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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.
The high school philosophy exam is a rite of passage for French students. This year included questions about Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human.”
By Catherine Porter, Reporting from Paris and its suburbs, June 19, 2026
The French were grappling with two questions this week.
Not whether President Trump would hurl insults and leave the Group of 7 early or who the least-known player in the World Cup is.
Instead, they were asking: Can one be happy when others are not? And, Do we have control of our words?
The questions were part of this year’s written test in philosophy, taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million 17- and 18-year-olds. The students, who have spent all year taking a required course in philosophy, have to answer one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This year, the tract came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human.”
Students have four hours to write their responses. The exam is such an important part of French education that local news outlets commit live-blogs to it, beside their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions on the radio and television and in newspapers.
“For me, the philosophy exam says everything about who we are,” said Édouard Geffray, France’s education minister. He was speaking from the yard of a high school he visited on Monday to crack open exam packages in front of television cameras and pass them out to students, and also to offer some last-minute nonphilosophical advice about proofreading.
The exam, he said, “actually says that we are a country in which we have chosen to put the examination of opposing views and debate at the heart of education.”
Napoleon introduced the subject of philosophy to high schools in 1809, originally to train administrators, explained Bruno Poucet, an expert on the history of education in France and a professor emeritus at the University of Picardy Jules Verne in Amiens.
But in the 1880s, the course took on a different purpose as the country re-established a democratic government after years of being ruled by an emperor. The new government worked to root out the Roman Catholic Church from schools, Mr. Poucet said.
“The Republic was breaking free, so it was going to rely on the Enlightenment to emancipate itself, intellectually and politically, from the weight of the Catholic Church,” he said.
All students take the course in their final year of high school, except for those in vocational programs, who train for jobs in areas like construction or hotel management.
“Victor Hugo said, ‘Instead of cutting off the heads, just fill them up,’” said Frédéric Worms, a philosopher and the head of the country’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, paraphrasing a passage from Hugo’s novella, “Claude Gueux.”
At his institution, the country’s top students are paid to study to become professors, scientists and, yes, philosophers. Alumni include Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
As a reflection of how important philosophy remains in France, Mr. Worms is one of many French philosophers who moonlight as radio hosts. Every week, he poses and answers three philosophical questions on air.
Anne-Sophie Moreau, an editor of Philosophie Magazine, said the philosophy course and exam were a rite of passage for the French, similar to military service in other countries.
“It’s the idea that you have to go through this collective reflection on values — on justice, on freedom, on what is a state, on democracy — to become a good citizen,” said Ms. Moreau, who is regularly hired by companies to lead seminars with their staff on topics like ethical investments and worker engagement through a philosophical lens.
So what’s a typical French philosophy class like? I visited Nicolas Franck’s class in a public high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy Parisian suburb, to find out.
Mr. Franck is the former president of the French philosophy teachers’ union and has taught the subject for 35 years. The day I visited, his students grappled with the question “Why do we work?” He sat on a desk at the front and went through the responses that students had offered.
“If it’s just to make a living, why do people earn more than they need?” he asked, reacting to one response. “There has to be something else at play.”
Work is one of 17 interwoven concepts that are the pillars of the course’s curriculum. Others include freedom, justice, truth, language and happiness. Teachers can design their courses as they see fit, dipping into a huge list of philosophers along the way.
Later, he explained that the point of the course was not just to learn historical philosophical theories.
“What counts most,” he said, “is an individual’s capacity to understand and grasp ideas.”
Over two hours, Mr. Franck and his students explored different views about work, from the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s view that it formed a distraction from contemplating our own mortality, to Karl Marx’s theory that through work, humans transform raw materials and their inner selves at the same time.
He told the students that their “convictions and biases” formed his raw material and that by teaching them, he was “transforming” them. “That’s the work I’m doing now,” he said.
One of Mr. Franck’s students, Raphaël Bakouch, said his teacher was succeeding. The class, he said, had “completely changed how I perceive the world.” Things he took as self-evident had become much more complicated. He said he was hounded by the question of “who am I?”
“My parents named me, and I inherited my family name,” Mr. Bakouch, 17, said. “Ultimately, the only thing that truly represents us and forms our true identity is our work — what we do, what we create.” He said he loved how the concepts all overlapped.
The philosophy course is widely considered the most difficult of a student’s final year. The average grade in 2025 was 10.8 out of 20, 2.3 points below the general grade point average.
The day of the exam, many around the country reminisced — often ruefully — about their own experience.
“For me, it was an incredible revelation,” Mr. Geffray, the education minister, said. His press secretary mumbled that he had been “hopeless” in the class and graduated with just an eight. The police officer outside said she had also failed the exam, which is why she went into policing.
“The grade is taken very personally,” Mr. Worms said. “It evaluates you for thinking about life’s deepest questions.” When he tells cabdrivers his profession, they invariably share what mark they got in the class, he said.
“If you are not able to explain the meaning of life, who are you?”
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2) Lebanon Emerges as Weak Link in U.S.-Iran Deal to End War
The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, once seen as a secondary front to the American-Israeli war on Iran, has become one of the main obstacles to ending it.
By Euan Ward and Christina Goldbaum, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, June 19, 2026
The preliminary agreement between Iran and the United States had barely come into effect when it all nearly unraveled on Friday. And, for the second time in recent weeks, the issue that threatened to derail it was Lebanon.
The conflict in Lebanon, once seen as a secondary front to the American-Israeli war on Iran, has become one of the main obstacles to ending it. That dynamic came into sharp focus on Friday, after fighting between the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and Israel intensified and a new round of talks between Tehran and Washington in Switzerland was subsequently scuttled.
While neither side gave a reason for the postponement, three diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details said that Iran had withdrawn from the talks because of Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
“Iran’s new leadership views Lebanon as part and parcel of its own national security, as previous Israeli advances against Hezbollah in 2024 paved the way for a direct conflict with Iran,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “For Iran, the end game is an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.”
The diplomatic breakdown on Friday was the second time in recent weeks that the conflict in Lebanon has upended talks between the United States and Iran. Earlier this month, Israeli strikes on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, prompted Iran to launch missiles toward Israel and Israel to respond with its own wave of strikes across Iran.
The breakdown came days after the United States and Iran signed a preliminary agreement to end their own war that calls for “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations” in Lebanon and pledges to safeguard the country’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty.”
The inclusion of Lebanon in the deal was seen as a diplomatic victory for Iran, which has long insisted that any agreement include Lebanon, where its ally, Hezbollah, attacked Israel in March in solidarity with Tehran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, which has not been party to the negotiations, had staunchly objected to those terms and vowed to continue the military campaign against Hezbollah.
