Progressive Political News

“From a public health perspective, this is ineffective and potentially deadly,” a public health researcher said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued an executive action this week ordering the removal of unhoused people across the state from encampments they’ve been living in, empowering cities to enforce laws that bar people from sleeping outside in public places.
Newsom did so after the Supreme Court ruled last month that such ordinances do not violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a ruling that advocates for unhoused people decried as deeply inhumane.
Within that ruling, which was issued in a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch opined that so-called “camping ordinances” didn’t target people based on their housing status, arguing that such laws also affect “a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”
Such laws, however, are primarily used to punish unhoused people, who are far more likely to be targeted by law enforcement than students or vacationers.
In a statement from Newsom’s office website, the order directs state agencies to supposedly “address homeless encampments while respecting the dignity and safety of Californians experiencing homelessness.”

Newsom’s statement was far more direct.
“We’re done, it’s time to move with urgency at the local level to clean up these sites, to focus on public health and focus on public safety,” he said.
And on X, Newsom said:

No more excuses. We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.

California contains around one-third of the entire country’s unhoused population. Advocates have pointed out that punishing and policing unhoused people is an inhumane and ineffective way to address the issue — the best way forward is simply providing housing to those who require it, including providing long-term, permanent housing solutions.
Advocates for unhoused people lambasted the governor over his order.
“Gavin Newsom wants to sweep unhoused people off the streets without any plan of housing,” wrote the social media account for the People’s City Council of Los Angeles. “This means that people will have all of their stuff thrown away & they’ll be arrested & sent to jail.”
The organization added:

This is not a real solution. This means more $ for cops & prisons. This is fascist shit.

LaToya Baldwin Clark, a law professor at UCLA, similarly disparaged Newsom’s call to enforce laws against unhoused people.
“Newsom’s declaration to clear encampments used by unhoused folks is cruel,” Clark said. “In LA, in California, the problem has always been that there is not enough housing, let alone affordable housing. Threatening folks with citations to enter shelters is wrong. Shelter beds are not housing.”
“There is nothing ‘humane’ about Gavin Newsom’s sweeping of homeless encampments in California while failing to provide unhoused individuals with any alternatives,” said Cleo Bluthenthal, a public health student at Johns Hopkins who advocates for social equity and justice. “From a public health perspective, this is ineffective and potentially deadly. On a human level, this is appalling.”

Just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a series of apparently coordinated arson attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network. No one has claimed responsibility yet. Before the games, protests highlighted the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities as “social cleansing.” We go to Paris for an update with Jules Boykoff, former professional soccer player, author and scholar focusing on the Olympic Games, and Paul Alauzy, Paris-based activist with the collective Revers de la Médaille (Other Side of the Medal). “We are not anti-Olympics,” says Alauzy. “You can support the games, but you need to know that they have a big social impact and they come with a cost. And they come with a cost of the lives of hundreds, thousands of people being mistreated.” We also discuss how Palestinian athletes are taking part in this year’s Olympics amid the Israeli war on Gaza, the health risks of competing during rising heat and COVID, the environmental impact of major sporting events and more.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show in Paris, where, just hours before the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, a series of apparently coordinated arson and vandalism attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network, on the Eurostar, impacting hundreds of thousands of passengers. Tens of thousands are expected to stream into the heart of Paris today for the opening ceremony this evening, when about close to 7,000 athletes from around the world are set to sail on boats down a four-mile stretch of the Seine.
Meanwhile, protests against the Olympics have taken place in Paris ahead of the games, condemning the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities in a monthslong campaign by French authorities that activists have denounced as a “social cleansing.” Just yesterday, another group of hundreds of mostly African migrants sleeping on the streets of Paris were rounded up by armed police, forced onto buses, driven out of Paris. Displaced migrants have spoken out against the violence.

NICLETTE: [translated] The NGOs who take care of us, give us a place to bathe, food to eat, will shut down soon. And we don’t know what will become of us and where we will go during the period of the Olympic Games.

JOCELYNE: [translated] I have two children. And because we’re living on the streets, one fell ill with asthma. So it’s very difficult for me with the Olympic Games. We do all of our activities in Paris. What will become of us now? Can anybody find a solution for us?

KEMOKO SOW: [translated] Go to the train stations. You see, everywhere you go, there are policemen. Fine, they are here for security. But, for us, they are here to catch us. We’re afraid to leave our homes during these Olympic Games. You see, there are millions of undocumented migrants who are in France.

AMY GOODMAN: A migrant from Mali and voices of two Congolese migrant mothers. Hundreds of people also have marched on Paris over the weekend to protest the participation of the Israeli delegation to the Summer Olympics amid Israel’s relentless war on Gaza.

