Indiana Law Could Endanger Tenure for Professors Who Speak Out Against Racism

The law “is clearly racist,” said David Greene Sr., president of University Alliance for Racial Justice in Indiana.

On March 13, Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) enacted Senate Bill 202, which mandates that professors in Indiana’s public universities uphold “intellectual diversity” within their classrooms to maintain their tenure safeguards. However, critics have pointed out that Senate Bill 202 actually undermines diversity and inclusivity measures and erodes tenure safeguards for professors who teach at public colleges and universities in the state.
Failure to comply with this law may result in disciplinary measures, such as termination, demotion, or salary reduction.
“What is most egregious about the bill is the fact that such sanctions would be imposed as a consequence for speaking about discrimination and racism in higher education classes in the state of Indiana,” the University Alliance for Racial Justice in Indiana said in response to the bill.
Critics have also pointed out that the law will likely be weaponized against Black professors. David Greene Sr., a Black pastor and president of the University Alliance for Racial Justice in Indiana, explained in a statement that “[I]n what it targets — diversity, equity, and inclusion — and who it targets — Black university faculty — [the law] is clearly racist.”

Opponents of the bill believe that it is just the most recent attempt by the Indiana legislature to crack down on so-called critical race theory (CRT). “So all Indiana law professors need to engage critical race theory, critiques of political economy, critical feminist discourse, anti-racist discourse, etc. . . . right?” Etienne Toussaint, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, joked on social media in response to Senate Bill 202 being signed into law.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as a legal academic field during the 1980s. However, by 2020, the far right had appropriated the term CRT, transforming it into a weapon in the ongoing culture war advanced by Republicans to limit conversations about Black history, systemic racism, and white privilege in schools. According to tracking by the University of California Los Angeles law school, more than half of the country has passed measures against the teaching of CRT in schools.
“The attack [on CRT] is not merely a culture war, but rather a mode of leveraging control of public institutions,” Elias Rodriques and Clinton Williamson wrote for Truthout in 2021. “The Republican gambit is to use an attack on critical race theory to stir up their base to stay electorally engaged, and if they limit the livelihood of those outside their constituency, so much the better.”
Senate Bill 202 represents the latest assault on academic freedom within the state under the pretext of promoting “intellectual diversity.” In fact, Indiana already passed a bill in 2023 that limited curricular content, and multiple state officials, including Republican Rep. Jim Banks, the Indiana Board of Education, and state Attorney General Todd Rokita, have made anti-CRT statements in the past.
“This is a bill that targets teaching. Not geography. Not math but teaching about race and racism. Who does it harm? It harms Black principals who are simply trying to improve a climate of a school. It harms Black teachers,” said Dr. Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University.

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As a Social Worker, I Know Oregon’s Recriminalization of Drugs Impedes Treatment

Oregon is moving backward. Gov. Tina Kotek will soon sign a bill passed in the state legislature, House Bill 4002, that will recriminalize drugs without offering any real solutions to the public suffering the war on drugs continues to perpetuate. The reversal upholds the same lie that’s been sold to United States public for decades — that the threat of jail deters consumption and helps get people into treatment. In fact, Oregon’s State Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber reiterated this sentiment in January when she said “there needs to be both carrots and sticks” to build in some “accountability” via the criminal legal system.
Both Democrats and Republicans introduced proposals to revert drug possession into a misdemeanor and impose jail time if treatment was not completed within a set timeframe. Ultimately, HB 4002 achieved bipartisan consensus and quickly moved through the House and Senate. Although advocates claim it was a victory, in reality, this policy is designed to disappear the poor and people experiencing homelessness into jails instead of giving them the help they need — a move that can be understood when you realize that much of the rollback effort was bankrolled by wealthy business owners and led by the former chief of Oregon’s prisons who all want to protect their bottom line.
Criminalization does not address why people are struggling — housing is unavailable, treatment is expensive and inaccessible, and many need medical and social services. Under Oregon’s new measure, attending a Christian-influenced Narcotics Anonymous meeting qualifies as “treatment” if no other options are available (which is true in much of the state), while other self-help groups are not considered to be qualifying treatment. If someone refuses to participate, they will go to jail and, when released, return in worse shape to the same circumstances and likely get arrested again.
I speak from experience when I say this is counterproductive. I am a social worker and former addiction treatment provider who has worked with people under criminal legal treatment mandate. I have seen how threats of punishment disrupt the therapeutic process and make it nearly impossible to help clients. I have begged parole and probation officers to let my clients stay in treatment after they tried to send my clients back to jail over a single positive drug screening. I’ve seen far too many clients cut off from services before they could fully benefit, fueling a cycle of punishment. Research confirms that the criminal legal system’s forced approach hurts more than it helps — people mandated to treatment do no better than those who are there voluntarily, and they face a higher risk of overdose.

Under Oregon’s new law, if someone continues to use drugs after being arrested for possession, they can be thrown in jail for up to six months. While in jail, the probation officer may permit release to attend community treatment, even though treatment is already scarce in Oregon since it is a state that ranked 49 out of 50 in access to substance use treatment before the state’s decriminalization statute, Measure 110, was implemented.
The measure increased access to treatment and harm reduction services after over $300 million in cannabis tax revenue was invested into the infrastructure via Behavioral Health Resource Networks and Tribal Grants across the state, but the system is not yet equipped to deal with a rapid influx of mandated clients facing the threat of jail. The new approach will make it harder to find a spot in treatment, as new criminal legal referrals threaten to overtake the few spots that exist. Moreover, people’s lives will be disrupted — they will be torn from treatment programs over a positive drug screen only to be jailed and put in line for treatment once again.
Arresting people will not facilitate greater engagement in an overburdened treatment system. Many people have few options in their communities, cannot afford fees and remain stuck on wait-lists. Like my former clients, people often have to travel long distances to get to the nearest facility or get on a wait-list until a slot becomes available. Further, cost remains a barrier, even for the insured. High co-pays and costly deductibles are common, and prior authorization policies dictate how much treatment one may receive. Under the state’s new measure, people will face incarceration when they cannot overcome these barriers.
Moreover, the criminal legal system has a terrible track record of providing access to more effective, evidence-based substance-use disorder treatments. Methadone and buprenorphine are effective treatments that cut the risk of fatal fentanyl overdose in half while also reducing cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Yet federal and state policies restrict access to these lifesaving medications, resulting in thousands struggling to find a provider. Few jails and prisons provide them at all.
The norm in many treatment settings is to use a one-size-fits-all approach called “Twelve-Step Facilitation,” an abstinence-only therapy rooted Christian theology and the principles of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Meanwhile, Contingency Management, one of the most effective treatments for methamphetamine and cocaine addictions, is not covered by the majority of insurance plans, and few facilities offer this approach. We shouldn’t force people into rigid, ineffective treatment that sets them up to fail and then punishes them for that inevitable failure.
Lastly, we must recognize that many of the people suffering on the street need housing first, an approach to addressing homelessness with decades of evidence from major cities across the globe. They may also need case management, mental health and medical treatment, and harm reduction support before they are stable enough to reap the potential benefits of treatment. We also need overdose prevention centers to help bring public drug use indoors, keep people safe and connect them with care. More than 100 of these sites are in operation in countries around the world, and research shows they reduce public drug use, reduce overdose deaths and improve public safety. Throwing the same vulnerable people into jail every few weeks perpetuates a costly cycle of punishment and disruption when we could be investing in programs that provide immediate and longer-term safety for everyone in our communities.
Saving lives at this moment requires us to ensure that our systems can serve our most vulnerable community members with quality, effective, on-demand services to meet their complex needs. Evidence-based, voluntary treatment is one piece of the puzzle; criminalization is not.

