Tell your senators to rein in ICE right now. Congress has to pass an appropriations bill by January 30 to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded, which means Dems have a lot of leverage to include provisions that rein in ICE and freeze its budget. Call your senators now and demand they use the appropriations bill to protect our communities from ICE. (More info here)
Keep an eye on your inboxes for news about Minnesota solidarity actions this Friday. Minnesota activists are holding a day of action this Friday, and are asking allies across the country to hold solidarity actions to keep the focus on ICE’s brutality in the state and advance the call to get ICE out of our cities now. We’ll be in touch soon with ways you can get involved in your area.
Join an important call on the upcoming Supreme Court decision that threatens to gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Any day now, the Supreme Court could issue a ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that could invalidate minority-majority districts and greenlight far more aggressively racist gerrymanders across the South. We’re partnering on a call tomorrow, Weds, Jan 21 at 8pm ET / 5pm PT, that will provide more info on the stakes of the case and how we can respond to a bad decision.
Email your senators and demand they act to restore ACA subsidies NOW. Two weeks ago, seventeen House Republicans understood that skyrocketing insurance costs threaten their political futures and voted with Democrats to pass a bill restoring healthcare subsidies. Now we need the Senate to get on board, too.
P.S. With the regime’s attacks on our communities and rights coming at an ever escalating pace, it’s never been more important to support grassroots organizations that are keeping up the fight for our democracy. If you can, we encourage you to support your local mutual aid networks, or chip in to power your friendly pro-democracy organizers at Indivisible.
by Sebastian on January 20, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
CVS, 701 Van Ness, is closing on February 24
Things were finally looking up on Van Ness last year with the new mayor, Mayor Daniel Lurie, and the new junior Supervisors, Stephen Sherrill and Danny Sauter, who share the jurisdiction over Van Ness.
They introducedlegislation to permit “formula retail” on a one-mile stretch of Van Ness Avenue between Redwood, a half block North of City Hall, and Broadway Streets, to fill empty storefronts.
They soon celebrated the opening of Apple Cinemas at the historic building at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, which only had one business operating at that time, Emerald Lounge. And a new gym called The Grand Athletic Club was going to open as well.
But the optimism was very brief. The owners of Emerald Lounge and The Grand Athletic Club are caught in the middle of a legal battle with the owner of the building, alleging broken promises, conflict of interest, and hostile management.
The Grand Athletic Club never opened at 1000 Van Ness despite signing a lease.
“Easy to buy illegal drugs, but difficult to buy legal prescription drugs on Van Ness”
Things go south at the beginning of the new year. CVS, the only pharmacy left on Van Ness, has announced that it will be closing its store on February 24, which causes a shockwave in the community.
The CVS closure is creating concerns about “pharmacy deserts” and access, especially for elderly residents in the Cathedral Hill and the neighboring Tenderloin. They refer their customers to their nearest store, a mile away, at 1059 Hyde Street.
This closure is part of a broader CVS downsizing in San Francisco, reducing their stores significantly from 2021 levels, leaving only eight locations in the city after this one closes. It deepens the pharmacy crisis in the city.
While downsizing is the reason, theft is also part of the reasons, according to the store employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Everything is behind a locked case. Even the fridges are all locked
Neighbors and the security guards of the Eye Institute next door often witness people running out of the store with unpaid merchandise, chased by the store’s security guard. A block away, Walgreens at 790 Van Ness closed on November 11, 2020, due to rampant shoplifting.
Ibrahim A. Sahid, who lives nearby and was a regular customer of the store, goes to CVS on Van Ness after the Franklin Walgreens closed. And his comment on the CVS closing: “There is no drugstore left on Van Ness. It’s a pharmacy desert.
Easy to buy illegal drugs, but difficult to buy legal prescription drugs. So much for the Van Ness corridor rebuilding. We can’t even keep the existing businesses, much less add new ones. I haven’t heard the Mayor try to negotiate with CVS to stay.”
Supervisor Stephen Sherrill’s comment on the Van Ness CVS closing: “This is obviously so sad and bad for the neighborhood. Shoplifting has caused cascading effects that has made it harder for customers to shop there and harder for CVS to compete with e-commerce. But bottom line is that we need to ensure that pharmacies can continue to operate here.”
Van Ness residents shared their concerns about the CVS closing with KRON4.
“We Are On Our Way Back. But We Still Have Work To Do”
When Daniel Lurie was elected as the Mayor of San Francisco in November 2024, I wrote: “Can Daniel Lurie Turn Van NessAvenue Into SF’s Champs-Élysées?” Wrapping up his State of the City speech at Angelo J. Rossi Playground in the Lone Mountain neighborhood, a year after he took office, Mayor Daniel Lurie said, “We’re just getting started, and we are not going to leave anyone behind. Let’s go, San Francisco!”
Van Ness businesses and residents certainly hope that Mayor Lurie doesn’t leave them behind. There are still plenty of empty buildings on Van Ness, the city’s spine, to fill, which he left out during his State of the City speech. Many mentally ill and drug users still roam around the Van Ness corridor, leaving residents and businesses to deal with them alone.
Drug users can still access drug paraphernalia from a harm reduction van every Thursday from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in Hemlock Alley between Van Ness Avenue and Polk Street despite Mayor Lurie’s shifting drug policy, moving away from harm reduction by stopping the free distribution of drug use supplies.
Graffiti is still out of control on Van Ness. Things are not much different from the previous administration, except that there are no more homeless tents, and the strong urine-perfumed sidewalks smell a little bit lighter under Lurie’s administration.
