By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

On Saturday afternoon, December 13th, a gunman entered a Brown University classroom in Providence, Rhode Island, and started firing. He killed two students and injured nine, then escaped. By Thursday night, authorities had located the body of the shooter in New Hampshire, dead by apparent suicide.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, this was the 389th mass shooting in the United States in 2025. At least four more have occurred since. Gun violence is not unique to this country, but its sheer magnitude and frequency here is without equal. The gun industry and its gun lobby have created a 50-state free fire zone, a killing field in the very country where, 250 years ago, its founders declared “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to be inalienable rights. Those rights have been forever stripped from Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, the two students killed in the attack. Of the nine injured, six remain hospitalized, one in critical condition.

Mass shootings, especially at schools, have become so common in the US that we now have a growing population of people who have survived not one but two of them. We interviewed two such survivors on the Democracy Now! news hour after the Brown shooting.

“Because I’ve already processed all the grief and the sadness before — I’ve been grappling with that for the past seven years — my most predominant emotion right now is, honestly, anger,” Brown sophomore Zoe Weissman said. She was at the Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Florida, which abuts the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where, on Valentines Day, 2018, a former student arrived with an AR-15-style assault rifle and killed 17 people, mostly students, injuring 18.

Zoe continued, “If politicians actually want to show they care about their constituents and want to be reelected, they need to show a concerted effort to pass gun violence prevention legislation on a federal level. If they don’t, we’ll make sure to vote them out, because we are the only country where this happens.”

Mia Tretta is a junior at Brown. She was shot by a fellow student with a handgun at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, on Nov. 14, 2019. He killed her best friend and one other student and injured two more before taking his own life.

“I came to Brown as someone who was shot in the stomach at 15 years old,” Mia said on Democracy Now! “When something as horrific and terrifying as a school shooting happens to you, you want to find as much sense of safety as possible, because, at least for me, my entire innocence, my childhood was taken from me by someone I didn’t even know. A big reason I chose Brown was because of the safety I felt on campus, the community I felt, the fact that Rhode Island is a blue state that values gun laws.”

Since surviving the shooting in high school, Mia has become a tireless gun control advocate. In 2022, at the age of 18, she spoke at the White House:

“Ghost guns are untraceable…as a student, I don’t just have to worry about Spanish tests, but about my life. School shootings with ghost guns are on the rise. The most lasting thing I’ve learned, other than the loss of friends or the shattering of my youth, is that nothing has relieved the pain in my heart like working to prevent more senseless shootings.”

Like Mia, Zoe Weissman promises action:

“We are a very politically active group of students…I think that you’re really going to see a large concerted effort, once we get back on campus in mid- to late-January, from students. I think I can speak for all of us that we’re angry and we’re ready to do something, not just on the state level, but on a federal one, as well.”

The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear what has been described as a “pile up” of 2nd amendment cases, including one challenging an Illinois ban on AR-15 assault rifles, the mass shooters’ weapon of choice. Other cases involve whether certain classes of people can have their gun rights restricted, like those with felony convictions, habitually addicted people, or those under the age of 21. If history is a guide, the court’s 6-3 rightwing majority is likely to reject any form of gun control as unconstitutional.

So it will take grassroots action to contain this uniquely American scourge of mass gun violence.

“America is the only country that takes gun violence as this fact of life, and it makes no sense,” 21-year-old Mia Tretta said. “There’s no world where walking down the street and being scared, or sitting in a classroom and getting shot and killed, is normal. This doesn’t have to happen.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

This month marks the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her courageous act triggered the historic Montgomery bus boycott, launched the career of a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., and changed the world. Remarkable events like the boycott have long been celebrated in this country as seminal moments achieved through struggle, woven into the fabric of our collective civic life. President Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers are on a campaign to erase this history, tearing down monuments to hard-won progress and whitewashing American history to conform to their white Christian nationalist agenda.

Take the recent changes to the National Park Service’s fee-free days, when the park admission fees are waived. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth have been stripped from the list of fee-free days, and Donald Trump’s birthday has been added. Gone are the only two days that celebrate Black history, which is in fact American history.

Other examples are Trump’s restoration of Confederate monuments, torn down in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests that followed, and his reversal of the renaming of military bases formerly named after Confederate officers. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “No more woke bullshit.”