On Friday, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said Israel had committed to an immediate cease-fire and had “halted all offensive operations” in Lebanon, as diplomats sought to keep the fragile deal between Iran and the United States on track. But he said that Israeli forces were still operating in southern Lebanon “to rid the area of Hezbollah and dismantle its terror infrastructure,” adding, “We will remain there until that mission is accomplished.”
There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah.
The terms of the agreement between the United States and Iran, however, have raised as many questions as they have answered.
The deal purports to extend its commitments to Washington and Tehran’s allies, but neither Israel nor Hezbollah signed the memorandum, and it does not explain how either side would be compelled to comply. It also does not resolve the two questions at the heart of the conflict: whether Israel will withdraw from southern Lebanon and whether Hezbollah will surrender its weapons.
Washington and Israel had sought to keep the two conflicts separate, while Tehran made Israel’s campaign in Lebanon a pressure point in negotiations with Washington.
That strategy left President Trump increasingly concerned that persistent Israeli attacks could imperil a deal. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has grown more openly frustrated with Mr. Netanyahu and pressed him to scale back military operations.
Since the agreement was announced, Israel has stopped issuing near-daily evacuation warnings for towns and villages across southern Lebanon.
Although Israeli strikes have also continued, their scale and pace had waned significantly until Friday.
Hezbollah said it had ambushed Israeli troops advancing on a hillside overlooking Nabatieh, the large southern Lebanese city, in fighting that killed four Israeli soldiers, according to the military. Israel responded with more than 150 strikes across southern and eastern Lebanon, killing at least 47 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that although Iran had “managed to connect the two theaters and leverage these negotiations with Trump to constrain Israel,” it was still “too early to judge” whether that restraint would hold — and, if so, for how long.
Lebanon’s cease-fire with Israel, brokered by the Trump administration in April, offers a cautionary precedent. It barred Israel from conducting offensive military operations while preserving the country’s right to take “all necessary measures in self-defense.”
Within hours of the announcement, Israel was invoking that broad latitude to continue strikes. In the weeks that followed, it also expanded its ground invasion despite the cease-fire. Like the U.S.-Iran agreement announced on Sunday, Hezbollah was not a signatory.
On another diplomatic track, the next round of Israeli-Lebanese talks toward a more stable solution in Lebanon will take place next week in Washington, the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Friday, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun.
While it is unclear how much direct control Iran has over Hezbollah, analysts say Tehran has exerted a much stronger hand in the group since its former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in Israeli airstrikes in 2024.
After Hezbollah and Israel agreed to a cease-fire later that year, Hezbollah held its fire despite near-daily Israeli airstrikes, until the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began in late February.
Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, said the U.S.-Iran deal “may create conditions for de-escalation” in Lebanon but did not address the core issues, including an Israeli withdrawal and the future of Hezbollah’s arsenal.
Israeli forces remain stationed across a broad section of southern Lebanon, the largest occupation of the country in more than two decades. Israel’s offensive has devastated border towns and forced more than a million people from their homes.
Israel has signaled it does not feel bound by any Lebanon-related agreements in the U.S.-Iran talks, and Israeli leaders have said in recent days that they do not intend to withdraw from the country. That stance puts the agreement’s promise to safeguard Lebanon’s territorial integrity to an immediate test.
Hezbollah’s weapons are bound up in the same deadlock. Israel has demanded that the group disarm before it will consider withdrawal. Hezbollah points to the occupation as evidence that its arsenal is still needed. Lebanon’s government has pledged to bring all weapons under state control, but has little ability to secure either outcome.
“It is unlikely that the Lebanon conflict is going to be resolved anytime soon,” Ms. Khatib said.
Reporting was contributed by Abdi Latif Dahir, Johnatan Reiss, Adam Rasgon and Alan Yuhas.
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3) Mines, Logistics and Deep Uncertainty Threaten a Middle East Oil Rebound
More oil is getting out of the Persian Gulf, but the region’s producers are looking for signs that it is safe as they ramp up plans for alternative routes.
By Lisa Friedman and Rebecca F. Elliott, June 20, 2026
Lisa Friedman reported from Rome. Rebecca F. Elliott reported from New York.
Vessels, including oil tankers, anchored this week in the waters off Muscat, Oman, near the Strait of Hormuz. Elke Scholiers/Getty Images
Oil is trickling out of the Persian Gulf as stranded tankers take advantage of the fragile détente between the United States and Iran to cross the Strait of Hormuz.
The preliminary deal signed this week by the two countries to try to end the war promised a formal reopening of the strait, a narrow waterway on Iran’s southern coast. But the agreement has brought no great flood of oil-laden ships — at least not initially.
Shipowners are eager to get out but generally remain wary of risking a journey through the strait until it is clearer that their crews will be safe. Oil producers in the area confront a similar calculus: They are ready to ramp up production but want to see evidence that a critical mass of vessels are returning to the Persian Gulf to pick up their oil. And any escalation of the regional conflict, like the violence involving Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants on Friday, could deliver a blow to efforts to kick-start the flow of energy.
Still, the companies in the region that pump and distribute oil are pressing ahead with plans to expand pipelines and fuel storage. The last 16 weeks have left them keen to become less dependent on the strait.
“We are thinking seriously of having larger storage facilities all over the world,” Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, said on Thursday at a conference in Rome.
This month, Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah, chief executive of the state-owned oil company Kuwait Petroleum, said in Washington that the firm was in talks with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates about expanding the pipeline systems in those countries to move Kuwaiti barrels around the strait.
Kuwait has been among the hardest hit by the strait’s closure because its location, sandwiched between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, leaves it no alternative route for exporting its oil.
“When you look at pipelines, they are only as safe as the export facility at the end of it,” Sheikh Nawaf said, noting that during the war, Iran launched attacks on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The conflict caused the largest oil supply disruption in history, and analysts said the recovery would be uneven, particularly in the Middle East. The continuing reverberations will be felt globally because the strait acts as a major artery, supplying about a fifth of the world’s oil.
Some oil has been flowing. On Thursday, 25 ships moved through the waterway, including 14 tankers, higher than the average of recent weeks, according to Kpler, a maritime data company. Some appeared to be carrying oil out of the gulf, and one of the tankers was carrying liquefied natural gas. Several empty oil tankers were returning to the gulf, presumably en route to load oil that had accumulated in storage there. Fewer ships moved through the strait on Friday amid the bursts of regional violence.
Analysts at JPMorgan Chase said in a report on June 12 that the strait was “starting to creak open,” with an estimated 5.1 million barrels of oil flowing through it a day, compared with 2.9 million barrels per day in May. Such a rebound was “meaningful” but still left flows at about 25 percent of levels before the war, the report said.
