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Australia’s first offshore wind auction is “going ahead as planned,” new energy minister confirms
Victoria's newly appointed energy minister says the state will go ahead as planned with Australia's first ever offshore wind auction, despite speculation of further delays.
The post Australia’s first offshore wind auction is “going ahead as planned,” new energy minister confirms appeared first on Renew Economy.
Labor’s data centre gas double-speak leaves the gate open for dodgy offsets
A promise of banning gas while waving through “gas firming” and “gas peaking” with unlimited offsets leaves gate open to fossil power buying its way clean with offsets.
The post Labor’s data centre gas double-speak leaves the gate open for dodgy offsets appeared first on Renew Economy.
Massive wind project, with up to 280 of Australia’s biggest-ever turbines, seeks federal green tick
Plans for a potentially massive new wind farm start federal environmental assessment, proposing up to 280 of the most powerful turbines seen in Australia.
The post Massive wind project, with up to 280 of Australia’s biggest-ever turbines, seeks federal green tick appeared first on Renew Economy.
“Second roof:” Solar glass pioneer unveils big rooftop module in time to ride wave of expanded PV subsidy
Australian solar glass and window specialist gets CEC accreditation for its new integrated solar panel, just in time for the expansion of the federal PV subsidy.
The post “Second roof:” Solar glass pioneer unveils big rooftop module in time to ride wave of expanded PV subsidy appeared first on Renew Economy.
Construction and concrete pours begin on another wind farm, as one state prepares to say goodbye to coal
Construction officially starts at another wind project in W.A., which is benefiting from firm coal closure dates and a state owned utility writing PPAs.
The post Construction and concrete pours begin on another wind farm, as one state prepares to say goodbye to coal appeared first on Renew Economy.
The Driven Podcast: More small cars arrive as EV sales stay big
Australian BEV sales pass the 20% mark for the second month in a row as Geely's best-selling hatchback arrives on Australian shores. Plus, news of the week.
The post The Driven Podcast: More small cars arrive as EV sales stay big appeared first on Renew Economy.
AFSA Newsletter | April-June, 2026
The second quarter of 2026 was marked by a clear shift from advocacy alone towards influence, implementation and institutional change. Across the period, AFSA’s work entered legislative chambers, regional trade discussions, global climate negotiations, financial policy debates and community learning spaces. The significance of this quarter lies not only in the number of activities undertaken, but in the way they connected. Seed rights were linked to human rights. Agroecology was linked to law and trade. Soil restoration was linked to enterprise. Food culture was linked to citizen power. Research was used not simply to describe problems, but to challenge the institutions and investment models shaping Africa’s agricultural future.
Several developments gave this quarter particular weight. The East African Community Agroecology Bill moved formally into the legislative process. The N’Djamena Declaration gave renewed continental direction to farmer managed seed systems. African farmer testimony began feeding directly into a United Nations process on the right to seed. At the same time, AFSA questioned the choices being made by major financial institutions, advanced agroecology in climate negotiations, strengthened agroecological markets and enterprises, and documented practical evidence from communities restoring soils and building livelihoods. The launch of the My Food Is African Barefoot Guide also expanded the conversation beyond policy, reminding us that food systems are shaped every day in homes, schools, markets, kitchens and public culture.
This edition therefore tells a story of convergence. Laws, markets, seeds, finance, climate, culture and community action are often treated as separate fields, yet the quarter showed how deeply they depend on one another. AFSA’s achievement was to hold these threads together and to keep African farmers, citizens and communities at the centre of each conversation. What emerges is not simply a record of completed activities, but evidence of a movement gaining stronger tools, clearer positions and greater influence over the decisions that will shape Africa’s food future.
Download the free PDF copy of the newsletter hereParty Time? Setting the record straight
On June 9, 2026 Tempest Magazine published Party Time?, the transcript of an interview with Charlie Post by David Camfield. The central question being asked was whether socialist organizations should consider themselves parties.
Charlie Post, a former member of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Solidarity and current member of Tempest, takes a stab at answering that question by outlining how all of the traditions in the U.S. failed because they followed what he calls “the micro-sect model”. While a revolutionary party is necessary, it requires that a large layer of the working class be radicalized.
Post provides a history starting in the 1860’s in Europe up to the broad Left parties of today. In addition to the basic objective problem regarding the working class, there were also subjective mistakes made by socialist organizations which included swinging from ultraleft abstentionism to adaptation. From my perspective, so far, so good.
At this point, Post begins a broad attack on the existing far Left. All groups either continue to use the micro-sect model or proclaim themselves to be parties. Those following the micro-sect model are prone to a “fetish of leadership” which played a part in those organizations ignoring or excusing oppressive behavior from leadership. This led to the demise of the ISO and other organizations.
Post then turns to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as an alternative to the micro-sect model. He says there were opportunities for engagement between 2017-2020. He cites the Jamaal Bowman debacle as an illustration of the decline of DSA into a more authoritarian and bureaucratic organization. Today, with the advent of Mamdani, Tempest is re-evaluating whether engaging with DSA is worthwhile.1
Post next turns to Solidarity. He was a member from its founding in 1986 until 2015. During much of this time, he was in the leadership. He claims that Solidarity was good at training its members until about 1993. This change, according to Post, had to do with members giving up on revolution and accepting reformism as the only thing possible. His conclusion is the most damning “What we ended up with was that the group—politically, not organizationally—liquidated itself into a more amorphous left-reformist current.” He later goes on to say that Solidarity became depoliticized and the atmosphere became toxic.
I am a member of Solidarity, serving on its National Committee, and also a member of Tempest and DSA. I joined Solidarity in 1997 so I can’t comment on the shift in training members that allegedly happened in or around 1993 but I believe our remaining founding members would be as puzzled by that comment as I was. It is also totally untrue that we have a paper membership of one hundred with an active membership of thirty.
Solidarity’s membership has been affected by the same objective factors that have fragmented the rest of the far left. The rise of DSA drew members away as well as allowed a portion of the existing membership to be comfortable in supporting progressive Democrats, a mistake in my opinion. However, this is a question on which Solidarity members are about evenly divided and one that we continue to debate.
We lost members as we grappled with gendered violence and trans rights. However, unlike other organizations, we got things right. I proudly served on the Gendered Violence Commission during this time. The loss of members was an inevitable result of this painful process.
I’ve added to the list of negative issues that have affected Solidarity in the interest of honesty and to acknowledge mistakes and shortcomings. That does not mean that the musings of a disgruntled former member are accurate or fair. We continue to call ourselves revolutionary socialists in the tradition of socialism from below. We continue to grow with youth and women as new members. We continue to seek opportunities for collaboration with other like-minded organizations and individuals.
One such collaboration is the United Left Platform (ULP) which Post does not even bother to mention and to which he has done a great disservice in his snarky attacks on Solidarity.
Which organization is immune from criticism? Tempest, of course! It’s unclear how Tempest has all the answers. This is where it gets very vague. If Solidarity is a drop in the ocean, then Tempest is a drop and a half, a fact that should engender a high degree of humility and self-criticism both of which were sorely lacking in this interview.
NB: Dual Solidarity-Tempest members Bill Balderston, Ron Lare, Ted McTaggart, Peter Solenberger and Judy Wraight concur with this article. The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of Solidarity.
[1] In my opinion, Tempest made a sectarian turn away from DSA, a mistake that I and others argued against at the time in an article published in Tempest magazine (“DSA after the 2023 convention: Another view”).The size of DSA has waxed and waned with the election of Trump in 2016, the election of Biden and the re-election of Trump. There is nothing surprising about this. Currently, DSA has over 120,000 members and continues to grow. A group with young, enthusiastic members who call themselves socialists and who have an active interest in Marx is one place we should want to be, illusions about social democracy notwithstanding.
The issue with Jamaal Bowman was a much more fundamental one than what Post identifies. DSA should not be endorsing Democrats, and if they do, they should not be surprised that there is no accountability. At most, DSA should be critically endorsing independent candidates. Revolutionary socialists should be arguing this at every step of the way, not mounting campaigns for expulsion when (surprise!) Democratic candidates, who have been endorsed by all kinds of groups and individuals, turn out not to be accountable. Post says that participation in DSA is a tactical question and I agree with that.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
The post Party Time? Setting the record straight appeared first on Tempest.
