Democracy At Work Premiered Nov 17, 2025 Capitalism Hits Home with Dr. Harriet Fraad[ CHH S08E21] The Violent Crimes of Lost, Angry Men In this episode of Capitalism Hits Home, Dr. Harriet Fraad explores how rape and mass murder become some men’s reactions to their reduced status as providers for dependent women and children. Men who never recognized the life-sustaining care they received from women are lost and angry.  Vulnerability and emotional need are inaccessible for many men. Anger and violence seem like socially accepted masculine ways to reestablish lost economic power and an emotional outlet for loneliness. As this epidemic continues to crescendo with the current administration in power, we must understand the correlations at play and explore ways to curb this unnecessary violence. Capitalism Hits Home with Dr. Harriet Fraad (CHH) is a @democracyatwrk production. The show explores the intersection of capitalism, class, and personal lives, examining the economic realm and its impact on individual and social psychology. Learn more about CHH: https://www.democracyatwork.info/capi… We make it a point to provide the show ad-free. Your contributions help keep this content free and accessible to all. If you would like to make a one-time donation, you can do so by visiting us at: http://www.democracyatwork.info/donate

Wajahat Ali Nov 28, 2025 Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA have already lost. No matter how hard they try to send people of color “back” to our “third world countries,” there’s just too many of us. We’re here & we’re winning. https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/de…

From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, we’re asking you not to shop from three major corporations enabling Trump’s fascist agenda.

Our Targets

	HOME DEPOT enables ICE terrorism by allowing Trump’s jackboots to violently detain and kidnap workers on its properties.
	TARGET caved to MAGA backlash by pulling Pride merch off the shelves, and canceled DEI programs that support Black workers and businesses.
	AMAZON provides technology to power ICE deportations while Jeff Bezos spends a fortune kissing up to Trump — funding both his MAGA agenda and vanity projects like his ballroom.

To send a strong message, we need not just you, but your family, friends, and community, to commit to supporting mutual aid or small businesses instead of Home Depot, Target, and Amazon next weekend.

Here are three steps to take right now:

1. Learn more: Make a plan to join the blackout from November 27 – December 1. Understand what we’re asking, why we’re doing this, and how to spend your dollars where they’ll do good.
2. Let us know you’re with us: Pledge to pause shopping at Home Depot, Target, and Amazon. Don’t give any money to the companies undermining democracy. Support local businesses or mutual aid efforts instead.
3. Spread the word: Use our graphics and customizable social posts to get others involved. Try to triple your impact by getting three other people to join the blackout.

We don’t have to be broke: Study shows states have many progressive revenue options—if the governors and legislators will take advantage of them

By Tim Redmond

November 24, 2025 (48hills.org)

The outlook for California’s budget is, of course, bleak. I say “of course” because most states are in serious trouble: Federal support makes up close to a third of most state budgets, sometimes more—and as the Trump Administration has set about destroying state funding to give tax cuts to billionaires, the situation has left governors and legislators looking for ways to cut programs.

We keep hearing terms like “tough budget choices” and “challenges.” That’s politics-speak for austerity, for more devastation of the remaining program that help the poor and working class.

But a new report from the Action Center on Race and the Economy offers another alternative: State governments have plenty of ways to raise new revenue from taxes on the rich and on big corporations. There’s enough money out there to come close to replacing what Trump has taken away.

State officials, the report says, need to stop just blaming Washington and start demanding that the very rich in their own states “pay us what you owe us.”

From the report:

We are in the midst of what many are deeming the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history from Black, brown and poor communities to the ultra-wealthy. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates that Trump’s 2025 federal tax cuts will result in the richest 1% receiving $117 billion in tax cuts in 2026 alone. The impacts of this transfer will be felt by children in under-resourced classrooms, families who will suffer avoidable deaths due to hospital closures or lack of healthcare, students who will be burdened with more debt to pursue education, and immigrants ripped off the streets by militarized forces whose budgets have ballooned at the expense of the programs poor people need to thrive.

