Factual information about Israel and Palestine may soon be outlawed in the California K-12 school system. Assembly Bill 715 is currently on Governor Newsom’s desk. The legislation was recently rushed through the California legislature, amended just days before passage, and voted on at 1 a.m. with almost no time for public comment.
The hurry is intentional because opposition grows whenever people learn about it. AB715 is opposed by educators across the spectrum, including the California Teachers Association, California Faculty Association, Association of School Board Administrators, California School Boards Association, and Council of UC Faculty Associations. Civil rights organizations, …
This alert was originally published on 14 August 2025. However, a technical problem prevented it from being shared via our usual email lists. This has now been fixed. Apologies for the delay in sending this out.
Late last Sunday, a targeted Israeli attack killed prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif alongside several colleagues. They were in a tent outside the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. Also killed were Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed …
Lately, I’ve had lyrics to ‘I’ve Got No Idols,’ by 1990s indie-darling Juliana Hatfield running through my head, particularly the line, “But I am a liar, that’s the truth, go home and think it through.” Why is this song, especially that particular lyric, taking up so much space in my brain these days?
I think it is because of JD Vance and his gift at being honest about being a liar.
Just about one year ago, during the presidential debate, when then-candidate Trump ranted about Haitian immigrants eating other people’s pets, it sounded like more of his bluster. In a rambling …
When Jay Janson declared, “You’re writing history with your breath,” I recognized the profound truth in his words. For Jay speaks not in ephemeral metaphors, but in potent mandates, each utterance a call to profound moral engagement. He is more than a historian; he is a living archive, a relentless prosecutor of empire who wields facts, fiery conviction, and unshakeable faith to bring hidden truths to light. His testimonies are not dry academic dissertations; they are ancestral echoes, resonant with the cries of the silenced.
I recall his presence at Riverside Church’s Peace and Global Justice ministry – not as …
He had moments of discomfort and embarrassment – pressed into calling the Qatari Prime Minister by his host to apologise for striking Doha and made to pay lip service to the prospect of a Palestinian state – but Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu had many reasons to be pleased. On September 29, President Donald Trump advanced a peace proposal that essentially preserves Israeli pre-eminence regarding the fate of Palestinians, though it entails a cessation of hostilities, an affirmation that Gazans would not be expelled (those leaving would have the right to return), and an injunction against Israeli annexation …
The news that hate had been finally eliminated was well received by the Well People: the well-born, well-informed, well-educated, well-heeled, well-known and well-intentioned.
The Wells pretty much owned the entire world but only made up a fraction of the total population. “Empathy has triumphed over odium. With hate finally behind us, we no longer have to sleep with one eye open. We can do our good work unimpeded, making this world a better place for all. First and foremost, the Less People will benefit from our achievements. A rising tide lifts all boats.”
I retired from the University of Texas at Austin journalism school eight years ago, but I can’t stop thinking like a teacher. So when I read the Texas Tech University chancellor’s memo instructing employees to comply with state and federal dictates that “recognize only two human sexes: male and female,” I pondered how I might use such a “teachable moment” if I were still in the classroom.
The self-preservation instinct would make it tempting to avoid any response to such political directives. The memo doesn’t specify what can and can’t be said in the classroom, …
Long before the Internet, evangelical church leaders were warning that pornography was corrupting the faithful. With the rise of social media and online platforms, access has exploded, making the fight against pornography one of the longest-running but least prioritized planks of the Christian conservative agenda, often overshadowed by battles over abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, and, more recently, unwavering support for Donald Trump. However, for all the energy conservative Christians have poured into fighting pornography, from the Meese Commission of the 1980s to Project 2025 today, the battle …
So, we are being subjected to the latest bout of verbal gymnastics as analysts bend themselves to the futile task of inferring logic from Donald Trump most recent effusions on matters Ukraine. Futile because the man possesses no approximation of a mind capable of coherent thought processes. His sole fixed reference points are emotional obsessions and slogans that sparkle in his otherwise inert grey matter. Statements and actions invariably are random, often self-contradictory, and susceptible to reversal either by mood shifts or by the manipulations of calculating persons in his entourage and stray acquaintances.
Moldova went to the polls on Sunday in what officials in Chisinau and Brussels have called a “milestone on the European path.” Yet with opposition parties banned, observers blocked, and voters in key regions sidelined, the election is being described less as a democratic contest and more like an attempt at forced pro-EU outcome.