That uptick lifted Persian Gulf oil exports to nearly nine million barrels a day in June, JPMorgan Chase estimated, the highest level since the war began, with much of the oil leaving through ports that did not require transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
In Saudi Arabia, the East-West pipeline, which connects the country’s Gulf fields to export terminals on the Red Sea, was a “lifeline” for the kingdom’s economy, Mr. Al-Rumayyan said.
“All the regional producers are preparing to increase oil production and get more oil out of the strait as soon as they can,” said Greg Brew, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.
Many shipowners remain cautious. Jerry Kalogiratos, a chief executive of Greek oil and gas shipping firms, said he was looking not only for an end to the fighting in the Persian Gulf, but also for evidence that his vessels would be able to navigate the strait safely and secure insurance to do so.
“There are still quite a few boxes to be ticked so that shipowners can say that we can safely pass,” Mr. Kalogiratos said on Wednesday at a conference in New York City.
Ensuring that the waterway is safe from mines could take weeks, experts said. Hundreds of vessels and their crews, stranded at sea for more than 100 days, need to get out. And shipping companies will need to secure war risk coverage from maritime insurers.
Also a hurdle: getting tankers back in through the strait to help drain regional storage facilities, which companies have filled to the brim.
“There are tankers in the gulf, a lot of them, which will move out, presumably,” said Robin Mills, chief executive of Qamar Energy, a consulting firm based in Dubai. “But when are they going to see enough tankers returning that they can get back to normal transits?”
Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a think tank in London, said the biggest challenge for energy markets had nothing to do with oil but with U.S.-Iranian negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. He said it was “a stretch” to think those talks could be completed in 60 days. That means the level of risk will stay elevated.
“Persuading the shipping companies and the insurance companies that this can be sustained over a period of time will be quite complicated,” Mr. Quilliam said. “If you have anything that looks like a return to conflict, it’s going to undo any progress that’s made.”
Developing alternative routes out of the gulf will also take time. The Emirates is about halfway done with a pipeline it hopes will double its crude export capacity, with an opening targeted for 2027. Kuwait is in talks with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to explore potential new pipelines that can connect its oil fields to export terminals outside the region.
“It’s going to be a period of prolonged instability,” said Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Jenny Gross contributed reporting.
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4) Disability Groups Fear RFK Jr.’s New Special Education Role
Alienated by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims about autism, advocates for disabled students are sounding the alarm about the Trump administration's shifting special education programs to his department.
By Michael C. Bender and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, June 20, 2026
Michael C. Bender and Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supports moving special education funds into his department. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The Trump administration’s decision this week to put Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of special education programs has sparked a sharp backlash from advocates for students with disabilities, who say the move will hurt children and that his views on autism make him unfit for the job.
Mr. Kennedy said earlier this year that children with autism would never hold a job, play baseball or go on a date. He quickly walked back the remarks, saying he was only speaking about the most severe cases — only to insist the next day that special education should be moved into his department. “They’re health-related programs rather than particularly educated programs,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Advocates for students with disabilities said that Mr. Kennedy’s comments show how the change puts disabled students at risk of being viewed as medical conditions to be treated instead of as boys and girls to be educated.
“It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of who kids with disabilities are, how they can be successful in school and how their futures can be very bright,” said Katy Neas, chief executive officer of The Arc, a national support group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The move is part of an extraordinary effort from the Trump administration to dismantle the Education Department, which supporters have said would improve government efficiency, lead to better results for students and satisfy a decades-long promise from Republicans to shutter the agency.
Closing the department entirely requires approval from Congress, which has focused on other matters this term. In the meantime, the Trump administration has transferred tens of billions in Education Department programs to the six different federal executive agencies, which includes health and human services.
Courtney Parella Spencer, the health department’s top spokeswoman, said Mr. Kennedy “strongly agrees” with the idea that “a child’s disability isn’t viewed as a medical condition that needs to be treated.” She said health department experts had “significant accumulated knowledge serving individuals with disabilities,” and would pool their expertise across programs to ensure that students’ needs are met.
“This partnership is about making federal support systems work better for children and families,” Ms. Spencer said, “while fully preserving the legal protections and educational rights guaranteed under federal law.”
Congress could block the changes, which some members oppose, but such a move does not appear to have broad support.
Advocates for disabled students battled for decades to convince local schools, state leaders and federal lawmakers to educate children with a range of disabilities, including physical limitations like deafness and blindness and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, alongside other students. That effort culminated in 1998 with changes to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that guaranteed disabled students the opportunity for a free, appropriate public education.
But the advocates said they have lately had to redouble their efforts to protect the rights of disabled children to receive quality public education.
Last year, in an interview on Fox News during her first week as education secretary, Ms. McMahon failed to come up with the name of the landmark law for disabled students. For many, the moment underscored the lack of experience that Ms. McMahon, a former pro-wrestling executive, brought to the job.
Edward M. Kennedy Jr., a civil rights advocate for people with disabilities and cousin of Secretary Kennedy, said in an email that he shared concerns about shifting special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.
His biggest worry, he said, was “the policy and philosophical shift away from viewing children with disabilities as having strengths, potential and a right to be integrated into classrooms.
“This shift to HHS reverts toward an antiquated, ‘medical model’ of disability policy that views disabled children as ‘sick’ and in need of health care, not an education,” Mr. Kennedy, a health care regulatory lawyer, said.
But concerns cross partisan lines.
Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary under President George W. Bush, described Secretary Kennedy’s comments as “a head-scratcher” and said she was deeply concerned about confusion caused by scattering education services across the federal government.
“I’m struggling with the rationale around all of this,” Ms. Spellings said, about dismantling the education department. “Is it just for a photo op of a padlock on the Department of Education building? To leap to the conclusion that this is going to enhance student achievement, I’m unconvinced.”
Beyond those broad concerns, there are particular concerns about Mr. Kennedy, who has rejected much of the science behind vaccines and autism.
Maria Town, the president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, said Mr. Kennedy’s views on autism, ADHD and mental illness, and his embrace of unconventional treatments, worry her. Ms. Town has cerebral palsy and said she benefited from federal protections as a student.
“Are children with autism going to be forced to engage in practices that we know don’t work?” Ms. Town said. “Kids with disabilities already get medical care from their doctors and health care practitioners. They deserve a chance to be students and to engage in the classroom like any other kid.”
Stephanie Smith Lee, who, during the George W. Bush administration, ran the Office of Special Education Programs, which is being moved to the Health and Human Services Department, said the change created more bureaucracy and risked damaging educational opportunities for students.
“Children with disabilities are not a diagnosis,” said Ms. Smith Lee, now the co-director of policy and advocacy at National Down Syndrome Congress. “These are students first and they need to be educated and they need to be educated alongside their general education peers — and the federal offices that oversee the education need to be in the same department.”
