The agency is currently in the process of reuniting 148 children with their families, and has contacted 183 additional families regarding reunification.

Aside from the attempting to reunite families, the Biden administration said it is also meeting with recently reunified families "to hear directly from them and better understand their experiences and current needs," including support for the trauma the federal government inflicted on them.

On Wednesday, the day before the DHS made its announcement, Selvin Argueta and his son, who is now 21, filed a federal lawsuit seeking monetary damages for the forced separation they suffered in 2018 under the policy. Argueta's son, Selvin Najera, was 16 when they arrived at the border from Guatemala, where they had faced threats from gangs.

Argueta was deported while Najera was sent to a detention center where, the lawsuit alleges, he faced physical and emotional abuse.

Father and son were reunited in January 2020 after a federal judge ruled that Argueta's deportation was unlawful. Their lawsuit seeks restitution for "intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, abuse of process, and harboring a minor."

"The real world human impact of the Trump administration's depravity still reverberates today," said journalist Ahmed Baba.

Rights advocates have condemned the Biden administration for continuing other anti-immigration polices including Title 42, under which families are still being separated. The Texas Observerreported in November that between January 2021, when Biden took office, and August 2022, at least 372 cases of family separation were documented by the government.

"Though family separation is no longer explicitly used as a weapon in U.S. immigration policy," wrote Erica Bryant at Vera Institute of Justice last June, "it is still a horrifying result."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

"These records paint a damning portrait of government overreach."

That's how Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and Fikayo Walter-Johnson, a former paralegal with the project, introduced over 200 documents obtained via public records request and released Wednesday on the civil liberties group's website.

The national ACLU and its Arizona arm sought the records after U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed last year that "Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a law enforcement component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was operating an indiscriminate and bulk surveillance program that swept up millions of financial records about Americans."

Following a February 2022 briefing with senior HSI personnel, Wyden wrote a March letter urging DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to launch a probe into the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC)—a nonprofit created as a result of a settlement between the Arizona attorney general's office and Western Union, a financial services company that fought in state court against the AG's attempt to obtain money transfer records.

As the ACLU released records about TRAC, Wyden on Wednesday shared a new letter requesting that "the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) relationship" with the Arizona-based clearinghouse.

"My oversight activities over the past year have uncovered troubling information, revealing that the scale of this government surveillance program is far greater than was previously reported," Wyden wrote to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

"Between October and December of 2022, my office received information from three other money transfer companies—Euronet (RIA Envia), MoneyGram, and Viamericas—which confirmed that they also delivered customer data in bulk to TRAC, in response to legal demands from HSI and other governmental agencies," the senator divulged.

Some customs summonses—a form of subpoena—applied to transfers of $500 or more between any U.S. state and 22 other countries and one U.S. territory. Those summonses were withdrawn "just 10 days after HSI had briefed my staff" in February, Wyden noted, adding that HSI has not yet scheduled his requested follow-up briefing.

Summarizing the documents acquired by the ACLU, Freed Wessler and Walter-Johnson wrote:

From 2014 to 2021, Arizona attorneys general issued at least 140 administrative subpoenas to money transfer companies, each requesting that the company periodically provide customer transaction records for the next year. Those subpoenas were issued under the same state statute that the Arizona Court of Appeals held in 2006 could not be used for these kinds of indiscriminate requests for money transfer records. This means the Arizona attorney general's office knowingly issued 140 illegal subpoenas to build an invasive data repository.

The documents we obtained reveal the enormous scale of this surveillance program. According to the minutes of TRAC board meetings we obtained, the database of people's money transfer records grew from 75 million records from 14 money service businesses in 2017 to 145 million records from 28 different companies in 2021. By 2021, 12,000 individuals from 600 law enforcement agencies had been provided with direct log-in access to the database. By May 2022, over 700 law enforcement entities had or still have access to the TRAC database, ranging from a sheriff's office in a small Idaho county, to the Los Angeles and New York police departments, to federal law enforcement agencies and military police units.

As Freed Wessler told The Wall Street Journal, which exclusively reported on the materials, "Ordinary people's private financial records are being siphoned indiscriminately into a massive database, with access given to virtually any cop who wants it."

The Journal also spoke with TRAC director Rich Lebel, who "said the program has directly resulted in hundreds of leads and busts involving drug cartels and other criminals seeking to launder money," and "because money services companies don't have the same know-your-customer rules as banks, bulk data needs to be captured to discern patterns of fraud and money laundering."