Van Ness is definitely still not presentable to grace Mayor Lurie’s well-curated social media accounts and to attract investments to bring in much-needed foot traffic. C’est la vie.
Burger King on Van Ness: a man passes out while kids are watching
The mural on the Van Ness 24 Hour Fitness building is defaced by graffiti
There are 3 more years to go! Let’s go, Mayor Lurie!
States like Canada have long known the current system of international rules-based order is a “fiction,” Carney said.
by Sharon Zhang January 21, 2026 (therealnews.com)
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 20, 2026. Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP via Getty Images
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In an unusually candid speech in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that world order is at a “rupture” point due to the U.S.’s longstanding vise-grip on the world and its swiftly expanding authoritarian nature under President Donald Trump.
Skewering “American hegemony,” Carney said that countries like Canada have long known that the idea of the international rules-based order was a “fiction” that states nonetheless signaled their support for in order to be granted access to crucial goods, trade, and other resources like finance.
For decades, states with “middle” amounts of power like Canada “participated in the rituals, and largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney said. In return, the U.S. allowed other states access to important systems.
“This bargain no longer works,” Carney told the World Economic Forum. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
But, over the past two decades, great powers like the U.S. are increasingly using “economic integration as weapons,” he said. This is causing countries to retreat into themselves, becoming less reliant on outside sources — which Carney warned will lead to greater fragmentation and volatility.
“Tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he said.
Countries like Canada “compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” he said. “This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
He calls for countries to form a third path, one of greater cooperation, in order to push back against the threats by major powers. Doing this would require dispensing with simply signalling support for global order in favor of redoubling efforts to actually enforce principles like those laid out in the UN charter, he said.
“We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together,” he said. Countries must “stop invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”
The speech comes just weeks after German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier similarly said that the U.S. is ending world order as it’s known, and instead turning the world “into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want” and countries are “treated as the property of a few great powers.”
Carney and Steinmeier both, perhaps, ignore their countries’ respective responsibilities for the erosion of the enforcement of international order — in theirsupport for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, their contributions to the global system of imperialism, and their participation in an increasing crackdown on asylum and immigration by wealthy countries, among other actions.
However, many experts have noted the vast erosion of international principles brought on by the U.S. in particular, which is accelerating under Trump.
Amnesty International USA warned in a report on Tuesday, the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, that Trump’s first year has led to a “human rights emergency” in which the administration is “cracking the pillars of a free society.”
“At stake are the rights that enable people to defend all other rights and live without fear from the arbitrary exercise of power and discrimination, including the rights to freedom of the press, expression, and peaceful protest; a fair trial and due process; equality and non-discrimination; and privacy,” the report said. “When these rights are weakened, the harms do not stay contained — they spread.”
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharonMore by Sharon Zhang
Sora Paez, left, Iory Gomez, center, and Stella Gamez, right, high-schoolers, join an anti-ICE protest at Civic Center Plaza as part of a school walkout on Jan. 20, 2026. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Hundreds of San Franciscans gathered in front of City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, both to protest President Donald Trump as he celebrated his first year back in office, and to declare plans to protest again over the next three years.
The rally was organized by a coalition of progressive organizations after a call to action from the Women’s March.
Protesters walk down Polk Street during an anti-ICE march at City Hall on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
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Costumed protesters stand at Civic Center Plaza for an anti-ICE protest on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Some held signs opposing the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela. Others demanded the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many carried posters featuring Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earlier this month. Protesters chanted her name on several occasions throughout the afternoon.
Elizabeth Oliver, right, a sophomore at Mission High School, leads protesters in a chant. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
“In 2025, we were caught on the back foot,” Arthur Wolf, from 50501 San Francisco, told the crowd in front of City Hall. “But we built power. In 2026, we solidify our power and we fight back.”
A Venezuelan flag flies in front of City Hall on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.A woman who identified herself as the “Unorganized Artist” holds a Trump puppet while wearing a Vladimir Putin mask at Civic Center Plaza on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Also in attendance was District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen, who talked about a resolution she introduced at last week’s meeting of the Board of Supervisors, demanding that state and federal partners push for a third-party investigation into all ICE-related deaths nationwide, and calling for a moratorium on ICE detentions until the results of the investigation are made available and corrective action is implemented.
“In this moment, it is more important than ever to continue to stand together, to go against these terror attacks against our communities,” Chen said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
After gathering at Civic Center, protesters marched downtown before ending their march in front of the San Francisco Federal Building. Organizers estimated the number of protesters at 1,500.
Protesters walk down Market Street during an anti-ICE protest in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.Protesters hold anti-ICE banners during a protest in front of the San Francisco Federal Building. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Similar demonstrations were held across the country, including in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., and organizers encouraged people around the country to walk out of their jobs or classes to participate — and to plan resistance to the Trump administration.
“On January 20, we call on our communities to organize teams,” read the call to action. “Call your neighbors and classmates, and turn your back and walk out on fascism. Host mutual aid planning meetings, organize public service, but walk out to block the normal routines of power, and make the stakes real. This is a protest and a promise. In the face of fascism, we will be ungovernable.”
Jim Martinez, a San Francisco resident, chants at an anti-ICE protest on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Stella Gamez, a senior at Mission High, walked out of her class on Tuesday afternoon with several of her classmates to join the protest at City Hall. Her teachers were understanding, she said.
