“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”

Yesterday, on September 10, 2025, the white supremacist nazi Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a hate rally. Sorry, Charlie! He was silenced in the midst of a racist screed about the origins of gun violence in the US — one he’s practiced before. He was merely expressing the unspoken rules of gun ownership in the United States out loud.

Kirk was asked “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” The nazi replied, “Too many.” The audience member responded, “In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

Kirk replied, in his last words, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

What stirring last words! Why did he spend his final breath asking his audience whether they wanted to count “gang violence” in the list of mass shootings? Because for Charlie Kirk and the ruling class, the question of gun ownership is simple. Every person should own a gun. The unspoken corollary to that is that only property owners are people.

For Charlie Kirk, as for the many others in the ruling class, rights are for property owners. Property owners are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men. Kirk knew that. He didn’t want “criminals” to own guns, and wouldn’t you know it, many “crimes” are defined or criminalized by poverty. He doesn’t want trans people to own guns, only cis people. Kirk stood for the proposition that all cis white men should own a house and a gun, they should patrol the internal frontier of their country against the poor, against Black people, against trans people, and against workers.

Sorry, Charlie!

We have not one tear to shed for Mr. Kirk, his backers, his supporters, or his ruling class friends. And unlike Mr. Kirk, we don’t agree that property owners should have guns. Only the working class, the poor, the sex-oppressed, the nationally oppressed and their agents, organizations, and tribunes should be armed. Until that day comes, Mr. Kirks’ allies will continue to talk out of the side of their necks.

It comes as no surprise, then, that uranium shipments in and through Navajo Nation territory have resumed. Energy Fuels, Inc. and the Navajo Nation (represented by President Buu Nygren) reached an agreement in January which allowed for the transport of uranium over Navajo land. The uranium has been and will be transported to a facility in Utah by the Energy Fuels company, a U.S. energy company.

The historical problem of uranium and the Navajo Nation is not lost on the Navajo people. During World War 2 and the Cold War, the United States government illegally violated treaties with the Navajo to mine and transport uranium on their land, resulting in outbreaks of radiation sickness and cancer, and later deaths. The generational impacts of this mining continue to this day.

The United States, in its ongoing dream of expanding its empire, seeks to procure uranium for energy, military, and economic purposes. Navajo protest is not congruent with this dream, and so businesses and the federal government have tirelessly worked to undermine Navajo sovereignty and steal the coveted uranium ore from the land which the Navajo call home, and transport said uranium over that land. 

What results is the following. 

1. A demonstration of U.S. colonialism in action. The 1868 Bosque-Redondo treaty established the Navajo reservation (the largest U.S. reservation), and Article IX of said treaty established the United States’ authority to build railroads and other infrastructure over the Navajo lands. What is at issue here is a corporation, on behalf of the United States, violating the land of the Navajo, which is in accordance with the wording of the 1868 treaty and the actions which surrounded it (including the termination of U.S. treaties with Indigenous nations in 1871).
2. A demonstration of the necessity for common action and solidarity efforts. In the summer of 2024, the same company had illegally transported uranium. Upon discovering this gross violation of what little sovereignty they were supposedly allowed, the tribal authorities attempted a roadblock, though were too late in doing so, as the uranium trucks had already passed through the Navajo lands. The subsequent resistance eventually resulted in the settlement that is now allowing uranium transport over Navajo Nation lands. This response was drafted and supported by the comprador Buu Nygren, who notably is married to Arizona State Representative and former Prosecutor Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, and has expressly acted against the wishes of a large number of members within the Navajo Nation, who called for negotiations to be halted.

The perspective of one member of the Navajo Nation who wishes to remain anonymous is that the actions of current President Buu Nygren, and more importantly the colonial overlord government, only serve to hinder the well-being of the citizens of the Navajo Nation. 

The respondent made clear that “Nygren was looked at with hope because he was from a younger generation,” and that “many of the younger voters in the Navajo Nation felt betrayed and lied to.” Nygren has worked with the company Energy Fuels, Inc. and was instrumental in signing the January deal to allow the shipment of uranium through Navajo land. Per the anonymous source, “When Navajo people want freedom over their land, it becomes frustrating that the President of the Navajo Nation agrees to allow uranium transport and mining again.”

To this day, communities across the Navajo Nation are impacted by the mining of uranium. One such community is Church Rock, which has a long history of mining the uranium the U.S. government used for its nuclear weapons. In 1979, Church Rock, a small community of about 2,950 (of which only 20 are non-Indigenous), was the subject of outrage after a uranium spill on the Rio Puerco. The disaster, which is to date the largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history, and the third largest accidental release of radiation after Chernobyl and Fukushima, is all but forgotten. Just two months prior to Church Rock, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown occurred, and the national response was immediate, with President Jimmy Carter visiting the site just days after. Church Rock was never visited by a U.S. President to address the disaster. The impact of the Church Rock disaster is not well researched, with a 2003-2007 study through Clark University, and an EPA profile being the only major sources of research on the matter. Nygren’s allowing the uranium operations to begin again is a disgusting insult to the survivors and victims of Church Rock, and is a clear indication of where his interests stand, that being with capital, and not his constituency.