MARTINE: [translated] Israeli athletes’ participation in the Olympics is very shocking, very shocking, especially when we know what has been happening for eight months in Gaza. There are dozens and dozens of young Palestinian athletes who will never be able to participate in the Olympic Games. And they can say “thank you” to Israel for that, and the international community, because I think that Israel allows itself to behave like this because the international community has only been giving it little slaps on the wrist for decades.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 400 Palestinian athletes and coaches in Gaza have been killed or wounded by Israeli attacks since October 7th. Eight Palestinian athletes are competing in the Paris Summer Olympics this year, the most in history, including 18-year-old tae kwon do fighter Omar Ismail. Meanwhile, Amnesty International slammed French authorities over a policy banning France’s Muslim athletes from wearing headscarves.
For more, we go to Paris, where we’re joined by two guests. Jules Boykoff is the author of five books on the Olympics, former professional athlete. His latest piece for the Scientific American is headlined “The Paris Olympics Are a Lesson in Greenwashing.” He’s co-written several pieces on the Paris Olympics alongside sports editor at The Nation Dave Zirin, including their latest, “The Appalling Social Cleansing of Olympic Paris.” And Paul Alauzy is a Paris-based activist with the medical NGO Doctors of the World and an organizer with Other Side of the Medal.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I’m so glad you could both join us in a Paris studio, considering what has taken place today. Paul Alauzy, if you can explain what French authorities are calling sabotage of the high-speed rails? Almost a million people are affected. But then talk about what you’re calling “social cleansing” in preparation for these Summer Olympics.
PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah. Hi. Thank you so much for having us.
Well, I don’t have much to say about the sabotage this morning, because, obviously, we’re not meddled in this.
But our collective, more than a hundred NGOs, community association, we really lived through violent social cleansing for the whole year. So, in just a year, we had more than 12,500 people, homeless people, refugees, homeless, sex workers, drug users, people from Eastern Europe, who were expelled from tent cities, from slums, from squats. And it is a rise of 40% comparing to two years ago. And in just the past week, 300 people were moved yesterday. Five hundred people were moved from tent cities just last week. The numbers of expulsion towards the most marginalized population of Paris has exploded, and it’s because of the organization of the Olympics.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Jules Boykoff, if you can describe, set the scene for us, how Paris has planned for these Olympics and how extensive this is kind of, what you’re calling, really, ethnic cleansing is?
JULES BOYKOFF: Well, back in 2017, when Paris was bidding on the Olympics, they promised that their Olympics would be different. And I think the subtext there was they were going to try to avoid the problems that have become endemic downsides of the Olympics, and that is overspending, militarization of public space, the displacement of marginalized populations, greenwashing and corruption.
And unfortunately, seven years later, they’ve totally conformed to the plan. They’re 115% on costs overrun. They have militarized public space. I feel like I’m attending a policing convention here. It’s intense, I’m telling you. They also instituted a AI-powered video surveillance, that will be legal and used throughout the games. Paul just talked eloquently about the displacement that has been happening here. This has been a thorough greenwash. We can maybe talk more about that. And there’s numerous open investigations into corruption here in Paris related to bribery around the games. And so, they said they would be different, but how different are they, really?
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what you’re describing as the greenwashing. I mean, we’re talking about a week that has seen not two, but three of the hottest days on record in the world. If you can talk about what this greenwashing is about?
JULES BOYKOFF: Absolutely. Well, since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has really talked a lot about sustainability and trying to embed it in the Olympic Games. But a recent academic study found that some of those most recent installations of the Olympics, like Tokyo, like Sochi in 2014, like Rio in 2016, are some of the most egregious greenwashers around.
Now, in that context, Paris arrived. And to be sure, they’ve sort of tiptoed over that very low bar. They have limited the amount of fresh construction that they’re doing. They’re reusing materials, so a lot of the seats in the venues will be made out of recycled plastic. They’re leaning on wood. They have more vegan options in the cafeteria. But the problem is, this event is fundamentally unsustainable.
Let’s look at what’s happening in terms of Tahiti. They’re hosting the surfing competition way away in Tahiti. It’s 9,735 miles away from here. So we’re racking up lots of carbon miles to do that. Even worse, Amy, when they were creating the tower to allow NBC and other big broadcasters to transmit the best pictures of the surfers to the world, they brought a barge in that ran over the top of a delicate coral reef. And you can watch the videos online of locals in Teahupoʻo , Tahiti, just screaming out in agony and pain. I don’t know how that conforms to green promises around the Olympics.
And so, basically, what I’m saying to you is, in Paris, we’re seeing a sort of pale green form of pale green capitalism, if you will, when what in reality is required is a systematic transformation in resplendent Technicolor.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you something, Jules. You’re an Olympic soccer player yourself formerly. I’m looking at an article right now about the 2024 Olympics, likely the hottest ever. Are athletes themselves prepared, dealing with the heat as they compete?
JULES BOYKOFF: Well, you’re right. I had the good fortune of representing the United States at the under-23 level.
And I’m concerned about athletes. Like you mentioned, these are some of the hottest days in the history of the world that we’re living. And if you want to understand why we’re having the Olympics in July and August, which are the hottest months of the year, it makes sense to think about the big contract that NBC signed with the International Olympic Committee. They paid some $7.75 billion for the rights to run the games through 2032. And guess what: NBC does not want to have the Olympics interfering with U.S. American football, which starts in September, basically. And so, that’s why they’re plopping athletes into this intense heat.
Last Olympics, we learned that athletes were forced to sign waivers that said that if they died of coronavirus or from heat exhaustion, that they couldn’t sue the International Olympic Committee. That’s the kind of situation that athletes have to deal with if they want to compete in the Olympics in the modern era.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at some facts and figures. Twenty percent of Olympic nations face extinction from sea level rise and extreme weather by 2030. Also, if you could talk about air travel, international travel, huge contributor to the impact of carbon — to the carbon impact on the games?
JULES BOYKOFF: That’s absolutely correct. Some 85% of the pollution and carbon associated with sports mega events comes from the travel. And that’s really not being sufficiently dealt with here in Paris.
If the Olympics or other big sporting events like the World Cup actually want to be green, there are a number of things they can do. One, they can make the games smaller. They suffer from something that some people call gigantism. Two, they can figure out ways of instituting measures that are more transparent for all of us to be able to see, like, what they’re doing. It’s quite untransparent right now in terms of what Paris is actually doing. There’s lots of things that could be done right, but we really need to scale back the size of these events, if we actually want to make them green.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Alauzy, I wanted to continue talking to you about the level of protest around Paris right now. I mean, there was a counter opening ceremony. If you could describe that for us?
PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And also talk about the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who is a socialist. And the swimming in the Seine of politicians to show that it is clean enough. Macron, the French president, wanted to swim in it, but people — well, you can describe what people threatened to do if he swam in the Seine.
PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah, sure. So, to talk about the organization around and against the games, it’s really tricky to organize against the games, because it’s a big propaganda machine, it’s very strong, and they have an insane security system around it. Of course they need to prevent any risk of terrorism. Nobody wants that. But for protesters and activists, it’s really tricky to do something.
So, during a year, we organized a lot of, you know, direct action to just pop up when the flame arrived in Paris, pop up in front of ministries, in front of touristic places. And we managed to do so and to have the images of the protests go around the world, which is good. But none of our asks to the Olympic Games, to city hall and to the state were really done, you know? The social cleansing continued and continued.
So, I spent I don’t know how many days being in tent cities and in leaving, expulsions along the Seine. And then we have politicians taking a bath in the Seine and making it the big society of spectacle, that, yeah, it’s amazing to swim in the Seine. So, a lot of French people threatened to — pardon me the expression — but to take a [bleep] in the Seine in order to prevent that and to maybe, you know, disturb the bath of our politicians. And, you know, they used $1.4 billion to clean up the Seine. We just ask for $10 million, $10 million, so not even 01% of that budget, to put an emergency plan in order to help the homeless and the refugees and all the population depending on Paris’s public space. And they even didn’t accept that. So, we can really see where the political priorities are.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about your organization, the Other Side of the Coin [sic], Revers de la Médaille? What does that mean?
PAUL ALAUZY: Well, it means that us, Le Revers de la Médaille —
AMY GOODMAN: The Other Side of the Medal, I should say.
PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah, exactly, the Other Side of the Medal. It means that we are not anti-Olympics. You know, I have a lot of friends. I come from a small village. They love the Olympics. They don’t know what’s happening in the streets of Paris. And they can cheer for it. That’s no problem. It doesn’t make them being people who are anti-migrants, anti-solidarity, anti-poverty. So we wanted to showcase to the people and spread the word around that you can support the games, but you need to know that they have a big social impact, and they come with a cost.
And they come with a cost of the lives of hundreds, thousands of people being mistreated, you know, people that go through migration. They went through Libya. They went through the Mediterranean Sea. They arrive here, and what they have is a police response. It is so violent to live through that. And the games, you know, they were so different 130 years ago. They were only for male. They were only for white people. They were even organized with the Nazis. So, even now after a year of protesting the games, I’m deeply convinced that if we continue to do so all around the world, we can still transform them for the better.
AMY GOODMAN: Jules Boykoff, if you can talk about the calls for Israel not to be included in the Olympics? Eight Palestinian athletes are competing in this year’s Olympics. Your co-writer at The Nation wrote in The Nation last year, quote, “Seven of them have secured what are called ‘universality places,’ which permit athletes from nations that have underdeveloped sports programs to take part in the games even if they come up short of formally qualifying.” Jules?
JULES BOYKOFF: Absolutely. So, first of all, at the protest, the protest that Paul organized last night, there was a huge pro-Palestinian rights presence there. I’ve seen it on the streets all around this city.
Now, if you want to understand the inclusion of Israel in the Paris 2024 Olympics, it does us well to slow down and compare it to Russia. In Russia, you have a country that will only bring about 12 athletes to these Olympic Games. Normally they bring upwards of 300. And that’s because of two reasons that the International Olympic Committee gave. One is that Russia violated the Olympic truce when it invaded Ukraine right after the Beijing Olympics and before the Paralympics, and, two, that they had violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine and, in doing so, took over four areas that encompass sports clubs from Ukraine, and the Russian Olympic Committee took over those sports clubs.
Now, in comparing it to Israel, I want to make it clear: History does not give us crisp facsimiles, identical twins, if you will. But there are very similar elements here. For starters, as you’ve been reporting today, the atrocities continue apace in Gaza, and we’re in the Olympic truce period right now. So, that’s one. And, two, you know, if you look at the stadiums in Gaza, nearly every soccer stadium has been totally decimated. The fields are unplayable. And moreover, probably the most storied football stadium in Gaza — it’s called Yarmouk Stadium — was taken over by Israeli Defense Forces and used to detain Palestinians and to interrogate them. Now, that sure sounds a lot like taking over the territorial integrity of Gaza.
And so, people are wondering, out loud here and around the world: Why is Israel not treated like Russians? Now, Russia are sending about 12 athletes here, and they will not participate under their flag. They’ll participate as what are called individual neutral athletes. And a lot of people have been raising the question: Why is Israel not also being asked to participate as individual neutral athletes? The International Olympic Committee has shown zero interest whatsoever in entertaining this totally reasonable question. And that’s why you’re seeing Israeli athletes participating under their flag and with their national anthem here in Paris.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jules, you have been writing about AI and the use of it at the Olympics. We just have 30 seconds, but if you can explain?
JULES BOYKOFF: Sure. So, in March 2023, the French National Assembly passed a law legalizing AI-powered video surveillance to police the Olympic Games. The law is supposed to sunset in March 2025 after the Olympics, but, hey, it doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to come up with scenarios by which the French government insists upon keeping that law in place. And this is in keeping with what we’ve seen with previous Olympics, where they use the Olympics as a pretext to get all the special weapons and laws that they’d never be able to get during normal political times, and all too often those special weapons and laws stay on the book and become part of normalized policing in the wake of the games. And I must say, Amy, normalized policing in too many places is also racialized policing, so you could argue that AI is actually increasing the racialized policing in a society.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both so much for being with us. Jules Boykoff, five books on the Olympics, a former Olympic soccer player, we’ll link to your pieces in The Nation. Paul Alauzy, a Paris-based activist with Doctors of the World and Other Side of the Medal. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

