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.” * * * 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. * * * 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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.” **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up 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_. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # 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&amp;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&amp;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> Copy to Clipboard 1

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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New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Julie Menin Doesn’t Care. ### Zohran Mamdani has called for taxing the rich to close New York City’s large budget deficit. His position is popular with most New Yorkers, but wealthy City Council Speaker Julie Menin is giving cover to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to raise taxes. * * * Julie Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves as the highest-ranking member of the city council. (Jim Spellman / WireImage via Getty Images) It was not an April Fool’s Day joke. On the morning of Wednesday, April 1, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the most powerful member of the fifty-one-person legislative body, made an announcement regarding the contentious city budget. Rather than work with the mayor to find new revenues, Menin has continued to dig in her heels in opposition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive budget priorities. Menin is promising to balance the city’s budget by revising estimates of revenue from existing sources and achieving savings through cuts (“right-sizing”), but she continues to oppose taxing the rich and refuses to join forces with the mayor to pressure Governor Kathy Hochul on the issue. New York State is currently in budget season, with the state budget constitutionally mandated to be passed by April 1 and the New York City budget due by the end of the fiscal year. But this year, the state budget will be late, due to the ongoing battle between Governor Hochul’s defense of the fiscal status quo and the growing statewide movement to tax the rich. The majority of New Yorkers, including 72 percent of New York state Democrats, support raising taxes on the rich, but Governor Hochul remains steadfast in her refusal to seek new revenue sources among the growing ranks of ultrawealthy New Yorkers. The stakes are high. Even setting aside the devastation Donald Trump’s federal budget cuts will impose on the most vulnerable New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani has inherited an estimated $5.4 billion deficit due to the mismanagement of the previous administration. Comptroller Mark Levine has called it the “biggest budget deficit since the Great Recession.” Mamdani has already found some savings within the budget, which Menin’s counter-budget doesn’t acknowledge. But together with the Trump cuts that will impact almost half of New York City residents, who rely on some version of Medicaid, Hochul’s refusal to tax the rich — and Menin’s support for the governor’s position — is a matter of life and death for many New Yorkers. As the Trump tax cuts represent a regressive redistribution of wealth from middle-class and low-income Americans toward those with the highest income and assets, we should understand the governor’s and speaker’s unwavering opposition to taxing the rich as making them complicit with Trump’s oligarchic agenda. Ironically, Hochul maintains a web page where New Yorkers can “tell their story” about how the federal budget cuts are affecting them personally and lists a variety of affected programs, including reductions to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and billions in funding for hospitals. This messaging conveniently deflects responsibility for public service provision from the state to the federal government. But as the New York State Tax the Rich campaign has always pointed out, great wealth already exists in New York, and there is no reason for the state government to allow New Yorkers’ health care and social service needs to go unmet. There are many reasons why Hochul and Menin are opposed to taxing the rich. As the governor relies on the billionaire donor class — including many named in the Jeffrey Epstein files — to fund her campaigns, she is obligated to prioritize their interests. And Hochul likely feels vulnerable in an election year, as she faces a challenge from Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. While Hochul held a comfortable lead of 20 points in February, that lead fell to 13 points in late March. This electoral heat will probably mean Hochul continuing to parrot Republican talking points in an attempt to placate her donors — but likely further alienating her base. In 2022, Hochul barely squeaked out a victory of 5 points over a MAGA Republican, former congressman, and now Trump administration acolyte Lee Zeldin in a historically low-turnout general election. Hochul failed to recognize then, and still seems not to recognize, that inspiring the Democratic base to turn out is a more promising electoral strategy than tacking to the center and providing an uninspiring “Republican lite” ticket. Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves thus far as the highest-ranking member of the city council. In addition to public pushback against Mayor Mamdani’s extremely popular call to tax the rich, Menin has so far used her political capital to promote extremely controversial protest “buffer bills” that would limit public assembly and create police work around protests in areas surrounding houses of worship, schools, universities, and other educational institutions. These bills passed, with some revisions, despite objections from civil liberties and human rights experts. These laws violate basic democratic rights of public assembly and freedom of expression under the guise of public safety, but they explicitly attack those who protested at universities during the height of the Gaza solidarity movement. Menin’s leadership on the council appears to represent a form of magical thinking, an attempt to undercut the momentum around and popularity of Mamdani’s demand to tax the rich to create a sustainable source of revenue. Menin’s announcement on Wednesday shows her refusing to engage with the material conditions facing New York. Whether it’s because of pure ideological commitment or her own class interests, Menin seems willfully blind to the real options for dealing with the country’s largest city’s big budget problem. A case in point: during the April 1 budget presser, when asked if New York should raise taxes, Menin stated that she does “believe in progressive taxation” but wants to avoid a situation where “you’re pitting states against each other,” referring to the right-wing and factually inaccurate talking point that the rich would move from New York should their taxes be raised. Menin and the city council’s counter-budget is a last-ditch effort, in collaboration with Governor Hochul, to weaken the growing consensus around the importance of taxing the rich in New York State and beyond. This is not just a local fight but also increasingly a national one, as efforts such as Illinois’s and California’s billionaire tax proposals show; Michigan, Rhode Island, and Washington State are similarly debating more progressive taxes on their richest residents. Menin fails to understand that more than her personal financial interests are at stake: much of the future of our fragile multiracial democratic experiment hangs in the balance. She may try to dress up her intervention in New York City’s “tax dance” as a “reasonable” response to Zohran’s agenda, but history will judge her and her allies as engaging in a final, desperate attempt to shore up Reaganomics — a fading and unpopular doctrine that New Yorkers and Americans broadly seem ready to abandon. * * *

New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Julie Menin Doesn’t Care.

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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _April 02, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ Two days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio unironically advised Iran to spend its public funds “helping the people of Iran” instead of on weapons, President Donald Trump announced that the US government has “to take care of one thing: military protection” and isn’t able to provide people in the US with necessities like healthcare and childcare. “Oh wow, he actually admitted it,” said US Rap. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) in response. At an Easter lunch at the White House Wednesday, the president said that “the United States can’t take care of daycare” and demanded that states fully fund childcare programs. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too,” said Trump. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” > Trump: We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things. pic.twitter.com/vLGpp7KJnm > > — FactPost (@factpostnews) April 1, 2026 The wars the president has waged and threatened to wage since taking office last year include his invasion of Venezuela in January and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; the killing of more than 160 people in boat bombings in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean; an oil blockade on Cuba that’s left tens of thousands of people waiting for surgeries and unable to access essential medications, with Trump threatening to take over the country by force; and the current US-Israeli war on Iran. The conflicts that Trump said Americans must sacrifice federal funding for public programs in order to continue are opposed by a majority of Americans, according to polls. All have been called violations of international law by legal experts. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Trump’s comments on the government’s inability to provide public services came as the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion to continue funding the war on Iran, which has killed nearly 2,000 Iranians and more than 1,000 people across the Middle East as the conflict has widened, and exacerbated the US affordability crisis by raising average gas prices to over $4 per gallon. A 2021 analysis by The New York Times found that the US spends about $500 per family each year on early childhood care, or roughly 0.2% of its GDP. Other wealthy countries that the US considers its peers spend an average of more than $14,000 per family annually, with Norway spending close to $30,000, Finland spending more than $23,000, and Germany spending over $18,000. The president has previously attacked childcare spending, cutting $10 billion in federal childcare funds to five Democratic-led states in response to a social services fraud scandal in Minnesota. Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year are projected amount to about $1 trillion over the next decade, and hundreds of hospitals are at risk of closing or having to reduce healthcare services as a result of the cuts—which, in addition to funding Trump’s military actions, helped pay for tax cuts for corporations and the rich. “The warmongers in the White House and Congress will always fund death and destruction,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) Wednesday night after Trump’s comments. “They will let people in our country starve and die before they stop funding wars.” Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, said Trump’s remarks were a simple statement of fact about the choice the administration has made about its priorities. “Trump is right. A pointless war or universal daycare,” said Platner. “He’s right: That’s the choice.” ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # ‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead by Julia Conley, The Real News Network April 2, 2026 <h1>‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead</h1> <p class="byline">by Julia Conley, 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/2021/02/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-daycare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>April 02, 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">Two days after Secretary of State <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/marco-rubio" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Marco Rubio</a> unironically <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/rubio-ironically-says-iran-should-spend-money-on-its-people-not-on-the-military/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">advised</a> Iran to spend its public funds “helping the people of Iran” instead of on weapons, President <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> announced that the US government has “to take care of one thing: military protection” and isn’t able to provide people in the US with necessities like <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/healthcare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">healthcare</a> and childcare.</p> <p>“Oh wow, he actually admitted it,” <a href="https://x.com/RepYassAnsari/status/2039489881509150732" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> US Rap. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) in response.</p> <p>At an Easter lunch at the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/white-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">White House</a> Wednesday, the president said that “the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/united-states" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States</a> can’t take care of daycare” and demanded that states fully fund childcare programs.</p> <p>“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too,” said Trump. “It’s not possible for us 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.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/factpostnews/status/2039444784083771629?s=20 </div> </figure> <p>The wars the president has waged and threatened to wage since taking office last year include his <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/why-trump-kidnapped-maduro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invasion</a> of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Venezuela</a> in January and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; the killing of more than 160 people in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/hrw-condemns-boat-strikes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">boat bombings</a> in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean; an <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/oil" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oil</a> blockade on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cuba</a> that’s left tens of thousands of people <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-blockade-kills-cubans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">waiting</a> for surgeries and unable to access essential medications, with Trump <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/cuba-and-us-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threatening</a> to take over the country by force; and the current US-Israeli war on Iran.</p> <p>The conflicts that Trump said Americans must sacrifice federal funding for public programs in order to continue are <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-venezuela-war-poll" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">opposed</a> by a <a href="https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-yougov-poll-on-u-s-boat-strikes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">majority</a><a href="https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-yougov-poll-on-u-s-boat-strikes"></a> of Americans, <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5790498-trump-threatens-cuba-takeover/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a> to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-war-too-far-poll" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">polls</a>. All have been <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-experts-venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">called</a> violations of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-human-rights-chief-cuba-blockade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">international</a> law by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-war-illegal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">legal</a> experts.</p> <p>Trump’s comments on the government’s inability to provide public services came as the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pentagon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pentagon</a> is seeking $200 billion to continue <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/hell-no-pentagon-wants-over-200-billion-to-fund-trump-s-illegal-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">funding</a> the war on Iran, which has killed nearly 2,000 Iranians and more than 1,000 people across the Middle East as the conflict has widened, and exacerbated the US affordability crisis by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/4-dollar-gas-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">raising</a> average gas prices to over $4 per gallon.</p> <p>A 2021 analysis by The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/new-york-times" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/upshot/child-care-biden.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">found</a> that the US spends about $500 per family each year on early childhood care, or roughly 0.2% of its GDP. Other wealthy countries that the US considers its peers spend an average of more than $14,000 per family annually, with Norway spending close to $30,000, Finland spending more than $23,000, and Germany spending over $18,000.</p> <p>The president has previously attacked childcare spending, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-cuts-federal-funding" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cutting</a> $10 billion in federal childcare funds to five Democratic-led states in response to a social services fraud scandal in Minnesota. Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year are projected amount to about $1 trillion over the next decade, and hundreds of hospitals are <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-medicaid-cuts-hospitals" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">at risk</a> of closing or having to reduce healthcare services as a result of the cuts—which, in addition to funding Trump’s military actions, <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/blog/republican-megabills-tax-cuts-for-millionaires-are-financed-by-taking-health-insurance-from-47" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">helped pay</a> for <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/tax-cuts" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tax cuts</a> for corporations and the rich.</p> <p>“The warmongers in the White House and Congress will always fund death and destruction,” <a href="https://x.com/RashidaTlaib/status/2039530737402323101" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Rep. <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/rashida-tlaib" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rashida Tlaib</a> (D-Mich.) Wednesday night after Trump’s comments. “They will let people in our country starve and die before they stop funding wars.”</p> <p>Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-senate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Senate</a> in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/maine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Maine</a>, said Trump’s remarks were a simple statement of fact about the choice the administration has made about its priorities.</p> <p>“Trump is right. A pointless war or universal daycare,” <a href="https://x.com/grahamformaine/status/2039529813916938561" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Platner. “He’s right: That’s the choice.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-daycare">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&amp;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=342429&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-daycare", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead

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The Biggest US Meatpacking Strike in 40 Years Is Still On At the sprawling JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, 3,800 workers from around the world have united to carry out the largest US meatpacking strike in 40 years.

