FAIR

Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened  deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s  movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.

Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).

And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “​​Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”

But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”

I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.

Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.

In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).

The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.

The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).

The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.

The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”

Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”

The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:

It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.

While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.

Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:

The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.

Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”

Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?

The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.

Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MSNBC (3/3/25)

Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.

David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.

David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.

JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?

DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.

Conversation (2/13/25)

If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.

JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?

DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.

AP (3/19/25)

There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.

It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.

But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.

And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.

Guardian (7/24/24)

None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.

And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.

JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.

DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.

HuffPost (3/14/25)

But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.

And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.

JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.

DP: Yeah.

JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.

So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.

David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”

DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.

And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.

I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.

JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.

Indianapolis Star (3/6/25)

And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.

DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.

Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….

JJ: And Andrew Pulrang.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”

Man of Steele (1/15/25)

JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”

And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.

DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.

JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.

CBS Mornings (3/3/25)

Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”

DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.

JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.

DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DP: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.

The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.

An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”

Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.

These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.

It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.

As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.

In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.

Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:

There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.

A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.

There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficit hawks at the Post.

But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.

In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.

To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”

Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.

Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.

Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):

Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.

Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.

Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Public Information (3/17/25)

This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.

Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.

Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”

In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered  or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.

We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.

Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.

Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.

Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.

The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”

Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:

The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.

The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.

Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.

Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:

If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).

The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

If corporate media like the New York Times were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.

Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”

MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:

We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.

The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.

Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:

But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.

The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.

The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the Washington Post (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.

The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:

The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.

Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:

If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.

The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:

A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.

Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.

The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.

The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.

Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.

Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”

The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.

For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”

Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.

Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”

This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:

• “Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
• “The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
• “Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”

In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.

Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.

The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”

For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.

An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.

The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.

This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:

To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.

For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!

The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”

The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.

The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.

The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:

Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.

The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.

The New York Times (3/8/25) says of Elon Musk, “He’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way!

The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.

The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:

Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.

The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:

Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.

The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.

Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.

This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.

Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.

The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.

News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.

Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.

As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.

Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.

As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”

In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”

The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”

Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-pandering Washington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.

There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has

the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.

The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.

Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.

The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”

The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”

Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.

While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”

The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.

Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).

Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.

The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”

​​Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.

Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:

“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”

These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”

Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”

Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.

As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.

Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).

So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.

To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:

“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.

“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.

The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”

Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),

becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.

Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.

Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.

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This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Also on the show: You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story, and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.

CounterSpin spoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin.

Featured Image: A protester at a disability rights protest in May 2022 in new York City. Credit: FollowingNYC from Pexels

Owned (Hachette, 2025), by Eoin Higgins, traces the relationship between tech industry barons and two former left-wing journalists.

Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20).

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism. 

This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23).

Both writers gave up coveted posts at established media outlets for a new and evolving mediasphere that allows individual writers to promote their work independently. Both have had columns at the self-publishing platform Substack, which relies on investment from conservative tech magnate Marc Andreessen (Reuters, 3/30/21; CJR, 4/1/21). Greenwald hosts System Update on Rumble, a conservative-friendly version of YouTube underwritten by Peter Thiel (Wall Street Journal, 5/19/21; New York Times, 12/13/24), the anti-woke crusader known for taking down Gawker. 

Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been  a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.)

The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24). 

In Higgins’ narrative, these billionaires originally saw Greenwald as a dangerous member of the fourth estate, largely because their tech companies depended greatly on a relationship with the US security state. But as both Greenwald and Taibbi drifted rightward in their politics, these new media capitalists were able to entice them over to their side on their new platforms.

Capitalists buying and creating media outfits to influence policy is not new—think of Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post (8/5/13; Extra!, 3/14). But Higgins sees a marriage of convenience between these two former stars of the left and a set of reactionary bosses who cultivated their hatred for establishment media for the industry’s political ends. 

Matt Taibbi (X, 2/15/24) learned the hard way that cozying up to Musk and “repeatedly declining to criticize” him was not enough not avoid Musk’s censorship on X.

Higgins is not suggesting that Thiel and Andreesen are handing Taibbi and Greenwald a check along with a set of right-wing talking points. Instead, Higgins has applied Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, which they used to explain US corporate media in Manufacturing Consent, to the new media ecosystem of the alt-right. 

Higgins even shows us that the alliance between these journalists and the lords of tech is shaky, and the relationship can be damaged when these tech lords are competing with each other. For example, right-wing multibillionaire Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Taibbi, who boosted Musk’s takeover and the ouster of the old Twitter regime, chose to overlook the fact that Musk’s new regime, despite a promise of ushering in an era of free speech, censored a significant amount of Twitter content. Taibbi finally spoke up when Musk instituted a “blanket search ban” of Substack links, thus hurting Taibbi’s bottom line. In other words, Taibbi’s allegiance to Musk was less ideological as it was material. 

Greenwald and Taibbi have created a world where they are angry at “Big Tech,” except not the tech lords on whom their careers depend.

Owned addresses the record of these two enigmatic journalists, and their relationship to tech bosses, in splendid detail. In what is perhaps the most interesting part, Higgins explains how these Big Tech tycoons originally distrusted Greenwald, because of his work on the Snowden case. Over time, though, their political aims began to align, forging a new quasi-partnership.

As the writer Alex Gendler (Point, 2/3/25) explained, these capitalists are “libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves.” Taibbi and Greenwald, meanwhile, became disaffected with liberalism’s social justice politics. And thus a common ground was found.

