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Israel Can’t Even Tolerate a West Bank Football Pitch
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OpenAI Is Bleeding Cash. Its Solution? Military Contracts.
### In an age of algorithmically generated “kill lists,” anxieties about AI integration into military decision-making are justifiably mounting. OpenAI’s recent hiring of over a dozen former defense bureaucrats does nothing to allay these concerns.
* * *
OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar expenditures significantly outstrip its revenue. To plug its financial hole, the company is attempting to solidify its connection with one of the richest user bases possible: the US military. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
Long before concerns mounted over the role of artificial intelligence in combat — including its role in civilian deaths in the Iran war — OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was quietly embedding itself inside the national security state to profit from algorithmic warfare.
That included hiring a bipartisan roster of over a dozen government insiders with decades of experience in national security positions between them, plus inking a partnership with a top Trump-connected military contractor.
After years of shaping US defense policy, these insiders are now assisting the AI giant to cash in on the Trump administration’s unprecedented defense spending — no matter the ethical quandaries involved.
The personnel moves appeared to pay off last month, when one of those hires reportedly helped OpenAI secure a $200 million defense contract within hours of the White House icing out rival AI company Anthropic over its concerns about its technology being used for surveillance and automated weapons.
OpenAI’s hiring strategy apparently began in January 2024, when the company quietly revised its usage policies, removing long-standing language prohibiting the use of the company’s advanced AI models for “military and warfare” purposes.
At the time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, under the guidance of CEO Sam Altman, was leading the industry with over 100 million weekly users, who were using it for a wide range of everyday personal and professional tasks, from writing and research to planning and advice.
Keen-eyed observers quickly picked up on the policy change. The firm initially claimed it was just a clarification to ensure the company’s usage policies remained readable, telling the _Intercept_ that they had simply wanted to “create a set of universal principles that are both easy to remember and apply.” However, when pressed further, an OpenAI spokesman admitted the company harbored a desire to pursue “national security use cases.”
At the time, the firm provided few details about how it planned to integrate its products into the sprawling military-industrial complex. But its internal actions have proved illuminating: The firm embarked on a quiet hiring spree, deepening its connections with the Department of Defense by recruiting national security state insiders with close ties to those in power.
Concerns about the integration of AI into military decision-making have been mounting, thanks in part to the Gaza war, in which the Israeli military has reportedly used the technology to determine bombing coordinates and to generate a “kill list” of targets.
Like many other AI firms, OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar expenditures have significantly outstripped its revenue, leaving the firm hemorrhaging cash. Its 2024 warfare pivot could have been a strategic plot to plug its financial hole with massive Department of Defense contracts, following other prominent Silicon Valley companies that have looked to the Pentagon as a business model of the future.
And to ensure OpenAI was best positioned to win potential defense contracts, the firm appeared to turn to a reliable tool of corporate influence: the revolving door.
# An Unprecedented Hiring Spree
Beginning in early 2024, OpenAI started bringing in new hires of all political stripes with experience on Capitol Hill, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and other parts of the national security establishment.
In February 2024, just a month after lifting its prohibition on military use of OpenAI models, the firm hired Katrina Mulligan as head of national security partnerships, a role in which she “structur[es] agreements with [Department of Defense] and national security customers.” Previously, Mulligan served in the Biden administration as a staffer for several top-level Defense Department officials.
"The company quietly revised its usage policies, removing long-standing language prohibiting the use of the company’s advanced AI models for ‘military and warfare’ purposes."
That included serving on the senior staff advising the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC). Despite being relatively unknown, SO/LIC is among the most important civilian positions in the US military, with oversight over the United States Special Operations Command.
According to military journalist Seth Harp, Mulligan’s boss at SO/LIC held “the pinnacle position in the secret military-within-the-military created after 9/11 to do assassinations and abductions all over the world.”
Harp, an expert on the Pentagon’s special operations programs, said Mulligan’s SO/LIC connections could prove helpful if OpenAI pursues contracts from the military operations’ secretive “black budget,” the classified budget that funds the military’s special operations.
“There’s lots of money to be made in that,” said Harp.
Four months after Mulligan’s hiring, in June 2024, OpenAI announced another high-profile hire: Gen. Paul Nakasone joined the company’s board of directors. Nakasone, a retired four-star general in the US Army, served as director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command from 2018 to 2024, holding two of the most powerful positions in the US national security state. OpenAI claimed the hiring would help the company make “critical safety and security decisions.”
OpenAI’s hiring spree continued through the summer. In August 2024, the firm brought on Morgan Dwyer and Benjamin Schwartz, senior Biden officials involved in implementing the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided billions in government subsidies for the development of US computer chip manufacturing, including for defense systems.
While brought on to support data center and infrastructure development, both Dwyer and Schwartz previously served in national security roles. Among other positions, Dwyer worked as the senior-most aide to the civilian leader managing military research and technologies, including artificial intelligence.
Schwartz, meanwhile, served as a longtime adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the Obama administration, where he advised on issues relating to terrorism and South Asia policy.
That same month, OpenAI brought in Sasha Baker to serve as its head of national security policy. Baker, a former national security adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and deputy chief of staff to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, also served as a senior Biden official in both the Biden National Security Council and Department of Defense.
"After years of shaping US defense policy, these insiders are now assisting the AI giant to cash in on the Trump administration’s unprecedented defense spending — no matter the ethical quandaries involved."
In the following months, OpenAI brought on two other Biden administration staffers: a former deputy spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council and a former assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.
While OpenAI hoovered up former Biden administration personnel, it also shored up its ranks with Republican officials.
In April 2024, the company hired Matt Rimkunas, a former deputy chief of staff and legislative director for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to lead its federal affairs team and later that fall added another former Graham staffer, Meghan Dorn, to its roster. Both Dorn and Rimkunas are registered to lobby on behalf of OpenAI.
While neither had extensive executive-branch experience, their former boss’ record as the foremost hawk in the Senate (and an appropriator who chairs the Budget Committee) could have boosted their profile.
# Friends in High Places
In June 2025, OpenAI announced one of its first major defense-industry initiatives. The AI giant disclosed plans to team up with Peter Thiel–backed defense technology firm Anduril to “improve the nation’s defense systems that protect U.S. and allied military personnel from attacks by unmanned drones.”
Anduril has benefited immensely from its position as one of the most deeply Trump-connected defense firms. (Among other links, the company’s founder, Palmer Luckey, is the brother-in-law to one-time Trump Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz.) Along with generating revenue, the partnership could have provided Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, with an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the tech right’s defense-focused startup culture, which has been brewing since Trump reentered the Oval Office with Thiel and other Silicon Valley venture capitalists by his side.
OpenAI’s integration into Washington’s national security apparatus continued apace in 2025, as the company secured a $200 million Defense Department contract in June. Per the arrangement, the company would provide the Department of Defense with AI capabilities “in both warfighting and enterprise domains.”
The following month, the company hired additional national security experts.
In July 2025, OpenAI brought on a new “head of government,” Joseph Larson, a former Anduril executive and one-time deputy chief digital and artificial intelligence officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. For his role in “advancing the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence to bolster national security and operational efficiency across federal missions,” Larson was feted by the government contracting community, receiving a “Wash100 award” from the contracting networking company Executive Mosaic in 2026. Larson’s connections would soon prove pivotal for the AI company.
OpenAI also added former California Sen. Laphonza Butler, a Democrat and former member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, to its roster of advisers last July.
That summer, the revolving door spun in the opposite direction when the Pentagon commissioned OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil and former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew as officers in the Army Reserve’s “Innovation Corps” to lend their technological expertise to military brass. Neither has been required to recuse himself from future contracting discussions between the Pentagon and OpenAI.
In the months that followed, OpenAI added Connie LaRossa, a former deputy assistant secretary of legislative affairs for the Department of Homeland Security and legislative director at the Department of Defense, to its staff. LaRossa has also worked on Google’s national security team, served as a lobbyist with Cornerstone Government Affairs, and worked for a subsidiary of the defense contracting behemoth General Dynamics.
Around that same time, the AI giant also hired a former national security adviser for the Biden Department of Justice and a former communications staffer for the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
# Right Place, Right Time
Despite the hiring spree, OpenAI’s models were still not the Defense Department’s preferred AI option at the outset of the war with Iran. Instead, the Pentagon had signed a major $200 million defense contract with Anthropic last year.
But last month, as the Trump administration soured on Anthropic over its opposition to its models being used for military applications without sufficient safeguards, OpenAI capitalized on the fracas by signing a new $200 million military contract.
The deal reportedly came together under the direction of Larson, the former Secretary of Defense staffer turned OpenAI head of government, whom the Pentagon contacted when its attempt to renew its contract with Anthropic began to flounder.
The use of AI in the Iran war has come under scrutiny. The Pentagon has refused to say whether or not artificial intelligence was used in the February 28 bombing of an elementary school in Iran that killed 175 people, many of them children.