Surviving the Storm: Tropical Storm Impacts on Coastal Birds
Data center power sales drive $220M increase in TVA’s net income
The federal utility’s total operating revenue was $10 billion over the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 3% year-over-year, with a net income of $965 million.
Take the Pledge for Migrant Farm Worker Safety
A pledge for Niagara municipal candidates
Road Safety for AllEveryone deserves the freedom to move safely through their community. Migrant farm workers are asking candidates to commit to practical action so that every worker can get to work, reach essential services and return home safely.
Take the pledge Read the commitmentsFreedom of mobility
Road safety is about the freedom to live a full life.Freedom of mobility means being able to travel between work, home, grocery stores, health care, legal services and community without risking your life.
For many migrant farm workers, there is little or no public transit. Workers may have no choice but to walk or cycle on dark rural roads without safe shoulders, bike lanes, crossings or lighting to get privacy and access basic needs.
Essential Work. Invisible to public planning.Migrant workers have helped sustain Niagara’s farms and food economy for sixty years. Their labour is visible everywhere. Their safety, transportation needs and voices have too often been missing from road design, transit planning and government decisions.
They have names
These deaths and injuries are part of a pattern.At least seven migrant farm workers have been killed or seriously injured on Niagara roads since 2019. Behind that number are workers, neighbours, friends and family members.
2026 Sinhue GarciaSinhue was killed while cycling home on Concession 6 near Line 4 in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He was 39 years old and leaves behind his wife and two daughters in Mexico.
2019 ZenaidaZenaida, a Mexican farm worker and mother, was killed in a hit-and-run in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
2022 Fermin Soto Sanchez and two co-workersFermin was killed and two of his co-workers were seriously injured when they were struck near St. Catharines.
2022 Ceto ReidCeto, a Jamaican farm worker, was seriously injured while cycling home from a laundromat.
2023 OmarOmar, a migrant farm worker, was injured in a hit-and-run on Lakeshore Road.
Sinhue Garcia was a neighbour, a co-worker, a friend and a father. He deserved to get home safely. So does every migrant worker who comes to Niagara to work.
The Road Safety for All Pledge
Candidates who sign commit to:Working with migrant farm workers, community members, municipal staff and regional partners to advance the following actions.
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Create and fund a migrant farm worker road safety plan
Support multi-year funding for improved lighting, protected shoulders or bike lanes, traffic calming, safer crossings and lower speeds on routes used by workers.
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Complete a worker-led road safety audit and map
Ensure migrant farm workers directly identify dangerous roads, routes and destinations and help set priorities for action.
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Put worker-identified routes into municipal and regional plans
Use transportation and master planning processes to prioritize routes identified by migrant workers.
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Assign responsibility and report publicly on progress
Identify a lead Niagara Region staff person and provide at least two public reports to council each year: one before and one after the height of the agricultural season from May to September.
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Ensure migrant worker housing is safe and dignified
Support proactive inspections through Niagara Region Public Health, including access to basic facilities, privacy, adequate space and protection from unsafe conditions.
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Call for a coroner’s inquest
Publicly support an investigation into migrant farm worker road deaths and serious injuries in Niagara.
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Meet directly with migrant farm workers
Hold direct meetings with workers and release a public implementation plan during the first year of the new council.
What happens next
Residents will know where candidates stand.We will publish how candidates respond to this pledge on this website. Please check back for updates.
For municipal candidates
Sign the pledgeAdd your name to publicly commit to the Road Safety for All Pledge and to working directly with migrant farm workers on implementation.
By signing, you commit to supporting all seven actions listed above.Your contact information will be used to confirm your response and communicate with you about the pledge. Only information you have agreed to make public should be published.
Candidate pledge formPlease complete the form below. We will follow up to confirm your response.
The post Take the Pledge for Migrant Farm Worker Safety first appeared on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
The post Take the Pledge for Migrant Farm Worker Safety appeared first on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.
By KAY MATTHEWS
I was at the library to pick up a book on hold when I checked out the new books. There on the shelf was Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. As we’ve all seen on social media, Carlson’s recent admission that there was a genocide in Gaza and his outspoken opposition to the war in Iran, are omnipresent. I picked up the book, figuring I’d browse through and get a sense of how author Jason Zengerle, a journalist with the New York Times, was going to treat this controversial public figure’s influence on the zeitgeist.
The book ends, in 2025, just as Carlson is beginning to question, and sometimes apologize for, his defense of Israel in Gaza and of the country in general. While the timing isn’t right for the author to speculate about just how much these flip-flops are politically motivated or “of the heart,” it isn’t hard for the reader to speculate on that motivation, as the book is, as Zengerle says in the Introduction, “the larger story of conservative politics and conservative media over the last thirty years” that resulted in the rise of MAGA. I ended up reading the whole damn book.
We begin in 1995 at the Weekly Standard with Bill Kristol, the newly minted editor from academia and son of Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism.” His partner at the magazine is John Pomerantz, former editor of the Washington Times and son of Norman, longtime editor of Commentary. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch gives them seed money of $3 million to be the magazine of choice in Washington D.C. Fox News won’t come alive until 1996.
It was an auspicious entry for a 26-year-old neophyte journalist, but Carlson’s politics pretty much aligned with the Weekly Standard’s; a prep school boy whose father was also a conservative heavy weight. Names we still see today in journalism got their start along with Carlson: David Brooks (NYT); David Frum (Atlantic); and Matt Labash (Substack). Despite his lack of experience, according to Zengerle, Carlson wrote “some excellent and entertaining journalism.” He profiled many of the 90s leading political figures—Ross Perot, Jack Kemp, James Carville, and Al Gore—usually in rather withering prose. He took on Newt Gingrich, who the paper initially supported but then saw as “feckless” and timid. Carlson also took on Grover Norquist (the Standard let him publish it in The New Republic) as a “cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist.” He became known in Washington as a “different kind of conservative journalist,” although his stand against abortion was lock tight.
Maybe if Carlson had remained a magazine or newspaper reporter he’d have avoided the ultra-right pull of the MAGA movement (Frum and Brooks just became hackneyed conservatives but Labash is a MAGA). He had a short stint at Tina Brown’s Talk, profiling George W. Bush, who he deemed unfit for office, and always aspired to be like his idols—Hunter Thompson, George Plimpton, and A.J Liebling—but they were from a different era and this era was soon to become the internet and cable news, where Carlson landed as a talking head. Through sheer luck (he was the only one in the Standard office when CBS came calling) he appeared on CBS’s prime-time news show 48 Hours to talk about the O.J. Simpson trial. CNN then came calling during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. While Carlson continued his job at the Standard, whose other reporters often mocked him for his television work, it was clear he was rising in the talking heads world. The Standard saw they were losing him and offered to reduce his workload by half if he’d stay, but CNN offered him his own show, The Spin Room, with cohost Bill Press, the former left-leaning chair on Crossfire. Rupert Murdoch put the kibosh on Carson working for both the Standard and his competitor, CNN. While The Spin Room didn’t last long, Carlson got promoted anyway to Crossfire, the longtime political debate show between the right and left.
He was in his element at Crossfire, or as Zengerle put it, “Carlson wasn’t merely a pundit; he was the host of Washington’s most exclusive cocktail party.” But, as in all things political, after a skewering by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart CNN fired Carlson and cancelled Crossfire. He rebounded to MSNBC where he hosted The Situation with Tucker Carlson and spared with Rachel Maddow until that show, too, was canceled.
But it was his venture into website news, The Daily Caller, that was a real turning point for Carlson. At the beginning, Carlson felt the website could embody what he said at the CPAC meeting in 2009 where Rush Limbaugh was the keynote speaker: The conservative media was struggling because it “refused to put accuracy first” and instead prioritized bombast and opinion. Despite Tucker’s truth-telling as a bonafide journalist, The Daily Caller was, unfortunately, anything but. Once The Drudge Report, a hard-right website, and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News became its main competitors, the Caller’s relentless quest for “hits” turned it into another media full of “bombast and opinion.” While he had hired respectable journalists at the Calling, he ended up hiring others who promoted white nationalism and racism.