Trump’s discrimination and erasure aren’t limited to race; within weeks of taking office, the National Park Service removed the “T” from “LGBT” on its Stonewall National Monument website. The pivotal Stonewall uprising, credited with launching the modern gay rights movement, was prominently led by transgender activists. It occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn, an LGBTQ+ bar attacked by New York City police on June 28, 1969. In recent years, Trump has been inciting virulent transphobia in his campaign to harness hate for political power.

Juneteenth, June 19th, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army ordered the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas. Juneteenth is considered the longest continually celebrated African American holiday, and it is the newest federal holiday.

The effort to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday was itself won only after a decades-long struggle. It was first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1986, while many states resisted. South Carolina was the last to adopt it, in 2020. To this day, Alabama and Mississippi officially mark the holiday as the joint birthday of both King and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Purging MLK Day and Juneteenth from the National Park Service’s fee-free days is not trivial. It signals official, government-sactioned and enforced racism and bigotry, originating in the Oval Office and radiating throughout the government, the media, and our society at large.

As Professor Jeanne Theoharis writes in her book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” she did not sit down on that bus because she was a tired seamstress. Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She had received training in nonviolent resistance at the renowned Highlander Center in Tennessee, where people like King and folk singer and activist Pete Seeger spent time, working to build movements for racial and economic justice.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first, either. Earlier that year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was also arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat. Decades later, she recalled her decision, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, “I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat…because it felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move.”

History matters. History motivates. Donald Trump knows this, and is attempting to purge the history of progressive struggle, waged by communities of color and other marginalized groups.

Meanwhile, key advances that took decades, even centuries to achieve, are being rapidly undone. The US Supreme Court is unabashedly advancing the MAGA agenda, most recently approving a racially-gerrymandered Congressional map for Texas that clearly violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Neither the Constitution nor legal precedent will stand in the way of the Court’s rightwing majority as they rubber stamp one noxious Trump priority after another.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King criticized not merely “the hateful words and actions of the bad people but…the appalling silence of the good people.”

Authoritarianism is on the rise, here at home and abroad, fueled by demagogues like Trump. There is no option but to resist.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat following U.S. missile strikes on September 2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the operation called a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody.” These actions, along with at least 20 additional lethal boat strikes that followed, are widely considered by legal and military experts to be war crimes.

President Donald Trump has declared, without proof, that these targeted people are narcotics traffickers and thus “terrorists” with whom the U.S. is at war.

“This entire operation, from the outset, is illegal,” David Cole, Georgetown University law professor, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. … They’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood.”

The Intercept’s Nick Turse first reported the killing of the survivors, a week after the attack happened. In that report, Turse wrote:

“A high-ranking Pentagon official … said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year.”

Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends on September 3, boasting of the boat strike: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.”

The Washington Post’s report provoked bipartisan concern in Congress and investigations into the strikes as potential war crimes. On Sunday, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the strike, saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”

Hegseth got the message, apparently, stating in a December 2 cabinet meeting, seated next to Trump, “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around.”

The decision to kill the survivors, he said, came from the operation’s commanding officer, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.

In Trump’s Air Force One comments, he added detail to his boat strike policy that bears mention: “Just look at the numbers … each boat, on average, is responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.”

As with every aspect of this murderous policy, Trump offered no evidence to back up his math. We know next to nothing about these boats, whether they are engaged in criminal activity, are fishing boats, or something else. Dominican Republic officials reported that one ton, or 1,000 kilograms, of cocaine was recovered from the wreckage of one of the boats the U.S. bombed.

That amount, if accurate, highlights the hypocrisy of Trump’s policies. He just granted a pardon to a convicted cocaine trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. He had spent just over a year of his 46-year sentence in a U.S. prison. In 2024, Hernandez was found guilty of flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine. That’s enough to fill over 400 of the alleged “narco-trafficker” boats Trump and Hegseth have been blowing up. Thus, using Trump’s math, Hernandez’s prolific cocaine smuggling would have killed over 10 million Americans.

So why pardon the convicted felon?