* * *
This article was first published by the _Lever_, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.
OpenAI Is Bleeding Cash. Its Solution? Military Contracts.
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Toronto’s Transit Crisis Is a Class Crisis
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Toronto’s Transit Crisis Is a Class Crisis
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La France Insoumise After the Local Elections
Local elections saw La France Insoumise make its first real gains in taking over city halls. Ahead of the 2027 presidential race, it still badly needs to expand its voter base to have a chance of winning a national election.
La France Insoumise After the Local Elections
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Western media accuses Iran of ‘escalation,’ taking ‘hostages’ for potentially capturing POW bombing their country
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[Original post on journa.host]
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The Los Angeles Community Schools Model
Los Angeles’s public Community Schools are a model to support fights to protect public education and experiment with co-governance.
The Los Angeles Community Schools Model
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Bernie Moreno Threatens the US-Colombia Relationship
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Trump Is Robbing You to Pay for His Dumb War
Not content with launching a costly and disastrous war on Iran, Trump has unveiled a new plan to pay for it by further slashing domestic programs that keep Americans economically afloat. His new 2027 budget document is effectively a political suicide note.
Trump Is Robbing You to Pay for His Dumb War
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Crypto Is Flailing
Donald Trump used the White House to pump crypto to unprecedented highs. It’s still collapsing.
Crypto Is Flailing
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Stop Asking If Israel Has a Right to Exist
The question “Does Israel have a right to exist?” isn’t a real inquiry about the rights of nations. It’s a manipulation of discourse, a litmus test that forces Palestinians to offer theoretical assurances before their real political grievances can even be heard.
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Israel, not Iran, is the imminent threat, says ex-counterterrorism official Joe Kent
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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _April 03, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._
President Donald Trump’s White House released a budget proposal on Friday that pairs an unprecedented, debt-exploding $1.5 trillion in military spending with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, healthcare, climate, and housing programs.
Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress, includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.
Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing “woke programs” and “ending the Green New Scam”—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, renewable energy initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.
The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the already-depleted Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures.
One budget expert noted that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to “its lowest level in the modern era.”
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in response to Trump’s request that “to pay for his endless wars, he wants the biggest increase to military spending in 70 years.”
“How does he pay for it? Cuts to ‘education, health, housing, and more,’” Casar added. “Hell no.”
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement that “the Trump-Vought budget proposal is a moral obscenity,” referring to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed Pentagon spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare, from the climate crisis to affordable housing, from improving schools to making college education affordable,” said Weissman. “Instead, Trump and Vought propose to spend an unfathomable amount on a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit to further empower an out-of-control and incompetent leader in Pete Hegseth.”
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“As usual, the priorities of the people are simply unimportant to this administration as they think about spending our taxpayer dollars,” Weissman continued. “Republicans and Democrats in Congress should treat this proposal with all the care it deserves and immediately hit delete.”
> “Trump said that our country cannot afford to help families with childcare or healthcare—but his own budget proves what a ridiculous farce that is.”
The White House unveiled its budget request days after Trump said it is “not possible” for the federal government “to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” because “we’re fighting wars,” comments that observers viewed as a stark summary of the administration’s priorities.
“Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can’t afford childcare, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Friday. “He is wrong. We are the wealthiest country in the world and can absolutely afford to both defend and invest in the American people.”
“The president is now demanding a massive increase in defense spending, including a $350 billion slush fund for his reckless war with Iran, while cutting billions from healthcare, education, housing, and more. This budget represents ‘America Last,’” said Boyle. “I will be demanding answers from White House OMB Director Russell Vought when he testifies at the House Budget Committee on April 15.”
The Trump White House is calling on Congress to approve a significant chunk—roughly $350 billion—of its proposed military budget increase via the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to push the funding through without any Democratic support. The new budget request also calls for a “historic investment” in the Department of Homeland Security, which has been partially shut down for more than a month as Democrats push for reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“This funding would come in addition to the $170 billion passed just last year that has enabled the deaths of migrants in detention centers, the detention of children, and the deaths of US citizens at the hands of mass deportation agents,” Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, said in response to the budget request.
“The president looked at the country, with our rising gas prices and nearly half of us struggling to afford basic necessities, and decided what we really need is a bigger war budget,” said Koshgarian. “Not healthcare or childcare or relief from high prices or expensive housing, but a nearly bottomless budget for whatever wars his cronies and the contractors dream up next.”
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# ‘A moral obscenity’: Trump budget pairs record military boost with billions in cuts to social programs
by Jake Johnson, The Real News Network
April 3, 2026
<h1>‘A moral obscenity’: Trump budget pairs record military boost with billions in cuts to social programs</h1> <p class="byline">by Jake Johnson, The Real News Network <br />April 3, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on </em><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-2027-budget" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>April 03, 2026</em></a><em>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">President Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/white-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">White House</a> released a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/budget" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">budget</a> proposal on Friday that pairs an unprecedented, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-2027-military-budget" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">debt-exploding</a> $1.5 trillion in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/military-spending">military spending</a> with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/healthcare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">healthcare</a>, climate, and housing programs.</p> <p>Trump’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">budget request </a>for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress, includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.</p> <p>Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/cuts-to-woke-programs-fact-sheet.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">woke programs</a>” and “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ending-the-green-new-scam-fact-sheet.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ending the Green New Scam</a>”—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/environmental-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Environmental Justice</a> program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/renewable-energy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">renewable energy</a> initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.</p> <p>The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the <a href="https://x.com/ChuckCBPP/status/2040064599572066667" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">already-depleted</a> Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures.</p> <p>One budget expert <a href="https://x.com/BBKogan/status/2040059927725494690" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">noted</a> that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to “its lowest level in the modern era.”</p> <p>Rep. <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/greg-casar" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Greg Casar</a> (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, <a href="https://x.com/RepCasar/status/2040072087935598736" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> in response to Trump’s request that “to pay for his endless wars, he wants the biggest increase to military spending in 70 years.”</p> <p>“How does he pay for it? Cuts to ‘education, health, housing, and more,’” Casar added. “Hell no.”</p> <p>Robert Weissman, co-president of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/public-citizen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Public Citizen</a>, said in a statement that “the Trump-Vought budget proposal is a moral obscenity,” referring to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.</p> <p>“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pentagon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pentagon</a> spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare, from the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/climate-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">climate crisis</a> to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/affordable-housing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">affordable housing</a>, from improving schools to making college education affordable,” said Weissman. “Instead, Trump and Vought propose to spend an unfathomable amount on a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit to further empower an out-of-control and incompetent leader in Pete Hegseth.”</p> <p>“As usual, the priorities of the people are simply unimportant to this administration as they think about spending our taxpayer dollars,” Weissman continued. “<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/republicans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Republicans</a> and Democrats in Congress should treat this proposal with all the care it deserves and immediately hit delete.”</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>“Trump said that our country cannot afford to help families with childcare or healthcare—but his own budget proves what a ridiculous farce that is.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The White House unveiled its budget request days after Trump said it is “not possible” for the federal government “to take care of daycare, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/medicaid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Medicaid</a>, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/medicare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Medicare</a>, all these individual things” because “we’re fighting wars,” comments that observers <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-daycare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">viewed</a> as a stark summary of the administration’s priorities.</p> <p>“Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can’t afford childcare, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Friday. “He is wrong. We are the wealthiest country in the world and can absolutely afford to both defend and invest in the American people.”</p> <p>“The president is now demanding a massive increase in defense spending, including a $350 billion slush fund for his reckless war with Iran, while cutting billions from healthcare, education, housing, and more. This budget represents ‘America Last,’” said Boyle. “I will be demanding answers from White House OMB Director Russell Vought when he testifies at the House Budget Committee on April 15.”</p> <p>The Trump White House is calling on Congress to approve a significant chunk—roughly $350 billion—of its proposed military budget increase via the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to push the funding through without any Democratic support. The new budget request also calls for a “historic investment” in the Department of Homeland Security, which has been partially shut down for more than a month as Democrats push for reforms to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/immigration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Immigration</a> and Customs Enforcement (ICE).</p> <p>“This funding would come in addition to the $170 billion passed just last year that has enabled the deaths of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/migrants" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">migrants</a> in detention centers, the detention of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/children" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">children</a>, and the deaths of US citizens at the hands of mass deportation agents,” Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, <a href="https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2026/04/03/trumps-budget-has-endless-funds-war-not-much-help-americans/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> in response to the budget request.</p> <p>“The president looked at the country, with our rising gas prices and nearly half of us struggling to afford basic necessities, and decided what we really need is a bigger war budget,” said Koshgarian. “Not healthcare or childcare or relief from high prices or expensive housing, but a nearly bottomless budget for whatever wars his cronies and the contractors dream up next.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-budget-record-military-boost-billions-in-cuts-to-social-programs">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342469&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-budget-record-military-boost-billions-in-cuts-to-social-programs", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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‘A moral obscenity’: Trump budget pairs record military boost with billions in cuts to social programs
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Ethiopia’s Trade Union Movement Is Growing Stronger
Over the last decade, Ethiopia’s trade unions have experienced impressive growth, more than doubling their membership. Ethiopia and other African states with growing unions cut against the idea that organized labor is facing global decline.