In April the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) finalized its Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) regulations, after being criticized by conservative lawmakers and religious organizations. Part of the update included a clarification that accommodations, like a leave of absence, applied to abortion care. But now since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference, which made it possible for Congress to rely on federal expertise when implementing a wide range of policy measures, conservative judges in lower courts can seek to reverse expert policies for ideological reasons — and that applies to policies regarding reproductive care.
As reported by Bloomberg Law this week, a coalition of 17 Republican attorneys general told a federal appeals court that the recent decision to overturn the Chevron deference should bring back their challenge to the EEOC’s pregnancy regulation. In other words, they’re trying to leverage the Chevron ruling to remove the EEOC’s approved leave of absence for abortion care. The move appears to be part of a more comprehensive anti-abortion plan to lean on the Chevron ruling to dismantle reproductive rights further.
“A Chevron ruling says that government regulations, or when the agency passes a rule, if it is not strictly required by the statute that Congress passed, then a court may invalidate the rule,” David S. Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel Kline’s School of Law, explained to Salon. Previously, it was up to the agency to determine clarity in cases where there was “vague language from Congress.” But the ruling in the Chevron case says now it’s up to the judges to answer that question. Depending on the judge, the decision could be made through an ideological lens.
That’s not the only possible threat to reproductive health care. Cohen provided Salon with another example: under Obamacare, preventative medicine must be covered, which includes birth control.
“Now, the conservative federal judiciary might say birth control, under our reading of the statute is not preventive medicine, so the agency went too far in requiring birth control,” Cohen said. “It used to be that the agency got a lot of deference. Preventive medicine is broad, it’s vague, so it’s up to the agency to determine what the rule is when you’ve got vague language from Congress.”

