We write to urge an immediate response to the growing pattern of governmental actions directed at independent media, educational institutions, advocacy organizations, and others engaged in protected political expression. These developments concern not only those immediately affected, but everyone committed to preserving the constitutional rights of free expression, association, inquiry, and dissent.

The reported congressional subpoenas directed to The People’s Forum and BreakThrough News should concern everyone who values freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, academic freedom, and the constitutional right to dissent.

Governmental investigations targeting educational institutions, independent media, and advocacy organizations because of their political advocacy strike at fundamental constitutional protections and raise profound questions about the health of democratic society, the right to dissent, and freedom of expression and association. Throughout American history, periods of political tension and international conflict have too often been accompanied by efforts to investigate, stigmatize, intimidate, or isolate those whose ideas challenge prevailing government policy.

Many observers view these subpoenas not as isolated events, but as part of a broader pattern that has included governmental investigations of labor organizations, prosecutions of international solidarity activists, legal actions affecting Palestine advocates, heightened scrutiny of student organizations and faculty, immigration proceedings involving political activists, and increasing pressure directed toward independent journalists and alternative media. While each matter presents its own distinct facts and legal issues, together they have prompted widespread concern about the health of democratic dissent in the United States.

History reminds us that constitutional freedoms are most severely tested not when speech is popular, but when it is controversial.

From the Palmer Raids, to the House Un-American Activities Committee, to the McCarthy era, to COINTELPRO, successive generations have witnessed governmental efforts that, in retrospect, came to be understood as serious infringements upon political expression, freedom of association, labor organizing, civil rights advocacy, anti-war activism, and movements for racial and social justice. Each generation has also produced courageous lawyers, journalists, educators, workers, students, faith communities, and social movements that refused to surrender those freedoms without resistance.

It is within that historical tradition that we view the subpoenas directed toward The People’s Forum and BreakThrough News.

Far from recognizing or according legitimacy, legal merit, or factual credibility to the congressional investigation, this statement expressly repudiates its premises. Rather, it places these developments within their broader constitutional and historical context, expresses solidarity with institutions that have made significant contributions to political education and independent journalism, and encourages a thoughtful, collective response in defense of democratic freedoms.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from American history, it is this: constitutional rights are rarely lost all at once. They are more often narrowed gradually — one investigation, one subpoena, one prosecution, one campaign of intimidation, one act of self-censorship at a time.

With one voice, we affirm the integrity of those educational institutions, independent media organizations, journalists, advocates, scholars, and community organizations whose work is rooted in the pursuit of justice, human dignity, democratic participation, peace, equality, civil liberties, and the right of all people to speak, organize, educate, and dissent without fear of governmental intimidation or censorship.

When these rights are threatened for one, they are endangered for all.

We therefore stand in solidarity with BreakThrough News, The People’s Forum, and all those facing governmental efforts to chill or punish constitutionally protected expression, and we call upon the broader democratic, labor, civil rights, faith, academic, and human rights communities to respond immediately and collectively whenever such attacks occur. No organization committed to the peaceful exercise of constitutional rights should ever be left to stand alone.

The Ida B. Wells Media Defense Network was created precisely because we believe attacks on political expression are seldom confined to a single organization. They reverberate outward — affecting journalists, educators, labor unions, students, artists, community organizations, and social movements. Too often, each struggle is experienced in isolation. Too often, the larger pattern is recognized only after democratic space has already narrowed.

Inspired by Ida B. Wells’ uncompromising commitment to truth, independent journalism, and resistance to injustice, our Network seeks to serve as a national educational and communications clearinghouse dedicated to defending political expression and the right to dissent. We do not replace the indispensable work of constitutional lawyers, civil liberties organizations, labor unions, or grassroots movements. Rather, we seek to strengthen those efforts by documenting attacks on political expression, providing historical perspective, amplifying independent journalism, encouraging public education, and fostering solidarity across movements.

In solidarity,
Mimi Rosenberg, The Ida B. Wells Media & Defense Network

July 17, 2026

An Open Letter to the Members of PEN America & Co-CEO Summer Lopez & Co-CEO Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf

I write as an independent radio journalist who, for decades, has produced and hosted Building Bridges and Equal Rights & Justice, nationally syndicated public affairs programs examining labor, human rights, civil liberties, and international justice. I am a co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Media Defense Network, a coalition dedicated to defending political expression, independent journalism, and the rights of those targeted for their speech and advocacy; a longtime anti-poverty attorney; and a member of Labor for Palestine. It is from those commitments to human rights, freedom of expression, and international law that I offer the following response to PEN America’s position on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

PEN America, BDS, and the Meaning of Moral Responsibility

PEN America recently circulated the attached letter to its membership defending its long-standing refusal to endorse the Palestinian-led BDS movement, even while acknowledging that genocide is taking place in Gaza. The organization argues that it vigorously defends the constitutional right to engage in boycotts but opposes cultural and academic boycotts as a matter of institutional principle.

That position deserves careful scrutiny. Throughout history, boycott has been among humanity’s most powerful nonviolent instruments for confronting colonialism, apartheid, racial oppression, and state violence. From the American Revolution to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, from the United Farm Workers grape boycott to the international campaign that helped bring down apartheid South Africa, collective economic and cultural withdrawal has never represented an assault on free expression. It has been one of its highest democratic expressions.

Today, as Palestinians endure what PEN itself acknowledges is genocide — amid the continuing devastation of Gaza, the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the destruction of hospitals, universities, libraries, and cultural institutions, the imprisonment of writers, journalists, physicians, and humanitarian workers, and the detention of medical professionals such as Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya — the refusal to support the principal nonviolent strategy called for by an overwhelming coalition of Palestinian civil society is not neutrality. It is a political choice with profound moral consequences.

The response below is offered in that spirit — not to discourage debate, but to challenge PEN America’s position and to ask whether an organization dedicated to writers, literature, and freedom of expression can acknowledge genocide while rejecting the most significant nonviolent campaign designed to end it.

Free Expression Without Accountability Is Not Neutrality

Your letter seeks to portray PEN America as occupying principled middle ground — defending the right to boycott while refusing to endorse the BDS movement itself. History teaches a different lesson. There are moments when neutrality in the face of systematic oppression is not neutrality at all. It is political accommodation.

Your opposition to cultural and academic boycotts of Israel, while simultaneously acknowledging that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza, presents a contradiction that cannot be reconciled. If, as you now write, “we continue to believe that what has happened in Gaza is a genocide,” then what meaningful, nonviolent instrument of international action do you propose to help stop it?

Boycott has never been an assault on free expression. It is one of history’s most effective forms of democratic expression. The American colonists boycotted British goods. The Montgomery Bus Boycott became a defining chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The United Farm Workers organized the grape boycott. International sanctions and cultural isolation became indispensable in helping dismantle apartheid South Africa.