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The generational warfare promoted by centrists and the Right, who have long been desperate to cut and privatize Social Security, is a fool’s solution to what ails the system. Taxing the rich is the answer.
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Stephen Lewis’s Complicated Legacy for the Canadian Left
Stephen Lewis, leader of the Ontario NDP, son of founding NDP member David, and father of current leader Avi, has died. He leaves a complex legacy: he helped bring the NDP into the mainstream but at the cost of expelling a socialist faction from the party.
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This story originally appeared in _Mondoweiss_ on April 02, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.
It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.
Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.
What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.
Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.
The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.
There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.
Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.
For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.
## A codification of existing practice
In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.
For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused.
> Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.
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What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months.
In Jenin, on November 27, 2025, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected.
That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution.
More recently, in Tammoun, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds.
Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes.
The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.
## Refusing Israel’s timetable for death
Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent.
And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule.
But Ibrahim Tuqan, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well.
The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals.
> What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart
Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination.
But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly:
_زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ_
_I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first_
What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone.
It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down.
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# ‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook
by Abdaljawad Omar, The Real News Network
April 3, 2026
<h1>‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook</h1> <p class="byline">by Abdaljawad Omar, The Real News Network <br />April 3, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:30% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Untitled-design-21.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-272634 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p>This story originally appeared in <em><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/the-rope-is-for-arabs-only-israels-new-death-penalty-law-for-palestinians-recycles-a-colonial-playbook/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mondoweiss</a></em> on April 02, 2026. It is shared here with permission.</p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/war-crime-global-condemnation-as-israeli-ministers-celebrate-death-penalty-law-targeting-palestinian-prisoners/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">passing of a death penalty law</a> for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.</p> <p>It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.</p> <p>Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/britains-pacification-of-palestine/67969BBBDFB9CF57200581CBB61C4427" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">study</a> of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly <a href="https://www.palquest.org/en/biography/9837/izzeddin-al-qassam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Qassamite</a> revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/02/when-palestinian-peasants-brought-an-empire-to-its-knees/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1936 uprising</a>, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.</p> <p>What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.</p> <p>Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed <a href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1648088" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">firsthand accounts</a> of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.</p> <p>The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.</p> <p>There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.</p> <p>Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.</p> <p>For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-a-codification-of-existing-practice">A codification of existing practice</h2> <p>In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group <a href="https://www.yesh-din.org/en/law-enforcement-against-israeli-soldiers-suspected-of-harming-palestinians-and-their-property-summary-of-figures-for-2017-2021/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Yesh Din</a>, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.</p> <p>For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months.</p> <p>In <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-after-footage-of-israeli-soldiers-executing-two-palestinians-in-jenin-goes-viral/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jenin, on November 27, 2025</a>, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected.</p> <p>That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution.</p> <p>More recently, in <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/israeli-army-killing-of-palestinian-family-sends-shockwaves-throughout-the-west-bank/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tammoun</a>, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds.</p> <p>Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes.</p> <p>The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Refusing Israel’s timetable for death</h2> <p>Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent.</p> <p>And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule.</p> <p>But <a href="https://palquest.palestine-studies.org/en/biography/9721/ibrahim-tuqan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ibrahim Tuqan</a>, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well.</p> <p>The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination. </p> <p>But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly:</p> </p> <p><em>زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ</em></p> <p><em>I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first</em> </p> </p> <p>What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone.</p> <p>It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/israels-death-penalty-for-palestinians">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342459&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/israels-death-penalty-for-palestinians", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook
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End the Blockade on Cuba
As a Cuban American traveling with a recent aid convoy, I witnessed the daily hardship sanctions produce. Washington must lift its devastating blockade.
End the Blockade on Cuba
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Wallace Shawn’s Road to Socialism
The left-wing actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, currently in two plays in New York, describes a harsh midlife conversion to class politics — transforming from a disengaged liberal to someone who sees himself as “a participant in the world struggle.”
Wallace Shawn’s Road to Socialism
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Between Chinamaxxing and the Kill Line
### Chinese observers see US dysfunction and feel their own problems are manageable. Meanwhile, Americans idealize China’s efficiency and security. Beneath both views, each society faces the same issues: alienation, unemployment, and weak welfare systems.
* * *
A viral Chinese meme imagines Americans one mishap away from ruin, while American influencers fantasize about China as a frictionless techno-utopia. Each reveals less about reality than about a shared anxiety neither country can quite name. (Wang Zhao / AFP via Getty Images)
On my trip to China last month, I was surprised to learn about China’s latest viral meme: the kill line (斩杀线). The term originates from video games and refers to a point at which a player’s health is so low that they’ll be defeated after a single hit. The Chinese internet has reconfigured this metaphor to create an exaggerated view of American economic precarity. According to the meme, Americans are always sitting at the cusp of a precarious “kill line.” Any minor shock such as a layoff or an accident can thrust even middle-class Americans into homelessness and destitute poverty.
Chinese state media (which never passes up an opportunity to criticize the United States) has spread the meme far and wide, including by misattributing an old video about homelessness in London to the US.
If the kill line was simply an exaggerated metaphor for American economic precarity and wealth inequality, there’d be little to object to. But its origins are deeply suspect. The Chinese influencer who coined the term and goes by the name “Squeaky King” claims to be an international student in Seattle who works part-time collecting corpses dumped in the sewer system for the county government. In his (entirely unsubstantiated) telling, these were the bodies of former middle-class corporate executives and professionals who were thrust into homelessness.
Of course, there is no evidence or photos to back up his implausible claim that a Chinese influencer on a student visa found a part-time government job hauling corpses around Seattle. The Chinese depiction of America’s kill line is more unsubstantiated conspiracy than reality.
As I learned about the kill line, I got to teach Chinese friends about “Chinamaxxing,” which befuddled them just as much as the kill line confused me. Chinamaxxing is the latest social media trend where influencers are embracing and idolizing Chinese culture. There are aspects to Chinamaxxing that are, although uncomfortably Orientalizing, mostly innocuous, such as drinking hot water, doing tai chi, and playing mah-jongg. But others that idealize life in China as zooming around cyberpunk cities in a self-driving electric SUV with a robot waiter erase the reality of daily life in the People’s Republic.
Most people in China suffer from similar social and economic crises that afflict Americans today. The United States’ extreme income inequality is well-known, but China’s is comparable. After accounting for taxes and redistribution, China becomes even more unequal because it falls under the US’s (very low) standards for redistribution. While Chinese inequality has gradually shrunk over recent years, this is mostly due to compression between the top and middle of the income distribution. Those in the bottom 30 percent have been left in the lurch.
Gen Z Chinamaxxers are the ones suffering the most from the crushing costs of college and see China as an escape from it. But while American higher education is exorbitantly expensive, the education affordability crisis in China is even more severe. Parents have to pay for high school, and tutoring is a de facto necessity to keep up with demanding curriculums.
The bottom quintile of Chinese families spend a massive 57 percent of household earnings on their children’s education. While China lacks the widespread student debt that afflicts college-educated Americans, the same problem of massive education costs is felt during the precollege years.
The kill line’s credibility has been reinforced by many videos of the very real problem of homelessness in American cities, but homelessness and extreme poverty are also major problems in China. Chinamaxxing influencers are simply blind to them because the government has successfully criminalized homelessness and driven the “low-end population” out of sight. If China’s poor aren’t at risk of falling below the kill line, it’s because they were never above it to begin with.
More critical Chinese netizens have turned the kill line meme on its head and noted China’s own kill line that disrupts the Chinamaxxing fantasy: turning thirty-five. Age discrimination in hiring is legal in China, and many job postings in tech, civil service, and blue-collar work explicitly ban applicants thirty-five or older. In addition, dismissal rates rise dramatically after workers turn thirty-five. This is because employers believe that those over thirty-five can’t keep up with the seventy-two-hour workweeks that 9–9–6 office culture demands. In China, being thirty-five is its own kill line, where an unexpected layoff can permanently condemn someone to underemployment in the gig economy.
Chinamaxxers’ longing for China resembles conservatives’ fantasies about life in medieval times. In the Right’s imagination, they’d be lords and ladies with castles rather than starving peasants working the land. Similarly, Chinamaxxers imagine themselves as China’s urban elite rather than the mass of impoverished gig workers who deliver their takeout.
The truth is that people just like imagining themselves as economically prosperous. For Chinamaxxers, this desire for material security presents itself under the guise of life in a different country.