But now it’s up to the judges.
In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court voted along party lines in a historic decision against the government in a pair of cases — Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. The ruling set a precedent of gutting the power of regulatory agencies to protect the environment and consumers. Gautham Rao, a professor of legal history at American University, told Salon at the time that the case had “historic implications” as an attack “on what we call the administrative state.” Reproductive rights advocates worry that the implications will extend beyond environmental protections.
Leila Abolfazli, director of National Abortion Strategy at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, told Salon she fully expects conservative justices to now start making claims that due to the decision in the Loper Bright case, some regulations related to reproductive rights can be revisited by the lower courts instead of federal agencies.
“But I will say that, with or without Loper Bright, the parties were making these claims, and some courts were open to them,” Abolfazli said. “But Loper Bright certainly gives them sights and saying, ‘No we get to decide what the law is, and it’s XYZ, not what the administration said.’”
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative Christian legal advocacy group that argued against the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and lost, filed an amicus brief for the Loper Bright case that outlined how a ruling to overturn the Chevron deference could unravel access to abortion care. In the amicus brief, ADF argues that “agencies are weaponizing federal healthcare laws to violate the right to life.” It specifically called out Title X, EMTALA covering life-saving abortion care, and the mail delivery of mifepristone. It also called out a range of agencies like the EEOC, for “forcing employers to pay for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and amputating healthy organs.”
“ADF definitely has a full, comprehensive plan on how it wants to take down abortion and other reproductive health care,” Abolfazli said.
In regards to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, that litigation will likely continue, Abolfazli said.
“But I think there’s an overarching comment here on how destabilizing the Supreme Court is right now. They are making these grand, sweeping decisions, overturning precedent and then not providing the rules of engagement,” Abolfazli said.
Cohen said that leveraging the Chevron case to unravel reproductive rights is yet another example that the “anti-abortion movement is not stopping at abortion.”
“They are looking to do anything to restrict family planning, sexual health, reproductive health. It’s not just about abortion,” Cohen said. “This is about anything related to sexual reproductive health and women’s health too.”