Fox News was then in its ascendancy, and while Carlson initially took a condescending view—he dismissed its biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, as a “thin-skilled blowhard”—he recognized its hard right ideological success. Because of his reputation as a fairly open-minded TV host with a good sense of humor, author Zengerle has this to say about his role at Fox News: “He became a partisan shill.”
Carlson was hired at Fox News while still at the Daily Caller, and his ascendency was slow. Zengerle provides a brief history of the development of Fox News under Roger Ailes and its relentless right turn during the Obama administration, with Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly leading the way. Once Trump announced in 2014 that he would run for president, Ailes saw immediately that he was “good for Fox News ratings” (Rupert Murdoch was not so convinced).
Until Trump’s presidential run Carlson was by no means a fan. But during his years at Daily Caller he’d “seen the web-traffic metrics” about where the conservative base was heading and “how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance, and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.” Five days before the election Fox News announced its new 7:00 pm show: Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
The last section of Zengerle’s book analyzes Carlson’s relationship with Trump over his two administrations. The first, in which Carlson “kept a wary personal and professional distance from the president” while the president watched his show every night and often called him afterwards to discuss it, led to Carlson’s planning his show with an eye towards influencing the president. While he actually became a moderating influence on aggressive foreign policy, he was steered right, both politically and culturally by a group called the NatCons, or national conservatives, born of think tanks like the Claremont Institute that “were either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard brain populism.” In July 2020, Tucker Carson Tonight became the highest-rated program in US cable news history.
During the presidential interregnum Carlson kept his options open, flip-flopping on the January 6, 2020 storming of the Capitol from condemnation to “a mob of older people from unfashionable zip codes” and anchoring Fox News investigative long-form documentaries. He also befriended J.D. Vance in his rise to power and advocated for his senate run. Then, abruptly, in 2023, Fox News fired Carlson with no explanation. He had plenty of offers—one from Elon Musk—but by this time “the world was his oyster” and with billionaires stepping up he quickly formed his new digital-media company, the Tucker Carlson Network. This is where he whole-heartedly endorsed Trump’s second run and this time, he was the one to call Trump on the phone. He supported Vance for vice-president, helped persuade Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to not split the ticket, and was now an inside man.
Tucker Carlson Network is where we also hear him pontificating on anti-immigration and abortion while decrying the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s Iran war. I think most left-leaning pundits remain skeptical of his motivations but certainly welcome the anti-Zionist position he now promotes (although it’s more like pro-Christianity anti-Zionism). It may move us closer to the end of MAGA, but the tragedy is the damage already done. And for that, maybe Carlson will be remembered as being hated by everyone.
Iran War, Soaring Prices Drive Record Oil Profits
U.S. President Donald Trump’s misguided war against Iran has caused another shock in global oil prices – the 14th such shock in the last half-century. World oil prices rose 50% or more after the war started, and have stayed high despite Trump’s repeated promises to stop the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. These price increases are is driving massive increases in profits for petroleum companies around the world – including Canada.
Canada produces three times more oil than it consumes. And while Canada imports small amounts of oil to the eastern provinces, almost none of that is sourced from the Persian Gulf. Hence there is no significant impact of the war on our domestic supply volumes or costs.
Nevertheless, because of a policy choice to tie domestic oil and petroleum product prices to global benchmarks (allowing oil producers to charge Canadians world prices for their own oil, on pain of diverting supply to more lucrative foreign markets), Canadian petroleum prices have soared in tandem.
The combination of sky-high prices with stable production costs is producing a profit windfall for Canadian petroleum companies. This is confirmed by the recent release of financial reports by publicly-traded Canadian oil companies for the second quarter of 2026.
The table below summarizes after-tax earnings and other metrics for the four largest publicly-traded Canadian producers. Their combined revenues (net of royalty payments) grew almost 50% in the April-June period, compared to the year-earlier period, thanks to the effect of Trump’s war on world prices.
After-tax profits rose more dramatically, since production costs remained largely unchanged. After-tax profits at the big four more than doubled: rising 144% compared to the second quarter of 2025, reaching a combined total of $13.3 billion. That’s almost $150 million per day in after-tax profit over the three-month period.
These four companies represent only a portion of the Canadian petroleum sector. Financial results for many companies (including wholly-owned subsidiaries of foreign oil companies) are never publicly reported. However, Statistics Canada publishes helpful financial data on an industry-wide basis. That data for the second quarter of 2026 will be released later in August.
Extrapolated to apply to the broad Canadian petroleum sector (upstream and downstream), the big four’s results suggest that second-quarter industry-wide profits could reach $30 billion (up from $12.6 billion in the second quarter of 2025). Canadian oil profits for the full year could reach $100 billion. That would set a new all-time record, smashing the peak $68 billion after-tax profit the industry recorded in 2022 (when oil prices were similarly shocked following the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
What are the oil companies doing with this record profit flow? There is no robust pattern of reinvestment in new Canadian projects. In fact, excluding acquisitions of other companies and properties (which does not represent an increase in real investment), capital spending by the big four companies actually declined slightly in the second quarter (compared to the year earlier period).
Instead, their main priority is to pay out so-called “excess cash” to company owners, in the form of increased dividend payments and share buy-back programs. Companies buy back their shares as a way of boosting share prices (this benefits company executives, too, through share-based compensation systems). The four majors spent over $6 billion on share purchases and dividend payments in the second quarter, up by almost $2 billion from like period 2026.
Hopes that booming oil profits will lead to new investment and jobs in the petroleum sector are being dashed by the priority these firms are placing on cash payouts, rather than reinvestments.
But the combination of record profits and rapid share buybacks has been great for company owners. Share prices at the big four majors have increased by an average of 45% since the start of the year. Most of those gains are captured by the wealthiest minority of the population. Other Canadians experience only higher costs and declining real incomes.
Research on the distribution of global oil profits during the 2022 price spike confirms that each oil shock further redistributes income upward. Global oil profits almost doubled that year, to nearly $1 trillion (U.S.). In the U.S., 50% of those gains were received by the richest 1% of the population; the bottom 50% of the population got almost none. A less extreme, but similar, pattern prevails in Canada.
In the meantime, oil-fueled inflation remains a threat to living standards and economic performance for most Canadians – those who do not own significant equity holdings in oil companies. Inflation has increased again in Canada since the Iran war started (just as it did in 2022 after the oil shock accompanying the invasion of Ukraine).
Spillover price increases for other goods and services (whose costs of production also increase due to high petroleum prices) will amplify inflationary pressures. And if the Bank of Canada responds with higher interest rates (as it will if above-target inflation persists), Canadians will be punished further with higher interest costs, on top of sky-high gasoline prices and faster broader inflation.
The current oil price shock, just the latest in an ongoing pattern of global price volatility, confirms that fossil fuel prices are the greatest threat to affordability and living standards for Canadian workers and consumers. Please follow the Centre for Future Work’s False Profits project for more details on the impact of oil prices on prices, real wages, and inequality in Canada.
The post Iran War, Soaring Prices Drive Record Oil Profits appeared first on Centre for Future Work.
Love Our Public Lands? That Means Maintaining Them
What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us
This article What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the National Guard’s occupation of Washington, D.C., it’s worth pausing to learn what D.C. resistance has to teach us — especially heading into the midterms.
Many of us are carrying real fear about how far Trump might go to interfere with this election. Our fear isn’t unwarranted. But it doesn’t have to be ungrounded, either. Yes, he will say outrageous things. Yes, the heads of the Department of Justice and FBI are trying to keep power for their boss and intimidate voter rights groups. Yes, if Trump could stop elections he would.
But an authoritarian who has to sabotage an election is doing it from a place of weakness. Trump is not Narendra Modi, who steadily gained popularity (until a grassroots “cockroach” movement turned the tables). Trump is in political freefall with cratering poll numbers and is lashing out; his only path to retain power is undermining the will of voters.