Both the “kill line” and “Chinamaxxing” are digital projections born of the same dissatisfactions with the present. For the Chinese observer, the American kill line makes domestic struggles feel manageable by comparison. For Americans, Chinamaxxing is an escape to high-tech efficiency and economic security that feels unattainable at home. Behind these parodies lie two societies that face the same crises of alienation, unemployment, and a weak welfare state. Only by moving beyond these fictions can we build the international solidarity necessary to overcome our shared struggles.
* * *
Between Chinamaxxing and the Kill Line
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_This story originally appeared inJacobin on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission._
One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.
Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the _New Yorker_ ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.
What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.
The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.
It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.
What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.
## Iran as Gaza
While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the first few days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s own estimate of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly dropped just under five hundred bombs a day.
According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the _number of targets struck_ , the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit around half as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).
Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, outstripping Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century.
> "The US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war."
As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.
The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been confirmed to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the bombing of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then dropped heavy bombs on entire residential buildings and destroyed whole residential blocks despite the obvious danger to civilians, burying ordinary Iranians under the rubble.
According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and schools, and a range of other civilian structures. That includes pharmacies, scores of police stations and other security sites, and the infrastructure used to pay officers, as well as a desalination plant that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old heritage sites. It has also targeted Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least three times since the start of the war, risking a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure.
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Israel has bombed oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also targeted infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a cancer drug facility, as well as its steel production, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.
There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on artificial intelligence for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would start using massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.
This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza.
It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, threatening that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and warning that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally prayed for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war.
## Lebanon as Gaza
It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.
There the Israeli military has illegally been giving Lebanese civilians forced evacuation orders in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable 20 percent of Lebanon’s population. It plans to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers gleefully loot the homes first.
In the process, Israel has been seemingly deliberately targeting Lebanese health care workers and journalists, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it killed across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used white phosphorus over residential areas.
> "What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare."
All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including attacks on health care facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like power plants, water and sanitation sites, and the agricultural land it relies on to produce food.
Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, pointing to their actions in Gaza to explain their war plans in Lebanon and even invoking Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a threat. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, according to the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the _exact same statistic_ the deputy chief of UNICEF just used to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.
## We Are All Gaza Now
What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.
This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden cries from neocons and Israeli officials that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.
Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like.
The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.
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# The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal
by Branko Marcetic, The Real News Network
April 3, 2026
<h1>The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal</h1> <p class="byline">by Branko Marcetic, The Real News Network <br />April 3, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg" alt="Jacobin logo" class="wp-image-271557 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p style="font-size:18px"><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/04/israel-gaza-iran-war-crimes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jacobin</a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/08/israel-gaza-worst-crimes-ever" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">near-unprecedented</a> slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.</p> <p>Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than <a href="https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/HumanTollGaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">10 percent</a> of its population killed or injured, the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/whats-legally-allowed-in-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>New Yorker</em></a> ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.</p> <p>What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.</p> <p>The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/graham-gaza/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/01/israel-historical-comparison-world-war-two-ii/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli officials</a> incessantly <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-uk-ambassador-compares-24-080710104.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invoking</a> the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDT8NdyoWfI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Curtis LeMay</a> himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.</p> <p>It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to <a href="https://x.com/BMarchetich/status/1721896111261225436" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pretend</a> to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.</p> <p>What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-iran-as-gaza">Iran as Gaza</h2> <p>While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the <a href="https://twitter.com/IAFsite/status/1712484101763342772" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first few</a> days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-891143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">own estimate</a> of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly <a href="https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa/2023/12/16/why-is-israel-using-so-many-dumb-bombs-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dropped</a> just under five hundred bombs a day.</p> <p>According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the <em>number of targets struck</em>, the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit <a href="https://airwars.org/record-pace-of-strikes-in-iran-bombing-campaign-analysis/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">around half</a> as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).</p> <p>Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-defense-forces-gaza-palestine-civilian-death-casualties-women-children-journalists-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">outstripping</a> Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignright"> <blockquote> <p><q>The US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.</q></p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.</p> <p>The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-missile-strike.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">confirmed</a> to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/middleeast/us-precision-strike-missile-iran-lamerd.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.wIvW.m2XCMt8F4wRY" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombing</a> of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/israel-is-dropping-2000-pound-bombs-on-densely-populated-tehran-reports-say/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dropped</a> heavy bombs on entire <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/civilians-find-no-refuge-from-strikes-as-middle-east-war-widens" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">residential buildings</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/23/unprecedented-israel-us-carry-out-extensive-strikes-across-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">destroyed</a> whole <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0w1qxzd4xo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">residential blocks</a> despite the obvious danger to civilians, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0w1qxzd4xo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">burying</a> ordinary Iranians under the rubble.</p> <p>According to the <a href="https://aje.news/hnjlh9?update=4449306" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Iranian Red Crescent Society</a>, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/29/iran-accuses-us-of-plotting-ground-attack-as-israel-steps-up-bombardment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">schools</a>, and a range of other civilian structures. That <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/schools-water-industry-what-civilian-targets-have-us-israel-iran-hit%20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">includes</a> pharmacies, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/why-have-the-us-and-israel-bombed-more-than-75-iranian-police-facilities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">scores</a> of police stations and other security sites, and the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/us-israel-iran-war-2026/card/bank-serving-iranian-security-services-targeted-in-strike-sources-say-OXbx1fxOGIHW2ID6kGaH?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfq016kwce8xf27vkrs8HVocvaGZjQyDmf7VVkOk4OsICcJ44nTGRGZTdfIdMQ=&gaa_ts=69cad" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">infrastructure</a> used to pay officers, as well as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/world/middleeast/desalination-plants-iran-bahrain.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">desalination plant</a> that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/03/19/nx-s1-5748554/iran-cultural-heritage-damage-war-isfahan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">heritage sites</a>. It has also <a href="https://www.icanw.org/iran_strike_near_israeli_nuclear_site" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">targeted</a> Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167175" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">three times</a> since the start of the war, <a href="https://cnduk.org/us-israeli-war-on-iran-risks-major-nuclear-accident/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">risking</a> a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure.</p> <p>Israel has <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-israel-strikes-iran-oil-gas-poison-people-environment-decades" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombed</a> oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hits-russian-iranian-weapons-smuggling-route-in-the-caspian-sea-6d09aca1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">targeted</a> infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/31/cancer-drug-facility-religious-site-hit-in-israeli-us-strikes-on-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cancer drug</a> facility, as well as its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/world/middleeast/iran-strikes-infrastructure-industry.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">steel production</a>, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.</p> <p>There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">artificial intelligence</a> for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-shifting-precision-munitions-2000-pound-bombs-iran-hegseth-says" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">start using</a> massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.</p> <p>This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza.</p> <p>It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threatening</a> that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pete-hegseth-mocks-iranians-think-020747836.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">warning</a> that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/26/pete-hegseth-pentagon-prayer-violence-united-states/89338978007/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">prayed</a> for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Lebanon as Gaza</h2> <p>It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.</p> <p>There the Israeli military has <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/amid-protection-crisis-lebanon-un-experts-warn-bombing-civilians-force" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">illegally</a> been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy9xlp46zgo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">giving</a> Lebanese civilians forced <a href="https://en.yenisafak.com/world/israel-orders-evacuation-of-lebanese-village-ahead-of-planned-attack-3716365" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">evacuation orders</a> in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/world/video/lebanon-israel-war-gebeily-intv-ctw-0330-10a-seg2-cnni-world" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">20 percent</a> of Lebanon’s population. It <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israeli-plan-lebanon-buffer-zone-follows-long-past-invasions-occupation-2026-03-26/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plans</a> to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/israeli-soldiers-are-looting-homes-in-lebanon/965795815802314/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gleefully loot</a> the homes first.</p> <p>In the process, Israel has been <a href="https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/2036859652256764188" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">seemingly</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-TTOz50NKlc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deliberately</a> targeting Lebanese health care workers and <a href="https://time.com/article/2026/03/30/these-are-the-journalists-israel-has-killed-since-the-start-of-the-iran-war/#:~:text=Ali%20Shoeib,%20a%20reporter%20for,(10:00%20GMT)." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">journalists</a>, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-attacks-southern-lebanon-kill-nine-paramedics-2026-03-28/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">killed</a> across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/25/israel-white-phosphorus-south-lebanon-researchers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">white phosphorus</a> over residential areas.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p><q>What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare.</q></p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2026/03/situation-lebanon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">attacks</a> on <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-03-21/ty-article/lebanese-health-officials-idf-strikes-targeted-over-100-medical-facilities/0000019d-1164-da49-a79f-f7fea32f0000" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">health care</a> facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-CRISIS/LEBANON-ISRAEL-INFRASTRUCTURE/gkvlklaxypb/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">power plants</a>, <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/israeli-forces-using-gaza-playbook-lebanon-decimating-water-infrastructure" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">water and sanitation</a> sites, and the <a href="https://english.ratopati.com/story/56105/israeli-attacks-destroy-22-percent-of-lebanons-agricultural-land" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">agricultural land</a> it relies on to produce food.</p> <p>Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, <a href="https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/lebanese-fear-occupation-israel-threatens-gaza-tactics-south-131425442" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pointing to</a> their actions in Gaza to <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/03/14/israel-lebanon-ground-invasion-hezbollah" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">explain</a> their war plans in Lebanon and even <a href="https://en.yenisafak.com/world/israeli-minister-threatens-to-turn-beirut-into-gazas-khan-younis-3715473" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invoking</a> Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/two-israeli-ministers-warned-southern-lebanon-will-be-another-gaza-deputy-pm-mitri/vi-AA1Zz0d8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threat</a>. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-executive-director-catherine-russells-remarks-humanitarian-situation-children?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to</a> the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the <em>exact same statistic</em> the deputy chief of UNICEF <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167175" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">just used</a> to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">We Are All Gaza Now</h2> <p>What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.</p> <p>This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-iran-bombing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cries</a> from <a href="https://x.com/marklevinshow/status/2028222720249315662" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">neocons</a> and <a href="https://www.news.com.au/world/israeli-fm-gideon-saar-accuses-iran-of-committing-war-crimes-with-missile-strikes/video/b7e1bc9e6fafc9f75d564385095e624f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli</a> <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/international/5358951-israel-iran-war-crimes-missile-strike-hospital/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">officials</a> that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.</p> <p>Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like.</p> <p>The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342446&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany
### Socialist, trade unionist, and candidate for New York State Assembly Conrad Blackburn: “If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people.”
