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Opinion
Hands Off—Yes! But What Are the Working-Class Demands?
Unified and spirited opposition to Trump's destructive rampage is exactly what's needed, but a successful movement will not grow without a vision and proposals to support it.
Apr 09, 2025
On Saturday, April 5th, fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to challenge Trump’s attack on, well, just about everything!
I went to the rally in New Jersey, where speaker after speaker had us chanting “Hands off our Social Security!” “Hands off our Medicare!” Hands off our Medicaid!” “Hands off our Abortion Rights!” and so on. This was the national theme developed by the Democratic Party.
A few protestors in the back chanted “Hands off Gaza,” which was not on the agenda. But they soon retreated into silence. One woman carrying a large Trump 2024 banner walked near the edge of the crowd of about 2,000 and took on a few angry shouts, but there was no confrontation. Tensions rose enough, however, that the chair of the gathering did feel obliged to remind us that this was a peaceful, non-violent gathering.
As I looked around at the well-healed demonstrators from our liberal town, I couldn’t help but imagine adding a few other items to the list: “Hands off our IRA’s!” “Hands off the Stock Market!” “Hands off Free Trade!” I’m sure that would have been right on the money.
But why was I raining on this parade? After all, these were my neighbors, good caring people who turned up on this rainy Saturday because they truly want to make our society a better place.
My mind went negative because it was crystal clear that the rally was the opposite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the established order that enabled Jim Crow and persistent poverty. Dr. King asked us to envision massive changes to the status quo. Today, we were chanting to defend the status quo that Trump is surely taking a wrecking ball to.
The Democrats who put the rallies together across the country missed a moment to present an alternative vision. This was a chance to announce new proposals to tame runaway inequality, the growth of which has undermined the Democratic Party’s coalition, and to provide job insecurity, the lack of which has given MAGA a foothold in the first place.
Instead, we got pure opposition, spirited to be sure. Its only virtue was to provide collective support to those of us who have been stunned by the revanchist thrust of Trumpism. We can’t believe what is happening and we need each other to shore up our spirits. It was a chance, feeble but necessary, to show some form of communal defiance.
But a successful movement will not grow without a vision and proposals to support it. Why didn’t the Democrats do that? Because, except for a few fellow-travelers like Bernie Sanders, their vision is deeply tied the status quo BT (Before Trump).
That set of BT institutions was working well for the top 20 percent of the income distribution, especially those with college and post-graduate degrees, including just about everyone at our town’s demonstration.
It was not working for those whose jobs had been shipped abroad to China, Mexico, or elsewhere, and who watched their communities then crumble.
It also wasn’t working so well for those who lost their jobs to finance Wall Street stock buybacks and outrageous CEO salaries.
And it wasn’t working well at all for those working at poverty wages, especially immigrant workers, risking life and limb with little protection.
In short, the Democratic Party, long the party of the working class, has no compelling vision today because it has left behind a big chunk of the working-class. As analysts debate what went wrong, they should perhaps ask why the Democrats are so reluctant to support a working-class populist agenda.
The answer lies in how it became the party of the established order and therefore was unable to provide a vision that makes sense to working people who have been screwed by the established order. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
And that’s a damn shame. Because we want and need to be inspired by a positive vision. But that will only happen when the Democrats take their hands off their imaginations and ours.
We need to return to the days when the vision was FDRs for four freedoms, not four family tax credits to support the “opportunity society.”
The Democrats still have a chance, the field is open, but really? That is not likely to happen until it is challenged by a new independent party that stands for substantive change, created by and for working people.
I’ll be demonstrating for that.
Trump Keeps Declaring Fake Emergencies That Make Our Real Emergency Worse
Pre-Trump, there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies.
Apr 09, 2025
We are living through a week unlike any other in my lifetime; maybe the last truly comparable stretch was the bank closure that marked the start of the FDR administration, but then the president was there to tell Americans they had nothing to fear; now we have a president who can only insist we “take our medicine.” He is constantly hyping the fear, and he is doing it with the constant invocation of a word—”emergency”—designed to send us into ever-deeper panic.
