Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable?
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr. Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed here, in no way calls for violence.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the President of the Texas State University system so easily–who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
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
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Dear Friend,
Since March 2025 the prison administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections was aware that Mumia's eyesight deteriorated to 20/200 (legally blind). Mumia was not able to read, including his mail, nor retrieve phone numbers, or proceed with his research and writing to complete his Phd dissertation.
For over seven months no treatment was provided. On September 2, Mumia was treated for complications from cataract surgery a few years ago. However, he remains disabled and at risk of loss of sight in his other eye, damaged by severe diabetic retinopathy. He needs that treatment immediately.
This is an outrageous attack on an innocent prisoner serving a life-without-parole sentence! A long history of Mumia’s 43 years imprisoned (29 of them on death row), have shown that prison authorities, who are required to provide adequate health care, failed to do so, leading Mumia’s supporters to the conclusion that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has actively tried to disable and even kill him. (They tried this in 2015 by failing to diagnose and treat Hepatitis C, sending Mumia into a near-fatal crisis.)
A loud and determined public response is required to win immediate treatment to restore Mumia’s full eyesight.
Please join this effort, do your part, and share this information.
Sincerely,
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  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 authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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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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1) Thousands protest Netanyahu’s U.N. speech in New York City.
By Andy Newman and Olivia Bensimon, September 26, 2025
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Friday morning, protesters on the streets of New York City addressed Mr. Netanyahu and the world.
The demonstrators began gathering in Times Square, across town from the United Nations building, early in the morning. A Palestinian flag flapped in the breeze as some of the protesters, most of them young, held signs reading “End All U.S. Aid to Israel,” “Arrest Netanyahu” and “Stop Starving Gaza Now!”
The crowd cheered loudly when organizers announced that heads of state had walked out of the General Assembly chamber en masse during Mr. Netanyahu’s speech. “Netanyahu you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” they chanted.
By the time the protesters began marching toward the U.N. at around 10:15 a.m., after Mr. Netanyahu had finished, there were about 2,000 of them, the police said. The demonstrators filled 42nd Street, the city’s marquee thoroughfare, then turned uptown and forced the closure of several blocks of Sixth Avenue.
The protesters also inveighed against America’s continued support of Israel. Trump administration officials “don’t care about the death of brown people who are Palestinians and they’re not considered human beings,” said David Robinson, 64, from Brooklyn. “We are watching this going on. It breaks my heart. And I don’t know why everybody isn’t here.”
Protests also greeted Mr. Netanyahu when he arrived in New York on Thursday. Shortly before midnight, 14 people were taken into custody at a “No Sleep for Netanyahu” demonstration near his hotel on the Upper East Side, the Loews Regency, and issued summonses for unreasonable noise, the police said.
Demonstrations against the Israeli government and in support of Palestinian rights have become common on college campuses and in major cities across the United States during the siege of Gaza that followed Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there, and starvation has spread throughout the territory. Israel is currently leveling parts of Gaza City through near-constant bombing.
A poll by The New York Times and Siena University this month found that in New York City — home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel — only 26 percent of registered voters sympathized more with Israel than with Palestinians, while 44 percent sympathized more with Palestinians.
Charles Hamlin, 63, came from New Orleans to attend the march. “I just am so frustrated with the apathy of Americans — putting on blinders, choosing to be willfully ignorant to feel not complicit in the situation,” he said.
Noting that Mr. Netanyahu had been charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes, Mr. Hamlin added that the prime minister “should not be able to come to New York City and lobby the U.N., Congress or anyone else to try to stave off the two-state solution or try to stave off a cease-fire.”
Some demonstrators also protested against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, who attended Mr. Netanyahu’s speech even as dozens of heads of state walked out.
Aaron Kirshenbaum, 24, from Brooklyn, called it “absolutely egregious” that Mr. Adams had let Mr. Netanyahu land in New York. The leading candidate in November’s mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would honor the International Criminal Court’s warrant and order the police to arrest Mr. Netanyahu if he set foot in the city.
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2) Israel Is Flattening Parts of Gaza City
By Samuel Granados and Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 26, 2025
Previously, Israeli troops advanced through Gaza City and then withdrew – only to return later to fight what they said was a renewed Hamas insurgency. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said this time around was different because the military would hold areas it seized.
“We capture territory and we hold it. We clean it out and we move forward,” he said in an interview this month with Channel 14, a right-wing Israeli television station.
Mr. Netanyahu says the offensive aims to decisively rout Hamas from one of its last strongholds in the Gaza Strip. But even many Israelis are skeptical that this strategy will succeed now, as Hamas has proven resilient in the face of nearly two years of devastating war.
The Israeli ground offensive has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in Gaza City, crowding into swelling tent camps in central and southern Gaza.
This has exacerbated what was already a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, with rampant hunger, mass displacement and a collapse of health care, schools and infrastructure. Many war-weary Gaza City residents say they simply cannot or will not be displaced again, and many have no homes to return to.
While closing in on Gaza City, Israel has used existing buildings as bases, only to later destroy them with explosives before moving onward, according to satellite images and videos verified by The New York Times.
One video shows the military destroying Al-Furqan school in the city, which it had earlier used as a military position.
In addition to carrying out demolitions, the Israeli military has also kept up airstrikes across Gaza City, striking hundreds of targets since mid-September.
In a satellite image from Sept. 18, the latest high-resolution image available from Planet Labs, a commercial satellite company, fewer tents could be seen compared with a time before Israel announced the launch of its Gaza City ground offensive two days earlier. Still, hundreds of tents were visible, many within around a mile of Israeli military vehicles.
Mustafa Siyam, 44, said he finally fled the city’s northern Shati neighborhood on Wednesday as Israeli forces drew nearer and the sound of explosions became incessant. He walked south for hours on foot with his wife and three children to reach central Gaza.
Mr. Siyam’s home was still standing before the current Israeli offensive. That might not be the case by the time he returns.
“It feels like the war has no goal or meaning, except to destroy as much of Gaza’s foundations as possible,” he said.
Israeli military officials have told reporters there is no policy to raze civilian neighborhoods wholesale. They say they are attacking sites used by Hamas, blowing up underground tunnels and other military targets.
But Israeli leaders have suggested it could go further than that.
Israel Katz, the defense minister, threatened in August that Gaza City would become “like Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” two cities that have been almost entirely destroyed in the war, unless Hamas laid down its arms and released the remaining hostages.
Eli Cohen, another minister in the high-level security cabinet, echoed the threat in a television interview, telling Channel 14 that “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins.”
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3) Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump
When broadcasters like CBS and ABC surrendered to the president, it looked as if they lacked backbone. The explanation runs much deeper.
By Noam Scheiber, Sept. 26, 2025
On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air, and many Americans concerned about government coercion seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
Though Mr. Kimmel’s employer, Disney, should have never caved to pressure to remove a talk-show host, the thinking went, and though it took too long for business leaders to stand up to the president’s bullying, they allowed, at least corporate America was finally drawing a line in the sand. “This is about fighting for free speech and against these abuses by Donald Trump,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, wrote on X.
But if the first eight months of the Trump presidency are any indication, the initial capitulation by Disney appears to be the more revealing part of the episode. After all, it’s hardly the first time that corporate America has caved to the administration.
When Mr. Trump first issued an executive order against a prominent law firm, the firm quickly sued, and several more firms discussed joining a collective response. But by the following month, nine major firms had cut deals with the White House.
After Mr. Trump suggested he might fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, some Wall Street chief executives gently pushed back, emphasizing the importance of an independent Fed. But these executives seemed to go mysteriously silent about Mr. Trump’s actual firing of a Federal Reserve governor. (Mr. Trump alleged that the governor had committed mortgage fraud, which she denied.)
Even ABC’s fellow broadcaster, CBS, showed some fight after Mr. Trump sued it for $10 billion (later increased to $20 billion) over what appeared to be the unremarkable editing of a news interview. CBS journalists appeared uncowed during a May 4 segment on “60 Minutes” featuring a Democratic election lawyer who compared the president to a “mob boss” seeking “protection money.” But CBS’s corporate parent settled two months later.
Why are leaders in the media, law and finance failing to stand up more forcefully to what many inside these industries say are abuses of presidential power?
Fear is the most obvious answer. They are scared that the president will do more damage if they try to resist, scared that he may even target them personally.
“It’s astonishing how spineless the masters of the universe and big bad billionaires really are,” said Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and Senate staff member who runs the financial reform group Better Markets. “If they’re going to cravenly capitulate over the independence of the Fed, it’s pretty clear they will not stand up for anything.”
Sheer terror undeniably plays an important role. But there appears to be a deeper explanation, too. Resisting government coercion is often a matter of collective action: Companies are much more likely to succeed if they stand together, rather than fight on their own. “It’s easy to pick off individual companies,” Mark Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies large corporations, said in an interview. “But if they’re all coming after you as a single collective, you can’t — he’d tank the whole economy.”
Over the past few generations, however, the culture and ethos of the American business elite has changed. A once cohesive establishment has broken down, making collective action rarer and much harder to achieve. Competition among companies has become increasingly cutthroat. Chief executives are often more concerned with their share price than their company’s long-term health, much less any genteel sense of obligation to a vague greater good. The civic organizations that once bonded corporate leaders to one another have been hollowed out or disappeared altogether.
“There’s no conceivable way anything like this could have occurred in the 1950s or ’60s,” added Mr. Mizruchi, author of “The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite.” But today, “it’s every person for themselves.”
The Rise of Shareholder Capitalism
The business world of the 1950s and 1960s was a clubby, inbred place and its apotheosis was the boardroom — especially the bank boardroom. The country’s biggest banks populated their boards with chief executives from a wide range of industries in order to keep tabs on the economy. When they gathered around a conference table, the executives tended to agree on matters large and small.
The bank boards “served as a source of normative consensus and stability among the leaders of the largest corporations, in part by helping to forge similar worldviews and behavior,” Mr. Mizruchi wrote in his book.
The agenda that these executives hashed out often reached far beyond their individual companies: Keynesian economic policies at home, anti-Communism abroad and, above all else, social order. It was an agenda of patrician civic-mindedness, built on feelings of mutual interest that often transcended party lines. And they enacted it through organizations and associations that allowed them to act as a unified front.
The Wall Street lawyer John McCloy, who served as the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank as well as the Ford Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, was so well-situated that he came to be known as “the chairman of the establishment.”
Other business leaders joined groups like the Committee for Economic Development, which advocated what they considered to be sound economic policy. The committee, whose trustees included the president of General Electric and the chairman of Coca-Cola, was a key player in the making of the Marshall Plan and pressed the government to hold down unemployment by spending more and cutting taxes during recessions. After President Richard Nixon pressured the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates in the early 1970s, another group of top executives, the Business Council, announced that a majority of its economic consultants had “strong concern” that the government’s approach would trigger “more rapid inflation.” (Inflation did subsequently spiral.)
Though members of this class were often elitist, racist and sexist, many at least thought of themselves as working in the national interest.
“The omnipresence of people like McCloy could be taken as evidence of conspiracy,” the journalist John B. Judis wrote in his book, “The Paradox of American Democracy.” “But it was more clearly evidence that the members of these different groups held a common view of their purpose.”
By the mid-1970s, however, this order was collapsing. Global competition and inflation chipped away at the profits that had kept the boardroom-dwellers feeling flush, and social change was chipping away at the race and gender barriers that had kept boardrooms so white and male. Prominent conservatives, like the Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, had urged business leaders to fund opposition to government intervention in the economy and other threats to free enterprise. Their efforts helped pave the way for the deregulation of industries like airlines, media, telecom and finance.
Around the same time, a new theory was descending from the ivory tower. Based on the work of economists like Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago and Michael Jensen of the University of Rochester, it held that the interests of shareholders should reign supreme in corporate decision-making, and that the key challenge of capitalism was to ensure that the hired help — that is, the executives — did what was best for the owners.
Economists of this ilk favored tying executive pay to a company’s share price, through stock options and stock grants. But their thinking unleashed a broader revolution, in which companies with underperforming stock became targets for corporate raiders, who could take them over, fire management and unlock vast piles of wealth.
Within a decade, the incentives of chief executives had completely changed. In the heyday of John McCloy and the bank boardroom, most chief executives had only a vague mandate to look out for their “stakeholders,” and often sought to maximize status and influence. By the 1980s, chief executives had to spend their waking hours plotting to maximize their share price, or find themselves out on their ear.
After relatively little turnover among the country’s largest corporations throughout the 20th century, almost one-third of the Fortune 500 companies vanished in the 1980s, many because of hostile takeovers. The average tenure of a Fortune 500 chief executive dropped from about nine and a half years in the early 1980s to around seven years in 2002, according to Mr. Mizruchi’s book, where it has continued to hover.
There were many advantages to breaking up the world of conglomerates, cartels and inbred boardrooms. The economy became more efficient and dynamic. Consumers often benefited and American firms became the most innovative on the planet (though critics later accused firms of focusing too much on short-term profits, and new firms of amassing their own monopoly power). The executive suite became more accessible to talented people who were once excluded as racial and gender discrimination eroded, albeit too slowly and haltingly.
But breaking up the American business establishment did have at least one major downside: It made it increasingly unlikely for companies to stand together. Instead of trying to fit in at the club, executives were inclined to kneecap fellow club members.