The Biggest US Meatpacking Strike in 40 Years Is Still On

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Dems Claim to Want a Hasan Piker — Then Try to Cancel Him Democrats spent the last year asking where their Joe Rogan was. Hasan Piker is one of the few left-wing figures with the audience they covet — but the party is deeply hostile to the spontaneity and independence that make figures like him appealing.

Dems Claim to Want a Hasan Piker — Then Try to Cancel Him

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Private Equity Firm Apollo Has a Labor Abuse Problem ### The AFL-CIO is calling on private equity firm Apollo — whose CEO has come under fire for ties to Jeffrey Epstein — to investigate growing reports of labor abuses at its subsidiaries, including union busting and intimidation of immigrant workers. * * * America’s largest labor federation is calling on the global private equity firm Apollo Global Management to investigate worker surveillance, wrongful terminations, and intimidation of immigrant workers at its subsidiaries. (Lionel Ng / Bloomberg via Getty Images) America’s largest labor federation is calling on the global private equity firm Apollo Global Management to investigate worker surveillance, wrongful terminations, and intimidation of immigrant workers at its subsidiaries. The union is also sounding the alarm over Apollo CEO Mark Rowan’s connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as well as to President Donald Trump’s push to condition university funding on adoption of conservative policies, including strict gender definitions. In a March 11 letter, the fifteen-million-member American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) detailed a “growing list of unaddressed workers’ rights violations” that allegedly occurred at three Apollo-owned companies. The AFL-CIO is urging Apollo’s board to “take action when red flags indicate potential wrongdoing” and to review its subsidiaries’ compliance with the company’s stated “Responsible Workforce Principles.” These principles state that companies will support discrimination-free workplaces, respect unionizing rights, and uphold other worker protections. In a written response to the union dated March 18, Apollo noted, “Neither Apollo nor any of its portfolio companies have ever interfered with an existing collective bargaining agreement.” The company response, which was shared with the _Lever_ , also noted, “Your letter cherry picks three isolated examples (two of which were not even originally equity investments) and ignores hundreds of other portfolio companies over the years, many of which have had productive and successful union engagement.” Through the various companies they own, private equity firms like Apollo employ roughly 10 percent of the private sector workforce, and many of these jobs are in high-risk, low-wage industries. Companies acquired by private equity firms have gone on to be associated with workforce neglect and anti-union tactics. # Disputes at Apollo-Owned Firms Among its list of concerns, the AFL-CIO highlighted incidents at a Kentucky-based facility run by Maker’s Pride, an Illinois-based food manufacturer acquired by Apollo and another private equity firm in March 2025. According to the union, workers at the company allege that managers surveilled unionization efforts, reported such activity to the police, and fired four organizers, among other actions. In September 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency tasked with overseeing unions, agreed with workers, ordering Maker’s Pride to cease anti-union efforts and reinstate the terminated workers. While the labor violations took place before Apollo acquired the company, the private equity firm has kept the same management in place and is now appealing the NLRB ruling. “Appealing the decision will delay justice for the fired workers, further deteriorate worker morale, and embolden management to stay the course,” the AFL-CIO noted in its letter to Apollo. “The union avoidance activities described in the . . . decision are in direct conflict with Apollo’s Responsible Workforce Principles.” In its response to the union, Apollo noted that its funds cannot “dictate members of the management team.” According to the AFL-CIO, other labor rights violations occurred at Apollo-owned Heritage Grocers Group facilities in Illinois and the Southwest. That allegedly included hiring a union-busting consultant and running an anti-union website and text campaign. The AFL-CIO letter suggested that some of the anti-union messaging seemed designed to intimidate immigrant workers, noting that the local union has “no special relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and that signing a union card will not help with immigration issues.” Heritage Grocers Group facilities have also settled prior class action lawsuits alleging pay, overtime, meal break, and rest time violations. “Without addressing each labor claim that has been made against the company, we note that the [local union] has withdrawn several labor-related complaints, and the [NLRB] has dismissed others,” the firm wrote in its letter to the union, adding that some of the actions predate Apollo ownership. Finally, at the 5 Times Square skyscraper in Manhattan, AFL-CIO representatives say Apollo-owned companies have employed subcontractors in an attempt to bypass the firm’s competitive wage and benefits standards, which Apollo subsidiaries are required to pay. Apollo told the union it does not control the business operating at the site, and that “the team was responsive to labor concerns and . . . pulled awards after receiving third-party verification of a subcontractor’s labor related violations.” The AFL-CIO noted that Apollo has a duty to adhere to its own workforce policies not just for the sake of the millions it employs but also for the millions more who have pension funds and retirement savings invested in the firm. “Billions of dollars of workers’ hard-earned pension assets are invested in Apollo or Apollo-managed private funds,” the letter states. “These workers rely upon the responsible stewardship of their investments for their retirement security.” * * * This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

Private Equity Firm Apollo Has a Labor Abuse Problem

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Capitalism Had a Beginning and Will Someday End Historian Sven Beckert on where the capitalist system came from, what keeps it alive, and what it would take to bring it down.

Capitalism Had a Beginning and Will Someday End

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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._ Secretary of State Marco Rubio lectured Iran in interviews this week, saying that the country should be spending money on supporting its people rather than on weapons and militaristic causes — an ironic statement coming from an administration that has gutted the U.S.’s social safety net while requesting a record-shattering Pentagon budget. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” said Rubio, speaking of the administration’s hopes for regime change in their war in an interview on _ABC_ ’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. “You’d have a much different country. So we are always hopeful that that would exist over there.” He repeated that sentiment in an interview with _Al Jazeera_ that same day, adding that the country “wouldn’t have water shortages” and that their economy “would provide opportunities for an incredible people.” His statements ignore that the U.S.’s strict, decades-old sanctions regime is responsible for over $1 trillion in damages to Iran’s economy, Iranian officials have said. They also ignore that, the same day as Rubio’s interviews, President Donald Trump threatened to destroy “all desalinization[_sic_] plants” in Iran, which would threaten crucial water infrastructure for the country and constitute a clear war crime, experts have said. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Rubio’s comments are highly hypocritical coming from a top official in an administration that, with Republicans in Congress, enacted sweeping cuts to some of the most crucial anti-poverty programs in the U.S., Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, kicking millions off their benefits last year. The U.S. and Israel’s war is also causing prices for oil and gas to skyrocket globally — which affects nearly every industry, with price hikes being passed on to consumers. While some countries have offered economic provisions to their citizens to ease price shocks, the Trump administration has dismissed the public’s economic concerns. Last month, top economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that the war will “hurt consumers” if it’s extended, but “that’s really the last of our concerns right now.” Meanwhile, Congress is slated to soon consider Trump’s record-shattering request for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget in 2027 — up from the already sky-high budget for this year of $1 trillion. At the same time, the administration has reportedly requested a towering $200 billion in supplemental funding just for the war. The U.S. already has by far the largest military in the world, spending more on defense than the next nine countries combined, while also having sent over $30 billion in military support to Israel in the first two years of its genocide in Gaza. Top House Republicans are reportedly looking to enact even further cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies in order to fund the Trump administration’s request for $200 billion in supplemental Pentagon funding for its war. These cuts could cause 300,000 more people to lose their health insurance, on top of the 16 million people estimated to lose their coverage due to the Republican cuts last year. Rubio’s comment is also hypocritical considering that this administration has denounced socialist countries that maintain anti-poverty programs, as well as his previous remarks criticizing proposals to fund public programs when he was in the Senate. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military by Sharon Zhang, The Real News Network April 1, 2026 <h1>Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military</h1> <p class="byline">by Sharon Zhang, The Real News Network <br />April 1, 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/rubio-ironically-says-iran-should-spend-money-on-its-people-not-on-the-military/" 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">Secretary of State Marco Rubio lectured Iran in interviews this week, saying that the country should be spending money on supporting its people rather than on weapons and militaristic causes — an ironic statement coming from an administration that has gutted the U.S.’s social safety net while requesting a record-shattering Pentagon budget.</p> <p>“Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/03/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-george-stephanopoulos-of-abc-good-morning-america" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Rubio, speaking of the administration’s hopes for regime change in their war in an interview on <em>ABC</em>’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. “You’d have a much different country. So we are always hopeful that that would exist over there.”</p> <p>He repeated that sentiment in an interview with <em>Al Jazeera</em> that same day, <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/03/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-hashem-ahelbarra-of-al-jazeera" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">adding that</a> the country “wouldn’t have water shortages” and that their economy “would provide opportunities for an incredible people.” His statements ignore that the U.S.’s strict, decades-old sanctions regime is responsible <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflicted-1-trillion-damage-on-irans-economy-fm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">for over $1 trillion</a> in damages to Iran’s economy, Iranian officials have said.</p> <p>They also ignore that, the same day as Rubio’s interviews, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-threat-desalination-plants-war-f624bed66bee79f68454d581ae1d624a" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">President Donald Trump threatened</a> to destroy “all desalinization[<em>sic</em>] plants” in Iran, which would threaten crucial water infrastructure for the country and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/trump-threatens-to-blow-up-all-desalination-plants-in-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">constitute a clear war crime</a>, experts have said.</p> <p>Rubio’s comments are highly hypocritical coming from a top official in an administration that, with Republicans in Congress, enacted sweeping cuts to some of the most crucial anti-poverty programs in the U.S., Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, kicking millions off their benefits last year.</p> <p>The U.S. and Israel’s war is also causing prices for oil and gas to skyrocket globally — which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/29/americans-struggling-rising-costs-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">affects nearly every industry</a>, with price hikes being passed on to consumers.</p> <p>While some countries have <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/spain-to-temporarily-freeze-rents-due-to-middle-east-war-pm/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">offered economic provisions</a> to their citizens to ease price shocks, the Trump administration has dismissed the public’s economic concerns. Last month, top economic adviser Kevin Hassett <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trump-adviser-says-war-induced-pain-to-consumers-is-the-last-of-our-concerns/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> that the war will “hurt consumers” if it’s extended, but “that’s really the last of our concerns right now.”</p> <p>Meanwhile, Congress is slated to soon <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-calls-record-defense-budget-00715298" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">consider Trump’s record-shattering request</a> for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget in 2027 — up from the already sky-high budget for this year of $1 trillion. At the same time, the administration has reportedly requested a towering $200 billion in supplemental funding just for the war.</p> <p>The U.S. already has by far the largest military in the world, <a href="https://www.pgpf.org/article/chart-pack-defense-spending/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spending more</a> on defense than the next nine countries combined, while also <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/report-us-spent-over-30b-backing-israel-regional-wars-in-2-years-of-genocide/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">having sent over $30 billion</a> in military support to Israel in the first two years of its genocide in Gaza.</p> <p>Top House Republicans <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/03/30/gop-health-care-pay-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">are reportedly</a> looking to enact even further cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies in order to fund the Trump administration’s request for $200 billion <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trump-asks-for-taxpayers-to-shell-out-200b-to-fund-his-deadly-cost-raising-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in supplemental Pentagon funding for its war</a>. These cuts could cause 300,000 more people to lose their health insurance, on top of the 16 million people estimated to lose their coverage due to the Republican cuts last year.</p> <p>Rubio’s comment is also hypocritical considering that this administration has denounced <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/rubio-denies-us-punitive-actions-blames-cuba-for-economic-failures" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">socialist countries</a> that maintain anti-poverty programs, as well as his <a href="https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/problem-marco-rubio-s-misplaced-interest-marxism-n1280557" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">previous remarks</a> criticizing proposals to fund public programs when he was in the Senate.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/rubio-iran-money-on-people-not-on-military">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&amp;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=342418&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/rubio-iran-money-on-people-not-on-military", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military