So I’ve been doing my best to think as calmly about that word as I can, with the hope that it will offer at least a bit of mental pathway through this horror and perhaps point toward the exit.
Let’s start with one of the less-noticed executive orders of the past week—by no means the most important, though if it is carried out it will probably affect more square miles of the U.S. than any other. This is a memorandum from Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture and hence the overseer of America’s vast National Forests. In it she declares “an emergency situation on America’s National Forest system lands.”
This emergency on our national forests, in the administration’s view, is
due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management.
For example: • The 2023 Wildfire Hazard Potential for the Unites States report identifies 66,940,000 acres of NFS lands under a very high or high fire risk.
• Roughly 78,800,000 acres of NFS lands are already experiencing, or are at risk of experiencing, insect and disease infestations.
As a result, the Forest Service is commanded to dramatically increase the amount of logging on these forests, exempting them from the longstanding system of oversight and challenge from communities and tribes affected by logging. Forest supervisors have been told to increase the volume of timber offered for sale on our lands by at least 25%.
Now, as many of us have been patiently explaining for years, the biggest cause of increased fire on our forests is the dramatic increase in global temperatures that has extended fire season in California virtually year-round, and for extra months on either end across the West. The biggest infestation of insects has come from pine bark beetles, and that is directly tied to a fast-warming climate. As Cheryl Katz explained almost a decade ago:
Bark beetles are a natural part of the conifer forest life cycle, regularly flaring and fading like fireworks. But the scope and intensity in the past two decades is anything but normal, scientists say, in large part because rising temperatures are preventing the widespread winter die-off of beetle larvae, while also enhancing the beetles’ killing power. Not only are the insects expanding into new territory, they’re also hatching earlier and reproducing more frequently. New infestations become full-blown with astonishing speed, and the sheer numbers of beetles exceeds anything forest experts have seen before. [One expert] says he’s seen spruce beetle epidemics in Utah so intense that when the insects had killed all the trees, they began attacking telephone poles.
To the extent that forests needed thinning to reduce wildfire risk (and it’s not at all clear that it does), the Biden administration worked to get the effort underway, spending $4 billion on the work—in some areas they were ahead of schedule, and in others behind, but overall
“the scale of spending is unprecedented,” said Courtney Schultz with Colorado State University. The forest policy expert said millions of acres had been through environmental review and were ready for work.
“If we really want to go big across the landscape—to reduce fuels enough to affect fire behavior and have some impact on communities—we need to be planning large projects,” she said.
Where the work was lagging, it was largely the result of a lack of bodies—something that will be considerably harder now that the Forest Service has laid off 3,400 workers. But at any rate, the new logging mandated under the “emergency declaration” isn’t the careful thinning work that might reduce fire intensity—instead, the forest industry is getting access to what it really wants, large stands of big trees. It is, in other words, a money grab by vested interests that supported Trump’s campaign.
That new cutting will make climate change worse, because as we now understand that letting mature forests continue to grow is the best way to sequester carbon. Meanwhile, cutting down those forests will mean far fewer trees to hold back the increasing downpours that climate change is producing. (A new study released yesterday showed that even in areas of the West where climate change is drying out forests and increasing blazes, there’s also a big jump in deluges—what one expert called an “eye-popping.”) I remember sitting down with the chief of the Forest Service under former President Bill Clinton, almost three decades ago, and even then he said the service’s internal data showed the greatest dollar value of the forestlands was water retention, not timber.
So, to summarize: We’ve invented an emergency where none exists. (The only thing even resembling an emergency in timber supply will come if we continue to tariff Canadian producers). We’ve abandoned most of the slow and patient work to deal with a problem, and replaced it with a boondoggle designed to increase short-term profits for Trump donors. That will juice the one actual emergency we do face worse—the rapid increase in global temperature—and it will make the effects of that emergency harder to deal with.