One clear measure of this was their behavior in Washington. Through at least the 1960s, a large majority of corporate lobbying was a collective enterprise — it happened through trade associations, not lobbyists that companies hired directly. That had completely reversed itself a generation later. In 1998, the typical industry spent about 63 percent of its lobbying money on its own lobbyists rather than trade associations, according to the political scientist Lee Drutman. By 2012, that portion had jumped to 71 percent.
“Shareholder capitalism puts intense pressure on quarterly earnings,” Mr. Drutman said in an interview. And that turned into pressure to gain an advantage over competitors with the government. “It becomes a real arms race,” he said.
Getting Yours
In some ways, corporations have never been more powerful. But they are also more vulnerable than ever to outside pressure — at exactly the moment when a president was determined to bend them to his will.
The country’s biggest banks have trillions in assets. But while bankers were once at the center of the club, they have spent the last few decades in an uneasy competition with hedge funds, private equity firms, asset managers and insurance-companies-that-act-like-banks.
Two banking-industry officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, highlighted the rising challenge from financial tech firms and cryptocurrency, which have brought about fears that customers might go around traditional banks.
“If I’m a traditional investment bank, my first instinct would be crypto should be regulated like everything else,” said Mr. Drutman. “But now that it’s not going to be, my second instinct is, ‘How do I make it work for me?’” When the collective solution fails, make sure you get yours.
Big Law used to be a highly stable business dominated by a few dozen pedigreed firms. The top firms mostly promoted from within, and most partners stayed with the same firm for much of their careers. Major clients stuck around for decades. But over the last generation, law firms have increasingly competed for one another’s rainmakers, who command eye-popping salaries and bring lucrative business. The fear of losing top talent and clients to rivals appeared to motivate some of the country’s biggest firms to cut deals with the Trump administration rather than fight executive orders targeting them.
American tech firms are among the most valuable companies on the planet. But over the past two decades, some of these companies have increasingly focused on undermining one another, not just in the commercial sphere but also in Washington. The competition to build lucrative new technologies, most recently artificial intelligence, has made coordination a particular challenge. Tech leaders rushed one by one to court Mr. Trump after the election. They barely flinched when the president insisted that some of them effectively pay a tribute to the government for the right to sell products in China.
Then there are the broadcasters, who have a history of pushing back against the White House. In a 1969 speech that would anticipate the Trump administration, Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked the “virtual monopoly” of television networks and questioned the power of their “small unelected elite” to shape coverage of his boss, Richard Nixon.
At the time, NBC and CBS were by far the two largest networks in the United States — “so damned big they think they own the country,” President Lyndon Johnson once observed. Perhaps in a tacit confirmation of the vice president’s critique, they showed little fear in speaking out about what they saw as an attempt at coercion. “Mr. Agnew uses the influence of his high office to criticize the way a government-licensed news medium covers the activities of the government itself,” the president of NBC complained.
But in the era of shareholder capitalism, the overseers of ABC and CBS must keep their eyes on the stock price. And by that measure they have been in no position to push back. The parent companies of both networks, Disney and Paramount, have seen their market value drop sharply over the past four years amid intense competition from streamers like Netflix and Amazon.
In fact, these same considerations may help explain Jimmy Kimmel’s return to his late-night perch. It was hard not to notice that Disney’s share price dropped amid the outrage over the host’s suspension, as customers began to cancel subscriptions to its streaming services. What’s true for companies may now also be true for democratic norms: Live by the share price, die by the share price.
Susan Beachy contributed research.
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4) Assata Shakur Dies at 78; Convicted Revolutionary Found Refuge in Cuba
A member of a militant Black group, she was found guilty in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper, escaped from prison and fled to Cuba, where she taught and wrote.
By Clyde Haberman, Sept. 26, 2025
Assata Shakur in Havana in 1987. She had channeled her politics through the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist organization that had broken away from the Black Panthers. Credit...Ozier Muhammad/Newsday, via Getty Images
Assata Shakur, the Black revolutionary once known as JoAnne Chesimard who found decades-long sanctuary in Cuba after escaping from a New Jersey prison where she was serving a life sentence in the 1973 shooting death of a state trooper, died on Thursday in Havana. She was 78.
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death without specifying a cause, citing only “health conditions and advanced age.”
Assata Shakur was both lionized and demonized long after she and the Black Liberation Army, the militant group she had embraced, faded from broad public consciousness. To supporters she was a tireless battler against racial oppression. To detractors she was a stone-cold cop killer, the first woman to land on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted terrorists” list, with $2 million in state and federal money offered for her capture.
For her part, Ms. Shakur regarded herself as “a 20th-century escaped slave.”
In the early 1970s, an era of American ferment on multiple fronts, Ms. Shakur channeled her radicalism through the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist organization that had broken away from the Black Panthers. Its members planted bombs, killed police officers and carried out robberies that they described as “expropriations.”
Ms. Shakur herself was indicted 10 times by federal and state authorities in New York and New Jersey on charges of murder, robbery and kidnapping. All but one of those cases ended in acquittals, dismissals or hung juries. The lone exception began with a car ride in the early morning of May 2, 1973.
She and two colleagues were in a beat-up Pontiac when New Jersey state troopers stopped them on the New Jersey Turnpike for having a broken taillight. The police account was that she and the others left the car with guns blazing. She fired first, they said, touching off a shootout in which a state trooper, Werner Foerster, was killed and another, James Harper, was wounded. One of Ms. Shakur’s companions, James Costan, was also wounded and died later. She, too, was shot, in the left shoulder and the underside of her right arm.
Soon captured, she was not put on trial until 1977 because, while in a holding cell with a man named Fred Hilton in an unrelated Bronx robbery case, she had become pregnant.
Ms. Shakur’s version was that she never held a gun on that 1973 morning and that her arms were in the air when she was shot. Her lawyers said she was mistreated in jail and given poor medical care. Doctors testified on her behalf that the wounds supported her claim that her arms had been raised.
Nonetheless, prosecutors insisted that, when shot, she was in a crouch and firing at Trooper Harper. In the end, an all-white jury of seven women and five men believed them. Though there was no evidence that she had fired at the slain Trooper Foerster, everyone involved in the killing of a police officer was deemed equally responsible under New Jersey law.
In March 1977, the jurors swiftly found her guilty of first-degree murder and assault. She was sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years.
She did not remain behind bars for long.
On Nov. 2, 1979, three armed men from the Black Liberation Army broke her out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, a penitentiary in western New Jersey now named for Edna Mahan, a prison superintendent. Using false identification, and apparently not having been searched for weapons, her colleagues were able to free her, taking two guards hostage and commandeering a van. The hostages were later released unharmed.
In an unrelated case eight years later, one of the men who had helped her escape, Tyrone Rison, testified that Ms. Shakur was taken to a “safe house” in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and then to an apartment in East Orange, N.J., followed by stops in Pittsburgh and the Bahamas. She arrived in Cuba in 1984 and was granted asylum.
There she stayed, getting by with money from the government while teaching, writing poetry and studying. Despite being labeled a terrorist by the F.B.I., and despite the $2 million bounty on her head, she remained beyond the reach of American authorities, all the while professing her innocence.
In 1988, Ms. Shakur published an autobiography, “Assata,” a name she had assumed in 1971, forsaking what she called her “slave name.” The book was replete with spellings and locutions that were standard in radical circles, like references to America as “amerika” and to the police as “pigs.” She routinely used a lowercase “i” as a first-person pronoun — to “take away from the egotistical connotation of the word,” she said.
As for her name, she wrote: “It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman.”
And so she became a Muslim named Assata Olugbala Shakur (Assata derived from an Arabic name meaning “she who struggles,” Olugbala from a Yoruba word for “savior” and Shakur from the Arabic “thankful one”). She regarded herself as a godmother to the rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot to death in 1996 when he was 25.
To many Black people she was a folk hero. Several rap artists name-checked her or even devoted entire songs to her. In “Rebel Without a Pause,” Public Enemy sang, “Hard, my calling card/Recorded and ordered, supporter of Chesimard.” In “A Song for Assata,” Common wrote in part, “Shot twice with hands up/Police questioned but shot before she answered.”
At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which Ms. Shakur once attended, a scholarship bore her name for several years. At the City College of New York, another school she attended, students named a community and student center for her and for Guillermo Morales, a Puerto Rican nationalist who was implicated in many bombings and who also found refuge in Cuba. A 2005 resolution in the New York City Council urged clemency for her, but it did not pass.
In Cuba, Ms. Shakur gave few interviews. She was described as being wary of strangers, concerned that such contact — not to mention the reward money — might lead to her being taken captive and returned to a prison cell in the United States.
Her survivors include Kakuya Shakur, her daughter with Fred Hilton.
The woman who became Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Queens on July 16, 1947. Her father, Carl Byron, was an accountant; her mother, Doris Johnson, was a schoolteacher. They divorced soon after their daughter was born. Part of JoAnne’s girlhood was spent shuttling between New York and North Carolina, where she lived with her maternal grandparents.
“All of my family tried to instill in me a sense of personal dignity,” Ms. Shakur wrote in her autobiography, “but my grandmother and my grandfather were really fanatic about it. Over and over they would tell me, ‘You’re as good as anyone else. Don’t let anybody tell you that they’re better than you.”
Her teenage years were troubled, and, she acknowledged, her temper was “terrible.” At 17, she dropped out of a Roman Catholic high school, took several jobs that didn’t last and finally attended night classes to get a diploma. At 21, she married a man named Louis Chesimard, and though their union ended after a year, the surname endured. She attended City College from 1968 to 1971 but did not graduate.
By then, her radicalism was in full bloom, first with the Black Panthers and then with the Black Liberation Army, a group that had basically fallen apart by the 1980s.
“I feel I’ve been a victim of America,” Ms. Shakur told a Newsday reporter who interviewed her in Cuba in 1987.
“If I owe allegiance to anything,” she said, “it is my ancestors, especially the ones who came over the slave ship. I feel I am answerable to them. I want to be able to say I tried, and that I tried to stand on this earth proud.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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5) Trump Says He Has Ordered Troops to Protect ICE Facilities in Portland
The president characterized Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities as being under siege from domestic terrorists.
By Luke BroadwaterAnna Griffin and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 27, 2025
Luke Broadwater and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Anna Griffin from Portland, Ore.
Protesters gathered outside an apparent ICE detention center in Portland in June. Portland is one of the Democratic cities that has been in the president’s sights. Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times
President Trump declared on Saturday that he had directed troops to be sent to Portland, Ore., saying he had authorized them to use “full force” to quell protests directed at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities.
The order was the latest instance of Mr. Trump’s use of the American military on the nation’s streets, after federal troops were sent to Washington last month in an effort to crack down on crime. Federal agents will begin arriving in Memphis as early as next week, after the president authorized the use of the National Guard there as part of a similar crackdown.
Like Mr. Trump’s other dispatches of federal forces, the Portland directive was quickly opposed by state and local officials, who called it unnecessary.
Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said in an afternoon news briefing that she had spoken with the president and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, on Saturday, and that she had told them to stay out. She did not plan to approve the use of the state’s National Guard, she added.
“Portland is doing just fine. I made that very clear to the president,” she said from the city’s downtown riverfront, as bicyclists and pontoon boats passed behind her. “We got this. We are doing fine. There is no insurrection. We do not need or want federal troops in Oregon.”
Ms. Kotek, who said that she learned of the president’s declaration after “waking up to the news on social media, like everyone else,” declined to reveal what Mr. Trump had told her, other than that he had agreed to continue talking.
Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that, at Ms. Noem’s request, he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
He added: “I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
It was not immediately clear what Mr. Trump meant by “full force.” Portland is one of the Democratic-led cities that has been in the president’s sights; he previously threatened to send the National Guard into Chicago to combat crime, though he has not yet done so.
In a statement, the Pentagon said it was “aware of the president’s directive to mobilize military personnel to Portland.”
Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said in an interview that Oregon’s state and congressional leaders had not heard from the administration before the president’s social media post, despite repeated requests for information and for a chance to provide input. He and other civic leaders said they were puzzled by what they viewed as a fixation with Portland.
“Anytime he sees a TV show that involves even a mention of Portland, he gets all worked up. You can set your clock by it,” he said. “A lot of his policies come by whim. So we need to push back, push back, push back until he gets another whim.”
Mr. Wyden said that he and other Democratic members of Congress were exploring ways they might respond if the administration did take steps they considered abuses of presidential power.
Demonstrators have been camped outside the ICE building near the Willamette River in southwest Portland for several months, rarely numbering more than two dozen. Brief, isolated skirmishes have broken out between protesters and federal law enforcement, but they have been confined to a few blocks in a neighborhood outside the urban core.
A charter school that rented space next to the ICE building moved out this fall, citing the heavy use of tear gas by federal agents and potential health risks for students.
Demonstrators have been pushing city leaders to use municipal land-use laws to close the federal facility. The ICE building has been used for immigrant processing since 2011, and city code bans the federal agency from detaining people there for more than 12 hours. This month, Mayor Keith Wilson, a Democrat, announced that the city would investigate whether the federal agency had violated local laws by holding people for longer than allowed.
Federal descriptions of how events have unfolded at the building in Portland run counter to accounts from local law enforcement and demonstrators.
“We’re certainly not on fire,” Bob Day, the chief of the Portland Police Bureau, said in an interview this week. “Some of what you are seeing out there just does not accurately reflect what’s happening in this city.”
Protesters at the ICE building in Portland said their days have taken on a familiar pattern: They position themselves just outside the garage gate, then chant and hold up signs when federal cars leave every 40 minutes or so.
Their efforts draw little to no response during the day and early evening. But later, usually after a nearby streetcar stops running around midnight, federal agents regularly leave the building to confront them and attempt to drive them away.
