Progressive Political News

In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump. But nobody expected this. Nobody at all. “We will restore…

President Donald Trump late Monday ordered a suspension of all American military assistance to Ukraine after his conduct in a televised meeting with the war-torn country’s president in the Oval Office last week sparked international dismay and outrage. Trump’s decision reportedly impacts over $1 billion worth of weaponry and ammunition that was set to be…

President Donald Trump’s environmental regulators are advancing a proposal to block states from warning consumers about herbicides and other agricultural products in their food, according to federal documents reviewed by The Lever. Among the substances that could now go undisclosed is a widely used chemical that some studies have linked to cancer and that Trump’s…

Corporate America has a public relations problem. Everyone hates it. Yes, it’s still the most impressive force in global entrepreneurship. Yes, some companies provide services or products that are integral to American life. But, also definitely yes, it appears to do nothing for the vast majority of citizen stakeholders.

I’m not saying anything new. You know exactly the feelings that are triggered every time you hear about (low) corporate rates of taxation or how much money Apple or Google made last quarter.

Part of that gnawing feeling of injustice—the sensation of having been swindled while simultaneously yearning to earn as much as the swindler—has to do with executive pay. Growing inequality is constantly in the news, and CEO pay is perhaps its most crystalline example.

Even before the shooting of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Officer Brian Thompson, the news of the week was about Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a name we hear far too often. He is already the richest man in the world but has continued to go to court over his pay package. The Tesla board had twice agreed to a compensation package of more than $50 billion, and a judge had for the second time rejected such a package.

I won’t get into the legal details, but the net effect of the whole affair was a bunch of headlines talking about one man earning an amount that is greater than the entire annual budget of the State of Connecticut. And Rhode Island. And Delaware. And many other states, I’m sure.

Musk already makes more than 220,000 times the federal minimum wage, or around $1.6 million an hour. If you’re like me, that figure will spark little novas of rage in your gut.

That news, of course, was eclipsed by the far more tragic story of UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson’s criminal murder. That murder was intractably immoral and despicable. It was also tied to the perception of greed among American corporations. The fact that so many Americans felt sympathy with the shooter, again, speaks to a PR problem.

But what can we do to fix this? In Switzerland, a 2013 referendum to cap executive pay to twelve times that of the lowest-paid employee failed. That kind of referendum would probably face Constitutional challenges in this country, so it’s not a tenable solution. Swiss voters didn’t like the idea, either, although they have instituted rules against “golden parachutes” and in favor of giving shareholders more say in executive pay packages.

Why not an agreed-upon salary cap between companies? Corporate America could follow the lead of sports leagues. The National Hockey League, the National Football League, and Major League Soccer all have hard salary caps for players. Don’t worry; very valuable players can still make an offensive amount of money. But they can’t make the annual budget of a state. The benefit to the leagues is that it gives every team a chance to be competitive, not just the richest teams. Major League Baseball, for example, does not have a cap, and by most measures it is a league in decline.

What if the Fortune 500 companies banded together to cap executive pay? It won’t work if only a handful of companies do it, though, and those companies will likely lose talent. But if all the companies joined together—like a league—they could institute a meaningful cap.

I can’t imagine that a well-functioning board—one that doesn’t have a sycophantic relationship with the CEO—would want to pour millions and billions of dollars into one man’s pocket (and they’re usually men) instead of creating a widely healthy financial picture for the entire company.

Maybe then corporate America could start to solve its PR problem. There are state and federal policy reforms being cooked up by the political brain trust that might solve this problem, too. But wouldn’t it be incredible if corporate America decided to do something itself? I recognize that this is a Pollyannaish view, but a girl can dream. And a corporation could one day do the right thing. 

Mary Tamer, a former Boston School Committee member and public education advocate, seemed like a natural fit to lead the Massachusetts chapter of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER-M) when she was named its executive director in 2022. But Tamer, who has since been ousted from DFER-M, is now engaged in a bitter legal dispute with its national parent group, claiming that DFER is a rightwing front for billionaires like Charles Koch. 

A group of New York hedge fund managers formed DFER in 2007 to promote charter schools. The organization’s founders saw Democrats as the barrier to privatizing education through charter schools. “So it dawned on us,” founder Whitney Tilson said, “that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic Party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job.” What Tilson meant by “moving the Democratic Party” was ramping up a stealth campaign.

According to education historian Diane Ravitch, DFER’s core values derive from its beliefs in the Republican Party’s agenda to privatize public services, whether it’s redirecting public education dollars to charter schools and voucher-funded private schools or outsourcing the teacher workforce to private organizations like Teach for America. And it aims to get this agenda enacted not by slugging it out fairly through the democratic process but by using private wealth to influence decisions affecting the public.

