Hello All – The “No Kings” protests across the USA were a resounding success. According to the No Kings website, nearly 7 million people attended events in more than 2,700 cities and towns. This was a 40% increase over the first round of No Kings events in June. Indeed, in almost all commentary I’ve seen so far, people mentioned that crowds were “much larger than expected,” etc. And this was also true in Hastings, where we were unable to advertise on the “mobilize.us” list, and yet more than 300 people attended our event, learning of it through word-of-mouth.
A highlight of our event in Hastings was a fiery speech by former congressman Jamaal Bowman. He addressed the dictatorship of King Trump, but he went further in calling our current government “fascist.” I think this is an important distinction, for when we focus on a wannabe “king,” we frame our oppressor as a single individual with a following. To describe our government as “fascist” – and no longer “moving towards fascism” or “having “fascist resemblances,” but simply as “fascist” – draws our attention to the regime itself, to its ideology and composition, to its cruelty and its scapegoating of minorities or imaginary “enemies,” to what Hannah Arendt called “the alliance of the mob and capital.” Understanding the Trump project as fascist also draws attention to the fact that Trump is the leader of a worldwide network of fascist or authoritarian regimes. Our dilemma and struggle is planetary, not simply a four-year cycle of presidential badness in one country.
The protests were covered poorly by the New York Times and barely adequately by the Washington Post. Much better coverage came from the UK Guardian; and dozens of comments in the Times’ on-line version compared the two insightfully. The Times low-balled turnout, selected pictures falsely minimizing the size of crowds, and were unmoved by the fact that, 10 months into Trump’s presidency, the largest demonstration in US history assailed his presidency for terror, stupidity, cruelty, and building a fascist regime. The cluelessness of our corporate media to the depths of depravity of our current rulers puts a burden on us to learn and share accurate news and understanding of what’s happening in our world. We can’t depend on those who benefit from “the system” to show us how we can overturn it.
MORE ON “NO KINGS”
Millions across all 50 US states march in No Kings protests against Trump
By Rachel Leingang and Edward Helmore, The Guardian [UK] [October 18, 2025]
---- Americans across all 50 states marched in protests against the Trump administration on Saturday, aligning behind a message that the country is sliding into authoritarianism and there should be no kings in the US. Millions of people turned out for the No Kings protests, the second iteration of a coalition that marched in June in one of the largest days of protest in US history. [Read More]
Why the No Kings Protests Matter
By Nicole Carty, The Intercept [October 18, 2025]
---- Last Friday, new talking points were seemingly rolled out across the MAGA sphere. Top GOP leadership, from House Speaker Mike Johnson to Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, began seeding a narrative about today’s “No Kings” protests. Rather than describing them for what they are — First Amendment-protected rallies where millions of Americans are expected to peacefully stand against the Trump administration’s unconstitutional, authoritarian, and un-American agenda — Republican leadership is framing the upcoming demonstrations as “Hate America” protests. Party leaders also called the gatherings “terrorist” and “Soros-funded” events that would be filled to the brim with “the antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists.” … It’s true: MAGA is terrified of the specter of massive nonviolent protest — and for good reason. Nothing threatens their agenda more than millions of ordinary Americans mobilizing to put a face to the opposition. [Read More]
THE MAMDANI CAMPAIGN
Inside the Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani
By Astead W. Herndon, New York Times Magazine [October 15, 2025]
---- Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist backbench state assemblyman who before this year had almost no name recognition in New York City, is now the general-election favorite against a former governor and member of one of the most famous families in state politics. He has already shamed the incumbent mayor, who was running a distant fourth, into an early exit from the race. In the June primary, Mamdani didn’t just beat the odds; he blew the door off the hinges, reshaping the electorate and taking advantage of ranked-choice voting to claim a commanding 12.8-point victory that reverberated through the country’s politics. But what happened after the primary may turn out to be even more important. In the time since then, as this article was being reported, Mamdani has engaged in a second primary of sorts, meeting quietly with city power brokers to consolidate support and box out his main rivals, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams. Some of it was reported. Much of it wasn’t. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
Historians of the anti-fascist struggle against Trump will have to cope with some unusual protest tactics. Please listen to this wonderful antiwar tune, “The Ballad of the Portland Frog Brigade” [Link].