A friend recently asked me if I thought former President Donald Trump staged his recent assassination attempt at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

My buddy believes every attack, physical, legal, or political, on the Republican presidential candidate is bound by divine intervention to backfire and boost his election bid. To goad me, he threw out the line that Trump has “benefited greatly” from the assassination attempt, which claimed the life of a rally-goer and injured two others. 

He knew that for years I’ve denounced conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and that neither of us would likely be swayed to take the other’s side. 

We eventually moved on to other topics. But I couldn’t shake the sense that a version of this conversation was happening among friends and families across the country—and that they had also left feeling as though the “other side” lives in another reality. 

If the young gunman had succeeded in killing Trump, he might have ratcheted up this level of polarization even further. What happened instead was that leaders on the left and the right began calling for unity. 

“We’re neighbors or friends, coworkers, citizens,” President Joe Biden said in a speech the day after the assassination attempt. “We must stand together.” TV talking heads, radio talk-show hosts and guests, podcasters, and influencers urged Americans to come and stick together. 

During his speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump initially offered a new, unity-oriented message, saying, “We rise together or we fall apart.” But he soon veered into divisiveness, calling Nancy Pelosi “crazy,” describing Biden as worse than the “ten worst presidents,” and accusing Democrats of “cheating on elections.”  

Not to be undone, the Democrats’ presumed presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, lambasted the Republican candidate during her first campaign rally. After noting that as a prosecutor, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she declared, “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Trump’s assassination attempt took me back to 1995, when, in an eerily similar turn of events, a young gunman set out to kill Israel’s prime minister at a rally. That assassin accomplished his goal, fatally shooting Yitzhak Rabin. I remember how, in the weeks after the tragedy, Israelis shelved their polarization, which had also pitted friends and family members against each other.

They had the chance to cement a new approach. Not for everyone to agree on everything—that would be equally disturbing—but to disagree respectfully and productively. 

That moment passed them by. Israelis reverted to their polarized politics. They continue to pay the price to this day. Unable to truly listen to each other and reach practical compromises, they’ve hit a wall on several existential issues, such as blocking anti-democratic judicial reform and enabling the creation of a Palestinian state.

We stand at a similar fork in the road: We can come closer or split further apart. 

As an educator and nonfiction storyteller who aims to advance civic discourse, I believe our opportunity lies with our next generation. 

The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State, which I direct, offers programs that enable K-12 educators to help their students develop civic discourse, critical thinking, active listening, and fact finding skills. Children and adolescents learn to identify credible sources, gather and examine data, triangulate their findings, discuss difficult topics with each other respectfully and productively, and embrace eclectic perspectives.

In such an environment, the students’ differences rarely, if ever, lead to polarization. Instead, they enrich their lives. 

If we provide these learning opportunities to our next generation, I believe they will come and stick together. 

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

In his speech to Congress on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a direct appeal to U.S. lawmakers to send Israel more weapons, vowing, chillingly, that the weapons shipments would enable Israel to “finish the job faster” in Gaza.
Netanyahu drew one of the clearest lines yet between the supply of U.S. weapons and Israel’s genocidal assault of Gaza, essentially straight out saying that the slaughter has been made possible by U.S. assistance — and that the speed of Israel’s genocide is scaled to how many U.S. weapons they receive.
“Fast tracking U.S. military aid can dramatically expedite an end to the war in Gaza and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East,” said Netanyahu, who tried to stoke war with Iran later in the speech.
“In World War II, as Britain fought on the frontlines of civilization, Winston Churchill appealed to Americans with these famous words: ‘Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job,’” he went on. “Today, as Israel fights on the frontline of civilization, I, too, appeal to America: ‘Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.’”
This rhetoric is horrific to those who have followed the genocide, in which Israeli forces have made it clear that they are willing to kill any Palestinian in Gaza — including newborn babies. “Finish the job faster,” in the context of what UN experts have labeled a “genocidal” famine, a looming polio outbreak, and Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate attacks, commentators noted, appears to be a call for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population of Gaza.