“I came here for the abolishment of ICE. They need to get out of all our states,” she said. “They’re making these lies against my people. And I don’t appreciate that.”
High schoolers joined an anti-ICE protest as part of a walkout against ICE at Civic Center Plaza. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Leila Salazar, executive director of Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization advocating for the environment and indigenous rights in the Amazon Basin, attended the rally with her daughter. “Every single day of this year has been marked with chaos caused by the U.S. federal government,” she said. “This is not the world that we want to live in.”
Protesters march down Market Street in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
Organizers encouraged the crowd to join a general strike on Jan. 23 by staying home from work or school and refraining from shopping.
The strike was endorsed by ISAIAH, a nonprofit coalition of Minnesota faith and community groups, and several unions, as a show of defiance against the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, and ICE’s continued presence in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Achieving a general strike is very difficult to do; by definition, enough people have to participate so that economic activity in an area is almost entirely halted. (In San Francisco, the best-known historical example is the 1934 Waterfront Strike). A long list of businesses in Minneapolis have already announced that they are closing on the 23rd.
Anti-ICE protesters march down Market Street. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
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Béatrice is a reporting intern covering immigration and the Tenderloin. She studied linguistics at McGill University before turning to journalism and getting a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.More by Béatrice Vallières
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Come out and support the GG26 in their fight to reduce their charges from felonies to misdemeanors
The Golden Gate Bridge 26 stood up for justice, for Palestine, for liberation, and paid the price for it. They are still being targeted for exercising their right to protest and for standing against genocide and state funded violence. A number of the GG26 are still facing felony charges.
We won’t let them stand alone. A packed courtroom sends a clear message: the community is watching, and we will not be intimidated.
Show up. Defend the right to protest. Free Palestine no more repression
This Friday we protest with singing, chanting and sign waving to call attention to the fact that ICE is our communities. We’ve got signs but bring your own if you can.
Our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis are getting savaged right now by domestic terrorists who instead of doing 10 to 20 in a federal prison have been given masks and badges and guns and carte blanche to wreak murderous, violent havoc in that fair city.
In response, unions and activists and community groups are calling for a general strike in Minneapolis on Friday Jan 23rd.
4. Friday, 4:00pm – 5:00pm, Gays to ‘crush ICE’ on January 23: Solidarity with Minneapolis
Castro Memorial Corner, 501 Castro Street at 18th St SF
Rally supporting the general strike in Minneapolis
Members of the newly-formed Gays Against Gestapo (GAG), will hold an action to crush ice cubes in strong solidarity with the city of Minneapolis, and also memorialize Renee Good who was murdered by an ICE agent and to demand his immediate arrest and prosecution. The action takes place in the heart of the LGBTQ Castro district.
Posters of Renee Good will be taped to the railing at the corner, in honor of her life and legacy, and to demand justice over her murder. A multitude of ice cubes are to be crushed with a mallet and hammer, symbolizing the key demand: Abolish ICE. Join us!
5. Friday, 4:00pm, ICE Out for Good! Solidarity with Minneapolis
Meet at:
Target 4th St. & Mission SF
Solidarity with Minnesota – to march on ICE profiteers.
What’s happening in Minnesota will shape all of our futures. On January 23rd, Minnesota is calling for a statewide shutdown. No school, no work, no shopping. ICE OUT. In the Bay Area, we’re coming together in solidarity with Minnesota to march on ICE profiteers on Friday, 1/23 at 4pm outside the Target on 4th & Mission. If we push the corporate pillars whose silence or collaboration is enabling the occupation of Minnesota, we can end ICE terror and topple corporate support for the MAGA regime.
6. Friday, 4:00pm – 8:00pm, Oakland: ICE Out of Everywhere / Rally & March
Meet at
Fruitvale BART 3401 East 12th St. Oakland
The Bay Area working class stands with Minneapolis against Trump’s fascist ICE goons. Join East Bay DSA, Bay Area Labor for Palestine, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Palestinian Youth Movement, and others as we march and rally in Oakland to honor the historic Minneapolis general strike (Day of Truth and Freedom) called by Minnesota unions and the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation.
The working class and socialists stand for life. ICE and the fascists stand for death. Democratic politicians are still weighing the pros and cons. In the same city that rose up against racist cops after the killing of George Floyd six years ago, fascists are being deployed to murder, kidnap, and brutalize migrants and people of color.
We know we face the same enemies here in the Bay Area – from racist cops to ICE agents and the billionaires who want to deploy them both against everyday people. It’s up to US to stand up and fight back – sick out, walk out, and stand in solidarity with our siblings in Minnesota – honor their call and join us to rally and march
7. Friday, 4:00pm, ICE Out Of MN-Support MN Gen Strike! Shut ICE Down NOW! SF Support Rally CANCELLED
California State Building 350 McAllister St. SF
The fascist military occupation of Minneapolis and Minnesota is being opposed by unions and labor with a general strike on Jan 23. This occupation is aimed at crushing the working class and people of Minnesota and then expanding to other cities. Trump is preparing for martial law to stop any further elections using the Insurrection Act. The Democrats and Courts will not stop this fascist and his billionaire techno fascist cronies who are running the government. Unions in NYC and other cities are calling for rallies on the same day and we need rallies and a general strike nationally.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom is backing up ICE and says that it should not be abolished despite the murder of Renee Good and the terrorism of these goons. The murderous methods of this gestapo operation is also being expanded with the $170 billion passed in his budget
.We also need to demand the withdrawal of all US troops and military abroad. These imperialist wars are financed by both the Democrats and Republicans who passed a trillion dollar budget and now Trump is preparing for more wars abroad by expanding the military budget to $1.5 trillion. WE need to unite our struggles and the way to shut down the fascist government is a mass national strike action closing the entire country.