According to the newspaper:

Mr. Lebel said TRAC has never identified a case in which a law enforcement official has accessed data improperly or the database has been breached by outsiders. The program has seen an increase in use in recent years because of the surging opioid crisis in the U.S., he said.

Law-enforcement agencies use TRAC's data to establish patterns in the flow of funds suspected of being linked to criminal activity, Mr. Lebel said, and the more comprehensive the data, the better the analysis. TRAC manages data that law enforcement provides, he said, and what it is receiving and storing is often in flux.

While declining to discuss TRAC's funding, Mr. Lebel said the nonprofit was originally stood up with money from the Western Union settlement that has since been exhausted. Mr. Wyden and others have said TRAC is federally funded.

Wyden wrote in his letter to Horowitz that "this unorthodox arrangement between state law enforcement, DHS, and DOJ agencies to collect bulk money transfer data raises a number of concerns about surveillance disproportionately affecting low-income, minority, and immigrant communities."

"Members of these communities are more likely to use money transfer services because they are more likely to be unbanked, and therefore unable to send money using electronic checking or international bank wire transfers, which are often cheaper," he explained. "Moreover, money transfer businesses are not subject to the same protections as bank-based transactions under the Right to Financial Privacy Act."

The senator's office said Wednesday that he "is working on legislation to close legal loopholes and ensure people who use money transfer services have the same privacy as those who use banks or money transfer apps."

Freed Wessler and Walter-Johnson also highlighted that "because members of marginalized communities rely heavily on these services rather than traditional banks, the burden of this government surveillance falls disproportionately on those already most vulnerable to law enforcement overreach."

"The government should not be allowed to abuse subpoenas and sweep up millions of records on a huge number of people without any basis for suspicion," the pair argued. "This financial surveillance program is built on repeated violations of the law and must be shut down."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

“DHS has not prioritized ensuring that PIV cards are terminated when individuals no longer require access.”

“Some DHS officials also told us they intentionally did not enter a revocation date after revoking PIV cards.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse. “These documents raise clear civil liberty concerns, concerns around the First Amendment and if the government is trying to shape the kind of news we see,” says Fang.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

And the Nominees Were…

A month or so ago, I put up an informal online social media survey on what events could possibly knock the war carnage in Ukraine off the top of the cable news cycle. My own and others’ morbid leading nominees went something like this:

+ a US mass shooting of epic proportions.

+ a new covid surge.

+ an extreme weather event rooted in climate change.

+ the shooting of a US-American Black person, probably a young man, by a white police officer caught on video, leading to protests.

+ a terrorist attack on US soil, probably committed by white nationalists.

+ an economic collapse.

+ partisan and cultural (race and gender) conflict over Joe Biden’s nomination of a Black female to the US Supreme Court.

+ A Joe Biden stroke or heart attack, leading to the disastrous elevation of the politically inept and transparently neurotic Kamala Harris to the oval office, sparking a massive right-wing rebellion (my favorite).

+ Kamala Harris seeks behavioral therapy to stop her habit of inappropriate laughing.

+ A federal prosecution of Donald Trump on charges related to his attempted coup against bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020.

Nobody guessed “Tom Brady un-retiring” or “an Oscar-winning actor slapping down and screaming at the host of the annual Academy Awards.”

How did we do?

One month later, I am told by regular watchers, Ukraine is still cable news top dog, especially at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, though the last network has significantly upped the percentage of its broadcast time going to domestic politics.

Sleepytime Joe still says stupid stuff like “imagine had the tobacco industry been immune to prostitute…some on!” Still, looks chipper, boosted by the horrific performance of the Russian military in Ukraine. A presidential cardiac event could happen any day and Kamala Harris looks as shaky and weird as ever.

There’s talk of the “Biden inflation” sparking a recession, but there’s always talk of a recession and the ecocidal US economy is still chugging along with lots of Help Wanted signs in a not-so “post-Covid” recovery. The holy US stock market is boosted by arms orders and anticipated North American fossil fuel and agribusiness exports booms being generated by Putin’s invasion.

Climate Crisis

An epic US tornado, flood, or wildfire matched to the scale of the capitalogenic climate crisis can happen any day now (tornado season is underway.) But so far, the only big climate-related event to (barely) crack the headlines was a flood that killed 443 people in South Africa. That was not a major concern for US media, which – let’s be honest – values one dead white Ukrainian over an entire village of drowned Black Africans. (When do US-Americans ever hear about the epic daily horrors of life in the Congo, where small children toil in the miserable extraction of rare minerals used in the manufacture of the First World’s cherished “smart phones”?)