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Socialist New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn: “Why don't we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?” (Courtesy of Andrea Guinn)
After propelling its first two members to public office in districts in Brooklyn and Queens and a part of the Bronx a decade ago with Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) chapter has elected ten additional members into city and state office and brought two already elected city council members into the organization. But the organization has yet to win a seat in Harlem.
Conrad Blackburn, a public defender and trade unionist with the United Auto Workers (UAW), is trying to change that. Blackburn, who has been endorsed by NYC-DSA, several of its elected officials, and other progressive groups, is running for New York State Assembly District 70. The district, which is facing an acute crisis of displacement and poverty, has long been occupied by a more moderate part of the New York Democratic Party; it is currently represented by Jordan Wright, whose father Keith held the seat for over two decades.
In 2018, Blackburn moved to New York City to work at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit providing legal services for poor people. Frustrated by low wages and a lack of workplace freedoms, he and his coworkers organized a union in the spring of 2020 as a part of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), a part of UAW Region 9A. A couple of years prior to that, living in Brooklyn for the summer with his family while he studied for the bar exam, he discovered Salazar’s campaign and by volunteering to canvass for her was introduced to DSA.
_Jacobin_ contributor Peter Lucas sat down with Blackburn to discuss the similarities between his upbringing in the South and the current political realities of Harlem, the consequences of corporate negligence in working-class neighborhoods, and suing Eric Adams.
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Peter Lucas
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Conrad Blackburn
I am originally from Florida. I was born in Miami, but my middle and high school years were in Tallahassee. Both my parents immigrated from Jamaica, but my dad left my family when I was five or six years old. I lived with my mom and my little sisters in a single-parent household. We grew up poor. We lived in the projects.
I was fortunate enough to do well in school growing up. I was in classes with a lot of upper-middle- and upper-class children. I was often the only black kid in my classes. When I would visit my classmates’ homes after school, not that far from where I lived, I’d see the big, fancy houses they lived in with both parents. They had food. They had everything that you could ever want. And then, I would go home and see all the things we didn’t have.
We struggled to get food. Sometimes I ate rice-and-ketchup sandwiches for lunch; sometimes I ate bread and butter for dinner. Electricity was not always there. We occasionally had to live without the lights. We would have to boil water to get hot water at times.
I started working at a young age, maybe thirteen or fourteen, just so my mom wouldn’t have to worry about me having some pocket change to ride the bus or get lunch. Growing up in the projects, I was routinely harassed by the police. Walking to school or around the neighborhood, cops would stop me and search me unconstitutionally. They wouldn’t find anything, but they wanted to strip me of my dignity. I never let that happen. I grew up next to people who were drug dealers and made money in other ways in the projects. I saw a lot of destitute poverty.
My mom often struggled to pay our bills. I remember the first time when I realized what it meant when my mom would pick up an envelope and begin to cry. It pained me to see my mother cry over bills, and that was the first thing that radicalized me. I didn’t want to see my mom hurt in that way, and I knew I wanted to do what I could to make sure my mom would never cry again.
Peter Lucas
Do you see a common thread in the struggles that you faced in the South reflected in Harlem?
Conrad Blackburn
I see a lot of the same issues. It boils down to our ability to live a dignified life and all of the oppressive forces — from the state to big developers to corporations — stripping us of that dignity. There are similarities in exposure to pollution and overpolicing. The housing situation is dire here, the same way it was in the hood in Florida.
"If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people."
Many apartments in Harlem are like shoeboxes. When I lived in the South, our place in the projects couldn’t have been more than six hundred or seven hundred square feet. It would take an eternity to get anything repaired by the building. Growing up, they tried to paint over the outside of the building sometimes to cover up the disrepair, like putting a Band-Aid on a stab wound. In Harlem, if you need to make a repair on your apartment, it takes a long time and is often insufficient. Knocking doors for this campaign, we have encountered people who are heating their homes with their stove, because their boiler has been broken for days.
Peter Lucas
How is your campaign reaching these voters? Are you doing something different, as opposed to what you might see in a traditional campaign?
Conrad Blackburn
I am first and foremost an organizer, and I would take that approach in office. In this campaign, we’re not just knocking doors and asking people to support us. We’re knocking doors and asking people what they need.
The most common issue is housing-related: rent, repairs, utilities, and so on. When I met the gentleman who was heating his house with a stove, I asked him: Have you talked to your landlord? Obviously, that’s the first thing you’re going to do if you have an issue. But that doesn’t mean the landlord is going to respond or actually address the problem. Asking this opens the conversation up to further questions like: Have you talked to anyone else in your building? Are they having the same problems? Have you guys made a plan to come together and collectively do something to get your landlord to act?
I often hear that it’s difficult to rely on other people; it’s hard to get them to actually follow up. I get it. Because so many people have to fight so many struggles, they’re too burdened to even think about trying to band together with their neighbors to fight against their landlord.
After these conversations, we put anyone that we encounter having an issue like that in touch with the tenant organizers on our team. The plan is to eventually have the organizations that our tenant organizers work with organize the buildings and lead know-your-rights trainings.
It is a methodical approach to raising people’s collective consciousness, to get them to see they are more powerful together, that they don’t have to accept defeat or accept the fact that landlords are not going to resolve their issues. They can organize collectively and fight.
Peter Lucas
You mentioned the environmental issues facing Harlemites. On your platform, you address business pollution in your “community protection” plank, which isn’t often associated with that.
Conrad Blackburn
I try to include a lot under the umbrella of community protection. Community protection is about protecting the community from things like an abusive police force, the criminal punishment system, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But it’s also about protecting the community from predatory corporations that buy a building to evict all of the tenants, so that they can knock it down to build a new high-rise where they can charge more exorbitant rent, and then in the process of constructing that new building, engage in a level of negligence that leads to things like Legionnaires’ being spread.
This past year, seven people died, and more than a hundred got sick in Harlem after contracting Legionnaires’ disease, and the biggest source of it was a construction project near Harlem Hospital. Legionella developed in the water in the cooling towers for the HVAC systems after proper testing and maintenance protocols were not followed and then spread into the air, making it toxic to live or work by the hospital.
It’s not the first time Harlem has had a Legionnaires’ outbreak, and there’s been another outbreak since. Last month, another outbreak, this time on 3333 Broadway, was confirmed. We live with the fear of our water having legionella in it because of this. If you knock on doors in this district, people will tell you that sometimes when they turn on their faucet brown stuff comes out. So community protection has to include protecting our neighbors from the corporations that dirty our water or air. I want to hold corporations accountable for this sort of negligence.
Peter Lucas
Harlem has a rich political history. How do you situate your campaign in the context of Harlem’s often-radical politics?
Conrad Blackburn
One of the main things that originally attracted me to Harlem is that my politics were formed by the radical leaders of the past in this neighborhood, who led the civil rights movement — people who were fighting for black liberation. And there was an understanding that in order for black liberation to actually hold, we have to fight a class struggle together.
Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker — all black socialist leaders — these were the people that were forming and fomenting radical political activism in Harlem. They were all talking about the class struggle being the foremost struggle that leads to everyone being able to lead a life that is dignified.
Peter Lucas
There’s also a history of political establishment in Harlem. You’re running against a political family: Keith Wright held this seat for twenty-four years and his son, Jordan, has represented the district since 2024. What is the political establishment in Harlem like?