The Palestinian call for BDS belongs squarely within this long tradition of organized, nonviolent resistance. Launched in 2005 by an overwhelming coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS calls upon the world to employ peaceful economic, cultural, and institutional pressure until Palestinians enjoy the rights guaranteed under international law. This is not censorship. It is conscience.

History also teaches another lesson. Genocide is rarely confined to mass killing alone. The destruction of a people has repeatedly involved forced displacement, starvation, destruction of homes, schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, religious institutions, and the erasure of language, memory, and culture. The Indigenous peoples of North America endured centuries of dispossession, forced removals, cultural destruction, and attempts to erase entire nations from history. The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and other genocides remind us that the destruction of culture is inseparable from the destruction of human life.

Today, Gaza’s universities have been devastated. Libraries, archives, museums, theaters, schools, and cultural centers have been destroyed. Journalists, poets, professors, physicians, and humanitarian workers have been killed. Medical personnel have been detained, disappeared, and, according to numerous reports, subjected to abuse while carrying out their humanitarian obligations. Among the most emblematic cases is that of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, whose detention has drawn widespread concern from medical and human rights advocates. His case symbolizes a broader assault on healthcare workers and the protection that international humanitarian law is intended to provide.

If PEN America truly believes genocide is occurring, where is its sustained campaign demanding the freedom of detained writers, scholars, journalists, physicians, humanitarian workers, and other civilians held without due process? Where is the organized international effort calling for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya and all those imprisoned because they sought to heal, document, educate, or bear witness?

Publishing reports after devastation has occurred cannot substitute for mobilizing every available peaceful means to prevent it. Nor is the historical comparison merely abstract. The Warsaw Ghetto did not need expressions of concern. It needed solidarity. Resistance movements confronting annihilation have never principally required sympathetic observers; they have required allies prepared to take risks alongside them.

Palestinians today do not simply need charity. They need allies willing to support peaceful mechanisms capable of imposing consequences upon a state that your own organization now acknowledges is committing genocide. That is precisely what BDS represents. You distinguish between defending the legal right to boycott and refusing to support the boycott itself. Legally, that distinction exists. Morally, it collapses.

Had PEN existed during South African apartheid, would it likewise have defended the legal right to boycott while opposing the anti-apartheid boycott itself in the name of preserving cultural dialogue? History would not have regarded such a position as principled neutrality. It would have regarded it as accommodation.

Your humanitarian assistance to Palestinian writers, your documentation of cultural destruction, your legal defense of pro-Palestinian speech, and your acknowledgment that genocide is taking place are important — yet they remain fundamentally incomplete if they stop short of endorsing the principal nonviolent strategy requested by the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society.

Humanitarian relief cannot replace political accountability. One cannot document the destruction of a people’s culture while opposing peaceful collective action designed to stop its destruction. Nor should accountability depend upon nationality, religion, or ethnicity. Any writer, intellectual, or public figure — Israeli or otherwise — who rejects peaceful forms of accountability while remaining silent about, minimizing, or defending the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the continuing devastation of Gaza, or the denial of Palestinian rights should expect rigorous moral and political criticism. Such criticism is not an attack on identity; it is a response to public positions taken in the face of extraordinary human suffering.

Culture has never existed outside politics. Apartheid South Africa understood that. Colonial empires understood that. The struggle for civil rights in the United States understood that. The purpose of boycott is not to silence ideas. It is to withdraw legitimacy from institutions complicit in oppression until justice becomes unavoidable.

PEN America rightly condemns government attempts to criminalize BDS. But by continuing to reject the movement itself — even while acknowledging genocide — it risks lending legitimacy to the very structures of impunity its own reporting exposes. That is not principled consistency. It is political capitulation. History will remember who defended dialogue. It will also remember who defended meaningful action.

Governments throughout history have relied upon the normalization provided by cultural institutions to soften international condemnation. Apartheid South Africa understood this well. Military dictatorships understood this. Colonial powers understood this.

Culture is never politically neutral. Neither is refusing to withdraw it. Many of the world’s leading intellectuals recognized that there are moments when solidarity requires more than witnessing. It requires collective refusal. The irony is especially striking for an organization devoted to writers. Writers have historically stood at the forefront of boycott campaigns against tyranny: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Arundhati Roy, Desmond Tutu. Few today would argue that artists should have continued performing at Sun City while Nelson Mandela remained imprisoned. Few defend the claim that cultural exchange should have proceeded as though apartheid did not exist. History judged those boycotts not as censorship but as moral resistance.

The lesson of South Africa, the Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous struggles against colonization, and every successful campaign of nonviolent resistance is unmistakable. Boycott is not the enemy of free expression. Boycott is one of free expression’s highest democratic forms. If PEN America truly believes genocide is taking place, the question remains unavoidable:

If not BDS, what peaceful mechanism do you propose that is capable of stopping it?

History — and the people of Palestine — deserve an answer.

Mimi Rosenberg, Esq.
Producer/Host, Building Bridges & Equal Rights & Justice radio productions
Co-founder, Ida B. Wells Media Defense Network

PEN America’s Letter to Its Membership

The following is the text of the letter circulated by PEN America that prompted my response.

July 15, 2026

Dear Mimi,

As the leaders of PEN America, we know that much of our work about free expression will provoke strong feelings, often from every direction. That’s the price of doing this work honestly, and it’s one we’ve always been proud to pay.

When we came into these roles in February, we said we would lead this organization in a principled defense of free expression. We also acknowledged that “there are many within our community who feel silenced based on their faith, identity, or culture. We must ensure PEN America can speak for all those who feel silenced, and continue to be a home for all writers.”

We meant what we said. Last week we published “A Silent Moratorium,” a piece documenting the stories of Israeli and Jewish writers who have experienced isolation and exclusion from literary life over the last several years. When we hear from writers in our community who feel unable to write freely and without fear, we won’t let fear of controversy stop us from telling their stories.

We are proud to have published this piece, and we are proud that it sits within a broader body of work to defend and uplift the stories of writers across a range of perspectives, identities, and backgrounds.

In response to some misrepresentation of our work that has been circulating since we published this piece, we want to set the record straight regarding a few areas of our work and talk about what this organization does.

Start with the question of boycotts. PEN America first published its position opposing cultural and academic boycotts on its website in 2007. We’ve also ardently opposed and advocated against unconstitutional legislative and statutory efforts to suppress the right to engage in boycotts. This is not contradictory. We believe part of our unique role is to protect the legal right to free speech vigorously, while also considering what it takes to build a broader culture of free expression.