In summarizing these men’s careers, Higgins finds that early on, both exhibited anger management problems and an inflated sense of self-importance. What we learn along the way is that there has always been conflict between their commitment to journalism and their own self-obsession. We see the latter win, and lure our protagonists closer to the tech lords.  

Higgins charts Greenwald’s career, from a lawyer who ducked away from his duties to argue with conservatives on Town Hall forums, to his blogging years, to his break from the Intercept, the outlet he helped create. 

We see a man who has always had idiosyncratic politics, with leftism less a description of his career and more an outside branding by fans during the Snowden story. Higgins shows how Greenwald, like so many, fell into a trap at an early age of finding the soul of his journalism in online fighting, rather than working the street, a flaw that has forever warped his worldview. 

As the lawyer for a white supremacist accused by the Center for Constitutional Rights of conspiring in a shooting spree that left two dead and nine wounded, Glenn Greenwald said, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me” (Orcinus, 5/20/19).

The book is welcome, as it comes after many left-wing journalists offered each other explanations for Taibbi and Greenwald’s right-wing spirals. Some have wondered if Greenwald simply reverted to his early days of being an attorney and errand boy for white supremacist Matt Hale (New York Times, 3/9/05; Orcinus, 5/20/19), when he used to rant against undocumented immigration because “unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate” makes “impossible the preservation of any national identity” (Unclaimed Territory, 12/3/05). 

Higgins gives us both sides of Greenwald. In one heartbreaking passage, he reports that Greenwald’s late husband had even tried to hide Greenwald’s phone to wean him off social media for his own well-being. 

In a less sympathetic passage, we see that of all the corporate journalists in the world, it is tech writer Taylor Lorenz who has become the object of his obsessive, explosive Twitter ire. Her first offense was running afoul of Andreessen, one of Substack’s primary financers. Her second was investigating the woman behind the anti-trans Twitter account, Libs of TikTok (Washington Post, 4/19/22).

In Taibbi, we find a hungry and aggressive writer with little ideological grounding—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it leaves one vulnerable to manipulative forces. Higgins shows us a son of a journalist who had a lot of advantages in life, and yet still feels aggrieved, largely because details of his libidinous proclivities in post-Soviet Russia made him vulnerable to the MeToo campaign (Washington Post, 12/15/17). It’s not hard to see how the sting of organized feminist retribution would inspire the surly enfant terrible to abandon a mission to afflict the comfortable and become the Joker.

Naturally, Owned doesn’t tell the whole story. While Musk’s Twitter has become a right-wing vehicle (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Al Jazeera, 8/13/24; PBS, 8/13/24), a great many left and liberal writers and new outlets still find audiences on Substack. At the same time, many of the platform’s users threatened to boycott Substack (Fast Company, 12/14/23) after it was revealed how much Nazi content it promoted (Atlantic, 11/28/23). And while Substack and Rumble certainly harnessed Taibbi and Greenwald’s realignment, many other left journalists have gone right for other reasons.

Big Tech doesn’t explain why Max Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gave up his investigations of the extreme right (Democracy Now!, 9/4/09) for Covid denialism (World Socialist Web Site, 4/13/22) and a brief stint as an Assadist version of Jerry Seinfeld (Twitter, 4/16/23). Christian Parenti, a former Nation correspondent covering conflict and climate change (Grist, 7/29/11) and the son of Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, has made a similar transition (Grayzone, 3/31/22; Compact, 12/31/24), and he is notoriously offline.

Higgins’ book, nevertheless, is a cautionary tale of how reactionary tech lords are exploiting a dying media sector, where readers are hungry for content, and laid off writers are even hungrier for paid work. They are working tirelessly to remake a new media world under their auspices.

Taibbi, who once upon a time spoke at Occupy Wall Street, has lazily morphed into a puppet for oligarchic state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) to literally repost Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich.

Thiel, Andreessen and Musk have the upper hand. While X is performing poorly (Washington Post, 9/1/24) and Tesla is battered by Musk’s plummeting public reputation, Musk’s political capital has skyrocketed, to the point that media outlets are calling him a shadow president in the new Trump administration  (MSNBC, 12/20/24; Al Jazeera, 12/22/24). Substack is boasting growth (Axios, 2/22/24), as is Rumble (Motley Fool, 8/13/24).

Meanwhile, 2024 was a brutal year for journalism layoffs (Politico, 2/1/24). It saw an increase in newspaper closings that “has left more than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties—or 55 million people—with just one or no local news sources where they live” (Axios, 10/24/24). A year before that, Gallup (10/19/23) found that

the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016. 

The future of the Intercept, which Greenwald helped birth, remains in doubt (Daily Beast, 4/15/24), as several of its star journalists have left to start Drop Site News (Democracy Now!, 7/9/24), which is hosted on—you guessed it—Substack.

Rather than provide an opening for more democratic media, this space is red meat for predatory capital. The lesson we should draw from Higgins’ book is that unless we build up an alternative, democratic media to fill this void, an ideologically driven cohort of rich industrialists want to monopolize the communication space, manufacturing consent for an economic order that, surprise, puts them at the top. And if Taibbi and Greenwald can find fame and fortune pumping alt-right vitriol on these platforms, many others will line up to be like them.