Israel has vowed to continue attacking Gaza until it has eliminated Hamas — a goal that experts have said is impossible to achieve in practical terms, especially as the genocide inspires a new generation of Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. At the same time, many reports — some from Israeli soldiers — have shown that Israeli forces consider any man or boy in Gaza to be a member of Hamas and therefore a legitimate target.
Netanyahu, perhaps inadvertently, alluded to this policy elsewhere in his speech. When speaking about Israel’s invasion of Rafah, where nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population had been sheltering before May, Netanyahu said that Israeli forces had killed no civilians there in the first days of their attack — but had killed 1,200 “terrorists.”
It is a lie that Israel has killed no civilians in Rafah; in fact, there have been many reports of the Israeli military killing people, including children, in civilian areas both before and after their invasion of Rafah in May. Netanyahu himself admitted that Israel has massacred civilians in Rafah, saying that a soldier told him a supposed accidental strike in Rafah had killed 24 civilians — which Netanyahu qualified as “practically” no civilian deaths.
As Netanyahu spoke, Israel was carrying out more massacres in Khan Yunis, which Israeli forces have fiercely attacked this week. In the past 24 hours alone, Israeli forces have killed at least 30 Palestinians and injured 146 others, the Palestinian health ministry reported on Thursday. Just prior to his speech, Palestinian officials reported that, in the previous 48 hours, Israel had killed 129 Palestinians and injured over 400 others in Khan Yunis alone.
Netanyahu also laid out a “day after” plan for Gaza in his speech, saying that Israel was aiming to “demilitarize” and “deradicalize” Gaza — in other words, even further intensify Israel’s control over Palestine and eliminate the ability of the remaining population of Gaza to resist against that control. His plan, in essence, is to eliminate all possibility of a Palestinian state.
“For the foreseeable future, we must retain overriding security control there to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel,” he said.

The top Democrat of the Committee on House Administration on Wednesday proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would reverse the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for “official acts.”
Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing members ruled in favor of former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for the November election, triggering a wave of warnings, including from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in her early July dissent that “the president is now a king above the law.”
Congressman Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) is leading the fight for an amendment to reverse that ruling. He said in a statement that the high court “undermined not just the foundation of our constitutional government, but the foundation of our democracy.”
“At its core, our nation relies on the principle that no American stands above another in the eyes of the law,” he continued. “I introduced this constitutional amendment to correct a grave error of this Supreme Court and protect our democracy by ensuring no president is ever above the law. The American people expect their leaders to be held to the same standards we hold for any member of our community. Presidents are not monarchy, they are not tyrants, and shall not be immune.”
Morelle proposed an amendment that would make clear “there is no immunity from criminal prosecution for an act on the grounds that such act was within the constitutional authority or official duties of an individual,” and presidents may not pardon themselves.

The effort is backed by over 40 other House Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional law scholar.
“We must do everything in our power to reverse the Supreme Court’s outrageous betrayal of more than two centuries of constitutional law in America,” said Raskin. “Nothing has been more sacred to American constitutional jurisprudence than the idea that no one is above the law, but the Roberts Court, in a fit of neomonarchical enthusiasm for Donald Trump, has tried to lay out the red carpet for a lawless autocratic president.”
“We should do everything we can in a statutory way to repair the damage,” he argued, “but ultimately, this will require some kind of constitutional amendment to block a fundamental change in American constitutional and political culture.”
Advocacy groups are also supporting Morelle’s proposal and highlighting what the recent ruling could mean for the future.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States has imposed serious obstacles to holding Trump accountable for his role in the violence on January 6 and the attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power,” said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. “As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, under the holding of Trump v. United States, a president could order the assassination of a rival, take a bribe for pardons, or order a military coup and — in each case — be immune from criminal liability.”
“It is incumbent upon Congress to fix this problem, and with his proposed constitutional amendment, Rep. Joseph Morelle is taking the first step to right an obvious constitutional wrong,” she continued. “By design, it’s not easy to pass a constitutional amendment. But it can be done — and in this case, it must be done. Public Citizen strongly supports this amendment, and along with our allies in the Not Above the Law coalition are committed to ensuring its passage, to restore presidential accountability and basic democratic norms.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to grant sweeping immunity to presidents was dangerous and wrong. Kudos to @RepJoeMorelle for introducing a constitutional amendment that would undo the decision. Strong action like this is needed to protect our democracy.https://t.co/4x9Lfaf6wc— Noah Bookbinder (@NoahBookbinder) July 25, 2024
People for the American Way president and CEO Svante Myrick stressed that “big problems need big solutions, and the Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidents unprecedented immunity is a big problem. Not just now, in the specific case involving Donald Trump, but in countless foreseeable and unforeseeable ways in the future.”
“Our democracy is built on the principle that nobody is above the law,” he added. “People For the American Way is proud to support this proposed amendment to strengthen and shore up that principle at this critical moment in our history.”
Common Cause has also endorsed the effort. Virginia Kase Solomón, the group’s president and CEO, called the court’s decision “dangerous” and a departure from “what the framers intended.”
“We thank Congressman Morelle for his leadership to uphold the rule of law and ensure accountability for all Americans, and we urge Congress to quickly pass this constitutional amendment,” she said.
In the United States, constitutional amendments may be proposed either by Congress with two-thirds majority support in both chambers or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures.
Although Morelle’s proposal lacks the support it would need to get through Congress, it sends a clear signal to voters going into the November election, when control of both chambers is up for grabs and the American people will likely get to choose between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Trump is a noted denier of the climate crisis, frequently decrying climate change as a “hoax.”

