Palestinian activist and recent graduate of New York’s Columbia University Mahmoud Khalil has spoken for the first time about his detention at the hands of the US government. Authorities arrested and are attempting to deport Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States and prominent figure in last year’s Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment. 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him on the evening of 8 March. They also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, who is a US citizen. President Trump said Khalil’s case is “the first arrest of many to come”. The goal is to intimidate student activists, undermine the right to free speech and smash all solidarity with Palestine. 
“Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favour of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end”, Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told the New York Times.
Khalil is being held in a detention facility in Louisiana but was able to dictate <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25592020-letter-from-a-palestinian-political-prisoner-in-louisiana-march-18-2025/">the following statement</a> by phone to his friends and family. 
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Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana 
Dictated over the phone from ICE Detention 
March 18, 2025 
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. 
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing. 
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities. 
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours—I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request. 
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom. 
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge—to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza Hospital director and paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace. 
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted. 
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns—based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked. 
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticising Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students—some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation—and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples. 
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change—leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice. 
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all. 
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana

US authorities have arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent figure in last year’s Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment. 
Khalil was reportedly inside his university-owned apartment in Manhattan when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him on Saturday night. They also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, according to Khalil’s lawyer Amy Greer.
Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States; his wife is a citizen. Greer told the Associated Press that the ICE agents told her they acted on State Department orders. She also said that Mahmoud’s whereabouts are unknown.
“Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, ‘detained’ seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate”, City University of New York professor Corey Robin commented. 
This is the first publicly known deportation effort under President Trump’s promised crackdown on student activists.
The Republican Party’s 2024 election platform promised to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America” and to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”.
Then, in a 30 January executive order, Trump warned: “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before”.
Shortly after the executive order was issued, the Justice Department assembled a multi-agency “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”. Its first priority, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-formation-task-force-combat-anti-semitism">according to a media release</a>, “will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses”.
The targeting of Mahmoud Khalil has nothing to do with “fighting antisemitism”, which has become little more than a euphemism for waging a war on Palestinians and their supporters.
Deportation Defense in the United States released the following statement. We encourage readers of Red Flag to <a href="https://actionnetwork.org/letters/demand-the-immediate-release-of-columbia-student-pro-palestine-advocate-mahmoud-khalil-from-dhs-detention">sign the petition and share it widely</a>.
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Demand the Immediate Release of Palestinian Student Activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention
On the evening of March 8, 2025, Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil was detained by the Department of Homeland Security. The arrest comes on the heels of the Department of State’s announcement that it plans to deport students affiliated with pro-Palestine protests. The student, who is Palestinian, is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.
Columbia University, which recently published a <a href="https://publicsafety.columbia.edu/content/protocol-potential-visits-campus-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice-agents" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">new protocol</a> on its plans to cooperate with ICE, has targeted Khalil for his Palestinian identity and outspoken activism on multiple occasions over the last 17 months. 
He served as a lead negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring and has frequently appeared in media interviews and press conferences. Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. 
Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various Zionist harassment campaigns, fuelled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instil fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others. 
Add your name to demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention and a reversal to Columbia University's protocol permitting ICE on campus without a warrant.