What Higgins implies is that Andreessen and Thiel’s quest to remake the media environment as mainstream sources flounder isn’t necessarily turning self-publishing journalists into right-wingers, but that the system rewards commentary—the more incendiary the better—rather than local journalists doing on-the-ground, public-service reporting in Anytown USA, where it’s needed the most.

Greenwald and Taibbi’s stature in the world of journalism, on the other hand, is waning as they further dig themselves into the right-wing holes, and the years pass on from their days as scoop-seeking investigative reporters. Both ended their reputations as members of the Fourth Estate in favor of endearing themselves to MAGA government. 

Taibbi has lazily morphed into a puppet for state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) space to literally rerun Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich. Greenwald cheered Trump and Musk’s destructive first month in power, saying the president should be “celebrated” (System Update, 2/22/25). Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration (GLAAD, 1/21/25; Gizmodo, 2/5/25; American Library Association, 2/14/25; ABC News, 2/14/25, Poynter, 2/18/25; FIRE, 3/4/25; EFF, 3/5/25).

And there’s a quality to Greenwald and Taibbi that limits their shelf life, a quality that even critics like Higgins have overlooked. As opposed to other left-to-right flipping contrarians of yore, the contemporary prose of Taibbi, Greenwald and their band of wannabes is simply too pedestrian to last beyond the authors’ lifetimes.

They value quantity over quality. There is no humor, narrative, love of language or worldly curiosity in their work. And they have few interests beyond this niche political genre. 

Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the left to support the “War on Terror” (The Nation, 9/26/02), could write engagingly about literature, travel and religion. Village Voice civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose politics flew all over the spectrum, had a whole other career covering jazz. This made them not only digestible writers for readers who might disagree with them, but also extended their relevance in the literary profession. 

By contrast, Taibbi’s attempts to write about the greatness of Thanksgiving (Substack, 11/25/21) and how much he liked the new Top Gun movie (Substack, 8/3/22) feel like perfunctory exercises in convincing readers that he’s a warm-blooded mammal. A Greenwaldian inquiry into art or music sounds as useful as sex advice from the pope. This tunnel vision increased their usefulness to the moguls of the right-wing media evolution–for a while.

Taibbi and Greenwald are not the true enemy of Owned; they are fun for journalists to criticize, but have slid off into the margins, as neither has published a meaningful investigation in years. The good news is that for every Greenwald or Taibbi, there’s a Tana Ganeva, Maximillian Alvarez, Talia Jane, George Joseph, Michelle Chen or A.C. Thompson in the trenches, doing real, necessary reporting.

What is truly more urgent is the fact that a dangerous media class is taking advantage of this media vacuum, at the expense of regular people.

Janine Jackson interviewed Rutgers University’s Eric Blanc about worker-to-worker organizing as a key force of resistance for the March 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The New Republic (2/13/25)

Janine Jackson: The difficult and disturbing political moment is throwing some underlying fissures in US society into relief. Along with which side some folks turn out to be on, we’re learning what levers of power regular people actually have and how we can use them. And we’re reminded that the antidote to fear and confusion is one another, is community, including the particularly powerful form of community that is a labor union. Indeed, workers can wield power even shy of a union, though that’s not a story you will often read about in major media. 

Eric Blanc is a longtime labor activist and organizer as well as assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He’s author of Red State Revolt: The Teacher Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics from Verso and, out this year, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big from UC Press. He also writes the newsletter laborpolitics.com. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Blanc.

Eric Blanc: Thanks for having me on.

JJ: Well, let me ask you to start with federal workers, who are, as we see, a primary target of Trump and Musk, but you remind us federal workers are also a key force of resistance here. Tell us about that.

EB: It’s hard to exaggerate the stakes of the fight right now around federal workers. There’s a reason that Musk and Trump have started by trying to decimate federal services and decimate federal unions, and that’s because they understand that these are blockages on their attempt to have sort of full authoritarian control over the government and to be able to just impose their reactionary agenda irrespective of the law. And they know that they need to not just fire the heads of these agencies, but they need to be able to have a workforce that is so terrified of the administration that they’ll comply even when the law is being broken. 

And so they have to go out after these unions and break them. And in turn, the stakes for, really, all progressive, all working people, anybody who has a stake in democracy, are very high because this is the first major battle of the new administration. And if they’re able to mass fire federal workers despite their legal protections to have job protections, despite the reality that millions of Americans depend on these services—Social Security, Medicaid, just basic environmental health and safety protections—if they’re able to destroy these services upon which so many people depend, this is going to set a basis for them to then go even harder on the rest of society. So think about immigrants and trans people and all of that. So the implications of this battle are very high. It is the case, fortunately, that federal workers are starting to resist, but there’s going to need to be a lot more to be able to push back.

JJ: Well, I grew up outside of DC. Both my parents worked at federal agencies. All of my summer jobs were at federal agencies, and anyone with direct experience knows that, with 0.0 illusions about perfection—but we understand that there are widespread misunderstandings and myths about government, generally, and about federal workers, specifically. Trump says, “We’re bloated, we’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.” How do we push back against that narrative?

USA Facts (12/19/24)

EB: Yeah, I think the basic response is straightforward, which is to highlight just how important these services are and to note that, far from having a massively expanded bureaucracy, the federal services, like most public services, have actually been starved over the last 50 years. The percentage of the workforce that works for the federal government has continued to decline for the last four decades. And so it’s just not the case that there’s this massively expanding bureaucracy. And if anything, many of the inefficiencies and the problems in the sector are due to a lack of resources and then the lack of ability to really make these the robust programs that they can and should be, and oftentimes in the past were. 