Ms. Smith Lee said she was holding out hope that Republican leaders in control of Congress would block the changes.
Republicans in the House and Senate have shown little appetite for confronting the Trump administration’s moves. But there was some skepticism expressed on Wednesday in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which oversees both the health and education departments.
Senator Bill Cassidy, the panel’s chairmansaid he opposed moving special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.
Mr. Cassidy said at the hearing that he would work with Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, on legislation aimed at blocking the move, which the committee would consider at its meeting in July. But Mr. Cassidy is a short-timer in Congress; he recently lost his Republican primary race in Louisiana to a Trump-backed challenger.
“I will publicly commit to working with him for the next markup in July at finding something which is an accommodation for everyone’s concern,” Mr. Cassidy said.
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5) Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich
By David Lay Williams, June 21, 2026
Dr. Williams is a professor of political science who studies the role of economic inequality in the history of political thought.
Anna Haifisch
Ever since Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, people have been trying to grasp the scale of his incomprehensible fortune.
Some have noted that a stack of $100 bills amounting to $1 trillion would extend 679 miles high. The economist Steven Durlauf has observed that John D. Rockefeller’s wealth at one point equaled about 1.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and that Mr. Musk’s wealth now amounts to at least twice as much, at more than 3 percent. It may not escape New York Knicks fans that even Jalen Brunson, who makes about $39 million per year, would need to play more than 25,000 seasons to accumulate that kind of money.
But of all the numbers I’ve seen, the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family.
As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest.
To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a modern economy would operate with Plato’s proposed constraints on wealth acquisition. But it is not hard for a modern reader to understand the concerns that led him to his radical proposal.
Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution.
It’s no wonder that when Socrates reflected on inequality in Plato’s “Republic,” he observed that a state characterized by significant wealth disparity is not a state at all but rather “two states, the one of poor, the other of rich men, and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.”
For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.
Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”
Plato’s fears about insatiable greed have been vindicated by Mr. Musk, who has already set his sights on $10 trillion. He has confirmed Plato’s concerns about the moral failures of the superrich by characterizing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” With his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he put the U.S. Agency for International Development program “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it, contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people. Such carnage is a predictable outcome of a society that has chosen to place no upper limits on wealth.
Plato was acutely aware that ideal solutions, such as his 4-to-1 wealth ratio, are impossible to carry out where great inequality already exists. But he did not encourage legislators and citizens to throw up their hands in surrender. Rather, he urged citizens (including the few rich ones with a “sense of fairness”) to do what they could to level society, starting by shaming those with excessive fortunes. He stressed that true poverty “consists not in a lessening of one’s property but in an increase of one’s avarice.”
Only by teaching the evils of extreme greed can society begin to restore the healthy balance of wealth necessary for a thriving republic.
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6) Where Billionaires Summer, a Gardener Died in the Snow
A landscaper’s difficult life and lonely death reveal the human cost behind the Hamptons’ manicured landscape.
By Rukmini Callimachi, Photographs by Victor J. Blue, June 21, 2026
Rukmini Callimachi and Victor J. Blue hiked into the forest to interview the dead landscaper’s brother, attended the funeral, shadowed laborers during a day of work and interviewed immigrants living in homeless encampments.
Landscaper Gilberto Camey walks out of the woods on his way to a day job, retracing the route his brother took before he was found dead after a winter storm.
Rukmini Callimachi and Victor J. Blue hiked into the forest to interview the dead landscaper’s brother, attended the funeral, shadowed laborers during a day of work and interviewed immigrants living in homeless encampments.
In winter, people in the Hamptons know how to protect the things they value. The decorative hedges outside multimillion-dollar homes are carefully wrapped in burlap. Bolts of cloth are unspooled, cut and pulled taut. Then they’re stitched closed by hand with specialized needles, sold in local shops.
That’s because the cold is potentially deadly to some of these plants — when the water inside them freezes, it expands, rupturing the cell walls.
On a sloping patch of ground less than a dozen miles from where the wealthy pay to swaddle their bushes, on a day cold enough to freeze a brook running through the woods, one of the men who stitched burlap around hedges disappeared on a Thursday in February.
The last time he was seen, Francisco Camey, 61, woke up on “his” side — the left side — of the enclosure he and his brother, Gilberto, 51, had created under a white tarp by stringing ropes between tall pines in a forest. Francisco headed out at around 9:30 a.m.
That night, the temperature dropped into the low 20s Fahrenheit, and the gusts off Peconic Bay made it feel as cold as 0 degrees. Francisco didn’t return to the shelter. It was still dark when Gilberto woke with a start after feeling an icy breeze, as if someone had pulled back the plastic sheet to enter the tent. “Is it you?” Gilberto called out, but no one answered.
The next day, Gilberto followed his brother’s tracks.
The trail in Riverhead, N.Y., crosses the brook, and then cuts across the side of a forest of towering pine and skeletal oak. You have to know where to look to spot the other inhabitants, many of them undocumented laborers from Guatemala.
Gilberto’s sneakers sank into the snow as he trudged up the trail, his hoodie pulled tightly against the cold. He emerged onto the bend of the highway and followed the two-lane road to the entrance of a park. Past the water fountain, next to a Little League field, Gilberto spotted something blue.
His brother had died on his back in a bank of snow, his white hair submerged in the powder, his only protection a blue Champion sweatshirt. His hands were clenched on his chest, like someone trying to cling to the last little bit of warmth.
“I thought I was going to die myself,” Gilberto said through a translator.
Across this chain of seaside villages comprising some of the most expensive real estate in the world, many of the migrant laborers who maintain the scenery cannot afford to live within it. The lucky ones rent a cuarto — a room inside a house crowded with other workers — for $800 to $1,000 a month. In winter, when landscaping work dries up, even that becomes out of reach for several dozen laborers, shelter workers and outreach staff say.
“It broke me to realize that in the Hamptons, plants are covered for the winter while people are left outside in the cold with nothing,” said Marit Molin, a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of Hamptons Community Outreach. “Like most other people, you think of the Hamptons as this place that’s lavish.”
The laborers’ encampments have become the home of a work force that is simultaneously essential and overlooked. Sheets of plastic hang in the woods in Bridgehampton, just down the road from Madonna’s 30-acre horse farm; in Southampton, where Calvin Klein built a glass-and-concrete fortress; and in East Hampton, where Jerry Seinfeld keeps an 11-acre estate.
The workers’ plight isn’t new. In 2022, a concierge for some of the Hamptons’ wealthiest patrons gave an interview describing how he had spent two years living in a six-by-six-foot tent in the woods. In 2024, a Guatemalan laborer who was living in the woods was struck and killed on a highway while walking to a bus stop, leading to an outpouring of concern.