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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _Mar. 31, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ Just days after the GOP-controlled Senate skipped town once they failed to send a voter suppression bill to President Donald Trump’s desk, the Republican on Tuesday signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of US voters and crack down on voting by mail—which is how he voted in Florida’s most recent election. The order, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, was first reported by the Daily Caller, a right-wing outlet. It requires the secretary of homeland security to establish a “citizenship list” of verified eligible voters in each state, using Social Security Administration records and other federal databases. Trump—who has repeatedly spread lies about election fraud, including his unfounded claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him, which led to his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021—also directed the postmaster general to craft rules for absentee ballots sent through the US Postal Service. Legal experts expect the order will be swiftly challenged in court as unconstitutional. David Becker, a former US Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Democracy Docket that “it’s obvious the president didn’t learn anything from his first failed executive order.” “This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections,” he said. “I expect that this will be blocked by multiple federal courts in a very short period of time and have no legal effect whatsoever.” Becker also noted that “after the Department of Justice has been telling courts they’re not creating a national voter list, this appears to confirm exactly what courts were concerned about.” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and a longtime election lawyer for Democrats, similarly said that “this is a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail.” “We know where this will go—the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement,” he added. “We will sue and we will win.” > With Marc at his battle station, voters will AGAIN win. https://t.co/KQYsdqGMq8 > > — Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) March 31, 2026 US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shared a message for the administration on social media: “See you in court. You will lose.” **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California’s former secretary of state, said in a statement that “instead of focusing on lowering the cost of energy, groceries, and healthcare, Donald Trump is desperately attempting to take over and rig our elections and avoid accountability in November.” The order was issued just over seven months away from the midterm elections that could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats—which could, in term, lead to a historic third impeachment for Trump. “This executive order is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” Padilla declared. “The president and the Department of Homeland Security have no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the independent Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting that nearly 50 million Americans relied on in 2024. A decade of lies about election fraud does not change the Constitution.” “Make no mistake: Trump’s attacks on our elections are a clear and present threat to our democracy. In the middle of an unauthorized war abroad and an escalating authoritarian crackdown by ICE here at home, Trump is attempting another illegal power grab,” he added, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I will use every tool I can to stop him, and I expect immediate legal challenges in order to protect our free and fair elections.” > The president has zero power to make any changes to mail-in voting so I expect this to be another nothing-burger. https://t.co/9pk7a5oYjf > > — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 31, 2026 After signing the order, Trump signaled that he, too, expects a court battle. While holding up the order, he said that “I don’t know how it can be challenged,” but critics will “probably challenge it” and “find a rogue judge.” There are “a lot of rogue judges. Very bad, bad people. Very bad judges,” he added. “But that’s the only way that can be changed, and hopefully we’ll win on appeal if it is. But I don’t see how anybody can challenge it.” Trump signed the order after unsuccessfully trying to convince the GOP-controlled Senate to pass the SAVE America Act—already approved by Republicans in the House of Representatives—before the current recess. The bill would require US voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification to participate in federal elections. Trump has been pushing for amendments to restrict mail-in voting as well as more attacks on transgender Americans. While Trump and other supporters of the bill have claimed it is needed to stop noncitizens from voting, that is already illegal and, according to research, incredibly rare. Critics warn that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have access to citizenship documents, including people who have lost paperwork, can’t afford replacements, or have changed their names. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown by Jessica Corbett, The Real News Network April 1, 2026 <h1>Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown</h1> <p class="byline">by Jessica Corbett, The Real News Network <br />April 1, 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-voting-executive-order" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Mar. 31, 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">Just days after the GOP-controlled Senate skipped town once they failed to send a voter suppression bill to President Donald Trump’s desk, the Republican on Tuesday signed an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/ensuring-citizenship-verification-and-integrity-in-federal-elections/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">executive order</a> to create a nationwide list of US voters and crack down on voting by mail—which is how he <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/did-trump-vote-by-mail" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">voted</a> in Florida’s most recent election.</p> <p>The order, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, was first <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2026/03/31/trump-mail-in-voting-executive-order-save-america-act-midterms/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> by the Daily Caller, a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/right-wing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing</a> outlet. It requires the secretary of homeland security to establish a “citizenship list” of verified eligible voters in each state, using <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-security" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Social Security</a> Administration records and other federal databases.</p> <p>Trump—who has repeatedly spread lies about election fraud, including his unfounded claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him, which led to his supporters storming the Capitol on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/january-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">January 6</a>, 2021—also directed the postmaster general to craft rules for absentee ballots sent through the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-postal-service" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Postal Service</a>.</p> <p>Legal experts expect the order will be swiftly challenged in court as unconstitutional. David Becker, a former <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-department-of-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Department of Justice</a> lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-signs-sweeping-order-attacking-mail-in-voting/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a> <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/democracy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Democracy</a> Docket that “it’s obvious the president didn’t learn anything from his <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-executive-order-elections" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first failed executive order</a>.”</p> <p>“This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections,” he said. “I expect that this will be blocked by multiple federal courts in a very short period of time and have no legal effect whatsoever.”</p> <p>Becker also noted that “after the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/department-of-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Justice</a> has been telling courts they’re not creating a national voter list, this appears to confirm exactly what courts were concerned about.”</p> <p>Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and a longtime election lawyer for Democrats, similarly said that “this is a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail.”</p> <p>“We know where this will go—the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement,” he added. “We will sue and we will win.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/2039099933429846232?s=20 </div> </figure> <p><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-senate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Senate</a> Minority Leader <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/chuck-schumer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chuck Schumer</a> (D-NY) <a href="https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/2039091317301522606" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">shared</a> a message for the administration on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-media" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">social media</a>: “See you in court. You will lose.”</p> <p>Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California’s former secretary of state, said in a statement that “instead of focusing on lowering the cost of energy, groceries, and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/healthcare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">healthcare</a>, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> is desperately attempting to take over and rig our elections and avoid accountability in November.”</p> <p>The order was issued just over seven months away from the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/midterm-elections" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">midterm elections</a> that could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats—which could, in term, lead to a historic third <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/impeachment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">impeachment</a> for Trump.</p> <p>“This executive order is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” Padilla declared. “The president and the Department of Homeland Security have no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the independent Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting that nearly 50 million Americans relied on in 2024. A decade of lies about election fraud does not change the Constitution.”</p> <p>“Make no mistake: Trump’s attacks on our elections are a clear and present threat to our democracy. In the middle of an unauthorized war abroad and an escalating authoritarian crackdown by ICE here at home, Trump is attempting another illegal power grab,” he added, referring to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/immigration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Immigration</a> and Customs Enforcement. “I will use every tool I can to stop him, and I expect immediate legal challenges in order to protect our free and fair elections.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/2039087693871628303?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2039087693871628303%7Ctwgr%5Eb72f5eaf078b562ce0bdb6097444d1ecd11eff1e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-voting-executive-order </div> </figure> <p>After signing the order, Trump <a href="https://x.com/MAGAVoice/status/2039096830857015304?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">signaled</a> that he, too, expects a court battle. While holding up the order, he said that “I don’t know how it can be challenged,” but critics will “probably challenge it” and “find a rogue judge.”</p> <p>There are “a lot of rogue judges. Very bad, bad people. Very bad judges,” he added. “But that’s the only way that can be changed, and hopefully we’ll win on appeal if it is. But I don’t see how anybody can challenge it.”</p> <p>Trump signed the order after unsuccessfully trying to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/save-america-act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">convince</a> the GOP-controlled Senate to pass the SAVE America Act—already <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/republican-pass-save-act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">approved</a> by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/republicans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Republicans</a> in the House of Representatives—before the current recess.</p> <p>The bill would require US voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification to participate in federal elections. Trump has been pushing for amendments to restrict mail-in voting as well as more attacks on transgender Americans.</p> <p>While Trump and other supporters of the bill have claimed it is needed to stop noncitizens from voting, that is already illegal and, according to research, incredibly rare. Critics warn that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have access to citizenship documents, including people who have lost paperwork, can’t afford replacements, or have changed their names.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-national-voter-list-mail-in-voting-crackdown">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&amp;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=342412&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-national-voter-list-mail-in-voting-crackdown", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown

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‘Don’t be a snitch’: US postal workers side with communities over collaboration with ICE

