“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. 
Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:
“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...
“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”
Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. 
Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. 
Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. 
Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.
New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. 
A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. 
However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. 
Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york">the Red Flag editorial</a> following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke">outlines the subsequent developments</a>.
Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.
That is something to be built on.

Editors

The Mamdani moment

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.
“No Kings” went to the polls.
In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.
The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. 
<a href="https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/">Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania</a>, considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in <a href="https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/">Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat</a>.
The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.
According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power">economic and political headwinds</a> that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”</a> and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024.
In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from">2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated</a>.
Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.
In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.
Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.
<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/">The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today</a>. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.
Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its <a href="https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/">law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities</a>. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s <a href="https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/">anti-union “right to work” law</a>.
Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit">single-payer health care</a>. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.
In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech">his victory speech</a>. Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.
Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. 
Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.
What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.
Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/">1900s model of “sewer socialism”</a>. This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. 
But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.
Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left">so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats</a>. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal
that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”.
Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.
His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him.
In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html">nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”</a>. 
We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. <a href="https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways">Social democrat Eric Blanc may</a> consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.
In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner<a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-">, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)</a>. At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc">even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it</a>.
What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election">As Liza Featherstone put it</a>, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”.
While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails.
There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead.
Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.

Lance Selfa

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

Ben Hillier

Did Palestine set New York free?