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Remembering Rachel Corrie, Who Was Crushed by an Israeli Bulldozer 21 Years Ago

We mark the 21st anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old U.S. peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a military bulldozer on March 16, 2003. Corrie was in Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement to monitor human rights abuses and protect Palestinian homes from destruction when she was killed. To this day, nobody has been held accountable for her death, with the Israeli military ruling it an “accident” and the Supreme Court of Israel rejecting an appeal from her parents in 2015. Rachel Corrie has since become a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and her legacy must be used “to direct attention back to Rafah” and prevent an escalation in the war, says her friend and fellow activist Tom Dale, who witnessed her final moments. We also speak with Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, who say they have met many Palestinians over the years who continue to honor their daughter’s memory. “For Palestinians everywhere, Rachel’s story has been very important,” says Cindy Corrie. “They tell us over and over again how much it meant.” After Corrie was killed, they devoted their lives to her cause and founded the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Saturday marked the 21st anniversary of the death of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. She was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16th, 2003, three few days before the U.S. attacked Iraq. Rachel was 23 years old. She was an Evergreen College student from Olympia, Washington. She went to Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement, which formed after Israel and the United States rejected a proposal by then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to place international human rights monitors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a U.S. Caterpillar bulldozer that was run by the Israeli military. She had been trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Rafah near the border with Egypt. Eyewitnesses say she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest. She was in full view of the bulldozer’s driver, as photographs show.

In June 2003, the Israeli military concluded her death was, quote, “an accident.” Human rights groups condemned the Israeli’s army investigation as a sham. A year later, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told Rachel’s parents he did not consider the Israeli investigation credible, thorough or transparent.
Rachel’s parents initiated lawsuits against Israel, the Israeli military and the Caterpillar corporation, but a U.S. federal appeals court ruled they could not sue the company because that would force the judiciary to rule on a foreign policy issue decided by the White House. In its ruling, the three-judge panel said the case could not go to court without implicitly questioning, and even condemning, U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In 2015, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Rachel Corrie’s parents after they had sued the Israeli Ministry of Defense for a symbolic $1 in damages, and upheld a lower court’s ruling that cleared the military of responsibility, saying Rachel’s death had taken place in a, quote, “war zone.”
In a minute, we’ll be joined by Rachel’s parents and one of her colleagues with the International Solidarity Movement. But first, this is Rachel Corrie in her own words, from a documentary about her by Concord Media called Death of an Idealist.

RACHEL CORRIE: I’ve been here for about a month and a half now, and this is definitely the most difficult situation that I have ever seen. In the time that I’ve been here, children have been shot and killed. On the 30th of January, the Israeli military bulldozed the two largest water wells, destroying over half of Rafah’s water supply. Every few days, if not every day, houses are demolished here.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Olympia, Washington, by Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. After she was killed, they devoted their lives to what Rachel Corrie lived and died for, and founded the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. Cindy is the foundation’s president; Craig, the treasurer. They’ve also gone on interfaith peace missions to Israel, Gaza, the West Bank. Also with us in London is Tom Dale, a writer who’s worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis and journalism in the Middle East. His new piece for Jacobin is headlined “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine.” In 2002 and ’03, he, too, volunteered in Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement, alongside Rachel. On March 16th, 2003, a little after 5 p.m. in Rafah, he witnessed this U.S.-made bulldozer run over Rachel. He held her hand as she lay dying on a gurney in the ambulance taking her to the hospital.
Welcome to all of you. I want to begin with Tom. Describe that day. What motivated you both? And what motivated Rachel to stand there in front of this bulldozer with that fluorescent vest on as it came forward and crushed her?
TOM DALE: So, to give some context and background, the International Solidarity Movement group in Rafah at that time were mostly concerned to protest against the and oppose the demolition of homes that were being carried out on the border with Rafah and Egypt. And there was no allegation, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that these homes were being demolished due to anything that the people who lived in them had done. They were being demolished simply because Israel had decided that its soldiers based along that border strip wanted a tactical advantage, and that involved clearing a 300-meter strip full of family homes, the overwhelming majority of which were refugees.
Now, at the particular time Rachel was killed, a bulldozer turned toward one of those homes, the home of Dr. Samir Nasrallah. And Dr. Samir and his young family were friends of Rachel. She had stayed with them. She had lived with them. She knew them intimately. And she placed herself in between the bulldozer and the home, as we had done so many times before and, indeed, as we had done earlier in that day. And what we had learned, over the course of several months, is that the bulldozer drivers were able to see us, were able to recognize what would be too far, and they were able to stop or withdraw at an appropriate moment.
But on this case, the bulldozer driver just kept on going. Rachel was sort of forced to climb up a kind of roiling mound of earth in front of the bulldozer. I think you heard earlier Cindy quoted saying that her head was above the top of the bulldozer blade. That’s absolutely accurate. It’s almost as if the driver would have been able to look her in the eye. But as he kept going, ultimately, she lost her footing, and she was sucked down into the earth and terribly, horrifically died. At that point, I ran to call for an ambulance. I learned then that Dr. Samir himself had seen the incident, too, and had called the ambulance.
And we had been living with these families. As I say, Rachel had been living with the Nasrallahs. I had been living with other families along the border. And that was an expression of a really deep commitment to the principle of shared humanity. And Rachel took on the cause of those families as if that cause was her own, and she made that cause her own. And that’s what motivated us to take that stand.
AMY GOODMAN: You quote Rachel’s diary. It’s absolutely amazing. She wrote this, of course, before her death, and she said she had a dream. Do you have it in front of you? Or I’ll read it.
TOM DALE: Please do read it. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Rachel wrote she dreamed that she was falling — quote, “falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react … And I heard, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.” If you can talk about what it means to hear Mohammed right now talking about how Rachel is remembered, Tom, and what happened to you as — you went in the ambulance with her to the hospital?
TOM DALE: Yeah, that’s correct. So, I mean, regrettably, by the time we got to the hospital, Rachel was dead. As I say, like, on the way, I had been sort of just steadying her hands on her abdomen. You know, of course, it was, like, a terrible moment. We were all distraught. We knew Rachel. We cared for her greatly. She was one of us. And then, immediately, of course, we were pushed into the cycle of responding to the series of bizarre lies that were being told by the Israeli Defense Forces.
And in terms of what it means to hear Mohammed say that right now, well, of course, you know, I’m very grateful. It means a lot, given that, of course, the situation that Mohammed and his family and all of Rafah are in now is so terrible, that he even has a thought for someone who was standing there 20 years ago is really remarkable and speaks to sort of the power of Rachel’s message. And I really hope we can sort of repay that in the international community and use this just as an opportunity, as another spur to direct attention back to Rafah, direct our energies back toward putting the pressure on politically to protect Rafah, and Gaza, in general, from a future onslaught.
AMY GOODMAN: Tom, I want to bring in Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, speaking from Olympia, Washington. That’s where Rachel went to college. In fact, I think I met both of you for the first time back in 2003. I just happened to be giving the graduation address at Evergreen College that year. It was the largest graduation class ever. But it was missing one student who was supposed to be graduating, and it was your daughter Rachel. And so, Cindy, you gave an address to the graduating class, as well. Twenty-one years later, I offer my condolences again to you. And I’m wondering your thoughts as you listen to Mohammed, on the ground in Rafah, talking about your daughter and what she has meant for the people of Rafah, Gaza and beyond?
CINDY CORRIE: Thank you, Amy.
I had a bit of difficulty hearing Mohammed, but what I know from our experience this past 21 years is that for Palestinians everywhere, Rachel’s story has been very important. They tell us over and over again how much it meant that someone from Olympia, Washington, that had no reason to be in Gaza, except that she had learned about the situation and knew that they were greatly in need, that she came to them, and that she stood to try to prevent the demolition of the — the many demolitions of Palestinian homes that were happening at the time.
And Rachel connected with the community. That was important to her. She worked with women’s groups, with children’s groups. Not only were homes threatened, but wells were threatened. She slept at the wells with other activists. Rachel was there with Tom and with others from the U.K., from the U.S., and people from other countries during the early time that she spent in Gaza.
We’re also often approached by younger people who have heard the story, some when they were children that remember it, and tell us that it changed their lives, changed the course of the direction of their lives, that they then felt that there were meaningful things that they needed to look for, meaningful ways to contribute in this world.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Craig, your thoughts, as well, 21 years later, with Rafah once again in the news, with President Biden saying that an Israeli invasion of Rafah is a red line, but not saying there would be consequences if the Israeli military went over that line?
CRAIG CORRIE: Yes, when I was listening today, I was thinking that, for me — and it’s different for other members of the family, but we were using Rachel’s memory and what she was doing as a portal for people to understand — from the United States, to understand what was going on in Gaza, what was happening to her friends, and, partially, the horror that’s going on now. And I think at this point we have to be looking directly at the Palestinians and hearing their voices, as you allowed today.
There’s never been a red line that any American president has — well, that’s not quite true — but, recently, enforced against Israel. And to me, as long as Israel is coveting the lands and the homes of Palestinian people, there will not be peace in Israel and Palestine, and neither the Israeli people nor the Palestinian people will be safe.
So, I think, really, the difference between Rachel, Tom, the rest of the ISM, the difference between them and the rest of us, is that they refused to look away when all of this was going on, and the rest of the world did look away.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, one of the ways Rachel’s words have been preserved was because of Alan Rickman. And, Craig, I just read a piece you wrote after the actor and director Alan Rickman died. You wrote it in The Guardian. And you talked about what a difference he made in making those words into that play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, based on her diaries and her emails. I’m looking at a piece — six weeks before opening night, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing the production, the move that was widely criticized as an act of censorship, finally opened in October 2006. And if either of you could comment on the canceling of people in this country and around the world now who express concern about what’s happening in Gaza, and also talk about your trip to meet with the Nasrallahs, the Palestinian pharmacist’s family, whose home Rachel was protecting?
CRAIG CORRIE: That’s a lot to talk about.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.
CRAIG CORRIE: I’ll start with Alan and the play. And I guess in that article, what I thought of is that that play, what people won’t understand about it is that it’s actually funny. He managed to get Rachel’s sense of humor. And he edited those words along with Katharine Viner, and we’re grateful to both of them. But he managed to get Rachel’s humor into the play, and I think that brought her personality. It made her human. And I’m grateful forever for that.
The play has been seen on every continent in the world, except Antarctica. And we, Cindy and I, have seen that, I think, in maybe six countries, in seven different languages. So, it was delayed in opening in the United States, but it had two runs in Great Britain, in London, before that. And it did eventually open in New York City. And since then, it’s been also all over the United States. And actually, there’s going to be a reading in a few days in Seattle again. So, I’ll let Cindy talk, I think, more about the other.
CINDY CORRIE: We visited the Nasrallah family in September of 2003. It was our first trip to the region. It was very important for Craig and me to see the place where Rachel had stayed and where her life ended. We traveled to Rafah with the help of our Palestinian friends, who met us at Erez Crossing. And we were taken — the very first day that we were there, we were taken to the area where the Nasrallah home still stood. And it was the only home left in that entire area. What I remember saying and feeling at the time was that house was sitting in a sea of rubble, because the Israeli military was destroying homes wholesale. Later, Human Rights Watch said that happened in the absence of military necessity. And over 16,000 people, I think, from 2000 to 2004, lost their homes at the time.
That day, we sat on the floor in the Nasrallah family’s home and ate a wonderful lunch meal with Umm Kareem, with Abu Kareem and with their very young children at the time. We were taken to the spot by Abu Kareem, showing us exactly where Rachel had been when she was killed. It was a very emotional day. We hugged. We saw the rooms in the house where Rachel had spent time with the children and the family. They pulled off their Arabic-English dictionary from the shelf and had me read, try to pronounce the words in Arabic, and they told me how Rachel was so much better at it than I was. And we saw also the space at the foot of the Nasrallah parents’ bed, which was at the backside of the house, where Rachel would sleep, she said, in a puddle of blankets with the children, because military people and machines would drive through that border area at night, and they would shoot into the houses. And there were bullet holes marking the entire home.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, and I just wanted to get your final comment, either Cindy or Craig, on what is happening today.
CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, that family did everything they could to hold onto that house. They were eventually forced out of that house, and some of them went through seven other houses. Now we hear that they want out of Gaza. After 21 years of trying to hold onto their homes and their lives and their futures and their pasts in Gaza, like so many people, they want to survive, and they want out. I can’t imagine what drives them to do that, but that’s the situation in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, again, Craig and Cindy Corrie, speaking to us from Olympia, Washington, and Tom Dale — we’ll link to your piece in Jacobin, “Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine” — joining us from London. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now! Check out our website at democracynow.org.