Trump announced the pardon days before Honduras’ national elections. Just before releasing Hernández on Monday, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the presidential candidate from Hernández’s right-wing party, hoping to gain another Trump-allied Latin American leader. By Thursday, the centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla was leading Asfura with 80% of the votes counted. Trump, seeing his preferred candidate losing, claimed fraud.

Meanwhile, the largest U.S. military buildup in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban missile crisis is underway in the Caribbean, as Trump escalates U.S. threats against Venezuela. He has again invoked the pretext of narco-trafficking, claiming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs a cocaine cartel, offering a $50 million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Trump recently pledged that strikes on Venezuelan land would begin “very soon.” In response, a bipartisan group of senators including Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky have put forth Senate Joint Resolution 98, barring U.S. military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization.

Meanwhile, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina has filed a complaint against the U.S. with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging the U.S. illegally killed him in his boat on September 15.

“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth bragged on December 2. Hopefully, a war crimes inquiry against Hegseth will be beginning soon as well.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The United Nations’ COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, known as “the Amazon COP,” wrapped on November 22nd. Powerful petrostates and large polluting nations succeeded in blocking inclusion of a roadmap away from fossil fuels in the summit’s concluding agreement. COP30 is the 30th “Conference of Parties” to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. Over 190 nations have spent a decade negotiating the implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, with little success.

The alternative to COP30’s drastic compromise, abandoning the “roadmap” that many climate-impacted nations described as a “red line,” was the potentially permanent collapse of the Paris Agreement. Global climate negotiations have been fraught for years, as the process requires nations with vastly different resources and objectives to reach consensus. As the climate crisis worsens and the planetary ecosystem on which we all depend for survival nears multiple tipping points, it appears fossil fuel interests, from the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia to multinational oil corporations, are scuttling climate solutions in the interest of their own power and profit. As a result, billions of people globally are being sentenced to climate devastation.

“I’m angry at a really weak outcome,” Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA’s director of policy and campaigns said on the Democracy Now! news hour after COP30. “I’m angry at the fossil fuel lobbyists roaming the venue freely, while the Indigenous activists were met with militarized repression. I’m angry at all the governments that aren’t standing up for their people.”

Wu was among thousands from civil society at COP, demanding an ambitious and just transition from fossil fuels. These activists are allied with nations on the front lines of the climate crisis, like the small island states that dot the Pacific and Indian Oceans, where rising sea levels threaten their very existence. Vanuatu is a Pacific archipelago of about 80 islands, home to over 325,000 people. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change, spoke to Democracy Now! during COP30’s final morning of scheduled negotiations:

“Earlier this morning, we were informed by the presidency [of COP30] that there are about 80 countries who have put a red line on any mention of fossil fuels in the outcome from this meeting, this UNFCCC process, this COP.”

Two camps emerged: About 80 nations, including the world’s major oil producers, rejected a roadmap from fossil fuels. Another group, also with about 80 countries, including Vanuatu, demanded its inclusion. With two conflicting red lines, consensus seemed impossible.

Over 1,800 scientists who make up the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading body on climate science, conclude that global average temperature rise must be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.8 deg F) over pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Regenvanu added, “We need to respect the scientific consensus of the IPCC. We need to stick to the 1.5-degree goal. But we have a certain number of countries who are vested in the fossil fuel pipeline — I would say not their populations, but certain members of the political classes. We’re seeing these people blocking progress for all humanity. It’s a result of this process that is flawed.”

The nations demanding a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels relented, accepting modest gains. For example, language was included supporting a future discussion on a “just transition” mechanism, essentially ensuring that human rights will play a role in addressing the climate crisis.

But ultimately, human impacts on the climate need to stop, and to do that, we need to transition off of fossil fuels.

Colombia, itself an oil and coal producing country, has offered an alternative. Colombia and the Netherlands announced on the final day of COP30 that they would co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, next April in Santa Marta, Colombia.

“The root cause of this problem is fossil fuels,” Colombian environment minister Irene Velez Torrés said at the COP. “We cannot look at the people in the future generations if we don’t do something now. We cannot accept a text that is not dealing with the real problems.”

Kumi Naidoo, a South African activist who fought apartheid as a teenager then went on to head Amnesty International and Greenpeace International, observed on Democracy Now!, mid-COP, “There’s absolute corporate capture here again. There are 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists. It’s a struggle to get the F-word said here — by ‘F-word’ we mean fossil fuels…we need a fossil fuel phaseout plan. We certainly will push in April to do so in Colombia.”