“They get violent,” said Andy Siebe, a participant in 2020 protests in Portland who was outside the ICE building Saturday afternoon. They rested in a camping chair and spoke with the many passers-by who honked in support, dropped off supplies or took pictures.
“Tear gas, batons, bear spray, rubber bullets, shields,” Mx. Siebe said.
Portland police officers have been ordered to stay out of the way when federal law enforcement officials clash with demonstrators, but to intervene when they see people committing acts of violence or vandalism.
There had been only 15 or 20 people participating in the latest protests each night, Mx. Siebe noted, adding that the federal activity would “change things.”
“It’s going to get people who stopped paying attention engaged again,” they said.
The shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas this week that killed one detainee and critically injured two others has left the agency particularly sensitive to any potential security concerns at its facilities. The F.B.I. said it was investigating the attack as “an act of targeted violence.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that “President Trump and Secretary Noem are taking action to restore law and order following weeks of violent riots at ICE facilities, assaults on law enforcement and the terrorist attack at our ICE facility in Dallas.”
She added: “We are not going to allow domestic terrorists to attack our law enforcement."
Mr. Trump signed an executive order this week targeting antifa, a loosely defined left-wing antifascist movement. He threatened “investigatory and prosecutorial action” against those who financially support it.
In his order, Mr. Trump said that he was declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not actually exist under U.S. law. Anti-fascism, like fascism itself, is a broad political ideology rather than a specific organization, and the United States does not have a domestic terrorism law.
Since July, the Department of Homeland Security has been focused on protesters outside an ICE facility in Portland, saying that month that the site was “under siege.”
“Rioters have attacked law enforcement officials, destroyed federal property, and have posted death threats at the facility,” the agency said in a statement in July.
In a news conference on Friday night, Portland civic leaders responded to reports of an increased federal presence, urging calm and telling residents that they believed Mr. Trump wanted to bait protesters into violent interactions with law enforcement.
“We’re in the midst of a renaissance, not chaos,” said Mr. Wilson, the city’s mayor. “If you walk out on the streets of Portland, or any day, you’ll see people with hope and businesses flourishing.”
He added: “As leaders, we are focused on bringing everybody together, not dividing us, and certainly not being part of a made-for-TV event.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
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6) Des Moines Schools Superintendent Arrested By ICE Is Placed on Leave
School Board members in Iowa’s capital made the decision one day after immigration officials accused the superintendent, Ian Roberts, of being in the country illegally.
By Mitch Smith and Ann Hinga Klein, Reporting from Des Moines, Published Sept. 27, 2025, Updated Sept. 28, 2025
Last week, school officials in Des Moines were celebrating improved marks on a state evaluation. The superintendent, Ian Roberts, who in two years on the job had already become a well-known figure in Iowa, said the report showed “that we have the foundation of an outstanding school district that will continue to grow and improve.”
Days later, the Des Moines Public Schools system was in disarray.
Dr. Roberts was in the custody of federal immigration officials, who asserted that he had been leading the school system while in the United States illegally. District officials were struggling to answer questions about their vetting process for hiring Dr. Roberts and straining to square the description of Dr. Roberts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials with the man they knew. On Saturday, School Board members voted 7 to 0 to place Dr. Roberts on paid administrative leave during a meeting that lasted less than three minutes.
“I want to be clear, no one here was aware of any citizenship or immigration issues that Dr. Roberts may have been facing,” said Jackie Norris, the School Board chair, in a statement that she said she was reading on behalf of the Board. “The accusations ICE has made against Dr. Roberts are very serious, and we are taking them very seriously.”
Ms. Norris, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, said Dr. Roberts had said he was a U.S. citizen on an Iowa application for a superintendent license. Board members declined to take questions from reporters.
The abrupt turn from optimism to chaos in the Des Moines school system started on Friday morning as word spread of a law enforcement search on the city’s south side. The police radio crackled with word that ICE agents were seeking a man in a gray suit and pink shirt who had fled officers near a trailer park. Hours later, ICE would say they had arrested Dr. Roberts, who was born in Guyana. ICE officials said Dr. Roberts had a deportation order, no authorization to work in the United States, and had faced weapon possession charges several years ago.
It would have been a shocking turn of events during any period. But the timing of Dr. Roberts’s detention, in the midst of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, contributed to heightened suspicions and tensions, with some residents protesting the superintendent’s detention and some politicians describing it as proof of a lawless immigration system.
“He should have never been anywhere around Iowa kids in the first place!” Representative Ashley Hinson, an Iowa Republican, posted on social media. She said Dr. Roberts “should be deported immediately.”
Dr. Roberts remained in custody at an Iowa jail on Saturday. Alfredo Parrish, a lawyer representing Dr. Roberts, said in a brief phone interview that he was in agreement with the district’s decision to place the superintendent on leave with pay.
“We are still trying to get the facts accurate,” Mr. Parrish said.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said that “those who believe immigration laws are optional are dangerously wrong.”
In Des Moines, a left-leaning city in a state led by Republicans, residents expressed a mix of views, as well as confusion about the situation.
Some wondered whether their school district, Iowa’s largest with more than 30,000 students, had missed red flags when it hired Dr. Roberts. They also voiced concern about ICE’s accusations, including that Dr. Roberts had been in possession of a loaded gun and a knife when agents confronted him; some, too, said they had doubts about whether they could fully trust those claims. There were also fond memories of an upbeat, engaging administrator who, parents said, had built deep bonds in his short tenure.
“It’s just shocking and confusing and makes me grieve for what was and never will be again,” said Elizabeth Talbert, a parent, who recalled how students once cheered when Dr. Roberts made an appearance at a basketball game. “No matter how this turns out, this is scarring, and it’s going to be divisive.”
ICE officials said Dr. Roberts, who had once competed in track and field at the Olympics for Guyana, entered the United States in 1999 on a student visa and had received a deportation order from an immigration judge in May 2024.
Court documents corroborated some of ICE’s description. Pennsylvania records from 2021 and 2022 showed that Dr. Roberts pleaded guilty after being charged with having a loaded firearm inside a vehicle.
That incident, which took place during Dr. Roberts’s stint leading the Millcreek Township School District, became a local news story. Dr. Roberts said at the time that a state game warden had cited him while he was hunting in a wooded area. He said he was a licensed gun owner and had placed the weapon in his vehicle while speaking to the officer in an effort to make the warden feel safe.
Still unanswered was how, if ICE’s other assertions were proven, Dr. Roberts had managed to move from school system to school system over the years, often in leadership roles, without authorization to work in the country. He had built an increasingly notable profile nationally as a school administrator, book author and recipient of advanced degrees.
Under his leadership, the Des Moines school district advanced racial equity efforts that were criticized by some conservatives. This fall, Dr. Roberts was asking voters to approve more funding for the school district. Chris Coleman, a City Council member, described him as a constant presence at Des Moines schools, businesses and government events.
“He was everywhere,” Mr. Coleman said. “He showed a caring spirit. He was very attentive and personable. He was a master at remembering names and making connections. I think that’s why the community is so distressed over the situation.”
In a statement, Sam Olson, an ICE field office director, described the employment of Dr. Roberts as “beyond comprehension,” given a judge’s order for his removal and a lack of work authorization. He described it as a situation that “should alarm the parents of that school district.”
Des Moines Public Schools officials said Dr. Roberts, whose base salary is about $286,000, had filled out forms at the time of his hiring that were intended to prove that he was allowed to work in the United States. The district noted that an outside consulting firm had been involved in the search that led to Dr. Roberts’s hiring, and that a background check firm had looked into Dr. Roberts’s past as part of the hiring process.
Officials at the consulting firm did not respond to questions, and the president of the background check firm said that immigration-related issues were outside the purview of their review. Des Moines district officials said they had been aware of the Pennsylvania gun case before Dr. Roberts was hired.
Dana Goldstein and Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting.
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7) Fear and Hope in Venezuela as U.S. Warships Lurk
On a visit to Venezuela, The Times found a nation bracing for potential U.S. military action.
By Julie TurkewitzPhotographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
Reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, Sept. 28, 2025
Members of the Bolivarian militia, a reserve force, riding on an armored military vehicle in Caracas, the capital, this month during a march in support of President Nicolás Maduro.
In one corner of Venezuela’s capital, hundreds of government supporters held guns to their chests, as one speaker after another, microphone in hand, urged them to defend the nation with their lives.
In another corner, businessmen and diplomats worried about the escalating tensions between Venezuela and the United States, about what they see as a lost opportunity for dialogue between the two countries and about the possibility of a U.S. strike that could unleash bloodshed and chaos.
Still, in other parts of the capital, Caracas, there was a battle-weary calm and skepticism that there will ever be political change in Venezuela.
Granted a rare visa for foreign journalists, I spent a week in Venezuela at a particularly tense time. Relations with the United States are at a crossroads, with the Trump administration sending warships into the Caribbean. The buildup’s size and President Trump’s public threats against President Nicolás Maduro have raised the specter of strikes, of commando raids in the South American nation, or of some broader conflict.
President Trump has said he wants to unleash the military on cartels and stop trafficking to the United States, and his administration has called Mr. Maduro the head of a terrorist organization threatening the United States and flooding it with drugs.
The United States says it has blown up at least three drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, including at least two from Venezuela, in a significant escalation of the kind of pressure that Mr. Trump has put on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl.
But while some drugs do come from Venezuela, fentanyl does not, and the cocaine that does is a very small percentage of the trade, far less than what comes from Colombia and exits from Colombia and Ecuador, according to the U.S. government’s accounting.
That has led many observers to say that the Trump administration’s real goal is to go after Mr. Maduro.
In interviews, some Venezuelans said they supported any action that would lead to the ouster of Mr. Maduro, who is accused of major human rights violations and whose movement has led the country for a generation.
The group supporting the use of force is led by Maria Corina Machado, an opposition leader. Her base says that by removing Mr. Maduro, the United States could defend the result of last year’s presidential vote, which Mr. Maduro is widely believed to have lost. Independent vote monitors and many countries, including the United States, recognized Mr. Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, a surrogate for Ms. Machado, as the legitimate victor.
One of Ms. Machado’s advisers, Pedro Urruchurtu, said she was coordinating with the Trump administration and had a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro’s fall. That plan involves the participation of international allies, he said, “especially the United States,” and would “guarantee a stable transition” to Mr. González.
But in interviews, other Venezuelans were far less eager to see the United States get involved. Many, even those who said they wanted to see Mr. Maduro gone, arguing that he has held on only through repression, said that a violent U.S. move was not the solution. Many people spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation.
Some said they doubted the willingness of the United States to keep a large contingent of troops on the ground to ensure the stability of a U.S.-backed government.
Three diplomats said they saw few signs that anyone in Mr. Maduro’s inner circle would split to support an opposition leader, or that the military would turn on him.
Other Venezuelans warned that ousting Mr. Maduro would only invite the armed actors left behind — the military, Colombian guerrilla groups, paramilitary gangs — into a battle for the spoils.
And in Venezuela, with its oil, gold and other minerals, there are many spoils.
“You kill Maduro,” said one prominent businessman, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti,” which descended into chaos after its last president was assassinated.
Still others were skeptical that Mr. Trump was willing to get involved militarily and said that the president’s gunboat strategy, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, would only push Venezuela further from the United States and toward China, Russia and Iran.
Mr. Maduro has responded to Washington’s mobilization by arming civilians, sending tanks into the streets and announcing military exercises throughout the country, which have been publicized on state television and social media. But his advisers say the central message to Washington is that their government does not want war.
The Venezuelan president sent a letter to Mr. Trump this month praising his efforts to halt other conflicts and said he was open to a “direct and frank conversation” with Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, Richard Grenell.
Early this year, Mr. Grenell seemed to be trying to improve relations, traveling to Venezuela to meet with Mr. Maduro just after Mr. Trump took office. But more recently, Mr. Trump appears to favor Mr. Rubio’s hard-line approach.
In an interview at her office inside the country’s oil ministry building, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said that she believed Mr. Trump was leading the world into “a stage where the United States has openly declared war on the world.”
“The Ministry of Defense is no longer Defense, it’s the Ministry of War,” she said. “Trade relations are no longer trade relations, they are a trade war.”
She called the boat attacks “absolutely illegal” and called for a normalization of economic relations with the United States, which has imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s vital oil industry.
“The people of the United States do not want war in the Caribbean,” she said.
Even amid escalating tensions, Venezuela has continued to accept twice-weekly flights of deportees from the United States, said the country’s foreign minister, Yván Gil.
Several diplomats and business leaders in Caracas said that they hoped the United States would shift back to a policy of diplomacy, believing that persistent negotiations could eventually persuade Mr. Maduro to hand power to a reformist successor or moderate opposition leader in exchange for sanctions relief and other conditions.
They also said that he is tired but cannot leave office if he thinks he will be arrested. Mr. Maduro, who is 62 and has led the country since 2013, is under indictment in the United States on drug conspiracy charges.
On the streets of Caracas, the strain between the two nations has produced contrasting images of war and peace.
On a recent day, a downtown boulevard filled with people the government had gathered for a rally: some civilians, others members of the Bolivarian militia, a reserve force.
Several people said that they worked for the government, that their superiors had required attendance and that they had been given unloaded guns to hold during the event. Many hurried to leave as soon as it ended.
Others said that patriotism had brought them out and vowed to defend Mr. Maduro and his movement.