Much of his weakness now has to do with how our movements have harnessed backfire. Trump’s use of ICE is limited by the fierce national resistance to his paramilitary. Backlash against the voter suppression of Callais brought Black voters in Alabama and other states to the polls in force. Trump’s power of controlling narrative isn’t as strong as it used to be. Even Fox News avoided re-airing his recent rant about the 2020 election. Admittedly we have more to do, but he is overreaching — his seizure of ballots in Fulton County in January to boost his Big Lie only woke up more people in the election protection space to the threat he posed.
#newsletter-block_d8c687347d79a9372019a397973704fd { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_d8c687347d79a9372019a397973704fd #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterSo rather than let our fears run wild, we can ground them in what’s already happened and how people responded. That’s the idea behind my “Election Defense Scenarios” book. It’s an attempt to lay out the scenarios of election sabotage — from National Guard at the polls to disinformation, Department of Justice threats and last-minute rule changes. In many cases, we don’t have to imagine what might happen — we can look to very recent history.
D.C. is one of the clearest examples we have. The city faced a wide array of threats and prepared for the June 16 primary without letting fear set the terms. Here’s what they did.
D.C.’s challengesSome of the challenges were the ordinary kind that come with any election reform. D.C.’s primary was the first election in the city’s history to use ranked-choice voting, after voters approved Initiative 83 in 2024. That meant there had to be a real voter education lift — organizers needed to teach people how ranking works. And there were the usual worries about longer lines as poll workers and voters adjusted to a new system.
But bigger issues loomed. By election time, D.C. had been living with a federalized National Guard presence for nearly a year, including a month-long federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department the previous summer. Ahead of the July 4 “America 250” celebrations, federal officials announced a “summer surge” that added roughly 2,500 more troops, bringing the total in the city to over 5,000.
The threat of the National Guard loomed large. At an estimated cost of over $1 billion per year for Trump’s domestic deployments, the National Guard has harassed citizens and decreased trust in the military. During the 2020 election, organizers say, National Guard troops had been deployed following Black Lives Matter protests and reportedly told people in line they had to get out of line to enforce the city’s curfew — an incident that went undocumented because no one had thought to film it in the moment.
Surprisingly, National Guards were deployed from Democratic-led states, including Michigan (and immediately after the election, Minnesota and Hawaii). At least Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has since removed its troops.
Previous CoverageUsing National Guards to interfere with elections was repeatedly threatened. As the Brennan Center reported, “It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Yet, Trump said, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling locations.
Alongside the troops came fears of political interference — a worry sharpened by D.C.’s unusual constitutional position. Congress controls D.C.’s budget and has repeatedly attempted to gut the city’s local governance. When President Trump was asked what he’d do if Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George — a self-described democratic socialist whose campaign was frequently compared to Zohran Mamdani’s — won the mayoral primary, he answered, “I wouldn’t like it — and maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it.” Organizers couldn’t dismiss the threat as bluster. It had legal teeth: Congress and the president hold unique levers over the city.
Each location has different conditions and scenarios. But no matter where you are, we can still learn a lot from what D.C. did to make their election a success.
The GOTV machine kept runningGroups with get-out-the-vote chops, like grassroots movement Free DC, ran the playbook for turning out voters. They did things like matching voter files to canvassing tools, texting unregistered residents and working precinct by precinct to make the case for coming out to vote. Free DC in particular leaned into its base-building structure. It gave volunteers the tools to text out surveys asking people when they planned to vote, then follow up with 20 people closest to them whom they’d personally commit to reaching.
It’s classic deep-organizing infrastructure, repurposed for a high-fear election environment. Because the threats loomed so large, many organizers wondered if turnout would sink. In the end, good organizing plus frustration over being occupied for nearly a year drove the highest primary turnout since 1994.
But turnout operations don’t answer the question: What do you do about troops near the polls?
Build a coalition where none existedD.C. needed more robust election protection infrastructure than it had before. The DC Election Protection Coalition came together under the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Advancement Project, alongside Free DC, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, the Washington Interfaith Network and more than 100 other partner organizations.
They trained hundreds of nonpartisan volunteers, who were divided into two tracks: election protection field attorneys (for people with legal backgrounds) and grassroots poll monitors (for everyone else). Both were stationed outside voting locations across all eight wards to answer questions and help resolve problems as they came up.
Long before Election Day, National Guard troops became one of those problems. The official election protection hotline fielded a report that the National Guard was outside a drop off box in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. Keya Chatterjee, co-founder of Free DC, decided to go check out the situation. When she arrived, she immediately whipped out her phone, capturing a video of armed Florida National Guards members right outside one of D.C.’s 450-pound, six-foot, double-locked ballot boxes. The Guard members said they had not been told to stay away and showed no knowledge they were apparently infringing on the law.
Keya’s documentation forced a response. After footage was shared with the D.C. Attorney General and Board of Elections, they opened a direct line to the Joint Task Force overseeing Guard operations in the city — and got a written commitment that troops would keep a 50-foot distance from polling locations on Election Day (an affirmation, at least, of what the law says).
This move did several things. Yes, it smoothed the way for a cleaner election. But the video confrontation went viral and helped model handling fear in productive ways. Seeing Keya talk directly to the National Guard showed residents how to stick up for their rights — a behavior a few folks would end up having to do on Election Day.
Train monitorsEveryone in the coalition wanted to reduce people’s fear. They didn’t always agree on how.
The traditional election protection approach for communicating with the public tends to minimize threats. The instinct is to keep messaging that elections are being run freely and fairly. But D.C. residents are already living the violence of Trump’s occupation.
Federal marshals shot and killed Julian Bailey in northeast D.C. in February. Car pursuits by the U.S. Park Police resulted in at least two deaths, including bystander Nolberto Meza, after the agency loosened restrictions on high-speed chases. And a damning report from Brookings Institution shows that nearly 7 in 1,000 children in D.C. have had a parent snatched away by ICE or other federal agents. In such a context, speaking to people’s lived experience is more reassuring than disguising the ugly truth.
The advice to name the threats maps onto recent messaging research. Following extensive qualitative and quantitative testing, ASO Communications and others found, “speaking about the anti-voter agenda increases self-reported desire among pro-voter Americans to feel concern over this agenda (+5-10 [percent] over the course of the survey), to engage in politics (70 percent are more motivated), and to motivate friends to vote (+5 [percent] over survey). We can frame voting as an act of resistance.” They noted that concrete descriptors about how the regime is keeping people from voting created the greatest engagement.
The DC Election Protection Coalition took up that approach as they trained their monitors.
Free D.C. organizers host a “vote-in” on June 3, casting ballots during early voting ahead of the primary election. (Free DC)The two approaches weren’t always perfectly in sync. Some election protection trainers taught volunteers to document, document, document if they saw Guard troops acting illegally — take horizontal videos for the widest capturing of information and file a formal incident report. By contrast (even sometimes in the same training!) grassroots groups’ guidance put the emphasis on making sure the voter in front of you got to vote right now — heckle, press, advocate directly for the Guard to leave, rather than only documenting for later.
Those need not be contradictory instincts so much as complementary ones — document for accountability (and video tape!), intervene for the person standing in line. And coalitions built for a genuine crisis rarely resolve every tactical disagreement in advance. What made the coalition work wasn’t perfect unanimity — it was offering space for each group to share its approach knowing we’re moving in the same direction.
Expand the circleElection protection efforts are too often narrowly built around technical expertise in election work. By building the coalition with grassroots mobilizers at the table, it brought in the expertise of those who knew how to rapidly mobilize. To combat the often fractured disconnect between grassroots election work and traditional election protection, Freedom Trainers and All Voting is Local, as one example, have teamed up to host cross-silo sessions between these groups to strengthen ties.
One of the D.C. coalition’s sharper moves was pulling in local rapid response and mutual aid networks so they were feeding into the same control room as the election protection operation. That meant in addition to information like “which polling place has a printer problem,” groups like Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid fed into a citywide picture, including neighborhood locations of ICE activity and checkpoints. That meant volunteers had better information about what was going on across the neighborhood that day.
The day of the electionJune 16 brought the ordinary hiccups of any election — printers breaking, standard supply issues — but D.C.’s neighborhood-level organizing infrastructure meant problems got solved fast. In the summer heat, one neighborhood network located a leftover cooler of water and got it to a polling site to help overheated voters and volunteers. In Columbia Heights and the other seven sites approved to stay open past the normal closing time because of long lines, volunteers swarmed with snacks and drinks to help people stay in line as long as it took.