After COP30, as the UN climate process limps forward, all eyes are on the Colombia summit to build the global movement to finally end our addiction to fossil fuels.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

BELÉM, BRAZIL–The Amazon rainforest, often described as the lungs of the planet, is teeming with life. Thousands of Amazonian land defenders, both Indigenous people and their allies, have traveled to the tropical city of Belém, Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon, carrying their message that the rainforest is at a tipping point, but can still be saved.

Their focus is on COP30, the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the official body created after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to negotiate and implement a global treaty to limit human-caused global warming. Thirty-three years later, the negotiations stagger forward at far too slow a pace than what is needed to avert catastrophic climate disaster.

That became apparent as the conference wrapped up its first week. Hundreds of activists arrived on several caravans and river-borne flotillas in advance of a major civil society march. On Friday night, an Indigenous-led march arrived at the perimeter of the COP’s “Blue Zone,” a secure area accessible only to those bearing official summit credentials. The group stormed security, kicking down a door. United Nations police contained the protest, but it was a marker of the level of frustration at the failure of the deliberations to deliver just and effective climate action.

Alessandra Korap Munduruku, president of the Pariri Indigenous Association, was a leader of the protest. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership and organizing, forcing British mining giant Anglo American to withdraw from Indigenous lands, including those of her people.

“It was very difficult for our people who had traveled for so long to get here, and the people wanted to be heard,” Alessandra said on the Democracy Now! news hour, speaking inside the COP. “We came in a large delegation, and we wanted to speak, and we wanted to be heard, but we were blocked. I have credentials to enter COP, but many of the Munduruku who are here do not, and so we decided that we needed to stop this COP. We needed people to stop and to listen to us…because we are the ones that are saying what the forest is demanding. We are the ones that are saying what the river is asking for.”

Close to 190 nations sent delegations here to hammer out a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Noticeably absent is the United States. President Donald Trump refused to send an official delegation, a first for the US. Trump calls climate change a “con job” and has ordered the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Jean Su of the Center for Biological Diversity responded to the US’s absence at COP, saying on Democracy Now!, “People should celebrate the fact that that obstruction is not here, and pass as fast as possible mechanisms like a fossil fuel phaseout roadmap, where the U.S. is not here, but they could be bound by it later.”

The US is the historically largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. Now that urgent action is needed to reverse the damage already done, the US backs out. When asked at COP30 if he thinks Trump might rejoin the talks, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres replied, “Hope is the last thing to die.”

It will take more than hope to save the Amazon rainforest. Sônia Guajajara is Brazil’s first ever Minister of Indigenous Peoples.

“Beyond forests, people need to understand that we have culture, we have people, and we have a diversity of people that protect the Amazon,” Minister Guajajara said on Democracy Now! during COP30. “It’s important that the world know that it’s not only forests and animals that live in the Amazon. There are people living there, people that are being attacked, assaulted. They’re having their rights violated, and they need protection.”

One important outcome Guajajara is working on at the COP30 negotiations is the recognition of the rights of Indigenous people: “We are expecting the recognition of Indigenous territories and the demarcation of these territories as a climate policy, one of the most efficient solutions to confront the climate crisis.”

Demarcation is the first, difficult step in Brazil to protect traditional Indigenous territories from exploitation by extractive industries like logging, mining and land clearing to make way for cattle ranching. Days after the COP30 protest led by Alessandra Korap Munduruku, her territory and nine others were finally demarcated, a hard-won victory that took years of struggle.

This year’s UN climate summit has the greatest number of accredited Indigenous people in attendance than ever before, nearing 1,000. Among the forces they are up against are over 1,600 fossil fuel industry lobbyists also in attendance. Who wins will determine the fate of the Amazon, and of the planet itself.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in to the US House of Representatives on Wednesday, after being blocked from her duly-elected role by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for 50 days, denying Congressional representation to Grijalva’s 800,000-plus constituents in southern Arizona. Johnson, it seemed, was far more interested in serving the interests of just one man, namely, President Donald Trump. By refusing to swear in Grijalva, Johnson was able to block the long-pending discharge petition that would force a vote on releasing the government’s files on the late, convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Well, Johnson’s delays are over. Adelita Grijalva is now a member of Congress, and, as her first official act, she signed the discharge petition. This allows an end-run around the Speaker, who sets the agenda in the House of Representatives and decides what comes to a vote and what does not. There will now be a vote in the House to compel the Justice Department to make public its full trove of Epstein files. The bill is expected to pass in the House, although its fate in the Senate is unclear.