US government ‘kidnaps’ Palestinian student activist

Robert Narai

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

The far right’s “war on woke” has been taken to a terrifying new level with Donald Trump in the White House. He has made it clear that oppressed groups will be trampled until they shut up and put up. Trans kids have no right to be addressed as themselves. Young Black men have no right to resist being murdered by cops. Women have no right to reproductive control. Immigrants are invaders. (But far-right criminals like Andrew Tate should be <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.html">brought back into</a> the country.) 
This isn’t just a push-back against cultural symbols; it is about winding back the clock more than half a century on the rights and expectations of the working class and all of its constituent oppressed groups. The left should oppose all of Trump’s “anti-woke” measures, individually and as a package. 
The move that has grabbed the most attention has been Trump’s orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices. Basically, DEI has been outlawed for government bureaucracies and institutions. Trump has even rescinded a 1965 executive order mandating non-discriminatory hiring practices for government employees and contractors. 
On the chopping block is everything from the high-profile cosmetic DEI government initiatives of recent years (for example, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/cia-dismisses-intelligence-officers-diversity/index.html">CIA has dismissed its DEI officers</a>) through to <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/education/education-department-schools-cut-dei-lose-funding/">cutting vital education programs</a> for disadvantaged kids. In fact, Trump has threatened to shut the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-department-education-budget-employees-why-trump-wants-it-shut-down-2025-02-19/">whole federal education department</a> because it disproportionately assists kids in poverty or with special needs. This offensive against DEI dovetails with the DOGE campaign to trash the public service. 
Trump has also made it clear that the private sector is expected to follow suit in abandoning DEI and woke policies. The response has been more than obliging. Since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action late in 2023, the anti-woke current has gained ground. But now there is a stampede away from DEI within corporate America. 
Walmart is ending diversity hiring commitments, shutting down its Center for Racial Equity and removing many LGBT-themed products from its website. Goldman Sachs is dropping its policy of having two “diverse members” on its board. Amazon is shutting down its “outdated programs and materials”. Google is ending diversity hiring and its observations of cultural events like Pride Month and Black History Month. Deloitte told its employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures. 
Meta is ending diversity hiring and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to bring more “masculine energy” into the company. Disney is getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow website, which highlights diverse employees. Talk about a bleak new order: no tomorrow for the kids. 
It’s an embarrassing turnaround, especially given the fanfare with which DEI was taken up by corporate elites just a few years ago. The craze began in response to the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020—the biggest demonstrations in US history. Corporations, government bureaucracies and NGOs rushed to capitalise on and contain the movement by rebranding themselves as “inclusive” and “culturally sensitive”. 
Some of the things they did were positive—like introducing or expanding non-discriminatory hiring processes. But mostly, it was about making token and well-publicised gestures, especially those that appeared to “diversify” management positions. There was also a rush to implement “implicit bias” training programs, often run by grifters such as Robin D’Angelo, who has amassed significant personal wealth by lecturing company employees about their inherent “privilege”.
It was no accident that US capitalists shelled out millions of dollars to corporate consultants like D’Angelo while opposing minimum wage rises and resisting workers’ attempts to form trade unions. 
Given the superficiality of DEI, it is no wonder that many corporate lackeys have quickly abandoned it in favour of the now trending far-right bigotry and an all-out assault on the oppressed. 
In general, the “woke era” offered only superficial reforms, at the same time as creating a sensibility that oppression is the result of cultural backwardness rather than structural and economic inequalities. It has been an era in which social solidarity and challenging the system have been jettisoned in favour of “calling out” bad ideas and the people holding them and adopting the supposedly “correct” and “inclusive” language, symbols and etiquette. 
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to call people by their correct pronouns, rename or remove colonial monuments and so on. But we should not, especially now, go along with the liberal narrative that DEI and “woke” represented an important extension of the gains made by the civil rights movement and the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
For the left, and those looking to dismantle systems of oppression, the “woke era” actually reflected a period of setbacks. It started with a turn away from the radicalism, collectivism and economic gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and towards the commodification and academisation of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This happened alongside Reaganism (named after the Republican US president), which inflicted crushing defeats on working-class organisations and asserted the primacy of markets over all aspects of life. “Woke culture” represents the fusion of degenerated progressivism with the sensibilities of Wall Street financiers.
Nevertheless, while a left critique of modern identity politics and its effects is necessary, it should in no way prevent us from opposing Trump’s attacks and from recognising their much broader implications. Unfortunately, some on the reformist left have welcomed Trump’s offensive against “woke”. Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine in the US, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html">was quoted in the New York Times</a> as saying: “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now. What comes next might be worse ... [but] it has a chance to be better”.
This is deeply misguided. For one thing, Trump and his cronies have very different reasons for opposing “woke culture”. And in fact, the political right has, for now, won the conversation on “woke”, a term originally coined by anti-racist activists in the US but now turned into a pejorative term that encompasses every symbol of respect and dignity that oppressed groups have won, as well as our fundamental rights and protections. 
In their eyes, anyone who has even a passing concern about oppression is infected with “the woke mind virus”. And that is why Trump’s moves against DEI are far reaching and include attacks on laws and conventions established as a result of the civil rights movement. And his attacks on woke extend even further: to any individual institution or policy that defends the environment, to threats of deportation to people who dare to stand up to Israel’s attempted genocide in Palestine, to dismembering the National Labor Relations Board, opposing minimum wage increases, trashing the public service and firing thousands of workers. 
Also, the lines between cynical DEI measures and supportable measures are very blurry. The left should not call for diversity on corporate boards or support HR departments having more discretionary power. And the left should not support the punitive and censorial atmosphere that has become associated with social justice and identity politics. But more opposition to racism and other forms of oppression throughout society is a good thing—as is awareness of historical and contemporary injustices.
Rather than distinguishing between reasonable and reactionary “social justice” policies, we should recognise that the right-wing assault on “woke culture” is part of an assault on the working class in all its diversity. In fact, any criticism of wokeness that does not pose a superior way to advance the fight against oppression is a step in the wrong direction. This is especially the case when it is coming from a heinously reactionary administration that is inspiring fascists and the far right the world over. 
Trump is not clearing the path for the left to build a superior way of fighting against racism and other oppressions but throwing up more obstacles to the creation of a more caring and egalitarian society. Trump aims to create an atmosphere of fear. He wants to brutalise the most oppressed, and society more broadly, to lower all of our standards and expectations. He is about attacking the working class and any idea that workers should have rights. 
Sunkara’s comments are linked to a broader political view, termed “class first” socialism, which conflates neoliberal identity politics with all anti-racism and opposition to oppression, and which says that focusing on oppression is alienating to the working class, particularly at an electoral level. In practice, these people tend to support the Democrats. They blame the party’s adherence to identity politics when it fails and, while this is certainly a factor, their critique is aimed at rehabilitating the party. 
As well as a thin veneer for opportunist electoralism, these class reductionists sell out our side twice over: once by in effect arguing for the abandonment of the oppressed, and then again by arguing that the working class is too basic and self-interested to care about oppression. 
Yet, here we have such a clear example, in the negative, of how oppression and class are entwined. Trump wants to attack the oppressed, as a spearhead for a major assault on the working class—not one that is going to be phased in but one that is going on as we speak. In the name of the war on DEI and “woke”, vital services that workers rely on are being slashed, workers themselves are being fired, and basic standards that the workers’ movement has fought for are under threat. 
The political right has clearly benefited from defining its agenda as a “culture war” to make it seem separate from class attacks. The far-right politicians want to be able to masquerade as defenders of workers against culturally progressive elites. Liberal elites also like to peddle this idea, because it assists their class interests to present workers as culturally backwards but also to frame the struggles against oppression as classless pursuits of human progress. 
It is up to the left to reject these lies. The rights of racially oppressed groups, women and the LGBT community are inextricably bound with the class struggle. It was during high points of class struggle that oppressed groups won the most gains. Struggles against oppression have repeatedly been a lightning rod for broader working-class rebellion and advances. 
If we are going to defeat Trump’s assault, our side needs this history and political outlook. Fighting back will require mass resistance in the streets, industrial action by workers and the offering of an anti-capitalist horizon for our struggles. 
We have seen mass resistance in recent times: the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the historic Palestine demonstrations in support of Gaza, some smaller but important mobilisations for trans rights recently. We need all these people and more to start organising, disrupting business as usual, asserting that the rights of the oppressed will be defended and expanded. 
And, crucially, we need to build links of solidarity between our struggles. Agonising about who has more privilege or whether people are harbouring implicit biases or manifesting micro-aggressions is a distraction from building these kinds of movements. 
Ultimately, to make real gains, we need the working class to move, to use its industrial power to fight for better wages and conditions and to fight like hell for the dignity and humanity that we all deserve. The workers’ movement, at its best, takes up the cause of every oppressed group because an injury to one is an injury to all. 
It is no accident that the far right and its billionaire champions want to degrade all of us: their power and wealth are based on trampling people. It is no accident that the liberal elites can be progressive only in tokenistic and superficial ways, because their power too is based on our oppression. 
In contrast to both, our power is based on solidarity and a collective drive for justice and dignity. It is this power—that of the working class and all of its constituent groups—that can one day establish a society that is genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Sarah Garnham