The Bosque-Redondo treaty again demonstrates that the United States interest in the Navajo Nation is purely colonial. Wherever the U.S. stands to gain, the Navajo people will lose. According to the anonymous interviewee, “The land given to us by Bosque-Redondo is not suitable for agriculture or building a life on. The education and medical resources we receive are the absolute bare minimum. The U.S. Government took advantage of us in 1868, and now we are again seeing the effects.”

When asked about how to combat the transport of uranium and other colonial actions, the respondent said, “The younger Navajo 7th generation needs to think about the implications of what our ancestors taught us and participate in the sovereignty we have now. We need to make our government accountable for us. Protests that are happening must continue in the form of blocking highways and disrupting infrastructure. We need to take charge for what is ours, because if we don’t, we can say goodbye to our land and sovereignty. If the U.S. comes to take what little sovereignty we have, will we just let that happen?”

The respondent encourages everyone, both Navajo and not, to complain to chapter houses [Local Navajo Nation representative organizations], which are across the U.S., and make your voices loud. “This shouldn’t be pushed under the rug like everything else has with our nation.” 

The continued struggle against U.S. colonialism by the Navajo people is a demonstration of the need for an internationalist struggle against U.S. colonialism and imperialism in all corners of the empire. The Navajo cannot be left to stand alone in their struggle, because their struggle is the struggle of all colonized and working peoples under the violent oppression of the imperialists. The Navajo Nation has for centuries been fighting a war that can only be won through the upending of the whole capitalist imperialist system. This war will be won by the self-conscious uniting of the Indigenous nations, New Afrika, and the conscious workers of the oppressor nation on a truly internationalist foundation built on a struggle for self-determination of all oppressed peoples.

The news and the news media determine who gets to be considered “innocent” of crimes. Yet we know the zionist state makes use of “civilians” in order to further its goals. In a time of genocide, even reporters and propagandists can be found guilty under the Genocide Convention, which even the U.S. government claims to recognize (despite its name, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty making genocide an international crime, rather than a convention for genocidaires. One can be forgiven for mistaking it for the latter, however, as the United States, one of the most genocidal states in history, is a proud signatory to the convention. It  became a signatory to the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948). At the Nuremburg trials, those who enabled the genocide were found guilty and executed. The zionist state utilizes Hasbara, the method of propaganda in which state actors, embedded as civilians, lie openly about the actions of the regime to launder its image and erode public trust in Palestinian sources. If the zionist state continues to utilize “civilians” and Hasbara, then we should not expect any citizens who support its genocidal forces to be considered “off limits” to counterterror. 

This trick — claiming colonized people are already guilty — is one that the U.S. imperialists have used for a long time. From Palestine to Sudan, the West has robbed the people of their right to innocence. Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is said to be a violent tyrant — so the U.S. can plot to assassinate him and pillage his country. Who is really innocent? What are the true crimes? If you listen to the U.S. government, you’ll never know.

There is a cradle of popular revolution rising. The zionist genocide is not merely confined to the borders of the zionist state. In fact, it is a genocide being carried out with the policy protections and active support of the United States government and our ruling class. It is a United States genocide. The United States has determined to expand its military borders to the four corners of the earth; its bases are located throughout the entire world. Its tendrils reach into every economy in every country. In such a case, the front, the frontier, the border, is everywhere. There is no “rear,” there are no “civilian populations.” Take the words of the genocidaires as true: there are those who are for and those who are against it.

“There are no innocent civilians,” according to the zionist embassies.

Every act of resistance builds up friction inside the imperialist machine. It is right and brave to inhibit the empire from carrying out its genocidal tasks. Policy makers and imperial managers must be made to understand that they are not secure. They are not safe behind the walls of a U.S. border. There is no territory, there is no home, that cannot instantly become the frontlines of the fight. Only when the political actors and the ruling, owning, capitalist class realize that they cannot sit safely in their glass and steel towers and derelict the murder and massacre of millions across the globe will they relent, will they pause. For them there are only two considerations: 1) profit, and 2) geopolitical stability. That means the ability of the U.S. empire to continue supporting their businesses abroad and extracting profit. It can all be boiled down to profit and its continuation. If we want our collective voices to be heard, to be louder than the few additional dollars for the U.S. ruling class, then we must amplify them. We cannot speak, we must shout. We cannot talk, we must argue.

There is only one argument the enemy respects.

It wasn’t. Warren’s politics were class peace and reform. He treated Communists as class agitators, but he also ruled consistently to “soften” the excesses of capital.

The Warren court went on to decide some of the most important cases in modern Statesian jurisprudence. Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal segregation, Loving v. Virginia, outlawing antimiscegenation laws, Griswold v. Connecticut, establishing the right to birth control, and four major criminal cases that established the rights we think of as fundamental to the criminal process: Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to a court-appointed attorney, Brady v. Maryland, the right to be given exculpatory evidence held by the state, Wong Sun v. United States, granting the right to suppress evidence that was obtained by the police illegally, and Miranda v. Arizona, the right to be informed of your rights when you’re arrested, the famous Miranda warning.