But advocates for the workers say that the scale shifted in the last year. Where once the tents were clustered together, the workers have now spread out for fear of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“People are more scared, and they tend not to seek help,” Ms. Molin said.
There is no permanent homeless shelter in the Hamptons, but an organization called Maureen’s Haven provides refuge during the winter months in a rotating network of churches. Francisco was a familiar figure there. Its office is just 1.2 miles from where Francisco’s body was found.
“He was a 5-foot-5 — a tiny guy,” one shelter worker remembered. “‘Little Francisco,’ we called him. He was a sweet guy.”
In the late 1800s, gardening manuals written for estate owners in rural New York recommended wrapping fruit trees in rough sacking as winter approached. Many years later, the practice had its critics. A gardening column in 1978 warned that no one wanted to look at a wall of burlap for months on end.
Today, the hedges in the Hamptons are not just covered — they’re upholstered. “It’s like watching Dior fit a ball gown,” an editorial in The East Hampton Star declared.
“Oligarch A on Lily Pond Lane does it, then Oligarch B, just down the road, says, ‘That looks pretty great,’” said Todd Forrest, head of horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. Like other horticulturists, he believes most of the plants that are covered up don’t actually need to be.
Over the years, the need for gardeners in the Hamptons attracted immigrants from countries with agrarian roots. The Camey brothers, who were among 13 children of a sharecropper in San Raymundo, a town in Guatemala’s central highlands, arrived in the early 2000s. Francisco was 8 when he followed his father into the fields to plant corn, later cutting his hands removing the husks, and then transporting the cobs in a basket on his back, said his sister Marta Camey, who spoke via WhatsApp from beneath the corrugated tin roof of their family compound.
“Because they farmed land that belonged to other people, when the harvest came, it was divided in half — half for the owner and half for us,” she said. “That’s why they left — in order to help us get ahead, to help lift us up."
The first brother to leave was Manuel in 2001, followed by Gilberto and Francisco in 2003 and 2004, and finally Rafael, according to Gilberto and Rafael. Having paid smugglers to help them cross into the United States, they joined an unprecedented wave of Latino immigrants to the Hamptons, where the Latino population in the two largest towns grew eightfold between 1980 and 2000. That population then nearly tripled in the decades that followed, according to census data compiled through the University of Minnesota’s National Historical Geographic Information System as well as demographic reports.
Today, Latinos account for over one-quarter of the population of East Hampton and one-fifth of the town of Southampton.
There are now so many Guatemalans — over 20,000, according to census data — that the country opened a consulate in Riverhead in 2021, not far from the forest where the brothers ended up.
The Camey brothers found housing in cuartos that cost as little as $150 per month. They joined the daily vigil in front of the 7-Eleven in Southampton, where landscaping trucks begin pulling up at 5 a.m.
But the backlash was already underway: By 2004, the year after Francisco arrived, the 7-Eleven in Southampton had posted “No Loitering” signs in Spanish and English, according to photographs taken by the sociologist Corey Dolgon and published in his history, “The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise.” In 2006, a proposal to build a hiring hall in Southampton so that the laborers could wait for rides indoors was shelved in the face of stiff resistance. People holding a “Stop the Invasion” banner stood outside a building where the League of Women Voters had organized a forum to discuss the proposal, The Southampton News reported.
Petitions denounced the overflowing basements and homes divided by plywood walls where migrants lived together.
“The people who came to the Town Board insist there is nothing racial intended,” Theresa K. Quigley, the deputy supervisor of the Town of East Hampton, told The New York Times in 2012. She added, “They say they’re talking about overcrowding, but they’re talking about Latinos.”
At first, the Camey brothers’ wages were high enough that they were able to pay off the debt they owed to smugglers. Day laborers on average were earning around $10 an hour — $1,400 in a good month, $500 in a bad one, according to statistics in The Southampton Press. That meant that even in a bad month, they could still afford their cuarto. Manuel was able to go back to Guatemala to see his family, paying a smuggler a second time to return, he said. Manuel learned conversational English and secured a job in food prep in a restaurant, giving him the steadiness of year-round work.
Francisco worked as many shifts as he could to pay his expenses and send his mother 700 quetzales per month, about $90. For years, the cuarto economy worked for him.
But the gap between those who live behind the hedges and those who care for them continued to widen: Soon after he arrived, the average sales price of a home in the Hamptons soared past $1 million. Now, some homeowners are spending as much as $1 million per year to care for their hedges and landscaping. Roughly a decade ago, around the same time that trimming the hedges in the Hamptons became a luxury industry unto itself, Francisco slid off the grid into the woods, his family said.
The cost of a cuarto had ballooned to as much as $1,000 a month, and when work dried up after the first snowfall, he didn’t have enough money to make it to spring, his brothers said. He also drank — beer, the cheapest he could find. It was a way to blunt the isolation, and during the winter, a way to take the edge off the cold, his brothers said.
Francisco’s sister Marta said he had gotten worse after the death of their mother in 2013.
“One time, he contacted me, and he couldn’t bear to speak,” she said. “He was crying. And maybe then, because of the sadness, he chose to surrender himself to drinking.”
Six years ago, Gilberto was forced to join Francisco in the woods. “The numbers, they didn’t work anymore,” he explained.
By then, Francisco had lost contact with Manuel, Rafael and Marta. They repeatedly tried to contact him, but he hid from them, possibly because he was ashamed of his drinking, they said. Gilberto began caring for Francisco, sharing the earnings from the landscaping work he did, buying groceries for the two of them and cooking omelets and beans on the grill outside their tent.
On the morning when Francisco left and didn’t come back, he told Gilberto that he was going to go buy beer. Weeks after he died, empty 25-ounce cans of Natty Daddy still lay around his tent, like rings around a planet.
The Suffolk County medical examiner ruled that Francisco died of “chronic alcoholism,” based on his history of alcohol abuse and a blood alcohol concentration of 0.23 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for driving. The report does not discuss whether exposure to the cold played a role, and officials at the medical examiner’s office declined to be interviewed, directing inquiries to Suffolk County spokesman Michael Martino, who did not respond to questions sent by the Times.
But after reviewing the records at the request of The Times, three prominent forensic pathologists reached a different conclusion.
“He does have alcohol of 0.23, but in my opinion, if he had been indoors or in the shelter, he wouldn’t have died,” said one of the nation’s best-known forensic pathologists, Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City as well as the former chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. “The cause of death is hypothermia from collapsing in the snow while intoxicated — but he’s not fatally intoxicated,” he said.