When government attempts to restrict the right to boycott, we speak out. When Texas and Arkansas passed laws requiring government contractors to sign pledges disavowing any boycott of Israel before they could get paid, we spoke out against both. When a federal appeals court upheld one of those laws in 2022, we said plainly that the ruling “drastically undermines constitutionally protected freedoms.” We’ve criticized the U.S. and Israeli governments alike when they’ve detained, barred entry, or deported people over boycott advocacy or criticism of Israel’s government.

We’ve also spent a decade defending all voices on campuses, including students and faculty organizing for Palestinian rights or facing discipline for their speech critical of Israel. We oppose bills that use vague “promotion of terrorism” language as cover to chill pro-Palestinian speech, such as recently passed in Florida. Since October 2023, we’ve put out dozens of statements specifically addressing the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech in this country. Since early 2025, we have been part of eight amicus briefs in important First Amendment cases against the Trump administration to protect the rights of faculty and students expressing pro-Palestinian speech, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.

In the past two years, PEN America directed half a million dollars in direct emergency support to Palestinian writers and artists in Gaza and in exile, including helping families relocate to safety — a level of relief we have not provided in response to any other conflict in our history. We published a report on the Israeli military’s destruction of cultural life and heritage in Gaza, built on interviews with Palestinian writers, artists, and cultural workers. We’ve translated and published the work of Palestinian writers in Gaza and elevated the voices of Palestinian writers calling for the preservation of their culture. We have said plainly, and continue to believe, that what has happened in Gaza is a genocide.

We don’t say any of this to shut off criticism or discourage open and respectful debate. There is no question that this organization’s work over the past decade, on one of the most contested conflicts of our time, has not been perfect. We’ve faced pressures and criticisms from every direction, and we intend to keep taking constructive criticism seriously rather than running from it. Our door is always open to engage with any members of our community who wish to be in conversation with us. As leaders of an organization dedicated to dialogue and open discourse, we are committed to hearing critique and debate, and to always driving this organization to be better. We will also hold firm to this organization’s mission and purpose, and to our commitment to a principled defense of free expression.

There is urgent work to be done in service of that mission, and we remain committed to carrying it forward.

Read coverage in The New York Times and find more details about this work on our website.

“Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
— Nelson Mandela

June 30, 2026

Friends and Comrades,

I am circulating this response to a recent essay by Ike Nahem, “Thoughts on Building a Cuba-Centered United Front in this Period,” which came to my attention through Cuba solidarity networks. Nahem’s essay criticizes the decision of the Seattle/Cuba Friendship Committee to remove Socialist Workers Party (SWP) participants from membership. In doing so, however, it obscures the central political question at issue: whether a movement dedicated to defending the Cuban Revolution can remain silent on, minimize, or accommodate support for Israel’s ongoing colonial project and the denial of Palestinian national rights. While affirming support for Palestine in principle, Nahem’s argument ultimately treats the Palestinian struggle as secondary to the preservation of organizational unity, suggesting that steadfast opposition to Zionism and solidarity with Palestinian liberation are potentially disruptive questions that must be moderated or set aside in order to maintain a broader Cuba solidarity coalition. Yet for many of us, the issue is not one of organizational expediency but of political principle, because solidarity with Cuba and solidarity with Palestine arise from the same anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist commitments.

The dispute is not fundamentally about organizational procedure or exclusion. It is about political principles. The Seattle/Cuba Friendship Committee’s action arose from profound disagreements over the SWP’s support for Israel, its opposition to the anti-Zionist perspective embraced by much of the international Palestine solidarity movement, and its departure from positions historically associated with anti-colonial liberation struggles. At stake is whether solidarity with Cuba can be divorced from solidarity with Palestine, or whether both are inseparable expressions of a common struggle against colonialism, racism, occupation, and imperial domination.

For many of us, support for the Cuban Revolution is not a matter of convenience or selective internationalism. Cuba’s revolutionary history, forged in opposition to colonialism, white supremacy, and imperial power, has consistently aligned itself with national liberation movements throughout the Global South, including the Palestinian struggle. Any attempt to separate the defense of Cuba from the defense of Palestinian self-determination risks abandoning the very anti-imperialist principles that have given Cuba solidarity its moral and political coherence. It is this question—and the broader implications of Nahem’s argument—that I address in the following response.

Ike Nahem is a longtime socialist activist and a leading figure in the Cuba solidarity movement, associated with the Cuba Sí Coalition and decades of work opposing the U.S. blockade and defending the Cuban Revolution. Precisely because his views carry influence among many who identify as anti-imperialists and supporters of Cuba, I believe it is necessary to respond.

I do so because the position advanced in his essay does more than express a tactical difference over coalition-building. In my view, it objectively accommodates a Zionist narrative that seeks to detach Palestine from the broader struggle against colonialism, racism, occupation, and imperial domination. By treating support for Palestinian liberation as secondary, negotiable, or potentially disruptive to the work of Cuba solidarity, the argument advances a false choice that neither history nor principle supports.

The Cuban Revolution has never stood merely for the sovereignty of one nation. Its enduring moral authority derives from its unwavering identification with the oppressed and colonized of the world—from Algeria, Angola, and Namibia to South Africa and Palestine. Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism has rested on the understanding that the struggle against colonialism and racism is indivisible. To defend Cuba while diminishing Palestine is therefore not an act of solidarity but a departure from the very principles that have animated Cuba’s role in world history.

It is for this reason that I believe Ike Nahem’s argument is not simply mistaken but politically dangerous. At a moment when the Palestinian people confront dispossession, occupation, apartheid, and mass violence—an ongoing holocaust—any effort to marginalize their struggle within anti-imperialist movements risks lending credibility to forces that seek to normalize those injustices. The issue before us is not whether Cuba solidarity should continue—of course it must. The issue is whether that solidarity will remain faithful to the revolutionary internationalism that has long defined it.

The following response is offered in that spirit: in defense of Palestine, in defense of Cuba, and in defense of the principle that liberation struggles are strengthened—not weakened—when they stand together.

While Ike acknowledges that the SWP’s position is “appalling,” “morally indefensible,” and contrary to Palestinian self-determination, he nevertheless argues that such positions should not constitute grounds for exclusion from Cuba solidarity formations because maintaining a broad, non-exclusionary united front around opposition to the blockade is, in his view, the overriding priority.

I profoundly disagree.

The question before us is not simply one of coalition-building or organizational policy. It is a question of political principle.

For those of us who have spent decades defending Cuba against blockade, sanctions, destabilization, and threats of intervention, Cuba has never represented simply a nation under siege. Cuba has represented a revolutionary commitment to anti-colonialism, anti-racism, self-determination, internationalism, and human liberation—towards the “beloved community,” an egalitarian society, a socialist society.