Among these progressive expansions of individual rights was Robinson v. California, the case that the current Supreme Court has just limited to its facts and robbed of any precedent-establishing power. What did the Warren court hold in Robinson? That it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th amendment of the federal constitution to criminalize a “status” over which a person has no control. In that case, the court struck down a California law making it a crime to be addicted to drugs. The fascist court of John G. Roberts, Jr., has just held, in the newly issued City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that the Robinson ruling doesn’t apply to the homeless. This is just the latest in the Roberts court’s piecemeal march against established Warren precedents, and represents nothing less than the sharp contraction of the U.S. empire.

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

By 1953, the war had been over for eight years. Europe lay devastated. In 1948, Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, pumping U.S. capital into areas Washington’s elite thought might be vulnerable to Communism. It was a kind of economic GLADIO, a stay-behind program (and if you don’t recognize GLADIO, that’s worth reading up on). The world war hadn’t ended before the Cold War began, and the U.S., its domestic production untouched by the conflict, stepped out of Great Britain’s shadow to claim hegemony over the West and proclaim itself the sword and shield of the Euro-American capitalist class.

Eisenhower was the first truly post-war president to preside over this new American empire. In a sense Warren and his court, which lasted until 1969, was an extension of the ruling class politics of the age. What was this policy? The expansion of New Deal-type programs — which Warren had attacked before taking the bench — and the creation of a new Pax Americana. Under Eisenhower, post-war imperial wealth flowed from all corners of the globe and it was used to establish social security, the interstate highway system, and NASA. Instead of the growth of social democracy and the welfare state, as seen in Europe, class struggle was suppressed in the U.S. through the expansion of public infrastructure and the goodwill (read: self-preservation) of the capitalist class, which gave out robust pensions, employer-provided health insurance, etc. These benefits fell primarily to the “white” workers, which by now included formerly “non-white” ethnicities from Europe such as the Irish and Italians. The class struggle was thus forced underground during this period, and it manifested explosively in the struggles for national liberation that shook the country from the mid-50s until the end of the 1970s.

We needn’t prove Warren’s personal motivations as Chief Justice to make our case. In fact, from all outside appearances, he genuinely believed in the principles he espoused through his decisions. But such is the case with many bourgeois politicians. They earnestly believe their class ideology. The fact that it serves a class purpose operates on a level below their conscious understanding. It is typical for members of the ruling class to be thoroughly seduced by the self-justifications and illusions that make up their class morality.

Above all, it is this legacy of bourgeois morality that the ultra-fascist majority on the Roberts court have set as their target. As arch-reactionaries, they are working to roll back the clock and restore the early 20th century pre-Warren legal landscape. They are ushering in an era of naked class domination, stripped of the comfortable fat provided by the loot of empire.

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

To understand Grants Pass we have to look at the direct precedent that the Roberts court has overturned. The case in question is Martin v. Boise, a 2019 decision concerning unhoused people that was issued by the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit covers the geographical area of Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California, and Arizona. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40% of the country’s entire unhoused population lives within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. As the fascist justice Gorsuch, author of the majority opinion in Grants Pass, noted, “homelessness in this country has reached its highest levels since the government began reporting data on the subject.”

The Martin ruling made it unconstitutional (within the Ninth Circuit) for a state to enforce criminal penalties on public camping if the city in question lacked sufficient shelter beds to house its unhoused population. The legal rationale is dull, but in essence the court held that it was a violation of the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to jail houseless people simply because they had nowhere to stay, especially if the city lacked sufficient public relief. The Martin decision was predicated on the Warren court’s Robinson ruling, where the court held it to be a violation of the 8th amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize addiction.

City of Grants Pass arises from a Martin injunction brought by Gloria Johnson and John Logan, who challenged the city’s public-camping laws. They brought a suit as a federal class action, representing “all involuntarily homeless people living in Grants Pass.” A panel of the Ninth Circuit found that Johnson and Logan faced a credible threat of punitive action from Grants Pass and that all unsheltered people in the city were “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s unhoused population exceeds available shelter beds. The city, desperate to retain its punishment power and other tools of state repression, sought a rehearing en banc by the entire court; it was denied. 

Grants Pass filed a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari (certification that the issue be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States). The cities of Albuquerque, Anchorage, Chico, Chino, Colorado Springs, Fillmore, Garden Grove, Glendora, Henderson, Honolulu, Huntington Beach, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Murrieta, Newport Beach, Roseville, Saint Paul, San Clemente, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Westminster, the National League of Cities (representing over 19,000 other American cities and towns), the League of California Cities (representing California’s 477 cities), the League of Oregon Cities (representing Oregon’s 241 cities), the Association of Idaho Cities (representing Idaho’s 199 cities), the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (representing all 91 municipalities in Arizona), the North Dakota League of Cities (representing 355 cities), the Counties of Honolulu, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Orange, the National Association of Counties (representing all 3,069 counties of the U.S. empire), the California State Association of Counties, the Special Districts Association of Oregon, the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, California Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and 20 other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia) all joined the city to support the petition for certiorari.