“If there is an invasion,” said Marisol Amundaray, 50, “I will safeguard my children and head to the street with my rifle.”
In other parts of the city, though, normal life continued. Not far from the presidential palace one morning, Constanza Sofía Arangeren twirled on a cobblestone street in a gold ball gown as a photographer snapped away.
She was preparing her 15th birthday celebration, and her mother was more anxious about the coming party than a possible invasion.
No one interviewed said they were hoarding supplies. Some said they were not worried about an attack; others said they couldn’t afford to.
“In a normal country where there is a threat like this, the first thing people do is stock up on food,” said Estefanie Mendoza, 42, a social worker with two children, “but we can’t do that.”
While the country’s economy has recovered somewhat since a protracted crisis helped fuel a migrant exodus, the rebound has been uneven.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have argued that significant amounts of cocaine are trafficked through Venezuela and that they are seeking to stop U.S. overdoses. A 2020 report from the U.S. State Department said just 10 percent to 13 percent of the global cocaine supply goes through Venezuela.
Fentanyl, which causes far more overdoses than cocaine, is almost entirely produced in Mexico with chemicals imported from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The boats that U.S. forces have bombed in the Caribbean have killed at least 17 people, according to the Trump administration.
Some legal exerts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians not directly taking part in hostilities, even if they are believed to be smuggling drugs.
In the state of Sucre, on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, the first boat to have been destroyed, on Sept. 2, is widely believed to have been carrying people from the towns of San Juan de Unare and Güiria, on a spit of land known as the Paria Peninsula.
For years the region has been dominated by cocaine trafficking, according to Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who has conducted field work in the area.
But migrants, trafficking victims and government-subsidized Venezuelan gasoline — which can be sold at a higher price in Trinidad and Tobago, just six miles away — also leave from this area, she said.
In an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.
Some in Venezuela said they feared U.S. military action would mean more loss. And they said they didn’t believe that Ms. Machado, who says she is in hiding in Venezuela, and Mr. González, in exile in Spain, could guarantee their security.
“Name one successful case in the last few years of a successful U.S. military intervention,” said Henrique Capriles, an opposition politician who has clashed with Ms. Machado.
A bloodless U.S. “extraction” of Mr. Maduro was the stuff of Netflix, he said, not reality.
“And the cost for us Venezuelans, what will it be? What guarantee do we have that this will translate into a recovery of our democracy?”
Nayrobis Rodríguez, Tibisay Romero and Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.
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8) Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has launched a McCarthyite assault on freedom of speech. The government, corporations, and institutions have censured, suspended, and fired workers from Jimmy Kimmel to the Washington Post’s only Black woman columnist Karen Attiah and others in almost every imaginable occupation for telling jokes, making statements, or posting critical comments on social media.
Even before Kirk’s assassination, the New McCarthyism was gaining steam. In one of the worst instances, Texas State University fired tenured professor Tom Alter for the crime of speaking at an online socialist conference. Far right grifter and self-declared “anti-communist cult leader” Karlyn Borysenko violated the conference’s protocols, recorded Alter’s speech, edited it to distort his comments, and shared her doctored video on social media, which then went viral.
President Kelly Damphousse responded by summarily firing Alter without due process, violating his First Amendment rights and academic freedom. Alter is a beloved teacher, author of the widely acclaimed book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, and a member of the Texas State Employee Union.
CounterPunch’s Ashley Smith here interviews Alter about his firing and the campaign to overturn his dismissal and reinstate him with full pay and benefits and without censure or restrictions.
Ashley Smith: You have just been fired from Texas State University for speaking at a socialist conference. What happened? What was the university’s justification for firing you? Has discipline or firing of this sort ever happened before? Isn’t this a threat to First Amendment rights and academic freedom for everyone?
Dr. Tom Alter: On September 7, I participated in the online Revolutionary Socialism Conference. I gave a talk during the session titled “Building Revolutionary Organization Today.” At the beginning of my talk, I identified myself as a member of Socialist Horizon and the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU). I consciously did not identify myself as a faculty member or employee of Texas State University (TXST) during my talk. I gave the talk over Zoom, from my home, on a Sunday morning, during my own time.
Unbeknownst to conference participants and in violation of the conference rules of no recording or streaming, an online social media grifter recorded the conference. This person is a self-described fascist with horribly antisemitic and anti-queer views. The next day the fascist grifter called a campaign for my firing from TXST.
Two days later, while I was at my son’s soccer practice, I received a text from a local San Marcos community activist group chat drawing my attention to TXST President Kelly Damphousse’s public statement announcing my immediate termination. That’s how I found out I was fired. Damphousse stated that he “was informed about controversial statements that were made by one of our faculty members at a conference” and accused me of “inciting violence.”
Upon seeing this I immediately returned home and found that I had been cut-off from my TXST email. I later found an email from the university Provost in my personal email notifying me of my termination. The provost’s email also refers to my participation “at a recent conference.”
After a review of the conference video, the university determined that I “have engaged in conduct that jeopardizes the health and safety of our university community. You have also engaged in conduct that reflects inappropriate and poor judgement as a faculty member at Texas State University.” The reasons outlined in the provost’s email are the University’s justifications for firing me.
Repression of academic freedom, even that of tenured professors, is not something new in the U.S. What makes my case different is that there was no due process, not even a predetermined sham process. I was a tenured professor at a public university; this entitles me to due process according to TXST policy and state law.
This is in addition to protections afforded to me and all Americans by federal Constitutional rights. My firing is a threat to everyone’s first amendment rights and specifically all educators’ academic freedom. If I can be fired without due process and in violation of my democratic rights, then all our democratic rights are in serious jeopardy.
What makes this threat to our rights even more alarming is that President Damphousse in citing the conference video in connection to my firing has capitulated to a self-described fascist. This erodes the basic underpinnings of a free and democratic society.
Ashley Smith: How have your co-workers, union, and students responded? What does your defense campaign look like? What has been the response from the university bosses to the outpouring of support for you and other targeted professors?
Dr. Tom Alter: While my firing by TXST was quick, the response of students to my firing was even quicker. I was fired on a Wednesday evening and on Thursday students spontaneously protested my firing on campus. Student-led protests on campus lasted for five school days, calling for my reinstatement and defense of free speech. The spontaneous student protests have subsided, but they have launched a long-term campaign in defense of free speech, which includes the demand “FREE DR. ALTER.”
My two unions, the TSEU and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also came to my immediate defense. The TSEU is a statewide union representing all employees of the state of Texas. The union quickly started circulating a petition calling for my reinstatement and has taken this campaign to campuses across Texas. The AAUP has provided legal assistance and statements of support.
Everyone, everywhere, join a union! If my firing results in increased union membership, that will be a win. Statements of solidarity and offers of support continue to pour in. They have come from academic associations and community organizations of all kinds. My email inbox is flooded with so many messages that I am unable to answer them. I want people to know that I have seen your messages, and they are keeping me going. Thank you.
Needless to say, members of Socialist Horizon were there at the beginning and put taking care of me and my family first. Now with the help of other socialist and working-class left organizations a broad united front national campaign is being organized. This campaign will not only defend me but anybody else facing politically motivated attacks from the right.
International solidarity has been extended to my campaign as well. For example, I received a message of support and solidarity sent from the flotilla currently on its way to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza.
As for the university bosses’ response to the vast amount of support and solidarity I have received in defense of due process, academic freedom, and democratic rights? Who knows. You will have to ask them and question their judgement as to why they sided with a fascist.
Ashley Smith: This seems to be part of a broader assault on higher education in Texas. Other professors have been disciplined and fired at different institutions. Is there a pattern to this? Who’s driving the attack and what is their aim?
Dr. Tom Alter: I agree my firing is part of a broader attack on higher education in Texas. A professor at Texas A&M was fired for teaching about gender identity. In the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, primary and secondary school educators in Texas have been targeted by state agencies for posting negative opinions of Kirk on their social media pages.
Students at public Texas universities, including TXST, have been expelled or forced to withdraw from school for using their free speech rights in opposition to public vigils for Kirk. This is only a rapid acceleration of long-standing attacks on free speech and diversity on college campuses in Texas.
During the past few years, university programs in Texas based on equality and diversity have been eliminated. And the Texas legislature has limited free speech on campus to only members of the university faculty, students, and staff. Though as we have seen in my case and those of student protesters, administrators still decide who actually gets free speech, even when we speak off campus.
There is a pattern to these assaults. The far-right conservatives who now govern Texas have a particular view of the world, one driven by capitalist reactionary ideas and profit. Their baseline of society is one that is naturally white, straight, patriarchal, and adherent to a deeply conservative form of Christianity. Others who do not fit this baseline are tolerated, and even accepted in certain circumstances, as long as they do not challenge this baseline.
Everything and everyone else are a threat that must be repressed. Hence, they find no contradiction in defending free speech for people calling for attacks on trans people, while denying free speech to students protesting the genocide of Palestinians.
Texas has long been a diverse and transnational space. Yet, during most of Texas’ history first as a republic and then as a U.S. state, it has been controlled by Anglo elites who concocted a one-sided, celebratory history of heroic Anglos taming a wilderness and triumphing over “savages” and non-white people to justify their rule.
Well, the far-right’s baseline does not reflect the reality of Texas today, which is incredibly diverse. And the heroic Anglo narrative of history has been exposed as a fabrication. Studies often recognize Houston as being the most diverse city in the U.S. in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and languages spoken. Other areas of Texas are not far behind in reflecting this diversity, though some areas do not.
I honestly love living in Texas because of its diversity—its people, food, and culture. Though Texas can also be cruel. Texas universities in recent years began to reflect the diverse reality of society in Texas and sought to meet the multifaceted needs of such a society. This became too much for the far-right to bear so they launched their assault on higher education. They aim to return Texas society to their baseline.
Ashley Smith: Your firing is part of a much larger attempt to transform higher education in this country. It began under the Biden administration with the repression of Palestine solidarity activism among professors, staff, and students. Trump has now turned that incipient McCarthyism into an attempt to purge the universities not just of left wing but also liberal professors and programs. What are they doing and why?
Dr. Tom Alter: The attack on higher education needs to be placed in context. Working-class and middle-class people in the U.S. are now suffering from high prices, high rents and mortgages, and a predatory health insurance system. The corollaries to this are increased attacks on women’s rights, queer people, immigrants, destruction of the environment, and a rise in police brutality especially against people of color.
Meanwhile, we are undergoing an incredible wealth transfer from working people to billionaires. This is due in part to U.S. imperialism beginning to lose its dominant position in the world economy to rival capitalists around the world. To maintain profit levels, capitalists have to plunder the working class.
What has been the role of the university in a free society? Public universities as classically liberal institutions are entrusted to be centers of education. They have also been at the forefront of scientific research and new technologies. To accomplish this, they must be open to a diverse array of people and ideas, with open debate, acceptance, tolerance, and free speech. They are not to be centers of indoctrination.
Universities have not always met this charge. Yet in recent decades, universities have made significant strides, mainly because of movements of workers and the oppressed. Students could now take courses in gender and women’s studies, Chicano studies, African American studies, and labor history. Universities have gone from being accessible to only the children of the wealthy and middle class to now being increasingly open to working-class students, though at the cost of crippling student loan debt.
All the while, the university served its primary function in a capitalist society of producing a professional and managerial middle class for capitalist production needs. With capitalism in crisis and a shrinking middle class, what then becomes the function of a university in a capitalist-based economy?
Through a bipartisan effort of both Democrats and Republicans, public universities are being run less as places of learning and more as a business. Many public universities have high acceptance rates with low graduation rates. The university receives tuition money with students receiving not a degree, but student debt.
With universities as centers of learning, open debate, tolerance, and free speech, the possibility exists that students might become sensitive to the suffering of other people and question an economy based on profit over people as well as the role of the U.S. military around the world. This does happen occasionally, as we witnessed with the large number of student protests against the genocide in Palestine in the spring of 2024.
University administrations with support from state governments and the Biden administration cracked down, many times violently, on campus protests against genocide. The struggle for a “Free Palestine,” while front and center and vitally important, has become more than a national liberation struggle in the Middle East. Just as the Black Civil Rights Movement was the center around which all other struggles of the 1960s revolved, the Palestinian liberation struggle today is the axis of fighting for free speech, against war, and for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Liberal Democrats like Biden are generally for diversity and tolerance. But at the same time are totally devoted to capitalism, so much so that when diversity and tolerance threaten capitalism, they toss diversity and tolerance out the window. We saw this in the Biden administration’s complete support and enabling of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, including his support for cracking down on student protestors. Trump has no such liberal qualms. He has launched an open campaign to turn universities into centers of far-right indoctrination, purged of any dissenting beliefs. Any that resist face defunding.
In addition to the assault on higher education, my firing is also part of a broader international right-wing campaign of accusing people of inciting political violence as a way of repressing dissenting voices. We see accusations of inciting political violence thrown at everyone from the Irish hip-hop trio, Kneecap, because of their unwavering support of Palestinian liberation, to me, because of my support for working-class political organization.
Ashley Smith: How should faculty, staff, and students respond to this New McCarthyism? What traps should be avoided? How does resistance on campus fit into the broader resistance against Trump’s attempt to impose authoritarian rule in this country?
Dr. Tom Alter: We are witnessing an open assault on higher education and a march toward authoritarian rule. I obviously became a target in this march. I have always believed and practiced that we must use our rights, or we will lose our rights. Well, I used my rights and lost my job.
