“Truth to power” is no longer enough. We must mobilize the masses to overthrow their criminal dictatorship.

Above: Homeland Security agent in February 2025, photo by RJ Sangosti

We’ve reached a point where it’s no longer enough to expose power, because power has shown it will act essentially the same no matter how much attention there is on it. This was in many ways always the case, but the Gaza genocide represents a new stage in the Nazistic depravity of our government. 

The Trump administration’s plan for Gaza is extermination, and the events of the last few weeks have proven this. The Zionist entity has been committing its biggest massacres yet, using bombs that are even larger than the ones it used previously; this is because the U.S. gave it these weapons. The occupier has also been dismantling United Nations relief networks for Gaza, and deliberately bombing the volunteers who’ve brought aid through other means; this is because Washington has done everything possible to shield the occupiers from consequences.

The White House’s bombing campaign against Yemen, motivated by a desire to protect the occupiers from Yemen’s blockade, is the biggest example of this effort to create impunity for a holocaust. It’s also a crucial part of the effort to escalate our third world war, and bring a conflict with China. The strategy of the Trump neocons is to keep bombing across West Asia until Iran and Russia capitulate towards Washington, leaving China unable to rely on its biggest partners. Then the plan is to start a proxy war with the PRC, whether through Taiwan, Korea, or both. The Trump White House’s aggressive nature simply can't be denied, not after the Yemen war Signal leaks; it’s no longer a viable argument to say that Trump is a peace president.

It’s also undeniable that our government is trying to criminalize opposition towards its foreign policy. The detentions and deportations of student Gaza activists are there for everyone to see, with the administration not even really trying to justify this through accusations of crimes. White House officials are stating that their problem is with the speech itself, thereby openly admitting that they’ve disregarded the constitution.

Everyone who’s paying attention sees that these things are happening, and this has potential to bring repercussions upon the perpetrators. But only if we go beyond the truth-telling aspect, and build a popular movement. There is momentum for such a movement; a new wave of pro-Palestine demonstrations has appeared, which means the forces that got hurt by last year’s campus crackdowns are regrouping. Until we expand the pro-Palestine struggle into organized labor, though, the struggle will stay trapped within a cycle of defeat. And to do this, we must adopt a skepticism of the organizing model that’s so far defined modern social movements.

I’m not just talking about the practice of putting identity over class, which is how the organized left has long functioned. The problem also exists within much of today’s “alt” media, which isn’t necessarily tied to the left. At this stage, it’s conservative alt media and the “dissident right” that have much greater sway; and this faction represents the same kinds of problems the organized left does. Its purpose is also to discourage involvement in the class struggle; and the substitute it sells for class struggle is the mere concept of “speaking truth to power.” The danger alt media poses is that it can create complacency, convincing audiences that we’re doing enough as long as we speak about our government’s actions. 

As long as these efforts are detached from popular mobilization, and from a project to build independent working-class institutions, they’ll remain inadequate. The crimes of our ruling class may get exposed, but without such a revolutionary effort, the crimes will continue. Social media has created widespread awareness of the infanticide, massacres, torture, sexual assault, and engineered starvation that the Zionist entity is carrying out with our government’s assistance. And this shift in mass perception will be an essential part of how Zionism gets defeated. Another part will be the construction of a collective organizational force, one that gives the U.S. masses the ability to overthrow their imperialist dictatorship. 

Such a force exists in the communist elements that are carrying forth the Marxist-Leninist tradition; in the aid networks that Palestine’s friends are building; in the independent worker organizations our movement is constructing alongside the unions. And whether the Zionist state’s demise comes before or after the USA undergoes revolution, these players are going to keep working to disable the war machine. We don’t need to wait until after revolution comes for stopping the genocide to be a possibility; we absolutely have the power to effect the operations of the U.S. empire. To do this, we must lead the masses into not just understanding the ruling system, but working towards its demise.

The only path forward is to commit towards the final defeat of the capitalist state, however many costs such a path will entail. This is a conclusion that many more are going to come to as they see the state try to crush dissent, and leave us with no options for getting change through reforms. Reform was never a viable way to defeat our ruling class, but now this reality has become much easier to see; the imperial state is committing crimes with such lack of restraint, and using its repressive powers in such aggressive ways, that any arguments about changing the system from within are no longer tenable.

The ones who seek to sell these kinds of arguments have to disguise what they’re doing as revolutionary, which is what controlled opposition “socialists” like Sanders and AOC have been doing for a while. At this stage, when these Democrat agents have lost much of their narrative power, the main pseudo-revolutionary voices are the conservative alt media types. Their role is to divert from the class struggle by presenting a solution that’s devoid of anything to do with the proletarian movement. They speak against monopoly capitalist institutions like Blackrock, and they expose aspects of U.S. imperialism; but they’ll always lead their audiences away from the workers' struggle.