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<cite>Palestine 36</cite> Reclaims a Buried Anti‑Colonial Revolt ### Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 resurrects the mass anti‑colonial revolt that Britain crushed with overwhelming force — and shows how its legacy still shapes the present. * * * Still from Palestine 36. (Watermelon Pictures) Bethlehem-born writer-director Annemarie Jacir is at the cutting edge of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers breaking through to Western audiences and beyond with undeniably powerful movies. Jacir’s 2008 _Salt of this Sea_ received two nominations at the Cannes Film Festival, while her 2012 Palestinian refugee drama, _When I Saw You_ , costarring Saleh Bakri, won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Now, her latest feature, _Palestine 36_ — which also costars Bakri as well as Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons — is having the national release Jacir’s epic richly deserves. As its title suggests, _Palestine 36_ — which was Palestine’s official selection for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and winner of the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Best Film Award — fictionalizes a key period in the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle. According to Rashid Khalidi’s _The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine_ , by 1939, the British military dispatched “a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, one for every four adult Palestinian men. . . . It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in 1938 . . . to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.” In this candid conversation, Jacir lays out the historical context and framework within which she dramatizes the mass uprising that began when Yasser Arafat was only seven years old — a revolt that shook the mightiest military in Europe. Jacir was interviewed for _Jacobin_ by film historian and critic Ed Rampell. * * * Ed Rampell Tell us about your personal background and how you got into filmmaking? Annemarie Jacir My parents are Palestinians from Bethlehem. My father is turning ninety, he was born in 1936, the first year of the revolt. My mother was born in the last year of the revolt in 1939. Ed Rampell Your family is Christian? Annemarie Jacir I am an _atheist_. Ed Rampell But you were born into a Christian family? Annemarie Jacir Yes. After Palestine was occupied, the West Bank was occupied in ’67, they stayed there for a couple of years, they decided, they found work abroad and didn’t want to bring up a family under occupation. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. I came to the US after that and my undergraduate was political studies and literature, at the Claremont Colleges in California, at Pitzer. I graduated from Pitzer with a double major, I was interested in film my final year and thought of switching majors. And my father said, “You just did a double major. Get out of school and finish.” So, I moved into LA where I lived a few years trying to learn about how to make films. I was contacting everybody about a job, production assistant, whatever. Those were very rough years and I found that LA really wasn’t my kind of city. I didn’t have the connections, couldn’t get into the film industry, so I was doing crappy jobs that were not really teaching me about filmmaking. I ended up at a literary agency representing screenwriters and started reading lots of scripts. I still didn’t feel like the whole machine of Hollywood was the kind of cinema I wanted to make. Then I went to graduate school in New York at Columbia and studied film. After that, I went to Palestine and have been living in Palestine ever since. Ed Rampell _Palestine 36_ brilliantly dramatizes history, especially events that few Westerners have ever heard of. Americans tend to think that between the two world wars, Britain was at peace, until it went to war with the Nazis in 1939. Your film shows otherwise. So, what happened in 1936 in Palestine? Annemarie Jacir In 1936, the British have already been in Palestine for almost twenty years. There’s already a lot of disgruntlement to begin with. The early years of British control [as a League of Nations Mandate], there was probably some kind of feeling that things were going to get better. But they didn’t. It was a project to control the resources and people. Also, there was, and I’m surprised how few people know this, there was Jewish emigration. But it was before the Holocaust. Yeah, because there was antisemitism, pogroms, and fascism, and Jews were fleeing Europe way before the Holocaust. Everybody thinks it happens later, when Palestine is flooded with refugees. Jews were emigrating — of course, there’s an indigenous Jewish population in Palestine, it was very small. Palestinian society is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, very mixed. So you look at the numbers of [Jewish emigration], and you see this influx. These things were all coming together and creating a tense atmosphere. There was the beginning of the first mass revolt against British colonialism in 1936. It included a national strike that was really the longest strike in history at that moment, a six-month strike. The revolt was really in two phases. It begins in ’36, and the British are losing control. Because it’s a farmer-led revolt. They couldn’t figure it out and began to lose control. Then there’s the Peel Commission, and they’re trying to figure out a diplomatic solution. And it becomes clear that there’s going to be no resolution. Then there’s the second phase of the revolt, which begins after the Peel Commission in 1937. That’s when the British brought in thousands and thousands of troops, weapons, tanks, planes — they were strafing the countryside. The purpose was to crush the revolt as quickly as possible. Many historians feel that was done as quickly as possible because World War II was on the horizon, so they had to crush this revolt and get out of there, basically. Ed Rampell That’s the historical background for the real-life events that you dramatize in _Palestine 36_ , largely through focusing on at least two Palestinian families. Amir and Khuloud are urban intellectuals in Jerusalem, and the villagers of rural Al Basma. The two families are connected by Yusuf. Tell us about these characters and how fact-based they are? Annemarie Jacir The heart of the film is the Palestinian villagers. Yusuf and his family, and Rabab [Yafa Bakri] and her daughter Afra [Wardi Eilabouni, with Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who was Emmy nominated for the HBO series _Succession_ , playing the grandmother Hanan], and the little boy Kareem [Ward Helou] and his father, the priest [Jalal Altawil plays Father Boulos]. These are our villagers. There’s Khuloud [Lebanon-born Yasmine Al Massri, costar of the ABC-TV FBI series _Quantico_] and Amir [Tunisia-born Dhafer L’Abidine] in the city. And there’s Khalid [Saleh Bakri, a frequent collaborator with Jacir and star of Cherien Dabis’s _All That’s Left of You_], a dockworker. "Everything the British did in Palestine, the Israelis just copied the blueprint." These characters all link up. For me, it was important, I didn’t want to have _a_ hero — the _one_ hero to do this classic story; you follow this person from here and there’s one hero. There’s no hero, they’re just regular people that are living through this very intense moment and they make a decision. All of them make a decision, whether it’s very small or big, wrong or right. They’re all confronted with history and they do something, they make a decision about how to move forward. The Palestinian characters are all fictional, they all come from different places. Khuloud, for example, the female journalist, she’s sort of a mix of upper-class female journalist, a socialite that was living in Jerusalem at the time and she was known very much for her parties with the British. The Palestinian elite was mixing with the British a lot. And women who were journalists at the time and founding printing presses — and not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon and Egypt — they’d write under male names, for two reasons. Yes, to be taken seriously in a patriarchal world, but also because these places had colonial governments and to write under a name when you were being critical, actually it’s protection. Ed Rampell And when we first see Khuloud, she’s cross-dressing. Why? Annemarie Jacir Yes, exactly. Why not? [Laughs] Ed Rampell It’s surprising. My interpretation is that as a woman in patriarchal society, she was assuming male roles that were denied to women. Annemarie Jacir Yeah. She’s writing under a male name. She’s having some fun with it, takes Amir’s suit. Who’s wearing the pants? [Laughs] The four British characters in the film are all based on actual historical characters. Wingate [a British officer and Christian Zionist played by Robert Aramayo] was a real guy, a really violent, unhinged man. They just released some papers with some new stuff about him; he was really much more crazy than my film shows. For me, his long hair was my poetic license but not historically accurate. He was always dirty, his uniform was always dirty, he never showered. He was known for being that way. Later, he had long hair, after he gets dismissed from the British Army, he was dismissed from Palestine actually. For me I wanted to indicate he was outside of the system, doing his own thing in the countryside. His unkempt hair was a way to signal that — but you can’t smell him onscreen. Thomas, the secretary [to the high commissioner], is based on a real guy who actually quit and became a Marxist. It’s an amazing story. He went there thinking there were good intentions, that they were doing something for the native population and it was helpful, then slowly, in his diaries, he realizes it is a failed project with an agenda, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. He ends up quitting and becoming a Marxist and anti-colonial activist for the rest of his life. In my film he’s Hopkins [played by Billy Howle], but his real name was Hodgkin. Ed Rampell Oscar winner Jeremy Irons portrays Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, Britain’s high commissioner for the Palestine Mandate. How did you manage to cast such a high-profile movie star? Annemarie Jacir Because he has an Irish wife, and we were on the Berlin film festival’s jury together. Irons was president of the jury. So we spent a lot of time together and became friends. I was writing this project at the time and telling him about it one day over breakfast and [his wife] was like, “This is amazing! Jeremy, you’ve got to be in this!” He was like, “Is there a role for me?” I was like, “ _Yeah_ there’s a role for you!” And he said, “Let me read the script. And if it’s helpful, I’d like to be part of it.” It was a beautiful role. Ed Rampell Liam Cunningham, costar of Ken Loach’s 2007 drama about the Irish War of Independence, _The Wind that Shakes the Barley_ , and of HBO’s _Game of Thrones_ , plays [Charles] Tegart, the real-life counterinsurgency expert who explains to the high commissioner and other British officials in your film the necessity of extremely brutal counterterrorist tactics to suppress the Arab Revolt. Is this scene a direct reference to the scenes of the pacification specialist in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, _The Battle of Algiers_ _?_ Annemarie Jacir People have brought up _The Battle of Algiers_ a lot with this film. But you’re the first person [to connect it to] that scene. Yes, you’re the first person to put your finger on it.**** "This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is, and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst conditions. We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world." Charles Tegart was Irish. They reference Ireland in the dialogue. That’s why Liam got such a kick out of playing that scene. This expert, he was in India, then they brought him to Palestine. He made a whole career out of this. He was the first one to come up with the concept of a wall, not the Israelis — they did it later. Everything the British did, the Israelis just copied the blueprint of it. And there are military forts all across the country, in order to create this system of control, called “Tegart’s forts.” They still exist. Ed Rampell Is that similar to the Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam? Annemarie Jacir Yeah. Absolutely. Ed Rampell Are the period clips actual archival footage? Annemarie Jacir Yeah. Every time you see the [original screen ratio], that’s real archival footage — it’s not manipulated. We restored it and I colorized it; I didn’t want black and white. Ed Rampell Your film seems to suggest that two peoples were victimized by the Holocaust. Obviously, the Jewish people; but also, the Palestinians were impacted by the immigration of more and more Jews fleeing Nazism. Many came to Palestine. Especially as other countries around the world, including the US largely — Annemarie Jacir Shut their doors. Absolutely. Ed Rampell But of course, it wasn’t the Palestinians who perpetrated the Holocaust. Annemarie Jacir The European Aryans did it. They did the most vile thing: the Holocaust. Then didn’t want to take responsibility for it. And instead of dealing with their own racism, they threw it on Palestinians, who have no history of antisemitism. We are Semites also [laughs]. That was the [Westerners’] way of dealing with it: that we would deal with it. They shut their doors, the US shut their doors, and thought, “OK, the way we deal with our racism is to put these people somewhere else.” Which is just ridiculous. The Zionist project considered many other places besides Palestine: Argentina, Uganda, Palestine. There were many proposals. I think it would have been the same thing in Uganda, if the Zionist project was about dispossessing the native population. Palestine ended up being what was chosen. Palestine has never been closed to Jews. Jewish pilgrims have been coming to Palestine — I said there’s an indigenous population. There are also Jews who have been coming to Palestine for hundreds of years, as well as Muslims and Christians. Bosnians fled persecution and came to Palestine. Circassians fled persecution and came to Palestine — I’m talking about in the 1800s. Armenians fled persecution and came to Palestine and lived among the Palestinians and became part of the fabric of life. And if Jews had done that — escaped, had nowhere to go, needed to be protected, and they came like so many communities — we would be in a very different place today. The Zionist project wasn’t about that. It was about control and dispossession. Ed Rampell Which the British facilitated for their own imperial interests? Annemarie Jacir Of course. They played both sides. Ed Rampell Earlier, you mentioned the Peel Commission. One of the most dramatic, pivotal scenes of your entire film is a dinner party where the Peel Commission’s results are announced over the radio at the Jerusalem home of the intellectuals Amir and Khuloud. _Palestine 36_ clearly shows that the British, under the mandate as the colonizers, gave preferential treatment to the Zionists to pursue London’s own colonial interests. In retrospect, considering the massive suffering of Palestinians with the events in the 1930s depicted in your film, continuing with the Nakba, and most recently with the Gaza genocide and the ongoing persecution in the West Bank, do you think that even though it was a bad deal, that in retrospect the Palestinians would have been better off if they had accepted the partition offered? As the British radio announcer says when they’re broadcasting the Peel Commission’s results: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.” Annemarie Jacir I think it would have led to exactly the same thing. I don’t know why anybody would agree that a colonial or outside power would decide. The British and French partitioned the whole Arab world and all of Africa. They had no right to do so. So why anybody would accept that — it’s never going to happen. Now, you’re asking would we be in a better place today had they accepted that? The Peel Commission and that announcement that’s on the radio is word for word the conclusion of the Peel Commission, it’s not my creative writing. The Peel Commission was not giving Palestinians independence. It wasn’t just partition, it was also that the Palestinians would not be ruled by Palestinians — Ed Rampell And they’d be forcibly removed. Annemarie Jacir Yes, but they’d be ruled by Transjordan. Even if they split the Palestinian part, it wouldn’t be run by Palestinians — it would be run by the Transjordanian government, a pro-British creation. It wasn’t even independence in that way. It’s very important. Arabs aren’t this big blob, twenty-two countries are not all the same. It’s not monolithic. Ed Rampell Where did you shoot _Palestine 36_? Annemarie Jacir We shot in Jordan, Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Bethlehem. This film was made under such difficult conditions. We had to stop shooting four times. It was terrible. And we continued. What was supposed to be three months ended up being almost two years struggling to make this film, because we made it during the genocide. This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst of conditions. We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world. We hope they can meet us; we make films to connect. It’s all about connecting. That connection cannot be severed. We’ve got to fight for it. Ed Rampell More films are being released now in the West by Palestinian and Arab filmmakers, such as _The Voice of Hind Rajab_. Why do you think that’s happening now? Annemarie Jacir [Laughs] I don’t think it’s happening now. It’s been happening for a long time. There’s a new wave of Palestinian directors, there have been lots of films over the years. I think there are less now. However, it’s because of Watermelon [Pictures] distributing the films — that has always been the obstacle in America, it has always been difficult for our films to be seen in the US, to be shown. We have been left out of the distribution in the US. We’re blocked from reaching our audience and we’re prevented from being in cinemas. There are the gatekeepers — now, because of Watermelon, there is distribution of those films that others have been afraid to touch. Or if they did touch — I have had distribution with my other films but getting them into cinemas is a battle. You have to have a distributor ready to take on that battle. Watermelon is committed to doing that. Ed Rampell At the Academy Awards this year, presenter Javier Bardem said: “No to war. Free Palestine!” What did you think of that? Annemarie Jacir I loved that and I thought it was so much needed. I was wondering why, in general, the Oscars were so quiet and nobody was saying anything. And not even just about Palestine. The state of the world is beyond awful. It’s the darkest times everywhere. Thank God for Javier, that he said something. And I wonder why more people didn’t say anything. * * *

Palestine 36 Reclaims a Buried Anti‑Colonial Revolt

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Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Opponent Is a Phony Populist Mallory McMorrow, who is running against Medicare for All champion Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate, recently went viral presenting herself as a populist crusader against surveillance pricing. Her record as a Michigan state legislator tells a different story.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Opponent Is a Phony Populist

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Canada Is Redefining Who Can Seek Asylum Forty-one years after the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the right of every refugee in the country to fundamental justice, Canada’s federal government is denying certain classes of refugees the right to an oral hearing.

Canada Is Redefining Who Can Seek Asylum

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War the New Normal In Iran and Lebanon, the US and Israeli militaries are bombing dense residential blocks, destroying civilian infrastructure, slaughtering children, and assassinating health workers. If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is the Gaza playbook, transplanted.

The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War the New Normal

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The Trump Library Is Going Full-On Supervillain Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests. Donald Trump's response? Release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room with paid parking — and call it a “presidential library.”

