Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and Trump) would like us to believe that support for the national rights of the Palestian people is tantamount to supporting Hamas and terrorism. With this cynical and duplicitous sleight of hand, Rubio hopes to provide Netanyahu a legitimizing cover to kill or expel the remaining Palestian people from Gaza on the one hand and on the other throw the movement here for Palestian national rights into a defensive posture and, more broadly, confuse the American people.

We should continue to challenge this line of thinking and the deadly actions that follow wherever we can. Most of us don’t have a big megaphone, but we do have a voice and we do interact with people in our everyday life

Today’s struggles against Trump and the billionaire class have a democratic as well as a class dimension. A working class approach should take this into account in its articulation of demands as well as its approach to allies and coalition partners — people of color, women, immigrants, gay, lesbian, and trans people, small business people, farmers, and many others.

Narrowly constructed class struggle politics — workers unite —is a recipe for defeat against Trump, Trumpism, and the billionaire class. It was Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution and in the epoch of imperialism, who correctly modified the slogan of Marx and Engels, Workers of the World Unite to Workers and all Oppressed People Unite.

Like Lenin, we should do likewise, adjusting our slogans and politics to the conditions of struggle that we face today, namely rising fascism and its relentless, farreaching, and unprecedented assault on class and democratic rights.

To think that Trump’s campaign against anti-semetism in any iteration should be taken seriously takes a leap of faith and, more to the point, a willful disregard for Trump’s and MAGA’s anti-semetic animus and positions in the present and past.

It strikes me that the debate as to whether Israeli policies toward the Palestian people are genocidal or not has been decided by Iife itself.

I watched UAW president Shawn Fain last night attempting to make arguments for supporting Trump’s tariff regime. After listening to him I had a few reactions.

First of all, Trump’s tariff regime is already unraveling the larger U.S. and global economy in which the auto industry is embedded. One isn’t separable from the other. If Trump’s tariff regime slows growth, or worse still, throws the economy here and worldwide into a recession, neither the autoworkers nor the industy will emerge unscathed by any stretch.

Second, the auto industry and its workforce are regionally and globally integrated to a much great degree now than they were a half century ago when I landed in Detroit. Undoing that would be a huge undertaking that, among other things, would create major divisions among autoworkers across national borders. In fact, it already is. Canadian autoworkers and their union are outraged by the action of the UAW here.

Third, not a word was said about other alternatives such as a shorter work week with no cut in pay or restraints on the free movement of investment capital across borders.

Finally, making deals with a neofascist regime while rights (including union rights) and living standards are being attacked by the same regime isn’t a good way to make friends and build broader unity, both of which are absolutely necessary at this grave moment in the life of our country.