So it’s just not the case that either there’s a massively expanded bureaucracy or that these services are somehow not important. The reality is that the American people, in some ways, don’t see all of these services. They take them for granted. They’re somewhat invisible. So the fact that, up until recently, planes weren’t crashing, well, that’s because you have federal regulators and have well-trained federal air traffic controllers. And so when you start to destroy these services, then all of a sudden it becomes more visible. What will happen if you stop regulating companies on pollution, for instance? Well, companies can go back and do what they did a hundred years ago, which is to systematically dump toxins into the soil, into water, and all of these other things that we almost take for granted now that are unacceptable. Well, if there’s no checks and balances on corporations, who’s going to prevent them from doing all of this? 

And so I do think that there’s just a lot of basic education that needs to be put out there to counter these lies, essentially, of the Trump administration. For instance, the vast majority of federal workers don’t live in DC. This idea that this is all sort of rich bureaucrats in DC—over 80% of federal workers live all across the country, outside of DC. And just monetarily, it’s not the case these are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars, they’re making decent working class wages. Overwhelmingly, you can look at the data. 

So we need to, I think, be really clear both of the importance of these services, but then also just to say it’s a complete myth that the reason that ordinary working class people are suffering is due to federal workers. It’s a tiny part of the federal budget, first of all, the payroll of federal workers. And if you just compare the amount of money that goes to federal workers to, say, the wealth of Elon Musk, there’s no comparison. Elon Musk, richest man on earth, has over $400 billion net worth. That’s almost double what federal workers, 2.3 million federal workers as a whole, make every year. So you just see the actual inequality is not coming from federal workers, it’s coming from the richest in our country and the world.

JJ: Well, an arm we have, a lever we have, is worker organizing to push back against this, besides us at home being angry and throwing our shoes at the TV. We can work together and we have historical models, we have contemporary models and examples of how that can work and how that can play out. 

I want to ask you to talk about the 2018 teacher strikes, because I see that you have lifted that up as a kind of analog, that there are lessons to be learned about places like West Virginia and Oklahoma, red states that in 2018 had this strike by teachers that, against all odds, one would say, were popular, connected with community, and were, in their measure, successful. I wonder what you think some of the tactical lessons were learned there. What did we learn from those strikes?

Jacobin (3/9/18)

EB: That’s a good question, and I think it’s important to start by just noting that these strikes are a good example of why we shouldn’t just succumb to despair now. There’s an overall sense of doom and gloom that nothing can be done because Trump’s in power, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s accurate that nothing can be done. And the example of the red state strikes are a prime indicator that even when you have very conservative people in power, in government, workers have an ability to use their workplace leverage and their community leverage to win. 

And so in 2018, hundreds of thousands of teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond went on strike. Even though those strikes were illegal, even though these were states in which the unions are very weak, right-to-work states, and even though the electorates in all of these states had voted for Donald Trump, nevertheless they got overwhelming support from the population because they had very simple, resonant demands, like more funding for schools, decent pay for teachers, make sure that there’s enough money so that students can get a decent education. 

These things cut across partisan lines in a way that, similarly, I think that the defense of basic services like Social Security and Medicaid today really does cut across party lines. And the tactics, then, that they used were, well, first they had to get over the fear factor, because these were illegal strikes, so they had to find ways to start generating momentum amongst teachers. They did things like really basic escalating actions like asking people to wear red on one day. So they didn’t start by saying, “Let’s go on strike.” They said, “Can you do this one simple action together? Can we all wear the same color on a given day?” And then they asked the community to come in. They said, “Community members, can you meet us after school on this day? We’re going to talk about our issues together. We’re going to hold up some signs. We’re going to provide some information.” 

So they built with escalating action towards eventually a mass strike. And they used a lot of social media because they couldn’t rely on the unions as much. Social media was very important for connecting workers across these states, for generating momentum. And eventually they were able to have extremely successful walkouts that, despite being illegal, nobody got retaliated against. They won, they forced the government to back down and to meet their demands. And so I do think that that is more or less the game plan for how we’re going to win around Musk and Trump. You have to essentially create enough of a backlash of working people, but then in conjunction with the community, that the politicians are forced to back down.

JJ: Well in worker-to-worker organizing, it seems like what you’re talking about here, I think a lot of us who have worked with organized labor or have that memory think of it as a top-down enterprise. And so worker-to-worker organizing is not just like a bright spot, something to look at, but a way forward, something that can be replicated. You direct something called the Worker to Worker Collaborative. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit about what worker-to-worker organizing is or how it’s different from a model that some folks may hold in their head?

We Are the Union (UC Press, 2025)

EB: Yeah. The basic problem with more traditional, staff-intensive unionism is that it’s just too expensive. It’s too costly, both in terms of money and time, to win big, to organize millions of workers. And whether it’s on offensive battles like unionizing Starbucks or Amazon, or whether it’s defensive battles right now, like defending federal workers, if you’re going to organize enough workers to fight back, there’s just not enough staff to be able to do that. And so part of the problem with the traditional method is that you just can’t win widely enough. You can’t win big enough. 