I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
This pattern more or less holds across the board. Each “emergency” we’re supposedly dealing with is, at worst, a long-term problem that needs serious and patient work, work that had begun in earnest under the Biden administration. Fentanyl deaths and illegal border-crossings—which if you can remember back three weeks ago were the original “emergency” justifying tariffs on Canada and Mexico—had both been falling sharply in the last year. The “emergency” justifying tariffing every country on Earth and also the penguins was the exact opposite of an emergency: a 50-year hollowing out of industrial areas, which again had begun to reverse because of the Inflation Reduction Act—specifically targeted by the Trump administration for reversal. As The Washington Postpointed out this week, a “stunning number” of battery and EV factories have been canceled in the last month, most of them in red states.
According to data from Atlas Public Policy, a policy research group, more projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona.
“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits, and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.
“It’s working-class people in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan, and Arizona that have seen some of these projects get canceled,” Keefe said. “And I can tell you who’s benefiting—China and other countries that are doubling down.”
I said before that there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies, likely to lead (if history is its usual guide) to military conflict. But I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
Reutersreported over the weekend that, for the first time in American history, less than half of electricity generated in March came from fossil fuels: “More power was instead generated using renewable sources such as wind and solar, which in March reached an all-time high of 83 terawatt hours.” It’s wonderful news, of course, heralding the chance at a new world. But that’s the crisis that Big Oil faces, and to fight it they’ve been willing to drag us all down.
It’s small comfort that the man they picked to do that job, Donald Trump, is so stupid that in the process of wrecking the American economy he’s actually putting big pressure on the oil industry too. He’s doing his best: Alone among industries, fossil fuel was exempted from tariffs, in what The Guardiancalled “a clear sign of the president’s fealty to his big oil donors over the American people,” and yesterday he commanded the Department of Justice to try and stop states from suing the oil industry or enforcing the Climate Superfund laws that charge Exxon et al. for the bridges and roads that taxpayers must constantly rebuild. (Trump comically called these efforts “extortion,” even as he attempts to blackmail every country on Earth, plus of course the penguins, with his tariffs). Trump’s even trying to boost coal this week, even though the data shows that 99% of the time it would be cheaper to build new renewables.
But the damage he’s doing to the world economy threatens to spill over to the oil industry—as the price of a barrel plummets, the chances of drilling new wells plummets too. According to the Times yesterday, Harold Hamm—Trump’s industry bundler—was wondering how to explain to the president that “when you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point that you’re going to drill, baby, drill.” Fossil fuel stocks have fallen sharply. Ha ha.
But in reality there’s one immediate and overwhelming emergency. It’s name is TrumpMuskVance, and it’s threatening to engulf almost everything in its unholy flames. People—even a few senators (thank you Cory Booker)—have begun pulling the alarms, and the volunteer fire company has begun to respond (such thanks to all who came out for the Hands Off rallies this weekend). We’re going to need quick wits, courage, incredibly hard work, and some real luck to put out this moronic inferno—but that’s the job of being a citizen in 2025. You matter as a political actor, more than any of us ever have before; I’ll make sure you know of the opportunities to put your talents to use!
World Athletics’ Sex Testing Policy Revives a Harmful, Discredited Practice
World Athletics calls it “protecting” women’s sports. History calls it discrimination.
Apr 09, 2025
On March 25, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe announced that the track and field governing body would introduce chromosomal testing of women athletes to “doggedly protect the female category.” Concern around “protecting” women athletes and the women’s category has resurged in recent years as the issue of transgender participation in sport has become politically expedient in the United States culture war, culminating in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January banning athletes from participation on teams that don’t align with the sex assigned to them at birth.
Sex and gender verification has been utilized by sport organizations for over a century. Previous methods included “nude parade” physical examinations requiring genital inspection, chromosomal testing, and testosterone level testing. However, World Athletics (previously known as the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF) stopped mandatory sex testing in 1991, due to scientific inaccuracy, inability to prove unfair advantages, and ethical concerns. Women athletes could continue to be tested if their gender presentation was deemed “suspicious.” Notably, Indian track star Pratima Gaonkar committed suicide in 2001 after failing a sex test. In the 2010s, South African distance runner Caster Semenya and Indian hurdler Dutee Chand endured intense public scrutiny over their sex and gender after they were assumed to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. This is one of many conditions that are broadly classified as differences of sexual development (DSDs), and can occur for many reasons but are usually linked to sex chromosomes or anomalies in how the body produces or responds to hormones such as testosterone.