Several people who attended GOP nominee former President Donald Trump’s rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday required medical attention due to heat, with more than a dozen people being transported to nearby hospitals.
Medics at the event responded to 44 heat-related calls, including people suffering from heat illness and bouts of fainting. At least one person sent to the hospital was reported in critical condition. Another person onsite suffered from cardiac arrest.
Although the rally took place indoors, rally goers appeared at the arena and waited outside for several hours. Temperatures reached 89 degrees, with humidity and direct sun beating down on attendees.

This isn’t the first event where Trump supporters have suffered from extreme heat.
In June, a campaign event in Arizona saw 11 people hospitalized due to high temperatures leading to similar medical problems. Heat was also problematic during Trump’s 2020 run — 17 individuals required medical attention (including 12 who were hospitalized) at an event in Florida that year when attendees were subjected to high-80-degree temperatures and humid conditions for several hours.

The latest episode of excessive heat conditions at a Trump rally comes on the heels of the two hottest days ever recorded on Earth. Sunday broke the previous record, only for Monday to hit even hotter temperatures on average across the globe.
Despite repeated instances of his own supporters suffering the effects of excessive heat, likely due to the climate crisis, Trump continues to be a denier of climate change, repeatedly describing it as a “hoax” over the past several years, including this year as a candidate for the White House.
As president, Trump undermined dozens of environmental regulations, including many that were previously established to address the warming of the planet. Trump also avoided a question on the climate crisis during his debate with President Joe Biden in June, refusing to say if his future administration would “take any action” to address it and instead ranting about unrelated topics.
Environmentalists expect another Trump presidency to be a disaster for the climate.
“Trump already has a record on pretty much denying the climate crisis and repealing environmental regulations and essentially just clearing the path for fossil fuel expansion. … We know what he did last time, and we have an even better understanding of how backwards it could get,” said John Noël, senior climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA.
But it’s becoming increasingly hard for Trump and other Republicans to deny the crisis is real. There’s even some evidence to suggest that the attempt on Trump’s life could be blamed, in part, on the observed rise in temperatures. According to at least one whistleblower, a law enforcement officer was supposed to be stationed on the roof where a shooter had targeted Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. That officer, however, allegedly abandoned their post because it was too hot to stay up there.Temperatures were indeed much higher than usual in that part of the state that day. In nearby Pittsburgh, temperatures exceeded 90 degrees, well above the projected high of around 83 degrees for the date the rally took place. Indeed, due to the shooting, heat-related medical situations at the Butler rally that day were largely ignored.

In the turbulent final weeks of Joe Biden’s doomed reelection bid, as Democratic Party leaders coalesced in a full-throttle push to end the president’s campaign, several leading progressives made the surprising choice to go against the grain.
“I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wrote in a New York Times guest op-ed, published July 13. “Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) also cemented herself as one of the Biden campaign’s most ardent defenders. On July 18, she took to Instagram live to warn of the “enormous peril” that would come from Biden dropping out of the race. “If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she said. Just days later, Biden ended his campaign, and Kamala Harris quickly saw a flood of donations and endorsements. Contrary to Ocasio-Cortez’s claims, the majority of elected Democrats voiced their support.
Historically some of Biden’s toughest critics, progressives including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) also publicly stuck with the sitting president until the end, citing the dangers of a second Donald Trump presidency. Meanwhile, representatives like Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) declined to take positions on the Biden campaign.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian American in Congress, has forged a markedly different path. She did not endorse Biden in either 2020 nor this election cycle, stating outright in November 2023 that the president has “supported the genocide of the Palestinian people.” In February, she urged Democrats in her home state of Michigan to vote “uncommitted” in the primary to protest Biden’s enthusiastic support for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.

