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In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion was sapped from the bottom 90 percent— enough to give every worker a $32,000 raise.

Thrusting their crotches before a construction site backdrop, four male-model types hoist hammers up to their gym-perfected torsos, smiling as if there is no other place they’d rather be than the stage of the Rio Hotel & Casino in the Las Vegas Chippendales show. Women of all ages gawk and scream as the men rip off their white tank tops and toss them into the audience, strip off their pants, swivel, and display their tanned butt cheeks. It’s one of the few places in the world where women are ogling and men are being ogled.

The Chippendales—what the performers themselves are called—come from a range of ethnic and educational backgrounds, are straight and gay, married and single, but they have a few things in common. According to dancers, as recently as 2019, organizational rules dictate that they’re at least six feet tall, have a six-pack, and have no more than a quarter inch of body hair.

Chippendales is also the name of one of the oldest male strip shows in the nation. Bachelorette and other parties travel from across the United States and the world to gaze at the nearly nude men, paw at their pecs during lap dances, grab their butts, and stare at their genitals, which are always enrobed in hand-crafted pouches (full-frontal nudity is heavily restricted on the Las Vegas Strip).

It’s easy to forget that the Chippendales, while thrusting to techno music as smoke billows in the air, are workers doing a job. Onstage showers and pantomimed sex on silk sheets are not a typical day at the office. Chippendales, originally featuring shirtless hunks in bow ties and cuff links when it was founded in 1979, has nearly always been seen as a curiosity or a joke (see: Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live in 1990). Forty-six years on, the Chippendales are asking to be taken seriously.

In October 2024, two Chippendales dancers, a married gay couple who also work as interior decorators, attempted to do something the show’s workers have never done: unionize. One half of the couple, Freddy Godínez, came up with the idea. Godínez looks like an AI-generated model, with a perfect five-o’clock shadow, a rippling eight-pack, and taut, tattooed forearms. He had no dancing experience when he started with Chippendales at age thirty-eight, but learned from his husband, Alexander Stabler, a forty-year-old with spiky blonde hair and a physique that gives away his background performing rope acrobatics with Cirque du Soleil.

Like nearly all of the nineteen Chippendales dancers, Godínez and Stabler worked part-time while holding down other jobs. Chippendales explicitly tells workers that they should treat the job as a side gig, according to multiple performers. Wyatt Hopkins, a Viking-

esque muscled man with ginger hair, took the job with Chippendales as an on-call position while he continued performing in Zombie Burlesque and Dita Von Teese’s burlesque show at The Venetian Resort. Usually, he danced with Chippendales once a week. Hopkins says he felt “disrespected” by the pay: “However, I chose to focus on the value of working alongside longtime colleagues, which was far more important to me than the compensation itself.”

Some Chippendales work all nine shows a week, which run Tuesday through Sunday (Friday through Sunday are two-show days). Until November, the tattooed and chiseled Chippendale Emerald Depree was a nine-show guy—as full-time as cast members get, working about thirty hours a week. A typical day at Chippendales usually begins around 6:30 p.m., when nine of the cast members arrive for rehearsal. They twist and thrust to the beat of Bad Bunny’s newest song, learning blocking, because shows change regularly to keep up with the TikTok crowd. At 7:15 p.m. there’s a show meeting, and then they suit up in their cowboy costumes, starting with their bespoke “cock socks,” and the show begins. They run through a series of choreographed dances to songs like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” ripping off their white tank tops with gusto and tossing them into the audience, where eager fans clamor for them like foul balls at a Yankees game.

After the show, they trade their thongs for black slacks and bow ties, and line up onstage in their shirtless glory for photos with the primarily female audience members, who shell out $35 each for the privilege. “They tell guests that this is how we make our tips, because we can’t get tipped in the casino because of gaming regulations,” Godínez says. In fact, performers only receive fifty cents of that $35. When Depree complained about the low photo pay, he says the show’s higher-ups told him that the Chippendales used to make only twenty-five cents per photo. “I was like, ‘You guys are trying to make us feel better because we’re making an extra quarter?’ ” he adds.