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

Four months after Texas legislators implemented a total abortion ban in 2021, Josseli Barnica presented at a Houston hospital. She was 28 years old and seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child, and she was miscarrying. In any normal circumstance, doctors would have offered to induce delivery or empty her uterus; to do otherwise would mean risking serious infection and possibly sepsis. 
But Texas’ anti-abortion laws make it a crime to end the heartbeat of a foetus, no matter how life-threatening the situation is to either mother or child. Doctors at the hospital agreed that they couldn’t intervene until the heartbeat was no longer detectable, so Barnica waited an agonising 40 hours to deliver, each passing hour increasing her risk of developing a deadly infection. Three days later, she died as a result of sepsis due to acute bacterial endometritis.
Barnica’s is just one case among many. Maternal mortality rates are climbing in states with abortion bans. Infant mortality is increasing too. The Journal of the American Medical Association
recently found that there’s been an almost 6 percent increase in infant mortality since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. That number jumps to 11 percent for Black babies.
Despite the clear and present danger posed by denying or delaying lifesaving health care to their patients, the tangled web of anti-abortion legislation in red states puts doctors and nurses in a bind.
If doctors in states like Texas decide to break the laws, they risk prosecution, fines and prison sentences of up to 99 years. The rare exceptions to blanket bans, such as in cases when the mother’s life is at risk, are too ill defined to interpret with confidence in the heat of a medical emergency.
“Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion’”, an obstetrician in San Antonio told ProPublica. These laws have made it nearly impossible for healthcare workers to provide patients with the care they want to deliver. In Idaho, another state that restricts all abortion outside of exceptional circumstances, one in four obstetrician-gynaecologists have left the state or retired in the last three years.
These bans affect women who want to carry their pregnancies to term as much as those who want to access abortion. Many of these states have now banned abortion even in cases where the foetus has a life-threatening condition or serious anomaly in utero, forcing women to endure the pain of childbirth in the knowledge that their baby will not survive outside the womb.
In this context, Trump’s re-election is another lurch backwards for reproductive justice. The 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v Wade has already set US federal abortion rights back by five decades, opening the space for a whole series of states to implement severe restrictions, and Trump’s administration promises to go even further. For anyone concerned about defending abortion and fighting for a world without sexism, this is a disastrous development.
But for the fanatically anti-abortion right, it’s as though Christmas has come early.
First, they were given a clear signal that the incoming administration will not stand in the way of the “pro-life” movement. Trump’s early flurry of executive orders included pardons for a number of activists charged with obstructing access to abortion clinics. The message is clear: the government and justice system will turn a blind eye to organisations and individuals who harass, intimidate or threaten violence against people seeking abortions. Pro-lifers can rest easy knowing they have the support of the president himself.
Next, Trump reinstated the global gag order, a law that prevents US foreign aid being sent to organisations that provide or counsel abortion. This first blow against global reproductive health care has been compounded by the blanket freeze on USAID implemented by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The freeze has already had a catastrophic impact on women’s health care across the world. According to sexual health NGO the Guttmacher Institute, it has so far impacted 3 million women in recipient countries including South Africa, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Palestine, blocking their access to contraceptive care and other vital services through family planning clinics. If the freeze lasts all year, up to 4 million unintended pregnancies may occur and at least 8,000 women will die unnecessarily in childbirth.
Dr Elizabeth Sully, senior research scientist at Guttmacher, described the dire situation now faced by countless women around the world. “You can go to a clinic now that maybe you’d been to before, and that’s where you’d been receiving your injections or your contraceptive pills ... and you show up to that clinic now and its doors are closed, or there’s no commodities in stock, and no one can tell you when to come back.” Not only will this decision force many millions into conceiving and carrying children they do not want, but it will also massively undermine efforts to curb HIV/AIDs and other preventable illnesses.
The total expenditure on USAID in 2023 amounted to $44 billion, providing millions of people with lifesaving health care. Musk’s unilateral decision to freeze funding will cause incalculable harm. And this from a man who has increased his wealth, according to some estimates, by <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/02/21/musk-companies-add-613-billion-value-since-election/">more than $600 billion</a> just since November.
On the home front, Trump and Vance have reaffirmed their commitment to de-funding Planned Parenthood, playing into pro-life hysteria that the organisation is a one-stop abortion shop. During last year’s election campaign, Vance was asked where he expected women to go for reproductive health care if Planned Parenthood clinics across the country were shut down. Vance declined to comment; the Republicans simply don’t care.
In 2025, the pro-life movement is pushing against an open door. The far right is in power and waging a campaign against social progress of all kinds, be it environmental protections, gender diversity, immigration or workers’ rights. The rise of this meaner, nastier, more nakedly pro-capitalist politics has rapidly shifted the parameters of what’s acceptable in mainstream public discourse. And capitalists everywhere are determined to be at the forefront of the new era of reaction.
Take two of Trump’s biggest billionaire backers, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Both men have made overtures towards supporting abortion in the past—in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, Zuckerberg and Bezos both publicly vowed to support financially any workers who had to travel interstate to access abortions. At the time, they clearly felt some pressure to pose as supporters of reproductive justice. But privately, both used their companies to donate large sums of money to anti-abortion Republicans. And now that unashamed misogyny is in the ascendancy, they have dropped any pretence of concern for the rights of women.
<a href="https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study">Studies show</a>
that when women are forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies to term, they become more vulnerable, less likely to finish higher education, less likely to stay in full-time work, more likely to stay with abusive partners and more likely to suffer mental health issues. And at the deadliest end of the spectrum, they are much more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. When abortion is banned, women and babies die. This is the central hypocrisy at the heart of the pro-life movement.
The truth is that anti-abortion politics has never been about protecting life. Abortion is a central cause for the right because it is a way to push back against the gains won by women and other oppressed groups in the 1960s. The idea that people should be allowed to exercise agency over their lives and not conform to a preordained role dictated by the state, church or family, is anathema to the right. Attacks on abortion therefore fit into a broader reactionary world view concerned with forcing ordinary people to bow down and accept their place in society. The right stand for strengthening the power of the nation, the state, the police, borders and every other institution that enables the capitalist class to hold onto their power and profits. This is why right-wingers are rarely single issue; they have a comprehensive vision for society that includes attacking women’s rights, promoting gender norms, jailing and deporting immigrants, crushing unions and slashing regulations that impose on the rights of capitalists to amass yet more wealth. 
To turn this situation around, a serious fight needs to be had. Luckily, despite the overall backwardness of US politics, a majority of people continue to support the right to abortion. Recent data from the<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/">
Pew Research Center</a> puts that number at nearly two-thirds of the population, a figure that has increased since the Dobbs decision. The first flickers of resistance to the Trump administration are growing in protests against ICE raids and deportations; the left needs to build on these examples to broaden the struggle against the resurgent right.
Just as the far right have linked together a broad spectrum of reactionary causes in their fight to shape society in their interests, our side needs to draw the links between every instance of injustice and oppression, pulling these disparate struggles together into a wholesale challenge to the system. Only through turning the rage that millions of us feel into a force that can’t be denied do we stand a chance of turning back the tide of reaction.
The capitalist class are fickle friends to anyone interested in building a society in which women aren’t forced to carry children against their will, in which health care is fully funded and freely available, in which the immense resources at our disposal are used to make the world a better place, rather than an increasingly dystopian hellhole for all but the wealthiest. Their representatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties are more concerned with defending the status quo than fighting for the oppressed.
As long as society is ruled by a clique whose power relies on dividing and disempowering the majority, women’s lives will continue to be subordinated to the interests of social stability and deference to power. Capitalism is the fundamental barrier to a society in which people’s needs and desires come before arbitrary structures of power and privilege; ending its reign of death and destruction has never been a more urgent task.