Federal giveaways to the ultrawealthy create massive budget deficits for our state governments, as well as local governments who depend on federal and state dollars. Across the country, many states are mimicking the actions of the federal government by reducing taxes on the ultra-wealthy and their corporations or enacting austerity measures to further cut the vital public services residents depend on. These actions are justified by the myth that there simply isn’t enough money to fund the programs our communities depend on the most; meanwhile, billionaires and megacorporations continue pocketing record-breaking profits.

We must resist austerity at all levels of government and make it plain that the wealth to fully fund our communities exists. The only path forward is to expose the CEOs and corporations in our states that are creating the crisis and champion common-sense revenue solutions that will make them pay. We can resist the billionaire-first agenda. Our state budgets can be a powerful tool to make up for disinvestment at the federal level. The only way to combat the federal tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy is by championing strong progressive revenue solutions that recuperate those funds for our communities at the state level.

The report offers some fascinating ideas, among them a digital ad tax. The giant tech companies make most of their money from selling ads—and much of that is never taxed:

Together, Big Tech has created a booming digital advertising empire that’s fast approaching $1.1 trillion.49 This empire is built on extracting our personal information and surveilling our every activity and location without paying us a dime for access to our personal information.

The vast majority of digital advertising money is collected by a tiny handful of companies—Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok and Microsoft. Google alone accounts for a quarter of the entire digital ad marketplace.

Taxing those ads would bring in billions to fund social services:

Because the tax is based on where ads are viewed, Big Tech companies would have to stop advertising in the state altogether to avoid being taxed. This is a smart and legal progressive revenue raiser that will capture funds from Big Tech’s booming advertising empire.

The report also calls for state wealth taxes, which fits with the theories of French economist Thomas Piketty. It also reflects what the Patriotic Millionaires argue: That the very rich pay almost no taxes on their real income. From the report:

The wealthier you are, the larger percentage of your wealth comes from unrealized capital gains. However, this wealth remains largely untaxed as wealthy individuals often hold onto their investments for many years and pass it on.

The same goes for capital gains and the “carried interest” loophole:

States like New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts, and Connecticut with large concentrations of private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital firms, have the most to gain from closing the loophole.

The report also dives into regressive spending (a big chunk of California’s deficit comes from overspending on prisons.)

And here’s an interesting concept I didn’t know about:

Raising progressive revenue is the easiest way to reduce Wall Street’s power in our state and local governments, because if we have the revenue we need, we do not need to rely on borrowing from these Wall Street entities. Another avenue for reducing their power is called fiscal mutualism. Fiscal mutualism is an economic concept where pension funds invest in municipal bonds issued by local governments. This helps lower borrowing costs for those governments, making it easier for them to finance public projects without needing to pay exorbitant interest rates and fees to Wall Street. By having a local pension fund invest in municipal bonds, a city can secure lower interest rates on its debt and the pension fund earns a steady return on its investment. Fiscal mutualism defined the first half of the twentieth century, with virtually every state restricting pension investments to federal, state, and local bonds. This closed-loop created a symbiotic relationship where pension trustees were invested in the stability and growth of their city and schools by purchasing bonds, and in return the city or school district made interest payments that directly benefited the retirement of its workforce. Tax-exempt municipal bonds generally offer lower yields than corporate investments, but wealthy investors accept the lower yield in order to receive the tax-exemption benefit. Fiscal mutualism eroded when legislative changes lifted regulations for pension investments, leading pension trustees to abandon fiscal mutualism in favor of higher-yield corporate investments.

The report challenges states like California, where the governor and most of the Legislature talks about the horrors of Trump, to stop complaining and bring some of that money back home.

Gav?

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Tim Redmond

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian-American, was freed on November 27, 2025 after over nine months in Israeli detention.

 (Photo: @infinite_jaz/X)

While expressing relief, the 16-year-old’s uncle noted the “hundreds of children like Mohammed, unjustly trapped in an Israeli military prison.”

Jessica Corbett

Nov 27, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

“Words can’t describe the immense relief we have as a family right now,” said Zeyad Kadur, the uncle of Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian-American who was finally released on Thursday after over nine months in Israeli detention.