All the lackeys of law and order, all the petty bourgeois strivers and graspers, all the pigs and their captains, all the fascist forces of the Western United States, put their names on the petition and many of these wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, begging for Martin to be overturned. The Roberts court was only too happy to oblige.

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

The unhoused generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to class. Either they are themselves working class proletarians, who work by wage labor, or they are sub-proletarians, thrown out of the labor force entirely and denied any means of support. These are people who would otherwise live by wage labor, who have no substantial property or investment in the machinery, land, or other tools by which society produces the commodities that are its lifeblood. Many unhoused people were sheltered proletarians or even petit-bourgeoisie only a short time before they became unhoused. With the dismantling of the feeble safety nets erected during the imperial apogee by the “liberal” crowd of Clintonites in the 90s, it has become easier than ever to fall out of the sheltered working classes and enter the ranks of the sub-proletariat, the great unhoused.

The unhoused already suffer a number of critical disabilities inflicted on them by “civil society” before we reach the question of criminalization. Lacking a permanent address and in many times deprived of a stable telephone number, the unhoused are generally prevented from voting by registration requirements. This means the lofty list of cities, towns, counties, etc., that filed to support the City of Grants Pass in its bid to criminalize homelessness were elected without input from the very population they want to police. This is what we mean by class domination. (In the case of the rest of the working proletariat, this relationship is slightly more disguised; because we can technically cast a ballot, and we are often duped into thinking the ballot matters.)

Marx calls those who are kept out of work the relative surplus population (meaning, those people who are, relative to the active work available, kept as extra or surplus without employment) or the industrial reserve army. By limiting the number of jobs available and ensuring that every proletarian and sub-proletarian who isn’t working lives in squalor and near-death, the capitalist class “forms a disposal industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost…. [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3. At the same time, this industrial reserve army creates a source of extra labor with which to break strikes and serves as a club to discipline the labor force. 

Imagine, for instance, that you work in a McDonalds or an Amazon warehouse. The conditions are atrocious in this particular location. Wages are being docked or withheld illegally, people are being disciplined for nothing, and you aren’t being allowed to take your breaks. You decide to unionize to force the owners to the table; after all, if everyone threatens to walk off the job, they’ll have to make concessions. If you’re in a city where there is a very large unemployed or under-employed population, the owners might simply say “Fine,” discharge you and all your fellow would-be unionizers, and hire replacements from that unemployed labor force — that industrial reserve army.

This helps keep down wages even before we begin to account for the widespread U.S. practice of utilizing basically free prison labor. Criminalization gives capitalists the chance to make use of that free labor because the habitually unhoused will be arrested again and again, and eventually be given sentences of imprisonment that turn them into a state workforce. This is state-labor-for-hire without compensation, all perfectly legal under the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. After all, about one-third of all California’s firefighters are judicial slaves.

The effect of this ruling on wages and benefits occurs purely by operation of the underlying political economy that will result. It doesn’t require an active conspiracy on the part of the court, the cities, the sheriffs and police, or anyone in the entire chain of command that will ultimately enforce the punitive bans that wind up criminalizing homelessness. Even if, at each step in this process, the agent of the state is merely expressing an honestly-held dislike of “public vagrancy” (and the Gorsuch opinion is brimming with classist descriptions of public defecation and children wading through used needles), it will have the same ultimate effect. More enforceable criminal penalties means more prisoners; it means more court fees; it means, therefore, in states where inmates are forced into slavery, a larger free laboring population. This means the cost of labor will fall relative to its value as more laborers enter the market. Businesses will have the choice between hiring free workers, who might be disobedient, agitate for a rise in wages, etc., or paying the state money to make use of a captive work force. The market price of labor will therefore fall. This, while we are experiencing the sharpest rise in cost of living since the inflation crises at the close of the 1970s, ensures that more workers will be made unhoused as their wages fall, and a downward pressure will continue to be exerted on wages.

The more precarious a workforce is, the more subject to random arrest and search or other punitive measures, the less likely it is to seek redress through unionization and organization. That lesson was demonstrated by the poultry industry when they simply had their unionizing workers deported en masse.

Marching Counter Clockwise

This decision is part of the court’s broad assault on the Warren-based state, the administrative state (that is, the delegation of rulemaking authority from Congress to the administrative agencies), and, critically, the legal regime of unionization. The ultra-fascist justices have rejected a century of precedent and appear intent on ushering in an era of labor-discipline that resembles the U.S. of 1900, before the labor struggles that established the legal right to unionization and prior to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. The Grants Pass decision fits neatly into this plan to march backwards, into a pre millenarian century.