There were also multiple National Guard interactions that went unreported. According to Keya Chatterjee, West End Library did have National Guards come into the poll site. Monitors were already at the site and immediately began telling them to leave and filming the confrontation with armed troops. Monitors repeatedly insisted the military had no legal basis to be there, and after forceful haranguing, the troops left without further incident.
A decision then had to be made: Do we release this or not? I can’t speak to the exact decision-making, but the reports of the National Guard at polling sites appeared sporadic (not a coordinated threat) and had limited impact because monitors moved fast. It seems voters still voted.
All this affirms the mantra of “record, record, record.” Even if it ends up not being released to the public, getting the facts on record is critical.
The plans that didn’t happenBecause ranked-choice tabulation can take days if no candidate wins a first-choice majority, organizers built a “patience campaign” in advance — a plan to spend up to a week reminding people that a delayed result is not a stolen one, and that counting ballots correctly takes time.
They also built a second, sharper contingency in case results were seriously contested or tampered with: a template borrowed from their experience organizing on May Day 2026. People were told if things went seriously wrong, to recreate the May Day activity — morning intersection blockades, a midday march to the Capitol, evening gatherings — all under a “no work, no school, no shopping” banner.
It did not have to be activated. But having a real plan for nonviolent noncooperation ready was itself part of what let residents and organizers approach Election Day with confidence instead of dread.
The threat isn’t over — and neither is the lessonTrump’s “take back Washington” threat hasn’t gone away just because the primary is over. Bills to weaken D.C. home rule continue through Congress, and the National Guard’s presence has been extended through the end of Trump’s current term — to the next presidential inauguration in January 2029.
D.C. has to take the takeover threat seriously, knowing not all threats will materialize.
As D.C. is marking one year of occupation, Free DC is inviting organizations and elected officials to sign on in opposition to the troops’ presence. The ask uses simple messaging like, “Publicly oppose any effort to prevent the seating of duly elected officials representing D.C. or any other jurisdiction.” And from individuals, Free DC is seeking support asking governors to get their troops out of D.C..
But D.C.’s story matters well beyond D.C. What happens in D.C. affects us all. And heading into the midterms, what happened during the primary is some of the clearest evidence we have for how to prepare for what’s coming.
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DonateFolks working on election protection need to get more comfortable with confrontation. A recent guide on responding to National Guard at polling places somehow left out D.C.’s lessons entirely. They said, yes, document — but there was no mention of confronting the National Guard as D.C. monitors did, telling troops they aren’t legally allowed to be here and insisting that they leave.
On the other hand, those of us coming out of organizing need to learn and respect the rules that already govern election work, and recognize we’re not the first people to think seriously about defending an election. There’s a deep well of experience to draw on, from movements across the U.S. and around the world — which is a lot of why I wrote the “Election Defense Scenarios” booklet with stories from each scenario.
What’s clear throughout is that we can defend our elections. Don’t get bogged down by the noise and while you can take every threat seriously, it doesn’t mean they’re all going to happen — and they may be calculated just to slow you down. So keep on the work, building with people across silos and teaching people to stand up for their rights.
This article What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
An Orwellian Mockery of Critical Theory
Originally published in New Politics’ summer 2026 issue
Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?
By: Gabriel Rockhill
Monthly Review Press, 2025
Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (or Pipers) is a neo-Stalinist hatchet job targeting the German intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who associated with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research before, during, and in some cases after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. The collective work of the Institute, otherwise called the Frankfurt School, is widely known as Critical Theory. In Pipers, Rockhill accuses the dissident Western Marxist tradition, of which Critical Theory has played an important part, of accommodating and even advancing capitalism and Western imperialism during the Cold War.
In line with Monthly Review’s Marxist-Leninist politics, Rockhill leaves no doubt that he intends to defend the so-called Second Camp—the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, or PRC—in Pipers (27–33, 64). To this point, in his review of Pipers, Russell Jacoby asks: “[Rockhill] never mentions North Korea, but why not?”1 Given the author’s explicit allegiances, for him to present simplistic and reductive takes on the Frankfurt School is to be expected. Still, in Pipers, the misinformation is in overdrive.
After all, Rockhill’s tedious and repetitive style reads like a mix of Soviet agitprop, rants by Lyndon LaRouche (as Matt McManus points out), and the “salacious gossip column” that Radhika Desai oddly hails in her promotional blurb.2 Rockhill reproduces the Stalinist-Dengist myth that only the Western ruling classes are imperialist, thus ignoring the continuities linking the Tsarist Empire, the USSR, and post–Soviet Russia on the one hand, and Imperial China and the PRC on the other (33–4, 64, 155). As John Rees explains in his review, Rockhill is thus “keen to set up a mutually reinforcing dualism where there is only ‘really existing socialism’ and ‘CIA funded anti-communism.’”3
Beyond ignoring the myriad atrocities perpetrated by the managers of Soviet and Chinese state capitalism, this binary approach in favor of the Second Camp lends itself to exaggeration and spectacle. It excludes the possibility of Third-Camp socialism, which rejects the hegemony of Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. Indeed, notes Richard Gilman-Opalsky, the author views even “Trotskyists and left-wing communists” as “imperialist tools.”4 As a matter of fact, Rockhill writes about “plenty of evidence” for a “Trotskyism-to-CIA pipeline,” while citing none—in keeping with the Stalinist school of falsification (261).5
In reality, as Charles Reitz emphasizes in his review, the Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse wrote “33 Theses toward the Military Defeat of Hitler-Fascism” in 1947. “33 Theses” predicts that, in the post–World War II context, the victorious Western powers would become increasingly neo-fascist and aggressively anti-Soviet. As such, writes Reitz, it “does not draw social theory into a camp compatible with U.S. imperialism,” but “quite the contrary.”6 Later, Marcuse penned the militant essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), which calls for the “revocation of free speech rights to fascists [and] racists,” in Reitz’s words.7 Unsurprisingly, Rockhill ignores both of these Marcusean essays and only briefly mentions the right-wing threats made against Marcuse’s life following the publication of “Repressive Tolerance” and its author’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (179, 306).
In this review, I will challenge Rockhill’s ahistorical approach, debunk the author’s reductive equation of Critical Theory with “anticommunism,” and contest his claim that Marcuse was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset.
Rockhill’s DistortionsRockhill ahistorically presents the “actually existing socialist” (AES) regimes as “seek[ing] the uplift of all,” while ignoring the plight of workers, peasants, women, colonial subjects, and sexual and ethno-religious minorities in the USSR and PRC (46). Rockhill announces that he seeks to “rejuvenate class struggle in theory,” yet fails to recognize class struggle within “projects of socialist sovereignty” (54–5). He cites Vladimir Lenin’s criticism of the social sciences’ defense of wage-slavery, but fails to mention Lenin’s own enthusiasm for Taylorism and state capitalism, and the Bolshevik leader’s imposition of bourgeois management onto enterprises that had previously come to be self-managed by workers in the Russian Revolution (73–5). Rockhill suggests that AES “has not been an unmitigated disaster,” but rather is “preferable for the overwhelming majority of people and the planet,” without acknowledging China or the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear stockpiles and carbon emissions, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, the desiccation of the Aral Sea, the Gulag, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or genocide perpetrated in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Tibet, and Xinjiang (171).
In Orwellian fashion, Rockhill mispresents Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union as anti-fascist, hence glossing over not only the Stalinist betrayal of the Republic and the workers during the Spanish Civil War, but also the Nazi-Soviet Pact that partitioned Poland and launched World War II. Rockhill denounces McCarthyism and the FBI’s targeted assassinations, but not the KGB or the Stalinist Terror. He observes that West German “intelligence services [were] stocked with former Nazis,” but forgets that much of the same was true of the Stasi, the East German secret police (207).8 He objects to “the practice of academically laundering state propaganda” and intellectual “[c]ollaboration with powerful state agencies” in the West, but not, apparently, under AES (34, 38–9, 220).