In February, Israeli forces arrested the Florida resident, then 15, at a family home in the illegally occupied West Bank over allegations that he threw rocks at Israeli settlers. Ibrahim’s release follows a monthslong pressure campaign from his relatives, rights groups, and American lawmakers, who have specifically urged President Donald Trump to demand the US citizen’s freedom.

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“Israeli soldiers had no right to take Mohammed from us in the first place,” said Kadur. “For more than nine months, our family has been living a horrific and endless nightmare, particularly Mohammed’s mother and father, who haven’t been able to see or touch their youngest child for nearly a year, all while knowing Israeli soldiers were beating him and starving him.”

“We couldn’t believe Mohammed was free until his parents wrapped their arms around him and felt him safe,” he continued. “Right now, we are focused on getting Mohammed the immediate medical attention he needs after being subjected to Israel’s abuse and inhumane conditions for months. We just want Mohammed to be healthy and to have his childhood back.”

According to the Guardian, which first exposed Ibrahim’s case in July: “Relatives said he was taken to a hospital for intravenous therapy and blood work immediately after his release, and noted he is severely underweight, pale, and is still suffering from scabies contracted during his detention. Ibrahim had lost a quarter of his body weight in detention, his family said.”

Kadur said Thursday that “we’d like to thank the more than a hundred organizations, local Florida community members, volunteers, and members of Congress who continued to speak up for Mohammed and demand his immediate freedom. We are also deeply grateful to the countless people who refused to stop telling Mohammed’s story, and to those who called their representatives every single day to demand they act to free him. Thank you for bringing Mohammed’s story to the American people and the world.”

The uncle added:

There are hundreds of children like Mohammed, unjustly trapped in an Israeli military prison, being subjected to Israel’s abuse and torture. No mother, father, parent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or child should ever have to go through what Mohammed just went through. As we support Mohammed and are beyond relieved he is free, we will continue to demand justice for Sayfollah Musallet, an American and Mohammed’s first cousin, who was beaten to death and murdered by a mob of Israeli settlers on July 11, 2025. We expect the American government to protect our families.

Mohammed was forced to spend his 16th birthday unjustly imprisoned by Israel, separated from the people who love him. Now that Mohammed is with his family, we can finally wish him a happy birthday. His mom, Muna, can prepare his favorite meal and be with her son. We are proud of Mohammed and love him dearly. The family requests time to be with their son after this painful experience.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding shared Kadur’s statement and also called for justice for Musallet.

https://x.com/theIMEU/status/1994085448793120899?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1994085448793120899%7Ctwgr%5Ec5b17a8755de1cc56e1b81c0d21efc8008b3208b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fmohammed-ibrahim-israel

Ibrahim’s freedom came as people in the United States celebrated Thanksgiving.

“Something to be thankful for today: Mohammed Ibrahim freed from captivity,” wrote Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim on social media.

US Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) similarly said, “On a day of thanksgiving we are so grateful Mohammed Ibrahim is on his way home.”

https://x.com/anewpolicyorg/status/1994065636159275112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1994065636159275112%7Ctwgr%5Ec5b17a8755de1cc56e1b81c0d21efc8008b3208b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fmohammed-ibrahim-israel

Robert McCaw, government affairs director at the largest US Muslim rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement that “Mohamed’s homecoming is a blessing, but it does not erase the torture and suffering he endured.”

“The US government has a responsibility to investigate Israel’s abuse of an American citizen and ensure that no other child—American or Palestinian—is subjected to the same treatment,” McCaw added.

The US government provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid annually, and has continued to do so over the past two years, as Israeli forces have waged a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip—a genocide that “is not over,” despite last month’s ceasefire agreement, as Amnesty International highlighted in a Thursday briefing. Amid that assault, there has also been a surge in Israeli soldiers’ and settlers’ violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Mohammed should have spent this year studying for his learner’s permit and enjoying time with his family—not locked in a military prison, beaten, starved, and terrified. His release is cause for celebration, but it must also be a turning point,” said CAIR’s Florida chapter. “The US cannot continue providing unchecked support to a government that tortures American children.”