Conrad Blackburn
The establishment’s whole goal is to build and conglomerate power for themselves. They want to continue their family legacy and have their names etched in Harlem history. In that pursuit, they are leaving the community behind, as they court money from interests that are not aligned with the people of Harlem. If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people. Listening to those moneyed interests has led to displacement, to Harlemites living a less dignified life.
Displacement is the number-one issue in this community. It is this stripping away the rich history of culture and arts and music and food in Harlem.
Peter Lucas
The broader New York political establishment has attacked socialism and DSA, in particular around the question of identity. What do you make of these criticisms?
Conrad Blackburn
It’s ironic they attack DSA for being a gentrifier organization, but DSA has never run a race in Harlem. Darializa Avila Chevalier and I are the first socialists to run in this district. It’s ironic that the machine would say that DSA is a gentrifying force when there are people who have been in power for decades, overseeing an extreme amount of displacement and gentrification in Harlem, because of the policies they endorse, on account of the special interests they are courting.
Part of why they feel they can make that attack is because DSA is an organization that does have a lot of white people. But there are not only white people in DSA. There have been people of color doing amazing work in DSA for years. Nearly all of NYC-DSA’s socialists in office are people of color. The attacks that they’re making ultimately just don’t ring true. It is incumbent on DSA to build power in Harlem, and that’s exactly what I hope this campaign does.
Peter Lucas
How did you come to join DSA?
Conrad Blackburn
In 2018, when I first moved to New York after law school, I lived with my aunt in Brooklyn for a summer to study for the bar. I didn’t know anyone in New York other than my aunts and my family that lived here. It was the same summer that Julia Salazar was running her first campaign for state senate. Seeing somebody openly running as a socialist for a state office was inspiring, so I volunteered. That was my introduction to DSA.
"Displacement is the number-one issue in this community."
But originally, my conception of DSA was that it was a white-led organization. As someone whose politics are rooted in a black radical tradition, I did not look behind the veil to see what was going on internally in DSA for a long time. But I kept hearing about all of the amazing socialists that they were able to elect to office. I continued to pay attention to what was going on in DSA, supporting socialists who were running for office in the ways that I could.
It wasn’t until later that I got a better sense of the organization. I signed up to be a member; I started going to meetings. I attended the endorsement forums and saw DSA’s democratic process in action. It reminded me of my union, and in seeing that, it clicked for me. I was like, okay, this is great, this is my political home. This reminds me of my union — how democratic it is, how member-led it is.
Peter Lucas
How did you get involved with the UAW?
Conrad Blackburn
I got involved with the UAW through organizing the union in my office. I work at a public defense organization. In my second year working there, a few of my close friends and I got together. We talked about how we were living paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t make ends meet. We didn’t have the protections and freedoms that we wanted in our workplace. We decided that the best option would be to form a union.
It is crazy because there is so much work that goes into making that happen, and we were just a bunch of young kids saying, oh yeah, let’s do it. But we made it a reality by organizing. We went to the ALAA, which represents all of the indigent service providers in the city, and it fortunately had the institutional knowledge to know who to go to unionize. That’s how we got connected with the UAW, of which ALAA is an affiliate, and one of its union organizers led us through the process.
Peter Lucas
Can you tell us a little bit about your legal work?
Conrad Blackburn
I’ve been doing this for eight years now. I started as a criminal defense attorney, which I still practice, and I also did a year of immigration. I worked on deportation defense during the first Trump administration. I did three years of policy work. At my office, policy work is a dual role, so I did my own criminal defense case load at the same time as I was doing policy work, lobbying and legislating trying to get bills changed.
Peter Lucas
And you sued Eric Adams?
Conrad Blackburn
My focus was on prisoners’ rights, which led me to work on the city’s anti-solitary confinement bill, which is now Local Law 42. I worked closely with grassroots organizers and groups like the Jails Action Coalition that have been organizing to stop the ills of solitary confinement for decades. I helped them draft the bill. We knew Mayor Adams was going to veto it, so we successfully secured a veto-proof supermajority.
Once it passed, Mayor Adams issued a whole bunch of illegal executive orders to stop the implementation of the bill. In doing this, he violated the separation of powers doctrine and engaged in executive overreach. I brought this to the impact litigation arm in my office and pressed to take the research to the city council. Initially skeptical, it decided to take the case and sue the mayor. We knew for this case that the city council would be a more credible voice because we know that our clients’ stories often get discounted and shot down. We won; a judge ultimately found that what Mayor Adams did initially with those executive voters was unconstitutional.
Peter Lucas
What is the current state of prisons and solitary confinement in New York?
Conrad Blackburn
Right now in New York City, there are people who are complaining that there’s no heat in some of the housing units at Rikers Island. There are people who are being locked in cells for hours and hours of the day, in violation of Local Law 42, not being fed, the cells that they inhabit are tiny. The beds are not real beds — it’s a piece of metal with a little pad on top of it.
"Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?"
People don’t have regular access to their family members; sometimes visiting hours are constrained because a building will go on lockdown, where people are kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day and not able to get out. People are not taken to their medical appointments. There are people with significant mental health complications in Rikers that aren’t getting the medications or the mental health care that they need. A lot of young people who are at Rikers Island are not receiving the schooling that they need because of fear of leaving their cell and being attacked. These are the lives people are leading inside of these institutions, and they scream at the top of their lungs but nobody hears them.
Mind you, there are people who are in Rikers Island because bail was set on them, not having been found guilty of anything — legally innocent but still sitting in these types of conditions. Oftentimes this adds to the cycle of violence, because the things people experience when they’re in jail, the kind of torturous things that I was talking about, where you can’t get food or are locked in your cell, and you take that with you when you leave. People suffer so much trauma and torture that is then brought back to the community, back to the home.
If you look at Kalief Browder‘s story, he was sitting at Rikers Island because he allegedly stole a backpack. He was repeatedly found not guilty, taken to court, and taken back to Rikers Island, but then was put into solitary confinement. There,he developed mental health complications from being placed into solitary confinement. After the case was dismissed, he got out, not found guilty, but because of what he went through, he ended up taking his own life. Those are the conditions and the consequences that people face living in jails and in prisons.
Peter Lucas
Where do you think that money should be invested instead?
Conrad Blackburn
We know that poverty drives crime. When people don’t have economic opportunities, when people can’t afford to live a dignified life, they turn to what they know or to what’s easy. Sometimes that is harming other community members, and that’s how crime is formed and fermented.
Instead of spending money on throwing people into cages, instead of spending money on overpolicing our communities, why don’t we spend money on ensuring that there’s free education for people who live in the city? Why don’t we fully fund the City University of New York? Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down? The more educational opportunities we provide people, the more levers of society they will have access to and can then pursue whatever field of education and work that they want. We have to be able to provide these opportunities to people.
* * *
Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany
jacobin.com/2026/04/blackburn-dsa-ha...
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Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany
Socialist, trade unionist, and candidate for New York State Assembly Conrad Blackburn: “If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people.”
Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany
jacobin.com/2026/04/blackburn-dsa-ha...
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The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?
The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.
The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?
jacobin.com/2026/04/right-classical-...
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The War on Iran Is More Expensive Than You Think
In the first two weeks of its war on Iran, the US spent an estimated $2.1 billion a day. It’s no wonder Donald Trump is saying that the cost of war means the federal government can’t afford to spend money to help Americans meet their basic needs.
The War on Iran Is More Expensive Than You Think
jacobin.com/2026/04/trump-war-iran-c...
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_This article was originally published byTruthout on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a __Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license._
Sixty-two years ago, St. John’s University (SJU) in New York City became the site of the first major faculty strike in U.S. history — a year-long conflict that followed the firing of 33 teachers, including three priests, without due process. Now, the struggle over labor conditions has forced the faculty to once again mobilize, a move precipitated by the current college administration’s abrupt announcement that it will no longer recognize two faculty unions or continue negotiations to hash out a new contract.
St. John’s president, Rev. Brian J. Shanley, and Provost and Senior Vice President Simon Geir Møller, told the _National Catholic Reporter_ (NCR) that the move was necessary to give the college “the flexibility required to innovate … and deliver on our promise to our students.”
But faculty members, who had been demanding improved wages and greater transparency in how their share of health insurance premiums are calculated, call it union busting.
And while the university’s administrators did not respond to _Truthout’_ s multiple requests for an interview, they told _NCR_ that the decision rests on a 2020 decision promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That decision, _Bethany College_, 369 NLRB No. 98, removed NLRB jurisdiction over most of the 849 religiously affiliated colleges and universities in the country and prompted at least eight predominantly Catholic schools — Bethany and Boston Colleges, and Duquesne, Edward Waters, Loyola Marymount, Marquette, St. Leo and Wilberforce universities — to end union recognition on campus.
Critics see this as part of a general rightward trend in higher education.