Nevertheless, in a few short years DFER captured the attention of Barack Obama, who had become frustrated with Chicago public schools and was open to alternatives. And the organization would eventually have its heyday during the Obama Administration. Some of its state branches performed effectively, including in Colorado and the Washington, D.C., branch. It developed strong ties to major political figures, including Cory Booker, Andrew Cuomo, Governor Patrick Molloy of Connecticut, and Hakeem Jeffries. 

Tamer’s complaint names DFER as a defendant, alongside the affiliated organization Education Reform Now and its advocacy group, Education Reform Now Advocacy. The complaint centers around the alleged gender- and age-based mistreatment Tamer received from DFER CEO Jorge Elorza, which she claims began after she inquired about “Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded rightwing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.”

Perhaps Tamer should not have been so surprised to find DFER allied with big money—the organization has, after all, accepted large sums from billionaires, primarily in the hedge fund industry, who believe in privatizing education through charter schools and vouchers. But wealthy conservatives who also seek to dismantle public education are avid funders, too. Rupert Murdoch sank at least $1 million into DFER, hoping it would help swing K-12 business to his education tech company. Jonathan Sackler, heir to the OxyContin-producing Purdue Pharma, made a $10,000 donation to DFER-Massachusetts before Tamer’s tenure. Other well-documented billionaire Republican DFER donors include Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller. 

The “rightwing coalition” mentioned in Tamer’s complaint appears to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes Koch-allied organizations such as American Legislative Exchange Council, State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity—the “troika” of Koch’s political organization—plus, Koch-funded groups yes. every. kid., Libre Initiative, Stand Together Trust, and the Independent Women’s Forum. School choice proponent 50CAN, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools are also members of the coalition.

Elorza has also been a speaker at the Charles Koch Institute.

The Walton family, of Walmart billions, has been the major financial backer of DFER for more than a decade. There are many documented instances of Walmart workers being mistreated by higher-ups. Yet Tamer alleges she only recently discovered that Walton organizations practice gender discrimination and other unfair employment practices. Meanwhile, Tamer was receiving an annual salary of more than $200,000 working for what she herself now claims is a rightwing masquerade front that attacks workers rights.

Tamer’s complaint depicts an organization spiraling downward, with key women leaders fleeing or being forced out, and state chapters closing.

Tamer’s complaint alleges that the chief financial officer and the chief operating officer, both women of color, left within months of Elorza taking over in 2023. On November 1, 2023, board members Marlon Marshall and John Petry acknowledged the problems and authorized a report on the organization’s culture, which was damning. “Soon thereafter,” the complaint continues, “presumably as a result of the report and the organization’s response,” Marshall and board member and organizational founder Charles Ledley resigned. Ledley also allegedly called for Elorza to resign. 

The complaint also alleges that a number of other women leaders were pushed out of DFER, including Jen Walmer, a Colorado director who had proved so consequential that Governor-elect Jared Polis selected her for his education transition team in 2018, and Connecticut state executive director Amy Dowell. 

Since 2009, DFER has claimed to be operating in nineteen different states and the District of Columbia. By February 2025, only the Louisiana, New York, Texas, and D.C. chapters remained. In January 2023, the number of national staff listed on DFER’s website was thirteen. By February 2025, there were only four.  

The lawsuit story was originally reported by Adam Gaffin at UniversalHub in Boston and also by Julie Manganis at Law360. The story has not been reported in The Boston Globe, the region’s main news outlet. In happier days, The Globe routinely used DFER representatives, including Tamer, as sources for education stories, and it printed in 2023 an op-ed on education by Tamer.

It’s hard to tell what DFER’s troubles will mean for the pro-privatization movement in education, which continues to pick up steam. But perhaps DFER’s internal turmoil, its organizational downsizing, and its declining status are signs that the pro-privatization action in K-12 is at least moving away from the faux Democratic facade to the full-throated rightwing organizations like the ones backed by Koch.

On February 7, thirteen neo-Nazi and white supremacist terrorists gathered on a highway bridge and exit ramp armed with assault rifles and engaged in a hateful rally against the predominantly African American residents of Lincoln Heights, Ohio. As the demonstrators proudly displayed swastikas, waved banners filled with hate speech, and shouted racial slurs, local residents confronted the aggressors, bearing firearms of their own before setting up an impromptu checkpoint to prevent more demonstrators from entering. 