If there is a trap people could fall into, it is censoring themselves and not exercising their rights. If you do that, you have done the right’s job for them. We must not surrender our rights but use them collectively. I will say over and over again, join a union, especially on our campuses. The more people who join the labor movement, the more we can transform our unions into instruments of class struggle and liberation.
Resistance on campus is part of the broader resistance against attempts to impose authoritarian rule in the U.S. Universities due to their very nature are centers of free speech. The crackdown began when administrators targeted student, faculty, and staff speaking out and organizing against the genocide in Palestine on campus.
Now, after Kirk’s assassination, Trump, university bosses, and corporations are targeting faculty and students for exercising their free speech on a wide number of political issues. If we lose free speech, we lose freedom of the press and freedom of association as well as our ability to address grievances. This is a fight we cannot lose.
Ashley Smith: Finally, what can people do to support your struggle? And what can they do to support others facing discipline or termination?
Dr. Tom Alter: The outpouring of support for my struggle has been incredible. Large numbers of people, unions, and organizations rightfully see my struggle as part of a broader fight for democratic rights against the rising tide of fascism in the U.S. There are a couple of petitions that people can sign, one by the TSEU and another on Change.org. There is also a GoFundMe to keep my family going during this difficult time.
Statements of support and in defense of free speech are also highly welcomed from unions, academic associations, community groups, and political organizations. Please do the same for other faculty, staff, and students facing attacks. Every single fight for our rights is part of our collective struggle. Solidarity is the only way to win.
It is also very important that we get organized. Join a union. If a union does not exist at your workplace, organize one. Join a political organization you feel represents your beliefs. I am partial to socialist organizing that connects all the struggles of working-class people in a quest to build a society free of class division that’s genuinely democratic and meets human needs.
Overall, if you hear about a fight for economic, social, and environmental justice, join it. Our future depends on mass struggle for collective liberation here in the U.S. and throughout the world.
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9) Netanyahu and Trump Meet to Discuss Gaza Plans
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House for talks on Gaza’s postwar future, and as Israel’s international isolation has deepened. Several European countries recently announced they now recognized a Palestinian state.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 29. 2025
President Trump greeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House on Monday. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel arrived on Monday at the White House, where he is scheduled to discuss with President Trump the latest U.S.-backed plans for postwar Gaza, which they hope could lead to resolving the two-year conflict.
It will be the fourth meeting between the leaders in Washington since Mr. Trump returned to office in January. Each meeting briefly raised hopes for a cease-fire in Gaza, but the fighting has ground on, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians.
This time, they will meet amid international efforts to develop specific proposals for governing Gaza once the war ends. The Trump administration is considering an idea pitched by Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, while France and several Arab governments have offered their own plans.
The meeting follows a week in which Israel’s international isolation deepened, as Britain, France and other European countries announced they would recognize a Palestinian state, over Israeli objections.
A longtime champion of Israel, Mr. Trump, too, has voiced impatience with the war and has said he “will not allow” Israel to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, which many Palestinians hope will be part of a future state. But it is not clear what leverage Mr. Trump is willing to use if Mr. Netanyahu resists the latest proposal to end the war and usher in a new government for Gaza.
In previous negotiations, Mr. Netanyahu has rejected compromise and opted to press on with the war against Hamas. His far-right coalition allies hope to control Gaza indefinitely and rebuild Jewish settlements there.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said he hoped Israel could “make it a go” on Mr. Trump’s proposal. “We’re working on it; it’s not been finalized yet,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
He suggested that Israel would be willing to grant amnesty to Hamas members if they ended the war and released the remaining hostages who were abducted to Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw hundreds taken captive.
Israel’s counterattack in Gaza has now killed over 65,000 people, including thousands of children, according to Gaza health officials. Their count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Here’s what else to know.
· Cautious optimism: Vice President JD Vance said Sunday that there was a “complicated negotiation” going on among Arab leaders, Israel and the Trump administration over plans for postwar Gaza. While expressing cautious optimism about a breakthrough, Mr. Vance added that a deal could always “get derailed at the very last minute.”
· Cease-fire negotiations: Hamas said on Sunday that it had yet to formally receive a copy of the latest cease-fire proposal. Negotiations have been at a standstill since Israel bombed Qatar on Sept. 9 in an attempt to assassinate Hamas’s top leadership in the Persian Gulf nation, a brazen attack that drew international condemnation.
· Latest fighting: Even as Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump discuss plans for postwar Gaza, Israeli forces continue to sweep through Gaza City, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee. Many have been displaced multiple times over the past two years, in a seemingly endless nightmare of fear, hunger and bombardment.
· International diplomacy: The war has shattered Israel’s global standing: Mr. Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes; several of Israel’s longtime European allies recognized a Palestinian state over Israeli objections; and even ordinary Israelis traveling abroad encounter protests and harassment.
· Remaining hostages: Despite the toll on Gaza and its residents, the war in Gaza has not forced Hamas to surrender or to release the remaining hostages held in the territory. At least 20 living captives are still being held, according to Israel, along with the bodies of roughly 25 others.
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10) New Ideas Emerge to End Gaza Conflict and Govern After War
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Trump head into a meeting on Monday, new proposals are under discussion.
By Liam Stack and Adam Rasgon, Sept. 29, 2025
Palestinians fleeing Gaza City in September. Fighting has intensified as Israel proceeds with a plan to take over the major urban center. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
As President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel prepare to meet at the White House on Monday, several new proposals to end the fighting in Gaza and govern the territory are under discussion.
This year’s U.N. General Assembly was dominated by debate about the conflict and the future of the embattled territory. At the end of the sessions last week, President Trump sounded optimistic on reaching a deal to end the war.
But he has made similar pronouncements before, and any effort to stop the fighting still faces significant obstacles. Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas remain at odds over a number of central points, and fighting has intensified in recent weeks with an Israeli ground offensive to take over Gaza City.
Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu sounded determined to press ahead with the Gaza City campaign. Hamas said on Sunday that it had not received any new proposals from the mediators and that negotiations are at a standstill.
These are some of the latest plans to end the war, set up a new system of postwar governance and address the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The Trump plan
Steve Witkoff, the U.S. envoy for peace missions, laid out the broad outlines of an American peace plan in a meeting with leaders of Arab and Muslim-majority countries at the U.N. last week.
Under the plan, Hamas would agree to return all living hostages and remains of former captives within 48 hours of the agreement, according to an Arab official and another person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence with Israel will be granted amnesty under the proposal, and those who want to leave will be guaranteed safe passage out of Gaza, the person familiar with the matter said. The Times of Israel reported earlier on the elements of the proposal.
The American proposal also includes a commitment from both sides to begin a new dialogue on peaceful coexistence, and a pledge that Israel will launch no further attacks on Qatar, according to a senior White House official.
Qatar, an important U.S. ally, has played a central role as mediator in negotiations to end the Gaza war alongside Egypt. Israel launched airstrikes on the Qatari capital, Doha, on Sept. 9 in a failed effort to assassinate a group of Hamas officials — a strike that angered U.S. officials.
But whether Mr. Trump can bring the war to an end will probably depend on how much he is willing to push Mr. Netanyahu, who has adamantly refused to back off his military campaign until Israel achieves its goals. He has also grown more defiant as multiple Western countries last week recognized a Palestinian state.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel and the United States were still drawing up the plan, and that he did not want to discuss the details yet to avoid pre-empting those conversations.
“We’re working on it; it’s not been finalized yet,” he said. “I hope we can make it a go.”
The Blair plan
One proposal calls for Gaza to be governed by an entity it calls the Gaza International Transitional Authority. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, may be considered for a role overseeing Gaza after the fighting ends, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The Transitional Authority would be backed by a multinational security force, which would provide security at border crossings and “prevent the resurgence of armed groups, disrupt weapons smuggling and neutralize asymmetric threats,” according to a version of the proposal viewed by The Times.
The Blair proposal also addresses Palestinian fears of permanent displacement from Gaza. It says the Transitional Authority would be empowered to issue “protected departure certificates” so that people who wish to leave Gaza will be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in the future.
The version of the proposal viewed by The Times did not mention Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war. But it did say the Palestinian Authority, a rival government to Hamas that administers parts of the West Bank, would have a limited role in governing Gaza. The Authority is more moderate than Hamas and cooperates with Israel on security.
Israeli officials have long criticized the Palestinian Authority, accusing it of corruption, mismanagement and fomenting hostility toward Israel. This proposal calls for significant reforms to the Authority, including its security practices.
It adds that the proposed Transitional Authority and the Palestinian Authority should make decisions “consistent with the eventual unifying of all the Palestinian territory under the” Palestinian Authority.
The French-Saudi plan
A third proposal, which gained the support of 142 countries at the General Assembly, is a plan known as the New York declaration, an effort led by France and Saudi Arabia.
It calls for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and an international security force organized by the U.N. to step in. Hamas would be banned from governing Gaza and would agree to hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority.
The proposal calls for postwar Gaza to be governed by a transitional committee made up of technocrats that would operate under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority. The authority would agree to hold elections within a year of the cease-fire.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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11) Will the Palestinian Authority Play a Role in Gaza’s Future?
The body, led by Mahmoud Abbas, administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and considers itself the rightful government of a future Palestinian state.
By Talya Minsberg, Sept. 29, 2025
Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestinian Authority, delivered virtual remarks a day before the official start of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Monday. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Trump on Monday, for ending the Gaza war and governing the territory afterward are circulating. One central question is whether the Palestinian Authority would play any role.
The authority administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and considers itself the rightful government of any future Palestinian state.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was intended as a temporary administration on the way to what many hoped would be the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state.
It administers areas of the West Bank where Palestinians live and cooperates with Israel on security. But relations with Israel have been fraught.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, delivered a video address to the U.N. General Assembly last week in which he accused Israel of committing “war crimes” in Gaza.
He spoke by video because the Trump administration denied him and his delegation entry visas to attend the Assembly in New York on national security grounds.
Who is Mahmoud Abbas?
Mr. Abbas, 89, has been president of the Palestinian Authority since 2005. He was first elected to a four-year term, but there have been no Palestinian national elections since 2006.
Critics say the administration under Mr. Abbas’s leadership is corrupt and authoritarian. Recent opinion polls have shown that most Palestinians want him to resign.
Israeli officials have long accused the Authority of mismanagement and fomenting hostility toward Israel.
“The Palestinian Authority is corrupt to the core,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his own address to the U.N. last week.
Supporters of the Palestinian Authority say that it is no more corrupt than other governments in the Arab world and that the Israeli occupation hampers its ability to succeed.
What does recognition of a Palestinian state mean?
This month, a number of countries, including Israeli allies France, Britain and Canada, recognized Palestinian statehood. They joined nearly 150 nations that have recently recognized a Palestinian state or are expected to do so soon.
The move, while mostly a symbolic act supporting Palestinian self-determination, deepened the isolation of Israel. Both Israel and its allies in Washington oppose the recognition of Palestinian statehood, describing it as a reward for Hamas, the Islamist group that has long controlled Gaza and which led the 2023 attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war.
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are rivals for leadership of the Palestinian people.
Israeli officials, angered by the recent international endorsements of Palestinian statehood, have suggested that Israel could annex at least part of the occupied West Bank in retaliation.
But Mr. Trump said last week that he would not allow Israel to do that.
What role could the Palestinian Authority play in a postwar Gaza?
Any effort to end the war in Gaza still faces significant obstacles. Israel and Hamas are at odds over central sticking points, and Israel escalated its military campaign in recent weeks with a ground offensive to take over Gaza City.
Mr. Abbas has called Gaza an integral part of a future Palestinian state, and said last week that his government was willing to take responsibility for the enclave. He pledged that Hamas would have no part in governing the territory after the war ends.
Among several new proposals to end the fighting in Gaza and oversee the territory afterward, one proposes that the Palestinian Authority would have a limited role in governing.
But given the criticisms of the Authority as corrupt, this proposal calls for significant changes to the body, including its security practices.
Another proposal, known as the New York declaration, suggests that postwar Gaza could be governed by a transitional committee operating under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority, which would hold elections within a year of a cease-fire.
Hamas said on Sunday that it had not received any new proposals from mediators and that negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza are at a standstill.
What is the Palestinian Authority’s relationship with Hamas?
A deep feud has long divided the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, narrowly defeating Mr. Abbas’s rival Fatah movement. The following year, Hamas violently ousted the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority from the Gaza Strip, seizing full control.
Various attempts at reconciliation between the factions have failed.
Mr. Abbas has condemned the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and says Palestinians want a modern state and a peaceful transition of power. There is no place for an armed Hamas in that vision, he said, calling on the group to lay down its weapons.
Hamas rejected Mr. Abbas’s assertion that the group would have no role in a Gaza government after the war, calling it “an infringement on our Palestinian people’s inherent right to self-determination.”
Hamas also said it will not lay down its weapons “as long as the occupation continues.”
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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12) The Man Behind Trump’s Push for an All-Powerful Presidency
Russell T. Vought spent years drawing up plans to expand presidential power and shrink federal bureaucracy. Now he is moving closer to making that vision a reality, threatening to erode checks and balances.
By Coral Davenport, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 29, 2025
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has exerted his influence over nearly every corner of President Trump’s Washington with his command of the levers of the federal budget. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, was preparing the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal this spring when his staff got some surprising news: Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team was unilaterally axing items that Mr. Vought had intended to keep.
Mr. Vought, a numbers wonk who rarely raises his voice, could barely contain his frustration, telling colleagues that he felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, according to six people with knowledge of his comments who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
“We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later,” Mr. Vought told his staff during one flash of irritation, according to three of those people. Mr. Vought’s spokeswoman, Rachel Cauley, denied that he made those comments, and that he felt frustrated by Mr. Musk.