The Trump Library Is Going Full-On Supervillain

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Why Yemen&#8217;s Houthis Opened a New Front in the Iran War ### Pushed by Tehran and domestic pressure, Yemen’s Houthis attacked Israel and joined the regional conflict. But they remain wary of reigniting their costly war with Saudi Arabia. * * * The Houthis have entered the Iran War, launching two ballistic missile attacks on Israel. (Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images) In his inaugural speech on March 12, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, announced that “new fronts” would be opened in Tehran’s war against the United States and Israel. Khamenei singled out Yemen’s “brave and faithful” Houthi movement, which forms part of a now-reduced resistance coalition of Iraqi and Lebanese militia fighting to “shorten the path to eliminating the Zionist sedition.” On March 26, the Houthis entered the war, launching two ballistic missile attacks over 2,000 kilometers into Israel. The date was selected to fall on the eleventh anniversary of the start of Saudi Arabia’s unsuccessful seven-year-long bombing campaign, launched in 2015 to roll back the Houthi takeover of the capital city Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, territory on which two-thirds of the population live. In a speech on “the National Day of Steadfastness,” the movement’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, made a distinction between the Houthi intervention and the Arab nations in “servitude to the tyranny” of “Zionist Jews and their Western Zionist supporters.” “Most regrettably,” al-Houthi said, “some regimes in this region have become entangled in serving them. They have opened their lands and deployed their wealth, media, and political positions in support of the aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The following day, the Houthi armed forces outlined their rationale and red lines. Yahya Saree, their spokesman, foregrounded that their fight was against the “Zionist scheme” and to enforce the Gaza ceasefire, rather than based on its alliance with Iran. Crucially, he said that the Houthis would not attack Muslim countries unless they joined a coalition with the United States and Israel. The Houthis emerged in the 1990s from Yemen’s Shia Zaydi population, a large religious minority whose heartland is the northern city of Saada. It was formed to combat corruption that they said had impoverished their territories and attacked the central government led by military ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh and his patron, Saudi Arabia. Saleh famously ruled by “dancing on the heads of snakes,” funneling oil revenues and Saudi cash through loyal tribal networks to prevent state fragmentation. The Houthis existed in a state of managed low-level warfare until in 2014, when following the Arab Spring’s failure, they marched into Sanaa. This triggered a war with Saudi Arabia and its junior coalition partner, the United Arab Emirates, which all but tore the social fabric of Yemen apart. Saudi Arabia instituted a highly destructive blockade of the country and backed a paper government, which lived much of its life in exile inside the kingdom. The Houthis killed Saleh in 2017 and the state fragmented. Yemen suffered a catastrophic humanitarian disaster due to a lack of food and medicine and Saudi bombing campaigns, sustained by the United States and the UK, killed tens of thousands, including civilians. Tehran helped the Houthis to develop a ballistic missile program — a cruder version of their own — which it used to target Saudi oil infrastructure, helping to establish the deterrence necessary to bring an end to the war. Following the 2022 ceasefire, the Houthis entrenched their power, which extends from the northwest down through the port of Hudaydah and into parts of the Taiz governorate. The powerful Islamist militia survives through a war economy characterized in part by oil racketeering, tolls, and khat cultivation. The Houthis bombed the ports that its enemy, the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government, used to export oil worth approximately $1-2 billion per year. Yemen now exports almost no oil, a significant problem for a country that statisticians regularly place in the bottom ten of the world’s poorest nations. After the October 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Houthis launched attacks on Israel and on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, resulting in Israeli and US attacks, under both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s administrations. These attacks culminated in a massive US air and naval assault in the spring of 2025 against Houthi-controlled infrastructure, including Ras Isa Port, missile launch sites, and also a prison in Saada, which allegedly killed and injured hundreds. Trump declared victory and a ceasefire was established with the Houthis, who continued to attack Israel and commercial shipping for several months. Iran’s relationship with the Houthis is characterized by broad strategic alignment combined with frequent disagreement on tactics and which interests to prioritize. Yemen’s Zaydis are Fiver Shias, who disagree with Twelver Iranian Shias on the succession of the fifth imam. Iranian Shias recognize Zayd’s older half-brother al-Baqir as the legitimate successor of the Prophet Mohammed. The Houthis are as concerned with shoring up their domestic position as they are with fighting the United States and Israel, who pose an immediate existential threat to Iran. Over the monthlong US-Israeli assault against Iran, the Houthis have been under extraordinary pressure to enter the war. Iran supported the Houthis in their long war against Saudi Arabia (from 2015 to 2022) and continues to exert significant institutional pressure on the group. “But the pressure is not just from Iran,” says Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House. “It also comes from their own constituencies and even their enemies who accuse them of being unserious and unable to play a regional role.” The Palestinian cause is fundamental to the Houthi self-identity and ideological reproduction. “[The Houthis] decided this was the time when they ought to get involved,” Helen Lackner, a scholar of Yemeni tribal politics, told _Jacobin_. “It’s very difficult for them not to get involved . . . because of their propaganda and of course because of the Israeli involvement. If it was just the Americans, then they could maybe sit on the sidelines. Being anti-Israel is really a very fundamental position.” The Houthis’ decision to open a new front is a calculated balancing act. On the one hand, they can’t avoid entering a war that they are both ideologically invested in and is going poorly for their enemies. “They also know for sure that they are next after Iran and Israel will go after them very brutally,” explains al-Muslimi. “So, they tried to, as you say in Arabic, have them for lunch before they have you for dinner.” On the other hand, the Houthis are attempting to exercise caution so as to not derail the “roadmap” process with Saudi Arabia, which would establish a modus vivendi with its giant northern neighbor. Under the roadmap, Riyadh could finance public spending in Houthi territory, particularly state salaries, and rebuild civilian infrastructure, much of which the Royal Saudi Air Force destroyed in the war. Since 2022, Yemen’s civil war has been all but frozen. The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE within Yemen was decided in January in favor of Riyadh, when it ousted the overstretched UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council in the south. Saudi Arabia now enjoys a near monopoly of influence over the new official government of Yemen (ministers were even sworn in this year in Riyadh) as well as the militias that support it, such as the Southern Giants Brigades. Riyadh seeks to develop the Yemeni state around favored Sunni partners but is also in long-standing talks with the Houthis to neutralize them as a threat. “The Houthis would be very happy if the war finished tomorrow,” explains Luca Nevola, a senior analyst for Yemen and the Gulf at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, who spent several years living in Houthi territory. “This is especially true as the negotiations with Saudi Arabia are a lifeline for their movement.” Nevola says that Israel was very effective in weakening the Houthis in 2025 with decapitation strikes after the Houthis had attacked Israel for its genocide in Gaza. The Houthis now face a security dilemma: join the war and risk losing their potential Saudi patrons or stay out and lose credibility at home and in Tehran. By targeting only Israel, the Houthis are trying to avoid both horns of the dilemma. “There is a lot of illusion in their idea of balancing. I think this will spill over,” says al-Muslimi. “They are thinking, ‘We can make a calculated move, thirty days into the war, get in and get out with low cost.’ They think they can show up to the party last but enjoy happy hour and then go home not hungover.” A war as unpredictable and open-ended as the one now being waged by Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu creates a hazard of mission creep for all belligerents. Other than the United States, all actors in this war see it as existential. If Israel escalates, as it almost certainly will, the Houthis are at risk of being sucked into an all–nothing logic of a war for survival. * * *

Why Yemen’s Houthis Opened a New Front in the Iran War

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Israel Is Stepping Up Its Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank Even as Israel attacks Iran and Lebanon, it is also intensifying ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The military and settler militias are using a crisis Israel created as cover for its illegal takeover of the West Bank.