The door now stands open for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison in name as well as form. Although the judicial system has long practiced a kind of debt imprisonment in actuality, in form the debtor’s prison is often seen as a quaint Victorian curiosity. There is much less need for covert imprisonment-for-debt now that the highest court in the country has ruled that it is permissible to make homelessness illegal. Yes, certainly, there is an act that these laws proscribe (sleeping in public), but the act is inextricably tied to the status that Gorsuch claims they aren’t criminalizing. The Supreme Court has legalized the debtor’s prison, has given its blessing to the mass incarceration of the unhoused, and has created the conditions for a massive reactionary backlash.

We can see it in the language the majority uses, through Gorsuch. He disdainfully complains that a Chico, California homeless shelter wasn’t sufficient under Martin, even though it “included protective fencing, large water totes, handwashing stations, portable toilets and a large canopy for shade…. Why? Because, in that court’s view, appropriate shelter requires indoor, not outdoor spaces.” Gorsuch has described a concentration camp for the unhoused and mocked a court for holding it insufficient.

This is the future imagined by the Roberts court. Of course Gorsuch defends the concentration camp. When the Supreme Court issues a decision, it isn’t merely making a legal ruling, it is communicating with the parties and potential future parties. The parties to this case weren’t merely the City of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson, and John Logan, but also every one of the thousands of cities and counties, sheriff’s associations, police groups, district attorneys, state’s attorneys, and other agents of the bourgeois state apparatus. The lurid language that Gorsuch uses is a signal. Justices choose their words carefully. We must be prepared. The state is. They are preparing labor camps for the houseless, “shelters” with protective fencing and a canopy for shade. Taken in the light of the other rulings the Supreme Court recently decided, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which we discussed when the year began, the intention of the court is clear. They aim to strip administrative agencies of their power, destroy the NLRB, and subject working people throughout the country to a regime of labor discipline by police control.

In March of 2021, the gray-haired fascist martinet in the Texas governor’s office started “Operation Lone Star.” Despite sounding like a bad Vin Diesel movie, Operation Lone Star is a declaration of a state of emergency along the Texas border which empowers the Department of Public Safety of Texas to deploy military force. Abbott’s government claims some 500,000 asylum-seekers and migrants have been expelled from the border since 2021 as a result. This past January, Lone Star-deputized militants seized a federal U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and expelled the federal agents. As expected, the flaccid Biden administration has done nothing to return it to federal control. 14 other extreme-reactionary states have sent their national guard to Texas to participate in Lone Star, including Arkansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida.

The Honduran, whose identity has not yet been released, was reportedly beaten so badly that his nasal cavity collapsed. He died in the long agonizing night between March 16 and March 17, prohibited from acquiring medical assistance in El Paso for want of citizenship. Another member of the group described the conditions in the migrant-complex, partially funded by Biden government money, at which they were held: “The man (who died) had been here for more than a week and they gave him nothing to eat, no water, no one to help him, no family. He did not have water, food, we had been here for more than a week without food.” This witness said of the Texas National Guard, “They hit us, they shoot us, they take us away with those things they have.”

Operation Lone Star, like Atlanta’s Cop City, is a paramilitary endeavor designed to train and equip fascist foot soldiers. The Texas National Guard and State Troopers have become the colonial police of the south, and are empowered to murder with impunity. Only the organization of the people of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez can challenge them. The time has come to stop accepting the rampant abuses of Abbott’s stormtroopers and put an end to them. As we watch U.S. tax dollars at work devastating Gaza and making billions for weapons manufacturers, we are forced to watch them also beating our brothers and sisters at the borders until they can no longer breathe.

Enough is enough! We call on all Communists, socialists, and fellow-travelers of El Paso to form a defense league, to prepare to guard their communities and those at the border, to counter Abbott’s fascist gangs! We cannot sit silent! The time has come to act.

On May 15 a pig army ran rampant at California’s U.C. Irvine. Despite the fact that the semester will end next month (U.C. Irvine’s spring quarter concludes on Friday, June 14), the protest was going strong. Other encampments have been broken up by sustained pig violence and state repression; a few were betrayed by their own unelected leadership, such as the camp at Brown, and dispersed after accepting false deals and empty promises from their administrators. Not U.C. Irvine.

$32 billion USD of the U.C. Irvine endowment is invested in zionist-allied or zionist-operated companies. This money supports the continued existence of the zionist state. On April 29 of this year, U.C. Irvine students established a divestment encampment and demanded that the school divest these zionist assets and cease to profit from the apartheid regime. The encampment expanded to occupy a lecture hall on campus and maintained its radical demands. Its leadership did not waver.

This is, perhaps, why the University unleashed no less than 10 pig agencies on the students there. An army of some 200 pigs assembled outside the encampment in full riot gear, carrying drawn nightsticks, and prepared to dismantle the camp and its barricades. These colonial cops marched in jackbooted columns that are all-too-familiar to anyone who watched the pigs attack an Austin, Texas encampment earlier this month or saw the marching SS troopers break up the UCLA encampment. Just like their siblings in blue all over the occupied United States empire, the California pigs were frothing for violence. They clubbed, beat, and batoned their way through the barricades, arresting at least 40 of the student-activists. The standoff began at around 2:30 pm; by 5:30, the camp was cleared and the pigs’ dirty business was done.