This had not been Mr. Vought’s plan.
Mr. Vought, who also directed the White House Office of Management and Budget in President Trump’s first term, had spent four years in exile from power. He worked through Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting his ceiling and coordinated with other Trump loyalists to draw up sweeping, detailed plans for a comeback.
He had carefully analyzed mistakes from the first term. And he had laid out steps to achieve the long-sought conservative goal of a president with dramatically expanded authority over the executive branch, including the power to cut off spending, fire employees, control independent agencies and deregulate the economy.
Mr. Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, had celebrity, access to the president and political capital that the budget director could never hope for.
But Mr. Vought (pronounced “vote”) had something Mr. Musk did not: He had done his homework.
In the months since Mr. Musk fell out with the president, Mr. Vought has at last begun to put his plans into action — remaking the presidency, block by block, by restoring powers weakened after the Nixon administration. His efforts are helping Mr. Trump exert authority more aggressively than any modern president, and are threatening an erosion of the longstanding checks and balances in America’s constitutional system.
Now, as the government heads toward a shutdown when federal funding lapses on Tuesday, Mr. Vought, 49, is leveraging the moment to further advance his goals of slashing agencies and purging employees, with his office telling agencies to prepare for mass firings unless Congress can strike a deal to keep the government open.
The ultimatum follows a string of achievements for Mr. Vought.
This summer, he pressured lawmakers to enact his plan to cancel $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting that they had previously approved — an unusual bow by Congress to the White House. The new law claimed another prize for conservatives: the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And a deal Mr. Vought cut with House Republicans helped secure passage of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy law that slashed spending on Medicaid and food stamps.
He has spearheaded a push to erase hundreds of regulations on the environment, health, transportation and food and worker safety, telling Mr. Trump at an August cabinet meeting that his efforts had led to 245 deregulatory initiatives this year. He has asserted White House power over independent agencies like the Federal Reserve, championing an executive order that forced them to submit their regulatory actions to his office for approval.
As the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with enforcing rules to protect people from predatory financial practices, he halted nearly all of the agency’s work, and sought to fire 90 percent of its staff.
At the heart of Mr. Vought’s plan, associates say, is the intentional engineering of a legal battle over Congress’s power to decide how government money is spent, potentially creating a new legal precedent for the president to block spending on any programs and policies he dislikes.
The next step in the fight is a legally untested maneuver in which the Trump administration would cancel another $4.9 billion in foreign aid spending — this time without congressional approval. The gambit, known as a “pocket rescission,” involves the White House eliminating the spending unless Congress votes to stop it by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
The threat has enraged many lawmakers, including some Republicans: Senator Susan Collins, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, called it illegal. But as the deadline has neared, they have done nothing to stop it. Mr. Vought is confident that the White House would win a Supreme Court battle over the moves to stop spending, according to his associates.
“He is lining up the billiards shots, getting each ball in place, one by one, for each consecutive move,” said Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist.
For the leaders of Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, Mr. Vought is seen as the disciplined architect who channeled the passion of MAGA into an actionable policy blueprint. The slain activist Charlie Kirk, whose podcast was one of many where Mr. Vought regularly shared his views with the Republican base, called Mr. Vought “an absolute rock star.”
To many legal experts, Mr. Vought’s work is a threat to the foundations of democracy.
“One of the main sources of power that Congress has over the executive branch is the budget,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a law professor at Georgetown University. “If the executive branch isn’t controlled by the power of the purse, then there is very little that will control the President.”
She added: “It’s a fundamental challenge to liberty for every single person in America.”
Mr. Vought, who declined through his spokeswoman to be interviewed, sees it differently. He said in a speech earlier this month that his mission was to bring to heel an unelected federal bureaucracy he likened to a “cartel working behind closed doors.”
“We have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state,” he said. “Step after step, it’s to move quickly, trying to think through what the founders would have done in the circumstances, and be aggressive.”
Over the years, Mr. Vought has made clear how he views his targets. He has said the Education Department promotes “woke-rot” propaganda like “grooming minors for so-called gender transition.” That the Federal Reserve has “been wrong for decades.” That the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development “actively embarrass the United States.” That the Internal Revenue Service targets “struggling families in a craven effort to sustain the broader bureaucracy’s radical progressive agenda.” And, in a remark captured on video unearthed by ProPublica that stung many in Washington, he said he wanted federal employees to be “in trauma.”
Once the budget director has the power to starve those government agencies, Mr. Vought has said, they can wither away. “We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said on Mr. Kirk’s podcast.
MAGA’s ‘Bulldog’
Mr. Vought started envisioning a blueprint to slash the federal government long before Mr. Trump was a Republican.
He grew up the youngest of seven children in a religious blue-collar family in Trumbull, Conn. His father, a Marine Corps veteran, was a union electrician, and his mother was a public school teacher.
In Mr. Vought’s telling, he grew up watching his parents dragged down by big government.
“My parents worked really long hours to put me through school,” he said at his first Senate confirmation hearing. “But they also worked long hours to pay for the government in their lives, and I have often wondered what they would have been free to build and give without such a high burden.”
After graduating from Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian school in Illinois, Mr. Vought went to Washington to work for Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, a Republican champion of fiscal austerity.
Mr. Gramm recalled his young staff member as prodigiously hardworking, attending law school by night while working by day to help his boss shrink the government.
“Russ worked for me as a child, and I’m proud of what he’s doing now,” said Mr. Gramm, who retired from the Senate in 2002.
Mr. Vought went on to direct budget policy for House Republicans during the rise of the Tea Party movement, when populist demand for smaller government propelled a wave of hard-line conservatives into Washington.
It was not a given that he would join the first Trump administration. Mr. Vought, who friends say is deeply driven by his faith and often leads adult Bible study classes at his Baptist church, considered opting out of Washington to attend seminary and become a pastor. In 2017, he heeded the call of the White House.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Vought argued that the president had the power to block federal spending Congress had approved. He was part of a group of White House officials who froze military spending for Ukraine in defiance of Congress, paving a path to the president’s impeachment.
He also helped come up with the idea of using emergency powers to build a border wall without Congressional approval, and pushed an executive order that could have enabled the president to easily fire tens of thousands of career civil servants.
The budget office was eventually forced to restore the Ukraine money, and the other moves were reversed by the Biden administration.
After the 2020 election, Mr. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a think tank devoted to sustaining Mr. Trump’s policies.
The clawing of either rats or pigeons in his office walls was so loud that it distracted visitors, according to a recent book, “Mad House." But Mr. Vought remained focused on his mission.
In 2022, he released a 104-page “shadow budget,” a prescription to remove “the scourge of woke and weaponized bureaucracy aimed at the American people”: deep cuts to Medicaid, foreign aid, scientific research and other programs.
Outraged when Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, cut a deal with Mr. Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Mr. Vought pushed House Republicans to take the extraordinary step of ousting their leader.
Mr. Vought was a constant presence in the group text thread of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-line conservatives who toppled Mr. McCarthy — bucking them up and pushing them to take what felt like an enormous political risk, said former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the effort.
“When people got scared or concerned about political impact, committee assignments, he was always there, strongly encouraging them,” Mr. Gaetz said. “He was instilling backbone in people.”
Mr. Vought’s public comments began to take on a more hard-line tilt. His think tank published papers establishing a rationale for why it would be lawful to deploy troops on U.S. soil, and advocating the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser whose “War Room” podcast is popular with the base, declared him “MAGA’s Bulldog.”
Back to the White House
After Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Vought devoted himself to preparing for a do-over — one that was bigger, bolder and, crucially, lasting.
Eyeing his next role, Mr. Vought described how the White House budget director would be critical in transforming the federal government. “Presidents use the O.M.B. to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” he told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson days after the 2024 election.
Mr. Vought’s research was featured in Project 2025, the policy blueprint prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation for Mr. Trump’s return to office. Mr. Vought also drafted potential executive orders.
But tensions emerged soon after Mr. Musk parachuted into Washington with a mandate to upend the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Vought was outraged when DOGE sowed chaos by sending out an email requiring federal workers to detail five accomplishments each week or lose their jobs, said three people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Vought supported purging federal workers, but complained that the email had skirted the legal process for personnel matters, creating what he saw as needless liability.
While Mr. Vought has called for the abolition of the Education Department, he was annoyed when DOGE moved to dismantle the agency’s data office, which tracks student academic performance, according to two people familiar with the events. The administration needed the data to inform efforts to discourage race-based college admissions, cut certain programs for poor and disabled students, and promote charter schools, these people said.
Mr. Vought’s spokeswoman, Ms. Cauley, called the accounts of those episodes “false.” Mr. Musk and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Vought later restored portions of the office, but with limited staffing. The Education Department has posted job openings to refill some of the positions.
“DOGE would have been far more effective from day one had they bothered to ask Russ and team how to achieve their goals,” said Joe Grogan, a friend of Mr. Vought’s who led the White House Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump administration.
Now, in the post-Musk era, Mr. Vought appears to be relishing his moment.
He works long hours and weekends in his suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, where he oversees a staff of more than 500.
On the wall is a photo of his favorite president, Calvin Coolidge, the farm boy and small-town mayor historians say most purely embodied the conservative principles of small government and fiscal austerity.
Around his home in a Virginia suburb, his neighbors — including former federal workers who lost their jobs under the Trump administration — have planted lawn signs that read “We Support Our Federal Employees.”
In the White House, Mr. Vought is not seen as a part of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, according to four people with knowledge of the dynamics. He regularly quotes the Bible and never curses — a sharp contrast with a president who sometimes refers to Christians in the third person. But people familiar with the relationship between the two men say that the president recognizes in Mr. Vought something that he highly values: a seasoned loyalist who knows how to use the federal budget to deliver what Mr. Trump wants.
“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end weaponized government,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement when nominating Mr. Vought.
Now Mr. Vought is building the case to achieve one of his primary objectives: securing the president’s authority to block congressionally approved spending on programs he dislikes.
To that end, Mr. Vought is laying the groundwork for a legal battle over the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, enacted by Congress in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s moves to block agency spending he opposed.
Mr. Vought, who says the law is unconstitutional, would like to see it overturned.
That goal has driven him to his current “pocket rescissions” package.
Mr. Vought’s friends say that his actions are designed to provoke a lawsuit from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, which has said the pocket rescission is illegal and “would cede Congress’s power of the purse.”
“Russ absolutely believes he is on sound legal footing and that he will be vindicated at the Supreme Court,” Mr. Grogan said.
Edda Emmanuelli Perez, the general counsel of the Government Accountability Office, disagreed, saying in an interview: “In order to not spend the money, the laws would have to be changed. And the president does not have the unilateral power to change the laws.”
Rob Fairweather, who spent 42 years at the Office of Management and Budget and wrote a book about how it operates, said there is reason for Mr. Vought to have confidence in a legal victory.
“What he’s doing is radical, but it’s well thought out,” Mr. Fairweather said. “He’s had all these years to plan. He’s looked clearly at the authorities and boundaries that are there, and is pushing past them on the assumption that at least some of it will hold up in the courts.”
Mr. Vought is already looking forward to that outcome, declaring on Glenn Beck’s show this spring: “We will have a much smaller bureaucracy as a result of it.”
Stacy Cowley and Charlie Savage contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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13) ‘I’m From Here!’: U.S. Citizens Are Ending Up in Trump’s Dragnet
As immigration agents take a more aggressive approach, they have stopped and in some cases detained American citizens.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Allison McCann and Jennifer Medina,
Sept. 29, 2025
Jason Brian Gavidia, an American citizen, standing where he was detained by ICE agents in Montebello, Calif., in June. Philip Cheung for The New York Times
U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living in the country illegally.
While many of those detained have immediately declared their U.S. citizenship to officers, they have routinely been ignored, according to interviews with the men, their lawyers and court documents. In some cases they have been handcuffed, kept in holding cells and immigration facilities overnight, and in at least two cases held without access to a lawyer or even a phone call.
How many U.S. citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps is difficult to say. No comprehensive log of such encounters is available from the federal government, and immigration agents are not required to document stops of citizens.
A review by The New York Times of publicly reported cases and court records found that since January, at least 15 U.S. citizens have been arrested or detained and questioned about their citizenship by immigration agents or local law enforcement officers enlisted to work with the federal authorities.
In late January, Julio Noriega, 54, of Chicago, had been handing out copies of his résumé to local businesses in Berwyn, Ill., when ICE officers approached him as he walked out of a Jiffy Lube auto service shop.
They handcuffed him and loaded him into a van, without allowing him to explain he was a citizen, according to a motion filed in the Federal District Court for Northern Illinois. He was released about 10 hours later, the court filing states.
Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, 18, was born and raised in West Palm Beach, Fla., where he lives with his mother and two brothers.
He was on his way to work with his mother and two friends in May when troopers from the Florida Highway Patrol stopped them in their employer’s pickup truck for what the agency said was a “commercial motor vehicle inspection.” Initially, Mr. Laynez-Ambrosio was calm, he recalled in an interview. But the situation escalated as troopers learned that others in the car were undocumented and ordered everyone out.
When no one got out of the vehicle, the troopers began to pull the three men out. At one point a trooper fired a Taser at one of them.
Mr. Laynez-Ambrosio, recording on his phone, repeatedly told the officers, “I’m from here!”
