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Civil Rights

Protest Is Not Terrorism, No Matter What The DOJ Tries To Tell You

April 18, 2026 Ron Jacobs, Counter Punch. , , ,
I recently helped organize a talk by Dr. Tom Alter, who was fired from his job at Texas State University in the Fall of 2025, supposedly for a statement he made as a private citizen at an online socialism conference earlier that year. The firing was illegal and a lawsuit against those responsible for the action is currently underway. Tom Alter has been on the road on and off since then, discussing his case, the current repression against those against Trumpism, the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine, and ICE. A key element of his talk is his insistence that, not only should this repression be opposed in every possible forum, but that opposition should not be afraid to include individuals and groups of a more radical bent in its literature and actions.

How A Legal Group’s Anti-LGBTQ Policies Took Root In School Districts

January 7, 2026 Kathryn Joyce, In These Times. , , ,
The West Shore school board policy committee meeting came to a halt almost as soon as it began. As a board member started going over the agenda on July 17, 2025, local parent Danielle Gross rose to object to a last-minute addition she said hadn’t been on the district’s website the day before. By posting notice of the proposal so close to the meeting, charged Gross, who is also a partner at a communications and advocacy firm that works on state education policy, the board had violated Pennsylvania’s open meetings law, failing to provide the public at least 24 hours’ notice about a topic ​“this board knows is of great concern for many community members interested in the rights of our LGBTQ students.”

Report Downgrades US Civic Rating To ‘Obstructed’

December 10, 2025 Chris Walker, Truthout. , , ,
A new report from an international organization dedicated to tracking civic freedoms throughout the world has downgraded its rating for the United States, due in large part to policies enacted by the Trump administration. The report, which was published on Monday, comes from a group called Civicus, which monitors “the state of civic freedoms — including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly — across 198 countries and territories.” The U.S. was previously rated as a “narrowed” society, in terms of civic freedoms. In its new report, Civicus now rates the U.S. as an “obstructed” society.

We Who Believe In Democracy Must Fight To Make It Real

September 26, 2025 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
We wake daily to new spectacles of violence and humiliation: kidnappings in broad daylight, attacks on unions, LGBTQ people, women, and immigrants, the erosion of long-cherished rights. It’s no longer a tricky question whether we have tipped into authoritarianism. The answer is yes. To fight back, we have to confront what the Trump administration is exploiting: fear. We are living in fear, cowed by it. Each workplace and free speech crackdown, each violation of democratic norms, feeds on the paralysis that fear produces. Fear is the fuel of authoritarianism. Democracy is its antidote. But all around us is evidence of how thoroughly democracy has been hollowed out—and it didn’t start with Trump. Democracy is its antidote. But all around us is evidence of how thoroughly democracy has been hollowed out—and it didn’t start with Trump.

DOJ Appears To Have Violated Luigi Mangione’s Right To A Fair Trial

September 25, 2025 By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Truthout. , , ,
A federal judge has ordered prosecutors to respond to a letter from Luigi Mangione’s legal team alleging that Trump administration officials’ recent social media posts about the case appear to have violated his right to a fair trial. “It appears … that multiple employees at the Department of Justice may have violated Local Criminal Rule 23.1, and this Court’s order of April 25, 2025 specifically identifying the strictures of this rule,” U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett wrote in her order on September 24 in response to the letter. The rule stipulates that “non-lawyer personnel employed by a lawyer’s office or subject to a lawyer’s supervision” in a criminal case have a duty not to release an “opinion that a reasonable person would expect to be disseminated by means of public communication” if there is a chance that the opinion will “interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the due administration of justice.”

Missing Links In Textbook History: The American Left Part III

August 27, 2025 Jim Mamer, Scheer Post. , , , ,
Is it not predictable that when segments of a population are harassed, marginalized and enslaved, they will eventually revolt? Does that not constitute a demand for justice? According to American historian Herbert Aptheker, in North America from the 1600s to the end of the Civil War, there were at least 250 revolts each involving at least 10 enslaved persons. The largest revolt of about 500 enslaved people took place in Louisiana in 1811. All of these rebels, widely cursed by those in power as threats, might better be remembered as America’s Black huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Throughout American history episodes of racist violence intensified when African Americans — and other people of color — made legitimate claims to full citizenship. In the twentieth century, given the right conditions, any of those incidents should have triggered a renewed civil rights movement, but for a variety of reasons, most did not.

New Immigration Laws 2025: How States Are Criminalizing Migrants And Allies

July 31, 2025 Jill Castellano and Shoshana Walter, The Marshall Project. , , ,
When Alabama lawmakers passed a sweeping anti-immigration bill in 2011, backlash was swift. Immigrant advocates warned that Latinos were fleeing the state, fearing arrests for their status or for "harboring" undocumented people. And some business leaders condemned the law after police arrested German and Japanese car executives for not having their licenses on them, a practice intended to funnel undocumented people from police stops into deportation proceedings. Civil rights groups sued, and courts overturned much of the law as unconstitutional. Activists thought the effort was behind them.