More climate ruin is coming. Biden has helped make sure of that by using the Ukraine War to open the nation’s emergency petroleum reserve and (as of last week) to break his campaign promise not to resume selling leases for private oil and gas drilling on public lands.

It’ll take a gargantuan US weather event to kick Ukraine off the top of the news, however.

The “So What Covid Wave”

Covid-19 appears to be having a bit of a comeback in the US. We learned last week that the U.S. is sliding yet again into what could become another surge, with cases rising nationally and in most states after a two-month decline.” We may be headed to what The Atlantic’s science writer Katherine Wu calls America’s “first so what [covid] wave” – one in which there is little public health response because:

‘As national concern for COVID withers, the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing. Community test sites are closing, and even the enthusiasm for at-home tests, whose results usually aren’t reported, seems to be on a serious wane… Testing and case reporting are now so “abysmal” that we’re losing sight of essential transmission trends…Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s affecting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded… We can’t react to a wave we don’t see coming… There is still no guarantee that the next wave is nigh—but if it is, the U.S. is poorly positioned to meet it. Americans’ motivational tanks are near empty; the country’s stance has, for months, been pretty much whatever. The next wave may be less a BA.2 wave, and more a so what? wave—one many Americans care little to see, because, after two years of crisis, they care so little to respond.’

Covid-19 cracked the headlines a bit last Tuesday thanks to a horrific decision by Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a badly unqualified 35-year-old federal judge eight years out of law school who was appointed by the pandemo-fascist Trump because of her militantly right-wing credentials (including membership in the white nationalist Federalist Society and a clerkship with the fascistic Supreme Court clown Clarence Thomas). The absurd ruling, which obliterated federal masking mandates in airplanes and other public transportation, subverted both common sense and the rule of law by falsely claiming that the CDC lacks constitutional authority to order masks to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic in public transportation (why does the CDC exist if it can’t do that?). The 30-something’s diktat was a big “F off and die” to the immunologically challenged and senior citizens. A number of people who flew on the day of the surprise ruling with the understanding that their fellow passengers and airline staff would be masked had to endure mid-fight celebrations and fellow flyers gleefully whipping off their face coverings after Mizelle made her idiotic and reckless judgement. No doubt many immuno-suppressed folks and parents of unvaccinated kids were caught by surprise and frightened by these mid-air displays. No one really knows the risks for masked passengers because there’s no data on the matter, which would require random before-and-after testing.

But…”so what”? Who cares? This is the USA, monument to rugged individualism and pathological indifference to the common good, animated by a firm belief in the survival of the fittest. This is sociopathic capitalism, where the rich fly in private jets and the vulnerable can suck it.

How much play Mizelle’s hack ruling got on cable I can’t say. (I’ve been away from cable television for a month.) My guess is that it was a fairly big cable news deal for a day or so. It’ll take the resumption of mass hospitalizations and deaths for covid to break through Ukraine on the national news Brain. Exquisitely timed with a new covid uptick, the ruling help bring that catastrophe about.

A Public Defender on the Court

The hearings over Biden’s appointment of a Black woman to the nation’s highest court made some brief but serious cable news media noise I’m sure, with MSNBC no doubt mocking asinine Republifascist Senators who tried to link Katanji Brown Jackson to global pedophile rings and other Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies funded by George Soros. Liberals high-fived over the ascendency of a Black female face to a high place even though (a) the Trump-made/Handmaid Court retains its absurd 6-3 right-wing woman- and minority-hating super-majority and (b) meaningful anti-racism and anti-sexism is about challenging and dismantling racist and sexist institutions and structures, not merely changing the color and gender of folks atop such institutions. I bet there was only minor attention given to a part of Jackson’s resume that lacks Culture War sex appeal of race and gender identity: she’s the first former public defender on the Supreme Court.

Garland Remains Inert

President Sleepytime’s ridiculous Attorney General, properly sur-named after a lifeless ornamental object (Merrick Garland) shows no signs of wanting to put the lethal fascist monster Trump behind bars for trying to overthrow the US-American republic – something that is no doubt causing some consternation among some MSNBC talking heads (as well it should). Beneath some standard, highly caffeinated liberal bitching from the likes of Ukraine war cheerleader Joy Reid and the intelligent Chris Hayes, the fact that January 6^th is going into the books like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch – a massive, technically treasonous and fascist coup attempt receiving only minor punishment with the top fascist perpetrator and his inner circle free to commit new crimes against the bourgeois state – is another nonstory lost in the fog of war and appeasement. Meanwhile, a recent New Republic poll shows that 58% of Republicans think Trump’s attempted fascist cancellation of the 2020 election was a “patriotic” act.