The experts who reviewed the results pointed to the absence of liver cirrhosis or other disease that would support alcoholism as the primary cause, as well as the circumstances in which Francisco was found: lying in the snow with his pants off, a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing.”
Dr. Baden said that in his time as chief medical examiner in New York City he had diagnosed at least 100 cases similar to Francisco’s: a person is drunk or on drugs, loses their balance or faints, and falls in the snow. Once the body’s temperature begins to plunge, one of the cruelest tricks of the cold takes hold: The body’s thermostat breaks. Instead of pulling blood to the core to protect the organs, the blood is pushed to the extremities. The person freezing to death has a sudden and intense sensation of burning up. In their final moments, they strip off their clothes.
A leading expert on hypothermia, Roger W. Byard, an emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, concurs: “I just can’t ignore the snow,” he wrote in an email. “Clearly the circumstances point to hypothermia.”
Not long after she moved to the Hamptons in 2015, Ms. Molin noticed children sitting in the landscaping trucks parked along her street, watching movies while their parents mowed lawns. Ms. Molin, now 48, started a free summer camp for the children of laborers. And when an arctic cold snap brought freezing temperatures in 2023, she learned of a cluster of tents in Southampton where seven men from Guatemala and Mexico were living.
“I was deeply shaken — standing in the woods, in the cold, hearing them panic about the coming weather,” she said, describing how she had decided on the spot to get them motel rooms. Today she regularly heads into the woods to deliver socks and Gatorade, and the donations she collects pay for hotel rooms during blizzards, phone credits, food and back rent for those who fall behind.
Ms. Molin remains one of the few direct lifelines for the men in the forest. Maureen’s Haven, the nonprofit that works with churches to shelter homeless people, was sued over zoning violations by the town of Riverhead last year and is looking for a new location while litigation continues. Earlier this year, a Guatemalan laborer arrived at the office, leaning on another man for support, shuffling forward on feet so damaged by frostbite that doctors later amputated portions of both, said a shelter employee who asked to remain anonymous because of the lawsuit.
The shelter later paid for a $300 one-way ticket back to Guatemala, a voluntary repatriation coordinated with the Guatemalan Consulate.
That has been the consulate’s main role, said one of its administrators, Sergio Rendon. “When they are in trouble, we help them repatriate,” he said through an interpreter.
Two weeks after Francisco’s death, Gilberto and Manuel walked Ms. Molin to the sloping hill where their brother’s body had been found.
Gilberto showed her the picture he had snapped on his phone, with Francisco naked from the waist down, having taken off his jeans and thrown off his shoe. Before the police arrived, Gilberto had struggled to dress his brother.
Ms. Molin raised the money for the funeral and sent a minivan to the bend in the highway near where Francisco’s body was recovered to pick up other laborers living in tents. On a chilly afternoon in March, the group rode to a hotel, where the men from Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras took turns showering and getting their hair cut.
They changed into the black pants and T-shirts Ms. Molin had laid out for them on the hotel bed before heading to the church.
Francisco’s funeral was held in an airy church in Riverhead, a gathering place for Guatemalan migrants.
The only picture that the brothers could find of Francisco is out of focus. He is sitting on a tarp eating a tamale, framed by the golden beach grass that grows near the Hamptons. The image was framed and placed at the head of the church on a small table, covered in a cloth embroidered with blue angels.
In the pews, the brothers divided themselves according to their economic status. On one side of the aisle, Gilberto took a seat in an empty pew. Manuel and Rafael sat side by side on the other. Having secured regular housing in cuartos, they looked immeasurably younger than Gilberto, even though the brothers are close in age. All three brothers blamed Francisco for his vicios, or “vices,” viewing his descent into the woods as a personal failure as much as an economic one.
As the white-cassocked priest sprinkled the coffin with holy water, Gilberto used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eyes. When the casket was carried outside, he turned his back and covered his face with his hands.
A small group of mourners headed to a Guatemalan deli nearby, where they loaded their plastic plates with pepian de pollo. On the wall were advertisements in Spanish for rooms to rent: “One cuarto available for one person or two,” one said. “Preferably men who don’t have vices” — “vicios,” it says.
The brothers again sat at different tables. As he left, 48-year-old Manuel — who still has full-time work at a restaurant — slipped Gilberto $100. “Get yourself a room,” he said softly. “Please stop drinking.”
In April, Gilberto moved into a $900-a-month cuarto, with help from Manuel and Ms. Molin. It was his first time outside the woods in years, but he still struggles to sleep. Everywhere he looks, he said, he sees his brother.
Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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7) Minneapolis Donors Gave as ICE Surged, but Eviction Filings Are Rising
Residents organized to keep their neighbors housed during Operation Metro Surge, and convinced state legislators to pass a rent relief bill in May. Some fear it won’t be enough.
By Cari Spencer, June 21, 2026
Cari Spencer reports on housing reform and homelessness for MPR News.
Rosie Aviles helps to transport food from a distribution site for La Viña Comunidad Cristiana Church. Caroline Yang for The New York Times
When Kate Eubank showed up to Minneapolis City Hall in January to advocate a statewide eviction moratorium, she thought of a five-year-old boy at her daughter’s school.
Ms. Eubank had brought the boy a Christmas present three weeks earlier as his parents hid from the ICE agents roaming Minneapolis streets. Soon after, the boy’s father was taken at a bus stop, his mother lost her job and the family missed a rent payment.
Parents at the school then scrounged up the money to help the family avoid eviction.
It was Ms. Eubank’s first time speaking at City Hall. “We are at the limits of our capacity as neighbors and as family,” she said, leaning into the microphone while a scrum of cable news cameras faced her. “We can’t do enough and we can’t do it alone.”
That feeling mounted for months, as Ms. Eubank and hundreds of other Minnesotans reached into their pocketbooks to keep their neighbors housed. When grassroots funding dropped off, many organizers continued pressing local government leaders for intervention even as national attention faded.
For months, the government’s response was muted. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, would not impose an eviction moratorium. The Minneapolis City Council passed $3.8 million in rental assistance, but the Democratic mayor, Jacob Frey, vetoed measures to temporarily extend the grace period before an eviction.
Then in May, organizers notched an unexpected political win, securing $40 million in emergency rental assistance from the state. It represents a fourfold increase in the amount the state spends on that form of homelessness prevention in a typical year. But to the small army of neighborhood organizers striving to prevent evictions, the ICE surge exposed a deeper crisis the state is poorly positioned to address.
State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat, largely credits the rent movement for pressuring lawmakers to match their herculean lift.
At least $14 million in grassroots donations have been distributed since January, according to Yusra Murad, an organizer affiliated with the rent-fund coalition Keep Minnesota Housed. That figure, based on a tally of 40 rent funds, represents only part of the total raised, excluding donations from charitable foundations and other crowdfunding efforts.