After photos, which last from thirty to forty-five minutes, they head to the “Flirt Lounge,” Sharpies in hand, to meet with throngs of audience members, clutching the men’s discarded ripped tank tops, waiting for autographs. The Chippendales quaff their two free staff drinks in between scribbling their signatures, sometimes on women’s cleavage. After fifteen minutes of fan service, they are free to leave, around 10:30 p.m, unless they have an 11 p.m show.

Stabler started at Chippendales four years ago as a “specialty act,” bringing the thrill of the Cirque rope show to a male strip revue that competes not only with four other male revues but also with illusionist David Copperfield, the Blue Man Group, Shania Twain, and concerts in the Sphere. When Chippendales offered Stabler $100 per show and no benefits, he was disappointed. “But I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and we’re taught that opportunities are scarce, and so I negotiated what I thought felt fair,” Stabler says. What he thought was fair was $140 a night for his aerial silks performance and $110 for when he was just dancing.

Soon after Stabler was hired, he learned there was a job opening for a part-time show host. He immediately thought of his husband, Godínez, who already had a Chippendale’s body and happened to be training for a fitness competition and taking vocal lessons. Godínez was hired and given an offer similar to Stabler’s: $100 per show. Despite low pay and requests that the buff Godínez slim down and become tanner, Godínez saw Chippendales as a good opportunity. But at some point, after a year of being in the show, he changed his mind.

Godínez wondered if anyone else felt Chippendales dancers deserved better treatment. Many of the dancers did. A dancer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said he had been brushed off when he asked for $25 more per show after a positive performance review. Hopkins remembers saying that “other shows on the [Las Vegas] Strip that show as much skin as we do get paid a lot more.” He says he’d asked Chippendales to match the rate he got for Zombie Burlesque and was told “there’s no budget.” Depree says a union was necessary because the work environment “was toxic.” He says he wasn’t treated with respect and was refused a day off for the Sabbath. “The dance captain told me the reason why I can’t go on tours is because … they don’t like Black people in Germany,” Depree says.

Godínez, who has spent his career in hotel management and has a master’s degree in urban planning, decided that something could be done. He convinced Stabler that a union was not only feasible but necessary.

Godínez reached out to Actors’ Equity Association, which agreed to represent the performers. “Organizing is actually pretty similar, whether it’s a strip club or a theater or a McDonald’s,” says David Levy, Actors’ Equity’s director of communications. “At the end of the day, it’s about the workers saying we deserve better.” Actress and model Brooke Shields, who is president of Actors’ Equity, is fully supportive. “They work hard; they should be compensated, end of story,” Shields tells The Progressive in an email. She’s been a fan of Chippendales for decades and even celebrated her nineteenth birthday with them in the 1980s. “We just had the best, best time. It felt, in a weird way, wholesome,” Shields remembers. “They were such nice guys.”

The day in October before Actors’ Equity was going to announce they were working with the Chippendales dancers, Godínez and Stabler met with management. They said they loved Chippendales, but they wanted “a livable wage, access to benefits, proper compensation for merch,” Stabler says. They asked management in the meeting to voluntarily recognize the union. But the talk didn’t go well, and that did not happen.

While most of the Chippendales The Progressive spoke with support the union—the majority of dancers signed authorization cards—not all do. Depree said that the better-paid dancers are not supporting the union. “They’re not going to want to go against the hand that’s feeding them,” he says. The anonymous dancer adds that “[Guys] that have been there for a long time, for some reason, don’t agree with [the union].”

Godínez and Stabler haven’t taken the stage since Actors’ Equity announced the union on October 8. It’s not because they don’t want to thrust their hips to the cheers of a margarita-fueled crowd. It’s because they’ve been left off the schedule. Hopkins also says he has seen a dramatic reduction in hours. Since October 2024, he has only been scheduled once. Depree was fired after he didn’t show up to work on the Sabbath. Actors’ Equity says all dancers known to support the union have been left off the schedule. At the end of 2024, the union filed an unfair labor practice claim, alleging retaliation and seeking the workers’ reinstatement and other remediations.

In January, the Chippendales show moved venues for the first time in more than twenty-four years to the Linq Hotel & Experience. The entire cast was forced to reaudition for their jobs on January 3. Stabler, Godínez, and three other vocal union supporters were not rehired. “It’s a very clear and transparent union-busting tactic to weed out any supporters,” Stabler says. “We looked good, and we nailed the audition. And prior to October, when we filed for the union, Freddy and I were star employees.”