“CAIR and CAIR-FL are calling on the US State Department, members of Congress, faith leaders, and civil society organizations to press for a full, public accounting of Mohammed’s treatment and to demand concrete consequences for the Israeli officials responsible,” the group added. “The organizations also reaffirm their commitment to supporting Mohamed and his family as he recovers from the trauma of his imprisonment and to advocating for all children subjected to abuse under Israel’s military system.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jessica Corbett

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

A young boy is seen reading on the floor between library shelves on July 8, 2011.

 (Stephen Simpson/Getty Images)

“It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them,” said a coalition of 33 library groups, publishing companies, and civil rights organizations.

Stephen Prager

Nov 27, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.

For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the “book purge” is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.

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It comes after Tennessee’s Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.

As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”

Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee’s libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state’s website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”

The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett’s instructions “contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law.”

“Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president,” the group continued. “Executive orders are not laws.”

But Crosby and Sims argued: “Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute ‘promoting gender ideology.’ The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals.”

On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an “age appropriateness review” of all books in their children’s section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee’s age appropriateness law or with Trump’s executive order.

As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University’s Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, “is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries.”

Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:

The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.

Earlier this month, the state’s Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements” from Hargett’s office.

It’s unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.

As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding “homosexuality” as a form of “public indecency” resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.

Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system’s board, Hargett’s order is “a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they ‘have to’ comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away.”

This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing “profound concern” over its review mandate.

The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.

“These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state,” the groups said. “Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding.”

“The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution,” they added. “It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle.”

The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library’s own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system.”

“We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians,” the alliance added, “rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Stephen Prager

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Published: November 25, 2021 (TheOnion.com)

SUDBURY, MA—Their forks clattering to the table mere moments after the 16-year-old’s sudden announcement, Thanksgiving guests at the Ross family dinner reportedly froze in disbelief Thursday after teenage son Ryan informed them of the genocide of Native Americans. “No, no, it can’t be! Not my precious holiday!” said mother Alexandra Ross, 47, one of several dumbfounded family members who at first listened in rapt amazement to the high school junior’s statement that the first Thanksgiving was nothing like what was taught in schools before breaking the silence by spitting out their mashed potatoes and turkey into their napkins and screaming at the top of their lungs. “This changes everything! Everything! What were we doing here gathered with your grandmother on a terrible day like this? Oh God, burn the tablecloth! Burn the little pilgrim figurine! Burn it all down!” At press time, family patriarch Jim Ross had proclaimed that he “couldn’t stand the horrible truth” before grabbing the carving knife and slitting his own throat from ear to ear in front of his stunned teenage son.

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The holiday’s real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let’s reconnect to that legacy.

Nov 27, 2025 (thenationmagazine.substack.com)

by Kali Holloway

It’s a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much—otherwise, they’d probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That’s because, if you study the path that Thanksgiving took on the way to its current culturally dominant presence in the calendar, it becomes clear that it’s low-key one of America’s wokest holidays. Far from being an eternal symbol of Pilgrims-and-Indians lies, Thanksgiving was, for a good portion of its history, a symbol of social reform and Northern abolitionism—a day the white slaveholding South held in disdain and refused, for decades, to celebrate. The myth of Thanksgiving isn’t just in sanitized denials of white settler-colonial violence and Indigenous genocide. It’s also in the fiction that the holiday itself has only recently become “politicized,” when it was never apolitical to begin with.

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It’s important to recognize that New England’s Puritan colonists often observed days of thanksgiving—think small “t”—to celebrate plentiful harvests and other communal successes. Likewise, Native American traditions of feasts and festivals for giving thanks date back thousands of years. The first national day of Thanksgiving was declared in a 1789 proclamation issued by President George Washington. Presidents John Adams and James Madison also declared days of thanksgiving during their terms, but none of those became a recurring annual holiday. Historian Joshua Zeitz notes that “by the late 1840s, some form of harvest thanksgiving celebration was observed in 21 states,” but the dates of each observance differed based on each governor’s choosing. Southern states were among those celebrating, but as anti-slavery sentiment grew more fervent and pervasive in the North, Thanksgiving took on new sectional meanings. As historian Matthew Dennis writes in Red, White, and Blue Letter Days, Southern “governors sometimes feared the feast as an abolitionist Trojan Horse”—a worry that wasn’t entirely baseless.