Shirley Killen

Abortion rights under siege in Trump’s America

One of the great myths of US President Donald Trump’s political career is that he’s an anti-establishment warrior, fighting on behalf of the everyman. 
The corporate media have pushed this narrative, publishing hundreds of articles arguing that Trump represents the revenge of the “white working class”—a term used by elites of both the liberal and right-wing varieties to refer to either dumb uneducated masses or salt-of-the-earth patriots, respectively. 
Indeed, this is the way he’s pitched himself since 2015. “Today we are not just transferring power from one administration to another”, Trump said in his first inauguration speech. “We are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.” His early calls to “drain the swamp” (remove nefarious lobbyists and insiders from Washington) have evolved into Elon Musk’s DOGE: they claim they are ending the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on programs designed by a DEI-obsessed urban elite. Or, in Musk’s words, “@DOGE will reprogram the base code of the matrix”.
The claim that an army of billionaires taking state power somehow represents a victory for factory workers, nurses, receptionists and agricultural labourers is absurd. They have climbed their way to the top by trampling on those below. 
Musk, who has fast become something like an unelected co-president, is the richest person on the planet. Just half of his US$360 billion net worth could end world hunger by the end of the decade. He made his fortune after getting a hefty leg up from his emerald-mine-owning dad, and protects it today by resisting unionisation inside his companies (Tesla workers make 30 percent less than members of the United Auto Workers). In 2023, Musk said: “I disagree with the idea of unions ... I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing”. What?
Trump has a net worth of US$6.4 billion, according to Forbes
magazine (though he claims it’s much higher). His wealth comes from a substantial inheritance and a career in real estate, although his most valuable asset is Truth Social, his hard-right Twitter knock-off. He first gained super stardom by telling a succession of people “you’re fired” on reality show The Apprentice and for twenty years owned the Miss Universe pageant organisation (in which creepy old men like him leer at bikini-clad young women). He owns a multimillion-dollar Manhattan penthouse plated with gold. 
Man of the people he is not.
Trump has assembled the wealthiest administration in history, with thirteen billionaires appointed to government posts. His cabinet is worth at least US$7 billion. These people have made their wealth by exploiting millions of workers and the environment and hoarding profits in offshore tax havens. 
In case there is any illusion that they might be forgoing their own interests to rule in the interests of American workers, just take a look at what the Trump administration has done since taking office.
In late February, the House of Representatives moved forward a mammoth budget blueprint that contains much of Trump’s legislative agenda. In it are massive tax cuts—worth up to US$4.5 trillion—and deep cuts to social spending. The tax cuts, which mostly extend those made during Trump’s first administration, mostly benefit the already wealthy. Medicaid and Medicare (which provide health insurance to poor and elderly Americans), student loan repayment plans and school breakfast and lunch programs that serve low-income children have all been slated for cuts. 
This is what the administration is really about: taking from the poor to give to the rich. Trump is Robin Hood in reverse. 
The DOGE cuts will also have a terrible impact on working people, not least the tens of thousands of public sector workers who have just lost their livelihoods after being fired by Musk. Public education is under attack, as are whatever measly regulations exist to put a check on corporate power.
There’s nothing new in this political strategy. Former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed to represent the “silent majority” of everyday Americans, who supposedly shared their conservative world view. During their bid for power, the Nazis said they wanted to serve the German people who had been betrayed by the elites. They even went so far as to call themselves socialists, just “national socialists” interested only in the good of the German masses. When winning an election requires securing the votes of a substantial section of the population, overtures must be made to the issues they care about. But once the political right takes power, it’s a different story.
The “anti-elite” message can ring a little true because the Democrats indeed come from another wing of the US elite. When in power, they rule for the rich. The squabble between the major parties does not represent a battle between opposing class interests, but simply different strategies for managing capitalism.
The MAGA crowd are picking on the vulnerable to stoke divisions among workers, all of whom will be oppressed by Trump’s administration. He’s using hyper-nationalist rhetoric to try to bind a section of the population to his project: generate fear about and loathing towards a purported enemy within—migrants and progressives, among others. 
Like many of Trump’s business ventures (google “Trump University”), it’s a con job to enable his wealthy capitalist friends to get even richer than they already are.

Eleanor Morley

MAGA’s elite ‘anti-elites’