I did not come to Cuba solidarity because Cuba was convenient. I came to Cuba solidarity because Cuba stood where history demanded it stand: with the oppressed against the oppressor, from Angola and Namibia to South Africa and Palestine.

That is why I believe the argument advanced in Ike’s essay, however well-intentioned, represents a profound political and moral error. It asks us to separate Cuba from the very principles that have given Cuba its historic significance and moral authority in the world.

The Cuban Revolution was not built on neutrality between colonizer and colonized. It was not built on indifference to racial oppression, occupation, apartheid, or national liberation struggles. It was built upon taking sides.

Cuba’s internationalist legacy—from its decisive role in the defeat of apartheid in Southern Africa to its unwavering solidarity with Palestine—cannot be treated as incidental or secondary to the struggle against the blockade. It is precisely that legacy that has inspired generations of freedom fighters throughout the world to defend Cuba.

As Nelson Mandela reminded us, “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

The following essay is offered in that spirit.

No Cuba Solidarity Without Anti-Colonial Solidarity

A Response to the Politics of Opportunism, Zionism, and Moral Evasion

Not Internationalism — Opportunism

There is something profoundly revealing in the argument that Cuba solidarity must remain “Cuba-centered” even if that means accommodating organizations that support, excuse, or rationalize the destruction of Palestine.

This is not principled internationalism. It is opportunism.

It asks us to defend Cuba while abandoning the very principles that have made the Cuban Revolution worthy of defense: anti-colonialism, internationalism, and solidarity with oppressed peoples. In the name of building a broader coalition, it risks subordinating those principles to political expediency, requiring accommodation to forces—including, in this instance, Zionism—that stand in contradiction to the values Cuba has historically championed. What exactly is Cuba if not the living product of an anti-colonial revolution? What exactly are we defending if not a society born from the struggle against empire, racial hierarchy, exploitation, and white supremacy?

The Revolution Did Not Begin in 1959

The Cuban Revolution did not emerge from a political vacuum. For many Cubans, the Cuban Revolution did not begin in 1959 but with the Mambises—the Black, mixed-race, and working-class independence fighters who took up arms against Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. Many were descendants of enslaved Africans brought to Cuba from the Angola-Congo region, whose struggle for freedom became inseparable from the fight for Cuban independence itself. Their cause was given political vision by José Martí, whose commitment to national liberation, anti-racism, and human dignity helped shape Cuba’s revolutionary consciousness. Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement consciously saw themselves as heirs to this tradition, completing the unfinished work of Martí and the Mambises by ending not only dictatorship but also foreign domination and neocolonial dependency. From the descendants of Africa who fought as Mambises, to Martí, to Fidel, and ultimately to Cuba’s internationalist solidarity with liberation struggles from Angola to Palestine, there runs a continuous thread of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and resistance to imperial power.

Cuba Chose the Side of the Oppressed

The Revolution’s legitimacy has never rested solely on its achievements in health care, education, housing, or science. Its moral authority rests on something even deeper. It has consistently chosen the side of the oppressed against the oppressor.

Cuba sent doctors where others sent armies.
Cuba sent teachers where others sent bankers.
Cuba sent internationalist fighters to Angola not for profit, not for conquest, not for oil, but to defeat colonialism, apartheid, and white supremacy.

The blood of Cuban internationalists helped secure the liberation of Angola, Namibia, and ultimately South Africa itself. As Nelson Mandela declared after his release from prison, the defeat of apartheid cannot be understood without Cuba’s contribution. Mandela also understood that the Palestinian struggle was part of the same unfinished struggle against colonial domination, reminding the world that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

He understood something that many self-described realists and pragmatists refuse to understand today.

The struggle is one struggle.

The systems of domination may wear different uniforms, fly different flags, and speak different languages, but colonialism remains colonialism. White supremacy remains white supremacy. Occupation remains occupation. Ethnic cleansing remains ethnic cleansing. Genocide remains genocide.

Palestine Is Not External to Cuba’s Mission

The argument advanced by Ike Nahem—and by the Socialist Workers Party whose presence he seeks to defend—amounts to saying that Palestine is somehow external to Cuba’s historic mission.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For decades Cuba has stood with Palestine in international forums. Cuba severed relations with Israel. Cuba consistently voted for Palestinian self-determination. Cuba educated Palestinian students. Cuba denounced occupation, apartheid, collective punishment, and colonial settlement.

Cuba understood that Palestine is not merely a regional dispute. It is one of the defining anti-colonial struggles of our era. To claim that solidarity with Cuba requires silence about Palestine is to detach Cuba from its own revolutionary history. It is to reduce Cuba to a geopolitical object rather than a revolutionary project.

“Told to Wait”

What is being proposed is not unity. It is political amputation.

The argument says that because the blockade is urgent, because Cuba faces enormous challenges, because solidarity must be broad, we must suspend judgment regarding support for Zionism.

But this logic has a long and unfortunate history. Again and again sections of the left have abandoned principle in the name of expediency. Again and again liberation struggles have been sacrificed on the altar of political convenience.

Workers were told to wait.
Black liberation was told to wait.
Women were told to wait.
Anti-colonial struggles were told to wait.
Palestinians are now told to wait.

History has never been kind to those arguments.

The Contradiction We Cannot Ignore

What we are witnessing today is not merely a military assault on Gaza. We are witnessing an attempt to erase a people—to destroy not only lives, but memory, culture, history, identity, language, and nationhood itself.

The destruction of universities, libraries, hospitals, places of worship, refugee camps, and entire neighborhoods is not collateral damage. It is the attempted annihilation of a people’s future.

And this is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

If anti-imperialism means anything, it must mean opposition to the most concentrated and visible expression of settler-colonial violence and national oppression in our time.
If anti-racism means anything, it cannot make exceptions for Palestinians.
If solidarity means anything, it cannot stop at the water’s edge when the victims are Palestinian.

What is being defended in the name of “broad unity” is not unity at all. It is the normalization of political positions that are fundamentally incompatible with the anti-colonial traditions from which Cuba solidarity emerged.

Why Should Zionism Be Treated Differently?

No one is entitled to a place within a coalition dedicated to liberation while simultaneously defending oppression.

No anti-apartheid movement would have provided organizational legitimacy to defenders of Pretoria.

Why should Zionism be treated differently?

The truth is that support for Palestine has become inseparable from the struggle against racism, colonialism, militarism, and empire because Palestine stands today where Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, South Africa, and countless liberation struggles once stood: confronting enormous military power backed by the world’s dominant imperial force.

A Retreat from Solidarity — or a Return to It

The effort to separate Cuba from Palestine is therefore not a defense of solidarity. It is a retreat from solidarity.

It asks us to defend Cuba's sovereignty while disregarding Palestine's.