The pattern has been set. NYPD’s storming of Hind’s Hall and CUNY is now the order of the day. Every outpost of the student movement should prepare for violent suppression, no matter what the current mood of the authorities may appear to be. UC Irvine justified this explosive response by pointing to the students’ occupation of the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall. Make no mistake! Whether students occupy a building or a quad, the fear has entered the hearts of the administration and the political caste that the student movement will join together with the radical elements of the labor movement.

Had there been radical locals from the community labor unions, radical clergy, petit-bourgeois professionals who support the movement for Palestine, in sufficient force, the pig army would have hesitated before they stormed the barricades and swept the U.C. Irvine students into jail. The masses have the capacity to resist the police, indefinitely if need be; but only when they are united, organized and prepared.

We once again urge the student movement to organize democratically elected councils and to join up with radical labor. Again, we urge the students to study how to retreat if they cannot hold their ground; again, we urge the student-radicals to spend the summer sharpening their knives and preparing for August.

The fight goes on!

Last year, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. (2023), which held that negligence could never be the standard for First Amendment cases. Essentially, SCOTUS said that, in order to hold someone accountable for their speech, malicious intent must be proved. Under Anglo-American law, there is a differentiation between general intent (intent to do an action) and specific intent (intent to bring about a result). Under the standard decided in Counterman, speech-related acts must have the specific intent of bringing about the complained-of result.

What does that mean in the case of DeRay Mckesson? If the fascist Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit had followed this decision, it would have meant that Mckesson could not be found liable to Officer Braindamage unless the officer could prove that Mckesson had organized the protest specifically with the intent of hurting him, or had otherwise directly urged the protestor who threw the concrete to do so. In fact, the District Court did hold that, and dismissed the suit, but Officer Shatterface appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a ruinous decision. The Fifth Circuit covers the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and in their 2022 decision they held that protest organizers owe a duty not to “negligently cause a third party to commit a crime that is a foreseeable consequence of negligence.” This means, as far as federal law is concerned in those three states, protest organizers are civilly liable for any damage caused by a protest.

Furthermore, it is possible that this will establish the basis for criminal liability. It is an echo of the RICO prosecutions in Georgia. It is not impossible that prosecutors’ offices throughout the South now possess the weapons to indict and charge any participant in a protest as part of a domestic terror plot.

This Monday, the nine robed fascists on the SCOTUS declined to review Mckesson’s case, denying certiorari, and permitting this Fifth Circuit decision to stand. The entire swathe of the U.S. South, the stronghold of the most powerful elements of right-fascistic reaction, will now treat all of its citizens the way it has long treated its Black and Indigenous citizens. The age of the settler-compromise is coming to an end, and the age of open warfare between the proletarian class and the state has returned.

Solidarity to all in the fortresses of fascism — we urge all aid in this hour of war to be sent to them. We will defy the tools of the enemy state, spit in the face of its bourgeois masters, and the masses will have no choice but look into the eye of their propertied enemy, and decide: Whose side are you on?

The capitalist economic system we live under prioritizes the production of profitable goods and services. However, just because something is profitable, does not mean it is beneficial to working people — in fact, our lived experience as the working class in Taos County proves that the opposite is the case! For example, it’s currently profitable for investment companies to buy housing units and convert them to vacation rental properties, which comprise at least 5% of all housing in Taos County. Even worse, a further 20% of the houses in Taos County are second homes! This means at least a quarter of all housing in the county has been hoarded by corporations or the rich, which limits the already slim amount of housing available and causes the price to skyrocket to unattainable levels for the working people of Taos. The tourist and corporate greed that makes the Taos housing market profitable forces locals to relocate further away from town or into homelessness. Clearly, the profitability of housing is not linked to prosperity for working people. 

Those who own businesses such as Taos Valley Inc. also reap the benefits of affluent tourists vacationing in Taos. But it’s not the owners who create the goods and provide the services to tourists at those businesses. It’s the workers who build, clean, and repair the rental units and hotels that we can’t afford to stay in; who serve, prepare, and cook food at the restaurants, and stock the grocery stores’ shelves. The working class produces the profits which the owners collect. The insatiable greed of the owners, and endless quest for profitability ensures the  goods and services we produce are increasingly unaffordable to ourselves, and can only be sold to the demographic that is pricing us out of town.

Worse still, the government of the town of Taos, whose ostensible responsibility should be the wellbeing of the town’s residents, encourages this grift through its partnership with two private agencies, The Center for Responsible Travel and George Washington International Institute for Tourism Studies. Together with these agencies, the local government  created a tourism plan. Though the stated mission of the plan is to ensure the industry benefits the local community, as long as the economy is based on profit, tourism will have disastrous effects on the working people of Taos County. The plan claims to promote collaboration between “residents, local governments, tourism industry stakeholders, enterprise leaders, nonprofit and social services managers” in order to benefit the community. But as we have examined, the needs of working-class residents are directly opposed to the desires of these “stakeholders”who need to displace and exploit us in order to make profits. How can a fundamentally exploitative relationship lead to mutually beneficial “collaboration?”