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Israeli Forces Again Storm Al-Shifa Hospital, Where 30,000 People Are Trapped

Casualties

31,726 + killed* and at least 73,792 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
591 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.***

*Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to 40,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on March 17, this is the latest figure.
*** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”
Key Developments

Gaza Health Ministry: Israeli military storms al-Shifa Hospital for the fourth time, killing and wounding a number of people.
30,000 people in al-Shifa Hospital ordered to evacuate to Khan Younis.
Palestinian Prisoners Society: Thirteenth Palestinian prisoner dies in Israeli custody since October 7.
UK charity Oxfam accuses Israel of “actively hindering” aid operations in Gaza.
PRCS provides mental support groups for traumatized Palestinian children, medics.
IPC: 1.1 million people, about half of Gaza, face “imminent” famine.
Nineteen aid trucks arrive in Jabalia without being blocked or fired on by Israeli forces in months.
UNICEF chief Catherine Russell: Airdrops and maritime deliveries are “a drop in a bucket” compared to the scale of humanitarian need.
UNICEF: one in three babies under the age of two in northern Gaza suffers from acute malnutrition.
Gaza Health Ministry: Israeli attacks killed 81 Palestinians and wounded 116 in Gaza during the last 24 hours.
Biden reportedly shouts and swears upon learning Michigan and Georgia poll numbers dropped over handling of Gaza war, according to NBC News.