Moldova went to the polls on Sunday in what officials in Chisinau and Brussels have called a “milestone on the European path.” Yet with opposition parties banned, observers blocked, and voters in key regions sidelined, the election is being described less as a democratic contest and more like an …
For several days, while Wessel lay critically wounded in a Berlin hospital, Goebbels issued daily health bulletins on his new hero. And since Ali Höhler belonged to a Communist street gang, Goebbels portrayed the gun battle as an infamous act of political terrorism. The Gauleiter wrote an emotional account of his visit to the hospital, and he quoted from the hero’s song: “Comrades shot dead by the Red front and Reaction march in spirit with our ranks!” When Horst Wessel finally died, Goebbels staged a tremendous funeral. “His song made him immortal,” Goebbels cried, and, echoing the line about …
United Nations Security Council hall (Image by depositphotos)
At the UN General Assembly, now underway, world leaders are gathering to confront some of today’s greatest crises: Palestine, climate change, the war on drugs—even the role and relevance of the UN itself. Too often, however, the institution feels less like the pantheon of a new human civilization and more like the emergency room of a crowded hospital—treating symptoms while leaving root causes untouched.
The deeper question before us is: What is humanity’s next move? The answer will …
Two U.S. military veterans allegedly shot and killed at least three people each this past weekend, Thomas Jacob Sanford in Michigan, and Nigel Max Edge in North Carolina. So, it is a safe bet that they will both be added (with, almost certainly, no mention of their status as veterans) to the database maintained by Mother Jones that I have for years been using as a starting point to track statistics on mass shootings.
It’s been almost two years since I posted an update. In that time, Mother Jones has added seven mass shootings to its database. …
I have to share with you good news. In his video speech to the United Nations Climate Summit 2025 held in New York on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced China’s 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions. He said that China will, by 2035, reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent to 10 percent from peak levels, and will strive to do better.
He also announced that China will increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30 percent, and expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times the 2020 levels, striving …
Elder abuse in the frothy swirl of debates regarding the role of the United Nations is currently modish. The body has, after all, reached the age of 80 years. It has been a life ramshackle, rickety and marked with failure. But it has also been one of audacity, experimentation and industry. The occasion of the UN General Assembly was, however, a chance to cast blame.
The blame for the body’s failings is characteristic. It’s elder abuse writ large. Too many instances of constipated failure. Too few cases of efficacy over aspiration. Bed-ridden, permanently in need of treatment, constantly offering the excreta …
Kidnapped words are the Janissaries of campaigns to promote an invented reality. Their original identities are obliterated. Worse, unlike the Ottoman Janissaries, figments of the past identity can be retained when its resonance is considered helpful. Words are kidnapped for two reasons. One is to slay them; the other is to exploit them. American politics offers rich examples of both variants.
The radical right in the United States effectively took control of the term liberaland all its variants so as to infuse it with strongly negative connotations. They succeeded so completely in transforming it into a political ‘dirty word’ that …
"The net worth of median households is basically nothing. We have major problems in our economy." – Carl Icahn, American businessman and investor
by Godfree Roberts / September 29th, 2025
Four years after defeating the US in battle, in 1955, Mao told colleagues, “If we can’t overtake America in 100 years we don’t deserve to exist. We should be wiped off the face of the earth”. Less than seventy years later, China overtook America.
Today, Chinese are much richer than their American and European counterparts, they live longer, healthier lives and their children graduate from high school three years ahead in STEM subjects. …
Activists and human rights defenders ride aboard a vessel departing from Tunisia’s northern port of Bizerte on September 14, 2025 to join the last boats taking part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, bound for the Gaza Strip to break Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian territory. Sumud means “resilience” in Arabic, and the flotilla describes itself as an independent group not linked to any government or political party. (Photo by Mohamed FLISS / AFP)Catholic theologian and author James W. Douglass, a co-founder of Mary’s House Catholic Worker house of …
It is a continuing source of frustration that an important segment of the Left holds the view that weakening the United States’ long-established grip on the top rungs of the hierarchical system of imperialism is — in itself — an attack on imperialism.
Many of our friends, including those who claim to aim at a socialist future, mistakenly see an erosion in the US position as the imperialist system’s hegemon as necessarily a step guaranteeing a just future, lasting peace, or a step towards socialism.