Last Saturday was a cold, blustery but sunny day in Chicago, when 25 of us picketed Tesla’s showroom at 900 N. Rush Street. Located just west of Chicago’s famed “Magnificent Mile” shopping district, the streets on the weekends are crowded with the wealthy who live in the area and tourists from around the globe. But, plenty of people work in the many retail shops or are out window shopping. It’s a perfect location for a Tesla showroom whose <a href="https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-much-do-teslas-electric-vehicles-cost#:~:text=The%20Plaid%20variant%20has%20a,your%20Tesla%20Model%20S%20yours:" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pricey cars</a> are for the rich or those who want to appear to be rich.
It was the second weekend of <a href="https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/anti-elon-musk-protest-san-francisco-tesla/3797640/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">protests</a> targeting Tesla, whose notorious CEO is Elon Musk, the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#47167e3b3d78" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">world’s richest man</a> and best-known <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/21/the-gesture-speaks-for-itself-germans-divided-over-musks-apparent-nazi-salute" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nazi</a>. Sitting at the right hand of Donald Trump, Musk has been the president’s hatchet man, destroying the United States’ already ragged welfare state, savaging the federal workforce, paralysing agencies designated to protect unions and the environment, and the list keeps expanding daily. The wide variety of federal workers across the country and their unions face the brunt of the offensive, but resistance has been building.
<a href="https://nycclc.org/news/federal-workers-rally-new-york-protest-musk-jobs-purge" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Protests and rallies</a> by federal workers have taken place, and a new rank-and-file federal workers’ network has emerged; it will take some time for workplace struggle to meet the challenge thrown at them, which is historically unprecedented. When President Ronald Reagan fired striking federal air traffic controllers in 1981 (represented by <a href="https://isreview.org/issues/49/patco/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PATCO</a>, which endorsed <a href="https://lhrp.georgetown.edu/collections/the-1981-patco-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reagan for president</a> the previous year), it was seen as historically unprecedented and the signal for a rollback of the US trade union movement for two decades that followed.
The Trump administration’s blitzkrieg attack has caught many off guard, despite plenty of <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/16/pete-hegseths-mein-kampf/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">forewarning</a> of what would come if he won the election. However, Trump’s policies have not proved popular, while the <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5114095-most-in-new-poll-disapprove-of-musk-role-in-trump-administration/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">conspicuous</a> role of the super-billionaire Musk has added to their unpopularity. Republican congressional representatives who have held “town hall meetings” have faced the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/republicans-congress-town-halls-trump.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawIp_vNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRvfpdFq5R81QTXWrIk_IAEb1UxBefvtPJj6D7snEAOZOQ2OzkTursfONQ_aem_LGAfF-B96-vryPkfnArsGw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrath</a> of their constituents, and the milquetoast Democrats are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/us/politics/democrats-trump.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">catching hell</a> from theirs as well. Meanwhile, Musk and Vice President <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/us/politics/vance-far-right-germany-munich-afd.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">J.D. Vance’s</a> interventions in European politics bolstering far-right and straight-up Nazi parties, like the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/20/musk-germany-election-afd-x-twitter/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alternative for Germany</a>, have also shocked many people.
Tesla takedown
Musk derives much of his wealth from his stock ownership of Tesla and Space X, along with his faux reputation as a “genius inventor” and innovative “clean energy” businessman. Despite his swagger and arrogance, Musk has weak spots that we should be punching as hard as we can right now. Tesla is the prime target. Tesla’s sales have plummeted in Europe and one of the major reasons is Musk’s promotion of the far right. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/business/tesla-germany-elon-musk.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to the New York Times:
“In Germany, home to Tesla’s only factory in Europe, only 1,277 new Tesla vehicles were registered in the month, the German Federal Motor Transport Authority reported on Wednesday. German consumers turned instead to domestic and Chinese automakers for electric cars, which recorded a 54 percent increase in demand in January.
“Tesla’s sales plummeted 63 percent in France in January from a year earlier, and 12 percent in Britain, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/world/europe/starmer-musk-uk-child-sexual-abuse.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">where Mr. Musk riled</a> Prime Minister Keir Starmer through inflammatory social media posts. Sweden, where <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/business/tesla-sweden-labor-dispute.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a mechanics’ strike</a> against Tesla is now in its second year, saw demand for its cars slide 44 percent last month, while sales in Norway dropped 38 percent.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Times reported:
“The decline is also noticeable in the United States, although not as steep. In California, the largest U.S. market for electric cars, Tesla’s sales have been declining for months. Registration of new Tesla vehicles fell 11.6 percent there in 2024 even as overall sales of electric cars and trucks climbed 1.2 percent, according to the California New Car Dealers Association.”
We can do better here in the United States. Musk must be made into a pariah and buying his cars and pickups made socially unacceptable. Inspired by actor, director, and documentary filmmaker <a href="https://alexwinter.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alex Winter</a>, protests have taken place at Tesla showrooms all over the United States. Largely organised through social media, especially at Bluesky’s <a href="https://bsky.app/hashtag/takedowntesla" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">#takedowntesla</a>, many have drawn a handful to many dozens of people. Winter explained in Rolling Stone how the call against Tesla happened:
“On Monday, Feb. 10, the<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1217086770/disinformation-researcher-says-harvard-pushed-her-out-to-protect-meta" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> fearless</a> and<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/10/meta-factchecking-donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> brilliant</a> sociologist Joan Donovan made a simple post on Bluesky: ‘Come out and participate in an international picket #TeslaTakeover locally. Stand up and be counted!’ I’d met Donovan when I was touring for my<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/youtube-dangerous-alex-winter-the-youtube-effect-documentary-1234805077/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> documentary</a> about the role of YouTube in the rise of the far right, and I like the idea of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/t/tesla/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tesla</a> store <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/t/protests/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">protests</a>, so I sent her a direct message asking if I could do some organizing to help drive turnout. 
“She said yes, and I immediately cleared time from my day and got busy. First, I reached out to organizers and allies I’ve met in the 15 years that I’ve been trying to raise the alarm about the rising power of Silicon Valley oligarchs. Next, I made a quick database and sign-up form using online tools. Then I posted it all to Bluesky. And that was it. What I assumed would be a relatively small, one day event.”
The burst of activism is refreshing and exciting. Winter calculated:
“There have now been protests outside of Tesla locations in over 100 cities, and the movement is picking up speed and going global. Our<a href="https://www.teslatakedown.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> website</a> has thousands of visitors a day, signing on for protests, creating their own and downloading our resources. Just as many people are showing up in front of Tesla real estate through entirely separate organizations, like<a href="https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/?tag_ids=25871" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Indivisible</a> and a new formation of rank and file federal workers called the<a href="https://www.federalunionists.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Federal Unionists Network</a>. Another massive day of action is planned this weekend. There are<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/14/telsa-employees-investors-musk-trump/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> reports</a> that Tesla’s shareholders are already souring on the company’s CEO and chairperson. The stock is<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+stock+price&amp;oq=tesla+stock+price&amp;gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDQgAEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgAEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgBEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyBwgCEAAYgAQyCggDEAAYsQMYgAQyCggEEAAYsQMYgAQyBggFEEUYQDIGCAYQRRhAMgYIBxBFGEDSAQgyNDQ3ajBqNKgCALACAA&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> dipping</a>.”
Global war against unions
Targeting Musk and Tesla is an important development in the struggle against the second Trump administration and fascism in the United States. Yet, for the movement to become sustainable it has to move beyond appeals to <a href="https://www.teslatakedown.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Sell your Tesla. Dump your stock.”</a> Most of us will never own a Tesla or own stock in the company. One of the most important lessons we can learn from the struggle against the last, infamous auto-magnet fascist Henry Ford is the importance of union organisation. Ford was the last of the Big Three auto companies to sign a contract with the young United Auto Workers union in 1941, ending a long, dark era for Ford workers.
Elon Musk is waging a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_and_unions" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">global war</a> against unions from Fremont, California, to Sweden to Berlin. His promotion of the far right is part of a plan to keep his plants unorganised and his workers under his thumb. The struggle against fascism and for organising the Tesla plants are one and the same struggle. Driving him from the White House would be a huge victory, while organising his plants could push him into oblivion.
First published at <a href="http://www.joeallen-60224.medium.com/">Joe Allen at Medium</a>. Joe Allen is a socialist based in the United States. He is the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost.