Israeli Army Storms Al-Shifa Hospital… Again
In the early hours of Monday morning, Israeli forces stormed al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza with tanks and heavy gunfire. There have already been a “number of martyrs and wounded” in the ongoing Israeli onslaught, which began around 2:00 a.m.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said about 30,000 people, including displaced civilians, wounded patients, and medical staff, are trapped inside the complex. Sniper bullets and quadcopters target anyone who tries to move.
A fire also broke out at the entrance to the hospital, and cases of suffocation occurred among the displaced women and children inside.
Less than two hours after the attack began, the Israeli military announced that it was conducting a “precise operation” in the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, claiming that Hamas was using the medical facility to “conduct and promote terrorist activity.”
“We know that senior Hamas terrorists have regrouped inside the [al-Shifa] Hospital and are using it to command attacks against Israel,” Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in a video posted on X.
The Israeli military used similar unverified claims to justify three prior attacks on the medical complex, killing dozens of Palestinians.
Hagari added in his English video statement that the Israeli military would be conducting a “humanitarian effort” during the planned assault, providing food and water. At the same time, he emphasized that there is “no obligation” for patients and medical staff to evacuate the hospital.
However, in Arabic, Israeli military’s spokesman Avichay Adraee called on Palestinians to evacuate the hospital and its surrounding area on X: “In order to maintain your security, you must immediately evacuate the area to the west and then cross Al-Rashid (Al-Bahr) Street to the south to the humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi.”
Al-Mawasi, a “humanitarian zone” in western Khan Younis, is a severely overcrowded strip of land in the west of the Gaza Strip, serving as one of Gaza’s few designated safe areas despite being subjected to Israeli fire.
According to Gaza-based Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud, “leaflets dropped by the Israeli military told people inside al-Shifa Hospital, its vicinity and the entire residential blocks surrounding the medical complex to evacuate immediately.”
“People are caught up between whether to leave and trust the statement or stay where they are. We are talking about thousands of Palestinians who have been sheltering inside the complex since the start of the war,” Mahmoud continued.
“In early December, the Israeli military made a list of allegations and stormed al-Shifa Hospital, destroyed the vast majority of its property, and severely damaged major buildings and medical equipment inside the hospital. About 250 people were arrested from inside the hospital,” Mahmoud said.
The Times of Israel, citing the Israeli military, reports that the army has taken control of al-Shifa Hospital and detained 80 people since the most recent attack began.
“The crimes of the [Israeli] occupation will not create any image of victory for Netanyahu and his Nazi army,” Hamas said, as cited by Al Jazeera. “The crimes of the occupation express confusion and loss of hope of achieving a military achievement.”
In a joint statement, Palestinian factions said targeting hospitals “is a continuation of the war of extermination waged by the occupation against the Palestinian people and a flagrant violation of all international conventions and laws,” reported Al Jazeera.
Gaza’s Health Ministry has described the assault as a “massacre against the sick, the wounded, the displaced,” and has called on all international institutions to immediately stop the invasion.
“What the occupation forces are doing is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law,” the Ministry continued. “The Israeli occupation is still using its fabricated narratives to deceive the world and justify the storming of the al-Shifa Medical Complex.”
“Babies Don’t Even Have the Energy to Cry”
Meanwhile, Palestinians in the besieged enclave are still being starved by Israel’s ongoing blockade, especially those living in the north, where Israeli forces have repeatedly blocked the entry of aid.
In a new report, UK charity Oxfam has accused Israel of “actively hindering” aid operations in Gaza, defying orders by the International Court of Justice to prevent genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Oxfam outlined seven ways Israel prevents the delivery of aid, including by only opening two crossings into Gaza, imposing a dysfunctional inspection system that keeps supplies help up, and cracking down on humanitarian missions.
“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then, conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” said Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa Director.
One in three babies under the age of two in northern Gaza is suffering from acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
Catherine Russell, the executive director of the UN’s children’s agency, says acute malnutrition is when “the body starts to consume itself as it has nothing else, and it’s a painful, painful death for children. I have been in wards where babies are suffering from malnutrition. The whole ward is absolutely quiet because the babies don’t even have the energy to cry.”
“If we can get therapeutic feeding to them, they can survive, but often, they are stunted for life, and stunted means your cognitive ability is impacted as well, so it is a lifelong challenge for these children — if they survive,” she continued in an interview with CBS News.
While some aid is being airdropped or delivered by sea, experts, NGOs, and residents say it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of millions of Palestinians. Russell says that the aid coming in through airdrops and a maritime route is “a drop in a bucket in both cases.”
“We have so little access right now and it’s very challenging. We are also facing very great bureaucratic challenges moving trucks in by land, which is by far the most efficient and effective way to get aid in,” she added.
“If things are dual use, sometimes they get rejected. So, we can’t get plastic pipes in, we can’t get some medical kits in if they have little scissors. It’s almost Kafkaesque, sometimes trying to figure out how to get things into this bureaucratic mess.”
Similarly, displaced Palestinian Zahr Saqr, told Al Jazeera, “The situation is so bad that no one can imagine it, and the ship, even if it helps, will be a drop in the ocean, because the entire region is in need of aid, and people are competing to take aid from the shore.”
Airdrops have caused chaos and killed several people by falling pallets when parachutes failed to open.
“We keep waiting for aid. This is not a solution, whether by ship or by plane. We saw planes dropping aid and people fighting over it. There are some children who drowned in the sea for aid,” Wael Miqdad, a Khan Younis resident, said.
The UN warns that nearly 600,000 people are on the brink of famine.
“The living situation is very bad. We cannot eat, or drink, and aid is very scarce. They told us there is aid in the south, but it is very scarce,” Iman Wadi, another displaced Palestinian, told Al Jazeera.
“Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it. We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide,” Abi Khalil continued.
Israel has created “the perfect storm for humanitarian collapse and only the state of Israel can fix it,” she added.
Over a Million Gazans Face “Imminent Famine” as Aid Reaches Jabalia
On Sunday evening, Al Jazeera cameras captured a convoy of 19 aid trucks entering the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. The trucks were carrying flour, rice, and other foodstuffs on their way to a UNRWA distribution center.
The delivery marks the first convoys to travel from the south to the north of the Gaza Strip without incident in four months.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the body responsible for assessing and monitoring famine, said that about half of Gaza is facing “imminent” famine.
“Between mid-March and mid-July, in the most likely scenario and under the assumption of an escalation of the conflict including a ground offensive in Rafah, half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions (IPC Phase 5), the most severe level in the IPC Acute Food Insecurity scale,” the IPC said in a statement. “This is an increase of 530,000 people (92 percent) compared to the previous analysis.”
The IPC also said that the rest of Gaza will likely face “a risk of famine” in July 2024 in the event of a “worst-case scenario.”
“The southern governorates of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, and the Governorate of Rafah, are classified in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency),” the IPC said.
Long Way to Go Until Israeli Military Goals Are Achieved
The Netanyahu administration shows no intention of ending its war on Gaza anytime soon, despite a growing choir of voices, including Israeli allies, calling for the end of the ongoing assault.
Israeli military Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said in a press statement that much has been achieved during a “multi-front and complex war,” but that it will take time to achieve more, according to Al Jazeera.
“We still have a long way to go until the war goals are achieved,” he said.
Halevi also said the army continues to plan operations in “areas where we have not yet operated,” in reference to Rafah in southern Gaza, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering.
“The military is preparing for offenses in the additional areas and together with the political echelon we will decide on the timing and the appropriate conditions,” he said.
“We are determined to act wherever Hamas is building its strength. It is wrong to leave Hamas brigades and Hamas battalions functioning.”
However, former military commander Yitzhak Brick says Israel has already lost its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“You can’t lie to many people for a long time,” Yitzhak Brick said in an article in Israel’s Maariv newspaper, as reported by Al Jazeera. “What is happening in the Gaza Strip and against Hezbollah in Lebanon will blow up in our faces sooner or later.”
Brick said the Israeli home front “is not prepared for a regional war, which will be thousands of times more difficult and serious than the war in the Gaza Strip.”
Biden Fears Upcoming Elections
U.S. President Joe Biden’s endless support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has jeopardized his chances of winning elections in 2024, reportedly sending him into a frenzy.
Biden began to shout and swear after learning that his poll numbers in the battleground states of Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the Gaza war, according to NBC News.
The report cited a lawmaker familiar with the private meeting in January at the White House, where the scene played out.
He believed he had been doing what was right despite the political fallout, Biden told the group, according to the lawmaker.
When asked about the episode, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said: “President Biden makes national security decisions based on the country’s national security needs alone — no other factor.”
In a post on X, Amnesty International reminded President Biden that Israel used U.S.-made munitions to kill more than 30,000 people in Gaza and called on the President to demand a ceasefire and stop the transfers of arms to Israel.
On Sunday, during a shamrock ceremony at the White House, the U.S. President said he agreed with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on the need for a truce deal in Gaza, still offering no plans to put material pressure on Israel.
“The Taoiseach [Irish leader] and I agree about the urgent need to increase humanitarian aid in Gaza and reach a ceasefire deal that brings hostages home and moves toward a two-state solution, which is the only path for lasting peace and security,” Biden said, according to CNN.
Varadkar says the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people because: “We see our history in their eyes, a story of displacement, of dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger,” he said.
The Irish leader, who has previously criticized U.S. arms transfers to Israel, said he “was not shocked” that Washington has decided to continue arming Israel.