Voices From The Terror List: Palestine Action Members Speak Out

July 25, 2025 Kit Klarenberg, MintPress News. , , ,
On July 1, British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced that Palestine Action (PA), a crusading campaign effort, would be proscribed as a terrorist group. Describing the movement as “dangerous,” she charged that its “orchestration and enaction of aggressive and intimidatory attacks against businesses, institutions and the public” had “crossed the thresholds established in the Terrorism Act 2000.” As a result, PA is now the country’s first protest group to be formally branded a terrorist entity, placing it in the same league as al-Qaida and ISIS.

LA Protest Response Risks Turning US Military Into Political Force

June 10, 2025 Ed Pilkington, The Guardian. , , , , , ,
The Trump administration’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles to intervene in civilian protests in the face of opposition from the Californian governor is a major escalation that risks the politicisation of the US military, armed service veterans are warning. Former top military figures have told the Guardian that the decision to put up to 2,000 troops under federal control and send them into the streets of LA is a violation of the military’s commitment to keep out of domestic politics in all but the most exceptional circumstances. The last time a US president federalised the national guard against the wishes of a state governor was in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson deployed them to protect civil rights marchers in Alabama.

DOJ Finds Tulsa Massacre Was ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack’

February 4, 2025 Aaryn Urell, Equal Justice Initiative. , , , , , , , , , ,
The Justice Department issued a report Friday on the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, when as many as 10,000 white Tulsans murdered hundreds of Black residents and burned businesses and homes to the ground in an attack that federal investigators found “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” “The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

Apology Demanded: County Executive Bars Civil Rights Hero From Meeting

November 7, 2024 the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
On Thursday October 31, 2024, Paul Pumphrey, a highly respected community elder and organizer was refused permission to attend a meeting on racial justice and later escorted out of the Executive floor by orders of Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich. “Mr. Pumphrey is a giant among civil rights leaders in Montgomery County,” said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, President of BACC. “This is unacceptable and the community demands an independent investigation and a public apology. Ironically, this behavior by Mr Elrich represents a continuation of Jim Crow policies.

Zionist Organizations’ Latest Strategy To Criminalize Palestine Advocacy

September 25, 2024 Amira Jarmakani and Emmaia Gelman, Mondoweiss. , , , , ,
Universities welcomed their students back this fall with a set of policies designed to silence pro-Palestine speech and preemptively criminalize protest. Fortified by strategies from the security industry, they provide an administrative alibi for further militarizing campuses. Yet there’s another, more insidious move at play, one belied by the fact that some universities house these new repressive policies under the guise “free speech” and student’s rights. Across the county, universities are employing the right-wing tactic of weaponizing rights to quash dissent. In the process, we are seeing how the pretense of civil rights mobilizes a machinery of repression aimed to eradicate the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Racist Hotel Owners File For Bankruptcy Ahead Of Civil Rights Trial

September 10, 2024 Brandy Calabaza, NDN Collective. , , , ,
Rapid City, SD – On Saturday, September 7 the Retsel Corporation, owners of the Grand Gateway Hotel, filed for bankruptcy just before the start of the federal civil rights trial brought by NDN Collective scheduled to begin Monday. NDN Collective filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2022 against the Grand Gateway Hotel after it denied service to Native Americans because of their race. The Retsel Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allows the business to remain open as it reorganizes its debts. Under this filing, all other litigation must pause until the business settles in bankruptcy court and that timeline is still to be determined. As a result, the civil rights lawsuit against the Grand Gateway is on hold.

UN Report Details Rampant US Human Rights Violations At Home And Abroad

November 10, 2023 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , , ,
A United Nations body has issued a damning report blasting the United States for its rampant violations of a major human rights treaty that it ratified in 1992. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrines the rights to life, to vote, and to freedom of expression and assembly; and the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It forbids discrimination in the enjoyment of civil and political rights based on race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (which includes sexual orientation).

‘McCarthyite Backlash’: Response To Criticism Of Israel Alarms Groups

October 31, 2023 Chris McGreal, The Guardian. , , , ,
Civil rights groups in the US have warned of a “wave of McCarthyite backlash” against criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza after Americans expressing support for the Palestinians have been sacked, faced threats of violence and hounded by pro-Israel groups. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has warned of the “continued criminalisation of advocacy for Palestinian rights” and described an “increasing tide of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab attacks in the US” following the Hamas cross-border attack in which about 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 200 abducted.
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