CHICAGO—More than 200,000 people turned out in downtown Chicago on 18 October to join the “No Kings” demonstration against the Trump regime. At one point, the march from the gathering spot through the Chicago Loop (downtown) stretched two and a half miles (4km).
The Chicago protest was part of a national effort, organised by a coalition of liberal groups, that brought as many as 7 million people—one in 50 Americans—into the street to protest Trump. Protests occurred everywhere, from the largest cities to small towns in conservative parts of the country.
Democratic politicians boosted the national effort, and the liberal MSNBC network promoted it. This was a departure from earlier national “No Kings” (in June) and “Hands Off” protests (in April), when leading Democrats kept their distance. But protesters in Chicago didn’t need prodding. The Trump administration’s attack on the city and its surrounding suburbs, beginning in September, was more than enough motivation for hundreds of thousands.
Trump ordered “Operation Midway Blitz”, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other militarised federal police forces descending on Chicago on 9 September. Trump’s racist crackdown on immigrants picked Chicago because it is a Democratic Party-dominated city, in a Democratic-dominated state, <a href="https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/12/chicago-immigrant-population-growth-trump-immigration-enforcement">where more than one in five residents was born outside the US</a>.
Since 9 September, Chicago has been on high alert. Each day, a battle with marauding federal agents unfolds. ICE, Border Patrol and other masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drive through neighbourhoods in unmarked SUVs and arrest immigrants (and many citizens) going about their daily business.
Parents dropping off their kids at school. Construction and landscape workers on job sites. Day labourers looking for work at Home Depots and Menard’s (“big box” hardware stores where contractors pick up building supplies and hire casual labour). People attending church services. Individual tamaleros/as (people who make and sell tamales from street carts) or vendors at neighbourhood swap meets (a flea market for multiple vendors). Even, seemingly, random people walking down the street or waiting at bus stops. 
Since the Supreme Court essentially <a href="https://eji.org/news/supreme-court-allows-stops-based-on-race-to-continue/">legalised racial profiling</a> at the Trump administration’s request, federal agents are making warrantless arrests each day. Apparently, having brown skin or speaking Spanish are the main pretexts that ICE is using for its stops and arrests. This, of course, gives the lie to Trump and his apologists who claim that they are focusing on criminals and dangerous individuals. As of 8 October, ICE <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/operation-midway-blitz-arrests-ice-crackdown-chicago-data-other-states/">had reportedly arrested 1,500 people in its Operation Midway Blitz</a>. Even <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Dq5IR_piZRT0%23:~:text%3DICE%2520says%2520at%2520least%252013%2520people%2520with,32%2520Chicago%2520Live:%2520https://www.fox32chicago.com/live%2520FOX%252032%2520Chicago&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi655zU7L2QAxX_GzQIHc2GBOIQ1fkOegQIAxAG&amp;opi=89978449&amp;cd&amp;psig=AOvVaw3dWlwP95KgYMFAB2fbraW1&amp;ust=1761430116144000">ICE admits that only about 1 percent of them</a> have violent criminal records.
ICE agents have already killed one man, who they tried to arrest after he dropped his son off at school. ICE and its mouthpieces at the Department of Homeland Security—one node of the Trump Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”—accused Silverio Villegas González of trying to run into ICE agents with his vehicle. Subsequently, video, including body camera footage <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwihider7b2QAxVQFDQIHZjCG-wQFnoECBkQAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Fice-fatal-shooting-chicago-bodycam-footage-villegas-gonzalez-rcna233484&amp;usg=AOvVaw3rb4QZ9R6IV_iIBYHQOA2V&amp;opi=89978449">from local police department officers</a>, exposed DHS’s story as a fabrication. 
Another Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martínez five times while she was sitting in her car behind the agent’s vehicle in the Latino working-class neighbourhood of Brighton Park. Miraculously, she escaped life-threatening injury. But, again, video footage of the incident showed that the Border Patrol—which claimed Martínez had rammed the feds’ vehicle and threatened them with a weapon—<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bodycam-footage-conflicts-with-dhs-account-chicago-womans-shooting-by-border-2025-10-08/">was lying about the confrontation</a>. It’s becoming conventional wisdom among many in Chicago—activists, journalists and many everyday folks—that DHS’s statements are lying cover stories that unravel within a few hours.
Perhaps the pinnacle (so far) of the ICE theatre of cruelty was the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/chicago-south-shores-border-patrol-raid.html">30 September early morning commando raid</a> on an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighbourhood. ICE and other federal agents stormed the building, some of them rappelling down its five stories from helicopters hovering overhead. DHS was treating a dilapidated apartment housing poor African Americans and Venezuelan migrants as a militia stronghold in wartime Iraq. And DHS filmed the assault to provide the likes of Fox News and MAGA influencers with images of “heroic agents” taking on what they said was a den for Tren de Aragua gang members.
The ICE agents marched dozens of people, in handcuffs, out of the building. They included barefoot children and adults in various states of undress. Agents racially segregated the detainees (Black people in one group, Latinos in another) before processing them. They arrested 37 people, only one of whom ICE alleges in court has any connection to a gang. And when people returned to their apartments, they found them ransacked, with doors torn off their hinges.
Because of these terror tactics, the ICE processing centre in Broadview, a small suburban town to the west of Chicago, has become a flashpoint for face-offs between protesters and federal agents. In previous periods of immigrant rights activism, the Broadview facility was a focal point for often symbolic civil disobedience actions, including politicians and clergy. With Operation Midway Blitz, hundreds have turned out regularly to protest and resist.
In response, federal agents have brutalised and tear-gassed crowds of unarmed people. In <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwixpoeH9r2QAxXvOjQIHWagJhwQtwJ6BAgHEAI&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_SbX0UbBFaY&amp;usg=AOvVaw27ufvJe-2NjumY3kvNdQ2O&amp;opi=89978449">one incident that went viral</a>, an ICE agent standing on the roof of the building fired a pepper ball into the head of Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, who was making a moral appeal to the ICE agents. This was yet another example of DHS’s gratuitous violence, as anyone watching the video could see that Black posed no threat to—indeed wasn’t even near—the agent who inflicted severe injury on him.
These repressive actions, and similar ones in city and suburban neighbourhoods, against unarmed civilians have prompted a series of federal lawsuits from immigrant rights advocates and the media against these tactics. Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued rulings barring federal agents from using tear gas and other violent measures against demonstrators and the press. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/us/gregory-bovino-chicago-immigration-tear-gas-hnk">ICE has already flouted the judge’s orders</a>.
Yet the most important story in Chicago is one of resistance. Chicago was a centre of <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/28/immigrants-marching-out-of-the-shadows">mass protests for immigrant rights in the mid-2000s</a>. Although the movement subsided, it produced thousands of activists and dozens of immigrant rights organisations rooted in communities across the region. As Chicago-based socialist <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/resistance-breeds-solidarity-a-report-from-chicago/">Sharon Smith wrote about the thousands</a> who attended the Chicago “No Kings” event:
“The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the ‘Rapid Response Networks’ that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs.
“These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of ‘Know your rights’ brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area versus when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area.
“Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.”
The activism in neighbourhoods around the city is yet another example of the fact that thousands of working people are willing to stand against the authoritarianism coming from the Trump administration in ways that elites at institutions like universities, corporations and the Democratic Party have not. 
For many liberals, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is something of an exception to this elite capitulation. Pritzker has denounced Trump and his “lackey” Stephen Miller, the white supremacist White House domestic adviser who is thought to be the main architect of the anti-immigrant assault. Pritzker has warned federal agents of consequences if they violate Illinoisans’ civil rights.
But Pritzker’s image is mostly based on talk, rather than action. In fact, Pritzker has ordered the Illinois State Police to set up a “free speech zone” at some distance from the Broadview facility’s driveway. The state police themselves have already beaten and arrested protesters in multiple confrontations there. In other words, while Pritzker touts his support for peaceful protests against ICE, his police force is performing crowd control for ICE—allowing it to maraud throughout the Chicago area. The Democrats’ commitment to uphold the status quo renders them accomplices to Trump, rather than serious opponents.
At the time of writing, the Supreme Court is reviewing <a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&amp;&amp;p=c9b1f1883d48acc275630ae224deb6ca6d8e6f5a734fd2ae86e3df47d3f34176JmltdHM9MTc2MTI2NDAwMA&amp;ptn=3&amp;ver=2&amp;hsh=4&amp;fclid=10f13388-b905-653b-2029-26d3b8816423&amp;psq=trump+appeal+to+supreme+court+illinois+national+guard&amp;u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy8yMDI1LzEwLzE3L254LXMxLTU1NzgyNjYvdHJ1bXAtc3VwcmVtZS1jb3VydC1uYXRpb25hbC1ndWFyZC1pbGxpbm9pcw">the Trump administration’s emergency appeal</a> of a district court ruling barring the federal deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained">Under a 150-year-old law</a>, the federal government is barred from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard in Illinois, following a similar deployment in Los Angeles earlier this year, is intended to usurp that authority. 
By law, Illinois’ claim that Trump’s order is illegal should be a clear-cut case. But the Supreme Court has been one of chief enablers of Trump’s effort to crown himself king. So, we shouldn’t expect that the court will stand in his way. A National Guard deployment into the streets of Chicago would mark another dangerous escalation. It would require the resistance to broaden and deepen.

Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak">must publicly insist</a>: “I know exactly what I’m doing”. 
The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/">the Nineteenth Amendment,</a> which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy.
It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this?
It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In The Reactionary Mind, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”.
The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference">to take one example</a>. These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia.
In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html">solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html">electric vehicles</a> being forfeited to the Chinese state.
Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction">To liberal Josh Marshall</a>, the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/">To socialist Ashley Smith</a>, the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”.
Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga">the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs</a> over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers.
Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. 
But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. 
We should remember that the likes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic">Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry</a>—in league with “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">lumpencapitalist</a>” <a href="https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf">supplement peddlers</a> (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/">aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending</a>. Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. 
Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html">But to tech billionaires</a> who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense.
A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are <a href="https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/">highly authoritarian and anti-modern</a>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm">Leon Trotsky’s observation</a> about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: 
“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”
These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/">which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state</a>.
And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. 
Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html">as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month</a>.
That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves.
US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it.

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
--------------------
Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

D. Taylor

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

Free speech under attack in the US

The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist <a href="https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW_JmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq_aem_l9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christian nationalists</a> of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rich and powerful</a> from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.
Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IRS tax return</a> reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=WORO-OgThig" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gushy video tour</a> of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.
The post-sixties campus
Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal.
The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">College Republican politics</a> in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:
“In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.
“This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.”
The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the <a href="https://dartreview.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dartmouth Review</a>, founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built <a href="https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“shanty towns”</a> on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to an article in the New York Times:
“But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by The Review against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of The Review. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.”
Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Subway gunman”</a> who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a Dartmouth Review editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986. The Dartmouth Review had rich and powerful friends, including <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ronald Reagan</a>. This was long before Charlie Kirk was around.
In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“political correctness”</a>—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mass media and intellectual pundits</a> with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators.
I was a member of the <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba">International Socialist Organization</a> at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO <a href="https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a pamphlet</a>, What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction:
“No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.”
The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses.
Under the perfect sun
In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a <a href="https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">major tourist destination</a> and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club.
But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recalled</a>:
“I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fredric Jameson</a>. I also sat in on <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Herbert Marcuse’s</a> undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.”
UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the New Indicator newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a <a href="https://creationsd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creation and Earth Science Museum</a>. I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!”
In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rebellion in Los Angeles</a>, following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring.
President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing crackpot</a> Ayn Rand.
The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’”
Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation.
Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!”
It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased.
Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting.
It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he [Reisman] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing.
Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them.
Joe Allen is the author of <a href="https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48">Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union</a> and <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS</a>. He lives in Chicago.

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