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Largest Dermatology Conference Voted on Right-Wing Proposal to End DEI Programs

A group of dermatologists recently sought to end their profession’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs en masse, exposing the degree to which the wider reactionary backlash against anti-racist efforts has found converts within the medical specialty.
The anti-DEI proposition was heard at a dermatology conference held in San Diego this month: the annual gathering of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), a nonprofit professional association with a membership of over 20,000.
Like many nonprofits, the American Academy of Dermatology has gradually incorporated efforts and programs to attract and hire a more diverse workforce. Such steps have included designing and implementing outreach and mentorship to potential students of color, diversity-focused workshops and conferences, plans to update literature and resources to represent a wider range of skin tones and a host of other programs distributed across the nation’s practitioners. Diversity efforts have been ongoing for some time and have been recognized by the Academy and many across the specialty as a necessary and beneficial adjunct to modern dermatological practices.
In truth, the need for such programs in this field is especially keen, owing to some rather glaring omissions. In a 2020 review, dermatology was found to be the second-least diverse specialty in all of medicine. The white-dominated nature of the profession has gone hand in hand with a systematic failure to include patients with darker skin in research and training materials — a failure that can have very real negative health ramifications for patients of color. But instead of acting in concert to embrace DEI initiatives and address these problems, there has been, as multiple sources described to Truthout, a marked backlash to “DEI” writ large simmering within the profession.
By introducing a blanket proposal to eliminate DEI programs throughout the dermatology field — “Resolution 003” — at the American Academy of Dermatology’s annual conference, a faction of DEI opponents within the field made their aims widely known. Their proposal, which was formally titled “Sunsetting All Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Programs,” drew instantaneous controversy and condemnation online. In response, other dermatological professionals filed countermanding resolutions. Ultimately the defenders of DEI prevailed at the conference: Dermatology’s DEI programs, it seems, will be preserved for another day. However, the tensions underlying this clash are far from resolved.

Zionist Agitation Merges With the Right-Wing Fixation on DEI
This sudden push against DEI at this week’s American Academy of Dermatology fits neatly into the broader context. The introduction of Resolution 003, rather unprecedented for the AAD conference, closely mirrors the strategies and priorities of the U.S. right wing’s ongoing fight against “DEI” as they (mis)understand it. Many use the word as a catch-all term to which they ascribe the bulk of the nation’s woes. (Recall that as recently as a few months ago, the buzzword to which the right’s ire was directed was “critical race theory.” And before that it was “wokeness,” and “antifa,” and an endless stream of other phantom enemies, with the right weaponizing these words to promote fear and rile up their voting base.) As a result, plenty of DEI programs, the bulk of them corporate, milquetoast and not particularly controversial — in practice very far from anything radical — have been subject to the poorly aimed vitriol of the MAGA crowd.
But the anti-DEI push within dermatology also exposed how Zionist efforts to suppress all criticisms of Israeli state policy amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza have become intertwined with the broader right-wing project of attacking DEI.
Leaked email correspondence sent between multiple leading dermatologists and reviewed by Truthout offered clear evidence that the Resolution 003 effort to “sunset” the entire span of the AAD’s DEI initiatives originated in an intent to retaliate against anti-Zionists in the field. In one email sent by Brian Raphael, the lead author of Resolution 003 to sympathetic dermatologists, the former writes that DEI “is anti semitic and harms Jews.” Truthout spoke to a source with knowledge of the matter that confirmed the veracity of the emails but asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
In the text of the resolution, the authors wrote, “Since October 7th, there have been instances where the DEI movement has been perceived as being filled with antisemitism, weaponizing the concept against Jews by labeling them as ‘oppressors’ and allegedly justifying extreme hate speech and violence.”
Building on that sweeping claim, they sought to mobilize their entire field to “sunset” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts aimed at gently welcoming people of color into the field and providing competent care to patients of color.
According to multiple dermatologists familiar with the issue, even the particular number of signatories included when Resolution 003 was first released was meant to signal the Zionist motivations behind this sweeping attack on the entirety of all anti-racist and diversity-oriented efforts within the dermatology field: The 107 signatories were supposed to be symbolic of October 7, the date of the Hamas-led attack on Israel that has become the rallying cry to justify the ongoing genocide that the Israeli military is perpetrating against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
While paying lip service to the idea that diversity is “important” and that DEI was “initially well-intentioned,” the authors of Resolution 003 also charged in its text that DEI has “evolved in recent months into a political movement that categorizes certain groups as oppressors and others as oppressed.” (Given that DEI programs have been around for years and are in no way a singular political movement, it would seem that the authors’ perception of this ostensible evolution is in fact a product only of right-wing media’s recent coverage and instrumentalization of the term.)
Once again, the leaked emails between the resolution’s authors, also reviewed by Truthout, make the intent behind the resolution utterly unambiguous. Comments from the lead author Raphael, such as “DEI has become a political ideology that has fueled anti semitism and threatens the future of Jews,” are indicative of the effort’s origins. The resolution’s authors, in leap upon free-associative leap, repeatedly conflate basic DEI policies with, first, the movement for Black lives, and then with anti-Zionism — leading them to the sweeping and preposterous conclusion that mildly reformist dermatological DEI programs, aimed at improving training and bringing more dermatologists of color into the field, should therefore be totally eliminated.
Raphael did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The resolution authors rather bizarrely attempt to portray their attack on DEI programs as being carried out in the interest of “disadvantaged communities,” arguing in the text of the resolution that “many professionals have dedicated their careers to advocating for and supporting disadvantaged communities, and the current DEI system, which is perceived to contain antisemitic elements, is seen as inconsistent with these values.”
The conflation of disparate political movements aside, their attempt to tarnish the entirety of dermatology’s DEI programs with allegations of antisemitism appears particularly egregious when considering the nature of the DEI programs in question: aforementioned efforts like including different skin tones in dermatological learning and research materials, offering training and curricula around treating patients of color, and other very basic decisions enacted to counter legacies of historical racism and ignorance within the field. That’s to say nothing of the very real consequences for patients’ health — crucially, a central aspect of DEI is to teach dermatologists to more accurately recognize skin ailments as they show up on a range of skin tones.
Zionists in Dermatology Are Working to Silence All Criticism of Israel
Amid this Zionist-led push to disband dermatology’s DEI programs, dermatologists who wish to speak out against the IDF and its killing of civilians in Gaza say they feel unable to do so, even outside of work, for fear of reprisal within their field.
As one dermatologist put it, “This resolution to sunset all DEI initiatives is an attempt by those who have power and influence in dermatology to stifle political diversity amongst future dermatologists. The signers of this resolution know that dermatologists of color tend to be pro-Palestine. That makes [the opponents of DEI] extremely uncomfortable.… However, I do think that there are also others in dermatology that have been wanting to sunset DEI for years, but now they’re hiding in the shadows.”
Truthout reached multiple dermatologists who said they strongly oppose both the genocide in Gaza and Resolution 003 but have felt unable to speak out about either. All sources requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences, citing the strong possibility of swift censure from mentors, professors, medical leadership, licensors, and others with power over their careers and livelihoods.
Their fear appears warranted. Last November, a Palestinian dermatologist, Amena Alkeswani, was threatened with firing and the loss of her license after she posted a heated statement regarding Palestine that her detractors framed as antisemitic. Truthout was provided with chat transcripts that indicated that, in the wake of Alkeswani’s post, top-level dermatologists, including the chair of the dermatology department at an elite university, had reported Alkeswani to the American Board of Dermatology and were planning other attempts to threaten her credentials.
Perhaps some might retort that Alkeswani erred in posting at all — after all, AAD professional guidelines caution against political outbursts and social media admonishments. But if that is the case, then Alkeswani is being held to a double standard. Truthout has reviewed tranches of social media posts posted by numerous dermatologists, including signatories of Resolution 003, spreading right-wing content about Muslims, DEI, and more, including to a group called “Derms on the Right.” Signatories of Resolution 003 were also seen to have publicly “liked” a puerile racist Facebook post mocking Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab. The clampdown on social media activity by AAD members has so far exhibited only a unidirectional trajectory.
The Conference Votes
The escalating tensions and social media scrimmaging within the dermatology field came to a head March 8-12 as the AAD held its major annual conference in San Diego, inviting its members to vote on a number of resolutions, including Resolution 003 and those proposed to counter it. After that, the results of the vote were taken to an executive committee; from there, the vote is passing to the handful of leaders on the board of directors. It was, sources describe, the most contentious AAD meeting in memory.
“Usually, the resolutions are for things like, ‘What kinds of sunscreen should we recommend?’” said one dermatologist who was present at the conference on the phone with Truthout. “This was different.”
Not only was Resolution 003 up for a vote — the online fervor around had, again, led to the introduction of two additional resolutions in response, 004 and 005. Their authors saw the need to hit back against the 003 authors’ all-encompassing denunciation of DEI. Resolution 004, for instance, took repeated pains to emphasize that the claims found in Resolution 003 (such as the ostensible politicization of DEI and its alleged ill effect on “unbiased and equal medical care”) are “unfounded” and had “no supporting evidence of fact within our specialty of Dermatology.”
Resolution 005, which was also crafted in defense of DEI, was introduced by Dina D. Strachan, MD, FAAD (fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology). The resolution explicitly critiques the “right-wing political initiative in the United States” that seeks to “harass non-traditional leaders and interfere with any efforts to foster an equitable, diverse and inclusive society.”
In the pages of Resolution 005, Strachan and her coauthors then declare that the dermatological community has “a great concern, given the stated threats to DEI, that the proposed resolution to dismantle this initiative is not about antisemitism but racial discrimination and unwillingness to accept diversity at levels of leadership.” Resolution 005 also points out that Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias are an equally salient concern for the field, and that “dismantling DEI does not protect anyone against anti-Jewish bias, Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias and conflating the issues has been shown to escalate discord and disunity.” Moreover, “No examples of anti-Jewish bias, which is what is put forth in the proposal, have been presented or tied to DEI in the AAD/A initiatives.”
As announced at the conference, it was ultimately a stripped-down version of this statement, Resolution 005, that prevailed and went on to a board vote. At least for now, the members of the American Academy of Dermatology have rebuffed the anti-DEI tenets of Resolution 003, with resounding condemnation: Sources say that the majority of participating members voted against it.
However, for a couple of reasons, the large majority of dermatologists in favor of DEI cannot yet claim full victory. For one, a final decision on the version of the resolution text that will actually be adopted has, for now, been punted; it will not be established until the board of directors meets, which may take place as late as May.
But more to the point is that, while the preferences of the majority of membership were made abundantly clear, the nuances of the text that they voted for would not survive the second round of voting conducted by a more exclusive leadership group. The version of Resolution 005 that survived the executive committee meeting on March 10 and that was ultimately passed to the board was a far cry from the clarifying diagnosis and stipulations of the original text of the resolution.
In fact, Resolution 005’s key points would be reduced to the point of near-banality — the text was cut in almost its entirety. Truthout reviewed a slide shown to the conference audience with the text of the stripped-down version of the resolution that prevailed. The trimmed-down resolution was far vaguer and more noncommittal:

The AAD/A Board of Directors update the mission of the Diversity Committee to more specifically examine and address any forms of hate toward identity groups defined by the AAD diversity statement of intent as they may relate to the AAD/A’s core mission and values.

That quote is not an excerpt — it’s the final resolution in its entirety. Nevertheless, the rejection of Resolution 003 and the adoption (in letter, if not fully in spirit) of Resolution 005 still represent a meaningful victory: By its heavily weighted majority vote, the dermatological community has decided to defend the value and importance of DEI programs within the white-dominated field — programs whose importance many dermatologists of color attested to during the conference talks.
Before the conference began, the AAD president, Terrence A. Cronin Jr., had sent out an email to the association’s members warning them that “public admonitions or personal attacks on social media platforms are inappropriate and may be considered ethical violations.” He sent the email after dermatologists of color publicly denounced Resolution 003’s authors and signatories. No such email was sent when Amena Alkeswani was under online attack from high-ranking colleagues, according to the dermatologists interviewed by Truthout.
Reached by Truthout for comment, the American Academy of Dermatology offered the following statement, attributed to AAD President Seemal R. Desai, MD, FAAD:

The American Academy of Dermatology’s commitment to diversity, inclusivity, and access to quality care for all is part of our Strategic Plan. The Academy is also committed to an environment in which our members, employees, and strategic partners feel welcome, included, and understood.We celebrate diversity in all forms including, but not limited to, religious, ethnic, cultural, gender, and racial identities and aim to improve disparities in health care. We are ardent opponents of any form of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, and racism of any kind.

After the conference, one dermatologist source (who, like the others, wished to remain anonymous for fear of career reprisals) commented to Truthout, “I am ultimately happy that 003 did not pass. This is a victory in that DEI was protected, and I commend the author of 005. Zero-zero-five, even in its amended form, is a much better alternative. The amended form I do not feel adds much to DEI, as DEI already existed to protect each other from all forms of hate and discrimination. But again, it kept DEI alive from the smear campaign.”
Resolution 003, the dermatologist continued, had alleged that, “DEI was antisemitic and promoted hate, without any evidence. In fact, the only evidence of hate within the derm community appears to be solely from the authors of 003.”
The dermatologist added that the authors of Resolution 003 “clearly feel comfortable with making racist comments, anti-Arab/Palestinian comments and Islamophobic comments online. Perhaps they feel this does not affect their ability to care for all patients equally.”

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Trump’s Small Donor Base Appears to Finally Be a Bit Tapped Out

Back in 2000 when Donald Trump first tested the waters of a presidential campaign by giving a series of speeches as a possible Reform Party candidate, he famously told Forbes Magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” He was speaking at the time about a weird deal he had going with motivational speaker Anthony Robbins in which he timed his political appearances around paid seminars that Robbins paid him a million bucks to give. By the time he decided to run for real in 2015, he didn’t publicly suggest that he could make money campaigning but he did make the case that he was incorruptible saying, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” (He’d obviously figured out that that real graft was to be made once he was in the White House.)
He pledged to spend a hundred million of his own money on his run but contributed only about $66 million out of $398 million so Trump didn’t “self-fund” by a long shot. In 2020 he didn’t use any of his own money at all instead raising $774 million for the campaign with the RNC and his Super PACs raising much more. (The 2020 election was by far the most expensive in history, doubling the record-breaking 2016 campaign.) His spending in that campaign was so profligate that it ended up having a cash crunch in the months before the election.
Still, the myth persists among the MAGA faithful that Trump is incorruptible because he’s allegedly a self-made billionaire and doesn’t need anyone’s money. (And even though they believe this, they’ve been sending him their own hard-earned cash just because they love him so much.)
Back in 2019, Politico reported on research showing that this myth has had some pretty serious political consequences:

Using a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, we found that believing Trump was not born “very wealthy” leads to at least a 5-percentage-point boost in the president’s job approval, even after considering the many factors that can influence public approval ratings. This shift is rooted in the belief that his humble roots make Trump both more empathetic (he “feels my pain”), and more skilled at business (he is self-made and couldn’t have climbed to such heights without real business know-how).

When voters were informed of the truth, that Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had to be bailed out repeatedly by his father, there were “noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character,” losing 10 percentage points from Republicans on empathy and 10 points on business acumen. “Our research shows that the basic information plugged-in elites take for granted is not known by many Americans, and can be consequential in political evaluations,” the researchers concluded. Imagine that.

The following video has gone viral on social media the last couple of days and it shows what might have been if all journalists had been as aggressive as Barbara Walters was in 1990 when she confronted Trump with his recent business failure (just one of many more to come) and the lies he was telling the public:

[embedded content]

You’ll notice that his persecution complex was in full effect even then, as he whines to Walters that nobody’s ever been treated as unfairly as he has been.
Trump has been dancing as fast as he can for decades, trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy and the law and he has been successful at doing it, apparently leading him to truly believe that he could always prevail by sheer force of will. When the 2020 election didn’t go his way, his fragile psyche couldn’t take it and he simply created an alternate reality in order to cope. Now he’s faced with the greatest challenge of his life, and he has to make one great hail mary pass in order to keep himself from going broke and out of prison. He has to win the presidency and he desperately needs money to pay his own legal expenses and finance his campaign. It’s not going all that well.
The wheels of justice are grinding infuriatingly slowly, largely due to some judges (and Supreme Court justices) who seem to be happy to help Trump out of his immediate criminal jam. But the civil judgments against him add up to more than half a billion dollars and nobody knows exactly what kind of collateral he’s having to put up to post the required bonds or who might be acting as his benefactor. The potential for corruption is so immense it’s stunning that anyone could have the chutzpah to run for president under these circumstances. But then again, this is Trump we’re talking about and the White House is his guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card.
But what about his campaign? Considering his precarious personal financial situation there’s no way that Trump will be self-funding any part of it and he’s commandeered the RNC for his personal use, most likely to help him pay for any lawyers who won’t allow him to stiff them. So, according to the New York Times, he’s having to hustle like crazy for campaign donations:

One of the most pressing issues facing Mr. Trump is the financial disparity he and allied groups now face with Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Mr. Biden’s campaign announced on Sunday that it entered March with $155 million cash on hand with the party, after raising $53 million in February. The Trump operation has not released a more recent total, but his campaign account and the Republican National Committee had around $40 million at the end of January.