Grand Rapids Fascism

Speaking of fascism, last week saw the heinous and unnecessary traffic stop shooting of the 26-year-old Black man Patrick Lyoya by a white male cop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There were local protests but nothing on a national scale and cable did not pay big attention I am told. Also speaking of fascism, Michigan, and Grand Rapids, a jury in a federal Grand Rapids courthouse recently four white Michigan Militia freaks walk for being caught in an FBI sting operation plotting to kidnap the liberal Democratic and female governor of that state – Gretchen Whitmer – as punishment for her enactment and enforcement of minimal public health measures to protect her state’s citizens from Covid 19 in the spring and summer of 2020. The fascists’ lawyer swayed the jury with the argument that the FBI manipulating people into committing crimes is “unacceptable in America… That’s not how it works. We don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them,” the lawyer said. Actually, though, “we” do in fact do that. As Buzzfeed’s Ken Bensinger noted, “[the fascists’ lawyer] was mistaken. Using swarms of informants to push suspected radicals toward violence is in fact exactly how it works: The FBI has been doing it for at least half a century, from the Black Panthers in the 1970s to Muslim groups in the wake of 9/11. But because the targets in this case were conservative white men, those tactics touched a nerve with a swath of the population that had never seriously considered the issue before.”

Yes, but the wannabe Whitmer kidnappers are not “conservatives.” They are radical white nationalists: fascists. Perhaps they will soon join Kyle Rittenhouse in a FOX News special on exonerated “patriots” and a luncheon with the big orange dog himself in Mar-a-Lago.

I have no idea how far the verdict on the Michigan kidnap plotters went on cable news. My guess would be that MSDNC’s Joy Reid and Chris Hayes dedicated a segment or two to criticizing the outcome and that Tucker Carlson and other revanchists applauded it on Fatherland News. And then everyone shifted back to Ukraine.

So What Mass Shootings

There’s been no white nationalist terror attacks yet this year, no Timothy McVeighs or Dylann Roofs to shock the nation, but don’t hold your breath. Mass murderous white nationalist Incels and conspiratorial paranoids are certainly hatching in the nation’s deep psychotic interstices, waiting for their five minutes of blood-soaked infamy. They only need a signal or two from Herr Trump or the RepubliNazi propaganda chief and open Putinist Carlson and/or a neo-Nazi lizard like Mark Levin or Charlie Kirk. A Joe Biden cardiac arrest that elevated the supposed “communist” (according to Trump) Kamala “Laughing Gas” Harris to the presidency could press some white male identity buttons and do the trick.

Mass shootings? There’s been nothing on the Las Vegas, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook or Parkside scale, but the problem, rooted in the deadly US combination of widespread arming and massive social inequality and alienation, marches on. The Gun Violence Archive reported 81 mass shootings leading to 81 deaths and 376 injuries in the US between February 24th (the day psycho-killer Putin invaded Ukraine) and April 17^th of this year. The gun-saturated “beacon to the world of the way life should be” (then US Senator Kay Baily Hutchinson’s description of the USA in an October 2002 speech supporting George W. Bush’s right to mass murderously invade Iraq if he wanted to [he did]) celebrated Easter weekend with at least two mass shootings, one of which killed two youths. A small number of the bloodlettings briefly cracked the national news, but they were no match for Ukraine given (a) the absence of truly mass fatalities and horror on the Las Vegas/Virginia Tech/Sandy Hook/Parkside scale and (b) the fact that gun violence is now routinized/normalized/banalized in Armed Madhouse Amerika. Let’s be honest: mass shootings have fallen into the category of “so what” in this lethal asylum, this loathsome business platform masquerading as a society.

What Will Be Omitted From the Dobbs v. Jackson Coverage

Back to Amerikaner fascism…Here’s a story that can be expected to compete with Ukraine for a bit: the US Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson, coldly defying the rule of law [1] by undoing women’s half-century constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives and thereby re-imposing the de facto female enslavement of forced motherhood. The decision could come any day but expect the high Trump/Handmaid court to wait for schools to let out. The woman-hating thugs atop the Simon Says Supremes will prefer to secrete their sickening decision after graduation scatters young women from college campuses. A large number of the nation’s many “red” (patriarchal-Republifascist) states will have their existing “medieval” measures validated and will pass revolting new “Christian”-femicidal legislation meant to put women “back in their place.”