Adelita Grijalva raised the Epstein files in her first floor speech, which she delivered after receiving a rousing standing ovation from her Congressional colleagues:

“Our democracy only works when everyone has a voice. This includes the millions of people across the country who have experienced violence and exploitation, including Liz Stein and Jessica Michaels, both survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse. They are here in the gallery with us this evening. Thank you for being here. [applause] Just this morning, House Democrats released more emails showing that Trump knew more about Epstein’s abuses than he previously acknowledged.”

Grijalva continued,

“It’s past time for Congress to restore its role as a check and balance on this administration and fight for WE the American people. We need to fight for our immigrant communities and veterans. We need to stand up for our public schools, children and educators. We need to respect tribal sovereignty and our environment. We need to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights, because that’s what the American people expect us to do: Fight for them. That is why I will sign the discharge petition right now to release the Epstein files.”

Grijalva won the special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of her father, the late Congressmember Raul Grijalva. She opened her speech paying tribute to him and to her heritage:

“I rise today, the proud granddaughter of a bracero, a hard working Mexican immigrant who came to this country for a better life, and I stand as the proud daughter of a US Congressman, a man who spent his entire life fighting for justice, equity and dignity for the most vulnerable.”

Grijalva thanked her constituents,

“Thank you to la gente of southern Arizona for making history, electing me the first Latina, the first Chicana from Arizona to ever go to Congress.”

And then, she spoke in Spanish:

“Este momento es historico para nuestra comunidad. Es un honor ser la primera Latina en representar a Arizona en Congreso y es seguro, que aunque soy la primera, no sera la ultima.”

(“This is a historic moment for our community. It is an honor to be the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress, and I am certain that although I am the first, I will not be the last.”)

Speaking on Democracy Now! on her first full day in Congress representative Grijalva explained her choice to speak in Spanish as well as English in her first House address: “I felt it was very important. In southern Arizona, we have a lot of Spanish speaking families and even many that are bilingual. I wanted to let them know I was there for them.”

Adelita is a name known to many in the border region, as the name of a famous “corrido,” or ballad, of the Mexican Revolution, called “La Adelita.” In the early years of the 20th century, the Mexican people rose up against the long-standing dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. While the song’s lyrics cast the revolutionary struggle in romantic terms, it has come to symbolize the central role women played in the revolution’s ultimate success.

House Speaker Johnson’s arbitrary and hostile refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva for close to two months was an absolute disservice, not only to her and her constituents, but to our democracy. As fears rise of Trump’s authoritarian actions, the people of southern Arizona now have a voice in Congress. Adelante, Adelita.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Zohran Mamdani made history, winning the race to be the next mayor of New York City. The Democratic socialist is the first Muslim and the first person of South Asian descent elected to lead the largest city in the United States. At 34 years old, he is the youngest elected to the office in over a century. His meteoric rise from a little-known state assemblymember to his stunning upset on Tuesday has sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. With over 100,000 volunteers, a savvy social media presence, and a platform to make New York affordable, Zohran Mamdani charted a path to victory, defeating the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo.

At his victory party at the Brooklyn Paramount late Tuesday night, Mamdani was welcomed on stage by a cheering crowd of jubilant supporters.

He opened his rousing speech saying, “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but, as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” quoting one of the most famous socialists in US history.

Eugene V. Debs was born to immigrant parents on November 5th, 1855. He started working at 14, laboring on the railroads, becoming a fireman, shoveling coal on steam-powered locomotives. He joined the fireman’s union, rising in its ranks. He then formed the American Railway Union (ARU), to organize all railway industry workers, including, he hoped, women and African Americans.