Management has hired white-shoe antiunion law firm Fisher Phillips to represent the company—not an unusual reaction. Retaliation is a common response to unionization efforts. “One in twenty of the people that have supported unions and tried to organize in a given year are being illegally fired,” says Harry C. Katz, the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University—and he thinks this is an undercount. While attitudes toward unions have become more positive in the past decade, particularly among younger workers, Katz says only 6 percent of private sector employees in the United States are unionized, compared to 33 percent in the 1950s.

Since the unionization push, the show’s casts have shrunk from nine or ten performers down to seven or eight. The acrobatic silks act Stabler performed has been scrapped, now that he’s off the schedule and the other performer who does it is injured. “Not only is it harming the folks that are not being scheduled, but it’s also harming the folks that are in the show, because they’re having to do a lot more,” Stefanie Frey, director of organizing and mobilization at Actors’ Equity, tells The Progressive.

Some dancers have told Stabler that they should pull back on the fight because it’s been difficult for management, but Hopkins disagrees.

“We love what we do. We love the opportunity that we’ve been given, but [Chippendales] doesn’t have a show without us,” Hopkins says. “Why can’t we get higher wages? Why can’t we get these benefits? When we get up there, we’re practically naked. We should be compensated for that.”

Management representatives did not respond by press time to requests for comment on this story. 

Almost immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order abruptly suspending funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided African countries with more than $11 billion total in 2023, primarily for humanitarian assistance and health programs. The impact will be nothing short of devastating. 

In Ethiopia, where an estimated 16 million people depend on food aid, the United States has been a dominant humanitarian donor. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country in the midst of devastating conflict, depends on the United States for about 70 percent of its aid. In Sudan, where a brutal war has led to catastrophic destruction of the country’s hospitals, the United States accounted for 45 percent of global relief funds in 2024, and in South Sudan, USAID funding alone made up about 15 percent of the country’s GDP.

Trump has claimed—without evidence—that USAID was being run by “radical lunatics.” Elon Musk posted on X that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” although he has yet to produce any evidence of malfeasance, let alone criminality.

It is difficult to reconcile these claims with the critical work performed by USAID, which led the international effort to bring the Ebola epidemic under control in West Africa a decade ago and has saved millions of lives in Africa through HIV prevention and treatment.

The fallout from Trump’s Executive Order has been rapid and widespread, with the issuance of stop-work orders for thousands of health care workers, shortages of HIV medication, and the closure of dedicated HIV clinics. There are also concerns that efforts to control mpox (previously called monkeypox), cholera, and the Marburg virus are now in jeopardy. 

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that disease in Africa could spiral out of control, leading to an estimated two-to-four million deaths annually and a dramatic increase in poverty, unless funding shortfalls are addressed urgently.

Food security is also at risk following the funding halt at USAID. In Sudan, for instance, critical food distribution operations have been severely disrupted, exposing millions to the risk of starvation.

Another Trump Executive Order, withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), threatens to exacerbate Africa’s health crises given the major role WHO plays on the continent. The United States had been the largest financial contributor to WHO.

Subsequent to Trump’s executive order on USAID, waivers have been issued by the State Department allowing the temporary resumption of “life-saving humanitarian assistance.” But in many cases it’s too late to prevent human suffering with health clinics closed, employees fired and general confusion regarding the scope of the waiver.

USAID had also engaged in work to promote democracy, social justice, and economic growth, as well as to support victims of sexual abuse and improve agricultural productivity—functions that will no longer exist. Gone too will be the soft power that came with USAID, which has been an important avenue for the development of diplomatic relationships across Africa at a time when China and Russia are expanding their presence on the continent. And by helping to reduce poverty, USAID played a key role in combating the spread of extremists and the risk of terrorism. 

USAID accounted for less than 1 percent of the United States’ federal budget. To make this cut, the Trump Administration appears willing to risk massive human suffering in Africa and dispose of an important source of soft power for the United States.

There will be additional costs to the United States as well. Eliminating USAID threatens to wipe out an estimated 52,000 American jobs, and American farmers would lose significant contacts for the sale of agricultural products. U.S.-funded food aid comprised of American commodities has amounted to around $2 billion in recent years. 