Orwell considered one’s openness to condemning the USSR to be “the test of intellectual honesty” for fellow leftists.9 Rockhill would have utterly failed his test. After all, the author of Pipers cannot appreciate Jacoby’s point, that, “[h]ad the Frankfurt scholars fled to the ‘really existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union and not the United States, they would have ceased to really exist in Soviet camps” (emphasis added). He never mentions the former Makhnovist Peter Arshinov, whom the Stalinist regime executed in 1937 for ostensibly attempting to resurrect anarchism in the USSR, much less the allegorical fate of the fictional love interest Larissa Antipova in Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957): namely, to perish in the Gulag.10 Nevertheless, Rockhill gleefully highlights the CIA’s opportunistic role in publishing Doctor Zhivago in Russian (138).
Rockhill falsely equates Critical Theory and Western Marxism with “imperial theory” and “imperial Marxism,” respectively, and accuses the Critical Theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno of being “radical recuperators” (47, 145, 178). He renames the Frankfurt School the “Washington School,” given that many of its associates worked for the U.S. government at one time or another. He does so, while barely acknowledging that the Frankfurt School legal scholar Franz Neumann served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials (244–5).
In reality, Rockhill excludes what Adorno identified as the “new categorical imperative imposed by Hitler upon unfree [humanity]”: to “arrange [our] thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”11 He guards silence around Marcuse’s equivalent formulation: “[t]he goal of radical change today is the emergence of human beings who are physically and mentally incapable of inventing another Auschwitz.”12 In this vein, Gilman-Opalsky, McManus, and fellow reviewers Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss rightly emphasize that Pipers features “naught but the most fleeting consideration of the historical confrontation” with antisemitism and the Holocaust in the post–World War II context, much less sympathy for the Critical Theorists as leftist and Jewish exiles fleeing Nazi Germany.
Communist Critical TheoryThere is plenty of counter-evidence to Pipers’ main claims about the history of the Frankfurt School—especially to Rockhill’s complaint that Critical Theory is irredeemably “anticommunist” and pro-Western imperialism. These charges fail on practical and theoretical grounds.
To begin with, in winter 1926–1927, Institute affiliate Walter Benjamin visited Moscow, where he witnessed the Kremlin “trying to bring about a suspension of militant communism.” Reading Pipers, one would not know either that Benjamin had been contemplating joining the German Communist Party at the time, or that his Latvian partner, Asja Lacis, would be imprisoned in the Gulag.13 Tellingly, Rockhill’s own research reveals that Neumann served as a Soviet spy (codename “Ruff”) during World War II (252–9). This finding seriously undermines Rockhill’s whole argument about Critical Theory’s “anticommunism,” as does Pipers’ revelation that the KGB was interested in recruiting none other than… Marcuse himself! Plus, the FBI files on Adorno and Marcuse that Rockhill shares in the Appendix describe the former as mingling with “Communist[s]” at a 1944 “Musicians’ Congress” in California, and the latter as a dangerous “Extremist” and “Key Activist” of the New Left! (370–89)
Theoretically speaking, Horkheimer’s early writings also disprove Rockhill’s claims. Meditating in his diaries Dawn & Decline, the young Horkheimer declares, “One has to fight for socialism […].” He decries “the horrible exploitation apparatus at work in the partly or wholly colonial territories,” adding that “the mass misery in India, China, Africa boggles the mind.” He expresses loyalty to the Soviet experiment:
It is extremely difficult to say what conditions are like there. I do not claim to know where the country is going; there is undoubtedly much misery […]. Anyone who has the eyes to see will view events in Russia as the continuing painful attempt to overcome this terrible social injustice. At the very least, he will ask with a throbbing heart whether it is still under way.14
Clearly, this is not the “compatible” theory to which Rockhill reduces Critical Theory (183). While there is much for which to criticize Horkheimer and Adorno—including their opportunistic collaboration with the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, 183–4), and, above all, Horkheimer’s support for the Vietnam War—a dialectical analysis would give credit to Horkheimer’s revolutionary youth. Likewise, the fragments of Adornian radicalism that persisted until a premature death (provoked partly by student protests) should be acknowledged, from Adorno’s co-editing of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and writing of Minima Moralia (1951), to his identifying the Vietnam War as the continuation of Auschwitz, calling on a “self-conscious global subject [to] develop and intervene,” and affirming the principle of hope in Negative Dialectics (1969) and “Resignation” (1969).15 It is notable, too, that Edward Said declares in Culture and Imperialism (1994) that Adorno is a “cultural and philological criti[c] whom I revere.”16
Besides Marcuse, Neumann, and Horkheimer and Adorno (at least partly), Benjamin further refutes Rockhill’s allegation about the Frankfurt School being accommodationist. As with the numerous gaps in his coverage of Critical Theory overall, Rockhill does not dwell on the messianic revolutionism expressed in Benjamin’s writings, such as the unfinished Arcades Project or “On the Concept of History” (1940). Instead, he seeks to portray Horkheimer as abandoning his ostensible comrade Benjamin to near-certain death in Nazi-occupied Europe (197–200). Fearing imminent deportation to the Nazis, Benjamin took his life in 1940 in the Catalan border-town of Portbou after failing to cross undetected from France through the Pyrenees mountains. The alleged text of his suicide note, which requests that his “thoughts” be transmitted “to my friend Adorno,” and for “the situation in which I find myself” to be explained to him, goes unmentioned in Pipers—as does Marcuse’s tribute to him at the close of One-Dimensional Man (1964).17
In terms of international politics, it is undeniable that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse criticized the Second Camp during the Cold War. Still, Rockhill cannot concede that they had good reason to do so as Critical Theorists, given that AES has long shielded itself from criticism by presenting itself as faithfully following Marxist prescriptions. Accordingly, Marcuse presents a brilliant critique of the USSR’s evident betrayal of Marxian theory and adoption of technological rationality in Soviet Marxism (1958), while Adorno condemned Russian fascism in socialist guise and the “murder of countless millions” carried out by AES regimes (186).18
Marcuse: A Revolutionary Intellectual, Not a CIA AgentBefore joining academia in the mid-1950s, Marcuse worked at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the State Department—not the CIA. Following his separation from government service, Marcuse became increasingly open about his revolutionary perspectives. The Marxian imperative of transforming the world clearly resonates in Eros and Civilization (1955), a utopian volume that Rockhill mentions only once, briefly—just as he mentions Freud, the book’s object of dialectical criticism, only in passing (15, 326–7). As a movement elder, Marcuse publicly supported his former graduate student Angela Davis during her persecution by the U.S. government and subsequent political imprisonment, and he donated to the Black Panther Party, as Rockhill’s own research shows (311n228). Writing in The Marcusean Mind (2025), Sid Simpson observes that Marcuse “largely ignores the dynamics occurring in the colonies,” though I believe that the thinker’s public opposition to the Vietnam War and the analysis he provides of the political situation in several post-colonies in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) may provide mitigating circumstances.19
By contrast with the false version propagated in Pipers, whereby Marcuse only saw the proverbial light late in life (306–9), the thinker was nearly a lifelong radical: as a conscript during World War I, he joined the Social Democratic Party and defended Berlin’s Alexanderplatz from right-wing gangs during the German Revolution. His doctoral dissertation, The German Artist-Novel (1922), links authentic art with revolutionary social change—a theme Marcuse revisits in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). As the recently deceased junior Critical Theorist Jürgen Habermas would do later, Marcuse broke with his former mentor Martin Heidegger for embracing Nazism. In Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse presents a progressive-revolutionary interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel and German Idealism. “Repressive Tolerance” is a call to arms that resonates to this day.
In sum, Marcuse was a revolutionary, anti-fascist intellectual: he was no “agent of empire” (267–71). Although Rockhill links Horkheimer and Adorno to the CCF, he must try a different tack to try to discredit Marcuse. To clarify, although the author of Pipers sometimes equates “OSS/CIA” (246), the OSS (1942–1945) was not the CIA (1947–present). Whereas Rockhill includes evidence of the CIA connections of several of Marcuse’s mentors and contacts while at OSS and State, this does not prove that Marcuse worked for the CIA. Neither does the fact that the Agency distributed some of his books in Eastern Europe during the Cold War (137, 271–88). The comment by Habermas that Rockhill cites about Marcuse returning to post-war Germany as an “officer of the U.S. army” likely refers to his being an OSS intelligence officer rather than an officer of the CIA, which didn’t exist at the time (269).