Joe Allen

‘Don’t buy Nazi cars!’: taking on Tesla from the showrooms to the plants

Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the far right portray themselves as radical outsiders at odds with the political establishment, upending norms and breaking all the rules. But in reality, far-right politicians are slavish servants of power—indeed, extreme embodiments of it. 
They personify everything cruel and exploitative about capitalism and are determined to make the system even worse for workers and the poor. Rather than being radical outsiders, the most prominent far-right leaders and their backers are the ultimate insiders: capitalists and those who aspire to be their political representatives. 
Trump made his fortune among the milieu of property speculators and casino operators. Musk, the world’s richest man, is a defence contractor, car manufacturer and media baron. Alice Weidel, leader of the fascist Alternative for Germany, is a banker who has occupied high-ranking positions at some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global.
Whether they own or manage car factories, defence firms or banks, they have the same basic interests: compete with other capitalists for profits and market dominance and fight to secure the best conditions in pursuit of that goal. The political programs they present aren’t in the least bit radical—they are utterly pro-capitalist.
Massive tax cuts for the rich and the pledge to “drill, baby, drill” are quite obviously about direct profit-making for sections of capitalists. But the war on “woke” and the return of machismo also need to be understood as part of an integrated pro-capitalist agenda. 
By attacking limited social gains such as anti-discrimination provisions, the far right is attempting to make open bigotry more acceptable. Mass deportations of undocumented migrants play a similar role. If people can live with these abuses directed against their communities, it normalises the idea that certain groups deserve fewer rights than others. 
In place of anti-discrimination programs, Trump has vowed to “create a society that is blind to colour and based on merit”. But the idea that those at the top of capitalist society are there because of their intelligence and hard work is bullshit. 
Trump, for example, is a trust fund baby who has bankrupted half a dozen companies. He owes his political power to wealthy tech industry backers like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. 
Likewise, Musk is from a wealthy South African family that made their wealth under apartheid in property development and emerald mines. He has built his vast empire off loans from his parents and off the backs of the workers he exploits. This is not unique to Trump and Musk but common to many people in positions of power who inherit their wealth and achieve their status through the opportunities afforded by class privileges.
Musk in particular personifies how economic power under capitalism is transformed into political power. Those with enough money can buy their way into government or bankroll political parties that promote and pursue their interests. Musk donated $246 million to Trump in the 2024 elections, becoming Trump’s biggest donor and most influential promoter. In return, he has been appointed as the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk has declared that DOGE—which is tasked with restructuring the government, cutting programs, firing workers and investing in high tech to increase the productivity of the remaining workforce—is nothing less than a “revolution”. 
But there is nothing remotely radical about any of this agenda. Republicans have long dreamed of gutting the federal bureaucracy (except for the bloated military and security apparatuses). Democrats claim to be different, but they have spent decades carrying out a milder version of that same project. Cutting government expenditure on social programs while funnelling taxpayer money into the means of destruction is mainstream capitalist politics across the globe. 
There is perhaps no greater illustration of whose priorities dominate the US government than the obscene spectacle of the world’s richest man slashing aid to the poor, sick and elderly under the guise of eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”.
Musk is now leveraging his massive fortune to finance far-right forces worldwide and to promote them through his social media platform, X. He has endorsed Germany’s fascist party in the upcoming elections and spoke at its recent conference about the need for the country to get beyond “Holocaust guilt”. He recently hosted an X interview with Alice Weidel, which drew an audience of up to 210,000 people. Weidel thanked Musk for the mainstream exposure, saying: “Elon, it’s a completely new situation for me that I can just have a normal conversation, and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed”.
Musk is also considering bankrolling Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party in Britain (although he has expressed his wish for the party to be led by jailed fascist street agitator Tommy Robinson instead). Among the other fascists he has befriended is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with whom Musk has met repeatedly since she came to power in 2022. (Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party traces its origins to Mussolini.) 
Musk has praised far-right Argentinian president Javier Milei’s model, which aims to dismantle public services, labour protections and all regulations on corporate exploitation. He has stated that the “Milei model” is the inspiration behind DOGE.
All big capitalists do this to varying degrees, putting their vast wealth into media empires and behind political parties that will promote and pursue their interests. Gina Reinhart has recently declared that she wants to use her wealth to bring Trump-style politics to Australia; Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has been working tirelessly to create favourable conditions for decades.
Capitalists, in particular, can quickly fall in love with the far right because it supports an extreme manifestation of the system they already benefit from and preside over: a dictatorship of the rich built on exploitation, competition, social hierarchy and bigotry.