Mr. Howard, who co-chairs the House housing committee and represents a suburb south of Minneapolis, said that “Minnesotans were leading in their own neighborhoods and then they took that same fight to the legislature. It really did prove pivotal.” He said lawmakers should learn from the system that Minnesotans built to provide far more rental assistance far more quickly.
“I heard more about the system failure of rental assistance during Operation Metro Surge than I ever have before, and I have heard about that for years,” Mr. Howard said. “We should feel pressure as government to be as responsive as we’ve seen folks at the community level.”
Alexandria Gomez, a substitute teacher, was among the thousands of Minnesotans who mobilized to support neighbors who were at risk if they left their homes.
She started the Phillips Community Free Store in 2020, sharing free produce and hygiene products outside of a volunteer-run bike shop in South Minneapolis. This January, while running food deliveries to families in hiding, she started getting questions about rent support.
Ms. Gomez and her fellow organizers quickly became experts on the resources available from the city and the county — and on the system’s limitations.
There were income restrictions. Confusing forms. Timelines that prevented residents from asking for help until they were almost over the edge. On top of it all, there wasn’t enough aid available, and people, many fearful of sharing information with the government, needed immediate help.
Ms. Gomez started a GoFundMe soon after Renee Good was killed, charting a system that skipped the usual requirements. If people said they needed help, she helped them. She was able to quickly identify who needed support, thanks to the network that persisted from 2020.
Leaders on each neighborhood block identified the needs in their area. She gave them cashier’s checks, which they passed along to families in hiding when rent was due.
Her efforts yielded more than $1.5 million in rent assistance, helping hundreds of families in the Phillips neighborhood stay in their homes.
Across the state, many other new rent funds worked in similar ways, as Minnesotans created a patchwork safety net together.
That community effort seems to have had a meaningful impact on eviction filings.
Last year, Minnesota hit a state record for the most evictions filed. In January and February, however, filings were slightly lower than the previous year, according to HOMELine, a nonprofit tenant advocacy group that tracks eviction data. Eric Hauge, a co-executive director at HOMELine, said mutual aid “absolutely kept filings artificially lower.”
But eviction filings are now again on track to exceed last year’s high. And grassroots donations have dwindled since Operation Metro Surge wound down, forcing many groups to shut down and shuffle renters to those that remain.
Now that the state aid has passed, it will probably reach local providers between July and September, according to the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.
“It’s too little, too late,” Ms. Gomez said of the state funding. “I don’t think it’s really going to scratch the surface of the need — especially considering we’ve only been helping people who are impacted by Metro Surge.”
For low-income renters alone, the state’s own research outlines a $350 million need for annual emergency rental assistance. When the federal government exacerbated that need, philanthropic foundations were slow to respond, with one notable exception: John Wilson, who grew up as a renter with an intimate view of housing precarity. He got rich after his company patented a cancer innovation, and started a foundation that has distributed more than $23 million to local rent groups as of June 11.
When the Wilson Foundation joined the rent movement in late February, Mr. Wilson tapped into a network of trusted mutual aid groups — allowing him to move at a speed unusual in the foundation world. Mr. Wilson said things seemed better than they were in March, but the amount of rent support requested has not diminished.
At La Viña church in Burnsville, a suburb south of Minneapolis, Pastor Miguel Aviles is acutely aware of how urgent the need created by the ICE surge remains in his community. Legal fees, outstanding bills and health costs are mounting, and many households are missing breadwinners. At the peak of Operation Metro Surge, he continued to lead his majority-Latino congregation in person, even when he feared he or his wife might be caught up in the seemingly indiscriminate sweeps. But he received the highest volume of calls for rent help in May and June, months after officials announced the end to the federal operation.
Mr. Aviles is celebrating the state rent relief win, but he’s not expecting the aid to reach many of the families he has been supporting.
As of June 5, the church has distributed more than $1.2 million in rent aid, helping more than 1,000 people. Many would not qualify for typical rent relief programs, Mr. Aviles said, because they are not named on an official lease and are renting from family or friends. “We know these cases are real and most agencies are ignoring these cases,” he said. “And these people are going to be out in the streets.”
Mutual aid is “putting the whole system on its head,” said Mr. Hauge of HOMELine. “And I think it does speak directly to the need for structural change.”
The struggle for noncitizens to access housing aid could get worse. In addition to wide cuts to food, health care benefits and much federal funding to the state, the Trump administration wants to disqualify citizens and legal residents who live with undocumented family members from receiving housing assistance or accessing public housing.
Anna Stamborski, a lead organizer of Neighbors Helping Neighbors — one of the largest mutual aid networks that formed in response to the ICE surge — said communities need to stay organized in the face of threats like these.
Although state funding is on the way, Ms. Stamborski and other rent organizers are disillusioned that the local government didn’t heed their most urgent demand: a delay in evictions when losing shelter meant potential violence with armed agents outside.
At the peak of the surge, it was not intervention from philanthropy, the government or corporations that reached those thrust into crisis, Ms. Stamborski said. It was those who built relationships and infrastructure with their neighbors. That’s the work Ms. Stamborski hopes will continue, as she foresees a long-term fight ahead.
“Churches know exactly who this rent relief is going for. Schools know exactly who these families are that need help with rent. Neighborhoods know exactly who those people are that they’re organizing within their neighborhoods,” Ms. Stamborski said. “There’s beauty in relationships and proximity.”
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8) Luxury Kushner Project Collides With Albanian Discontent
Protests in Albania against plans for a luxury tourist site have become a cause célèbre for opponents of President Trump and his family. But the politics are local.
By Andrew Higgins, Reporting from Tirana, Zvernec and Vlore, Albania, June 21, 2026
Protests in Tirana, Albania’s capital, against the government this month. Some Albanians worried that their cause was being hijacked by foreign activists. Hameraldi Agolli/Associated Press
Protests in Tirana, Albania’s capital, against the government this month. Some Albanians worried that their cause was being hijacked by foreign activists.Hameraldi Agolli/Associated Press
For more than three weeks protesters have gathered peacefully in Tirana, the capital of Albania, cheered on by Americans who see them as plucky warriors against President Trump, Israel and the greed of the “1 percent.”
The protests were set off by public outrage over violent security guards at the site of a planned coastal development financed by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and investors from the Gulf with an estimated cost of more than $4 billion.
For Americans on the left, Albanians are resisting Trump family corruption and so-called billionaire vultures. Conspiracy theorists on the right are embracing a different theory; they see pushback against Israel and supposed plans for what they call a “new Epstein island” off the southern coast of one of Europe’s poorest nations.
Albanians actually taking part in the protests, however, beg to differ.