If the town could simply admit that the working-class economic interests of its residents are opposed to the wealthy’s, it would be a start, but the town doesn’t even bother to maintain a caring façade! Recently, some neighbors at the Taos Men’s Shelter repeatedly sought a meeting with the town commissioners to talk about the state of the shelter and how the town could improve its programs. They were denied every time. When our neighbors from the Shelter were finally able to schedule meetings with local non-profit executives, their ideas and reflections were rudely dismissed. What then, is the point of the survey and the new tourism plan? The town is sloughing off the incalculable suffering the tourism industry is causing the working people who live here. With the help of fancy firms, the town pays lip service to the grievances expressed by the people of Taos, while actually protecting and encouraging the parasitic vultures who profit from the tourism industry, and who are expanding their barrage on poor and working people.

The struggle of working people in Taos, though it has specificities, bears a stark resemblance to processes occurring across the country. The root causes and the response to the fires that wreaked havoc in Maui, especially on native Hawaiians, are connected to tourism in Northern New Mexico. In Maui, intensive construction undertaken by the tourist industry stripped the environment of components critical to fire prevention, such as water, creating the conditions for the deadly fire to take place. In the aftermath of the fire, investment firms, who operate identically to those in New Mexico, and in some cases may be the same companies who own about half of the short-term rental units in Taos, bombarded Hawaiians who had just lost their homes in the fire, seeking to buy their land. These marauding investors are seeking to further displace people in the midst of a crisis so their firms can profit. What’s happening in Maui is also happening in the midst of an economic crisis in Northern New Mexico, with bloodsucking investors coercing Hispanic and Indigenous Tiwa people to sell their land. This cruel pattern will repeat until the working and oppressed classes organize to stop it.

As working people in Taos, we must get organized to protect our communities against those profiting off of our demise. Join us at Kit Carson Park every Wednesday from 11:30–1:30 to learn about how we are organizing against this profiteering. Email us at newmexicosurvivalprograms@gmail.com or find us on Instagram at @newmexicosurvivalprograms.

The ban will apply to In-N-Out locations in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Workers at In-N-Out locations in California and Oregon, “blue” states that have tended to adopt marginally better, but still woefully inadequate, policies in response to the pandemic, will still be allowed to mask.

The company has threatened workers who do not comply with the ban, who attempt to keep themselves and others safe by wearing masks, with disciplinary measures, “up to and including termination of employment.”

In-N-Out announced the rule in an internal memo circulated to its employees, whom the company euphemistically calls “associates.” The change in policy came to light when the memo was leaked on Twitter.

The memo states that an exception will be made for workers “who have a specific medical condition or other health concern that requires them to wear a mask,” but that such workers “must provide a valid medical note” to store management.

Evidently the company does not believe that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is still claiming hundreds of lives every day in the U.S., constitutes a “health concern” in itself. The company also disregards the fact that six in ten people in the U.S. have underlying health conditions that increase risk of severe COVID-19 complications. 

No, the company places the onus on its workers to prove that they deserve the right to a safe workplace.

The memo is nothing new for In-N-Out. The company has been forced to close multiple locations during the pandemic due to non-compliance with COVID-19 ordinances. It has also resolutely refused to enforce vaccine mandates. The bosses have proven time and time again that they will gladly sacrifice their workers upon the altar of profit.

As infectious disease expert Dr. Judy Stone points out in a recent article in Forbes, “requiring proof of a disability might be considered a violation of the Americans with Disability Act.” Getting a doctor’s note is also onerous for many workers, due to the singularly astronomical costs of health insurance and care in the U.S., the difficulty of even scheduling an appointment, and the loss of wages incurred by taking time off work. Moreover, although the internal memo promises that employees requesting an exemption to the ban are not required to disclose “confidential medical information,” the company still requires that “the medical note should clearly state the reason for the exemption” — an absurd contradiction in terms, and a gross violation of health information privacy law.

Face masks are a basic component of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their use has proliferated during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As Dr. Stone notes, In-N-Out’s policy directly contravenes official guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advise that everyone should have the right to wear a mask in public.

How does In-N-Out justify its policy of reckless endangerment, its blatant disregard for its workers’ lives?

According to the memo, the purpose of the new face mask ban is to force workers to “show their smiles and other facial features.” (Ah, of course! Nothing brings a smile like the risk of illness, disablement, and death!) But then the company, leaning a bit too much on euphemism, tips its hand: the face mask ban, continues the memo, will “promote clear and effective communication” between workers, management, and customers, with the aim of creating “customer-centric” restaurants.