FOX News will crow about the decision and MSNBC will denounce it. What won’t be considered newsworthy on either network or at CNN is how the establishment liberal-Dem “pro-choice organizations chose not to mobilize million of people to try to prevent the reversal of Roe out of (a) a fear of “the mob,” that is, of masses of angry and informed citizens in the streets and public squares and (b) the cynical electoral calculation that the likely coming Handmaid decision will work to the dismal Dems’ advantage in the November 2022 mid-term Congressional elections.

Republifascist Congress

Which reminds me of the likely biggest news story of late 2022: the Republifascist takeover of the US Congress (a decision reversing Roe will NOT in fact let the Dems keep Congress), setting the stage for accelerated national dysfunction and right-wing consolidation atop all three branches of the thoroughly corrupted US national government in 2025. I have no idea where the Ukraine War will be by next November, but, barring a major conflagration beyond Ukraine (which could happen), this will hold the news cycle for quite some time. (Liberals might want to study some of these Ukrainian resistance Molotov Cocktail videos they were applauding a few weeks ago. We look forward to the Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer militia movement headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut and San Francisco’s Presidio Heights.)

Trump’s Anti-“Marxist” Hate Rally Tour

And that in turn reminds me of the biggest media non-story of the year: Donald Trump’s persistent knuckle-dragging presence on the hate rally tour circuit, where the tangerine-tinted tyrant feeds his ravenous white nationalist base with his usual nuggets of steaming Hitlerian falsehood, including these:

+ He won the 2020 election.

+ Biden “abolished the southern border.”

+ Foreign countries are flooding the US with criminals via rampant “open border” immigration.

+ The climate catastrophe is fake news.

+ The Democrats are “radical socialists” who “hate America.”

+ “We allow Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America.”

Someone should do a combined Google and LexisNexis search to try to determine how many times Trump has said and attacked “Marxists” and “Marxism” (along with “radical Left” and “socialists” and “communists”) since at least 2015. Hateful obsession with Marxism and Marxists and the creepy habit of calling one’s liberal and centrist enemies “Marxists” (and related terms mentioned above) are classic fascist calling cards. They were written all over Trump role model Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, consistent with Hitler’s statement during his largely successful self-defense in the Beer Hall Putsch trial: “My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister: I wanted to be the destroyer of Marxism.” The destroyer of Marxism and what Hitler called “Judeo Bolshevism.” Hitler’s anti-Marxism was intimately linked to his venomous anti-Semitic and anti-“Slav” racism [2]and the related conspiratorial anti-globalist German white nationalism of the time. He would have been quite at home in today’s Trumpified Republican Party. (One irony here is that there really was a big and significant Marxist Left for fascists to crush in post-WWI Germany and there is no such Left in the US today [3].)

The “Marxist” (“lol”) Democratic Party and its media wings, which semi-secretly welcome the coming reversal of Roe (for electoral purposes), treat the continuing Trump menace as a minor story at best, thereby diminishing their own responsibility for his survival and calculating perhaps that his nauseating endurance is their best bet for keeping the White House in 2024-25. I near conclusion with an instructive quote from Salon’s Chauncy de Vega, who has been working for seven years to get Democrats and others to wake up and smell the fascist essence of Trump and Trumpism:

‘The Democratic Party has shown itself to be largely ineffective, powerless and incompetent in their response to the neofascist attacks on democracy. This is part of a much larger pattern: For more than 50 years the Republican Party and the “conservative” movement have won and kept power by leveraging the politics of white racial resentment and grievance-mongering, even though their policies are extremely unpopular with most of the public. In many ways, Trumpism, neofascism and straightforward white identity politics are the next step in that political strategy…Republicans (and the Trump movement specifically) view liberals, progressives, Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups as enemies and an existential threat to their right-wing nightmare version of America. That animus is not about “mere” disagreements about public policy or just a matter of “polarization,” partisanship or hyperbolic language. It is a direct threat of violence, with the goal of eliminating the “enemy” in order to “purify” America…In even more plain speech: if you are not white (and a man), a heterosexual, and a so-called “Christian,” today’s Republican Party, the “conservative” movement, and the larger white right do not like you. They want you to suffer. Republicans are masters at the personalization of grievance, and will lie and distort reality and the facts to frighten their voters in order to win, maintain and expand their political power and societal control.