Worker-to-worker organizing is essentially the form of organizing in which the types of roles that staff normally do are taken on by workers themselves. So strategizing, training and coaching other workers, initiating campaigns—these are things that then become the task and responsibility of workers themselves with coaching and with support, and oftentimes in conjunction with bigger unions. But workers just take on a higher degree of responsibility, and that has been shown to work. The biggest successes we’ve had in the labor movement in recent years, from the teacher strikes, which we talked about, to Starbucks, which has organized now over 560 stores, forced one of the biggest companies in the world to the bargaining table. We’ve seen that it works. 

And it’s just a question now of the rest of the labor movement really investing in this type of bottom-up organizing. And frankly, there is no alternative. The idea that so many in the labor leadership have, that we’re just going to elect Democrats and then they’ll turn it around—well, Democrats are sort of missing in action, and who knows when they’re going to come back into power. And so it’s really incumbent on the labor movement to stop looking from above and start looking, really, to its own rank and say, “Okay, if we’re going to save ourselves, that’s the only possible way. No one’s going to come save us from above.”

JJ: And it seems that it develops also with just a more organic, if I could say, understanding of what the issues are because it’s workers themselves formulating that message rather than leadership saying, “We think this is what will sell, or we think this is what we can get across.” It seems more likely to actually reflect workers’ real concerns.

In These Times, 11/22/24

EB: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, workers are best placed to understand each other’s issues. They’re also the best placed to convince other workers to get on board. One of the things bosses always say whenever there’s a union drive or union fight is, “Oh, the union is this outside third party.” And sometimes there’s a little bit of truth to that. I don’t want to exaggerate the point, but there could be an aspect of the labor movement that can feel a little bit divorced from the direct ownership and experiences of workers. But when workers themselves are organizing, oftentimes in conjunction with unions, but if they really are the people in the lead, then it becomes much harder for the bosses to third-party the union because it’s clear the union is the workers.

JJ: Right, right. Well, how much does it matter, for this kind of bottom-up organizing, whatever it is that’s happening at the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]? What role—I don’t even actually know what’s happening, it’s in flux as is everything. But you think that maybe not that we shouldn’t worry about it, not that we shouldn’t think about it, but we shouldn’t over-worry about machinations at the NLRB, yeah?

EB: Well, I do think that the Biden NLRB was very good and it helped workers unionize. So the fact that we don’t have that NLRB anymore is a blow to the labor movement. I think we just have to acknowledge that. That being said, it’s still possible to unionize. You don’t need the NLRB to unionize. The labor movement grew and fought for many years before labor law was passed. And even today it’s very ambiguous. The NLRB is sort of paralyzed on a national level, but on a local level you can still run elections. And so it’s not even completely defunct. And I think it’s probably still possible to use it to a certain extent. 

But the reality is that the legal terrain is harder than it was. On the other hand, the urgency is even higher, and you still see workers fighting back and organizing in record numbers. I’ve been really heartened by, despite the fact that the legal regime is harder, you’ve had some major union victories just in the last few weeks under Trump. For instance, in Philadelphia, Whole Foods workers unionized despite Trump, despite an intense union busting campaign coming straight on down from Jeff Bezos. This was only the second time Amazon—because Amazon’s the owner of Whole Foods now—has lost a union election, and that was just a few weeks ago in Philadelphia. 

And so it shows that there is this real anger from below. And I think that there’s something, actually, about the Trump administration, that because it’s so fused to some of the richest people on earth with the administration in an oligarchic manner, but then unionization itself becomes almost a direct way to challenge the Trump regime. Because you’re going up against both their destruction of labor rights, and then also, frankly, it’s just the same people are up top. The bosses and the administration are almost indistinguishable at this point.

JJ: And I feel like entities like Amazon, like Whole Foods, have presented themselves as sort of the future of business, the future of the way we do things. And so I think labor actions, first of all, recognizing that it’s still workers doing this and it’s not happening in a lab somewhere, they just seem like especially important places to call attention to in terms of labor activity.

Eric Blanc: “ I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity.”

EB: Yeah. And I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity, right? And the labor movement is the number one force that can do that, and force the politicians to show which side they’re on. Are you on the side of Jeff Bezos or are you on the side of low wage workers who are fighting back? Waging more and more of those battles, even if it’s harder because of the legal regime, I think is going to be one of the most crucial ways we have to undermine the support of MAGA amongst working people of all backgrounds.

JJ: Well, and we need one another for that support as we go forward. Well, finally, unless you’re living in a hole or unless you actually like what’s happening, it’s very clear that business as usual isn’t going to do, kind of wherever you’re walking in life, we need to be doing something bigger, bolder. But we know that there are people, to put it crudely, who are more afraid of disruption than they are of suffering. Disruption sounds very scary, doing things the way they haven’t been done yesterday, even though we do have history that we can point to, is scary. 

And I think that makes the stories we tell one another and the stories we tell ourselves so important, the coherence of the vision of the future that we’re able to put out there is so crucial. And of course, that brings me back to media. You mentioned the importance of social media, independent media, just the stories that we tell, the stories that we lift up, the people that we lift up. It seems so important to this fight. It’s not meta phenomena. So I just wonder, finally, what you see as a role for different kinds of media going forward?