Unlike the World Athletics’s 2023 policy that banned trans athletes from competing in the women’s category, this policy targets women who were assigned “female” at birth, identify as women, and have always lived as women. They simply don’t have the XX chromosomes that World Athletics now deems necessary.
Chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical.
The new policy requires mandatory chromosomal testing, including a check swab and dry-blood test. While World Athletics claims to have consulted 70 sporting and advocacy groups, it is unclear who was included. Their cited scientific bibliography is largely authored by individuals affiliated with World Athletics, ignoring significant research questioning the ethics and efficacy of female eligibility policies in sport. Notably absent are two pieces by Roger Pielke and colleagues: one exposing flaws in World Athletics’ original 2011 policy and another reaffirming those issues after the organization admitted its female eligibility research was flawed.
The well-established problem with World Athletics’ chromosomal testing is that it actually has no linkage to performance. Put simply, “failing” a chromosomal, DNA, or sex test tells us nothing about whether an athlete will destroy a world record or even win a race. “Failed” tests, more often than not, indicate a chromosomal anomaly—something that neither enhances an individual’s athletic ability nor impedes their quality of life (if this were the case, it would probably be diagnosed way before an elite sport competition!). The inability of chromosomal testing to determine an “unfair” performance advantage was resoundingly proven by geneticists, bioethicists, medical researchers, physicians, and endocrinologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was what led to the abolition of mandatory sex testing.
Systematically, policies like these disproportionately target women from the Global South and reinforce racial and gender biases. A 2020 Human Rights Watch report detailed discrimination, surveillance, and coerced medical intervention that elite athletes from the Global South experienced when seeking to comply with sex testing practices. The women interviewed detailed how medical practitioners did not fully explain the tests and procedures conducted, and the humiliation and discrimination they experienced in their communities when their medical records were disclosed without informed consent. This may be why earlier, in 2019, the World Medical Association released a notice imploring physicians to “take no part in implementing new eligibility regulations for classifying female athletes.”
These concerns highlight the urgency for educating sport governing bodies, and the general public, about the broader implications for the autonomy and safety of girls and women that can result from “protective” policies in sport. While the new World Athletics policy does not mandate surgical alteration, history shows the risks of such regulations. In 2013, four elite women athletes underwent gonadectomies and partial clitoridectomies—an unnecessary and harmful procedure classified as a form of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)--to comply with eligibility rules. These policies can serve to legitimize and reinforce cultural practices with serious health risks for girls and women.
Women athletes must already carefully negotiate their athleticism with market-driven expectations of femininity to secure sponsorship deals, which are especially critical for women athletes because of the sport industry’s pervasive pay inequity. Mainstream beauty norms—favoring whiteness, thinness, and hairlessness—inform which bodies will be deemed “suspicious” under World Athletics’ new policy. Black and brown athletes, particularly those with more muscular builds and deeper voices, are more likely to be targeted. Research shows that elite women athletes already feel they are forced to choose between appearing “strong” or “feminine”; the reintroduction of sex testing may add further pressure for women athletes to conform with rigid gender norms to avoid harassment and surveillance. Athletes like Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Semenya endured an onslaught of online attacks following public scrutiny of their gender. Women in sports generally already face disproportionate abuse, with an NCAA study finding that women basketball players receive three times more abusive messages than their male counterparts.
World Athletics’ claims that chromosomal testing will protect women athletes and the women’s category. However, chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical. Rather than “protecting” the women’s category, these regulations reinforce harmful gender norms, disproportionately target women from marginalized backgrounds, and risk severe personal and professional consequences for women athletes.
In the Mess of Our National Disaster, Can We Find the Seeds to Renew Democracy?
History suggests that disaster not only destroys—it also disrupts. It crushes old assumptions, forcing people to see one another, to respond, to rebuild.