Jewish writer and commentator Peter Beinart has a substack link that I hope everybody knows about. His work has been especially important in illuminating ethical and theological issues raised by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Here is a (video) link to his most recent offering, an interview with historian Ilan Pappé about his recent book, Israel on the Brink. – 60 minutes
The film “A House of Dynamite” has just opened in theaters and will be available on Netflix stating Friday. It is about a nuclear war crisis, a nuclear attack by an unknown source on the United States. You can watch a short trailer here. Kevin Martin, Director of Peace Action (CFOW is an affiliate of PA) writes about the film here. Luckily this is not even a drill, it’s just a movie. But the “Dooms Day Clock” of the Atomic Scientists is now set at just 90 seconds before midnight. It looks like the film illuminates a great danger.
Sometimes I find old pictures of daily life heart-breaking, a world we have lost. This is especially so when the lost world has been destroyed, not simply faded away. A set of 3 dozen pictures from before 1948 Palestine had this effect on me. Perhaps others will also find the pictures interesting. [Link]
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
The “No Kings” protests featured solid fact, satire and ridicule, and feisty antics. This formula for successful protest has a long history, and for anti-fascist protest we can’t do better than some excerpts from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. Chaplin plays both Hitler and his doppelganger, a poor Jewish barber. So for stalwart newsletter readers this week, here we have Chaplin in the role of Hitler, dreaming of world domination. And here we have Chaplin as the Jewish barber, mistakenly thought to be Hitler by his Nazi entourage, speaking to the masses about his vision of world peace. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The U.S. Denounces Her. Multinationals Threaten Her. She Likes Her Odds.
[Francesca Albanese]
By M. Gessen, New York Times [October 16, 2025]
---- Albanese became a hometown hero after the White House branded her an enemy, which it did because of her work, over the past three years, as the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. In the course of that work, she has pursued strategies that are as legally ambitious as they are politically risky. She has documented human rights abuses, as her predecessors did. She infuriated some of her allies by condemning the Hamas violence of Oct. 7, 2023, then caused a storm when she leaped onto social media to contest a boilerplate statement by the president of France that framed the violence as antisemitic. Perhaps most explosively, she has called out the corporations, including some of the largest in the United States, that enable and benefit from human rights abuses, and which are likely to continue to do so, regardless of the cease-fire. [Read More]
On the Precipice of Authoritarian Rule
By Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch [October 16, 2025]
---- Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists…. The Trump administration’s military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule. With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented. [Read More]
A Family Business. Trump’s theory of politics.
By Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation [October 14, 2025]
---- The quandary of understanding Trump, not as an electoral accident but as something more, has returned with a vengeance. Trump’s actions in office the second time around have made matters still more complicated. On one level, over the past 10months, Trump has acted like any other Republican of the past 50 years, pressing on with the party’s long-standing agenda. He has defunded essential welfare programs; he has slashed government spending and undermined government agencies; he has cut taxes for the rich. But in his aggressive use of ICE against immigrants, his campaign against trans people, his sabotage of basic science, his nationalistic belligerence, and his willingness to use government authority against private universities to make them subject to his will, he goes well beyond the conventional free-market Republican mainstream. All of this raises the question: Are Trump and Trumpism best understood as the consolidation of an elite economic program, as a nostalgia-laced brew of prejudice and rage, or as a coherent, forceful new style of authoritarian rule—and if it’s the latter, why is this happening now? How has this politics not only made its way into the center of American power but with a near majority, too? Making sense of all this is not just an abstract exercise; it raises important questions about what kind of politics the left will need to counter the nightmarish course we seem to be hurtling along. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Video) “Israeli Sadism in a Nutshell”: Amira Hass on Israeli Prisons, Settler Violence & Gaza Ceasefire
From Democracy Now! [October 17, 2025]
---- Just days after the U.S.-backed ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect, President Trump has issued new threats against Hamas, saying Thursday the United States would back a military intervention against the group if it fails to uphold the ceasefire agreement. “There is the fear all the time that the war will be renewed,” says Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who joins us from Ramallah. Hass is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and is the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. [See the Program]
Gaza must decide its own political future — before the world does for us
By Mahmoud Mushtaha, 972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [October 16, 2025]
---- On Monday, world leaders gathered in Sharm El-Sheikh to promote what they described as a new “path toward peace” in Gaza. The summit was ostensibly intended to consolidate the phases of the ceasefire and outline a long-term governance and reconstruction plan for the Strip. Yet it ended with an ambiguous roadmap and an uncertain future for Palestinians — who, as usual, were entirely left out from the conversation.… What unfolded in Sharm El-Sheikh was not an effort to bring real change for Palestinians, but rather another act of regional choreography — a vision of a Middle East built around Israeli and U.S. interests, not Palestinian rights. Based on what we know so far, U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, which he touts as one that will lead to “strong, durable, and everlasting peace,” will see Israel retain control of the Strip’s borders, airspace, and aid flows, with the very international actors who armed and financed its genocidal assault now acting as mediators and monitors of compliance. This plan says nothing of ending the siege or dismantling the occupation, but instead looks to undermine Palestinian autonomy by imposing external oversight and governance. It imagines a pacified Gaza; subdued enough to pose no threat to Israel, yet still denied the power to protect or rebuild Palestinian life. … Now that the outlines of the ceasefire, however shadowy, are beginning to surface, and the question of who will govern Gaza becomes relevant again, Palestinians must take responsibility — not for what was done to us, but for how we forge a path toward dignity and sovereignty. The most urgent question is who will define the direction of our national movement. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “The 9,100 Palestinians left behind in Israeli prisons after the ‘peace’ deal,” by Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [October 15, 2025] [Link]; and “Mapping the rise in Israeli settler attacks across the occupied West Bank,” by Marium Ali, Aljazeera [October 14, 2025] [Link]
WAR ON VENEZUELA?