For decades, Northern antislavery clergy—especially New England’s evangelical Protestant ministers—had already been using Thanksgiving to deliver their most impassioned antislavery denunciations. On January 1, 1808, Black abolitionist and Episcopal priest Absalom Jones preached “A Thanksgiving Sermon,” recognizing the first day of the federal ban on transatlantic trafficking of Africans into America to be enslaved. The Rev. Jones suggested that January 1 should be annually observed as a “day of publick thanksgiving” to “remember the history of the sufferings of our brethren” and to commemorate the end of “the trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America.”

In fact, the date did become an annual day of Thanksgiving for Northern Black communities, at least until the Civil War and emancipation, particularly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Historian David Waldstreicher writes that celebrations included a street parade to the church, followed by “a reading of Congress’s act abolishing the slave trade, much as white celebrants read the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s inaugural address, or other texts.”

The second national day of Thanksgiving declared by President Washington, February 19, 1795, saw Boston preacher Thomas Baldwin issue a plea that “the day soon arrive when not difference of climate or features nor the color of the skin—when nothing but crimes shall consign any of the human race to slavery.” In his Nov. 26, 1835, Thanksgiving sermon, New Hampshire’s Rev. Calvin Cutler called slavery “a standing memorial of our shame and hypocrisy,” labeling the institution a betrayal of the country’s professed ideals and a threat to freedom of all. “When the nation hold as self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights’… [yet] one sixth of this very nation have these inalienable rights wrested from them by violence…. Is there no danger that our liberties will be infringed and destroyed, when the nation by their practice give the lie to their profession?” Cutler’s sermon text reads.

Thirteen years later, on the Thanksgiving just weeks after the election which gave Zachary Taylor the presidency, Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson—radical abolitionist, mentor of Emily Dickinson, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and later, a supporter of John Brown’s 1859 armed rebellion—bemoaned the fact that there would be “another slaveholding President at the head of this nominally free Republic,” and warned the time had arrived when the North “could go no farther in its subserviency to the Slave Power.”

And there is Boston-based Unitarian minister Theodore Parker’s November 28, 1850, sermon for Thanksgiving, delivered just two months after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which ordered that Black folks who had escaped bondage be captured and returned to their so-called masters, even if they were in free states. The demand that free Northern states comply with Southern slavery was not just gross federal overreach but belied the South’s professed belief in states’ rights. (Sound familiar?) Parker’s fiery Thanksgiving sermon laid bare how the law had intensified sectarian passions.

“I think I know of one cause which may dissolve the Union—one which ought to dissolve it, if put in action,” Parker announced. “That is, a serious attempt to execute the Fugitive Slave Law, here and in all the North. I mean an attempt to recover and take back all the fugitive slaves in the North, and to punish, with fine and imprisonment, all who aid or conceal them. The South has browbeat us again and again.… She has imprisoned our citizens; driven off, with scorn and loathing, our officers sent to ask constitutional justice. She has spit upon us. Let her come to take back the fugitives—and, trust me, she will wake up the lion.”

By the 1850s, white Southerners had already begun a kind of massive resistance to Northern influence, reconsidering “sending their kids north to Ivy League universities, subscribing to Northern publications, or hiring Yankee tutors for their children,” as journalist Jenny Jarvie notes. And now, as tensions flared further, they also began to reject the celebration of Thanksgiving.

And yet, this did not deter Sarah Josepha Hale, who should be remembered as American history’s most tireless advocate for a national celebration of the holiday. Hale’s 1827 novel Northwood: Or, Life North and South, was among the earliest American novels to offer even a cursory criticism of slavery; while her books have been mostly forgotten these days, her poetic composition “Mary Had a Little Lamb” remains a popular grammar-school banger today. In any case, the author rose to become editor of two of the country’s most prominent magazines, and in their pages, Hale waxed poetic about the need for a shared day of gratitude and moral reflection. Her campaign also included letters written to presidents and yearly missives pleading her Thanksgiving case to every state governor. But as the Civil War dawned, responses from soon-to-be Confederate states were often chilly. Virginia governor and enslaver Henry Wise groused in his 1856 response to Hale that the “theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving ha[d] abided other causes,” meaning the governor believed the day had been used to spread abolitionism.