Federal Unionists Network

EB: Okay. I think it’s absolutely crucial. One of the reasons why the right has made the inroads it has is that it’s been better at getting its story out there and waging the battles of ideas through the media, through social media, and through more mainstream media. And frankly, our side has trailed. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the same resources, but I think it’s also there’s an underestimation of how important it is to explain what is going on in the world, to name who the real enemies are, and to provide an explanation for people’s real anger and their real anxiety about what’s happening. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely crucial. And I think we need to, as a labor movement, as progressives, as left, really push back and provide an alternative explanation that all of these problems are rooted in the power of billionaires. It’s not rooted because of the immigrants, not because of the federal workers, not because of trans kids.

And I’ll just say that one of the things I find to be hopeful is that social media is being used pretty effectively now by this new federal workers movement, and I’ll give you one plug, which is that they have a new website, go.savepublicservices.com, through which anybody can sign up to get involved in the local actions happening nearby. It’s going to be a rapid response network to stop all of the layoffs that happen locally, wherever you live, and to save the services on which we depend. So people can go to that website, go.savepublicservices.com, and take advantage of that media opportunity to get involved locally.

JJ: Alright then, we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Eric Blanc. The new book is We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big That’s out now from UC Press, and you can follow his work at laborpolitics.com. Thank you so much, Eric Blanc, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EB: Thanks for having me on.

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been underway for almost two months now, and every day brings headlines testifying to his determination to fulfil his promise of mass deportation of immigrants. Senate Republicans are moving forward with a bill allocating an additional $175 billion towards border militarization efforts—including deportations and border-wall construction.  

Deportees have been shipped to remote camps and militarized hotels in Panama and Costa Rica, facing horrifically unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, and denied access to aid, lawyers and press. Venezuelan deportees detained at Guantánamo Bay—who have since been deported to Venezuela via Honduras—had been similarly mistreated by US immigration officials.

All of this, of course, comes after four years of US media and political classes working in lock-step to manufacture consent for such a catastrophic displacement event (FAIR.org, 8/31/23, 5/24/21). Both conservative and centrist media outlets associated immigrants with drugs, crime and human waste. During her bid for president, Vice President Kamala Harris supported hardening our borders, calling Trump’s border wall—which she once called a “medieval vanity project“—a “good idea.”

We’ve been here before many, many times. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself— but it often rhymes. 

Media of all kinds—from tabloids to legacy outlets—have repeatedly sensationalized the immigrant “other,” constructing an all-encompassing threat to native-born US labor and culture that can always be neutralized through a targeted act of mass displacement or incarceration. The resulting violence addresses none of the structural problems that cause the immiseration of angry workers in the first place.

From Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment to Operation Wetback, this characterization of the foreigner has had catastrophic consequences for millions of human lives. 

The Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) argued that “Chinese should be restricted to one particular locality” so as not to “endanger” white property.

Chinese labor began to cement itself by the 1850s as a crucial element of westward expansion. American companies employed a steady trickle of cheap immigrant labor to extract precious minerals, construct railroads and perform agricultural work. For their willingness to work long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions, Chinese workers were scorned by their fellow workers—including minority workers—helped along by an unforgiving and vitriolic media ecosystem. 

Juan González and Joseph Torres’ News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (Verso, 2011) documents how sensationalistic media coverage of Chinese immigrant workers contributed to creating the social-political conditions necessary for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In 1852, prominent broadsheet Daily Alta California argued that Chinese people should be classified as nonwhite, a decision eventually cemented a year later in a murder trial that rendered Chinese testimony against white defendants inadmissible, under racist rules of evidence that also targeted Black, Indigenous and mixed-race witnesses. Sinophobic violence against Chinese mine workers from whites, Native Americans and Mexicans subsequently became much more commonplace. 

Meanwhile, instead of condemning the xenophobic violence faced by these workers, Bayard Taylor at the pro-labor, progressive-leaning New York Tribune (9/29/1854) called the Chinese “uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond conception,” and described them as lacking the “virtues of honesty, integrity [and] good-faith.”

Into the 1870s and ’80s, “The Chinese Must Go” became a rallying cry of California’s labor movement. A San Francisco Chronicle piece (7/21/1878) from 1878 described a “Mongolian octopus” growing to engulf the coast. Headline after headline described Chinese-Americans as “Mongolian hordes” and “thieves.”

Simultaneously, violent incidents targeting Chinese mineworkers became massive union-led anti-Chinese pogroms. Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2008) specifically details a late October 1871 pogrom in Los Angeles during which more than a dozen Chinese men and women were killed, with numerous Chinese homes looted for tens of thousands of dollars. At trial, members of the crowd testified to the jury that “Los Angeles Star reporter H.M. Mitchell had urged them to hang all the Chinese.” 

Lynchings and pogroms were often accompanied by expulsions. In her The Chinese Must Go (Harvard University Press, 2018), Beth Lew-Williams details how Chinese laborer Hing Kee’s December 1877 murder was immediately followed by a driving-out of the two dozen other Chinese workers in Port Madison, Washington. Hing’s murder was reported by the Seattle Daily Intelligencer (12/18/1877) as merely an act of personal violence. Yet, in a different story on the same page, readers were encouraged to take the “Chinese question in hand” in a call to action to “restrict” Chinese workers from “endanger[ing]” white property by opening businesses outside of small ghettoized communities.

Finally, in 1882, the mania reached its boiling point. The populist groundswell, bolstered by media sensationalism, culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first major immigration restriction passed in US history and, for a very long time, the only one that specifically named a group for exclusion.  