Israel Is Stepping Up Its Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

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_This story originally appeared inPrism on March 23, 2026._ _Real journalists wrote and edited this (not AI)—independent, community-driven journalism survives because you back it._ Donate _to sustain Prism’s mission and the humans behind it._ Like many others, I’ve spent the last few days looking at the many iconic photos of Dolores Huerta, the renowned feminist, labor organizer, and powerhouse co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Union. In one of my favorites taken in Salinas, California, Huerta gently holds a microphone up to her mouth with a slight smile on her face, her other hand in the air commanding the attention of the room. The photo was taken during a UFW rally in 1970, just a few years after Huerta said she was raped by Chicano civil rights leader and union co-founder, César Chávez. For Latinos nationwide grappling with Huerta’s recent revelation, Chávez’s legacy is forever fragmented: the time before and the time after we learned he was a rapist. As part of an investigation by _The New York Times_ published March 18, Huerta for the first time publicly disclosed the sexual and emotional abuse she experienced at the hands of her comrade while they were the public faces of the Latino-led farmworker organizing movement. Together, they helped obtain union contracts, higher wages, and more dignified working conditions for farmworkers, in part by organizing a grape boycott. It was also in a secluded grape field where Chávez raped Huerta—a tactic commonly deployed by other rapists against their unsuspecting compañeras in agriculture who toil alongside them. While Chávez died in 1993 at the age of 66, Huerta, now 95, said she felt forced to keep the abuse a secret for fear no one would believe her, and because the revelation had the potential to delegitimize the movement. Her decision is surely not unfamiliar to women abused by men in social justice movements. Alongside Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas also detailed their experiences with Chávez. Now in their 60s, both women were the children of UFW staff members, and Chávez was a figure they revered for his power, influence, and commitment to justice. He wielded these attributes to groom Murguia and Rojas and sexually abuse them for years—a dynamic not unfamiliar to many survivors. It is a stunning revelation that the most prominent Mexican American leader in U.S. history, a man who helped transform labor rights for those working in conditions akin to slavery, was also a pedophile and rapist. Or is it? “Cesar Chavez is just a man,” said Esmeralda Lopez in the _Times_ investigation. Lopez, also the daughter of a UFW staff member, was a teenager in 1988 when she became the target of 61-year-old Chávez. Though she successfully rebuffed his advances, the experience stuck with her. “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” she said. “The movement—that’s the hero.” But a hero he was. A 1983 _Los Angeles Times_ poll revealed that Chávez was the Latino that Latinos in California admired most. Intentional or not, Chávez’s outsized presence and position as movement figurehead eclipsed the sacrifices, contributions, and efforts of countless farmworkers, activists, and organizers— _especially_ women. Even decades after his death, our communities have actively maintained Chávez’s hero status, even as his legacy was already frayed at the edges. When I was a child, my father made sure I knew César Chávez’s name. I had never heard of Dolores Huerta. The same was true in my California public school. I was 8 years old when Chávez died. He is the only Mexican American I can ever recall being introduced to as part of my K-12 education. Still, learning about his achievements as a young person led to a powerful realization: Everyday people can rise up against injustice. Chávez was “ _our_ people,” my dad would say, and this instilled in me a sense of pride I didn’t previously carry. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how directly Chávez’s work impacted my family. When my dad came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant, it was activists with El Movimiento, or the Chicano Rights Movement, who helped him enroll in community college classes and learn English. Thanks to the organizing work of UFW, a farmworker family member who first came to the U.S. as part of the brutal Bracero Program later experienced vastly different working conditions as a citizen in California’s Central Valley, where two generations in our family once worked the grapevines. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up As a movement journalist covering injustices in agriculture, I have thought of Chávez often, mostly of his initial disdain for undocumented workers, his eventual evolution on the subject, and the countless ways that conditions in American fields have worsened since his death. My investigation of gender-based violence in agriculture, published last September, now feels more prescient than ever. > **_The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence._** Revelations of Chávez’s abuse feel earth-shattering, largely because of who we believed him to be. The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence. Even so, I was completely distraught over the revelations of Chávez’s abuse, even as I’ve reported multiple investigations revealing the dangers and inevitable harms that occur when movements place people on pedestals. All day I fielded messages from other grief-stricken Latinas, including survivors, farmworkers, and organizers. I sobbed reading the accounts from Huerta, Murguia, and Rojas. Because their abuse was ignored. Because they deserved better. Because I understand how culturally—and within _our_ culture—women are sacrificed to protect the men who abuse them. I will never get over how easily we set our women ablaze—especially as someone who’s been licked by the flames. I dreaded speaking to my dad the day the Chávez news broke. While we are incredibly close, largely because he is now a very different man from the one who raised me, he was my introduction to gender-based violence. The conditions he cultivated in my childhood home led me to internalize a very particular message about girlhood: the safety of the marginalized men who abuse us is predicated on our silence. It is because of my father and other abusive men in my family that I can relate to the way Huerta holds Chávez’s duality. After the revelations were made public, Huerta spoke to journalist John Quiñones, acknowledging that Chávez had “an evil side,” but that she still hoped “his legacy would live on in the things that were accomplished.” As I suspected, my dad had nothing to say about the allegations against Chávez—that he molested and raped children; that he raped Huerta; that he used his position of power to harm young girls and women. Instead, my dad questioned Huerta’s reason for going public, adamant she aimed to destroy Chávez’s legacy. Nevermind that she has been the torchbearer of that legacy for 60 years, and like Murguias and Rojas, she has been forced to live in the inescapable shadow of her rapist. I abruptly ended our call. As the media frenzy now ramps up, with legacy outlets competing for more gory details and reporters vying to be among the first to re-traumatize Huerta, a bomb has gone off in Latino communities and movement spaces. In some ways, Chávez was all that Mexican American communities had. We are otherwise not allowed to make history. In broader American culture, we are ahistorical, always foreign or newly arrived. This country could not survive without Latino farmworkers, and Chávez was our small slice of America—proof that there was once a time when people outside of our communities recognized and valued our contributions to this country. Now, during an era of racial animus toward Latinos and catastrophic conditions for farmworkers and other low-wage workers, how do you erase César Chávez, who is the namesake of streets and parks nationwide? What do parents and educators say to the young Latinas who attend the 86 public schools named after a man now known for using his position as a Chicano civil rights leader to sexually abuse girls like them? > Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee. Murguia said she decided to publicly share her story for the first time because she learned that a street near her home in Bakersfield, California, was in the process of being renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard. While there is a growing chorus to purge Chávez from California’s public memory, his victims never had the power or the luxury—even as Chávez’s abuse of young girls and women appeared to be an open secret. UFW’s own archive, the _Times_ reported, contained items such as audio recordings of Chávez repeatedly calling Huerta “a stupid bitch” during board meetings and an unsettling letter a 13-year-old Rojas wrote to Chávez in 1974. Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee. While these demands are important, how far do they go in a country that only seems to appreciate powerful men who abuse their power? I don’t disagree with removing Chávez’s name from public places, but as a survivor, these efforts feel hollow while living under the regime of a twice-elected rapist. But none of us can really say what justice looks like for Chávez’s surviving victims; that is for them to decide. What I do know is that next time I see Chávez’s face on a children’s book when I’m browsing a bookstore, or I catch sight of him painted on a mural two stories high, I will not pause to consider his leadership or recount his many achievements for our people. Instead, I will think only of Huerta, Murguias, and Rojas, hoping that by sharing their stories, they finally felt free to step into the light. _Editorial Team:_ _Lara Witt, Lead Editor_ _Lara Witt, Top Editor_ _Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor_ ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. 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Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # César Chávez’s shadow by Tina Vasquez, The Real News Network March 31, 2026 <h1>César Chávez’s shadow</h1> <p class="byline">by Tina Vasquez, The Real News Network <br />March 31, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:20% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/PRISMlogo-sized.png" alt="" class="wp-image-293467 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://prismreports.org/2026/03/23/cesar-chavez-abuse-latino-movements/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Prism</a> on March 23, 2026.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p><em>Real journalists wrote and edited this (not AI)—independent, community-driven journalism survives because you back it.</em> <a href="https://prismreports.org/ways-to-give/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donate</a><em> to sustain Prism’s mission and the humans behind it.</em></p> <p class="has-drop-cap">Like <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-19/dolores-huerta-photos-cesar-chavez-scandal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">many others</a>, I’ve spent the last few days looking at the many iconic photos of <a href="https://prismreports.org/2021/04/09/labor-activist-dolores-huerta-reflects-on-her-decades-long-fight-for-workers-rights/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dolores Huerta</a>, the renowned feminist, labor organizer, and powerhouse co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Union. In one of my <a href="https://www.nps.gov/places/000/dolores-huertas-house.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">favorites</a> taken in Salinas, California, Huerta gently holds a microphone up to her mouth with a slight smile on her face, her other hand in the air commanding the attention of the room. </p> <p>The photo was taken during a UFW rally in 1970, just a few years after Huerta said she was raped by Chicano civil rights leader and union co-founder, César Chávez. For Latinos nationwide grappling with Huerta’s recent revelation, Chávez’s legacy is forever fragmented: the time before and the time after we learned he was a rapist. </p> <p>As part of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/cesar-chavez-sexual-abuse-allegations-ufw.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">an investigation</a> by <em>The New York Times</em> published March 18, Huerta for the first time publicly disclosed the sexual and emotional abuse she experienced at the hands of her comrade while they were the public faces of the Latino-led farmworker organizing movement. Together, they helped obtain union contracts, higher wages, and more dignified working conditions for farmworkers, in part by organizing a grape boycott. It was also in a secluded grape field where Chávez raped Huerta—a tactic <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/rape-in-the-fields/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">commonly deployed</a> by other rapists against their unsuspecting compañeras in agriculture who toil alongside them.  </p> <p>While Chávez died in 1993 at the age of 66, Huerta, now 95, said she felt forced to keep the abuse a secret for fear no one would believe her, and because the revelation had the potential to delegitimize the movement. Her decision is surely not unfamiliar to women abused by men in social justice movements. </p> <p>Alongside Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas also detailed their experiences with Chávez. Now in their 60s, both women were the children of UFW staff members, and Chávez was a figure they revered for his power, influence, and commitment to justice. He wielded these attributes to groom Murguia and Rojas and sexually abuse them for years—a dynamic not unfamiliar to many survivors. </p> <p>It is a stunning revelation that the most prominent Mexican American leader in U.S. history, a man who helped transform labor rights for those working in conditions akin to slavery, was also a pedophile and rapist. </p> <p>Or is it? </p> <p>“Cesar Chavez is just a man,” said Esmeralda Lopez in the <em>Times</em> investigation. Lopez, also the daughter of a UFW staff member, was a teenager in 1988 when she became the target of 61-year-old Chávez. Though she successfully rebuffed his advances, the experience stuck with her. “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” she said. “The movement—that’s the hero.”  </p> <p>But a hero he was. A 1983 <em>Los Angeles Times</em> <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-26/latino-heroes-the-few-and-far-between" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poll</a> revealed that Chávez was the Latino that Latinos in California admired most. Intentional or not, Chávez’s outsized presence and position as movement figurehead eclipsed the sacrifices, contributions, and efforts of countless farmworkers, activists, and organizers—<em>especially</em> women. Even decades after his death, our communities have actively maintained Chávez’s hero status, even as <a href="https://www.kut.org/texasstandard/2022-10-17/cesar-chavez-complicated-legacy-united-farm-workers-immigration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">his legacy</a> was already <a href="https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/chavez-ufw-and-wetback-problem/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">frayed at the edges</a>. </p> <p>When I was a child, my father made sure I knew César Chávez’s name. I had never heard of Dolores Huerta. The same was true in my California public school. I was 8 years old when Chávez died. He is the only Mexican American I can ever recall being introduced to as part of my K-12 education. Still, learning about his achievements as a young person led to a powerful realization: Everyday people can rise up against injustice. Chávez was “<em>our</em> people,” my dad would say, and this instilled in me a sense of pride I didn’t previously carry.</p> <p>It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how directly Chávez’s work impacted my family. When my dad came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant, it was activists with El Movimiento, or the Chicano Rights Movement, who helped him enroll in community college classes and learn English. Thanks to the organizing work of UFW, a farmworker family member who first came to the U.S. as part of <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-10/bracero-program-donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the brutal Bracero Program</a> later experienced vastly different working conditions as a citizen in California’s Central Valley, where <a href="https://thecounter.org/farm-worker-weighs-in-short-stories-gordo-agricultural-community-california/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">two generations in our family</a> once worked the grapevines.  </p> <p>As a movement journalist covering injustices in agriculture, I have thought of Chávez often, mostly of his <a href="https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/chavez-ufw-and-wetback-problem/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">initial disdain</a> for undocumented workers, his <a href="https://www.latinorebels.com/2021/04/01/cesarchavez1974letter/?utm_campaign=what-the-cesar-chavez-revelations-mean-for-our-community&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=thelatinonewsletter.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">eventual evolution</a> on the subject, and the countless ways that conditions in American fields <a href="https://smry.ai/www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/opinion/cesar-chavez-farmworkers.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">have worsened</a> since his death. My <a href="https://prismreports.org/2025/09/24/women-h2a-visa-farm-workers-migrant/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">investigation</a> of gender-based violence in agriculture, published last September, now feels more prescient than ever. </p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p><strong><em>The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence. </em></strong></p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>Revelations of Chávez’s abuse feel earth-shattering, largely because of who we believed him to be. The truth is that any of our families and movements are shadowed by César Chávezes, and ours is a country and a culture haunted by the specter of sexual violence. </p> <p>Even so, I was completely distraught over the revelations of Chávez’s abuse, even as I’ve <a href="https://prismreports.org/2020/09/17/immigrants-allege-mistreatment-by-georgia-doctor-and-whistleblower/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> <a href="https://prismreports.org/2020/07/13/exclusive-lauded-immigration-attorney-accused-of-advocating-for-family-separation-2-0/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">multiple</a> <a href="https://www.theassemblync.com/news/environment/agriculture/farmworkers-union-floc-leadership/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">investigations</a> revealing the dangers and inevitable harms that occur when movements place people on pedestals. All day I fielded messages from other grief-stricken Latinas, including survivors, farmworkers, and organizers. I sobbed reading the accounts from Huerta, Murguia, and Rojas. Because their abuse was ignored. Because they deserved better. Because I understand how culturally—and within <em>our</em> culture—women are sacrificed to protect the men who abuse them. I will never get over how easily we set our women ablaze—especially as someone who’s been licked by the flames. </p> <p>I dreaded speaking to my dad the day the Chávez news broke. While we are incredibly close, largely because he is now a very different man from the one who raised me, he was my introduction to gender-based violence. The conditions he cultivated in my childhood home led me to internalize a very particular message about girlhood: the safety of the marginalized men who abuse us is predicated on our silence. It is because of my father and other abusive men in my family that I can relate to the way Huerta holds Chávez’s duality. After the revelations were made public, Huerta <a href="https://abcnews.com/US/hard-dolores-huerta-speaks-alleged-abuse-cesar-chavez/story?id=131232139" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spoke to journalist John Quiñones</a>, acknowledging that Chávez had “an evil side,” but that she still hoped “his legacy would live on in the things that were accomplished.” </p> <p>As I suspected, my dad had nothing to say about the allegations against Chávez—that he molested and raped children; that he raped Huerta; that he used his position of power to harm young girls and women. Instead, my dad questioned Huerta’s reason for going public, adamant she aimed to destroy Chávez’s legacy. Nevermind that she has been the torchbearer of that legacy for 60 years, and like Murguias and Rojas, she has been forced to live in the inescapable shadow of her rapist. I abruptly ended our call. </p> <p>As the media frenzy now ramps up, with legacy outlets competing for more gory details and reporters vying to be among the first to re-traumatize Huerta, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-17/la-me-cesar-chavez-allegations" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a bomb has gone off</a> in Latino communities and movement spaces. In some ways, Chávez was all that Mexican American communities had. We are otherwise not allowed to make history. In broader American culture, we are ahistorical, always foreign or newly arrived. This country could not survive without Latino farmworkers, and Chávez was our small slice of America—proof that there was once a time when people outside of our communities recognized and valued our contributions to this country. </p> <p>Now, during an era of racial animus toward Latinos and catastrophic conditions for farmworkers and other low-wage workers, how do you erase César Chávez, who is the namesake of streets and parks nationwide? What do parents and educators say to the young Latinas who attend the <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/schools-named-for-cesar-chavez-face-renaming-debates-after-assault-allegations/2026/03" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">86 public schools</a> named after a man now known for using his position as a Chicano civil rights leader to sexually abuse girls like them? </p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee.</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>Murguia said she decided to publicly share her story for the first time because she learned that a street near her home in Bakersfield, California, was in the process of being renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard. While there is <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-18/calls-remove-cesar-chavez-from-buildings-parks-roads" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a growing chorus</a> to purge Chávez from California’s public memory, his victims never had the power or the luxury—even as Chávez’s abuse of young girls and women appeared to be an open secret. UFW’s own archive, the <em>Times </em>reported, contained items such as audio recordings of Chávez repeatedly calling Huerta “a stupid bitch” during board meetings and an unsettling letter a 13-year-old Rojas wrote to Chávez in 1974.</p> <p>Grappling with Chávez’s true legacy—as a civil rights leader and a rapist—requires more than scrubbing his name from every street sign and school marquee. While these demands are important, how far do they go in a country that only seems to appreciate powerful men who abuse their power? I don’t disagree with removing Chávez’s name from public places, but as a survivor, these efforts feel hollow while living under the regime of a twice-elected rapist. But none of us can really say what justice looks like for Chávez’s surviving victims; that is for them to decide. </p> <p>What I do know is that next time I see Chávez’s face on a children’s book when I’m browsing a bookstore, or I catch sight of him painted on a mural two stories high, I will not pause to consider his leadership or recount his many achievements for our people. Instead, I will think only of Huerta, Murguias, and Rojas, hoping that by sharing their stories, they finally felt free to step into the light.</p> <p><em>Editorial Team:</em><br /><em>Lara Witt, Lead Editor</em><br /><em>Lara Witt, Top Editor</em><br /><em>Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor</em></p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/cesar-chavez-sexual-abuse-dolores-huerta">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&amp;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=342381&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/cesar-chavez-sexual-abuse-dolores-huerta", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

César Chávez’s shadow

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Football’s Soul Belongs to the Working Class Despite corporate and elite attempts to wrest football from ordinary people, it remains a site of struggle for community and belonging amid capitalist alienation. The upcoming World Cup will showcase the game and its contradictions.