Apr 09, 2025
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a stark warning: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, and the consequences are dire. “If we fail to [address this crisis], we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being,” he wrote. Then came the line that now feels prophetic: “We will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”
This country is certainly dividing, and whether it can stand remains to be seen. As an immigrant from apartheid-era South Africa and a Californian shaken by the fires, I love and fear for the country I have known as home since adolescence. Having grown up in a society fractured by systemic oppression and seeing firsthand how division and authoritarianism hollow out a nation, I recognize the peril America faces. Trump and his allies have solidified their hold on power, reshaping institutions to entrench minority rule, while political violence moves from the fringes to the mainstream. State leaders openly defy court rulings, and democratic backsliding is no longer a theoretical threat but a lived reality. The consequences stretch far beyond our borders, fueling global instability.
Given everything at stake—from escalating climate disasters to an economy teetering on crisis—many are wondering: Are we entirely lost?
No, I say. It’s disastrous, yes. But it is precisely in the disastrous that we may find the seeds of renewal.
We now have a choice: Succumb to panic, numbness, and doomscrolling; or take purposeful action by confronting disaster head-on.
The reality is that democracy has been eroding for years; climate disruption worsens daily. The difference now is that we can no longer ignore the truth of our situation. Mass deportations. The rise of authoritarianism. A looming constitutional crisis. Wildfires, hurricanes, bomb cyclones, rising sea levels. The unraveling is no longer theoretical. It is here.
And this recognition could be our saving grace.
Murthy’s warning underscores the link between personal loneliness, social fragmentation, and political chaos. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The isolation of atomized individuals provides the mass basis for totalitarian rule.” Contemporary research supports her argument. A 2021 RAND Corporation study found loneliness is a primary driver for adopting extremist views and joining extremist groups. A 2022 study published in Political Psychology found that weak social bonds correlate with lower voter turnout and increased support for populist parties.
In this context, the disastrous might offer an unexpected antidote.
Charles Fritz, a sociologist who helped lead the University of Chicago’s Disaster Research Project in the 1950s, analyzed a broad data set of catastrophic events and concluded: “The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primary group solidarity among the survivors, which overcomes social isolation, provides a channel for intimate communication and expression, and provides a major source of physical and emotional support and reassurance.” There is ample further evidence to back up his conclusion, as Rebecca Solnit documents at length in A Paradise Built in Hell.
We are wired to adapt to slow declines, to normalize the unraveling. But disaster shatters the illusion of stability. It forces a reckoning. History suggests that disaster not only destroys—it also disrupts. It crushes old assumptions, forcing people to see one another, to respond, to rebuild.
Most of us aren’t living in an actual disaster zone right now. But when we see images of Los Angeles burning, Asheville flooding, or state officials openly defying the rule of law, we feel the urgency of the moment.
We now have a choice: Succumb to panic, numbness, and doomscrolling; or take purposeful action by confronting disaster head-on. This isn’t just about responding to immediate crises, but about addressing the isolation and division that have fueled them. By acting with intention, we don’t just face disaster—we undo the fragmentation that made it possible.
Growing up under apartheid, I learned how systems of oppression function and how they fail. I saw firsthand that division is not inevitable, that transformation is possible—but only when people refuse to be passive in the face of crisis. Former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln understood this too. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he declared in his first inaugural address in 1861, on the eve of national collapse. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Those bonds of affection, Lincoln said, could be rekindled by the “better angels of our nature.” He knew then what we must remember now: Survival depends on rebuilding these bonds.
Regardless of how our political situation unfolds, we are entering an era of massive upheaval, and none of us will remain untouched. Whether through fire, flood, or political collapse, displacement is no longer a distant threat—it is a certainty.
Can you feel it? The disaster at your doorstep?
Let it inspire you to act. Talk to the neighbor who voted red. Reach out to your friends. Volunteer with organizations fighting for justice. Host a community discussion, support local activism, or donate to causes that uplift marginalized communities. Advocate for change by calling your representatives. Support artists and thinkers who challenge the status quo. Every action—big or small—helps rebuild what’s been broken.
Let the better angels of our nature prevail. It’s the only way forward.
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