8. Saturday, 12Noon – 2:00pm, Unite to Fight the Right! Protest the ‘Walk for Life’ West Coast
Front steps main SF library Polk/Larkin. SF
What we call for: • Guarantee access to free contraception & safe, legal abortion on demand without apology • Repeal the Hyde Amendment • Overturn state barriers to reproductive choices • Stop forced sterilization • No to caged kids, forced assimilation, & child welfare abuses • End medical & environmental racism; for universal healthcare • Defend queer & trans families; guarantee gender-affirming care • End gender stereotypes and discrimination based on age • Ensure medically sound sex education & affordable childcare • Sexual self-determination for people with disabilities • Living wages for all, particularly family, domestic & institutional caregivers • Uphold social progress with expanded voting rights & strong unions
9. Saturday, 1:00pm-2:00pm, Houseless People Create a Real Solution to Homelessness in San Francisco
3990 Cesar Chavez (nr. 26th & 27th Sts.) SF
With prayer and permission from First Nations land protectors, indigenous, houseless, and formerly houseless families and elders reclaim a tiny triangle of Mama Earth in occupied Yelamu (San Francisco) to build a healing solution to homelessness.
What: Prayer Ceremony & Press Conference announcing HOMEfulness in Yelamu
“We are dying just trying to be housed,” said Walter, a houseless RoofLESS Radio reporter for POOR Magazine and longtime San Francisco resident.
As one of the coldest winters in the Bay Area and across the U.S. bears down, homelessness among families and elders continues to rise. Meanwhile, the primary “solution” offered by local, state, and federal governments remains the same: the erasure of houseless bodies from public space through violent police-led “sweeps”—a chilling, hygienic metaphor used to justify the physical removal of human beings from the environment.
After years of surviving poverty and homelessness, tiny and her mother Dee, a disabled artist, began articulating the vision of Homefulness. That vision’s first iteration emerged in 1996 with the launch of POOR Magazine, an intentionally glossy literary magazine co-created by houseless artists, poets, and journalists working out of community centers, shelter beds, and jail cells.
There is now a small triangle-shaped lot in Yelamu that POOR Magazine can begin the process of spiritually and legally unSelling and building Homefulness—which will include the Homefulness healing center, educational space, sliding scale cafe/free market, and housing for over 30 houseless residents.
Because POOR Magazine understands that Mama Earth is not a commodity, they worked with revolutionary legal advocates at the Sustainable Economies Law Center to establish the first-ever Liberation Easement, permanently removing Homefulness land from speculation and profit. A similar Liberation Easement is now being shaped in partnership with Ramaytush Ohlone leaders in so-called San Francisco.
View site for more info
Since the 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, houseless people have lost constitutional protections, leading cities across California to dramatically increase sweeps—each one more dangerous and deadly than the last.
HOMEfulness is an answer to the immediate emergency of homelessness. But it is also healing medicine—not only for houseless elders, families, and disabled people, but for all of us, housed and unhoused, who are in need of hope, repair, and home.
We do not consent to Trump and his billionaire allies taking a chainsaw to our government and our economy for their benefit! San Francisco is a sanctuary city and We the People need to defend the values that make it so. Let’s stand united and oppose the endless assaults on our communities, our civil rights, the rule of law, and our democracy.
Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together and call out the Trump/MAGA regime as a community. Plus, it’s fun! Think of it as our democracy corner—a place for you to voice your opinion, hang out with like-minded fellow protesters, and experience a cathartic moment together.
What you can do: • If you’ve got signs, flags, cardboard cutouts, or any protest visuals you want to make, bring ’em! We also have spare signs to lend. • If you have whistles, drums, cowbells, or other noisemakers, bring ’em! • Musicians are welcome and encouraged. Sing the song of democracy! • Many of our regular protesters are part of local activist groups who are happy to chat with anyone who wants to pair their indignation with direct action beyond street protest.
On the 80th Anniversary of the end of WWII, we honor the history and legacy of the “comfort women,” the hundreds of thousands of women and girls who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. The survivors are also called the “grandmas.” Although most of them perished, those who did survive became spokespeople for women’s rights and were instrumental in changing International Law, making sexual slavery and sexual violence during war a crime against humanity and a war crime. This exhibition, with photos and original artwork by the survivors, highlights the “grandmas” history, activism and their ongoing struggle for redress and justice.
A forgotten network of radicals helped teach King how to organize—and how to link civil rights to economic redistribution for all
Eric Blanc Jan 19, 2026 (laborpolitics@substack.com)
Almost everyone left of center now understands that Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical than the milquetoast, “I Have a Dream”-only version many Americans grew up with.
MLK Jr. was a political radical who spent his final years opposing militarism, denouncing capitalism, and demanding a massive economic redistribution. That’s why Zohran Mamdani’s go-to definition of socialism has been to quote King: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
And yet, even many of the most sympathetic “radical King” accounts still cling to a familiar American fairy tale: the Great Man who simply had it in him—born with moral courage, hatched fully formed, and then leading history forward by sheer force of charisma.