He’s having to hit up billionaires and Wall Street more than ever before and it sure looks like he’s making some deals, such as his abrupt turnaround on banning TikTok last week after meeting with one of their major investors. This is because so far, his small donor base appears to finally be a little bit tapped out. The campaign claims that February will be its strongest month for small dollar fundraising which would beat the $22.3 million in August. But as the Times pointed out, the Biden campaign is seeing a massive rush of small donor money, raising more than $10 million online after the State of the Union, more than doubling Trump’s much-ballyhooed haul of $4.2 million from his ignominious mug shot.
How can it be that Biden is raising so much more money when we are told daily that Trump voters are overwhelmingly excited while Biden’s are disconsolate and depressed? Well, money isn’t everything and incumbency always has an edge in the money game but it does seem odd that with Trump holding a slight lead in many of the polls he would be having trouble raising money while the Democrats are awash in cash.
Perhaps Biden voters are more enthused than is commonly recognized or, just as likely, are more terrified of another Trump term. But maybe it’s also the case that Trump’s rapturous followers aren’t as representative of Republican voters as they would have us believe. And just maybe people have heard a few things about Trump being indicted on 91 felony counts in several different criminal cases and being hit with over half a billion dollars in fines. Is it possible that people are still telling pollsters they support Trump but they aren’t putting their cash where their mouths are? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes money does speak louder than words.

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Warren Says Trump Will “Try to Ban Abortion Nationwide” If He Regains Power

Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned Sunday that Donald Trump will aggressively pursue a national abortion ban if elected to another term after the former president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee boasted about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — a move that opened the floodgates for draconian attacks on reproductive rights across the country.
Trump nominated three of the five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe in 2022, and he stacked lower federal courts with far-right extremists.
In a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, Trump said the justices “did something that from a lot of standpoints is extremely good” and repeated commonplace right-wing lies that Democrats support infanticide — claims that are frequently used to justify further rollbacks of reproductive freedoms. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case brought by right-wing groups that could dramatically weaken access to medication abortion.
The former president said he will be deciding “pretty soon” on a specific abortion policy for his 2024 campaign for the White House. The New York Timesreported last month that Trump has told advisers and allies that he “likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.”
Asked during the Fox News interview whether he thinks a 16-week abortion ban would be “politically acceptable,” Trump responded, “We’re gonna find out.”

Trump’s campaign previously dismissed the Times reporting as “fake news.”
Trump on if a national 16 week abortion ban would be politically acceptable: “We’re gonna find out.”He then lies about Democrats supporting the murder of born babies. pic.twitter.com/B5e41m9ftm— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2024
Warren (D-Mass.) said in response that “Donald Trump is proud that he overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s proud he ripped away a fundamental freedom from millions of women, and if he regains power, he will go even further and try to ban abortion nationwide.”
“By overturning Roe, Trump put judges and politicians in the driver’s seat of women and their families’ most personal healthcare decisions,” said Warren. “He opened the door to even more extreme restrictions on our freedoms: criminalizing doctors, passing bans with no exceptions, and restricting access to IVF — and he brags about it.”
“Trump said we’re going to find out if the country will accept his plans for a national abortion ban, and he’s right,” the senator added. “He’s going to find out this November when the majority of Americans who support reproductive freedom turn out to send President Biden and Vice President Harris back to the White House and remind Donald Trump that we will not go back — not now, not ever.”
Right-wing groups, including the coalition known as Project 2025, have been working for months on a range of proposals that would further curtail reproductive freedoms at the federal level and undercut people’s ability to receive basic medical care.
“In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access,” Politicoreported last month. “Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.”
Project 2025, a coalition of dozens of right-wing groups — including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is “drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals,” and “collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access,” according to Politico.
“Donald Trump is to blame for the ongoing abortion access crisis,” Planned Parenthood Votes said in a statement earlier this month. “Because of his first-term actions, 21 states — and counting — now ban some or all abortion; and one in three women are blocked from access in their home states. As Project 2025 makes clear, opponents will not stop until abortion is banned and out of reach in all 50 states.”

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Chicago Ballot Amendment Would Tax Real Estate Moguls to Fight Homelessness

“It was never a surprise that wealthy real estate interests would fight an effort like Bring Chicago Home,” says Asha Ransby Sporn, the campaign director of the Bring Chicago Home referendum campaign. The Bring Chicago Home ballot amendment would shift the city’s flat-rate Real Estate Transfer Tax of .75 percent to a graduated system, with a 0.6 percent tax on sales under $1 million, and a 2-3 percent progressive tax on sales over $1 million. The money earned through this measure is designed to serve as a source of funding to address affordable housing, especially for those experiencing homelessness in Chicago.
Not surprisingly, as Ransby-Sporn notes, the real estate lobby in Chicago has been relentless in undermining and challenging this referendum, including mounting a legal challenge against it. In February, Cook County Circuit Judge Kathleen Burke sided with the industry in invalidating the referendum using an unclear reasoning that cited unreleased court records. It appears that she took issue with the measure’s combination of multiple questions — a logic that could be extended to prohibit any referendum proposing a progressive tax structure.
After the Chicago Board of Elections appealed, Judge Raymond Mitchell reversed Burke’s February decision on March 6, allowing the question to remain on the March ballot.
Like New York City and Los Angeles, Chicago faces an affordable housing crisis. Unlike these other cities, however, Chicago does not have a dedicated funding stream to help combat the crisis. Bring Chicago Home represents a critical step in this direction by providing the city with some committed funding for fighting houselessness, in addition to asserting metropolitan agency, establishing political willpower and respecting voters’ voices.
The history of Chicago’s affordable housing crisis, and the related rise in people experiencing homelessness, have roots in both national and local policies. At the national level, decisions were made to deregulate financial institutions in response to the economic downturns of the 1970s and the subsequent Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980s and 1990s. Such deregulation opened the housing market to commercial banking interests and subsequent speculation, securitization and fraud. These changes have led to regular economic downturns, most notably the Great Recession and the Savings and Loan Crisis, which slowed the construction of new housing, displaced millions through evictions and foreclosures and increased the share of institutional investor owners at the expense of individual buyers. Not surprisingly, the effects of these crises have been felt most strongly by low-income Americans and communities of color.