The impacts of the Trump Administration’s policies are reverberating throughout the continent.

In Kenya, protests have once again broken out in recent weeks over the abductions of Kenyans involved in the anti-corruption movement against the government of President William Ruto.

As of the end of January, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights had recorded sixty-three cases of extrajudicial killings and eighty-nine enforced disappearances, with twenty-nine people still missing. 

The United States’ response to the reported abuse of human rights in Kenya has been muted at best. From the Trump Administration, there has been only silence, as the number of abductions grows and the bodies of murdered activists are discovered. There are compelling reasons to believe that this silence has become the official U.S. policy. Noosim Naimasiah, senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute, an independent research organization working in eastern and central Africa, argues that the United States’ approach to Kenya is blatantly self-serving. 

“Given increasing anxieties over competition with Russia and China for influence in Africa, the United States has clearly turned a blind eye to atrocities in Kenya to safeguard its gateway into East Africa,” Naimasiah says in an interview. She emphasizes the important role Kenya plays as a strategic partner to the United States in the fight against terrorism in Somalia. 

Naimasiah worries that closing USAID may contribute to further civil unrest. “Unemployment was a major catalyst for Kenya’s protests last year,” she notes, “and the suspension of USAID funding will seriously exacerbate those issues.”  

Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Trump Administration claims a new law regarding land expropriation is a human rights violation because it enables the government to take land from white South Africans without compensation and therefore discriminates by race. In response to this supposed violation, Trump issued an Executive Order that promotes the resettlement of white South Africans in the United States and terminates all U.S. aid and assistance to South Africa.

The South African government, in response, challenged the premise of Trump’s Executive Order, citing that it “lacks factual accuracy.” The new law, while allowing for expropriation, requires the government to first attempt to acquire the property on reasonable terms. Organizations representing the farming industry have labelled claims of race-based land seizure as false; groups representing Afrikaners have rejected Trump’s offer of resettlement. 

The uncontested rationale for Trump’s actions is the desire to hold South Africa to account for the case it has brought in the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel, a critical U.S. ally in the Middle East, has committed genocide in Gaza.

Trump’s Executive Order also aligns with Elon Musk’s accusations that South Africa discriminates against whites. Musk, now a central figure in the Trump Administration, has objected to Black ownership requirements in South Africa that are frustrating efforts to receive a license for Starlink, his satellite internet business.

One of the most concerning recent developments in Africa is the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where longstanding tensions between the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23 and the DRC military and its allies escalated dramatically in January, resulting in an estimated 7,000 deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

M23 now controls Goma, the largest city in eastern DRC with a population of two million, and is advancing further into DRC territory. A rebel leader has threatened to take the DRC’s capital city, Kinshasa.

At the heart of the conflict are vast reserves of minerals in the DRC, which rebel groups have been smuggling into Rwanda for sale on the international market. There have been reports of extreme human rights violations, prompting United Nations officials to warn that the conflict could expand to encompass more countries in the region.  

The DRC’s position is that Western powers should be doing more to resolve the conflict by taking stronger action against Rwanda. In recent weeks, violent protests erupted outside multiple U.S. embassy buildings in Kinshasa and U.S. citizens have been advised to leave the country.

The new U.S. administration has done little to address the growing crisis. Trump has acknowledged that it is “a very serious problem.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for “an immediate ceasefire” and for “all parties to respect sovereign territorial integrity.” The U.S. Department of Treasury has also imposed relatively limited sanctions very recently, targeting a Rwandan government minister and a spokesperson for M23. The DRC are still calling for a more robust response.

The unwillingness of the current Trump Administration to take stronger action against Rwanda most likely reflects the significant contributions Rwanda makes to U.S.-aligned security efforts in Africa. In Mozambique, Rwanda has committed thousands of soldiers to the fight against Islamic State insurgents. Concerns regarding ISIS in Mozambique remain significant and the United States has been focused on promoting peace and stability in the region.

To be fair, the Trump Administration is not alone in showing complacency towards the current high-risk situation in the DRC—no Western government has yet come forward with decisive steps to stem the escalating conflict.

