Climbing On That Soapbox

Let’s talk about talking. And by talking, I mean communication as an act of reclaiming power from oppressors.

Last week, this old white man was one of a group of protesters booted from a US Senate hearing for cutting into RFK’s Yay Trump Hours and publicly pointing out that hey, Gaza should be getting food! Children should not be starving en masse! What a revolutionary ideal that has never been heard before.

Yes, Ben Cohen. Yes, the Ben & Jerry’s guy. (By the by, he and Jerry Greenfield tried to get their products pulled from Israel in 2021. Unilever stopped it – a win for capitalism and settler-colonialism!)

On a video of his arrest (which, given camera angles and other context clues, was likely taken by some smart-alec on their smartphone) Cohen can be clearly heard saying “I said that Congress is paying to bomb poor kids in Gaza and paying for it by kicking poor kids off Medicaid in the U.S.”¹

So, given he got up in a meeting and loudly said that the US should not be spending its tax dollars to mass-starve and mass-murder people, Cohen was of course arrested and dragged off by DHS. Given that he is a rich white man, Cohen was released on Wednesday with a slap on the wrist.

Okay. How about Logan Rozos? He’s a black transgender actor, and a recent graduate from NYU who used his graduation speech to directly and openly condemn the genocide in Palestine. The ADL and local Zionist groups promptly verbally dogpiled him.

NYU’s response? Well, verbally, via spokesperson John Beckman: “NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”

Uh-huh. “Subjected to” those remarks, when Rozos’ speech was met with an uproar of cheers and support? Sure. Completely incidentally, NYU has previously called the cops on nonviolent student protesters and banned students from campus facilities for similar acts of protest, gleefully joining Columbia University on the list of ‘US educational institutions not to trust with your education’.

NYU’s practical response? They’re withholding Rozos’ diploma. He graduated. He was commencement speaker for Gallatin at NYU. He did the work, right? He should get the diploma. Boom.

But no, ‘tis not so! In great country of America, you talk bad about Israel²? You get boot.

Now, I will say this much, there’s no sign that Rozos is going to be deported. He’s American, after all! He’s a citizen! He’s safe, right?

Um. Wait. Trump wants to deport “homegrowns” too. ...except that isn’t deportation returning someone to their country of origin? So if you’re sending someone to a different country, that’s not deporting. That’s abduction and trafficking.³

That’s 238 Venezuelan men, 90% of whom had no criminal record, trafficked to a gulag in El Salvador. That’s a small child with cancer, with US birthright citizenship, turned back at the border incoming to the US.

That’s racism, pretending to be a concern for social purity. That’s xenophobia and fascism in a fancy hat that says “More Patriotic Than You.” That’s class warfare, too - oppression of the working class, especially the working poor. And it’s all dressed up, all nice and pretty and clean in red-white-and-blue.

Except there’s nothing clean about it.

There’s nothing clean about the gulags. There’s nothing clean about the gestapo – excuse me, ICE. There is nothing moral about selling out entire peoples so the US can hitch itself to Israel’s bandwagon for the sake of a strategic foothold in the Levant, and that sweet sweet offshore oil money. Which is also stolen, because Israel was the result of Britain scamming a strategic chunk of land out from under its most recent conquerors (Egypt) and, also, you know – the Palestinians. The people living there. Who actually have a claim, and their claim is “that’s our home”.

I understand why actual Jewish refugees fled to Israel when when Europe booted them out after WWII. I understand wanting a homeland. However, the modern Israeli settler-colonial government built their state off of the time-honored tradition of stealing "their" land from indigenous peoples. I suppose the chain of logic could be that returning evil unto evil is fair, so paying evil forward is... also... fair? Yeah, no, stealing other people’s land is never going to be morally justifiable.

Relatedly: I also live on stolen land. Every non-Native US resident does. We-the-great-country-of-America have also betrayed the people who lived here, committed systematic genocide on them, since long before Zionism in its current form ever existed. This land was originally inhabited by, is still inhabited by, and remains in the care of its First Peoples.

“We honor generations of the First Peoples for their enduring stewardship of these lands and waters. We recognize that settler colonization resulted in stolen land, forced displacement, broken promises, and lasting trauma. We support indigenous efforts toward land reclamation, self-governance, healing, and the preservation of their traditions and cultures.” – Immigrant Defenders Law Center

Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsed Mahdawi are pro-Palestinian student activists.

Öztürk is a Turkish citizen, attending Tufts University on a student visa. On March 27, 2025, she was abducted by ICE agents in an unmarked car. The reason given for this was that, in an op-ed post from the previous year, she had expressed criticism towards campus authorities' Israel-inclined coverage of the Palestinian genocide - which, in clown logic, was as good as a confession of being a Hamas supporter.