That story is wrong in a specific way that matters for today’s left. King’s radicalism wasn’t a private attribute. It was the outcome of apprenticeship inside an organized tradition—a network of socialists, labor radicals, and movement educators who did the unglamorous work of training leaders, building institutions, writing drafts, running logistics, teaching strategy, and connecting civil rights demands to bread-and-butter class politics.
It’s unfortunate that this institutional legacy has been scrubbed out so successfully that people might end up thinking King invented his own politics in isolation. In reality, he came up inside a web of socialist organizers and “movement schools” that treated racial justice and economic justice as inseparable—and, crucially, treated organizing as a craft you could teach.
Part of what makes the erasure so effective is an accompanying myth: that early American socialists—especially those associated with the old Socialist Party—“ignored race,” full stop, and therefore couldn’t possibly have helped seed the Black freedom struggle’s mass politics. There’s a kernel of truth there (the history includes shameful racism and exclusion), but it’s also a caricature that turns a complex tradition into a straw man—and, conveniently, makes it easier to pretend that socialism and antiracism only meet in the 1960s as a kind of happy accident. In reality, the US Socialist movement—including former racists like Victor Berger— after 1917 forcefully attacked white supremacy and empire rather than accommodating them, establishing an organized legacy that went on to play a central role in MLK Jr.’s politics.
This isn’t an argument for diminishing King’s heroism or agency. King was extraordinary. But if we care about the kind of politics he practiced—mass organization, movement discipline, and democratic socialism—we have to pay attention to the scaffolding that made it possible.
Rosa Parks at the Highlander School
Myles Horton and The Highlander School
It’s tempting to treat the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott as the instant birth of the modern civil rights movement—one brave woman refuses to stand, a young pastor gives a speech, history turns. But the boycott succeeded because it sat on top of years of organizing: NAACP networks, church infrastructure, labor-style discipline, and political education.
Rosa Parks is often flattened into a symbol—quiet seamstress, tired feet, spontaneous defiance. But Parks was a serious organizer, a student of movement strategy, and someone who had been steeped in the traditions of interracial radicalism and labor solidarity. Her decision to sit in the front of the bus in December 1955 didn’t come from nowhere. It came from training, relationships, and political formation—including her relationship to one of the most important movement institutions of the twentieth century: the Highlander Folk School.
Highlander, based in Tennessee, was a radical training ground born out of the labor left of the 1930s. Its founder, socialist Myles Horton, saw it as a place to build power from below—first in the labor movement, and later in the southern freedom struggle.
Myles Horton
Myles Horton came out of a world where socialism was a practical current in working-class life. Horton had studied under Christian socialist Reinhold Niebuhr and in his autobiography he describes learning politics from people like “the old Socialist, Joe Kelley Stockton,” a friend of Eugene Debs who made socialism tangible through his generous daily life and fierce class struggle politics.
Highlander, launched with financial support from Niebuhr and the Socialist Party, wasn’t designed to produce charismatic leaders, but to produce collective capacity—to teach ordinary people to analyze their conditions, talk to each other across divisions, and act together.
As Horton put it, Highlander existed so people didn’t wait for “some government edict or some Messiah” to improve their lives. Its radically democratic pedagogy insisted that “the best teachers of poor and working people are the people themselves,” and that the point was not adjustment to an unjust society but its transformation.
And though it often gets forgotten today, Highlander’s early political DNA was explicitly socialist. In one fundraising appeal, Horton described Highlander’s goal as “education for a socialistic society” and he made clear the school’s commitments: it existed “to help create a new social order.”
The school’s early focus was heavily labor-oriented—mostly white textile and mine workers in the mountains—but Horton and his team moved toward racial justice as they confronted the South’s core system of rule. Horton reached out to Black labor organizers in the 1940s and by the 1950s shifted Highlander’s focus “completely” toward fighting segregation.
Rosa Parks and Montgomery
Rosa Parks’s relationship to Highlander is one of those threads that gets cut out of the story because it complicates the heroic myth. Parks didn’t just feel her way into resistance. She prepared.
Montgomery’s movement anchor, Black labor organizer E. D. Nixon, insisted that effective civil disobedience required “careful planning” and “a well-trained and disciplined core of leadership.” This was the logic he had been taught at Highlander: organization first, then disruption. Thus Nixon arranged for Parks and other local Black activists to attend the school in August 1955 for a two-week intensive multi-racial training. Parks later recalled:
At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops, and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.
Rosa Parks with the Clinton 12 at Highlander
Montgomery’s subsequent boycott matters here not only because it propelled that as-then-still-unknown King into national leadership, but because it was the first major breakthrough of the modern civil rights movement’s mass-action model: sustained collective discipline, economic pressure, and moral confrontation with Jim Crow power. It turned the struggle from courtroom battles into a social insurgency. King’s gifts—his voice, his steadiness under pressure, his ability to frame the fight in moral and democratic terms—were real. But the movement around him was also teaching him what kind of leader he needed to be.
That teaching came from people who already knew how to organize. And a surprising number of those people came out of socialist and labor traditions.
Bayard Rustin
If you want to point to a single figure who helped turn King from a gifted local leader into the organizer of a national movement, Bayard Rustin is hard to beat. Rustin treated nonviolent mass organizing as a technology of power. It was something you trained for, drilled, organized, and executed with precision.
Rustin is sometimes remembered as the man behind the 1963 March on Washington. That’s true—but it sells him short. Rustin wasn’t just an event planner. He was a strategist who carried decades of political experience in labor coalition-building, in Gandhian nonviolence, and in building structure and discipline. He was also a committed democratic socialist. As he put it in a 1958 report on his recent trip abroad, “The problem in Europe—as in the United States—is the absence of a vital socialist movement.”