But Trump’s America First agenda has certainly limited the tools America has at its disposal to convince Rwanda to step back. By threatening to terminate USAID, Trump has lost the ability to specifically target Rwanda with the threat of reduced funds—a threat that proved effective against Rwanda back in 2012, when M23 launched its first major attack.

Trump and his America First agenda also bear significant responsibility for the fractures emerging in the international world order, which may embolden the sort of imperialistic moves we are seeing by Rwanda. So far, in Trump’s second term, we have witnessed American threats to the territorial integrity of Denmark, Canada, and Panama, as well as a U.S. response to the war in Ukraine that is widely regarded as very favorable to Russia.

The Trump Administration’s actions in Africa, so early in his second term, demonstrate that the America First agenda is being pursued far more aggressively than expected and with blatant disregard for core American values, including humanitarianism, the promotion of democracy, and the rule of law—foreign policy guided by a moral compass.

This is not to say that prior U.S. administrations were faultless in upholding core American values in Africa. Kasmuel McOure, a leading figure in Kenya’s protests, highlights clear examples of “blatant hypocrisy” in Biden’s foreign policy, not just in Kenya but in sending aid to the repressive regime in Equatorial Guinea and making deals with Niger’s junta, all in the name of maintaining U.S. influence in Africa.

But the Trump Administration has reached new lows, with no bottom in sight. 

“At this point, we can’t even call it hypocrisy anymore,” says Naimasiah. “To be hypocritical, Trump would need to at least pretend that he cares.” 

In the longer term, there may be a silver lining for Africa. The America First agenda could be the catalyst needed for African countries to wean themselves from foreign aid and strengthen regional cooperation. What is certain, though, is that Trump’s actions so far will cause significant, unnecessary human suffering and erode the United States’ standing in Africa—and we’re barely a month into his term.

The squatter currently occupying the White House isn’t the only one on the warpath these days. Attorneys general from seventeen states are pursuing a federal lawsuit that seeks to invalidate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 by having it declared unconstitutional.

The lawsuit is named Texas v. Becerra, from Texas being the first plaintiff.

This is a big deal for disabled folks because Section 504 was our first comprehensive civil rights law. It prohibits “any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” from discriminating against any “qualified individual with a disability in the United States.”  

I think this is the main reason the United States is much more accessible to people with disabilities than it was prior to 1973. Important places like hospitals, schools, and public transit entities receive some sort of federal financial assistance. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 extended the obligation to make things accessible to pretty much all public and private entities, whether or not they received federal financial assistance.

So why, more than fifty years after the Rehabilitation Act became law, are these attorneys general suddenly so eager to trash Section 504? Well, it seems like they just cannot resist using this as an excuse to take more cheap shots at transgender people.

In May 2024, the lawsuit begins by pointing out, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule of revised Section 504 regulations, which says that gender dysphoria “may be a disability.” The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) points out on its website that this conclusion was based on an appellate court case in which an incarcerated person was initially kept with the women until a medical exam revealed their male genitalia. The court agreed that gender dysphoria can qualify as a disability as defined by Section 504 and the ADA under certain circumstances.

The DREDF website says: “We agree with this common-sense approach . . . . It is important for the disability community to stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community and to oppose attacks targeting transgender people.”

These attorneys general are also grousing about the “integration mandate” in the final rule. It says that services provided by entities covered by Section 504 must be offered to disabled people in “the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of the qualified individual with a disability.”

By taking loud exception to this concept, the attorneys general demonstrate how they don’t know and/or don’t care that generations of disabled folks have been locked away in cruel isolation. 

There once was a time when disabled folks were routinely and involuntarily uprooted to some distant asylum, nursing home, or school just so they could receive public services. The whole point of laws like Section 504 is to challenge this type of lazy and destructive thinking, but more than fifty years later, many disabled Americans are still being mistreated under this selfish public policy.

It seems as though these attorneys general prefer that disabled people just went away and died so they don’t have to be bothered with us. They probably would ask the court to make us go away and die, if they could.

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins recently suggested that Americans struggling to afford rising egg prices should buy chickens themselves — an impractical solution, people experienced with managing chicken coops have said. In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday to discuss rising consumer costs, Rollins laughed, saying that the egg pricing…