No.

Those who stand with Cuba because Cuba stood with the oppressed peoples of the world cannot accept such a bargain.

We do not defend Cuba despite its anti-colonial principles. We defend Cuba because of them.

And we refuse to sever Cuba from the very traditions of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, revolutionary humanism, and international solidarity that have made the Cuban Revolution a beacon for oppressed peoples for more than six decades.

There is no contradiction between solidarity with Cuba and solidarity with Palestine. The contradiction lies in claiming to support one while excusing the destruction of the other.

For Palestinian liberation, Cuban sovereignty, and the unfinished struggle against colonialism, racism, and imperialism everywhere,

Mimi Rosenberg, Esq.
Host and Producer, Building Bridges and Equal Rights & Justice radio productions
WBAI 99.5 FM / Pacifica Radio

From the Archive — An Invitation

As many of you already know, I have spent decades on the air building bridges between exactly these struggles. If this essay speaks to you, I hope you’ll listen to a few of the conversations that carry its argument forward:

• Africa Called, Cuba Answered — Cuba’s solidarity with African liberation, from Harlem’s Hotel Theresa (where Malcolm X welcomed Fidel) to a march down 125th Street.

• From Nakba to Cuba: No More Genocide in Our Name — settler colonialism, blockade, and empire confronted together in Palestine and Cuba.

• Cuba Stands in Solidarity with Palestine — Rosemari Mealy on Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism.

• The Fight to End the U.S. Blockade on Cuba — why defending Cuba means defending an anti-colonial project.

And this is only a sliver. For the last couple of years I have been working to gather as many of these broadcasts as I can — hundreds of Building Bridges and Equal Rights & Justice episodes — into one place you can actually search: Angola and South Africa, Malcolm and Fidel, the Nakba and the blockade, and hundreds of conversations more. Many of you may not know how far back it runs, or that it can be searched at all. It can — and it is a living archive I am still building. Please explore it, and share it: browse or search the whole collection at mimirosenberg.substack.com.

We have to begin by naming the moment with clarity and moral precision. The most recent and visible killings of immigration dissenters and community defenders — Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and Keith Porter Jr. — are not aberrations or unfortunate excesses of policing; they are warning signs of a state growing more ferocious in its willingness to use lethal force against those who resist.

At the very same time, the United States escalates war and coercion abroad — across the Middle East and expanding its military operations — indeed a holocaust hand-in-glove with the nationalist/colonialist project of Zionism against Palestine. And, then there’s the revival of regime-change policies in Latin America, treating Venezuela as a battlefield, abducting its duly elected president Nicolás Maduro and holding him as a prisoner of war, and tightening the decades-long economic strangulation of Cuba.

These are not separate developments but expressions of the same logic. They reflect colonialism turned inward and outward at once — a fascist license to dominate, remove, or eliminate those deemed obstacles to power.

This logic is not new. It is rooted in the original, ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples — the foundational American holocaust of dispossession and extermination that was never ideologically uprooted from this nation’s soil. It continued through slavery, the crushing of slave revolts, the violent destruction of Reconstruction, and the institutional terror of Jim Crow — American Fascism.

The machinery of racialized control — prisons, deputized mobs, military occupation, blacklists, and mass detention — has always been present. What we are witnessing now is not a departure from American history but its reactivation in a more consolidated, openly authoritarian form. Facism and white supremacy, its ideological buttress and enabler, are as American as cherry pie as the great exponent of the liberatory Black Power movement Imam Jaamil Al-Amin a/k/a H. Rap Brown recognized.

Before anything else, we must situate the present moment honestly. The assassinations of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, and Alex Pretti occurred as people were organizing — building united fronts across labor, immigrant, and community struggles to confront rising authoritarianism and militarism. When organizers and defenders of their communities are killed or targeted, history teaches us to look not only at individual acts but at the political conditions that enable such violence. These deaths send a message. They are meant to intimidate. They occur in a climate designed to crush those working to build collective resistance.

It is therefore critical that we call this what it is. What we are witnessing is not merely conservative governance or right-wing reaction. It is the consolidation of executive, legislative, judicial, and media power that history recognizes as fascist practice — rule through fear, repression, propaganda, and the normalization of state violence against targeted populations.

Fascism does not begin with camps. It begins with permission: permission to criminalize dissent, demonize minorities, militarize civil life, and create enforcement arms whose function is political terror disguised as “law and order.”

Hitler’s early enforcement arm, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts), offers a stark precedent. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the SA were not yet a formal state army. They operated as street enforcers — breaking strikes, attacking unions, terrorizing Jews, communists, and socialists, and creating the everyday climate of fear that made dictatorship possible. They normalized arrests, disappearances, and beatings long before the camps were fully systematized. Their purpose was to clear the ground of opposition.

Today we see analogous mechanisms. ICE raids, Border Patrol militarization, National Guard deployments in cities, and calls to use active-duty military forces domestically function less as neutral law enforcement than as political instruments. Immigrant communities — our compas, our neighbors — are abducted, disappeared, deported. Students are disciplined. Workers are fired. Organizers are surveilled. Blacklists reappear in new forms. Due process erodes. The spectacle of force is itself the point: fear becomes governance.

The propaganda machine completes the process. Whole populations are branded “criminal,” “invader,” or “terrorist.” Once dehumanized, repression appears justified. The targeting of Palestine solidarity activists, migrant organizers, and critics of U.S. foreign policy is meant to chill speech and isolate dissenters. It is a warning to everyone else: stay quiet or pay the price.

U.S. history shows how easily this can become law. The incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II was accomplished not by rogue actors but by executive order, media hysteria, and a compliant Supreme Court. Entire families were placed in concentration camps based solely on ancestry. Similarly, domestic counterinsurgency schemes such as the proposed King Alfred Plan envisioned mass detention of Black communities during unrest. The architecture for repression has always existed within the state; it simply awaits political authorization.

And yet, the people are resisting. The opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism has been broad, multiracial, and unmistakably democratic. More than seven million people across the country have mobilized in “No Kings” protests and related actions, rejecting strongman rule and defending humane principles. Communities have stood up against the abduction and disappearance of Brown and Black compas and their families. Workers have organized - indeed calls by major labor federations heretofore reticent to organize on political grounds to empower the working class have called for a general strike. Students have walked out. Neighbors have shown up at detention centers. This solidarity is precisely what the state fears.

What makes the moment more dangerous is the tepid — often complicit — posture of Democratic Party leadership, whose own expansions of surveillance, deportation infrastructure, policing, and war powers helped lay the groundwork for today’s abuses. By normalizing these tools, they paved the way for their far more ruthless use. Authoritarianism does not emerge from nowhere; it grows from institutions that were never fully democratized.