Football’s Soul Belongs to the Working Class

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Why the Fight for Cultural Recognition Is Not Enough ### Capitalism is only too happy to accommodate and absorb cultural challenges that don’t alter its foundations. Without economic transformations, the gains of identity-based politics are narrow — and reversible. * * * A political order that celebrates diversity can abandon it when profits are at stake and turn conservative overnight because its alliance with capital is conditional. Only economic transformation makes equality durable and universal. (Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images) Discussions of inequality in contemporary societies often revolve around a familiar distinction between injustices rooted in status and those rooted in class. On one side stand struggles for recognition, aimed at securing respect and social standing for particular groups. On the other stand struggles over material distribution, aimed at transforming the economic structures that produce class divisions in the first place. The contrast is often framed as a strategic one. Recognition politics is seen as more flexible, more achievable, and less threatening to the system. Class politics, by contrast, appears rigid, confrontational, and rarely victorious. This perception is widespread. In the Swedish trade union report _Right-Wing Populism and Equality — An Essay_ , Anders Nilsson and Örjan Nyström describe contemporary inequality in terms of vertical and horizontal dimensions. Vertical inequality concerns class and economic distribution. Horizontal inequality concerns status, identity, and recognition. According to their account, vertical inequality has deepened in recent decades, while important gains, despite backlash, have been made along the horizontal axis. Women have entered elite professions, LGBTQ rights have expanded, and anti-racist norms have gained ground. These advances, however partial, have unfolded alongside rising economic polarization. The result, they argue, is a volatile political landscape. Progressive neoliberalism has opened the doors of power to selected individuals from historically excluded groups, allowing them to “break the glass ceiling,” while leaving the underlying economic order intact. For those whose material conditions continue to deteriorate, this produces resentment. Feminism, anti-racism, and LGBTQ politics come to be seen not as emancipatory movements but as vehicles for the upward mobility of a few. The perception takes hold that women, queer people, and racialized minorities are climbing the social ladder together, while others are left behind. This picture is both accurate and deeply misleading. It is true that status politics has been more readily absorbed into mainstream institutions than class politics. But it is false that its victories have been widely shared. Only a narrow layer has benefited from the forms of recognition compatible with neoliberal capitalism. For the majority, economic constraints continue to limit the possibility of living a free and dignified life, regardless of whether the injustice they face is cultural or material in origin. In other words, status politics today is widely (though less and less) accepted at the level of discourse but unevenly distributed in reality. Its gains are fragile, reversible, and constantly subordinated to economic imperatives. The same political order that celebrates diversity can just as easily abandon it when profitability is at stake. Progressive neoliberalism can turn conservative overnight, because the alliance between recognition and capital is always conditional. These tensions were already visible in the famous exchange between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler in _Social Text_ in the late 1990s. That debate remains one of the clearest attempts to think through the relation between class and status in contemporary politics. But Fraser’s own position has shifted in important ways since then. The shift does not mean abandoning the distinction between class and status. On the contrary, that distinction remains central to her work. What has changed is her assessment of how far status politics can go within capitalism. Where she once suggested that struggles for recognition could make significant gains without directly confronting property relations, she now insists that their limits are far tighter than they appear. If status politics is to become a project for the many rather than the few, it cannot avoid the question of economic power. # Class, Status, and the Redistribution-Recognition Debate In her debate with Butler, Fraser defended the importance of analytically separating class injustice from status injustice. Class inequality, she argued, is built into the structure of capitalism itself. Status hierarchies are not. They may be widespread, and they may have severe material consequences, but capitalism does not depend on any particular cultural hierarchy in order to function. Because of this, movements oriented toward recognition can often win reforms without challenging the system as a whole. Butler rejected this claim. Capitalism, she argued, is not neutral with respect to social norms. The heterosexual nuclear family, Butler argued, plays a crucial role in reproducing labor power, and sexual minorities often suffer not only cultural stigma but economic disadvantage as well. What appears to be “merely cultural” is in fact deeply material. Fraser responded by insisting on a distinction between the material and the economic. Cultural injustice can produce real, tangible suffering without being structurally necessary to capitalism. To treat every form of oppression as economically grounded, she argued, risks reducing political analysis to a single dimension. Yet the debate was never only about theory. It was also about strategy. Fraser’s broader project was to address what she called the redistribution-recognition dilemma within progressive politics. Many oppressed groups, she argued, are “bivalent.” They suffer both economic exploitation and cultural devaluation. To overcome their situation, they must demand both recognition as a group and the transformation of the social structures that make such groups unequal. To clarify the strategic options, Fraser introduced the distinction between affirmative and transformative politics. Affirmative strategies seek to correct injustices without altering the basic framework of society. Redistribution within capitalism and diversity policies within existing institutions fall into this category. Transformative strategies, by contrast, aim at structural change. Economically, this points toward socialism. Culturally, it involves confronting entrenched status hierarchies rather than simply affirming them. This framework allowed Fraser to argue that cultural and economic struggles need not be opposed. Both could be either reformist or transformative. But it also made clear that the deepest forms of justice require confronting the underlying order itself. Already in this early work, Fraser distinguished between struggles over distribution and struggles over property relations. In her later writing, however, this distinction becomes more decisive. The focus shifts away from the internal strategy of movements and toward the structural limits imposed by capitalism itself. # Why Recognition Alone Is Not Enough This shift is especially clear in _Feminism for the 99%_ , written with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya. The manifesto calls for a feminism rooted not in elite advancement but in the lives of the majority: poor and working-class women, migrant women, racialized women, LGBTQ people, and others — those encouraged to think of themselves as middle class while living under conditions of exploitation. At first glance, this language resembles the familiar vocabulary of intersectionality. But its logic is different. The point is not simply to list multiple forms of oppression, but to show how they are sustained within a common economic order. Rights that exist only on paper mean little without the material conditions required to exercise them. The legal right to abortion is meaningless for those who cannot afford the procedure. Formal equality before the law does not protect those who lack housing, health care, or economic security. As Anatole France famously observed, the law in its majestic equality forbids both rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges. The same holds for the rights celebrated by contemporary liberalism. Without economic transformation, they remain unevenly distributed and easily revoked. In this sense, the apparent success of status politics under neoliberalism is largely superficial. Cultural hierarchies can be challenged without threatening the system, but the benefits of those victories remain confined to a minority. Oppression that does not originate in the economy is still shaped by it. As long as capitalist property relations remain intact, both economic and cultural justice are limited. For this reason, the authors of _Feminism for the 99%_ insist that redistribution within capitalism is not enough. Periods of relative equality have always depended on exceptional historical conditions, and they have always rested on exploitation elsewhere — of global labor, of social reproduction, of nature itself. A durable expansion of freedom requires breaking with that exploitative logic. # From Identity to Property Relations This later emphasis also changes the role of Fraser’s earlier distinction between affirmation and transformation. That framework emerged in a theoretical moment shaped by post-structuralism, when identity itself was often treated as suspect and its destabilization as inherently radical — a tendency that has, if anything, intensified. Fraser never fully accepted this view, but her formulations sometimes reflected the debates of the time, foregrounding the question of identity in debates over political strategy. In her later work, the focus shifts. The decisive issue is no longer whether movements affirm or dissolve identities but whether people have the material power to make use of the rights they win. Recognition politics without economic change risks becoming a politics for a minority, leaving the majority behind. This does not mean that status-based movements must abandon their identities. It means that their victories remain limited unless they are linked to a broader struggle over the structure of the economy. As the sociologist Hampus Andersson puts it in his reading of Fraser, struggles for recognition need “support from a wider project — the struggle for equality and socialism” if they are to benefit the whole of the groups they claim to represent. Such a perspective also makes possible a different kind of solidarity. Most people share a common position in not belonging to the ruling class, and that shared condition provides a real basis for collective politics. This is not a matter of constructing purely discursive alliances but of recognizing material interests that genuinely converge. None of this reduces every injustice to class. Status hierarchies have their own logic and their own history. But without transforming property relations, struggles against those hierarchies risk being absorbed into capitalism’s hollow version of equality — an equality that leaves the structure of domination untouched. * * *

Why the Fight for Cultural Recognition Is Not Enough

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When German Socialists Mobilized Against Genocide in Namibia ### German imperialism was responsible for the first genocide of the 20th century in its Namibian colony. The country’s socialist movement spoke out vehemently against the atrocities, offering solidarity across the barriers of race and geography. * * * When the people of Namibia rose up against German rule, the socialist leader August Bebel compared them to the ancestors of modern-day Germans who fought against the Roman Empire. His praise for the uprising enraged Germany’s colonial lobby. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images) It was the first genocide of the twentieth century. In January 1904, the Herero people of Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia), who had been under German rule for just twenty years and who were losing control of their lands and cattle to German settlers, rose up against the colonizers, killing about a hundred Germans. The German government responded by sending an expeditionary force under General Lothar von Trotha, a veteran of colonial wars, to reinforce the German garrison in the colony. By August, Trotha was in a position to attack the lightly armed Hereros with artillery and machine guns, defeating them and driving them into the Kalahari Desert. In October, Trotha issued what became known as his “extermination order,” which included the following words: > The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people — otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them. In the same month, the smaller Nama ethnic group joined the uprising. Trotha issued a similar extermination order directed at them. It was not until early 1907 that the German colonial troops succeeded in brutally crushing the uprising with overwhelming military force. Of some 80,000 Herero, it is estimated that 75–80 percent died: some were killed in combat, while others died of hunger and thirst after being driven into the desert. Over half of the 20,000 Nama were also killed. How did the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the fast-growing socialist party representing an ever larger proportion of Germany’s working class, react to these events? Was it captured by nationalism and pro-imperialist interests, or did it uphold principles of internationalism, anti-racism, and human rights? # Empire and Revolt The German Social Democrats had emerged from twelve years of illegality in 1890 far stronger than they were before their banning and had adopted an explicitly Marxist party program in 1891. They gained a greater share of the vote in successive elections up to 1903, when they won nearly a third of the votes cast — three million in total. "The German Social Democrats had emerged from twelve years of illegality in 1890 far stronger than they were before their banning." This made them the party with the highest number of votes in the country, although the unfair and unreformed electoral boundaries of Reichstag constituencies left them with only the second-highest number of seats in parliament. Buoyed by these successes, at the Dresden Party Congress in September 1903, the party’s leader, August Bebel, confidently predicted a triumphal march toward the achievement of a socialist society. Shortly after the outbreak of the rebellion, the German government requested funding for an expeditionary force. In the debate in the Reichstag on January 19, 1904, August Bebel blamed the German colonizers and their mode of colonial rule for the rebellion, arguing that the Herero were as justified in rising up against the German invaders as the ancient Germanic tribes had been justified in resisting the Roman Empire — an argument designed to provoke the chauvinistic German nationalists on the political right. The Social Democratic Reichstag members abstained from the vote on credits for the expedition, arguing that they did not yet have enough reliable information on the causes of the war just a week after its outbreak, and were unwilling initially to vote against assistance for German settlers. (The government was strident in its insistence that the funds were necessary to defend German civilians, including women and children — four women had been among the one hundred killed in the initial uprising.) Nonetheless, given their opposition to colonialism in principle, the Social Democrats refused to vote for the expedition. # Opposition to Colonialism The older historiography on the attitude of German socialists to colonialism focused largely on the right-wing, revisionist side of the party and its sympathies for imperial expansion. In reaction to this, Jens-Uwe Guettel has written about “the myth of the pro-colonialist SPD.” In fact, both the SPD party program and the majority of party members were firmly opposed to colonialism. In part, this was for fiscal reasons: the vast majority of the Imperial German budget was spent on the army and navy, and colonies were an additional charge. The imperial government relied heavily on indirect taxes on foodstuffs and consumer goods, which were largely paid by working Germans, to cover these expenses. "Both the SPD party program and the majority of party members were firmly opposed to colonialism." However, in addition to the financial arguments, German Social Democrats also opposed colonialism on the grounds of internationalism and respect for the rights of self-determination of peoples, and because colonialism was associated with exploitative capitalist practices and corruption. The anti-colonialist views of the Social Democratic Party are demonstrated not only by the speeches of party leaders like Bebel and official resolutions of party congresses. Police surveillance reports of workers in Hamburg pubs record their hostility to colonialism. At party branch meetings in Berlin, rank-and-file members roundly condemned the pro-colonialist views of right-wing party figures. # “Barbaric Methods of War” Bebel partly based the party’s decision to abstain on the vote to fund the military expedition to South West Africa in January 1904 on a lack of information. Two months later, he had more information to go on, and he found it alarming. In the Reichstag, Bebel raised questions about the conduct of the war, especially concerning the treatment of Herero prisoners of German troops and the fact that none were reported to have been taken alive. A year after the war’s outbreak, Bebel was even more forthright in his condemnation of the conduct of the war. He spoke at length about Germany’s responsibility for the uprising, exposed cases of mistreatment of the African population by the colonial regime, and defended the right of the Herero to fight for their independence. He also denounced the “barbaric methods of war” of the German forces under General Trotha. "August Bebel denounced the ‘barbaric methods of war’ of the German forces under General Trotha." In December 1906, shortly before the government dissolved the Reichstag early to commence a nationalistic election campaign that targeted the Social Democrats for their unpatriotic opposition to the colonial war, Bebel continued to pillory the conduct of the war in parliament and to argue that the Hereros were justified in rebelling against the loss of their lands and cattle. He also explicitly denounced the German Army’s campaign of extermination and annihilation — the word genocide did not then exist — reading out General Trotha’s “annihilation order” on the floor of parliament and condemning the way in which Hereros had been driven into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. # Lampooning the Army The Social Democrats did not confine their opposition to the war in South West Africa to speeches in parliament. The party had an extensive array of newspapers and periodicals, which could reach millions of readers. For example, the illustrated satirical magazine _Der Wahre Jacob_ (“The Real Jacob”) had a print run of around 200,000 during this period, which may have brought it to a million readers when one counts large working-class households and copies available in pubs and reading rooms frequented by party members. The party also had several dozens of daily newspapers, including the Berlin-based _Vorwärts_ , which passed a circulation of 100,000 copies a day during these years. "The party press campaigned strongly against the war, despite the ever-present threat of politically motivated prosecutions." The party press campaigned strongly against the war, despite the ever-present threat of politically motivated prosecutions for offenses such as insulting the army. Anti-militarism was a constant theme of the German socialist press until the very eve of World War I. _Der Wahre Jacob_ carried frequent cartoons mocking the officer corps and attacking the conduct of the military in the colony. One finds cartoons showing an aristocratic Prussian officer in full retreat before a crowd of Herero fighters and General Trotha being outwitted by Herero evading capture. In response to a report that Trotha had offered 5,000 marks for the head of rebel leader Samuel Maharero, the magazine printed an alleged reply from Maharero: “I wouldn’t give you five Marks for the head of a Prussian general.” # Shield and Sword Not all of the magazine’s depictions of the war were in a humorous vein. There were also images that drastically depicted German atrocities in South West Africa. One cartoon from January 1905 showed an African being held by a German soldier while another soldier bayoneted him. A missionary looks on, blessing the scene and forgiving the perpetrators. Other images depicted mass shootings of Africans. While _Der Wahre Jacob_ lampooned the German officer corps, it was still sympathetic to the plight of the ordinary soldier in a conscript army notorious for brutal discipline. German soldiers were shown as cannon fodder, their bodies lying in the desert among the bodies of slain Africans. "_Der Wahre Jacob_ depicted the Herero and Nama as peoples conducting a justified fight for their own rights against an inherently unjust and oppressive system." _Der Wahre Jacob_ depicted the Herero and Nama as peoples conducting a justified fight for their own rights against an inherently unjust and oppressive colonial system of rule. Echoing August Bebel, the magazine compared Hendrik Witbooi, the Nama chief who waged a guerrilla campaign against German rule, with the German national hero Arminius, or Hermann, of the Cherusci, who defeated the Romans at the battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE. A graphic expression of solidarity with the Herero and Nama in their resistance to German rule was to be seen on the front cover of _Der Wahre Jacob_ in January 1907. This was a couple of weeks before the national elections that the government chose to fight as a pro-imperialist campaign against the Social Democrats. An allegorical female figure representing socialism, wearing the revolutionary red Phrygian cap and holding a shield and sword, is shown defending a group of Africans against German colonialism, personified by Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow. The image is a direct parody of a notorious racist print designed personally by Kaiser Wilhelm II calling on Europeans to defend themselves against the “Yellow Peril,” referring to the rising power of Asia. # Exposing Genocide Social Democratic press coverage of the war was not limited to _Der Wahre Jacob_ , or its Munich-based counterpart, the illustrated _Süddeutscher Postillion_ (“South German Postillion”). The party’s flagship paper, _Vorwärts_ , condemned the abuses that the Herero and Nama had suffered at the hands of German colonists. By the end of 1904, it was outspoken in reporting on “the annihilation of the Herero” by General Trotha. The left-radical _Leipziger Volkszeitung_ (“Leipzig People’s Paper”) was also militantly anti-colonialist and vocal in condemning the conduct of the war. In the Prussian provincial city of Posen (today’s Poznań), Rosa Luxemburg ran critical commentary on the war for the Polish workers of the province in the Polish-language _Gazeta Ludowa_ (“People’s Newspaper”). "The difficulty of communications and the exigencies of war precluded any direct contact between the party and the Herero or Nama peoples." There were limitations to the position of the German Social Democrats on South West Africa. It remained on a rather theoretical and vicarious level: as one delegate at the 1904 Bremen Party Congress pointed out, the party had no local delegates in the colony. The difficulty of communications and the exigencies of war precluded any direct contact between the party and the Herero or Nama peoples. However, newspaper reports of Bebel’s Reichstag speeches did reach Germans in South West Africa. Some of the humorous cartoons of Africans in the socialist press reflect the stereotypical graphic conventions of the time, although these are outweighed by depictions that counter the increasingly racist imagery that appeared in Germany during the war. The party publications emphasized the humanity of the Herero and Nama and upheld their right to revolt. There was also a minority on the right of the Social Democratic Party that was inclined to justify colonialism on the grounds that it was spreading economic development and therefore contributing to raising the “civilizational level” of the colonized peoples. But the majority of German socialists vigorously rejected this reasoning. In the face of a concerted campaign of nationalistic and racist hysteria against African insurgents, German Social Democrats spoke out against the distant genocide, a crime that did not yet have a name in international law, and condemned the oppressive colonial regime that the Imperial German government was imposing on a distant people. Few German socialists would ever meet a member of the Herero or Nama peoples, but they spoke out in defense of their human rights and their right to rebel. * * *