While it is true that those fighting the most powerful nation-state in the imperialist system for sovereignty, …
Why did humans, who lived for 40,000 years as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, become farmers and abandon equality for a dominance hierarchy permeated with all kinds of nastiness, including war, slavery, and exploitation? It has remained a mystery why, ten thousand years ago, as farmers, most of humanity moved to social structures dominated by a tiny minority, and proceeded to commit heinous crimes against their fellow human beings.
If humans treated each other equally as hunter-gatherers, why not equally share the bounty as farmers? How did they allow their fellow human beings, whom they had always considered as their equals, to become enslaved, killed …
On the radio, Oct. 1, as a way to remember the evil of the Jewish State of Israel
by Paul Haeder / September 29th, 2025
Kelly’s on house arrest, essentially, for another three years of a sentence that did not meet the supposed level of his “crime.”
And not too many Substackers even can grasp how the “otherside” of the railroad tracks lives, though Kelly, from Wisconsin, is smart, a musician and got that sheepskin in accounting, too.
He’s got the Palestine flag in his backyard in River Falls, Wisconsin, and he has his heart at the heart of their liberation, in a time of amnesia-lobotomy and absolute consumer euphoria.
Here’s the KYAQ interview, talking about Oct. 7 then and now and beyond: …
Billionaires, beware: Thousands of your countrymen are focusing hard on reining in your riches. All of them, including large numbers of millionaires, want you to pay higher taxes. They want a twenty-first century America with less income inequality and more tax fairness.
Something like the America of decades ago, before the laws started leaning toward high-income taxpayers. (And they’re still leaning that way: see the gifts handed out to the rich in the Big Unbeautiful Bill rammed through by the GOP earlier this year.)
The posse that’s pursuing billionaires includes tax experts, scholars, investigative journalists, Democratic lawmakers, and two groups …
Trump’s Trade War has officially backfired on US Farmers and the entire US agricultural sector. 40% of crops farmed in the US is sent abroad but after Trump attacked China, China began sourcing soybeans, corn and other products from countries like Brazil. In today’s video we break down why the Trump Trade War is hurting the US and why it has little to no effect on China.
It takes a lot to make UN delegates walk out from an address to the General Assembly. But this was precisely what Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed to achieve in his September 26 speech. His address began by attempting to show his country as a guardian of law and civilisation, fighting a lonely, unsupported war against fiendish barbarians. “Last year I stood at this podium and I showed this map. It shows the curse of Iran’s terror axis.” Such an axis threatened “the peace of the entire world. It threatened the stability of our region and the …
How many of you have met socialists who look like the one at the top of the article? I have and there are plenty like this. It was in the Fall of 2017 that my life-partner, Bruce Lerro and I travelled from Oakland to Berkeley to hear Suzie Weissman, biographer of the Russian Revolutionary Victor Serge, give a talk about the Russian Revolution on its 100 year anniversary. As we made our way in towards the building we saw a man selling newspapers. As it was …
After the smoke cleared, most of the subversives lay dead on the battlefield.
Later the afternoon I offered my army ration to one of the survivors who seemed somewhat cultivated.
He waved it away. “Thanks, I’m not hungry, only thirsty.”
I handed him my canteen bottle. “Let me ask you, was it worth it, this great rebellion of yours? Pain and suffering, people dying, including innocent civilians in crossfire, horrendous destruction all over the land.”
“Eleven,” he said.
I shook my head. “Eleven! What about eleven?”
“Eleven of us have made it through,” he explained.
Pakistan: TLP blockade causes disruptions. Image credit: ANI.
The assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, in January 2011, marked a turning point in Pakistan’s politics. This act of violence opened up a new chapter in Pakistan’s politics, wherein blasphemy laws and religious emotions serve as the foundation of a fully organised political movement, which terrorises the state.
Qadri, a supposed member of the elite police, shot Taseer for having publicly mocked Section 295-C of the Penal Code, a notorious …
“Tradwives” are having a moment. Amidst the rejection of “lean-in” culture and “girl boss” backlash, a host of popular social media accounts created by and geared toward young women promote the role of traditional wives, or “tradwives.” Now, a proliferation of so-called “aspirational” lifestyle posts romanticize conventional gender roles, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and financial dependence on men. The “tradwife” hashtag has become so widely used on TikTok and Instagram that the term was added to the Cambridge dictionary last August.
Although framed as a feminine ideal, the tradwife movement …