Mahdawi is a Columbia University student, and a ten-year US resident seeking citizenship. He went into hiding following the detention of another Columbia student protester, Mahmoud Khalil. He was abducted by ICE agents on April 15, when he came into a US CItizenship and Immigration Services office for his scheduled citizenship appointment.

On April 30, Mahdawi was released on bail. He has stated that he has no intention of letting a regime of fear silence him, and will continue to speak on behalf of Palestinians.

In regards to both his and Öztürk's "deportations," there have been concerted efforts - protests and call-ins, people speaking out and getting their representatives' attention that this was not an issue their constituents were willing to let slide. Multiple congressmembers visited the facility where Öztürk and Khalil were held, prior to her release on bail on May 9.

Applying pressure works. Calling your reps works! Uniting our voices works!

And yet, Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by ICE on March 8, 2025. He is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. He was the first student protester to be disappeared by the Trump II regime as part of a putative effort to punish "Hamas supporters" - which, really, is a classically authoritarian punishment for expressing views that go against the regime's officially official party line.

As of this writing, Khalil has been in an ICE detention facility for over two months, and was denied temporary release for the birth of his first child. He remains imprisoned, without any sign of due process being applied to his case.

These protestors, these people who chose to speak out for Palestine, are all legal US residents. However, they did not have the shield of being born US citizens.

They are not the only ones. They're just a few of the ones whose names are still spoken.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

As a fellow Substack writer once said,

“When you try to have a reasonable discussion with oppressors, they always throw it back at you.

Don’t fall for it.

Don’t stop talking.”

And folks, we have plenty to talk about.

How about the cover-ups on ongoing epidemics?

How about the political theater of a one-time “birth bonus” compared to the actual costs of having and raising a child, and the physical and psychological costs of being forced to carry an unwanted or even flat-out nonviable pregnancy?

The “Big Beautiful Bill” about to knock 8.6 million Americans off of Medicare, leaving 3.9 million without any health insurance at all, and kicking in the teeth of federal food aid programs while it’s at it?

The climate. Oh, the climate.

How about the manufactured immigration “crisis” and the racism directly fueling it?

This country’s legacy media is a deeply unfunny joke. More and more, it’s nothing but a mouthpiece for the broligarchs. Those few within the system who still try to speak out face opposition - are punished for their courage by the supposedly morally “pure,” for their oh-so-wicked and un-American views.

Well, technically, the whole schtick that all peoples – not even all peoples everywhere, but all US citizens, deserve equal rights? Yeah, the founders never actually wanted that. They wrote the Constitution specifically to cover their backs up against popular uprisings in the first place.

Since then, we’ve had centuries of cyclical uprisings and backlashes. The Civil Rights Movement, famous of the 1960s, was a hard-fought struggle for hard-won victories; but, unlike what today’s textbooks will tell you, the ideological war against systematic oppression very much did not end with 1965’s victories. It never stopped.

And now we come to today, with the vastly different stratified Americas we are born into – whether we are white or people of color, whether we are straight and cis or literally any other identity, whether we are currently abled or chronically ill, whether we are complicit in land theft or survivors of genocide. We live here.

Those of us who were born here are citizens by default. Those of us who came here later in life, and managed to successfully naturalize, are citizens. Those of us who went through the motions and did all their paperwork, and came here fleeing authoritarianism and poverty, and hoped and prayed and worked for better lives - the people who came here because it was their best way forward - are now being paid back for all their effort with contempt, with abuse, with being disappeared to ICE detention facilities and gulags.

Those people had been living in Palestine, whose ancestors had been there for centuries, were forcibly evicted from their homes and lands. Have had their cultural heritage and political sovereignty erased. Same thing the Pilgrims did, same thing the founders did. Same Western settler-colonial imperialist playbook. None of this is new.

Now, smartphones are still pretty new. Granted, they’re increasingly difficult to secure (and if Starlink becomes everyone’s Internet provider by force, that’ll upgrade in difficulty to “impossible” – get a dumbphone, if you can) but for now, a smartphone is still a little video camera that nearly everyone has in their pocket. Cameras are fairly new. The Internet is newer, and Substack is – what, a few years old?

Print isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries. Books sure aren’t new – they’ve been around in some form or another for thousands of years. Putting messages on walls? About as old as humans ourselves. Spoken language? Absolutely ancient. You really can’t get more traditionally human than talking.

So let’s use those old traditions, in our new ways. Let’s use these new technologies, in the ancient tradition of telling the arbiters of power we have had enough.

Let’s reach out to those like-minded, our fellow resisters of the mingled tides of christofascism and tech-worship. Against eugenics and fascism. Against the same ideological plague of dehumanization that saw six million of my people marched into gas chambers, less than a century ago.