Trump’s Military Escalation Against Venezuela Repeats The Iraq War Blueprint
By Manolo De Los Santos, Znet [October 18, 2025]
---- The mood in the Caribbean grows increasingly tense, as the United States intensifies its military threats. Beneath the deceptive shroud of the “war on drugs,” the United States is actively executing a blueprint for military intervention in Venezuela, employing lethal force and projecting power in a manner that legal institutions and regional leaders have condemned as a profound threat to international order. This aggression is not a law enforcement operation; it is the negation of law, a neocolonial revival of the Monroe Doctrine, designed to shatter the sovereignty of Venezuela, seize control of the world’s largest oil reserves, and install a compliant regime. A chilling adoption of extrajudicial violence has marked the current escalation. The Trump administration has ordered unilateral military strikes against private vessels near the Venezuelan coast, allegedly to stop drug trafficking. To launch these alarming attacks, the US military has deployed a massive naval force of warships, drones, and special operations forces. These strikes have resulted in the summary execution of at least 27 people as of recent reports. [Read More]
Why we need to take Trump’s Drug War very seriously
By Ted Galen Carpenter, Responsible Statecraft [October 10, 2025]
---- The option of using the U.S. military against drug traffickers in Latin America became a prominent theme of not only Trump but other Republican political leaders in 2023 and 2024. Not surprisingly, Trump quickly joined the lobbying campaign to attack the cartels. He explicitly embraced the proliferation of proposals from GOP members of Congress at that time to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). … However, Trump no longer considers an AUMF even remotely necessary. He implicitly believes that the Executive may do virtually anything he deems necessary to defend the United States. Both undocumented immigrants and suspected drug runners fall into the category of being a national security threat in his opinion. [Read More]
(Video) “Cold-Blooded Murder”: David Cole on Trump’s Boat Attacks & CIA Covert Action in Venezuela
From Democracy Now! [October 17, 2025]
---- There are growing questions over the legality of U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. “These are sitting ducks, and we are simply engaged in cold-blooded murder of individuals who may or may not be drug smugglers,” says David Cole, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Cole says that President Trump is “committing homicide” by killing people without trial. “These individuals who have now been sent to the bottom of the sea by this president, if they were tried, at most, would face a sentence of some period of years,” says Cole. “There would be no death penalty authorized under the Constitution for these individuals, even assuming they’re guilty.” This comes as Trump has authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela aimed at regime change, raising fears of a military confrontation between the two countries. [See the Program]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
“Antifa” Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [October 17 2025]
---- Federal prosecutors are making good on the Trump administration’s threat to treat antifa-related activity as terrorism. On Thursday afternoon, prosecutors in Texas announced that terrorism charges had been filed against two people for alleged involvement in a shooting during a July 4 protest against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured. This is the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label, just a month after President Donald Trump announced that he was designating antifa a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups. The Prairieland case is setting a chilling example for how the government will use so-called counterterrorism efforts to crush anti-fascist dissent. Neither of the people named in the indictment are accused of shooting the gun. Instead, Zachary Evetts and Autumn Hill are accused of “providing material support to terrorists” and having “aided and abetted” the alleged attempted murder of government officers. [Read More] ALSO BY NATASHA LENNARD, “The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act,” The Intercept [October 7, 2025] [Link]
Case Before Supreme Court Could Destroy Voting Rights Act and Cement GOP Control of House ‘For At Least a Generation’
By Stephen Prager, Common Dreams [October 15, 2025]
---- The US Supreme Court will rehear a case on Wednesday that could strike a death blow to the Voting Rights Act and, in the process, virtually guarantee that Republicans hang on to power in the 2026 midterm elections and well into the future. … According to a report from Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter, if Section 2 is dismantled, it would guarantee Republicans an additional 19 safe seats in the US House of Representatives, and as many as 27 when combined with the GOP’s Trump-led push for mid-decade gerrymandering. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump Has Just Condemned More Americans to Hunger