MLK Jr. and Bayard Rustin
Rustin also helped shape the intellectual and strategic framing of Montgomery. He constantly pushed King and other leaders to think bigger: don’t treat the boycott as a local dispute; treat it as a model. Don’t treat segregation as a “Southern problem”; treat it as a national crisis of democracy. And don’t separate civil rights from economic rights.
That last point is crucial. Rustin’s politics came out of a socialist tradition that understood racism as inseparable from political economy. He was relentless about moving from protest to power via majoritarian working-class politics.
This is also where Rustin’s own life shaped his political commitments. He lived as an openly gay man in a movement world that was often hostile to homosexuality. He survived repression, marginalization, and surveillance. Those experiences sharpened his sense that moral purity is not enough. You need organization strong enough to win.
King absorbed a lot of this. The “King style” people now admire—moral clarity fused with disciplined organizing and broad coalition politics—didn’t come only from the pulpit.
A. Philip Randolph
If Rustin helped professionalize strategy, A. Philip Randolph helped define the movement’s relationship to labor and economic justice.
Randolph became a Socialist Party leader in a Harlem milieu that fused class struggle with a Black freedom politics. In New York he and his co-thinker Chandler Owen tried organizing unions, got fired for telling the truth about low wages, and, with backing from the left-wing Jewish Daily Forward, launched The Messenger in 1917, which they advertised as “The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.”
Randolph’s socialism was a way of reading power and a way of building it. He believed Black freedom couldn’t be won only through courtroom victories or moral persuasion, because segregation was anchored in material domination: jobs controlled by bosses, housing controlled by landlords, and politics controlled by those who owned the economy. That conviction pushed him toward the hardest terrain in American life — Black labor struggles — and the belief that democracy required economic power for working people.
MLK Jr. and A. Philip Randolph
Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters wasn’t simply a successful union—founded in 1925 to organize the thousands of Black men working as Pullman porters on the railroads, it was the first major Black-led union to win a charter from the American Federation of Labor. It became a training ground for a generation of Black working-class organizers—including E. D. Nixon in Montgomery—who understood how to pressure institutions, bargain collectively, and build durable organizations.
Randolph also pioneered a tactic that would define the civil rights era: the threat of mass action as leverage. His proposed March on Washington in 1941—aimed at forcing federal action against discrimination in defense industries—was a model of using mobilization to extract concessions. It showed that you didn’t have to wait for goodwill. You could force change.
By 1963, that Randolph tradition culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event that is often sanitized into a warm memory of one speech about a dream. But the march’s very framing was a statement: jobs and freedom. Not just rights on paper, but economic demands.
And Randolph’s language was militant in its insistence on pressing forward. Randolph declared, “This march will not be stopped. It will go on.” That line was a warning to the political establishment that the movement would escalate until its demands were met.
Stanley Levison
Stanley Levison might be the least known of King’s key socialist advisers, but his impact was no less significant. Levison—introduced to King by Bayard Rustin during the Montgomery bus boycott—was a wealthy Jewish businessman and lawyer with a deep Marxist past, someone the government treated as a dangerous contaminant. Indeed, he was “a dyed-in-the-wool leftist” and “a full-blooded Marxist” until he severed formal ties with the Communist Party in 1956.
As his biographer notes, Levison did much of the backend work that made King’s work possible. Levison “counseled, raised funds for, ghostwrote articles and speeches for, did the accounting of, and often bailed out King” from 1955 to 1968.
That doesn’t mean Levison “made” King. It means King operated inside a support system built by seasoned organizers and radical intellectuals—precisely the kind of system that Great Man stories erase.
MLK Jr. with Stanley Levison
Levison also shaped King’s message in important ways, especially around class. As King put it in his book on Montgomery, the labor movement “must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality.” Levison’s politics mattered here. He was a Marxist with real ties to labor radicalism, someone who saw economic structure as the key to racial hierarchy. And he helped King articulate that link in public language.
Levison also brought a kind of ethical discipline that helped shaped King’s choices. When King considered a profitable lecture tour, Levison snapped, “You can’t do that,” and when King asked why, Levison answered: “Because the kinds of people that you will be preaching to about nonviolence are too poor to pay for your lectures.” King quickly agreed. It’s a small detail, but it underscores how personal virtue emerged from political discipline—one rooted in socialist movement culture.
A Forgotten History
If this socialist tradition mattered so much, why is it so absent from popular memory?
One answer is repression. Levison, Rustin, and others were targeted by the FBI and by politicians who believed civil rights could be discredited by association with socialism. J. Edgar Hoover treated Levison as “Mr. X,” a Communist figure supposedly infiltrating King’s circle.
Another answer is American political culture. Many people find it comforting to believe change comes from exceptional individuals, not from organization. It reduces history to biography. It lets you admire King without asking what kind of collective apparatus is needed to produce more leaders like him and to win real change.
And then there is the myth about early socialists and race: the idea that socialism is inherently blind to racism, making it easy to treat socialist influence on King as irrelevant or accidental. There were real failures and compromises across the white socialist and labor left. But there were also profound contributions—Randolph and Rustin’s entire careers being one of the most obvious. And their politics came straight out of the Socialist Party, which had made a sharp anti-racist turn after World War I.