Against the plagues that have not so much been unearthed from disturbed tombs as carried neatly forward, repackaged for a new era, sanitized and hidden under layers of gloss until we got complacent. Wake up. This isn’t new.

The idea that Not-Us deserve to die is not new. That, too, is a long and storied human tradition.

But, so is caring for our weakest and most vulnerable! There were surgical procedures and false teeth in ancient Egypt. There was early herbal medicine in not-yet-known-as-India in the Stone Age. We've had walking sticks since humans first figured out that if someone doesn't have two good legs at the moment, a sturdy stick can help them move.

So are communities. The much-lauded modern American nuclear family? That’s a construction of the post-WWII economic boom and the advent of suburbia. Many societies still live in extended families – extended networks of care where people share parenting, share work, share their burdens. It is very much possible to (re-)build social and economic safety nets that are not dependent on the state to function.

So is taking whatever platform you have and saying with your whole chest that torture is wrong, trafficking is wrong, genocide is wrong. That these things are evil and should not be tolerated; that tolerance must of necessity include an intolerance for intolerance itself.

We here at General Strike US?

We say, no institutionalized mass murder. No genocide. Especially not of children – not in Palestine, and not here.

We say, Free Palestine. We say, Land Back. We say, no place for fascism.

We have our platforms. We do need to be ever more cautious, going forward, with how we use them . We need to avoid surveillance and manage our digital footprints.

We need to decide how much of ourselves we are willing to risk now, against the growing pressure of empire’s boot on all of our necks. And there is risk.

We are not safe.

We who are autistic or otherwise disabled are not safe from RFK’s registry, from Dr. Oz and Casey Means' quackery, from anti-vaccination ideology and its disproportionate impact on poor (often Black and brown) communities and the disabled community as a whole. We who are dependent on Social Security for income are not safe from the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, in any way. We who are in any way queer are not safe from the gleeful violence of bigots.

Women are not safe, not from illegal detention or from sexism, or specifically a bunch of self-righteous white fascists taking ownership over their⁴ bodies. (Especially Black women.)

Children, poor people - poor children? Ha. No.

Those of us in America who have “too dark” a skin color are clearly not safe. Those of us who are Muslim are not safe. Those of us who are visibly Asian in descent will likely not be safe, as COVID panic resurges in the wake of rising infection rates.

And those of us who look white, who sound white, who perform whiteness and all its attendant social trappings as if performing a rite to repel the evil eye? We won’t be safe, either. No one outside the ruling class, the broligarchs and their nearest and most skilled at boot-licking, will have any form of safety at all, in the America they are building around and over us right now.

We have to reach out, so we can come together. We can resist!

We can protest. There are so many ways to do this! We can boycott strategically. We can put up flyers and posters. We can protest in person. You can mask up - itself a protest against eugenicist policies, and a measure of real protection against their effects.

We can, and should, learn how to protect our information – both in terms of what we publish (see Ozturk’s local op-ed), and in terms of what we don’t (see all our supposedly-private data currently being run through by DOGE’s sticky greasy fingers). We, again, need to teach ourselves how not to be constantly tracked by the data oligarchs. No more smartphones at protests, please – those are already easily trackable via location data. Bring a camera.

We can call and message our representatives. Call them every day, every single day that you can. Leave messages. Flood their inboxes. If you are registered to vote in the US, you have the leverage of being a voting constituent – and these people really don’t want to lose their voter counts.

We need to talk to each other. We must learn and relearn how to communicate in good faith, and how to spot and defy bad faith actors.

We have to speak out now, before we are all silenced. While we still have voices, we need to act.

We have our voices, and a duty to use them. That duty is not only to our peoples, not only to our countries, and not only even to our families and our neighbors and our communities. We, as human beings, have a duty to ourselves to act as people of conscience. To fight, in whatever ways we can, the myriad functions and forms of fascism.

So, please: Get out there. Use your platforms. Climb your soapboxes.

Fight.

Do not comply in advance.

- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

1. Transcript courtesy of this Deseret article.

2. I can make stereotypical Russian accent jokes all I want. My claim to expertise is that my family speaks Russian. Because my family fled the USSR, and back then the official language of Ukraine was Russian. 🇺🇦

3. Right? Right? I might be wrong! I didn’t speak English until I was five. Maybe I should check a dictionary. Maybe some other people could use a dictionary.

4. I say “their” because I haven’t identified as a woman since my teen years. That said, I do still have a uterus. The idea that I might be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy is horrifying. The idea that I might be forced to be sterilized against my will for being disabled is also horrifying. Some traditions really, truly, should never be revived.