By now, Southerners even found Thanksgiving foodstuffs suspicious. In Hale’s novel Northwood, she had described pumpkin pie as “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving; the size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the party who prepares the feast.” Pumpkins were grown on New England’s small farms, the symbolic opposite of the sprawling Southern plantations that served as labor camps for so many Black enslaved people. Those Northerners who ate pumpkin, according to Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon, were engaging in a form of identity politics—“a way to affirm New Englanders’ identity through attachments to a place, a particular landscape, and the simple virtues of farm life.” And thus, the South even held pumpkin pie as an expression of anti-slavery sentiment, or what might be termed “virtue signaling” in today’s parlance. What’s more, since most of the South’s cooking was actually done by Black enslaved women, and sweet potatoes were similar in every way to the yams of West Africa, sweet potato pie was the South’s more popular dish. That remains true at both Black and white Southern Thanksgivings.

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Hale lucked out in 1863, when more than 35 years into her campaign, President Abraham Lincoln finally cosigned the idea of an annual national Thanksgiving. Nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation, in a decree dated October 3, Lincoln designated “the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving.” That declaration did little to promote national unity, coming as it did amid the churn of the Civil War. But after the South’s defeat two years later, the December 8, 1865, edition of The New York Times carried the reprint of a sermon by Manhattan Presbyterian minister James Renwick Wilson. It was titled, “The Abolition of Slavery the Chief Cause for Thanksgiving.”

“The great blessing that has flowed to us from the late conflict is the destruction of slavery; it was only desirable that the Union should be preserved and the government saved, that it might be the defender of liberty,” the sermon read. “The war has been worth all that it cost the nation; the sacrifice has been great, but the benefit greater. How great a cause of thankfulness we have in the destruction of this wickedness, those only can realize who have formed a true conception of the system, and of its far-reaching and destructive influence. The war has taught the nation a lesson which it was slow to learn, but taught it effectually.”

But even after the war’s end, the South—or rather, the white South—continued to abstain from celebrating Thanksgiving. As activist Dan Morrison writes, “only after Black people were betrayed with the downfall of Reconstruction and white unity once again prevailed” during the era known as Reconciliation did white Southerners “celebrate Thanksgiving along with their Northern white cousins.” And even that took decades. For example, in 1868, Texas’s Austin State Gazette suggested that the day be ignored, since it was a celebration of “Reconstruction, the 14th amendment and nigger voting.” Texas Governor O.M. Roberts, an ex-Confederate officer, called it a “damned Yankee institution” in the late year of 1879. Black people and white Republicans celebrated the day, nonetheless. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a bill that moved Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November.

So what of the more familiar popular myth of Thanksgiving—the one in which faceless Indians “welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear,” to quote Dan Silverman, author of This Land Is Their Land? Puritans were associated with New England, and the North more broadly, and Southerners were loath to include mention of them even as Thanksgiving picked up steam below the Mason-Dixon Line. The First Thanksgiving author Robert Tracy McKenzie writes that “long after the Civil War, most artistic representations of Thanksgiving that included Native Americans portrayed them as openly hostile, and it is no coincidence that the now familiar image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a common table dates from the early 20th century.” Silverman emphasizes that the Pilgrims and Indians story gained traction as white Protestants, status-insecure in the face of waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, sought a way to reassert cultural dominance. And here we are.

A few years ago, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton—who calls slavery a “necessary evil” and more than once has advocated murdering protesters—complained that Thanksgiving was being undermined by “revisionist charlatans of the radical left.” Cotton, like the rest of the right-wing chorus singing this tune, was actually confessing his deep, seemingly infinite ignorance. The real revisionism of Thanksgiving’s history isn’t in acknowledging the truth of colonial violence but in whitewashing the abolitionist politics that once defined the day. The most historically faithful way to recognize that history, too long ignored, is by highlighting those radical roots. This year, let’s honor tradition by once again making Thanksgiving radical.