At the local level, city leaders have, since the late 1990s, abandoned public housing while failing to establish a reliable funding stream to address the subsequent spike in houselessness. The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Plan for Transformation signaled the city’s shift away from publicly owned and managed housing toward public vouchers for Section 8-approved units and mixed-income private developments. In the 1990s, before the plan was implemented, the CHA oversaw nearly 43,000 units of public housing; by 2010 this number had been reduced to 25,000. Of the approximately 20,000 units of permanent public housing that remained following the complete implementation of the plan, about 40 percent were allocated for seniors.
Moreover, the CHA Plan resulted in a loss of about 16,000 units allocated for families, with the expectation that an increase in Section 8 vouchers and vouchers for mixed-income developments would take up this slack. However, the Section 8 wait-list has been closed since 2014, and the CHA itself cites wait times of between six months and 25 years for other forms of public housing (mixed-income vouchers and permanent units). Our collaborative, digital, public history project, the Dis/Placements Project, focuses on Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, where wait times for all CHA public housing units (including permanent public housing, project-based vouchers, individual/family housing and senior units) range from 3 to 25 years, with the majority listed as “more than 25 years.”
A comparison with New York City provides some insight into the decline of permanent public housing in Chicago. While the population of New York City is about three times larger than that of Chicago (8.468 million vs. 2.697 million), New York maintains approximately eight and a half times more public housing units than Chicago (177,569 vs. 21,000). With the loss of so many public housing units over the last few decades, the unbelievable Section 8 wait-lists, and the real estate industry’s appetite for luxury building construction and conversions, it’s no wonder that so many low-income Chicagoans are struggling to find a home.
If we take the count conducted by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (rather than the more limited Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Point-in-Time” count), then there are approximately 68,440 Chicagoans experiencing homelessness — a number that puts the city third in the nation, just behind New York (approximately 100,000) and Los Angeles (about 75,000). What is important to note here is that both New York and Los Angeles have dedicated funding streams for combating homelessness — New York City’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year included $4.1 billion for homelessness services, while Los Angeles’ fiscal 2024 budget set aside 10 percent of funds, or $1.3 billion, to address the crisis of homelessness. Chicago, on the other hand, allocated only $250 million to manage this multifaceted problem in 2023-2024.
City2023-24 budgetDollars allocated to address homelessnessPercent of overall budget allocatedNew York City$106.7 billion$4.1 billion3.8 percentLos Angeles$13 billion$1.3 billion10 percentChicago$16.6 billion$250 million1.5 percent
In Los Angeles, homeless services are funded through Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax that was approved by voters in 2017, which consistently funds about 85 percent of the county’s homelessness budget. In New York, the majority of the Department of Homelessness Services’ budget is funded through the City Tax-Levy. The Homeless Service has long had a comparatively large budget because of the city’s right-to-shelter consent decree, passed in 1981, following the decision in Callahan v. Carey, in which the New York State Supreme Court determined that the city and state were responsible for providing shelter to the homeless.
Chicago’s lack of a dedicated funding stream means that it depends on federal and state dollars for the majority of its money for homelessness programs. Those state and federal funds are not only insufficient, but they also fluctuate according to decisions that are outside the city’s control. The Bring Chicago Home transfer tax proposal is projected to raise at least $100 million per year, giving the city government a dedicated funding stream for addressing homelessness. Furthermore, raising these additional funds would begin to bring Chicago in line with other major U.S. cities, putting some measure of control over housing in local hands.
Opponents of the referendum have employed scare tactics and applied pressure at the county level in an attempt to preclude a democratic referendum on the Bring Chicago Home proposal. Allowing real estate interests to determine the direction of public policy is not how we will restore housing agency to the people of Chicago.
The battle between the progressive left in Chicago and entrenched Democratic machine politics at the city and county levels has been ongoing for many decades. This conflict was perhaps most pronounced during Harold Washington’s tenure in the mid- to late 1980s, when the progressive mayor and his allies took the machine head on and faced obstruction from entrenched intraparty rivals. Mayor Brandon Johnson is seen by many as the heir of Washington’s progressive coalition, and Bring Chicago Home was one of his signature campaign promises, so the reemergence of this fight should surprise no one.
To be sure, Bring Chicago Home addresses only one facet of the complicated problem of affordability and focuses largely on the issue of homelessness. It does not necessarily provide all of the funding required for tackling this issue. Even if the referendum is passed, the city must also fund the construction of new public housing, continue to provide incentives to affordable developers, and work to preserve existing low-cost units through single-room occupancy protections and the legalization of rent control to more effectively address the shortage of approximately 120,000 affordable units.
Nevertheless, it does create a dedicated source of funding to tackle this intractable issue, which would be a step in the right direction. Establishing this funding stream will bring Chicago’s response to the homelessness crisis in line with other major U.S. metros, assert the city’s agency in addressing these challenges, and — most importantly — provide needed support to the city’s most vulnerable residents.

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More Than 40 Pro-Palestine Orgs Refused to Meet With Biden in Chicago Last Week

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

An open letter to the White House sent by Muslim, Arab and Palestinian American leaders and groups informed President Joe Biden that they would not meet with him in Chicago when he requested to do so last week.
The White House had requested that these leaders visit with the president to discuss Israel’s relentless attacks against Palestinians in Gaza. Biden arrived in the city on Thursday last week.
The letter was signed by more than 40 leaders and organizations in Chicagoland, including American Muslims for Palestine, CAIR Chicago, the Muslim Bar Association of Chicago, Muslims for Just Futures, the Palestinian American Council, the Human Dignity Project, the United Holy Land Fund, and more.
“This letter is to communicate with transparency and clarity why the Palestinian American leadership of Chicagoland has unanimously decided (along with key Muslim and Arab leadership) against attending planned meetings with White House officials in Chicago this week,” the letter-writers state in the opening paragraph.
Saying that there “is no point in more meetings,” the letter-writers noted that the White House’s position on Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza is already known. The organizations and individuals who have signed on to the letter, meanwhile, have “made it abundantly clear, including in prior meetings with the White House, but also in press statements” their opposition to the U.S.’s staunch support of Israel’s genocide.

“With a genocide that has flattened Gaza, forcibly displacing 85% of its residents, and claiming the lives of 31,000 people, 13,000 of whom are children, the White House has not only refused to call for a ceasefire, but also enabled this blatant campaign of ethnic cleansing to take place by providing financial and military means, as well as diplomatic support at the United Nations,” the letter states. “A meeting of the minds is nowhere in sight.”
The letter goes on:

There is no confusion as to our consistent demand for an immediate and permanent ceasefire to end the mass murder of civilians and stave off the worst humanitarian crisis in modern times. We believe another meeting would only act to whitewash months of White House inaction followed by meek handouts. We are interested in serious action.

“We stand with a diverse coalition of our fellow Americans when we demand, at minimum, an immediate and permanent ceasefire, complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, ultimately ending the siege and blockade of Gaza, allowing the natural flow of humanitarian aid, reinstating funding to UNRWA, a cessation of weapons sales or transfers to Israel, and accountability measures for all war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of genocide, and justice and liberation for the Palestinians,” the letter from the coalition of leaders concludes. “That is what history will judge us by, not more token meetings when every day is of the essence.”
The letter to Biden came almost a week before the now-nominal statewide Democratic Party primary election for president. Although Biden attained enough delegates to secure his nomination status last week, the state is still an important one in the Midwest for him to secure in the 2024 general election. The primary election in Illinois will take place this coming Tuesday.
More than 100,000 Arab Americans live in the Chicago area, and more than 350,000 Muslims live within the state of Illinois.
Although Illinois is deemed likely to vote “blue” in the race, losing the support of Muslims, Arab and Palestinian American voters there and in neighboring Great Lakes states would be devastating for Biden — especially when it comes to Michigan and Wisconsin, swing states that are considered imperative for Biden to have a shot at securing a second term in the White House.
Muslim and Arab voters were indeed a major component of the electorate that helped Biden to defeat Donald Trump in Michigan in the 2020 presidential race. But as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has gone on now for several months, and with no action by the administration to pressure Israel to agree to a permanent ceasefire, Muslim voters are expressing their grief and frustration with the Biden White House through protest votes — including voting “uncommitted” in primary races.
Muslims in Illinois are a part of that movement, with pro-Palestine groups planning to turn out in droves to vote uncommitted on Tuesday. Chicago is home to the largest per capita Palestinian population in the entire country.
Even though the primary doesn’t give voters an option to have their uncommitted votes recorded, the movement is hoping that, by voting in other down-ballot races but not the presidential primary, they can showcase to Biden that they feel betrayed by his participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“It felt like the President did not see many Americans [in his State of the Union address] — and we want to make sure he knows he needs us,” read a flyer from the Muslim Civic Coalition encouraging an uncommitted vote in the primary.

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