- Mamdani, Islam and Socialism
- Renee Good: The Great Backlash
- How ICE Blitz Changed Chicago
- MAGA’s Cultural Agenda Enforced at Smithsonian
- Fear of “Feminization”
- Educators Fight Back
- LGBTQ Showdown in Pennsylvania School District
- Disability Justice
- Stand Up and Challah
- At 250, “Common Sense” Still Matters
Mamdani, Islam and Socialism
By Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, CounterPunch
Mamdani faces a herculean task, to sustain a movement while governing the city. Here, I believe, lies the core of the kind of socialism that Mamdani needs to remain committed to. A form of socialism that refuses to worship the instruments of power and sustains the spirit of a movement that has given rise to it.
Renee Good: The Great Backlash
By John Yang and Lisa Gilbert, PBS News Weekend
This week’s series of shootings by federal agents enforcing Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration have sparked a weekend of protests. Voices of anger and outrage were heard at rallies and demonstrations across the country. John Yang speaks with Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive advocacy group that helped organize Saturday’s protests, for more.
How ICE Blitz Changed Chicago
By Francia García Hernández and Madison Savedra, Block Club Chicago
Federal agents arrested thousands during an unprecedented immigration mission in Chicago. They also killed a man, shot a woman five times, tear-gassed a 1-year-old, separated families and brutalized people across the city, claiming it was all to make Chicago safe.
MAGA’s Cultural Agenda Enforced at Smithsonian
By Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian
On 27 March an executive order was published, claiming that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centred ideology” that “promoted narratives that portray American and western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The executive order was titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.
Fear of “Feminization”
By Clara Bingham, The National Memo
“The Great Feminization” makes the case that women have damaged workplace culture because of their feminine personality traits, like back-biting, gossiping, and over emoting. It relitigates the excesses of #MeToo and identifies women’s recent ascendency in some white-collar professions as the principal cause of the horrors of “wokism.”
Educators Fight Back
By Jesse Hagopian, Truthout
Even in a year defined by escalating repression, 2025 delivered something unexpected: cracks in the censorship machine. Many universities mounted an important resistance to the Trump administration’s attempt to coerce ideological compliance by conditioning access to federal funding on the adoption of so-called “patriotic education” frameworks that ban discussions of race and gender.
LGBTQ Showdown in Pennsylvania School Districts
By Kathryn Joyce, In These Times
A legal challenge brought by a Christian Right law firm, the Thomas More Society, is challenging the authority of Pennsylvania’s civil rights commission to apply anti-discrimination protections to trans students in public schools. Now the Education Law Center is arguing that Trump’s executive orders are not the law itself and cannot supersede case law supporting the rights of LGBTQ students.
Disability Justice
By Marianne Dhenin, Truthout
Disability justice advocates and organizers from across the U.S. explain what’s at stake for disabled people in Trump’s attacks on voting rights, education, the climate and Indigenous land stewardship, health care, and trans rights. They also shared where they’re finding hope and how you can join the struggle for disability rights and justice as it continues into the second year of Trump 2.0.
Stand Up and Challah
By Kelly Rissman, London Times
The aroma of babka, challah and chocolate rugelach wafts out of Breads Bakery’s location in Midtown Manhattan. But on January 2 Breads’ staff declared they were unionising over unsafe working conditions, minimal pay and — unusually — its ties to Israel, a pointed complaint given the bakery’s owner was born in Israel, as was its chief executive.
At 250, “Common Sense” Still Matters
By Edward J. Larson, Salon
At a time when absolutist regimes ruled most of the globe and threatened to engulf the rest, “Common Sense” called for popular governments with frequent elections to assure “their fidelity to the Public will.... [M]onarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes,” Thomas Paine wrote.