“The anti-union arguments that have emerged coincide with the appointment of conservative board members and trustees who do not want to deal with unions,” Joseph A. McCartin, executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told _Truthout_. “College and university board members at religiously affiliated institutions are heavily weighted to the financial sector, which does not work with unions and sees them as a nuisance. But the moral principles that guide the church have a clear message about workplace justice. These colleges need to be asked how they reconcile their actions with the church’s stated values.”
To wit, McCartin cites a pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, that was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. The 40-year-old document centers “social justice and the Biblical and ethical principles that support it” and demands that Catholic colleges and universities be “exemplary” in providing “a sufficient livelihood and social benefits” to workers. The document further demands that Catholic institutions “fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively … through whatever association or organization they freely choose.”
Theology professor Chris Denny is president of the St. John’s Faculty Association, which, along with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has represented the full- and part-time faculty on St. John’s Jamaica, New York, campus since 1970.
“Catholicism is not a lapel pin you take out of a drawer and put on when you want to showcase your faith,” Denny told _Truthout_. “Simply put, the university’s treatment of faculty and students does not embody Catholic social justice teachings. The Vincentian tradition at St. John’s follows the model set by St. Vincent de Paul.” SJU, he says, was founded on this tradition. “It does not comport with lavish spending on athletics and team sports while the rest of the campus is a shambles. Our students understand that our workplace conditions are their learning conditions so they understand what’s at stake here.”
Denny argues that the _Bethany_ decision may not have bearing on St. John’s. “We are governed by the New York State Employment Relations Act, which is overseen by the state Public Employees Relations Board (PERB),” he says. “PERB covers private entities like St. John’s and we’re now in a standoff with the administration over PERB’s role in governance.”
But the matter of jurisdiction is currently subject to some legal contestation. The question of whether the PERB or the NLRB has standing over employer-employee relations at St. John’s will be at the heart of an Unfair Labor Practices claim that the Faculty Association and AAUP plan to file. They will ask PERB judges to adjudicate this issue if the administration continues to stonewall and does not return to the bargaining table.
But the unions are hoping it won’t come to that.
Sophie Bell, acting president of the campus AAUP chapter, says that the union was surprised by the February suspension of bargaining and the decision to end union recognition. “This was my second time bargaining for a contract and in the earlier negotiation I felt like management was a real partner at the bargaining table,” she told _Truthout_. “This time it felt different and I got the impression that Shanley does not want a union.”
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Nonetheless, she says that the bargaining team — 12 union members and a slightly smaller number of managers and attorneys — had been meeting regularly since the spring of 2025 and was making slow progress. “We’ve been working without a contract since July 1. We became concerned when management hired Proskauer Rose, an anti-union law firm, to represent them, but we were still talking,” she says.
But now that the talking has stopped, Bell says that the AAUP has three demands for Shanley and the Board of Trustees: Resume contract negotiations; recognize the bargaining unit’s right to a fair, equitable contract; and establish open lines of communication between faculty and Trustees.
As of late March, little headway has been made toward these goals. Nonetheless, the union has continued organizing — bringing hundreds of demonstrators to Madison Square Garden during an NCAA basketball championship game that featured St. John’s, and garnering support from a raft of community and labor organizations, elected officials, and progressive religious leaders.
## Anti-Union Fervor Had Been Building on Campus
That support has been encouraging, first-year writing instructor David G. Farley tells _Truthout._ At the same time, he says that faculty are on edge since no one anticipated that the union would be totally rebuffed by management. Still, Farley said rumors about administration proposals that would worsen labor conditions — including reduced research leave, increased teaching loads, and the development of a robust online course catalog that will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence — have swirled for several years.
In February, St. John’s University administrators]announced the elimination of 18 programs across the colleges including languages, chemistry, physics, toxicology, and hospitality management, Farley told _Truthout_. “At about the same time they announced a new partnership with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for courses in security studies.”
At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been ramping up its raids in communities throughout the country and, Farley says, “as concerned faculty, we quickly responded and got a petition going. We circulated it to current students, alumni, and staff, to say, _‘Don’t do this. It goes against the university’s social justice mission.’_ In February, after less than a year, the [CBP] partnership was dissolved. This victorious campaign was galvanizing for faculty and we created connections to one another in a way that we had not done before.”
Jeanette C. Perron, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical science, agrees that the CBP campaign was significant. Nonetheless, she says that it took attending an open bargaining session to kickstart her union activism. “It was clear that we were spinning our wheels,” she told _Truthout_. “I could see that the people on the other side of the table did not respect the union. I thought our bargaining team had come up with some really good ideas about ways to save money, but everything they suggested was dismissed. That was eye-opening to see.”
Moreover, management contempt for both the Faculty Association and the AAUP, Perron and Farley say, has been the glue uniting faculty, many of whom see what is happening on their campus as emblematic of the attacks on higher education more generally.
“The Shanley administration has taken a profit-driven, corporatist approach to education,” Lara Vapnek, a history professor who has been at St. John’s for 20 years, tells _Truthout._ “Until Shanley came in 2020, the mission of the school was to serve the poor and promote social justice. Shanley has taken the school in a different direction and it is crushing.” She calls the summer 2025 hiring of EAB, a consulting firm hired to help the Board of Trustees “restructure” the school, and the hiring of anti-union lawyers from Proskauer Rose, turning points. “It seems as if the administration wants to turn St. John’s into an athletic franchise with an online university,” she quips.
Still, like others on campus, Vapnek is heartened by the faculty activism in response to what’s happened on campus, from the amount of community support they’ve received to the organizing that is taking place on and beyond the St. John’s campus. “The kind of top-town, ‘ _Let’s just wreck it and act like everything is okay’_ mentality is very DOGE-like,” she says. “It fits with the attacks on women, people of color, and the queer community, attacks on the teaching of history, and attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities.”
“Basically, I see what’s taking place as a rejection of knowledge,” Vapnek concludes. “The faculty at St. John’s are great but we are all being treated as expendable. We think we’re providing value to students and to the university but the administration is treating us as if we’re standing in the way of progress.”
That said, Vapnek and her colleagues concede that union busting at St. John’s and other colleges and universities may be the point. They refer to a 2025 audit commissioned by the AAUP and conducted by Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan State University.
The survey found St. John’s to be in “solid financial condition” but noted that the school has the highest management salaries in the country, and perhaps predictably, Bunsis reported that faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation.
Meanwhile, basketball coach Rick Pitino’s six-year contract provides an annual salary of $3.3 million, with athletic spending far outpacing instructional spending. The average annual faculty salary is $80,757.
_**Editor’s note** : This article has been corrected to clarify that 18 programs, not majors, were canceled, this February, not last spring._ _We have also corrected a quote_ _to say National Endowment for the Humanities instead of National Institutes of_ _Health_.