“You’ve got no rights here. You’re illegal, brother,” a trooper is heard saying. In Florida, a new state law requires all local and state law enforcement agencies, including the Highway Patrol, to participate in immigration enforcement.
All three men were taken to a nearby Border Patrol facility, and though Mr. Laynez-Ambrosio continued to say he was a citizen, he was held there for about six hours.
Asked about the U.S. citizens identified by The Times, the Department of Homeland Security defended its actions as “highly targeted.”
“If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability,” Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Federal officers’ tactics remain a source of contention in the courts. This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that the roving patrols are targeting Latinos and violating the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” A federal judge in Los Angeles ordered a halt to stops based on a person’s apparent race or ethnicity, or other factors that suggest they are Latino, such as speaking Spanish or accented English.
But this month, the Supreme Court put the order on hold. The lawsuit will still make its way though the lower courts and may end up back at the Supreme Court. In the meantime, federal agents in and around Los Angeles will not be constrained by the lower court’s finding that such stops were unconstitutional.
Immigration enforcement agents have for decades focused on workplace raids or targeted unauthorized immigrants in order to arrest them for deportation. But during some immigration sweeps in heavily Latino communities, particularly in Southern California, federal agents have roamed the streets, courthouses and workplaces demanding proof of citizenship from residents. The roving patrols and impromptu interrogations have been a striking departure from the understanding that the Constitution allows citizens to remain silent and places limits on who officers can question, hold and detain.
As videos of these encounters have spread online, many Latino men and women who are citizens have begun to carry their passports as they go about their daily lives, fearful that they too will be stopped and questioned by immigration agents.
A report by the Cato Institute found that a substantial number of ICE actions have targeted workplaces and neighborhoods that are heavily Latino. One in five of the agency’s arrests has been of a Latino resident with no criminal past or removal order, according to Cato, a prominent libertarian think tank, which analyzed ICE arrest records obtained through the Deportation Data Project.
In upholding a lower-court ruling against the government, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cited the experience of Jason Brian Gavidia, 29, who was born in California, the son of Salvadoran and Colombian immigrants. Mr. Gavidia, who refurbishes old cars, was raised in East Los Angeles, where Latinos make up the overwhelming majority of the population.
According to videos of the encounter, interviews and court records, officers did not identify themselves as they entered his auto business in Montebello, Calif., in June, masked and with guns drawn. They wrestled another owner, Javier Ramirez, 32, to the ground, holding him at gunpoint, and pushed Mr. Gavidia against a fence.
“The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American — and they repeatedly ignored his answer: ‘I am an American,’” the ruling stated.
The officers, who were from Customs and Border Protection, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, took Mr. Ramirez away in a van, driving him around for hours before taking him to a federal detention center downtown, according to a statement he submitted to the court. Mr. Ramirez did not speak to a lawyer or any family member for three days, he said in an interview.
Asked about the men’s cases, D.H.S. has said that Mr. Gavidia interfered with their enforcement operations and that Mr. Ramirez assaulted officers. But Mr. Gavidia was never charged, and a charge against Mr. Ramirez was dropped. Security videos of the incident reviewed by The Times do not show Mr. Ramirez assaulting officers.
In several of the cases, D.H.S. officials told The Times that the citizens assaulted officers; prosecutors have not pursued charges in any of those incidents.
As Mr. Trump campaigned for re-election, promising to carry out the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, he often cited as a model a 1950s initiative named after a racial slur, “Operation Wetback.” In the decades since, federal courts have ruled that immigration agents cannot detain people without having a specific, factual basis for believing a person is in the country illegally.
The Supreme Court emergency ruling earlier this month effectively allows agents to stop anyone on suspicion of being an immigrant living in the United States illegally.
George Retes Jr., 25, a U.S. Army veteran who works as a security guard at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, Calif., said he had been trying to report to work in July as people protested an immigration sweep. He said that he tried to explain to officers that he was not involved with the demonstration and needed to get inside, but that he received conflicting instructions from the officers. He said he got back in his car and tried to reverse as some officers directed, but protesters were massing behind his vehicle.
Federal officers then deployed tear gas on the crowd, broke his windshield, cast pepper spray on his face and took him into custody, he said. “As they’re walking me away, I’m telling them: ‘I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m American. I’m a veteran. I didn’t do anything wrong,’” he said.
He was held for three days without a phone call.
In an essay published this month in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Retes reiterated that he was wrongfully detained and warned that what happened to him could happen to “any one of us.” In a response to the essay, the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X that the arrest of Mr. Retes during the raid was “for assault.” A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said they filed a complaint but later asked the court to dismiss the case, which it did.
In August, a 15-year-old U.S. citizen with developmental disabilities was sitting in a car with his mother outside a high school in Los Angeles as his cousin registered for classes when agents surrounded him at gunpoint. The 15-year-old was handcuffed for several minutes before agents let him go, according to an interview with his lawyer and a claim filed with federal immigration authorities.
Asked about the case, immigration officials said they had been in pursuit of a man from El Salvador with gang ties. In their claim, lawyers for the boy, identified only as B.G., contend they racially profiled a Mexican American citizen and put his family in danger.
The tactics and the results have raised questions even among some who support the administration’s overall approach on immigration.
“If you’re going to be aggressive on deportations in the interior, you cannot make a mistake,” said Daniel Garza, a former police officer who backed Mr. Trump and heads the Libre Initiative, a conservative group focused on Latino voter outreach. “If people are being stopped solely because of the way they look, that is a problem.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas, who was born in Florida, said that in May he tried to keep going about his work at a construction site in Foley, Ala., when he saw immigration agents shove his brother, who is undocumented, to the floor.
He pulled out his phone to film and was quickly tackled to the ground by other officers, Mr. Venegas said. They kept him in handcuffs for hours, claiming his identity documentation was fake, he said. A spokeswoman for D.H.S. said that Mr. Venegas tried to physically obstruct immigration officers; no charges were filed and he said he stood filming from several feet away.
More than a month later, at another construction site in Fairhope, he was confronted again, Mr. Venegas said. This time, agents didn’t handcuff him, he said, but they again questioned his citizenship, escorted him out and held him for at least half an hour.
“I cannot work in peace anymore,” Mr. Venegas said in an interview. “I am always nervous.”
Indeed, for Americans caught up in the immigration dragnet, those encounters can remain visceral memories, even as they move on with their lives.
Miguel Angel Ponce Jr., 33, said he still feels paranoid after what happened to him in July. Mr. Ponce was driving to work in Houston when, he said, he was pulled over by ICE agents just minutes from his house. He was not told why he was being arrested, only that he looked like someone they were looking for. He was cuffed, placed in the back of their car and driven to a parking lot nearby, where he remained for over two hours.
A D.H.S. spokeswoman said Mr. Ponce was “temporarily taken into custody by mistake,” adding that once the agents confirmed he was not the person they were after, “they took him back to his residence and apologized for the confusion.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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14) She Was Fired for a Comment on Her Private Facebook Account
A look at how one state has turbocharged the crackdown on anyone who has criticized Charlie Kirk after his death.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Reporting from Muncie, Ind., Sept. 29, 2025
Suzanne Swierc was fired from her job as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times
Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
“They were calling me all kinds of names, threatening my job,” Ms. Swierc said. “It was every awful curse word under the sun.”
“I immediately texted my supervisor, and I said, ‘I think I have a situation.’”
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Within hours, Libs of TikTok, a social media account known for transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries, posted it publicly on its popular X account. Ms. Swierc got her first message 19 minutes later. Elon Musk posted about it. So did Rudy Giuliani. Indiana’s Attorney General, Todd Rokita, also mentioned it on X, calling her comments “vile,” and saying that they “should make people question someone’s ability to be in a leadership position.”
When someone from a Buffalo area code left a voice mail message stating Ms. Swierc’s home address and saying maybe she “should get the same treatment as Charlie,” Ms. Swierc called the police. Eventually, the post would get 6.9 million views.
The experience, Ms. Swierc said, affected her physically.
“I had the hardest time moving around my house that morning,” she said. “My brain was not processing things. Space and time became kind of their own thing. I wanted to vomit.”
She added: “September 12th was one of the worst days of my life.”
Five days later, Ms. Swierc was fired from her job as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State, one of more than 145 people around the country who’ve lost their jobs for posting negatively about Mr. Kirk. Mr. Rokita, the attorney general, noted the firing approvingly.
“Ball State’s legal analysis was also 100% correct here,” he said on X on Sept. 17, the day she was fired. He then listed other institutions of higher and lower education in the state and said they “should take notice,” and added, “We are waiting.”
The rash of firings, which are raising questions about the limits of free speech, has been supercharged in Indiana, where top officials have been channeling public anger about posts that criticize Mr. Kirk into a kind of internet hotline, where submissions — that can include someone’s name, social-media posts and employer’s contact information — are displayed publicly on a government website.
The portal, called Eyes on Education, was started early last year as a way for parents of school children to submit examples of “inappropriate materials.” The concept spread to public universities later that year, after the passage of a law intended to take on liberal bias in higher education. Ball State University has its own portal, EthicsPoint, where students can anonymously report professors for biased behavior.
Ms. Swierc’s was the first submission in the Charlie Kirk section of Eyes on Education. As of Saturday, 32 others in education were listed as targets for firing. Mr. Rokita declined to be interviewed for this article.
‘People Are Afraid’
The firing compelled Sarah Vitale to get involved. An associate professor of philosophy at Ball State, Ms. Vitale is part of a local progressive political group called Muncie Resists, and is the secretary of the American Association of University Professors at Ball State, an advocacy group for university employees.
University faculty in Indiana were already on edge after last year’s law exposed them to anonymous complaints. They have started to accompany one another to meetings with human resources, in a sort of buddy system. Ms. Vitale went with Ms. Swierc to hers. But while she knew people were nervous, she was unprepared for what came next. When she and her colleagues began to circulate a petition opposing the firing, many were too afraid to put their names on it. Some gave only their first names. Others said they’d agree only if others in their department did.
“People are afraid,” Ms. Vitale said in an interview last week. “They’re afraid for their jobs.”
The fear is a measure of how much pressure higher education is under in Indiana. Another set of changes, which drew little notice because it was tucked into this year’s budget bill, eliminates programs that draw fewer than 15 graduates in a major. One colleague, a chair of a department that is close to the 15-student threshold, messaged Ms. Vitale to say that he was concerned that signing would lead to retaliation, and his first responsibility was to his faculty and their livelihoods.
A colleague in a different state who serves with Ms. Vitale in the leadership of the Radical Philosophy Association took their name off its website, as did several people in the A.A.U.P. at Ball State because they were worried about doxxing by outside groups. Ms. Vitale said she was fine with keeping her name public, but in the end all of their names came down.
As of Sunday, the petition against her firing had 83 signatures, out of about 3,000 full-time faculty and staff.
In interviews, faculty members said they opposed the firing, even if they didn’t want to be on the record saying it. But the reaction among the broader public was mixed. The Ball State announcement, which was viewed millions of times on X, got 25,000 likes.
A number of conservatives in Indiana made the argument that the left had been canceling people for years, so in some ways, they created the norm — and the right is merely using it. They also said it’s not so unusual for political leaders to involve themselves in cancellations. Democratic political leaders called for Donald Trump to be cut off from Twitter, and celebrated when he was.
“I do not see this as Republicans going after the left,” said Charlie Mandziara, the president of the College Republicans at Ball State. He said the calls for the firings were an effort to tamp down political violence, which inflammatory social media posts, he said, only encourage.
Mr. Mandziara, a 19-year-old sophomore, said that most of his friends who are not conservative had been respectful about Mr. Kirk’s death, including a fraternity brother who is the head of the College Democrats. But he did see people on campus laughing about Mr. Kirk after the killing, and saw comments on social media that implied he deserved it.
“That encouragement, if left rhetorically unopposed, can devolve into further violence,” he said, adding, of Ms. Swierc, “the university made the correct decision in letting her go.”
But others disagreed with the firing, including Michael Hicks, a former army officer and veteran who is a prominent Indiana conservative.
Mr. Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State, said he broke down for the first time in 35 years of teaching while talking to students in class the day after Mr. Kirk was killed. The moment was a shock for students too. Some on campus compared it to this generation’s 9/11. But in the days since, what could have been a chance to teach students about the First Amendment, why it is essential to honor it, and how to fight against the undertow of anger and revenge, turned into something else.
“We chose to indulge the most base motivations of those who just want to see people fired,” he said, “because we lacked the courage to say that we defend speech with which we disagree.”
He said students asked him to mentor a chapter of Turning Point USA, which was led by Mr. Kirk, at Ball State back when it was first starting. Initially, he was pleased, but when he visited Turning Point’s webpage, he recoiled. He found a “watch list” of liberal professors.
“I told the student that I thought conservative voices on campus needed a bit of boosting, but that I didn’t work with people who made enemies lists,” he said. “It’s just a different version of cancel culture.”
‘I Only Feel Anger’
Ms. Swierc is still struggling to understand the reaction to her post. She had said she could not be friends with someone who thought Mr. Kirk was wonderful, but her post also said she believed in the Resurrection and was praying for his soul. She said she was trying to say that two things could be true: His death was a tragedy, and he was more conflict-entrepreneur than peacemaker.
On Sept. 22, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on her behalf against the university president, Geoffrey Mearns, on the grounds that her firing violated her First Amendment rights. Her last full paycheck came on Friday, and her health insurance ends Sept. 30.
A university spokesman declined to comment.
I asked if she regretted what she said, after all that had happened. She said no.