When German Socialists Mobilized Against Genocide in Namibia

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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _Mar. 30, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ President Donald Trump said Sunday that his administration would let a Russia-owned tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of oil to reach Cuba, loosening the illegal fuel blockade that has intensified the island’s already-grave humanitarian crisis. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said that “if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem,” backing off his previous threat to tariff any nation that supplied the besieged island with fuel. Cuba has not received any oil imports since January 9, sparking nationwide blackouts and food shortages and leaving hospitals without critical supplies—with deadly consequences for patients. Trump insisted that the oil on the Russian tanker—which experts say is enough to buy Cuba at least several weeks of energy—is “not going to have an impact,” declaring, “Cuba is finished.” “They have a bad regime, and they have very bad and corrupt leadership,” added Trump, who presides over what analysts have deemed the most corrupt administration in US history. “Whether or not they get a boat of oil is not going to matter.” > Reporter: There's a report that the US is going to let a Russian oil tanker go to Cuba? > > Trump: If a country wants to send some oil into Cuba, I have no problem with that. > > Reporter: Do you worry that that helps Putin? > > Trump: It doesn’t help him. He loses one boatload of oil.… pic.twitter.com/8Vh6gHwaxs > > — Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2026 Trump’s comments came after The New York Times reported that, “barring orders instructing it otherwise,” the US Coast Guard would not intercept the Russian tanker as it approached Cuba. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up The Russian vessel, known as the Anatoly Kolodkin, is expected to reach the island by Monday night, providing some reprieve to a nation whose economy has been strangled by unlawful US economic warfare for decades. In recent days, an international convoy of activists has delivered tons of food, medicine, and other aid to the island, but the shipments are a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Michael Gallant, a member of the Progressive International Secretariat, welcomed news that the US is allowing the Russian tanker to reach Cuba as “very good news”—but said Trump’s decision is hardly deserving of praise. > Very good news. “The US will allow,” of course, means “will not illegally intercept and seize the entirely legal and legitimate sovereign trade in oil” https://t.co/YF2RRIXC2S > > — Michael Galant (@michael_galant) March 29, 2026 Trump imposed the fuel blockade in January, absurdly characterizing Cuba as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security. Earlier this month, Trump threatened to “take” Cuba by force, calling it a “very weakened nation.” Trump’s remarks prompted Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to vow “impregnable resistance” to any US attempt to seize the island. The Trump administration is reportedly seeking Díaz-Canel’s removal as a necessary condition in talks with the Cuban government. Trump’s threats led Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) to introduce legislation last week that would prohibit the administration from using federal funds for any attack on Cuba without congressional authorization. “Trump has started illegal regime change conflicts in Venezuela and Iran and is now threatening Cuba,” Jayapal said in a statement. “These military attacks put our troops in danger, endanger innocent civilians, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and are not what the American people want.” “Trump promised to end forever wars—he lied,” Jayapal added. “Congress alone has the power to declare war, something Trump clearly does not respect. He has no plan to improve conditions for the Cuban people or promote democracy, and we must pass this legislation to block him from acting on a whim.” ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Trump declares ‘Cuba is finished’ while letting Russian oil tanker break illegal US blockade by Jake Johnson, The Real News Network March 30, 2026 <h1>Trump declares ‘Cuba is finished’ while letting Russian oil tanker break illegal US blockade</h1> <p class="byline">by Jake Johnson, The Real News Network <br />March 30, 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-russian-oil-tanker-cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Mar. 30, 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 <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> said Sunday that his administration would let a Russia-owned tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/oil" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oil</a> to reach <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cuba</a>, loosening the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/un-experts-condemn-us-executive-order-imposing-fuel-blockade-cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">illegal</a> fuel blockade that has intensified the island’s already-grave humanitarian crisis.</p> <p>Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said that “if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem,” backing off his previous threat to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74vyr44xn3o" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tariff any nation</a> that supplied the besieged island with fuel. Cuba has not received any oil imports since January 9, sparking nationwide blackouts and food shortages and leaving hospitals without critical supplies—with <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-blockade-kills-cubans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deadly consequences for patients</a>.</p> <p>Trump insisted that the oil on the Russian tanker—which experts say is enough to buy Cuba at least several weeks of energy—is “not going to have an impact,” declaring, “Cuba is finished.”</p> <p>“They have a bad regime, and they have very bad and corrupt leadership,” added Trump, who presides over what <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-corruption-uae-bribes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">analysts have deemed</a> the most corrupt administration in US history. “Whether or not they get a boat of oil is not going to matter.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/2038429641212400076?s=20 </div> </figure> <p>Trump’s comments came after <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/americas/cuba-russian-oil-tanlker.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The New York Times</a> reported that, “barring orders instructing it otherwise,” the US Coast Guard would not intercept the Russian tanker as it approached Cuba.</p> <p>The Russian vessel, known as the Anatoly Kolodkin, is expected to reach the island by Monday night, providing some reprieve to a nation whose economy has been strangled by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/cuba-blockade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">unlawful US economic warfare</a> for decades. In recent days, an international convoy of activists has <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news/international-aid-convoys-deliver-aid-to-cuba-as-russian-tanker-makes-way-to-bust-us-oil-blockade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">delivered</a> tons of food, medicine, and other aid to the island, but the shipments are a <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/cuba-convoy-humanitarian-aid-us-sanctions-blockade-crisis/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Band-Aid on a gaping wound</a>.</p> <p>Michael Gallant, a member of the Progressive International Secretariat, welcomed news that the US is allowing the Russian tanker to reach Cuba as “very good news”—but said Trump’s decision is hardly deserving of praise.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/michael_galant/status/2038390779652059250?s=20 </div> </figure> <p>Trump imposed the fuel blockade in January, absurdly <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">characterizing</a> Cuba as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.</p> <p>Earlier this month, Trump <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-take-cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threatened</a> to “take” Cuba by force, calling it a “very weakened nation.” Trump’s remarks <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/cuban-president-resistance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">prompted</a> Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to vow “impregnable resistance” to any US attempt to seize the island. The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/trump-administration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trump administration</a> is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/world/americas/trump-cuba-president-diaz-canel.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly</a> seeking Díaz-Canel’s removal as a necessary condition in talks with the Cuban government.</p> <p>Trump’s threats led Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pramila-jayapal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pramila Jayapal</a> (D-Wash.) to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/cuba-and-us-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">introduce legislation</a> last week that would prohibit the administration from using federal funds for any attack on Cuba without congressional authorization.</p> <p>“Trump has started illegal regime change conflicts in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Venezuela</a> and Iran and is now threatening Cuba,” Jayapal said in a statement. “These military attacks put our troops in danger, endanger innocent civilians, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and are not what the American people want.”</p> <p>“Trump promised to end forever wars—he lied,” Jayapal added. “Congress alone has the power to declare war, something Trump clearly does not respect. He has no plan to improve conditions for the Cuban people or promote <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/democracy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">democracy</a>, and we must pass this legislation to block him from acting on a whim.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-cuba-russian-oil-tanker-illegal-us-blockade">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&amp;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=342347&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-cuba-russian-oil-tanker-illegal-us-blockade", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Trump declares ‘Cuba is finished’ while letting Russian oil tanker break illegal US blockade

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This Canadian journalist is in Iran to show the sides of war corporate media won’t

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A Plan to Stop ICE From Stealing the Midterms A campaign to ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement from polling places would provide a concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today, months before the election.

A Plan to Stop ICE From Stealing the Midterms

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Muskism Is the Specter Stalking Our Present Elon Musk sells us sovereignty through technology in an age of crisis. Muskism resembles past futurisms, but with an important difference: this time, the question of who owns the machines is paramount.

Muskism Is the Specter Stalking Our Present

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