But the US economy still depended on cheap immigrant labor. Media had successfully diverted labor’s attention from the underlying systems that necessitated low-wage agricultural work—but without such a precarious class, who would take on such a thankless job? 

The Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) announced the “hunting down” of Japanese “subversives.”

As the Japanese took on the role of an exploitable immigrant labor class, similar nativist sentiment burgeoned, demanding an amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act. After 1900, the Japanese had replaced the Chinese as the most sensationalized immigrant labor pool in California—while still making up a tiny proportion of the state’s total workforce. 

Not White Enough, by Lawrence Goldstone (University Press of Kansas, 2023), catalogues the role that media outlets, among other political actors, played in setting the stage for Japanese internment during World War II. Into the late 1910s, politically ambitious media tycoon William Randolph Hearst ran headline after headline in the San Francisco Examiner warning of a Japanese invasion, and accusing Japanese workers of being disguised soldiers smuggling ammunition.

In the 1930s, as the Japanese empire expanded throughout Asia and the Pacific, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US grew with it. The FBI created watch lists of potential Japanese-American subversives, including Shinto and Buddhist priests, and the heads of Japanese-American culture and language associations.

In the early 1940s, Texas Rep. Martin Dies, chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, regularly leaked updates to journalists of baseless “findings” of Japanese-American subversion. In a July 1941 report, the committee declared it had found that “no Japanese can ever be loyal to any other nation other than Japan,” and that even generationally US-born Japanese-Americans “cannot become thoroughly Americanized.”

What Dies failed to mention was that every agent on the West Coast discovered to hold loyalty to Imperial Japan was white. 

The rare examples of sympathetic coverage of Japanese Americans in local papers in San Francisco and Los Angeles evaporated after Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. As the FBI and ONI began rounding up the thousands of Japanese immigrants placed on watchlists, the Los Angeles Times (12/8/1941) ran a front-page story announcing the apprehension of hundreds of “suspicious” Japanese “subversives.” On the same morning, the San Francisco Examiner (12/8/1941) described these unlawful detentions as “taking into custody undisclosed numbers of ‘suspicious aliens,’ considered as potential saboteurs.”

Media clamored in a race to the bottom to produce the most provocative anti-Japanese headlines. While supportively covering raids on Japanese-American communities, they also published piece after piece detailing Japanese attacks on US soil and Japanese-American infiltrations that never occurred. In one particularly egregious instance, the Alabama Journal (12/8/1941) ran a piece headlined “How Jap Could Easily Poison City’s Water Supply.” 

Though detentions began with the December 1941 round-ups, Roosevelt officially passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. 

As shameless as the fabrications that led to and justified internment was media’s coverage of internment itself: FAIR has previously reported on the New York Times’ 1942 coverage (3/24/1942) of the concentration camps, describing the “trek” to a “new reception center rising as if by magic” as characterized by a “spirit of adventure.” 

The role of media in demonizing Japanese Americans, ultimately resulting in internment, is undeniable. Newspapers worked dually as mouthpieces for unfounded FBI claims of subversion and as launching-pads for fantasies generated to maximize outrage at the perceived Japanese “other.” Then, once the “other” was contained, media went to work framing internment as a privilege.  

Never mind that Japanese Americans produced 40% of agricultural output in California, that they had lived in and contributed to their communities for decades at this point— they were all double-agents, and they were neutralized. 

The New York Times (3/26/1951) warned that “‘wetbacks’ filter into every occupation from culinary work to the building trades” and promised that “tomorrow’s article will discuss how the ‘wetback’ influx creates an atmosphere of amorality.”

Though undocumented Mexican labor had always been an instrumental part of agricultural production, especially in the US Southwest, it hadn’t actually garnered large-scale attention until the 1950s; even, in fact, with a mass-deportation event during the Great Depression. But just a few short years after the internment camps closed, the US undertook the high-profile mass deportation of Mexican laborers in Operation Wetback.

During World War II, with a shortage of agricultural workers, the United States came to an agreement with Mexico known as the Bracero Program. In exchange for tightening border security and returning undocumented immigrants to Mexico (on Mexico’s demands), the US would receive Mexican agricultural contract workers. On paper, the deal was a win/win for the US and Mexico: The US would receive workers, and Mexico would stop hemorrhaging its working population.

In practice, however, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the predecessor of ICE) acted on the interests of big agriculture. The INS selectively enforced border security: It was common for INS to hold off on carrying out deportation orders until after the growing season. Farmers also preferred using undocumented labor to braceros, as undocumented workers could be acquired with less red tape and, usually, lower wages. Thus the INS worked specifically to uphold the precarity of Mexican labor, rather than to restrict its numbers.

Then undocumented Mexican labor became the center of a bizarre red-scare media sensation. Avi Aster (Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback; Latino Studies, 2009) pieces together the peculiar relationship between red-baiting and illegal immigration, and how it would ultimately lead to popular consent for Operation Wetback.

It began with a New York Times five-part story (3/25–29/1951) published in March 1951, detailing “the economic and sociological problem of the ‘wetbacks’—illegal Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern United States.” Times journalist Gladwin Hill took a dual interest in the horrible conditions under which Mexican migrant workers toiled, and in the imagined threat that these workers posed to US society. He also insisted that it was possible for Communist spies to cross the Rio Grande with Mexican migrant workers—that although it had never happened before, “in cold fact Joseph Stalin might adopt a perfunctory disguise and walk into the country this way.”