“I am trying to start talking about what is good and right and what is not,” she said. “I feel that we’re reaching a point in the timeline of affairs in the United States where it’s time to say something.”
That night, a vigil for Mr. Kirk was held on campus. A crowd of about 100 young men and women filed into John J. Pruis Hall. A few held signs that read “I am Charlie.”
Several College Republicans were there. They had been working on a joint statement with the College Democrats that had hit a snag over whether it should support freedom of speech in addition to opposing political violence. They eventually all agreed that it should.
Mr. Mandziara was there. He strode across the stage to the lectern.
“I only feel anger, a righteous, focused anger, not toward people I disagree with or any political party, but toward lying hypocrites who think that past a certain threshold of disagreement, you deserve to die,” he said. “People who encourage and justify political violence while screaming from the hilltops that people that they disagree with are evil, are wrong and should be condemned.”
He added that conservatives do not have to “tolerate calls to kill us,” or “let any of the people who have encouraged this violence to hold power over us, whether it be in office, in education, or in any other field.”
He ended by asking for a moment of silence “for the state of this nation.”
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15) ‘Mine, Baby, Mine’: Trump Officials Offer $625 Million to Rescue Coal
The new effort, which includes opening 13.1 million acres of federal land for mining and eliminating pollution limits, aims to save an industry that has been declining for decades.
By Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman, Reporting from Washington, Sept. 29, 2025
A coal mining operation in West Virginia. Credit...Adrees Latif/Reuters
The Trump administration on Monday outlined a coordinated plan to revive the mining and burning of coal, the largest contributor to climate change worldwide.
Coal use has been declining sharply in the United States since 2005, displaced in many cases by cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power.
But in a series of steps aimed at improving the economics of coal, the Interior Department said it would open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal mining and reduce the royalty rates that companies would need to pay to extract coal. The Energy Department said it would offer $625 million to upgrade existing coal plants around the country, which have been closing at a fast clip, to extend their life spans.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it would repeal dozens of regulations set by the Biden administration to curb carbon dioxide, mercury and other pollutants from coal plants. The agency would also revise a regulation limiting wastewater pollution from power plants that the industry considers costly.
In what has become a familiar tableau, miners in hard hats stood as a backdrop as administration officials gathered at the Interior Department and repeated a phrase that President Trump said he now expects of any employee who discusses the black, combustible rock: “Clean, beautiful coal.”
The announcements came days after Mr. Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that the United States would “stand ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies if you need them,” referring to liquefied natural gas, oil and coal. Mr. Trump has promoted the coal industry ever since campaigning frequently with coal miners 2016.
While coal plants once generated nearly half of America’s electricity, they produced just 16 percent last year. Hundreds of coal plants have retired since the mid-2000s as utilities switched to natural gas, wind and solar power. Stricter regulations on air and water pollution have also made burning coal more expensive. Coal mining, which has been linked to significant air pollution and water contamination as well as black lung disease in coal miners, has also faced increased federal restrictions.
“This is an industry that was under assault,” said Doug Burgum, the Interior secretary who along with Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, blamed regulations on what they described as an ideological war on coal. Chris Wright, the Energy secretary, said Monday morning on Fox that coal was “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colo., and New York City.”
The phrase “climate change” was not mentioned during the hourlong coal event. Instead, the officials described coal as an economic necessity. “In addition to to drill, baby drill, we need to mine, baby, mine,” Mr. Burgum said.
It is unclear how much the Trump administration can revitalize the industry. In recent years, growing interest in artificial intelligence and data centers has fueled a surge in electricity demand, and utilities have decided to keep more than 50 coal-burning units open past their scheduled closure dates, according to America’s Power, an industry trade group. As the Trump administration moves to loosen pollution limits on coal power, more plants could stay open longer or run more frequently.
The Trump administration has previously taken other extraordinary steps to keep coal plants operating. In June, the Energy Department issued an emergency order to prevent a coal plant in Michigan from closing as scheduled, although neither the grid operator nor the local utility had asked the agency to do so. The cost of that extension is expected to fall on consumers.
Mr. Wright has hinted that more such orders could be on the way. All told, more than 100 plants have announced plans to retire by the end of Mr. Trump’s term.
“I think this administration’s policy is going to be to stop the closure of coal plants, most of them cooperatively working with utilities,” Mr. Wright said during an onstage interview last week at The New York Times’s Climate Forward event.
At Monday’s announcement, Wells Griffith, the under secretary for energy, said that a recent Energy Department study found that America’s grid faced a higher risk of blackout if too many coal plants retire. That study has been criticized by a number of clean-energy groups and Democratic-led states for being overly pessimistic about the ability of other fast-growing sources like wind, solar, batteries and natural gas to help fortify the nation’s power system.
Holly Bender, the chief program officer at the Sierra Club, an environmental group, said the administration’s actions would increase air and water pollution and raise electricity bills. “The Trump administration’s reckless actions announced today will hurt the American people, all to prop up the aging and outdated coal industry,” she said.
While it champions fossil fuels, the administration has taken steps to restrict the use of wind and solar power nationwide, criticizing those sources as unreliable and too dependent on the weather.
Coal power has been growing around the world in China and other countries. Last year, global coal demand reached a record high, according to the International Energy Agency, although the agency says it still expects coal demand to plateau in the coming years.
Mr. Burgum cited that trend as a reason for the United States to invest in coal. “China is absolutely the number one user of coal and they are aggressively adding more power,” he said. “Our nation can lead in technology but if we don’t lead in electrical production, we’re going to lose the A.I. arms race.”
Even as it burns more coal, China has also led the world in building wind and solar power. Last week the country announced for the first time plans to start reducing its planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.
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16) In Coal-Powered West Virginia, Sky-High Energy Costs Strain Residents
As residents’ electricity prices have increased, nearly one out of five customers of the leading utility company in the state is behind on monthly bills.
By Ivan Penn, Visuals by Alyssa Schukar, Reporting from Charleston, W.Va., Sept. 29, 2025
A coal-fired power plant owned and operated by a subsidiary of American Electric Power in Winfield, W.Va. Coal provides about 86 percent of the state’s electricity.
As his electricity bill soared in recent years, Martec Washington decided not to replace his broken-down car and started riding the bus. He has taken on multiple jobs, including scheduling surgeries and teaching hip-hop fitness classes. And he is trying to use less energy.
Yet his electric utility bill keeps climbing. In some months, he owes his utility company more than the $750 rent on his house in Charleston, W.Va.
“Electric bills shouldn’t be equal to rent or mortgage,” said Mr. Washington, a community activist who in 2022 lost the Democratic primary for mayor. “The bill is freaking ridiculous.”
West Virginia is awash in coal, natural gas and oil, making it the fifth-leading producer of energy in the United States. Yet the state’s electricity costs have risen much faster than the national average. Some energy experts say West Virginia is a harbinger of what could happen as President Trump champions fossil fuels and throttles renewable energy.
Trump administration officials have ordered aging coal power plants to stay open and pushed for the quick approval of new oil and natural gas projects while denying permits or ordering work to be halted on solar and wind energy projects.
On Monday, the Energy Department said it would spend $625 million to upgrade coal power plants and the Interior Department said it would make 13.1 million acres of federal land available to coal mining.
In the past few decades, generating electricity from coal has become much more expensive than other energy sources like natural gas, wind and solar. Coal plants are also relatively inefficient and expensive to maintain.
Mr. Trump’s coal push comes as monthly utility bills are rising from coast to coast. People are paying more because utilities are having to upgrade aging grids and prepare for extreme weather driven by climate change. They are also investing billions of dollars in new power plants and lines to meet the voracious energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers.
In West Virginia, the situation is even worse.
Over the past 15 years, electricity rates in the state have risen almost twice as fast as the national average.
Many residents are buckling under the strain. American Electric Power, a company that owns two utilities in the state, told state regulators last year that nearly one in every five of its customers in West Virginia, or 84,000 households, is typically behind on its electric bill every month.
Regulatory filings show that those two utilities, Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power, cut power to 56,000 households for not paying what they owed in 2023, the most recent year for which data were available. That is up from 3,300 during the pandemic in 2020. The company’s disconnections were more than 10 times that of a typical state, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
“Shutting them off from power is not a humane solution,” Mr. Wolfe said. “It forces people to choose between buying food and paying their energy bill.”
Appalachian Power is locked into contracts that require it to buy coal at relatively high prices. Rates are also high because they include the cost of the expensive turbines and other equipment that burn coal to generate electricity.
Coal provides about 86 percent of West Virginia’s electricity, a number that has not decreased much even as the United States has reduced its reliance on coal to less than 20 percent of all electricity, from two-thirds, several decades ago.
The state’s utilities could invest in new wind and solar farms that generate power more cheaply, but the utility and its customers would still be paying off its coal plants for years to come.
“There was a time some years ago when West Virginia had some of the lowest rates in the country,” said Jim Kotcon, chairman of the West Virginia Sierra Club. Now, he added, the state is in such a pickle that “even the utilities will testify to the Legislature that they have no plans to build a new coal plant.”
But Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican ally of Mr. Trump’s, remains committed to coal. “Baseload generation from coal, natural gas and nuclear are critical to our way of life,” he said this month, a reference to the amount of power needed to meet fundamental demands.
Higher Prices, Lower Incomes
In June 2010, West Virginia’s electricity rates were more than 30 percent lower than the national average. That gap closed to just 10 percent this June, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
A household in West Virginia using 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity — a rough estimate of an average American home’s monthly consumption — will pay almost $160 a month, compared with the national average of $175.
But that does not account for weather or the insulation of homes. Actual electricity bills for many West Virginians can run into the hundreds of dollars when it is very hot or cold.
In addition, residents there usually earn much less than elsewhere. The median household income in West Virginia last year was about $61,000, compared with about $84,000 nationally.
“West Virginia is high up on that list of energy burden,” said Frank Rambo, executive director of Horizon Climate Initiative, an environmental nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Va.
For Mr. Washington, 37, it’s a big hardship. He lives in the neighborhood where he grew up, a low-income community near state government offices.
His city is home to the University of Charleston, hip coffee shops and a restaurant helmed by a James Beard Award-winning chef. But Mr. Washington can’t enjoy any of that.
In December, he skipped paying his natural gas bill to cover the nearly $1,000 he owed for electricity.
“I chose to pay a higher electric bill because at least with that one, I can turn the heaters on when we’re in the house and turn them off when we don’t need them,” Mr. Washington said.
But when he was out one day, the home was so cold that a pipe burst because his gas had been shut off.
The Public Service Commission of West Virginia, which regulates Appalachian, Wheeling and other investor-owned utilities, declined to comment for this story.
Across the country, many are in arrears on their electric bills. Missing payments totaled $14.5 billion at the end of 2023, up from roughly $10.5 billion in 2021, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
A record seven million people have sought help from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. But recent federal budget cuts have meant fewer dollars are available to them.
‘Had Them Over a Barrel’
Electric bills are climbing for various reasons. In addition to increased spending on maintenance by utilities, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted supply chains and drove up prices for coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels. Electricity made from burning such fuels is generally more expensive than from renewable sources, but it becomes much more so during geopolitical crises.
Though West Virginia has a lot of coal, some mining companies have filed for bankruptcy protection or shut mines because of falling demand for their products nationally.
At the same time, state regulators have demanded that West Virginia’s utilities rely more on coal plants, which cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in construction, maintenance and operation expenses. That led Appalachian Power to enter the expensive long-term contracts for coal.
In addition, the war in Ukraine has hit the state hard, said Robert Williams, the state official who represents utility customers before the West Virginia Public Service Commission.
“There was a global squeeze in the natural gas market and coal market,” Mr. Williams said. And because West Virginia’s utilities are so reliant on coal, the suppliers “had them over a barrel.”
Given the state’s coal mines, West Virginia’s elected officials are reluctant to embrace renewable energy. Its vast mountain ranges are not ideal for large solar farms, though wind power has significant room to grow. The state has no nuclear power plants.
Appalachian Power, the American Electric Power utility that is the state’s largest, said it was “making significant investments in West Virginia to enhance reliability and improve service for all our customers.”
The utility said it was reviewing and proposing ways to reduce customer bills, including by helping the state attract more businesses so the cost of running the system could be spread over more customers.
The utility “is committed to working with state leaders to ensure we can help them achieve their policy goals, while always keeping customer affordability at the forefront of the conversation,” Aaron Walker, Appalachian’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.
Drew Galang, a spokesman for Governor Morrisey, said West Virginia could generate more power than it used. By using more of that capacity, including by selling more electricity to other states and data centers, it hopes to lower energy prices for its residents.
Mr. Morrisey has signed legislation to encourage the development of data centers and microgrids to help power them. Officials also plan to push for upgrades to existing power plants to make them more efficient, reducing costs.
“In order to meet these goals, West Virginia will consider all of its options, including nuclear power,” said Mr. Galang. “We must focus on providing reliable and consistent baseload generation. Coal and natural gas generation provides security, which is very important for consumers and businesses.”
But to some energy experts, West Virginia’s experience highlights the potential pitfalls of investing more in fossil fuel power plants, coal in particular. Customers could get stuck paying for them for a while.
Since 2012, U.S. coal plants have collectively lost about $14 billion, according to RMI, a research group formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. Many of those losses were borne by residents and businesses through their electricity bills.
In West Virginia, electricity bills will probably remain high because customers have to pay the remaining debt on coal plants along with the cost of any new energy sources.
“We’re going to have the coal plants here since they’re on our backs for the next few decades,” Mr. Williams said.
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