…Democrats [need] to tell the truth about the human misery that Republicans and “conservatives” have caused for decades — and the much worse misery they will cause in the future…Yet out of gross denial, or perhaps naive investment in a “normal” political order that is dying and cannot be resurrected, the Democrats have not done that and likely never will. This is not even defeat. It’s surrender, and a pitiable sight at a moment when courage is required to save American democracy and society from the neofascist assault’ (emphasis added).

That’s very well said though I think the dismal demobilizing dollar Dems’ crime is worse than surrender: it is complicity.

NOW is the Time

Those who reject the surrender, and the tyranny of “normal” politics and cynical electoral calculation should consider coming out into streets with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, which is urgently organizing mass emergency protests to send the message that reversing Roe means mass disruption of business as usual. In the meantime, sign RU4AR’s petition, which ends with this call to action:

“If you care about the half of humanity that is born female… if you remember the dark days of back-alley deaths and foreclosed lives… if you are among the 1 in 4 women whose hopes and dreams — or even survival — has hinged on access to abortion… if you refuse to inherit, or pass on, a world that is hurtling backwards…NOW  is the time to hold nothing back. NOW is the time to rouse thousands and soon millions in struggle so that we can look every woman and girl in the eye with the promise in word and deed that they will have a future as full human beings. NOW is the time to stand up, together, as if our lives depend upon it—for, in fact, they do.”

The other night I dreamt that this statement was read aloud by female valedictorians at spring 2022 college, university, and high school commencements across the US. Thousands of graduating students waved and wore the green bandanas that have become the symbol of powerful Latin American abortion rights movements. They turned graduation into a radical and feminist political moment not soon to be forgotten.

Endnotes

+1. Today as when the Roe v. Wade decision came down, a super-majority-plus of Americans support women’s right to an abortion. There has been absolutely no fundamental change in societal attitudes or conventions that can justify the high court repudiating stare decisis, the legal doctrine that obligates courts to follow historical cases when making a ruling on a similar case.

+2. In 2018-2020 I heard from left-identified know-it-all Know Nothings that Trump had nothing to do with fascism because (i) fascism was about a specific kind of political economy and required the state/dictator being in command of the economy and (ii) Trump remained subordinate to capital as president. It was astonishing to see the extent to which these critics missed fascism’s central racial dimension. Gosh, was Adolf Hitler a fascist? It appears that he was! And Hitler wrote this in sick, sprawling manifesto Mein Kampf: “The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception of development…The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization.” Throughout Mein Kamp, the complete and total asshole Hitler “refrains,” in William Shirer’s words, “from any expression on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.” Mein Kampf is among other things a long attack on Marxism, Jews, “Slavs,” and other supposed inferior, sub-Aryan races. It’s all about race and the author’s sick interwar German version of white nationalism, wherein virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism is linked to anti-Marxism and hatred of the Soviet Union via the concept of Judeo-Bolshevism. It’s all tied in with open hatted of democracy for purportedly empowering “inferior” polyglot mongrel races and being subject to nefarious manipulation by Semitic elites who supposedly stabbed a great Aryan nation (Germany) in the back. The revolting volume is also infected by a big strain of arch-patriarchal sexism, of course. The rapist, racist Trump and many his fellow Republifascists would have felt quite at home in the Nazi “Make Germany Great Again” (MGGA) Party, which was all about the virulent eliminationist white nationalism of its time and place.

+3. Which some left-identified know-it-all Know Nothings have taken to mean that fascism can’t be a real thing in the US today. For criticism of this also idiotic argument, see Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022), 176 (see pp. 173-181 for a broader critique of 18 related narratives of Trumpism-fascism denial advanced by left-identified commenters, almost always frustrated and older white males shielded by color and gender from the worst effects of US neofascism.) On how the fascist (“late” fascist) menace – framed largely around race – is very much alive and well in the absence of a revolutionary socialist and proletarian Left in Europe and the Americas, see Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s astonishingly brilliant book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (London: Verso, 2021).

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Lee Fang.

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• President Joe Biden signs immigration orders to undo family separation policy.
• Senate confirms Biden’s historic cabinet picks: Homeland Security and Transportation Secretaries.
• Democrats file 77 page impeachment brief against Donald Trump, his lawyers file defense.
• Thousands arrested in Russia protesting prison sentence for dissident Aleksei Navalny.
• Biden administration finds Myanmar military engaged in coup, paves way for sanctions.
• Biden administration to increase vaccine allocation to 6,500 pharmacies.
• Study finds 27% of Americans would not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
• California Clean Water Act introduced to eliminate pollution in state’s waterways.

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