Lincoln Heights, a village of about 3,000 residents located thirteen miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio, is the oldest self-governing African American community in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon line. The suburb’s once-thriving business district and rich community resources have slowly eroded over the course of several decades due to disenfranchising policies promoted by the Cincinnati Police Department and Hamilton County officials that have targeted the village’s tax base, property valuation, and self-governance. Lincoln Heights, formerly one of the wealthiest African American communities in the United States, has faced a systemic denial of resources since its incorporation in 1946, when only ten percent of its originally proposed area was awarded by Hamilton County, excluding industrial plants that were instead given to the predominantly white village of Evendale. The village has also been affected by a Cincinnati Police Department gun range built on its border, which has caused such intense noise pollution that residents have compared it to living near a war zone.

Because the Lincoln Heights police force was disbanded in 2014, law enforcement from the neighboring village of Evendale, a predominantly white community, and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office were the first to respond to the rally. Residents of Lincoln Heights quickly gathered to address the armed threat to their community and were kept back by police seeking to avoid any escalation between the two groups. 

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department is the closest operating law enforcement agency to the site of the rally, with offices at the Lincoln Heights Municipal building less than half a mile from the spot on the highway where demonstrators dropped a banner that read “America is for the white man.” Eye-witness videos, traffic camera footage, and body-camera footage from officers all show that after local residents assembled to expel the neo-Nazi group, Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputies and police officers from the nearby village of Evendale escorted the demonstrators back to their rented U-Haul truck and helped them load their racist paraphernalia before allowing them to leave without pressing charges. 

Daronce Daniels, a Lincoln Heights village councilmember and a leader of a local revitalization and advocacy nonprofit called The Heights Movement, says that law enforcement’s response to the aggressors’ display reflects the lasting impact of public policy on Lincoln Heights, which has relied on the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office since 2014. “It’s a disappointment as a human and taxpayer to see police protecting hate crimes and terrorists over their community members,” Daniels says.

According to a statement released by the Evendale Police Department, the demonstrators did not apply for a permit and law enforcement had no prior knowledge of the rally. The Evendale police determined that the rally was not unlawful because their position on the overpass sidewalk did not block traffic. The demonstrators arrived on the scene in a U-Haul truck, potentially violating an Ohio law which prohibits drivers from allowing passengers to ride in an unlatched cargo area. Evendale Police Chief Tim Holloway said in a statement that the “public safety concerns of the situation outweighed any potential positives associated with issuing a single traffic violation.” 

On February 12, the school district of Lockland, another nearby village, formally requested “a third-party investigation of the Village of Evendale and the Village of Lockland Police Departments, specifically in reference to the events that occurred the afternoon of Friday, February 7, 2025.” This request was made after a camera on the Lockland Educational Annex building, which serves preschool through fourth grade students, captured footage of an Evendale police cruiser leading the demonstrators’ U-Haul truck onto school property following their expulsion from the overpass.

Videos of the incident shared on social media show neo-Nazis with assault rifles shouting racial slurs at local residents. At one point, a man seen returning from a conversation with law enforcement is heard saying “Hey Carl, the cops just said they’ll give us an escort to Freddy’s car,” to another man, who responds “I’m ready to fight, fuck them n—-rs.”  

The men also made reference to their involvement in the “Hate Club,” a hardcore segment of the white supremecist movement. The group was founded in October 2024 by Anthony Atlick, a white supremacist active in Missouri and Ohio who has been associated with neo-Nazi groups such as the Blood Tribe and the Goyim Defense League (GDL). 

On February 11, Evendale police shared that the U-Haul vehicle used by the neo-Nazis was last known to be travelling toward Louisville, Kentucky, where the group was reportedly staying in a hotel.

“If you don’t feel safe in your community then what do you have? [Safety is] the foundation,” says Daniels. In recent weeks, he says, outsiders have been coming into the Lincoln Heights community, taking pictures of residents and their license plates in an effort to terrorize them. Daniels believes that racist organizers are feeling emboldened in the wake of the pardoning by President Donald Trump of the January 6 Capitol rioters, many of whom carried flags and symbols associated with neo-Nazism, white supremacy, and other forms of far-right extremism.

“Our entire Black community finds this [January 6 rioter pardons] unacceptable,” he says.

In the days following the white supremacist march, local residents set up a checkpoint at the site of the rally, and have since been patrolling their own streets in lieu of law enforcement. A Lincoln Heights resident who gave their name only as Von said that the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office promised to increase patrols in the neighborhood, but that they have yet to see this enacted. Von, Daniels, and other members of The Heights Movement, gathered the evening of February 12 to report on the day’s patrols to other group members and residents. According to Von, the day after the rally, another vehicle transporting individuals wearing swastika arm patches was seen driving through Lincoln Heights.