Oliver Milman

Trump puts US in unflattering company as lack of representative reveals disdain for climate progress

(TheGuardian.com)

More than two decades ago, the US railed against the “axis of evil”. Now, after international climate talks spluttered to a meagre conclusion, the US finds itself grouped with unflattering company – an “axis of obstruction” that has stymied progress on the climate crisis.

Donald Trump’s administration opted to not send anyone to the UN climate summit in Brazil that culminated over the weekend – a first for the US in 30 years of these annual gatherings and another representation of the president’s disdain for the climate crisis, which he has called a “hoax” and a “con job”.

But even without the administration touting “drill, baby, drill” at the grey conference center in Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon river, 194 other countries were unable to bring down the curtain on the era of coal, oil and gas. The words “fossil fuel” were not mentioned in the agreement text after fierce opposition led by Saudi Arabia, which has previously been cajoled by the US to take a more moderate line at climate talks.

Michael Jacobs, of the thinktank ODI Global and the University of Sheffield, said that the Cop30 summit revealed “an increasingly bitter conflict at the heart of global climate politics: between those who accept the scientific fact that to deal with climate change the world must wean itself off fossil fuels over the coming decades; and those who are actively resisting this in pursuit of their short-term energy interests”.

The US can now be considered in the latter group, along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia, according to Jacobs. “I think today we have witnessed what the three countries have agreed,” he said of Trump’s separate dealings with Saudi Arabia and Russia over the past week.

“Geopolitically, this is the creation of a new axis of obstruction – actively promoting fossil fuels and opposed to climate action.”

The US now finds itself ranged against a loose coalition of about 90 countries, including much of Europe, that demanded a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels – the root cause of the worsening climate crisis – in Belém.

This group will convene in a separate summit in Colombia in April to further this goal, amid impatience with the ponderous, consensus-driven UN framework on the climate crisis that barely held in place at Cop30.

“Even without the Trump administration there to bully and cajole, petrostates again shut down meaningful progress on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels with necessary funding for poorer countries,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

If a world of petrostates and “electrostates” is forming, the Trump administration is adamant the US remain in the first group. Over the course of Cop30, the administration busied itself with some stark counter-programming in the US – stripping protections from streams and wetlands, making it harder to prevent species from becoming extinct and ushering oil and gas drilling into more than 1bn acres of US waters.

This last measure includes new drilling in pristine areas of the Arctic and, in a sort of trollish move timed for the visit of the California governor, Gavin Newsom, to Cop30, the prospect of oil rigs off the coast of California (Newsom has said this will happen “over my dead body”).

“President Trump has been clear: he will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman. “President Trump serves the American people, not radical climate activists who have fallen victim to the biggest scam of the century.”

But while Cop30 ended in frustration, there was recognition from observers that the world is still moving away from the age of fossil fuels, with double the amount, globally, invested in renewables like wind and solar than traditional energy sources last year.

And while China didn’t fully step into the leadership vacuum in Belém, it is certainly leading as a clean energy superpower, even outstripping its antediluvian competitor – China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America earns from exporting fossil fuels.

Even in the US, there is little appetite for Trump’s climate revanchism. Two-thirds of American voters oppose the president’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, while clear majorities want action to slash planet-heating emissions and are worried about the heatwaves, floods, storms and other climate-driven calamities that are pushing up insurance rates and harming Americans’ health.

If there is an axis of obstruction, it may be able to slow the transition down but is unlikely to halt it altogether. “The rest of the world is fed up with delay and denial,” as Al Gore, the former US vice-president, put it in the wake of the Cop30 outcome.

“Ultimately, petrostates, the fossil-fuel industry, and their allies are losing power. Just as we have passed Peak Trump, I believe we have also passed Peak Petrostate. They may be able to veto diplomatic language, but they can’t veto real-world action.”