The ARU struck against the Pullman Company, owned by George Pullman, who built and operated a massive fleet of luxury railroad sleeper cars, amassing a fortune while keeping his workers in near-indentured status in his company town of Pullman, Illinois. The strike went national, hobbling the rail industry. President William Howard Taft called in the military, violently breaking the strike, killing over 30 strikers. As the public face of the strike, Eugene V. Debs was targeted for prosecution. He was convicted and sentenced to six months in a county jail. As he read and wrote in his cell, Debs became more radicalized, and left jail a committed socialist.

By 1900, he ran as the Socialist party’s candidate for president, the first of five such runs. In 1905 he co-founded the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, seeking to organize workers across industries into “One Big Union.” During his presidential run in 1912, he built so much momentum that establishment candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were seriously concerned he could win.

After the US entered World War I, patriotic fervor swept the nation. Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, then the Sedition Act in 1918, making it a crime to speak out against the war. Despite this, Debs spoke at an outdoor mass meeting in Canton, Ohio, criticizing the war. No known recordings of Debs’ voice exist, but actor Tim Robbins read the speech in a 2009 performance of Voices of the People’s History of the United States, produced by Anthony Arnove and the late historian Howard Zinn. Debs said, accusing Wall Street tycoons of warmaking,

“Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch patriot. Every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug. What rot. What false pretense. Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.”

Debs was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. His address to the court at sentencing, on Sep. 18, 1918, is considered one of the most eloquent speeches in modern English. That’s the speech Mamdani quoted. Debs opened with perhaps his most famous words (performed at a different Voices event by actor David Strathairn),

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Debs served three years in federal prison – running his final presidential campaign, in 1920, from his cell.

New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani chooses his words carefully. In quoting Eugene Debs, he not only signaled his Democratic socialist beliefs; he was issuing a call to action. Like Debs, Mamdani understands, and his campaign embodied, that the struggle for justice requires mass organizing.

President Donald Trump has threatened to punish New York City for electing Mamdani, by cutting off federal funds. Like President Taft, Trump has deployed the military to several cities, and promises more. Mamdani replied to Trump in his speech with a challenge:

“To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” He went on, “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

As the United States government shutdown marks its fifth week, approaching the record 35-day shutdown set back in 2018-19, unleashing a worsening cascade of hardship, one explanation for the shutdown comes from long-time Republican strategist turned Never Trump activist Stuart Stevens of the Lincoln Project, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour last week:

“Say what you will about Jeffrey Epstein. The guy’s dead, and he can still shut down Congress.”

What does the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who, according to the official record, died by suicide inside his prison cell in 2019, have to do with a government shutdown in late 2025? The answer comes from Tucson, Arizona, and Congressmember-elect Adelita Grijalva – who recently won a special election to fill the House seat left vacant by the death of her father, longtime progressive Democratic Congressmember Raul Grijalva.

Adelita Grijalva won the special election on September 23rd as the representative of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, representing Tucson. Despite her election, though, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to swear her in – more than a month after her victory. His obstruction of this essential, Constitutionally-mandated function of our democracy is without precedent.

President Donald Trump is profoundly afraid that the contents of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files will see the light of day. Trump’s name reportedly appears in the files numerous times. There is currently a bipartisan discharge petition in the House of Representatives, which would force the release of the Epstein files. It needs 218 votes to pass.

When Adelita Grijalva is sworn in to Congress, she has vowed she will be that deciding vote, directing the Department of Justice “to make publicly available certain records related to Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell,” Epstein’s co-conspirator, currently serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.

Why else would Johnson so blatantly violate his duty and refuse to swear in Grijalva, other than to protect Donald Trump from whatever is contained in the Epstein files? What is shocking is that release of the files was a major pledge Trump made during his 2024 presidential campaign.

“Then, as soon as this administration is in office, all of a sudden there’s nothing to see here. The American people want to know what is in those files, who is implicated. And the victims need an opportunity for justice and a voice,” said Congressmember-elect Adelita Grijalva on Democracy Now!, two weeks after winning her election.

While Grijalva waits, ready to be sworn in to begin formally representing her 800,000-plus constituents, more and more Republicans are growing frustrated with the government shutdown, and with Speaker Johnson’s intransigence on keeping the House of Representatives out of session.

California Republican Kevin Kiley insisted on CNN on Wednesday that the House should immediately get back to work, then responded to a question about Johnson’s refusal to swear in Grijalva:

“She won her election. She deserves to be sworn in. That district deserves a representative, and we were supposed to be in session, by the way, right after she was elected…I don’t understand why this is even an issue.”