Christopher Williams, the interim village manager of Lincoln Heights, who is also the village’s public works director, has family roots dating back 100 years in the land where Lincoln Heights sits. He says many of the ancestors of today’s Lincoln Heights residents migrated from the South and founded this community to resist the negative impacts of Jim Crow era segregation. Seen as a beacon for African Americans seeking prosperity and autonomy for their businesses and families, the self-governed suburb grew through the 1970s with Black businesses, police chiefs, and mayors leading the way. 

Williams doesn’t doubt that residents will continue to “stand tall” in the face of terrorists threatening their peace. “We live together, we go to school together, we stick together.”

In January, the U.S. pro-Palestine campus encampment movement began making headlines again as a target of renewed repression. The student protesters—who called on universities to divest from Israel, support a ceasefire in Gaza, and allow free speech on campuses through demonstrations, building occupations and later, a series of encampments on campuses across the country—had already been targeted with expulsions, disciplinary retaliation, harsh treatment by armed police, and more over the past sixteen months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Activists are organizing against these restrictions: Columbia University students are suing administrators over mass arrests at their encampment in 2024, a group from the university is organizing to identify international student activists after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cancel the student visas of pro-Palestine protesters. 

The encampment movement shares some common roots with a smaller, less well-known movement of student occupations in which I took part more than fifteen years ago, after Israel’s first major assault on Gaza after Hamas came to power. Today’s student movement has grown and radicalized the debate around Israel’s occupation, helped along by public sentiment that has swung against Israel, and they’ve paid the consequences for it. Meanwhile, our protests succeeded mostly in planting a seed for future change. 

In mid-February 2009, I’d just arrived in St. Andrews, a wealthy, conservative town fifty miles from the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, for a year abroad. The First Gaza War had just ended with a unilateral Israeli ceasefire, after its forces launched attacks on Gaza City, Khan Yunis and Rafah, killing more than 1,100 Palestinians. Before October 2023, Israel launched two more major military operations in Gaza, killings hundreds more, while Hamas attacks killed dozens of Israelis. 

The realities of those days seem surreal now: Israel had only begun its blockade of Gaza, and Hamas had been in power for just three years. Few people outside of the region seemed to understand much about Palestine, and it was barely covered in mainstream news—I had only learned about the fuller history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine a few semesters earlier from one of my first college professors, the international relations scholar Stephen Zunes. We had no TikTok, Instagram, or smartphones to give us eyes on the ground; YouTube and Twitter were only just catching on. 

Even so, when I wandered into a lecture hall hoping to learn what had been happening in Gaza, it was crowded. I was greeted by a tall, thin man in a green army jacket. Today, Patrick O’Hare is a senior researcher in social anthropology at the University of St. Andrews whose research and writing focuses on waste production and processing. But in 2009, he was just another anthropology student, part of the group that had organized the film night I was attending in an effort to spur student action. 

“I just remember innocent people being killed by Israel and no one doing anything in St. Andrews,” O’Hare recalled to me.  

“The response on campus had been really lame, and I was burning inside,” says alumna Seema Patel, who now works in public health. “The Islamic Society had been too scared to put out a statement.”

A few weeks earlier, inspired by the nascent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, students at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in London had launched an occupation of the Brunei Gallery, demanding the school cut ties to the Israeli arms industry. The movement quickly spread to other U.K. campuses. The list would soon include St. Andrews, after leftist students gauged interest among attendees at the film night. 

“A small group of us were convinced of the potential impact of an occupation . . . if we got the numbers,” O’Hare says. “So we called a general meeting to which a lot of people turned up, and we pitched the occupation idea, which was supported unanimously.” With the vote, Scotland’s most prestigious university joined a list of at least twenty-seven student occupations, the last of which ended that March. 

On February 18, 2009, we rushed the posh Lower College Hall, and set up camp. Inside, we hung Palestinian flags, shared snacks, made decisions by consensus, set up communication with other occupations, hosted speakers, and created an open space for students to learn about Palestine. It lasted about a week. For Patel, the experience was also about creating a political community: “Mainly, I occupied to find like-minded people on the issue.”

Messages of support came flooding in from pro-Palestinian voices, but for O’Hare, the “most important of all” were the links made with institutions in Gaza. Patel remembers she “had never been as connected” as she felt after we received a letter from a university in Gaza. At the same time, we debated issues that are still being discussed all these years later: Is it antisemitic to say “from the river to the sea”? How should we understand Hamas? And, hauntingly: Is this ethnic cleansing? And at what point should we call it genocide? 