“It is important, as you all know, to not only march against the genocide,” Tlaib said during a February speech. “It is also important to create a voting bloc, something that is a bullhorn to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
The split response from the “Squad” during the last gasp of Biden’s presidential run, particularly as his administration funneled weapons to Israel, flummoxed parts of the left, who said the lawmakers were abandoning their progressive values. While some sources told reporters that progressives were backing Biden out of political self-interest, many analysts noted that their support was part of strategy to get the president to push his platform to the left. Squad members seized upon a vulnerable moment when Biden was ostracized by the Democratic mainstream to seek new policy concessions. Indeed, in the final stretch of his campaign, Biden announced a slew of proposals favored by progressives, including reforming the Supreme Court, limiting rent hikes and eliminating medical debt from credit reports.
Now that Biden has dropped out, the electorate will be watching closely to see how Harris shapes her campaign platform. But progressives’ much-maligned choice to enthusiastically back “Genocide Joe” raises the question: In our current political moment, how much can a centrist candidate really be “pushed left”? And given Biden’s decision to ultimately drop out of the race, was this the right time for progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to make that push?
It’s true that the Democratic Party’s platform has drifted left over the years, in large part due to breakout support for Senator Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016, which galvanized voters around a left-wing populist message. And endorsing electoral opponents in exchange for specific policy positions is, of course, a well-established political tactic. After Sanders dropped out of the 2016 race, he held off on endorsing Hillary Clinton until he won a number of — albeit limited — concessions on the official Democratic Party platform. Mainstream Democrats ultimately agreed to embrace a $15 an hour federal minimum wage and to commit to a “reasoned pathway for future legalization” of marijuana.
During the 2020 election, the Democratic Party incorporated additional progressive messaging into its platform again in response to conversations with Sanders’s team. Medicare for All, while not officially endorsed, was mentioned for the first time. And the platform expressed opposition to Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
Biden received Sanders’s 2020 endorsement after he promised to form “unity task forces” to develop his agenda. Those task groups included notable progressives like Ocasio-Cortez, who was made co-chair of the climate committee, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), who was assigned to work on health care. Dubbed the “Progressive Unity Platform,” that agenda advocated to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour and adjust it for inflation; end capital punishment; implement a tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; end cash bail; establish universal pre-kindergarten; and repeal President Donald Trump’s travel and immigration bans, among other recommendations.
Shifting language may reflect a new ideological mainstream, but it is not a substitute for political action. It is notable that few of the policies from any of these platforms have been implemented during Biden’s presidency, despite his administration notching key wins on legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The federal minimum wage still sits at $7.25 per hour, the United States is not one of the 27 countries that currently implement a federal carbon tax, and even 2020’s Progressive Unity Platform contained no mention of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal or the cancellation of college debt.
Biden repealed many of Trump’s immigration policies when he entered office, only to reverse course this year and enact a ban on asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border that pulls straight from his predecessor’s playbook. And while Biden’s administration revived a U.S. legal ruling in February that deemed Israeli settlements illegal — which they are under international law — it also pushed forward with Trump’s plan to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a widely condemned decision that violated United Nations resolutions. Since October 2023, Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has enabled the killing of at least 39,000 Palestinians, and likely many thousands more.
This final point is the most crucial. There is no way to push a pro-genocide candidate left. There is no such thing as a progressive genocide. Yes, the Squad might be able to achieve some domestic policy wins at home, but there is a deep hypocrisy to granting one’s imprimatur to a candidate who enables the mass slaughter of civilians overseas.
Coalition-building among Democrats is, of course, important for doing politics. But let us not also undersell the power of popular movements to force those in power to change their tune. While Biden announced some new policy proposals in response to progressive pressure — including ones that can’t go into effect without congressional approval — they were also notably positions that already polled well among the public, such as medical debt relief and expanding Social Security. It was activists who pushed the Democratic Party to adopt tougher stances on climate change, and Harris’s campaign will now likely be closely watching the “vote uncommitted” movement, which galvanized more than half a million Democrats to cast uncommitted primary ballots in protest of Biden’s support for Israel.
Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, and his stance on Israel is just as militaristic as Biden’s, if not more so. But we can, and should, demand more from our officials than cynical political maneuvering. Harris has long been unequivocal in her support for Israel, and if elected, she’s unlikely to diverge significantly from Biden’s policies. Now that we have arrived at this unusual inflection point, it’s critical for those on the left to continue to push for the ceasefire and an end to weapons shipments to Israel. What we need now is continued grassroots pressure and unified, clear and principled messaging from our progressive lawmakers.
One such message arrived on July 21, after Biden dropped out of the race. Representative Tlaib released a statement, inviting Harris to engage in a dialogue with her team about what her constituents would like from a Democratic nominee. “They want to see a permanent ceasefire and an end to the funding of genocide in Gaza. They want to see immigration policies that support a fair and humane system, not one that vilifies immigrants,” Tlaib wrote. “We are in unprecedented times but the demands of our constituents and people across the country remain the same: they want a President and government that is focused on saving lives, giving people the ability to thrive, and valuing the humanity of one another over bombs.”