The media and political classes ran with these claims and never looked back. In 1954, the Times ran such headlines as “’Invasion’ of Aliens Is Declared a Peril” (2/8/1954) and “Reds Slip Into US, Congress Warned” (2/10/1954), while the Los Angeles Times (2/10/1954) announced a “Heavy Influx of Reds Into US Reported.” These marked a shift in rhetoric from warning about supposed Communist infiltrators amongst Mexicans to warning about Mexicans themselves.

In June 1954, Operation Wetback was put into effect. Hundreds of thousands were deported in the first year of the program, in a partnership between the US and Mexico. What was once a fringe issue for nativist labor leaders in the Southwest became celebrated policy. A day short of the one-year anniversary of the operation, the Los Angeles Times (6/17/1955) declared, “Problem solved: For the first time in the controversial history of the wetback problem, there is hardly any problem left.”

Again, nothing changed for workers—rather, the state’s security apparatus bolstered its budget, labor was sufficiently distracted, and the vague specter of Communism was kept at bay for another day.

The International Teamsters (March 1954) joined in the media red-baiting, repeating the US government’s absurd propaganda that “more than 100 Communists a day are coming across the sparsely patrolled border.”

In every case of xenophobic hysteria, media have a critical role in sensationalizing the perceived “other” and establishing the political and social circumstances necessary to justify violent acts of mass displacement and incarceration.

Though these causes are often championed by right-wing populists, sensational, nativist narratives have not been confined to right-wing media. All kinds of sources, from penny papers to union publications to legacy outlets, lie about immigrants constantly and with reckless abandon. If media aren’t lying to sell more papers and accommodate the political ambitions or xenophobic tendencies of their financiers, they’re parroting the lies of the political class. 

Whether framing them as an amorphous security hazard or merely as a danger to “native” labor, media are happy to play into the scapegoating of individual immigrant groups, leading to acts of mass violence, because, ultimately, nothing changes for labor. 

“Native” labor champions the anti-immigrant cause, but ultimately, our capitalist system demands that when one low-wage immigrant group disappears, another must take its place. Our economy, especially in an increasingly globalized labor market, is built around the input of low-wage immigrant labor (particularly in the agricultural sector). 

As long as organized labor scapegoats the perceived “other,” and as long as solidarity doesn’t develop between “native” and “foreign” labor, all workers are worse-off. This is the social and political ecosystem that corporate media work to maintain.

Independent outlet Capital & Main (3/11/25) reported on conditions in immigration detention facilities: “A few who had spent time in state prison before being transferred to ICE custody said they received much better treatment in prison than in ICE custody.”

Responsible, ethical journalism would challenge rather than parrot false claims about immigrant and migrant workers promoted by the US political class—and not just when they’re at their most egregious, as when the right claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. Journalists should seek to examine the differences in treatment of foreign-born and native-born labor, run human interest stories, and highlight the violence and human catastrophe involved in mass displacement and incarceration, instead of downplaying them or running stories about how these events are an “adventure.” 

And instead of advancing scare-mongering narratives about how immigrant workers pose a threat to native-born labor, journalists ought to be investigating who stands to gain from pitting the TV-watching and newspaper-reading public against an easy outgroup. However, as long as corporate media exist to advance the interests of wealthy financiers and the political class, the solution lies beyond individual journalists working towards reform within their institutions.

It’s important to note that as long as nativist mainstream media narratives have existed, they’ve faced alternative media resistance, especially from within targeted communities. Prior to Chinese exclusion, for example, Chinese-American advocate Wong Chin Foo established the Chinese American, a weekly Chinese-language paper that he used as a platform to organize the first Chinese-American voters association. During internment, Japanese-Americans published papers such as the Topaz Times to promote internal education about community-led schooling, recreation and other initiatives, as well as updates about relocation.

Today, there are journalists working outside the corporate media who are producing good, humane, hard-hitting coverage of immigration. Small independent outlets like the Border Chronicle, Documented and Capital & Main offer on-the-ground news that centers people rather than national security and xenophobia. 

And the democratization of alternative media channels has also allowed for mass direct resistance to immigration authorities—much to the chagrin of border czar Tom Homan, for instance, who on CNN (1/27/25) frustratedly described sanctuary city residents as “making it very difficult to arrest the criminals” because of mass education. One outlet doing this work is NYC ICE Watch—an activist group that follows in copwatch tradition by using their Spanish/English bilingual Instagram account as a platform to provide real-time updates on ICE activity and raids, organize community training and call for mutual aid requests around New York City. 

Beyond the grassroots level, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is using a different approach, utilizing public Chicago Transit Authority adspace to promote public education in a partnership with the Resurrection Project, National Immigrant Justice Center, and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on the Know Your Rights ad campaign.

In the absence of a corporate media ecosystem willing to lend its platform to this kind of work, independent media are more important than ever in resisting the ostentatious barbarism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. 

As long as establishment outlets derive material benefits from collaborating with the political and capital classes, cruelty towards the “other” can never truly be a mistake to be learned from: It’s merely a means to an end, another performance seeking to prevent US-born workers from developing consciousness of all that they have to gain by standing with their immigrant counterparts.