Nor can we separate repression at home from empire abroad. The same system that militarizes our neighborhoods bankrolls devastation in Palestine, partners with Zionist expansionism, wages economic warfare on Cuba, and revives the Monroe Doctrine to dominate Venezuela. Colonial violence overseas and fascist methods at home are two faces of the same project: maintaining U.S. hegemony through force.

Extremist gangs like the Proud Boys are noisy but marginal. History shows the real danger arises when the state itself provides the badge, the gun, and the legal cover. When repression becomes policy rather than aberration, fascism has moved from fringe to structure.

History warns us how quickly “it can’t happen here” becomes “it already has.” Naming this system for what it is — fascist in intent and increasingly in practice — is not rhetorical excess. It is a political necessity. We cannot fight what we refuse to identify.

The task before us is clear: build the united front capable of resisting, defending our communities, and stopping the consolidation of a fascist state — because an injury to one remains, now more than ever, an injury to all.

In a recent meeting a thoughtful and sincere question arose: Did Renee Nicole Good’s possible designation as a “legal observer” with a Minneapolis “ICE Watch” group— a network of neighbors and activists who observe, document, and share information about ICE activity to protect their communities exacerbate the circumstances of her death? That question — clearly motivated by concern for civil liberties and community safety — deserves a meaningful response. As I reflected on it, I realized that the very framing points to the need for a deeper inquiry as to where the real injury lies and it opens space to consider the role of citizens confronting state power.

The tragedy in Renee’s death did not begin with her presence on January 6, 2026, her conscience, or even her role as someone watching events unfold. It began with the mission and design of a federal enforcement apparatus whose very purpose is to surveil and control communities based on origin, race, and status. The idea that a label — “legal observer” or otherwise — could make her killing worse is not only legally irrelevant, but it also obscures the real cause of this violence.

Renee’s death was not the consequence of observation. It was the consequence of a system that dehumanizes entire communities the moment they are deemed expendable. The offense begins with interior enforcement as policy, with agents tasked to round up, surveil, and criminalize communities based on origin, race, class, or immigration status. That system dehumanizes entire communities before anyone even steps outside their front door. Renee’s death did not hinge on a label; it was a foreseeable consequence of a system built on exclusion, suspicion, and force.

Renee Good was a civilian, a parent, and a human being. She lived as a queer woman in partnership with her wife, Becca Good, with whom she raised her children. In life and even in death, her identity was distorted and used to diminish her humanity by political operatives and conservative outlets seeking to justify state violence. Her loved ones remember her as kind, creative, and committed to community, not a threat to it. That human reality should never be lost in bureaucratic spin or culture‑war misdirection.

The law protects the kinds of actions that Renee and others like her took. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and judicial precedent affirms that these protections include the right to observe, record, and share information about government conduct in public spaces. Individuals have this right by virtue of citizenship and humanity, not by virtue of an official permit. Similarly, the Fourth Amendment limits searches and seizures to those supported by judicial warrants and probable cause, and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process and equal protection. Yet ICE’s routine reliance on warrantless street‑level stops, racial and ethnic profiling, and aggressive interior enforcement routinely strays from these constitutional boundaries, especially in mixed‑status communities and neighborhoods already traumatized by policing. Civil rights statutes like 42 U.S.C. §1983 presuppose that ordinary people will witness abuses and hold state actors accountable. When citizens observe and document enforcement, they are not interfering; they are exercising rights that enable democratic oversight and public accountability.

ICE is not an anomaly in American history. It stands in a long lineage of state power deployed to oppress and control. Long before ICE existed, the United States sanctioned and empowered slave catchers under the Fugitive Slave Acts, giving federal authority to capture and return human beings to bondage. That system explicitly treated people as property and trained agents to see African‑descent lives as less than fully human. At the same time, the dispossession of Native American nations — through broken treaties, forced removals like the Trail of Tears, and violent repression — exemplified how state authority functioned as a vehicle of subjugation and conquest. Both systems rested on legal frameworks that justified dehumanization, surveillance, and coercion. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act codified racism into immigration law, banning Chinese laborers from entering the United States and denying Chinese immigrants the right to naturalize. Under Executive Order 9066 during World War II, over 100,000 Japanese Americans — two‑thirds of whom were U.S. citizens — were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps because of ancestry and wartime fear, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court initially upheld in Korematsu v. United States before that decision was repudiated decades later.

These episodes — slavery, Native American dispossession, exclusionary immigration laws, and wartime internment — are not disconnected curiosities of history. They are structural patterns of state power that define American governance when fear and prejudice are given legal sanction. In each case, law was used to make certain lives expendable, to otherize entire groups, and to consolidate power through fear of “the other.” Political elites leveraged prejudice as currency, building careers and authority on narratives that dehumanized entire populations while claiming to protect “legitimate” citizens.

At the same time, ordinary people of conscience have always acted to resist. Abolitionists who guided the Underground Railroad did not wait for legal sanction; they challenged the law because it was immoral. Civil rights activists documented police brutality when official channels failed to protect Black communities. The Black Panther Party’s patrols were not provocations; they were community defense. These acts were denounced in their time as dangerous or unlawful, yet history remembers them as necessary moral courage. In that tradition, Renee Good stood. She did not threaten society; she sought to protect it. The social fabric is torn not by observation, but by the normalization of state violence and the militarization of daily life. When conscience is treated as provocation and neighbors as obstacles, tyranny becomes acceptable.

Responsibility for her death is not diffuse or abstract. It lies first with the ICE agent who pulled the trigger, and with the institution that trained and empowered him. It lies with the Department of Homeland Security that shields such practices from meaningful oversight. It lies with the political architects and provocateurs who have deliberately militarized immigration enforcement, exploited xenophobia and racism, and fractured communities to consolidate their own power. This is not accidental governance; it is a strategy rooted in the logic of exclusion and fear. ICE is not merely dysfunctional; it is a systemic manifestation of oppression and exclusion, enforced by law, policy, and political will. Reform cannot cure that; abolition and systemic transformation are the only moral responses.

So no, Renee Good’s killing was not made worse by whether she was a “legal observer.” That framing misdirects attention from the true crime: a system that dehumanizes and targets communities, that deploys lethal force with impunity, and that justifies itself through narratives of fear. Her presence, her witness, and her courage were expressions of constitutionally protected rights and human compassion. Her identity as a queer woman, her partnership with Becca, and her devotion as a mother are inseparable from the human reality that her death exposes. She acted as a citizen, a neighbor, and a humanist. Standing up for her memory — legally, politically, and historically — is not optional; it is necessary.