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [October 15, 2025]
---- The pain of these changes was not immediately felt—but it’s about to be. Twelve states and territories had previously gotten exemptions from the federal government that allowed them to avoid enforcing many of the work requirements. These states, which include New York, where I live, had until February of next year to implement Trump’s demands. But on October 3, the Trump administration simply changed its mind and rescinded the waivers. New York now has to implement the work requirements by November 1. That jeopardizes the food resources of three million New Yorkers who rely on the assistance. It’s hard to overstate how harmful this is. Over 42 million people receive some form of SNAP assistance. Those living in states that previously had waivers account for 36.5 million of those recipients. All those people could now be at risk of losing their benefits. The (Republican-controlled) Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least four million people will lose all or part of their SNAP benefits once the changes go into effect. [Read More]
What Trump’s War on Sanctuary Cities Is Really About
By Marcela Valdes, New York Times [October 17, 2025]
---- Donald J. Trump has been railing against sanctuary cities for a decade, describing them as hotbeds of crime and magnets for undocumented immigrants. Attacking them was a staple of both of his presidential campaigns. So it was hardly a surprise when he signed an executive order in April directing the attorney general and the homeland security secretary to “pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures” to force cities and states to implement federal immigration laws. … More than 300 sanctuary jurisdictions exist in the United States — including those four cities and several entire states, according to the political scientists Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien. Some have passed laws barring city employees from asking individuals about their immigration status. Others will not honor requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain people unless they are suspected of violent crimes. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Resistance to Trump’s Military Occupations Just Keeps Growing,” by Sasha Abramsky, The Nation [October 10, 2025] [Link]
OUR HISTORY
Bravery on The Front Lines in the Face of Fascism
By Paul Von Blum, The Progressive [October 15, 2025]
---- As radical historian Paul Buhle and comics writer Raymond Tyler demonstrate with their new comic art collection, Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Facsist Resistance, stories of partisan resistance can offer inspiration for those opposing fascism even when their military tactics are not directly replicable. Like their many distinguished predecessors—including World War II-era comic artists such as Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood, whose influence the editors cite in the book’s afterword—Partisans’s contributors craft striking visual art alongside their insightful commentary about the bravery and courage of women and men who fought and died fighting fascism throughout World War II. Buhle and Tyler have selected outstanding visual artists and storytellers to chronicle the resisters who fought the Nazi invaders in Europe. The artistic styles are diverse, but will prove engaging for any reader who wants to learn more about the hidden histories of anti-fascist struggle. [Read More]
To Free Labor: The triumphs and travails of American Marxism.
By Robin Blackburn, The Nation [October 13, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of Karl Marx in America, by Andrew Hartman. Robin Blackburn is an editor of New Left Review and a leading historian of slavery in the Western Hemisphere.]
---- Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he was long fascinated by the lure—and contradictions—of American freedom. As a young man, he applied for permission to emigrate to Texas. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the debates gripping the Young Hegelians as Europe’s old order crumbled in the 1840s. Later, he would correspond with many of his contemporaries who traveled across the Atlantic, including a set of comrades who would go on to publish two of his outstanding early works: The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels, published in German and French in 1838 and in English in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German, in New York, in 1852.More surprisingly, Marx’s gifts as an essayist and social observer led The New York Tribune to appoint him as its London correspondent. Between 1853 and 1861, he contributed 487 articles to the Tribune, a journal with around 200,000 subscribers in the 1850s, making it the second-most-read American newspaper. In the years that followed, movements and parties would rally under the banner of his socialist politics. While Marx did not necessarily become a household name in the United States, he would nonetheless motivate generations of radicals to take up the cause of socialism. [Read More]