Grijalva and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes have taken Speaker Johnson to court, suing him (along with the House Clerk and its Sergeant-at-Arms), demanding she be sworn in. The complaint states, “Prior to the election of Ms. Grijalva, every time a special election has been conducted during Mr. Johnson’s tenure as Speaker of the House, the winner has been sworn in immediately upon unofficial notification of the results,” and notes that among those quickly sworn in by Johnson were Celeste Maloy, Vince Fong, Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine – all Republicans, and, in September, Democrat James Walkinshaw of Virginia. The suit also argues that Johnson’s delay is based on Grijalva’s expected vote on the Epstein files discharge petition.

All this time, during the government shutdown, while members of the House are getting paid for not showing up to Congress, more than one million federal workers, deemed “essential” like TSA workers and air traffic controllers, are forced to work without pay.

As Trump exerts maximum pressure to block the release of the Epstein files, and after literally demolishing the East Wing of the White House – traditionally the First Lady’s domain – and paving over the Rose Garden, first planted by First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy, Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva’s voice and vote is needed in Congress, now.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

In the 1979 slasher film, “When A Stranger Calls,” a babysitter getting threatening phone calls is alerted by the police, “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from within the house.” Well, life is imitating art in Washington, DC, as the White House itself is under attack – in this case, too, the perpetrator is inside the house. President Donald Trump abruptly ordered the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House. Built by enslaved workers during the 1790s on land chosen by George Washington, The White House is owned by the public, not by Trump. It is “The People’s House,” yet, there seems to be no way to prevent Trump from taking a wrecking ball to it.

The demolition provides a perfect metaphor for what Trump is doing to the institutional pillars of our democracy: tearing them down with authoritarian hubris, answering to no one as he erects yet another garish monument to himself.

The demolition will make way for an enormous ballroom, about 90,000 square feet in size – more than one-and-a-half times the size of a football field – that Trump boasts will hold 1,000 people. The architectural rendering depicts a cavernous gold-trimmed room betraying Trump’s obsession with gilt (that’s g-i-l-t), in a style that writer Garrett Graff called “Kremlin-esque.”

In July, after the White House announced plans to build the ballroom, Trump said,

“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

Trump often lies, and this is no exception. Far from being untouched, the East Wing has now been totally demolished. As for his love of the place, Golf Magazine in 2017 was told by a Trump golf partner that Trump said, while golfing, “That White House is a real dump.”

Trump has completely ignored precedent and the legal process for making such dramatic changes to the White House. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a letter to the National Capital Planning Commission, now dominated by Trump appointees, wrote, “we are deeply concerned that the massing and height of the proposed new construction will overwhelm the White House itself—it is 55,000 square feet—and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.” You read that right: the ballroom is far bigger than the White House itself.

Trump has made other changes to the historic building, including paving over the Rose Garden, installed by First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy.

Trump also revealed he plans to build a grand arch, inspired by France’s Arc de Triomphe, on the National Mall for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. When asked by CBS who the arch was for, Trump replied, “Me.” People are now calling it the “Arc de Trump.”

In response to mounting criticism of the East Wing demolition, the White House put out a statement reading in part, “unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom.”

That alleged private funding bears noting. The estimated price tag has grown from $200 million to over $300 million, and will certainly also need significant amounts of staff time and resources from taxpayer-funded agencies like the Secret Service.

This is happening amidst a government shutdown, where thousands of federal workers have been furloughed and fired, and when the draconian impacts of Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” are now hitting millions of Americans, from increasing health insurance premiums to the elimination of SNAP food benefits.

Let’s call this construction, with due sarcasm, Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Build.”

Among the corporations reportedly paying are tech giants Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Palantir; military contractors Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen; cryptocurrency company Coinbase; Comcast, T-Mobile, cigarette maker Altria, and more.

This corporate largesse is clearly offered to curry favor with Trump, who operates in an overtly transactional manner, while seeking unprecedented authoritarian control.

The Republican-controlled Congress has completely abdicated its oversight role, and the federal courts, while slowing Trump’s power grab, are ultimately subordinate to the US Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority, three of whom are Trump appointees, repeatedly empower him with favorable rulings.