Student occupations in Scotland called for an end to national contracts with Eden Springs, which sources water from the Golan Heights, Syrian land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. We also demanded that St. Andrews cut ties with BAE Systems, a military company that provides components for Israeli fighter aircraft, collects aid for Gaza, and creates scholarships for Palestinian students. Though our occupation was no massive success, we won some  concessions: O’Hare is co-chair of the St. Andrews Education for Palestinian Students program, which came out of the occupation and grants annual fee waivers to two masters students. 

Like the 2024 encampments, the occupation movement of this time was a seed of politicization. The St. Andrews action counts among its veterans change-makers including academics, artists, nonprofit workers, and activists from Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. I even interviewed another 2009 occupier, now a lecturer in intelligence and security studies at the University of Leicester, about Gaza for The Progressive last year.

“It was one of my best experiences at St. Andrews as a student,” O’Hare says. “The coming together of different sections of the student body was particularly noteworthy: people who were anarchist, Muslim, Arab, liberal, human rights activists, a real mix. 

Compared to the 2024 encampment movement, the 2009 U.K. occupations were tiny. But by the time our movement ended, it had inspired students at two U.S. campuses in New York, Rochester University and New York University, to incorporate demands around Palestine into their own anti-austerity protests. 

Our protest was targeted with some repression—Patel recalls private security were called in on the last day of our negotiations with administration. Water in the building was cutoff, and we received some online harassment and backlash from pro-Israel students. 

But while the movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has grown, so has the repression against it, in the United States and beyond. One first-year student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me that watching “images being broadcast of the terrible things that are supposedly happening for my safety…specifically as a Jewish person, made me feel responsible.”

Since the encampment, Northwestern has enacted restrictions on assembly and speech, which the student says seem to only be applied to what the administration perceives as protests. When students set up a sukkah, or hut, in solidarity with Gaza for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in October, the administration sprung into action. “Our thing was, they shouldn’t have a problem with it, because it was a religious structure,” they say. “But nope, that didn’t fly. They brought cops in to deconstruct it in front of us that night, which sucked.”

Stephen Zunes, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement in solidarity with Black South Africans in the 1980s and a regular contributor to The Progressive, sees parallels between that movement and the student movement in support of Palestine. Much like the Gaza solidarity encampments, Zunes told me, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against South Africa “included encampments, what we called shantytowns, modeled after the poor living conditions of South African Blacks” living under white rule. But while students in the 1980s were punished—Zunes was arrested for his activism—they were not targeted with bans from their campuses or harsh legal charges, as pro-Palestinian student protesters are now facing. 

“Where shantytowns were allowed to stay up for months during the anti-apartheid struggle, encampments [for Gaza] were torn down within hours at the same universities,” Zunes says. Vincent Boudreau, the City College of New York President who called police in against protesters, was Zunes’s classmate at Cornell, and was also arrested multiple times for his anti-apartheid activism. “And here he is,” Zunes says, “calling the cops to come in and attack people.”

As to the explanation for this heightened repression, Zunes says, “I think the biggest single reason is that they can. They can use the excuse of antisemitism to go after people, and so a lot of liberals who might otherwise be sticking up for these groups on civil liberties grounds feel that they’re obliged to crack down . . . . I don’t doubt that if they could have been as repressive towards anti-apartheid people in the 80s, they would have.” But he also notes that protesting in general has become more difficult in a post-9/11 world. (Though it’s since expired, the 2001 Patriot Act’s “national security” provisions were ultimately used against activists in many cases.)

Linda Quiquivix, a geographer and the author and illustrator of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, sees the repression of student protesters as an indication of the limits of the university as an institution rooted in empire and colonialism. She says that when she visited several student encampments at universities in the Los Angeles area in 2024, students told her they felt the protest camps were “a safe space for them to finally talk” about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

Quiquivix also sees the occupations as an experiment in mutual aid— the “creation of another world,” if on a small scale, with students organizing amongst themselves and with surrounding communities to manage everything from shelter to food and waste. She compares this type of organizing to that of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and the international Arab Spring uprisings from which they took inspiration—including in Egypt, where revolutionaries established an encampment in Cairo’s Tahrir Square weeks before overthrowing the longstanding dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

“It’s something that I haven’t seen in my lifetime,” Quiquivix says of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement. “I know that Occupy had something like that. But the closest I can recall to seeing something like that is Tahrir Square.” 

In spite of the crackdown against student protests, the encampment movement sparked a network of student-led occupations at colleges across the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. Their efforts, Zunes argues, have “radicalized the discourse on Israel-Palestine,” and made it “more legitimate to not just critique the occupation, but to question Zionism itself.” 

“I think that the encampments, for these students, have been life-changing, because they have been able to feel . . . that they can create another world, they already know it,” Quiquivix says. “I think it was an enormous seed.”