Most controversially, Rockhill cites the Soviet mouthpiece Pravda, articles published in the late 1960s in the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor magazine, and claims made by the journalist Leo Matthias as the basis for the charge that Marcuse was an “Agent of Imperialism” and/or a CIA agent (268–9). Rockhill does not care to mention the antisemitic tropes Matthias employed in thus slandering Marcuse, as highlighted by his friend Günther Anders.20 In fact, historian Tim Müller, one of Rockhill’s main sources, candidly told him in a 2024 YouTube interview that he could “not find anything in the sources that would support” the claim made by Matthias.21 That did not stop Rockhill from repeating it in Pipers.
ConclusionIn closing, Pipers amounts to absurdist theater. It is a warmed-over reprise of the dystopian falsification that underpinned the Stalinist Show Trials. Rockhill defames the Critical Theorists, especially Marcuse, in keeping with this Orwellian tradition of falsification. Lamentably, Pipers plays on antisemitic conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” while underplaying the importance that Critical Theory places on identifying and overcoming antisemitism, other forms of racism, and authoritarianism.22 Rockhill expresses disdain toward the Frankfurt School’s “esthetes” and “intellectual free agents,” whose Critical Theory carries on the legacy of the radical Enlightenment through its “generalized critique of domination,” in line with his pushing of obscurantism and lies in defense of state capitalism and the Second Camp (151, 187–8).
Notes1. Russell Jacoby, “No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot,” Jacobin, April 18, 2026.
2. Matt McManus, “Western Marxism through the Looking Glass,” Damage Magazine, April 8, 2026.
3. John Rees, “Not a Rockhill to die on,” Counterfire, Jan. 2, 2026.
4. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, “‘Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?’” Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, April 2, 2026.
5. Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part One),” Historical Materialism.
6. Charles Reitz, “When Marxist Intellectuals Collaborated with the CIA,” CounterPunch, 12 Dec. 2025 (emphasis in original).
7. Charles Reitz, Herbert Marcuse as Social Justice Educator: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2025), 7.
8. Deutsche Welle, “Book Claims Stasi Employed Nazis as Spies,” DW, 31 Oct. 2005.
9. Eric Laursen, The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 115 (emphasis in original).
10. Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917–1921, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 283.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 365.
12. Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation: Collected Papers, Vol. 5, eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London: Routledge), 213.
13. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 9n3, 53.
14. Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: Notes, 1926–1931 & 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 36, 66, 72.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 85.
16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 316.
17. Samantha Rose Hill, “Walter Benjamin’s Last Work,” LA Review of Books, Dec. 9, 2019.
18. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto,” trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 2011), 49.
19. Sid Simpson, “Herbert Marcuse and the Post-Colonial: Missed Connections with Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Winter, and Aimé Cesairé,” in The Marcusean Mind, eds. Eduardo Altheman C. Santos et al. (London: Routledge), 71.
20. Günther Anders, Gut, dass wir einmal die hot potatoes ausgraben, eds. Reinhard Ellensohn and Kerstin Putz (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2022), 127. Thanks to Ulrich Plass for this citation.
21. Gabriel Rockhill, “Marcuse and the U.S. National Security State: Cold War Discourse, with Tim Müller,” YouTube, 13 July 2024.
22. Lars Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2017).
Your gas car works fine. Consider an EV anyway, scientists say.
A few years ago, environmental scientist Elliot Campbell went around asking people why they would, or would not, switch to an electric vehicle. A surprising number of them asked him a question in return: Because building an EV generates emissions, isn’t it better for the planet just to keep my gas car running for as long as possible?
Campbell, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, didn’t know the answer, so he set out to find it. Turns out the old adage that the greenest car is the one in your driveway is a myth. In fact, his study, published today in the journal Science, finds that swapping even a two-year-old gas car for an EV leads to a lifetime emissions savings of roughly 50 percent.
Not everyone can afford to ditch a nearly new car, of course. It’s simply the most extreme example of the broader point his study revealed: The emissions saved by driving an EV very quickly compensate for the planet-warming gases generated by building it. Campbell said that finding consistently surprises his students, and goes against his own instincts.
“I like to repair things and keep them going,” he said. But, “we found there is a big advantage to retiring the gas vehicles early.”
Campbell designed the study to give internal combustion vehicles every possible advantage. “We really tipped the scales in favor of the gas vehicle,” he said. Most notably, it ignored the emissions that went into making the gas car, treating them instead as a sunk cost. EV still came out ahead, which suggests that climate-conscious drivers should make the switch as soon as it’s feasible.
“You’re just delaying the benefits longer and longer,” he said, noting that sidelining gas guzzlers off the road can improve air quality as well. This is especially true for cars that were built to less stringent standards, added David Reichmuth, a transportation sustainability expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The magnitude of the benefits for getting an older gasoline vehicle,” he said, “can be much higher in terms of the air pollution.”
Reichmuth was not involved with Campbell’s study, but said it aligns with his own work on the issue. His analysis found that EVs reach an emissions break-even point at around 18,000 miles, which the average driver travels in about 18 months. That, however, depends on where a person lives and the source of their electricity.
The benefit is greatest where the grid is greenest. In upstate NY, which generates a lot of hydroelectric power, getting around in an EV is like driving a gas car that gets 219 mpg. But even in the Rockies, where coal and natural gas are the norm, an EV is better than anything getting less than 68 mpg.
Campbell’s study identified few exceptions to the conclusion that replacing a gas car with an electric one significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Even moving away from high-efficiency vehicles and hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, is a climate win in the long-run. One case where it wouldn’t make sense, Campbell and his co-author found, is with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which have larger batteries and travel farther on electric power before switching to an internal combustion engine. Another is low mileage situations, such as with a second car that doesn’t get used that often.
“To me, this is the biggest factor,” said Moaz Uddin, senior electric vehicle policy specialist at the think tank Great Plains Institute, about mileage. He gave the example of a retiree who only drives their Prius a few thousand miles a year. “It’s good that the study considers that.”
The new research finds that in order to repay the carbon debt of making a new EV, it must be driven 4,400 miles if it’s a car and 6,700 miles each year if it’s a truck. That’s already well below the 12,500 miles the average driver travels in a year, and the benefits to making the switch are likely to grow.
As the United States increasingly relies on renewables, for example, charging an EV becomes even more environmentally appealing. Campbell and his co-author also point to improvements in battery recycling as a way of reducing the emissions involved with making an electric car.
One hole in this latest study is that it doesn’t consider the cost of going electric. While previous research has shown that EVs come with higher upfront costs but lower operating expenses, it’s a thread that Campbell hopes economists pull on. He would also like to see someone better account for the emissions generated while extracting oil and getting gasoline to the pump, rather than simply the burning. But, for now, he believes the study sends a clear message.
“We’re trying to show that there’s not an environmental motivation for extending the lifetime of a gas vehicle,” he said. “Electric vehicles are a very clear winner.”
The most direct policy interpretation of the study would be to give people money to scrap gas cars. There have been some efforts to do this, such as the 2009 federal Car Allowance Rebate System, also known as “cash for clunkers.” That gave people $3,500 to $4,500 if they upgraded to more efficient vehicles, and blew through its $3 billion budget in only a month. Reichmuth, though, says that the issue could be tackled earlier in the process.
“The obvious policy implication is don’t sell the gasoline car to begin with,” he said, with the corollary being that EVs need to be as attractive an alternative as possible. “Make sure there are more options, more support, for people to make that initial choice.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your gas car works fine. Consider an EV anyway, scientists say. on Aug 6, 2026.
Big Oil spends $17.1 million lobbying against climate policy in first half of 2026
Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association lead top spending on lobbying
Sacramento, Calif. — As they made huge profits in the second quarter of 2026, oil and gas corporations spent $6.7 million on California state lobbying and influence, totalling $17.1 million in the first half of the year. Oil and gas giant Chevron led with the highest spending, pouring over $2.5 million into lobbying efforts in the second quarter. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the powerful oil industry trade group, trailed closely behind with $2.3 million.