Why the capitalists have fallen in with the far right

In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have unleashed a reign of terror on the US working class. Musk’s DOGE team, who are entirely unelected and apparently accountable to no-one, are defunding or shutting down swathes of the public sector that operate or fund services providing health care, education, housing, social welfare and environmental protection. Tens of thousands of federal public sector workers are being intimidated into resigning from their jobs.
Trump and Musk are gutting workplace health and safety and consumer protection. They have dismembered the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal body tasked with protecting workers’ rights to unionise. Any provisions to promote the interests of oppressed groups, many of which were fought for and won in the 1960s, are being stripped away. 
This is accompanied by a racist offensive to divide and demoralise workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been let loose, with thousands arrested in raids across major US cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. 
Trump’s objective is to slash the public sector (aside from the military and security agencies), reduce oversight of private corporations, deliver fewer services to those in need and bend the state apparatus to his will. That will then free up federal funds that can be funnelled to the military and to subsidise corporations and the rich.
The vigour with which Trump, Musk and their cronies in the cabinet are prosecuting this agenda is matched only by the feebleness of the opposition. 
As compared to 2017, when a number of Democrat-aligned media owners, university administrators, Hollywood studio chiefs and Silicon Valley CEOs, along with judges, senior Republicans and departmental heads and left-sounding Democrats opposed Trump and his hard right agenda, opposition from such quarters is barely visible today. Most of yesterday’s opponents have been purged, converted to Trump’s agenda or stand silent out of fear or political opportunism. 
The right wing of the Democrats support his anti-immigrant measures, while liberal Democrats are in disarray and demoralised. The same holds for the hundreds of NGOs that operate in the orbit of the party. 
So much for the liberal “resistance”.
But what of those organisations that are meant to fight for workers’ rights, the trade unions? Little has been heard from them. The federal public sector union chiefs went to the federal court to prevent Musk sacking tens of thousands of public servants and won a brief reprieve. That lasted one week before the same judge waved the cuts through. The union leaders have made no call for broad resistance by workers and those who depend on government services. In some cases, union leaders are even praising Trump for his supposed support for “working Americans” or imposition of tariffs which, they argue, will save jobs.
The forces of official politics—all of which embody different wings of capitalist politics—are giving Trump a free run. What then can stop him? The US working class must move. 
The working class constitutes by far the majority of the US population. It ranges from farm workers and IT workers in California and Las Vegas hotel cleaners to flight attendants and baggage handlers at Dallas Fort Worth airport, oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico, warehouse workers in the logistics hubs of Atlanta and Chicago, New York City bus drivers and teachers in Boston. Whichever way you measure it, at least 100 million Americans are in working-class jobs. Then there are their dependants, the unemployed and working-class pensioners. All up, the working class is two-thirds of the entire population, a mighty force if mobilised to fight.
Workers’ numerical strength is not the only thing that gives them power. More important is their strategic position in American life: nothing moves—not a container, not a crane, package, bus or aeroplane—unless the working class moves it. Nothing gets built and nobody is treated, taught or fed unless workers do the work. And nothing is dug from the ground unless workers do it. 
In a just world, it would be the working class, the direct producers, who would benefit from their labour. Under capitalism, however, because the bosses own all the factories, mines, warehouses, ports and hotels and workers own nothing, workers must sell their ability to labour to the capitalists, allowing the bosses to cream off the profits. 
It is this theft of workers’ labour that is the source of the capitalists’ profits but also their vulnerability: they depend on workers for everything. This is obvious in any strike: when the workers fold their arms, nothing moves and the flow of profits to the bosses dries up. No matter how high and mighty the bosses think they are, they need us; we don’t need them.
And unlike every other oppressed group, workers have a common interest and a common enemy. Each individual worker can improve their life only in cooperation with other workers, and only insofar as they can collectively wrest control of the wealth of society from their bosses. 
The working class needs to leverage this power to halt Trump and his billionaire buddies. Just think about it. If bank workers refused to process financial transactions handing public money over to billionaires, we could stop them looting the Treasury. If truck drivers refused to deliver the cement and construction workers refused to build the detention centres, Trump’s plans to grab, process and deport millions of migrants could be stopped in its tracks. 
There is something else special about the working class. Karl Marx described the working class as the universal class, in that when it fights it does so in the interests of all humanity. This is clear when it comes to the fight against racism. The working class needs unity if it is to win against its class enemy, the capitalists. Racism divides workers and weakens their collective strength. This is why Amazon bosses, currently confronted by a union organising drive at the company’s big warehouse in North Carolina, are trying to stoke divisions between African-American and Latino workers. It is why Trump and Musk are attacking DEI initiatives, which, although they are mostly tokenistic, are at least recognition that the effects of racism should be countered. Wiping out DEI serves only to intimidate racial minorities, embolden racists and undercut workers’ unity.
Because workers need unity in their ranks, they are often at the forefront in the fight against racism, and that benefits not just workers but every oppressed group. In 2019, the Chicago Teachers Union won a clause in their contract declaring that their employer could not ask about or keep track of the immigration status of students or their families. The contract barred ICE agents from entering school grounds unless they provided their credentials, a reason for their request and a signed warrant. In 2017, two unions, the Teamsters in New York City and the National Union of Healthcare Workers, both pledged to refuse cooperation with federal agents in prosecuting or deporting members.
Going back further, on 1 May 2006, labour unions and Latino Catholic organisations and community groups organised a nationwide Day Without Immigrants. Millions of migrant workers and their supporters boycotted work and shops on the day in protest at an anti-migrant bill then being considered in the US Senate. One to 2 million marched in Los Angeles, half a million in Chicago, and 200,000 in New York, along with tens of thousands in other cities. These protests killed the bill. 
Such acts are only the most dramatic way workers can stop Trump in his tracks. But in most cases, getting to this point will require workers to build their confidence by organising to defend their own jobs, wages and conditions. Right now, this means a determined fight to prevent mass lay-offs in the federal public service. That means service-wide strikes. Musk may want to slash public-sector jobs, but government machinery must still turn if the capitalists are to enjoy the services they require. 
If workers defend their jobs successfully, they are more likely to develop the confidence to act in solidarity with other oppressed groups. This is why, in practice, it is those workers with a record of fighting for their own rights who are likely to lead the way in a broader fight against Trump’s right-wing offensive.
That the workers’ movement in the US is at a low ebb should not make us despair. Unions still represent nearly 15 million workers in the US, and every year tens of thousands of workers—last year these ranged from school employees in Virginia and nurses in Michigan to VW auto workers in Tennessee—joined a trade union. 
Unions can still fight and win. After a seven-week strike at Boeing in Seattle last year, metal workers won a 38 percent pay rise over four years, while a three-day strike of east coast longshore workers (wharfies), the first since the 1970s, yielded a 61percent pay rise over six years. Simply a threat to strike by American Airlines flight attendants secured an immediate 20 percent pay rise.
Trump only has to recall his first term in office, when an illegal teachers’ strike wave swept the country in 2018, disrupting parents’ attendance at work for the duration, to remind himself of the power of workers when they withdraw their labour. Particularly impressive was the fact that these were strikes in conservative, Trump-supporting states, such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, where Republican governors had a battery of anti-strike laws at their disposal. The teachers pressed on regardless and won most of their claims. 
Then there are the actions workers took early in the COVID-19 pandemic. US socialist Lance Selfa noted recently: “Workers in the Alameda County, Calif., public health system conducted a strike that succeeded not only in winning their own demands on pay and working conditions but also stopped the county’s plans for privatizing the public hospital. Autoworkers in Ford and GM plants came off the unemployment line to produce ventilators. Workers in the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania occupied their workplace in March 2020 for a month while they produced tons of materials for use in producing facemasks. Hundreds of smaller, and largely unheralded, actions of working-class self-defense took place, especially in the first year of the pandemic.”
As these examples show, workers have power and an interest in wielding it for the whole of society. Trump and Musk may now seem unstoppable, but that’s because no organisation of any social weight is doing anything to stop them. 
Public opposition may begin to emerge from liberal or union bureaucratic quarters in coming months, especially if Trump’s right-wing coalition splinters or the economy or financial markets tank. But we can’t wait that long. The attacks are coming thick and fast now. 
Even if resistance to the whirlwind of attacks is currently extremely weak, there are glimmers of hope: demonstrations outside federal offices to protest against the gutting of government services; rallies of one or two hundred in big cities to oppose attacks on migrants and ICE raids. These actions, although small, are steps in the right direction. Everyone shocked by the brutality of the right-wing attacks must try to build on them. But to be most effective, the working class must be at the centre of such mobilisations. Unlike the liberal institutions currently lying low, the working class has not just an interest in defeating Trump’s right wing offensive but the power to do so.
Most likely mass working-class resistance won’t suddenly erupt in the next month or two, but all it would take is for a few groups of workers to start to move and the situation could shift quickly. It’s not like Trump and Musk have a solid mandate to carry out their drastic attacks on workers’ rights—Trump did not even win a majority of votes at November’s election.
And to move from token actions to a mobilisation with real weight, workers must prevent their resistance being coopted by the Democrats, the fate of so much of the resistance last time around.
That means socialist politics and socialist organisation, and rebuilding a movement that looks to the strategic power of the working class, and mass grassroots action, to confront Trump’s right-wing agenda.