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# Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York
by Eleanor J. Bader, The Real News Network
April 2, 2026
<h1>Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York</h1> <p class="byline">by Eleanor J. Bader, The Real News Network <br />April 2, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-277549 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This article was originally published by <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/faculty-fight-anti-union-tactics-at-st-johns-university-in-new-york/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truthout</a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a <em> </em><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)</a> license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Sixty-two years ago, St. John’s University (SJU) in New York City became the site of the first major faculty strike in U.S. history — a year-long conflict that followed the firing of 33 teachers, including three priests, without due process. Now, the struggle over labor conditions has forced the faculty to once again mobilize, a move precipitated by the current college administration’s abrupt announcement that it will no longer recognize two faculty unions or continue negotiations to hash out a new contract.</p> <p>St. John’s president, Rev. <a href="https://www.stjohns.edu/who-we-are/leadership-and-administration/office-president/rev-brian-j-shanley-op" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Brian J. Shanley</a>, and Provost and Senior Vice President <a href="https://www.stjohns.edu/who-we-are/leadership-and-administration/simon-geir-moller-phd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simon Geir Møller</a>, told the <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/st-johns-university-says-it-no-longer-recognizes-faculty-unions-after-56-years"></a><a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/st-johns-university-says-it-no-longer-recognizes-faculty-unions-after-56-years" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>National Catholic Reporter</em></a> (NCR) that the move was necessary to give the college “the flexibility required to innovate … and deliver on our promise to our students.”</p> <p>But faculty members, who had been demanding improved wages and greater transparency in how their share of health insurance premiums are calculated, call it union busting.</p> <p>And while the university’s administrators did not respond to <em>Truthout’</em>s multiple requests for an interview, they told <em>NCR </em>that the decision rests on a 2020 decision promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That decision, <a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-declines-jurisdiction-over-faculty-at-religious-institutions" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Bethany College</em></a><a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-declines-jurisdiction-over-faculty-at-religious-institutions">, 369 NLRB No. 98</a>, removed NLRB jurisdiction over most of the <a href="https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/us-colleges-with-religious-affiliations-what-students-should-know" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">849 religiously affiliated colleges and universities</a> in the country and prompted at least eight predominantly Catholic schools — Bethany and Boston Colleges, and Duquesne, Edward Waters, Loyola Marymount, Marquette, St. Leo and Wilberforce universities — to end union recognition on campus.</p> <p>Critics see this as part of a general rightward trend in higher education.</p> <p>“The anti-union arguments that have emerged coincide with the appointment of conservative board members and trustees who do not want to deal with unions,” <a href="https://global.georgetown.edu/people/joseph-mccartin" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joseph A. McCartin</a>, executive director of the <a href="https://lwp.georgetown.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor</a> at Georgetown University, told <em>Truthout</em>. “College and university board members at religiously affiliated institutions are heavily weighted to the financial sector, which does not work with unions and sees them as a nuisance. But the moral principles that guide the church have a clear message about workplace justice. These colleges need to be asked how they reconcile their actions with the church’s stated values.”</p> <p>To wit, McCartin cites a pastoral letter, <a href="https://www.usccb.org/resources/economic_justice_for_all_1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Economic Justice for All</a>, that was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. The 40-year-old document centers “social justice and the Biblical and ethical principles that support it” and demands that Catholic colleges and universities be “exemplary” in providing “a sufficient livelihood and social benefits” to workers. The document further demands that Catholic institutions “fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively … through whatever association or organization they freely choose.”</p> <p>Theology professor Chris Denny is president of the <a href="https://fasju539789868.wordpress.com/HOME/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John’s Faculty Association</a>, which, along with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has represented the full- and part-time faculty on St. John’s Jamaica, New York, campus since 1970.</p> <p>“Catholicism is not a lapel pin you take out of a drawer and put on when you want to showcase your faith,” Denny told <em>Truthout</em>. “Simply put, the university’s treatment of faculty and students does not embody Catholic social justice teachings. The Vincentian tradition at St. John’s follows the model set by <a href="https://ssvpusa.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. Vincent de Paul</a><a href="https://ssvpusa.org/">.</a>” SJU, he says, was founded on this tradition. “It does not comport with lavish spending on athletics and team sports while the rest of the campus is a shambles. Our students understand that our workplace conditions are their learning conditions so they understand what’s at stake here.”</p> <p>Denny argues that the <em>Bethany</em> decision may not have bearing on St. John’s. “We are governed by the <a href="https://perb.ny.gov/laws-and-rules" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York State Employment Relations Act</a>, which is overseen by the state Public Employees Relations Board (PERB),” he says. “PERB covers private entities like St. John’s and we’re now in a standoff with the administration over PERB’s role in governance.”</p> <p>But the matter of jurisdiction is currently <a href="https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/halted-federal-judge-stops-enforcement-1989278/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subject to some legal contestation</a>. The question of whether the PERB or the NLRB has standing over employer-employee relations at St. John’s will be at the heart of an Unfair Labor Practices claim that the Faculty Association and AAUP plan to file. They will ask PERB judges to adjudicate this issue if the administration continues to stonewall and does not return to the bargaining table.</p> <p>But the unions are hoping it won’t come to that.</p> <p>Sophie Bell, acting president of the campus AAUP chapter, says that the union was surprised by the February suspension of bargaining and the decision to end union recognition. “This was my second time bargaining for a contract and in the earlier negotiation I felt like management was a real partner at the bargaining table,” she told <em>Truthout</em>. “This time it felt different and I got the impression that Shanley does not want a union.”</p> <p>Nonetheless, she says that the bargaining team — 12 union members and a slightly smaller number of managers and attorneys — had been meeting regularly since the spring of 2025 and was making slow progress. “We’ve been working without a contract since July 1. We became concerned when management hired Proskauer Rose, an anti-union law firm, to represent them, but we were still talking,” she says.</p> <p>But now that the talking has stopped, Bell says that the AAUP has three demands for Shanley and the Board of Trustees: Resume contract negotiations; recognize the bargaining unit’s right to a fair, equitable contract; and establish open lines of communication between faculty and Trustees.</p> <p>As of late March, little headway has been made toward these goals. Nonetheless, the union has continued organizing — bringing hundreds of demonstrators to Madison Square Garden during an NCAA basketball championship game that featured St. John’s, and garnering support from a raft of community and labor organizations, elected officials, and progressive religious leaders.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-anti-union-fervor-had-been-building-on-campus">Anti-Union Fervor Had Been Building on Campus</h2> <p>That support has been encouraging, first-year writing instructor David G. Farley tells <em>Truthout.</em> At the same time, he says that faculty are on edge since no one anticipated that the union would be totally rebuffed by management. Still, Farley said rumors about administration proposals that would worsen labor conditions — including reduced research leave, increased teaching loads, and the development of a robust online course catalog that will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence — have swirled for several years.</p> <p>In February, St. John’s University administrators]announced the elimination of 18 programs across the colleges including languages, chemistry, physics, toxicology, and hospitality management, Farley told <em>Truthout</em>. “At about the same time they announced a new <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/st-johns-university-quietly-suspends-partnership-with-customs-and-border-protection" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">partnership with Customs and Border Protection </a>(CBP) for courses in security studies.”</p> <p>At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been ramping up its raids in communities throughout the country and, Farley says, “as concerned faculty, we quickly responded and got a petition going. We circulated it to current students, alumni, and staff, to say, <em>‘Don’t do this. It goes against the university’s social justice mission.’</em> In February, after less than a year, the [CBP] partnership was dissolved. This victorious campaign was galvanizing for faculty and we created connections to one another in a way that we had not done before.”</p> <p>Jeanette C. Perron, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical science, agrees that the CBP campaign was significant. Nonetheless, she says that it took attending an open bargaining session to kickstart her union activism. “It was clear that we were spinning our wheels,” she told <em>Truthout</em>. “I could see that the people on the other side of the table did not respect the union. I thought our bargaining team had come up with some really good ideas about ways to save money, but everything they suggested was dismissed. That was eye-opening to see.”</p> <p>Moreover, management contempt for both the Faculty Association and the AAUP, Perron and Farley say, has been the glue uniting faculty, many of whom see what is happening on their campus as emblematic of the attacks on higher education more generally.</p> <p>“The Shanley administration has taken a profit-driven, corporatist approach to education,” Lara Vapnek, a history professor who has been at St. John’s for 20 years, tells <em>Truthout. </em>“Until Shanley came in 2020, the mission of the school was to serve the poor and promote social justice. Shanley has taken the school in a different direction and it is crushing.” She calls the summer 2025 hiring of <a href="https://eab.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EAB</a>, a consulting firm hired to help the Board of Trustees “restructure” the school, and the hiring of anti-union lawyers from Proskauer Rose, turning points. “It seems as if the administration wants to turn St. John’s into an athletic franchise with an online university,” she quips.</p> <p>Still, like others on campus, Vapnek is heartened by the faculty activism in response to what’s happened on campus, from the amount of community support they’ve received to the organizing that is taking place on and beyond the St. John’s campus. “The kind of top-town, ‘<em>Let’s just wreck it and act like everything is okay’</em> mentality is very DOGE-like,” she says. “It fits with the attacks on women, people of color, and the queer community, attacks on the teaching of history, and attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities.”</p> <p>“Basically, I see what’s taking place as a rejection of knowledge,” Vapnek concludes. “The faculty at St. John’s are great but we are all being treated as expendable. We think we’re providing value to students and to the university but the administration is treating us as if we’re standing in the way of progress.”</p> <p>That said, Vapnek and her colleagues concede that union busting at St. John’s and other colleges and universities may be the point. They refer to a 2025 audit commissioned by the AAUP and conducted by <a href="https://www.emich.edu/cob/faculty/h_bunsis.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Howard Bunsis</a>, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan State University.</p> <p>The survey found St. John’s to be in “solid financial condition” but noted that the school has the highest management salaries in the country, and perhaps predictably, Bunsis reported that faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation.</p> <p>Meanwhile, basketball coach <a href="https://www.essentiallysports.com/ncaa-college-basketball-news-rick-pitino-net-worth-and-salary-everything-you-need-to-know-about-st-johns-hcs-riches/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rick Pitino’s six-year contract</a> provides an annual salary of $3.3 million, with athletic spending far outpacing instructional spending. The average annual faculty salary is $80,757.</p> <p><em><strong>Editor’s note</strong>: This article has been corrected to clarify that 18 programs, not majors, were canceled, this February, not last spring.</em> <em>We have also corrected a quote</em> <em>to say National Endowment for the Humanities instead of National Institutes of</em> <em>Health</em>.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/anti-union-tactics-st-johns-university-new-york">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342437&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/anti-union-tactics-st-johns-university-new-york", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York
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Chapo’s Comic Book Is a Riveting Political Horror Show
The Chapo Trap House comic book, Year Zero #1, is a collection of horror stories with a clear political message: liberal capitalism is not failing accidentally — it is functioning as designed, producing horror as a by-product of stability.
Chapo’s Comic Book Is a Riveting Political Horror Show
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