The point is that King’s movement was built inside a broader left ecosystem that treated racial justice and economic justice as inseparable. None of this reduces King to a puppet. The opposite is true. King’s greatness was not just that he had advisers. It was that he listened, learned, and evolved. Many leaders resist that kind of learning. King actively sought it.
He also chose, again and again, to accept the risks that came with these relationships. Staying close to Rustin and Levison—both targets of intense repression—was not safe. It wasn’t politically convenient. King did it because he recognized that movements need thinkers, strategists, and builders, not just preachers.
The story of King’s radicalism is not the story of a lone genius. It is the story of a gifted leader who joined a tradition—and helped bring its best instincts to national scale.
No Solitary Heroes
We live in a moment when Donald Trump has helped hurl the United States back toward some of its worst legacies of racism, exclusion, and oligarchy. In this environment, the right lesson from King is that moral clarity has to be fused with organization, mass leverage, and material demands.
King’s most dangerous idea was never simply that racism is wrong. It was that democracy requires redistribution—what he and his circle increasingly framed as a kind of democratic socialism in practice: building a society where working people have power, where rights are real because they are backed by economic security, and where the fight against racism is inseparable from a fight for a better life for all workers.
That vision did not emerge from King alone. It was shaped and sharpened by a broader socialist tradition—through figures like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, and Stanley Levison—who taught him how to organize, how to think structurally, and how to connect the struggle for dignity to the struggle for material freedom for all.
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Organizations in Minnesota have called for a mass day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23. Each of us, and all our organizations, should try to participate nationwide. It’s all hands on deck to protect our communities from ICE terror.
In NYC, students will be walking out on January 23. The UFT, NYC’s teachers union, has also committed to participating in the day of action. Students and unions nationwide should follow their lead.
The fight to tax the rich in NYC has taken on an increased urgency after it was announced that the city is facing an unexpectedly large budget shortfall due to Eric Adam’s mismanagement. We need your help to canvass and phonebank our fellow New Yorkers — sign up here.
Young people with placards reading “Greenland is not for sale!” take part in a demonstration on January 17, 2026 in Nuuk, Greenland.
(Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/AFP via Getty Images)
“Europe should respond to Trump’s blackmail with targeted measures aimed not at American consumers, but at American billionaires,” wrote Gabriel Zucman.
The leading French economist Gabriel Zucman is urging European governments to inflict financial pain on American billionaires in response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to seize control of Greenland, a mineral-rich island that some of Trump’s rich campaign donors see as a potentially massive profit opportunity.
“Europe should respond to Trump’s blackmail with targeted measures aimed not at American consumers, but at American billionaires,” Zucman wrote in a post on his Substack. “Access to the European market—by billionaires and the companies they own—should be made conditional on paying a wealth tax: in effect, a tariff for oligarchs. If Elon Musk, for example, wants to keep selling Teslas in Europe, he should have to pay it. If he refuses, Tesla would lose access to the European market.”
Zucman outlined his proposal after Trump threatened over the weekend to hit France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland with tariffs up to 25% if they don’t drop their opposition to the US president’s demand for “the complete and total purchase of Greenland,” an autonomous territory of Denmark.
The targeted countries are currently weighing retaliatory tariffs and other potential responses to Trump’s threat.
Zucman, a renowned expert on global inequality, argued that while existing mechanisms such as the anti-coercion instrument known as Europe’s trade “bazooka” can be useful, “anti-oligarchic protectionism has a decisive advantage: It opens a two-front struggle against Trump, at home and abroad.”
“By targeting oligarchic wealth rather than national pride,” Zucman wrote, “Europe can blunt Trump’s ability to mobilize nationalist resentment and rally part of the American public behind his imperial agenda.”
Trump’s proposed Greenland takeover is widely opposed by the island’s population and US voters. But as journalist Casey Michel wrote for The New Republic last week, there is one key constituency that stands to benefit massively from a US takeover of the mineral-rich territory: American oligarchs, including some of Trump’s top campaign donors.
“Ranging from tech moguls to fossil fuel company heads, all of these figures and forces have invested in mining and extraction companies across the island—and all stand to profit if only they can cut out any pesky Danish or Greenlandic authorities from regulating or restraining their operations,” wrote Michel. “The figures behind the curtain are by no means obscure. KoBold Metals, a mining outfit helping lead Greenland’s ‘modern gold rush,’ has seen investments from figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and hedge funds like Andreessen Horowitz.”
“Another company eyeing Greenland,” Michel added, “is Critical Metals Corp, which is backed by the same hedge fund that Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s commerce secretary, spent years running.”
“The vast fortunes of the sleaze buckets who put Trump into the White House and back his attack on democracy in the United States and around the world will suddenly be thrown into question.”
Tariffs targeting such firms and the billionaires behind them, Zucman argued, would be the most effective way to penalize Trump’s reckless behavior and deter him in the future.
“If imperialism is driven by oligarchic power, then oligarchic power must be confronted,” Zucman wrote. “What are the alternatives? Doing nothing invites endless blackmail.”
US economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, made the case for a similarly aggressive European response to Trump’s economic warfare.
“European countries can announce that they will no longer honor US-owned patents and copyrights,” Baker wrote Monday. “Putting US patents and copyrights on the line is a guaranteed attention grabber. The vast fortunes of the sleaze buckets who put Trump into the White House and back his attack on democracy in the United States and around the world will suddenly be thrown into question.”
“The key point is that European countries, by opting to not respect US patents and copyrights, have an incredibly powerful weapon to use against Donald Trump and his rich supporters,” Baker added. “The time has come for them to go nuclear.”