“Nobody here is protesting against Trump or Israel,” said Elis Kodra, 33, who turned up with his girlfriend for a recent rally with several thousand people outside the office of Albania’s beleaguered prime minister, Edi Rama.
“We are protesting against everything else,” he added, complaining that Albania has been ruled since the collapse of Communism 35 years ago by the same self-serving politicians who rotate in and out office, give state contracts to their friends in business and pay little attention to the economic and other grievances of ordinary citizens.
The protests began after a video circulated online showing private security guards on May 30 dragging away a man who had joined a few dozen residents and environmental activists on a beach in the south of Albania that Mr. Kushner wants to be part of a proposed luxury hotel and resort project.
They had gathered to protest the sudden appearance of a metal fence with razor wire on the beach, which sits in an area designated a “protected landscape,” which allows construction to take place, near the village of Zvernec. The area and a mostly uninhabited nearby island, Sazan, are both part of the proposed development plan.
Sazan Real Estate Development L.L.C., the company linked to Mr. Kushner that is overseeing the project, said the guards who had manhandled the protester were employed by a third-party security contractor. “The incident,” it said, “was concerning and does not reflect the standards we expect from any party working in connection with the project.”
The government tried to calm public anger by canceling the licenses of two private security companies involved in the beach fracas, firing the local police chief and ordering the fence dismantled.
Yet protests continued, turning Tirana’s central boulevard into a nightly carnival of young and old, setting off what has been called Albania’s “flamingo revolution,” a reference to the protected area’s rich bird life.
Unfurled each night is a big banner in English that reads, “Albania is not for sale.”
Mr. Rama said in an interview that he met in January in Tirana with Ivanka Trump, who is married to Mr. Kushner, and an accompanying team of architects involved with the proposed project. But he insisted that no contracts had been signed or construction permits issued. The island at the center of the project, he said, belongs to the state and has not been sold, nor will it be.
Claims online that construction has already started, he said, are part of a “hurricane of digital hysteria,” though he conceded that there had been some “preparation of the site,” including the laying of a gravel track through a forest.
While a few protesters eager to catch the attention of foreign television crews have waved signs in English against Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, the main targets for their anger are Mr. Rama, 61, who has been in and out of government since 1998, and a former prime minister, Sali Berisha, 81, who leads the main opposition party.
Protesters have chanted, “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail.”
Mr. Rama, who secured a fourth term as prime minister last year when his Socialist Party won a landslide victory, said Albanians were being used as “cannon fodder” in “a fight in the United States and Europe against Trump.”
An online flood of exaggerated claims about the number of protesters, disinformation about their goals and false reports of violent clashes, he said, show that “democracies are committing suicide” by “allowing this venom and this infection to completely corrode their bodies.”
“Democracy without truth is not democracy anymore,” he added.
The government itself, though, has added to the online melee with claims that Iran has been stoking the protests to get back at Albania for sheltering an Iranian opposition group, Mujahedeen Khalq. Officials have also contended that the tourist industry in neighboring Greece, eager to avoid competition from Albania, has egged on and even funded the protesters.
Elez Biberaj, a political scientist and the former head of the Voice of America’s Albanian service, said the protests were not against President Trump’s family but “reflect collapse of public confidence in the entire political system” in Albania.
This has been largely lost in translation, turning the domestic travails of one of Europe’s poorest, most pro-American and smallest countries — its population is under three million — into a global cause célèbre for both the left and the right on platforms like TikTok, X and Instagram.
Lutfi Dervishi, 58, an independent political analyst, said he had grown up before the collapse of Communism and looked up to the United States as a beacon for the rule of law and media freedom. “I never in my wildest dreams thought that Americans would be looking to Albania for inspiration,” he said.
The protesters have inspired mainly American progressives. Senator Bernie Sanders hailed them on X as the vanguard of resistance against the “global oligarchy,” writing that Albania had risen up against an “environmentally disastrous luxury resort planned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Qatari billionaire partners.”
Rachel Maddow, the liberal television news host, cheered the “huge protests against the corruption of Donald Trump and his family.”
Some on the American right have also found encouragement from the demonstrations. Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, lauded the protesters for trying to take back their land “from Israel, Kushner, the Rothschilds and Ivanka Trump,” claiming that Albania “is going into civil war” with “bombings and machine gun attacks.” None of that is true.
Videos filmed years ago during riots in Tirana have been presented online in recent days as violence set off by Albanian fury against Mr. Trump and his family, while a huge gathering of jubilant Spanish soccer fans near a beach in northern Spain has been labeled online as an anti-Trump protest in Tirana led by triumphant young Albanians.
Online support for the Albanian protests has sometimes veered into openly antisemitic tirades. Some feature claims that Jews want to occupy parts of Albania and subject its people, a majority of whom are nominally Muslim, to the same fate as Palestinians.
Those kinds of claims make some protesters worry that foreign activists are trying to hijack their cause. Baki Goxhaj, 41, a practicing Muslim and a pro-Palestinian activist in Vlore, the coastal city near Mr. Kushner’s proposed project, travels each day to Tirana to join the protests with his wife. He said he had told others, “Don’t shout, ‘Down with Jews.’”
The protest movement, he said, “is not against Trump or against Jews,” adding, “It is against our own very corrupted government.”
What Mr. Goxhaj and many others see as corruption often involves the sale and use of land, a highly sensitive issue in a country where the former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha confiscated all private property after he took power in 1944. When Communism ended, this left Albanian courts in a position to adjudicate a torrent of rival property claims by former owners and their descendants.
Gentian Mocka, 56, said his family had been fighting for decades in the courts to recover over 91 acres of land confiscated by the Communist government. The property, which he said was later obtained fraudulently by a local lawyer who did work for Artur Shehu, an Albanian living in Miami, is part of a land parcel sold to partners of Mr. Kushner from Qatar in the luxury resort project.
Albania’s anticorruption agency, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, last week issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Shehu, a naturalized American citizen, accusing him of buying land and using Albanian construction projects to launder money for drug traffickers. The proceeds from his land sale to the Qataris have been frozen, Mr. Rama, the prime minister, said, but the sale still stood.
Mr. Shehu did not respond to messages seeking comment. He had previously called accusations of meetings with drug traffickers “fake news” and said that he had arranged to sell the land to Mr. Kushner and investors through an unnamed intermediary.
Mr. Mocka said that if he managed to get his land back he would happily sell it for Mr. Kushner’s project. “The whole family wants to sell and just wants to be finished with this whole thing,” he said.
Mr. Rama said the protesters were free to gather peacefully outside his office, adding, “Albania is not a dictatorship.” But he insisted that they would not derail Mr. Kushner’s resort project.
“It will not be canceled,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
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