Now is the moment for accountability, for unequivocal political opposition to systems of state violence. We must demand that the agent responsible be held to account under the law, without immunity or political shelter. We must challenge the institution of ICE, not merely for missteps, but because its very existence embodies a lineage of oppression that has repeatedly been rejected by conscience and history. We must mobilize for abolition as a moral imperative, not a rhetorical slogan — abolishing systems that treat people as targets, and building community structures rooted in care, justice, and human dignity.

We cannot accept a society where observation itself is treated as threat. We cannot permit state terror to be normalized. We cannot allow fear to be the measure of human worth. The memory of Renee Good demands that we act — boldly, collectively, and without compromise — to dismantle structures of oppression – Abolish ICE and the entire Trumpian plutocracy and build a world where all lives are equally protected by law and equally respected by conscience.

For Your Consideration

Mimi

Ken’s passing feels unreal, not only because of its suddenness, but because his presence was so steady, so woven into the daily and long-term work of struggle. He was someone I assumed would always be there—thinking, listening, questioning, organizing, and quietly grounding those around him. I say this with as much love as I can summon: Ken was one of a kind, and the space he leaves behind is vast.

At the core of Ken’s life was a deep, abiding commitment to the stories of workers—the people who create all the wealth of society. He understood that these stories were not just history or testimony; they were the raw material for building power and for moving toward the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. believed in and worked toward. That commitment defined the entirety of Ken’s life journey.

Ken Nash, a labor librarian for District Council 37, a rank-and-file fighter, a working-class intellectual, and a labor/radio journalist with Building Bridges, has passed—and with him, a life entirely aligned with the struggle for working-class liberation.

For decades, Ken committed to the belief that workers only become powerful when they organize themselves, ensure that the organizations they function in or create operate democratically, and insist that those worker formations become instruments of real political power—power to the people, power to the working class. He rejected abstraction and self-centered business unionism. He rejected labor hierarchies—largely self-serving, Eurocentric, and cis-gendered male in control. He rejected careerism. He rejected safety over solidarity.

Ken loved labor—not sentimentally, but materially. It was his profession, his calling, and his politics. He believed unions could either mirror the hierarchies of capitalism or become political engines capable of dismantling it. And he fought—patiently and persistently—for the rank and file to be the force that chose the latter.

Within that struggle, Ken understood racism as systemic, structural, and foundational to capitalism itself. He knew that the fight against white supremacy was inseparable from the fight for working-class power—and that this struggle would be ongoing. He never treated it as optional or symbolic.

He also knew that labor organizations alone were insufficient to erect the “beloved community.” Labor and community had to be synthesized—the coming together of where we work, where we live, and how we organize—if real power was to be built. Ken carried a historical understanding that the deepest creativity, vision, and momentum for change most often emerge from the margins, from those most exploited and most excluded - those who organize against systemic bias, historically against settler colonialism and plantation capitalism and the myriad ideological biases attitudinal and systemic to maintain those structures.

Ken acted without fanfare and without self-regard. He fought for the unionization of unpaid staff at Pacifica, never hesitating, never calculating the personal cost. When internal fights came, he did not retreat. He internalized the struggle and stood firm.

He had a generosity of spirit that was steady and unassuming—and a corny, grounding sense of humor that reminded us, even in moments of conflict, that struggle is a human endeavor.

Ken will forever inhabit Tompkins Square Park—a ghost not of nostalgia, but of unfinished work.

This is not only a moment of grief. It is a moment of responsibility.

To honor Ken Nash is to join the good fight:

—to build a truly worker-run society, —to struggle for the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, —and to dismantle—brick by brick—the walls of Jericho: war and militarism, racism and white supremacy, economic inequity, and the unjust distribution of life’s necessities.

Ken gave his life to the possibility of that world.

The task now is ours.

And finally, as the sunshine begins to find its way back—driving out this long, terrible winter of our discontent—I want to ask you to gather with me at Tompkins Square Park.

Come for your own remembrance of Ken.

Come with the stories, the laughter, the arguments, the unfinished ideas you shared with him.

Ken would probably still be smiling—maybe even shaking his head a little—at Mayor-elect Mamdani invoking Eugene V. Debs, offering a rare note of hope in the electoral process. Ken understood moments like that mattered. But he always knew, and reminded us, that hope does not rest in elections alone.

It rests with us.

It is we, the people, who must keep boots on the ground—who must raise our voices, organize, struggle, and recognize one another in the long fight for equal rights and justice - without which there can be no piece.

So let us gather. Let us remember. Let us appreciate what Ken gave—and recommit ourselves to the work he left in our hands.

You will be contacted when the sun begins to shine again.

~ Mimi Rosenberg

Dear Comrades,

I’ve been reflecting (see below) on the growing pressure—both personal and institutional—to accommodate or capitulate to controlling forces that threaten our intellectual and political integrity. Whether framed as pragmatism or self-preservation, these compromises often come at the cost of our principles, our organizations, and ultimately, our souls.

What’s being asked of us isn’t just silence—it’s surrender. And while it may feel like we’re protecting something by “going along,” history reminds us that this is often fool’s gold.

To help spark deeper conversation and collective clarity, I’m sharing some thoughts I’ve been working on. My hope is that they can help us begin shaping a position of principled noncompliance—because the time to choose is fast approaching.

In Solidarity - Mimi, member, the Ida. B. Wells Media Defense Network

When Silence Is Complicity or The Cost of Going Along to Get Along Is Too Big A Price to Pay

The Illusion of Safety Through Capitulation

I write this because, sadly, the threat to personal liberties and political speech is no longer theoretical—it is frighteningly real. We are living through a moment in which expressing views that run contrary to government positioning or dominant institutional narratives can result in serious consequences: jeopardized education, derailed careers, and even the loss of personal liberty. The cost of speaking out is rising, and the pressure to self-censor—to compromise, to capitulate—is mounting.

Going along to get along” is often framed as wisdom—a survival tactic, a gesture of civility, a way to keep the peace. But beneath its surface lies a quiet violence: the erasure of dissent, the flattening of conviction, and the normalization of complicity. In a society structured by inequality, consensus is rarely neutral. It is often the product of pressure, fear, and the desire to avoid being marked as “difficult.”

The idea that one can survive by softening their stance or “going along to get along” is proving to be a dangerous illusion. Capitulation does not protect—it erodes. It turns institutions into enforcers of silence. As Professor Rashid Khalidi recently described his former university, Columbia, it has become “Vichy on the Hudson”—a chilling metaphor for how easily spaces of learning can become collaborators in repression.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the repression of speech around Palestine. The case of Mahmoud Khalil—a Columbia graduate detained by ICE and threatened with deportation for his pro-Palestinian activism—is emblematic of this crackdown. Khalil’s refusal to capitulate, even under threat of losing his legal status and being separated from his newborn child, is a courageous act of resistance. His case is not isolated—it is part of a broader campaign to silence dissent, particularly on campuses, where students and faculty are being surveilled, suspended, and expelled for speaking out.