Top 5 lobbying and influence spenders of Q2:
Company/Trade Association Amount Chevron $2,550,280 Western States Petroleum Assn (WSPA) $2,280,267 Phillips 66 $379,401 California Resources Corp (CRC) $230,417 Marathon Petroleum $189,712Chevron, California Resources Corporation, Marathon, Valero, and WSPA all lobbied against SB 1245, the California Fuel Affordability and Stability Act, which would lower gas prices at the pump and boost transparency in oil markets, while stabilizing California’s gasoline supply. Similarly, Marathon, Valero, CRC, WSPA, and Chevron all fought to kill SB 1259, the Refinery Transparency Act, that would require refineries to disclose estimated costs and timelines for closure and remediation.
Bills impacting refinery workers were also severely influenced by the oil industry. AB 605, the Refinery Closure Safe Staffing Act, and AB 2157, the Displaced Oil and Gas Workers Fund bill, both saw lobbying from Chevron, Valero, and WSPA.
SB 982, which would have allowed the Attorney General to sue fossil fuel companies to recover climate-disaster costs, was killed following lobbying from several oil corporations, including Valero, Marathon, CIPA, CRC, Exxon, Chevron, and WSPA among others. SB 982 drew lobbying from more oil and gas entities than any other bill in Q2 of 2026.
As California’s transportation fuels transition, refinery closures, and affordability remain a priority issue for lawmakers in Sacramento, advocates continue to stress the importance of climate policies the oil industry is trying to kill.
“With millions to spend year after year on lobbying and misinformation campaigns, it’s obvious that companies like Chevron don’t need any more state-funded handouts,” said Woody Hastings, Phase Out Polluting Fuels Director for The Climate Center. “It’s critical that Governor Newsom and the legislature stop giving billions to polluters through the Cap and Invest program. It’s time to hold polluting corporations accountable and invest in clean transit, clean air, and a healthy California.”
Other payments went to front groups, including Californians for Energy Independence, which received $1.2 million from Chevron (and nearly $3 million for the year), and firms like DDC Public Affairs, The Axis Agency, and Unearth Campaigns LLC.
The massive lobbying spending comes as oil companies announce their second-quarter profits, with Chevron making over $12 billion — a nominal, all-time quarterly record, and five times its 2025 Q2 profits — and Valero making $3.7 billion, more than five times its 2025 Q2 profits. ExxonMobil earned more than both Chevron and Valero in Q2, reporting a $14.5 billion profit, more than double its Q2 profits from the previous year. Q2 profits follow the ongoing war on Iran, which has driven months-long price spikes at the pump. Name brand gas stations like Chevron have been named by the Division of Petroleum Market Oversight for overcharging at the pump for the same gasoline sold at unbranded stations. Average gasoline prices in California topped $6 per gallon in May.
“Chevron isn’t spending $2.5 million fighting affordability bills because the oil industry is broke — they are spending millions because they’re scared of accountability and transparency,” said Faraz Rizvi, Policy and Campaign Manager with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). “While our communities breathe toxic pollution from their refineries and pay sky-high prices at the pump, Chevron just posted a $12 billion quarter — five times what they made a year ago. That’s not a coincidence, it’s their business model: gouge us at the pump, kill the bills that hold them accountable, and pocket record profits while our neighbors get sick. Sacramento needs to see this for what it is.”
Additional information on Q2 lobbying activity is available upon request.
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Methodology: This report analyzes raw data from the California Secretary of State’s Political Reform Division as of Aug. 3, 2026. The analysis includes the lobbyist employers in the “oil and gas” category for the 2025-26 legislative session. The state’s definition of oil and gas lobbyist employers includes, in addition to traditional oil and gas firms, firms that advocate for biomass energy, compressed natural gas, and/or carbon removal. This press release’s numbers match the totals listed by the Secretary of State; however, Clean Energy and Kinder Morgan appear to have understated their Q2 spending, listing lobbying payments but reporting grand total spending at $0.
BAKERSFIELD
We acknowledge that Bakersfield is the traditional home of the Kitanemuk people of the Tejon Tribe. Part of our commitment to decolonizing ourselves, our language, and our organizations is a commitment to learning and better understanding the history of Indigenous Peoples of so-called California, including the history of contact, colonization and the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands which has been part of the continuation of modern colonization.
LOS ANGELES
We acknowledge that Los Angeles County is the traditional home of the Tongva, Chumash, and Tataviam people. Part of our commitment to decolonizing ourselves, our language, and our organizations is a commitment to learning and better understanding the history of Indigenous Peoples of so-called California, including the history of contact, colonization and the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands which has been part of the continuation of modern colonization.
SACRAMENTO
We acknowledge that Sacramento is the traditional home of the Maidu, Miwok and Nisenan people. Part of our commitment to decolonizing ourselves, our language, and our organizations is a commitment to learning and better understanding the history of Indigenous Peoples of so-called California, including the history of contact, colonization and the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands which has been part of the continuation of modern colonization.
SANTA BARBARA
We acknowledge that Santa Barbara is the traditional home of the Chumash people. Part of our commitment to decolonizing ourselves, our language, and our organizations is a commitment to learning and better understanding the history of Indigenous Peoples of so-called California, including the history of contact, colonization and the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands which has been part of the continuation of modern colonization.
The post Big Oil spends $17.1 million lobbying against climate policy in first half of 2026 appeared first on Last Chance Alliance.
Growing Fire-Resilient Communities Through Native Habitat
“People Over Data Centers” Maryland’s First Statewide Conference on Confronting the Data Center Crisis
BALTIMORE, MD – With a bipartisan wave of data center opposition sweeping Maryland, two top nonprofits today unveiled plans to host the first statewide conference aimed at confronting the crisis in all its many forms. The daylong gathering on November 7 at the Baltimore Convention Center will feature everyday Marylanders and state and national leaders working to safeguard our water, air, health, climate, and insulate power bills from Big Tech’s alarming infrastructure agenda.
Nearly 80 percent of Marylanders already live in a county or city that has imposed a temporary moratorium on new data center permits, in what is perhaps the biggest and fastest grassroots rebellion in state history. Now leaders of those local fights – combined with top state officials, experts, and activists of every stripe – will bring their expertise to Baltimore to debate new ideas and offer practical next steps.
“With riveting local and national speakers, plus panels covering everything from water pollution to AI to local moratorium victories, journalists and policymakers will be able to hear and interact with everyday Marylanders working to defend their communities at the municipal, county, and state level in Maryland,” said Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
“For the first time, community leaders, organizers, and advocates from across the state will gather to share what’s working in the fight against dirty and dangerous data centers,” said Lydia Lawrence, Director of Conservation, Nature Forward. “People from urban and rural communities and across the political spectrum are uniting to protect our communities from the harmful impacts of unchecked data center expansion. This conference will send a clear message to elected officials at every level: data center reform can’t wait.”
WHAT: Maryland’s first statewide conference on the dangers of unfettered data center growth and the practical actions communities can take to fight back
WHEN: Saturday, November 7, 2026, 10 AM – 5 PM.
WHERE: Baltimore Convention Center, downtown Baltimore, Maryland
WHO: Prominent Maryland political leaders, activists, and everyday Marylanders
ENTRANCE: To obtain a press pass, please contact: kc@chesapeakeclimate.org
HOSTED BY: Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) and Nature Forward.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Visit peopleoverdatacenters.org
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Chesapeake Climate Action Network is the first grassroots organization dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the impacts and solutions associated with global warming in the Chesapeake Bay region. Founded in 2002, CCAN has been at the center of the fight for clean energy and wise climate policy in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.
Throughout its history, Nature Forward, first established in 1897 as the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia, has championed nature for all by playing a pivotal role in conserving our region’s iconic natural places from development, including the C&O Canal, Dyke Marsh, and, most recently, Ten Mile Creek. Past member and board president Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is credited with launching the now global environmental movement. Nature Forward’s nature experts provide hundreds of opportunities each year for people of all ages and abilities to enjoy, learn about, and protect the environment.
The post “People Over Data Centers” Maryland’s First Statewide Conference on Confronting the Data Center Crisis appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
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