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Nearly two weeks after finally being freed from the Israeli military prison Neve Tzedek, 18-year-old conscientious objector Yuval Peleg forcefully called out the Israel Defense Forces in a Monday statement shared by Amnesty International.
“After five times being imprisoned and a total of 130 days spent in military prison for refusing to enlist in the IDF, I have finally been released and exempt from army service. I am incredibly happy to be out of prison,” said Peleg, who was released January 6.
Even though Peleg made his objection to compulsory enlistment clear through the refusal process by the conscientious objector network Mesarvot, and to IDF representatives at the recruitment center in Ramat Gan last year, the military initially declared his refusal to be disobedience. Amnesty has advocated for the release of Peleg and other “prisoners of conscience.”
The video below was shared by Mesarvot in November, when Peleg was released from his fourth stint behind bars.
Yuval Peleg was released today after 100 days in military prison and is expected to return in the coming days for a fifth term of imprisonment.
“It was a difficult experience, and lasted longer than I had hoped,” Peleg said Monday, “but I want to thank everyone at Amnesty International for the support—it was incredibly strengthening to know that even though I’m imprisoned there are people all over the world who support my actions and are pushing for my release, and without them I’m not sure how I would have gotten through it.”
“As difficult as this was, I do not regret refusing the draft and would do so again,” he continued. “The IDF has proven itself to be a despicable, criminal organization, and there is no excuse for joining it. I, and many others, will continue to fight and oppose it as long as is necessary. I would like to remind everyone that while I have finally been freed, there are still two other conscientious objectors in prison currently, and another that might be sent back. I hope they all get released as soon as possible, and support them throughout their incarceration.”
“Most importantly, the criminal actions of the IDF and state of Israel have not ceased,” Peleg stressed, pointing to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip launched after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 71,550 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 171,365, according to local health officials. Global experts warn the true toll is likely far higher.
The IDF’s killing has continued despite a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in October. Since then, the Gaza Health Ministry said Monday, Israel has killed 465 Palestinians and injured 1,287, plus 713 bodies have been found beneath the rubble.
Scholars, world leaders, human rights groups—including Amnesty—and other critics like Peleg call the Israeli assault genocide. The conscientious objector noted Monday that “the genocide in Gaza is ongoing despite the facetious ‘ceasefire’ and the now almost 60-year occupation of the West Bank keeps accelerating, to add to the campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Zionists since even before 1948.”
“This is what truly must be fought against,” he said, “and as long as it continues, so will the resistance to it.”
Peleg’s comments came after Reutersreported Friday that not only are Palestinians in Gaza suffering “a volcano” of psychological trauma, but also Israel’s Defense Ministry has recorded a nearly 40% increase in post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops since September 2023, with 60% of the 22,300 people being treated for war wounds experiencing PTSD.
“An Israeli parliamentary committee found in October that 279 soldiers had attempted suicide in the period from January 2024 to July 2025, a sharp increase from previous years,” according to the news agency. “The report found that combat soldiers comprised 78% of all suicide cases in Israel in 2024.”
The US 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline—which offers 24/7, free, and confidential support—can be reached by calling or texting 988, or through chat at 988lifeline.org. For the Veterans Crisis Line, dial 988, then press 1, or text 838255.
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Watermelon Pictures Sep 24, 2025 Watch the official trailer for ALL THAT’S LEFT OF YOU, a powerful multigenerational drama from acclaimed filmmaker Cherien Dabis (AMREEKA). Executive produced by Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, All That’s Left of You is an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival and was chosen as Jordan’s official submission to the 98th Academy Awards. Festival Awards Include: Golden Gate Award – San Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature – San Francisco International Film Festival Best Narrative Feature – Sydney International Film Festival Spanning seven decades, the film follows a Palestinian teenager in the Occupied West Bank whose involvement in a protest leads to a moment of violence that reverberates through his family. As his mother reflects on the political and emotional forces that shaped that day, the film traces the hopes, losses, and resilience of one uprooted family across generations. All That’s Left of You is a deeply moving portrait of dispossession, memory, survival, and inheritance, bearing witness to the enduring legacy of Palestinian life and resistance. Presented by Watermelon Pictures, a film production and distribution company rooted in creative resistance and committed to amplifying underrepresented voices worldwide.
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Premiered 12 hours ago Happy Martin Luther King Day! MR’s compilation of MLK-related audio returns! Excerpts include: -A previously unheard speech from MLK on reparations, white economic anxiety and guaranteed income -Dr. King’s first TV “interview” from the show “The Open Mind – The New Negro” in 1957, hosted by Professor Richard D. Hefner. -“Beyond Vietnam”, the speech delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. -MLK’s last speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution“, delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. -Walter Cronkite reporting King’s assassination in 1968. -Nina Simone performing the song “Why?” live, 3 days following MLK’s assassination at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island in April 1968.
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This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
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Milk Club Trans Caucus Meeting Date: Tuesday, April 28 Time: 5-7 PM Location and Zoom Link: Meeting info available to members of the Milk Club Trans Caucus. Please reach out to trans@milkclub.org if you would like to join the Milk Club Trans Caucus.
San Francisco Young Democrats meet with SFDems Chair Nancy Tung Wednesday, April 29th | 2pm Location: SC T-160 (third floor of Student Center) Register The San Francisco Young Democrats at SF State are teaming up with SFDems to make sure their voices are heard. Want to get more plugged into San Francisco... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
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