At the same time, we are witnessing a coordinated effort to erase discourses on racism, queer and trans life from our schools and libraries. Book bans targeting LGBTQ+ themes and authors of color have surged, with thousands of titles removed from shelves across the country. These bans are not just about books—they are about erasing identities, histories, and lived experiences. When we capitulate legally or politically to these efforts, we destroy lives. We do not win democracy or equal rights by surrendering the stories that make those struggles visible.

This writing is a reflection on that reality. It is a call to resist the unprincipled and domineering demands that seek to control thought, erase dissent, and punish defiance. It is a reminder that history has shown us the cost of silence—and the power of resistance.

History’s Blueprint for Defiance

Oppressive regimes have long relied on censorship, surveillance, and fear to maintain control. Yet, noncompliance—often at great personal cost—has repeatedly disrupted these systems. The printing press shattered the monopoly on information held by religious and political elites. Despite bans and book burnings, underground pamphlets fueled revolutions. During the Inquisition, the Catholic Church suppressed dissenting texts. Thinkers like Galileo Galilei and Baruch Spinoza refused to stay silent, laying the foundations for modern science and philosophy. In the 20th century.

In France, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was falsely accused of treason in 1894. His conviction, rooted in antisemitism and institutional cover-up, sparked a national crisis. Émile Zola’s open letter “J’Accuse…!” exposed the injustice, igniting public outrage. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, but only after years of resistance.

History offers no shortage of examples. Radical thinkers and organizers who refused to go along—who insisted on naming injustice and imagining alternatives—have been punished, surveilled, and erased. Emma Goldman, for instance, was deported in 1919 for her anti-war activism and anarchist beliefs. But her ideas endured, inspiring future generations. Her repression came during the Palmer Raids—a precursor to the FBI’s later counterintelligence programs - it reveals a longer arc of state repression: Goldman’s deportation was not an anomaly, but part of a continuum that would later include the systematic targeting of Black liberation movements, Indigenous resistance, and anti-imperialist organizers.

The Black Press and the Power of the Printed Word

In the United States, the Black press became a powerful tool of defiance. Ida B. Wells, born into slavery and raised during Reconstruction, became one of the fiercest voices in American journalism. Her anti-lynching editorials enraged white mobs, who burned down her press. Forced into exile, she continued publishing from New York and Chicago, documenting racial terror and challenging the nation’s conscience.

The Chicago Defender defied Southern officials who tried to suppress its distribution. Smuggled in suitcases and mailed in secret, it reached Black troops and communities with a message of resistance: “Let us rise.” Its bold stance helped fuel the Great Migration and gave voice to the civil rights movement.

Broadcasting Defiance: The Legacy of Black Power Radio

In the 1960s and ’70s, Black Power radio stations like KDIA in Oakland became cultural hubs for the movement. DJs and activists used the airwaves to promote self-determination, economic independence, and resistance. These stations bypassed mainstream gatekeepers, broadcasting news of police raids, legal defense efforts, and community organizing. They shaped cultural identity and galvanized collective action.

Whistleblowers and the Fight for Truth

Newspaper resistance and whistleblower courage also played pivotal roles in challenging repression. Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 exposed government deception about Vietnam. The Supreme Court sided with the press, declaring: “The press must be free to publish the news.” Chelsea Manning’s 2010 leak to WikiLeaks revealed war crimes and surveillance. Julian Assange’s platform challenged state secrecy, igniting fierce debates about press freedom. These acts of digital resistance forced journalism to confront power.

Appeasement Is Not Protection: The Danger of Cooperation with Repression

Today, we see a resurgence of McCarthy-era tactics: congressional committees issuing subpoenas to universities, unions, and media outlets, demanding internal documents and communications. Institutions are being threatened with defunding, loss of accreditation, or revocation of broadcast licenses—not for criminal acts, but for expressing dissent, revealing inconvenient truths, or refusing to align with reactionary policies.

Some may believe that cooperating with these inquiries will spare them. That by handing over names, softening their programming, or distancing themselves from controversial voices, they can survive. But history teaches otherwise. You cannot appease a bully. You cannot negotiate with a system that thrives on fear and punishment. The moment you comply, you validate the premise that dissent is dangerous—and you become complicit in its suppression.

Unions that betray their members under pressure lose their moral authority. Radio stations that dilute their message to retain their license lose their soul. Universities that sacrifice academic freedom to preserve funding cease to be places of learning. The cost of going along is not just reputational—it is existential. You lose the very thing you were meant to protect: the right to speak, to teach, to organize, to resist.

The Ideology of Noncompliance

Repressive systems thrive on fear and conformity. They sell the illusion that submission equals safety. But history proves otherwise. Compliance doesn’t protect—it makes one complicit. Ostrich politics—burying your head to avoid conflict—only emboldens the system designed to silence dissent.

Resistance is survival through solidarity. Galileo didn’t survive by appeasing the Church—he survived by truth. Ida B. Wells didn’t protect herself by retreating—she exposed the horror. Black Power radio didn’t play it safe—it played it loud. Dreyfus didn’t regain justice through quiet endurance—it took a nation’s reckoning. Mahmoud Khalil didn’t survive by compromise—he survived by refusing to disappear.

Why Resistance Matters Now

Repression thrives when we convince ourselves that playing nice will save us. But history speaks louder. Courage isn’t the absence of fear—it’s action in spite of it. Movements survive because people refuse to be isolated. Shared defiance is harder to silence. Censorship is a war on stories. Telling the truth—especially when forbidden—is revolutionary.

We must speak out about Palestine, especially now, when it has become the dominant issue around which speech is being repressed. We must defend the right to teach about racism, queer and trans life, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. When we capitulate—legally, politically, or institutionally—we destroy lives. We do not win democracy or equal rights by erasing the very people who demand them.

We will not water down truth to fit inside the margins of state approval. We will not mistake tolerance for protection or diplomacy for justice. Noncompliance is not conflict—it is care. Survival demands voice, not disappearance.

The Refusal to Vanish

You don’t survive repression by submitting. You survive it by speaking. Every act of defiance—every uncensored broadcast, every underground newspaper, every whistleblower’s leak—is a refusal to disappear.

From Ida B. Wells to Black Power radio, from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning, from Mahmoud Khalil to every author fighting book bans and students and teachers fighting curriculum erasure—the message is clear: truth is not negotiable. Compliance rewards the powerful—not the compliant.

So we speak, even when it shakes us. We resist, even when it costs us. Because silence is complicity—and we were never meant to vanish.

Together, we resist.

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