Tom Bramble

Workers have the power to stop Trump

Transgender rights are firmly in the crosshairs of US President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the 26 executive actions signed on Trump’s first day back in office was a sweeping order aimed at eliminating the idea of a “gender identity” separate from sex in the federal government. Among other measures, “gender” will be changed to “sex” on all government forms, and funding for anything pertaining to “gender ideology” will be cut.
Three subsequent executive orders encourage the US military to disqualify “individuals with gender dysphoria”, direct the Department of Health to de-fund “chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and compel athletic and educational institutions to “keep men out of women’s sports”. Trump’s language is deliberately brutish. His aim is to vilify and intimidate an already highly stigmatised community, and to send a message to all those who dare not conform to society’s institutions and expectations: be afraid. 
The initial order claims that so-called gender ideologues have used “socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces”. The not-so-veiled implication is that transgender women pose an insidious and potentially violent threat to the rest of the female population. The order on gender-affirming care singles out “impressionable children” as especially vulnerable to “radical and false ... gender ideology”.
Fearmongering around the safety of women and children is a longstanding tactic of the American political right. Jim Crow-era panics about “race mixing” have morphed into modern narratives that link migrant communities to child-trafficking and violent crime. Trump’s anti-trans crusade fits squarely into this playbook, reinforcing and reinforced by simultaneous racist uproars around border control and law enforcement.
Such frenzies create a sense of escalating crisis and imminent danger. The far right presents these as problems that only harsher policing and authoritarianism can resolve. Other executive orders signed upon Trump’s inauguration include, predictably, “Securing Our Borders”, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety”.
Republicans have also incorporated transphobia into economic appeals to voters. The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/us/politics/trump-republican-transgender-ads.html">estimates</a>
the party spent $37 million on election adverts condemning federal funding for gender-affirming care in 2024. The broadcasts focused on trans prison inmates in particular as undeserving of medical support. In a country where 15 million people are saddled with medical debt <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-15-million-americans-have-medical-bills-on-their-credit-reports/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Consumer%20Financial,medical%20bills%20on%20credit%20reports.">according</a>
to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Republicans see an opportunity to tap into existing anger about government spending priorities and direct it against the marginalised and oppressed.
In their recent book Who’s Afraid of Gender?, gender theorist Judith Butler outlines how the global far right have incorporated transphobic hysteria into their broader political framework over the past decade. “Intimate fears and anxieties” about personal identity, safety and the traditional nuclear family “become socially organized to incite political passions”, Butler writes. 
US legislative records bear this out. In 2015, according to researchers at <a href="https://translegislation.com/">Trans Legislation Tracker</a>, 21 bills targeting trans rights were brought before US state legislatures. Those proposals mostly sought to restrict trans women’s access to public bathrooms. The number of bills snowballed over subsequent years as a coalition of Christian fundamentalists, conservative think tanks and Republican lawmakers worked together to extend their scope into health and education. 
In 2024, some 674 anti-trans bills were considered in 43 states. This avalanche of persecution now targets trans people and their supporters in almost every sphere of life, from inclusive schooling to workplace rights and gender-affirming medical care.
Anti-trans agitation in public schools is particularly important for Republican politicians because it connects them to a reactionary “parental rights movement”. According to the New York Times, that movement <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/us/parental-rights-school-board-elections.html">gained momentum </a>in 2022 by opposing coronavirus health measures, but it also opposes teachers’ unions, LGBTI-related literature, history curricula relating to slavery and evolutionary theory. US social conservatism weaves together racism and gender oppression with anti-abortion religious sensibilities in reaction against progress on multiple fronts.
Trump clearly places transgender rights under the shadow of a broader “woke” agenda. A White House memo from 27 January directs federal agencies to cease spending on any social programs that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering”. In a Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-president-trump-calls-enemy-within-more-dangerous-any-foreign-entity">interview</a>
last October, Trump warned, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics”. He then suggested that the National Guard or military should be deployed against this “enemy from within”. In a campaign speech last October, he declared “I will take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female”. 
Transgender people are being targeted not only as a specific minority group, but as part of a multifaceted “enemy” that’s been constructed to advance Trump’s reactionary agenda. The notion that “gender ideology” permeates institutions at various levels helps to justify and fuel the new administration’s broader agenda of reorganising government and its priorities. Trump has repeatedly promised to dismantle the Department of Education specifically, which <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-save-american-education-and-give-power-back-to-parents">he says</a> is infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”.
Any organisation receiving federal funding can become a target for conservative campaigns if it does not follow strict norms around gender identification and segregation. Any federal employee who supports trans people as part of their job now risks being fired. This is not only a direct attack on trans people, but a way of normalising an atmosphere of heightened repression and surveillance in an increasingly authoritarian United States.
Around the world, the far right are looking to the US as a model for the sort of society they want to create. A fight back is urgently needed both to defend trans people from Trump’s vicious attacks and to take on the reactionary agenda that motivates them and threatens us all.

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