Which is why President Trump and his enablers were so openly disturbed by the massive protests that spread across the United States last Saturday, on what was called, “No Kings Day.” Over 7 million people, from Maine to Alaska and Hawaii, in red states as well as blue states, filled the streets to reject Trump’s imperious power grabs. They said, with incredible creativity and in a consistently peaceful and nonviolent way, essentially what the framers of the Constitution wrote, only a few years before enslaved workers laid that cornerstone of the White House: “No kings, no monarchs.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The bombing has stopped in Gaza. Palestinians there, still waiting for the food and other aid to reach them, are now sifting through the rubble of their homes seeking their dead. In Israel, twenty families reunited with their loved ones who endured two years of captivity in Gaza following October 7th, 2023. Their pain and joy received blanket coverage in the US, and rightly so. But the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians rarely appears in the mainstream US media. It is absolutely essential that people here, the source of Israel’s arsenal, have access to the full breadth of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One experienced participant in the Middle East peace process is Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu. On the first day of the ceasefire, she said on the Democracy Now! news hour,

“While people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us. Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.”

A strikingly similar analysis came from the uncle of one of the Israelis taken captive on October 7th. Joel Beinin is an emeritus professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. His niece Liat Beinin Atzili was held captive for 54 days in Gaza in 2023. The family’s story is the focus of a new documentary, Holding Liat.

“The world media focuses on the Israelis,” Joel Beinin said on Democracy Now! “There’s always a serious imbalance in coverage and centering Israel and Israelis, and much less attention to Palestinians. Palestinian society, as a whole, is suffering far, far more than Israeli society has ever suffered as a result of the armed clashes, going back all the way to 1948. That’s something that we in the West don’t tend to have adequate appreciation for.”

US media outlets interview current and former Israeli ambassadors to the US, US ambassadors to Israel, and policy analysts and so-called experts on the Israel/Palestine conflict. But prominent Israeli critics of Israeli government policies are rarely heard.

As President Trump spoke to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, this week, two members silently held up signs that read, “Recognize Palestine.” The chamber erupted as they were escorted out, their colleagues shouting in unison, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The two were Ayman Odeh, an Israeli Palestinian, and Ofer Cassif, an Israeli Jew, both members of the Hadash-Ta’al coalition.

“Yesterday, there was a disgusting display of flattery and personality cult by two megalomaniacs who are hungry for power and blood. That’s the main bond between [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu and Trump,” Ofer Cassif said on Democracy Now!. “This was a minimum — and, I would say, even polite — protest against the policy of mainly the government of Israel, the genocidal government of Israel, the government that sacrificed the Israeli hostages and the even Israeli soldiers on the altar of a messianic, crazy ideas…taking place under the auspices of the governments of the United States, in plural — Biden and, later on, Trump.”

The most vital voices to hear in any conflict are its victims, those at the target end of the weapons. Israel made it very hard to hear from Palestinians in Gaza, by preventing foreign news organizations from entering, and, tragically, by killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza on an unprecedented scale, with over 250 killed since October 7th, 2023.

Palestinian human rights activist Ahmed Abu Artema spoke to Democracy Now! this week from exile in Amsterdam after recently escaping Gaza. He helped organize the nonviolent 2018 Great March of Return in Gaza, using the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The march was violently suppressed by the Israeli military.

“The essence of the problem [is] dehumanizing us, dehumanizing the Palestinians,” Ahmed said. “We lost our beloved ones. We lost our houses. We lost everything. So, it sounds like there are people who deserve life — Israelis — and there are people who don’t deserve life, in the perspective of Trump and the perspective of this colonial Israeli government.”

Ahmed survived this latest assault on Gaza, but his 12-year-old son, Abboud, did not. He was killed with five other family members in an Israeli airstrike on October 24, 2023, that also injured Ahmed and many others. “This is an example of the daily Israeli bombing against Gaza,” Ahmed told us at the time from his hospital bed.

When you hear people speaking from their own perspectives, whether a Palestinian father, or an Israeli-American uncle, it breaks down barriers to understanding. You become less likely to want to destroy them. That is why we need a media that reflects the full spectrum of debate, the full range of voices. Without that, peace, in the Middle East and elsewhere, will remain beyond reach.