The true purpose of the ban is transparently to enforce labor discipline and to appease the section of reactionary consumers who believe that restaurant and other service workers should serve them with a smile — even in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

The capitalist is driven by the profit motive, and by that motive alone. He buys the worker’s time, hour by hour, and for every hour’s wage he pays, he intends to squeeze the worker’s body to the last drop of productivity. And so he demands discipline, and he will use both carrot and stick — more often the latter, when dealing with unskilled, poor and low-wage, and easily replaceable workers — to get it. He demands that the worker never pause a moment to rest; he strictly curtails talk between employees; he waits like a hound to snap and bark at the first sign of idleness. He deplores that he must rent human beings, who tire; who need to break for food and water at regular intervals; who must pause to use the restroom, or to catch their breath between tasks, or to wash their hands. He institutes a regime meant to fashion human workers into machines, and he employs a team of managers to fit the workers to his mechanical designs.

That is why something as mundane and inoffensive as a mask, meant to keep the worker safe, is unconscionable to the capitalist: It hides one of the worker’s “parts” — her mouth — and therefore disrupts “clear and effective communication.” The hypothetical seconds the mask-wearing worker might spend repeating herself are, from the capitalist’s perspective, precious seconds that she could otherwise spend selling another burger to another customer — and he will not abide even a second of lost profit. Moreover, the worker who protects herself, her co-workers, the customers, her family, etc. from illness, who tends to her human needs and her human rights to health and safety, who reclaims even a thin cloth mask’s worth of agency and bodily autonomy, shatters the capitalist’s fantasies of tireless waged machines, humanizing not only the worker, but also her work, her part in the process of production — and that cannot be allowed.

The capitalist is a monster, no doubt, but an impossibly fragile monster — a monster who shudders with grave offense when faced with a bit of unprofitable cloth.

In-N-Out is brazenly violating its employees’ legal rights. It is forcing the workers to subject themselves to the perils of a debilitating and often deadly illness, amid an ongoing pandemic. That much is indisputable.

What does this prove? Only this universal fact of wage-labor: When the workers are disorganized, when we fail to combine in unions and take collective action, we are too weak to assert our rights in the only language the bosses understand — brute force. Only by inspiring fear in our exploiters with the constant threat of strikes and shut-downs can we secure and reaffirm our safety, dignity, and livelihoods.

The Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Arizona v. Navajo Nation last Thursday, condemning the Navajo people to surrender their treaty rights to water from the Colorado River and the other tributaries, streams, and sources that feed the Navajo reservation. This follows directly on the heels of the court’s Haaland decision which, as the Clarion predicted, marked not a high-water mark in the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, but rather the beginning of a long-planned onslaught against the Indigenous peoples within the prison-house of the U.S. Empire.

Water is a precious commodity in the American West. Future desertification of the whole growing region is almost inevitable. The Navajo nation has been battling state governments for decades over the allocation of water in the region and the federal government for at least as long, looking for recognition of the rights that were promised by treaty.

In its duplicitous and cowardly Navajo Nation decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recast the issue; the treaty, they whine, only guarantees the Navajo Nation the right to water that flows into the reservation. If anyone were to redirect the water away from the reservation, then that’s just too bad. That water, they say, between the lines, has more use elsewhere — watering cash crops. As long as the $5 billion worth of agricultural industry is kept intact, so what if the Navajo people starve as a result?

The bulk of the opinion is actually an attack on the principle of the so-called “trust” that we discussed on Monday, the idea that the U.S. imperial state owes anything to the Indigenous peoples it has displaced, murdered, and betrayed. While Haaland made hay from the idea of the “trust relationship” in order to uphold Congress’s power to pass laws that govern Indigenous persons, Navajo Nation explicitly states that the trust relationship is non-existent. Justice Thomas dismisses the idea entirely in his concurrence. “[T]he idea of a generic trust relationship with all tribes — to say nothing of legally enforceable fiduciary duties — seems to lack a historical or constitutional basis.” Gorsuch and the three left-liberal justices alone — Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — return to the treaty rights, to the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples. But let us not forget that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson also signed on to the main opinion of the court in Haaland, where the reactionary justices made it clear that the “period of treaty making” had ended and that the Indigenous peoples would be governed not from a sovereign to a sovereign but rather by the fiat of Congress, whose powers over them are “plenary,” an unassailable, hegemonic domination. Gorsuch clearly and plainly states the perfidy of the federal government:

The Navajo have tried it all. They have written federal officials. They have moved this Court to clarify the United States’ responsibilities when representing them. They have sought to intervene directly in water-related litigation. And when all of those efforts were rebuffed, they brought a claim seeking to compel the United States to make good on its treaty obligations by providing an accounting of what water rights it holds on their behalf. At each turn they have received the same answer: “Try again.” When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The Navajo reservation is the largest Indigenous reservation in the U.S. Empire. It encompasses over 17 million acres, and the tribe has enrolled over 300,000 members. The average non-Indigenous American citizen uses 82 gallons of water a day. The average Navajo person uses 7 gallons. In parts of the reservation, as much as 91% of the households lack access to water.

The court remains today what it has always been — the sword and shield of U.S. settler-capital. The decisions in Haaland and Navajo Nation could not appear more different on their surface, but if one looks beneath, it will become clear that they serve the same purpose: to grind the millstone of disenfranchisement and genocide.