This narrative tactic is capable of succeeding in part, but we can push back against it, and guide the people to victory against their capitalist dictatorship. We have to show them that only class struggle can rescue us; which we can do by helping lead the workers in their fights, and publicizing how such fights benefit the people. Nobody can refute an argument as powerful as demonstrable reality. That’s why the psyops which come from “alt” media, as effective as they can be, will in the end be defeated by the forces of popular revolution.

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Jackson Hinkle has surpassed alt media, proving communism is essential to the anti-imperialist movement

When I say that Jackson Hinkle has surpassed alt media, I mean he’s been able to connect with a kind of global mass energy that very few other commentators have connected with. Essentially nobody else within media circles has gained widespread support from the masses within the countries that are resisting U.S. imperialism. Only Jackson has done so to such a significant degree, and this is an accomplishment that all anti-imperialists must learn from.

When I point out how alt media hasn’t managed to do the same thing, this is not me dismissing every independent media figure. There is a role for reporting on the things the legacy media won’t talk about. The problem is when independent reporters want to gain an audience among the popular masses, without understanding what Jackson has done in order to gain such an audience; that being to speak to the people in a way which connects with their revolutionary desires. There are certain alt media figures, including Eva Bartlett, Richard Medhurst, and Fiorella Isabel, who have recently been trying to discredit Jackson in reaction to his visiting Yemen. Bartlett was the one who started off this wave of character assassinations, and her tactic was to portray Jackson as an operative whose appearances are managed by the U.S. government. 

This is dangerous slander, of the kind that can get somebody killed; saying someone is an American spy while they’re visiting a U.S. adversary could incite an assassination attempt against them. It’s also counterproductive to the anti-imperialist cause, and Aaron Mate has been compelled to speak out against “Jackson Hinkle deranged syndrome.” The lesson from this story is not just that we should avoid jumping on hate brigades; it’s also that Jackson has found a way to advance the anti-imperialist cause which works far better than the standard alt media model. 

These alt media personalities who’ve attacked Jackson have effectively admitted that their model is inferior; if Jackson didn’t represent a threat towards their operations, they wouldn’t feel the need to smear him. There is a path towards narrative victory, and therefore political victory, that our movement isn’t going to be able to reach if it stays dependent on these traditional indie influencers. And to figure out what this path entails, we must study how Jackson has gotten this level of reach.

What Jackson Hinkle has done is convey communism’s ideas, and do so in a way that’s digestible to the average person. This has made his messaging stand out so much among other commentators, including most of the ones who call themselves Marxist-Leninists, because he truly understands what Marxism-Leninism means. He sees that Marxism does not need leftist politics, and that leftism is in fact a hindrance to Marxism. This makes him almost incomparably more effective than somebody like Ben Norton, who presents a “communism” that’s tied in with woke politics and is therefore lacking in substance. 

What Jackson and his party ACP represent is an iteration of Leninism that’s fundamentally rooted within popular revolution; within the struggle of the global masses to throw off multinational capitalist rule. Jackson’s efforts to communicate these ideas wouldn’t be as effective if not for the manner in which he conveys them, which is absolutely essential; the other aspect is in how he and ACP come across as relatable to the bulk of the masses, instead of only trying to speak to a niche. But this charisma factor also has to do with the content of the arguments Jackson puts forth. He’s set out to bring the language of popular revolution to a mass audience, and this has entailed telling the truth in a way that’s approachable; which is going to attract much attention and goodwill. The authentic nature of the communication comes through, reaching people who support class struggle but don’t find leftist politics appealing.

This type of messaging beats not just the left, but also the right; and at this stage, the right is a much more relevant threat towards the class struggle than the left is. Which means Jackson and ACP have an extremely important role: to challenge the far right by offering what the far right can’t. Nick Fuentes and the other Hitlerite “groypers” have not been able to translate their online movement into a real-life popular mobilization, like the ACP has. That’s because groyperism, though successful in the algorithms, lacks any practical program for improving the lives of the masses. 

The ACP is prioritizing algorithmic success as well, but unlike the groypers, it’s also rallying its members to serve the people. It’s cleaning up our communities, aiding disaster victims, feeding the needy, and providing the workers with assistance and guidance in their struggles against the employers. This gives Jackson, and those who share his goals, a kind of credibility that our opponents don’t have. We’re proving to the people that we’re on their side, and can be relied on to fight for them.

Our ruling class has been using many different kinds of political deceptions to try to divert the masses away from revolution. But the trend we keep seeing is that these state-backed ideologies fail to fulfill their purpose, and the psyop managers need to find a new manipulation tactic. During the Biden era, wokeism was the primary imperialist narrative tool. Then it switched to anti-wokeism, with MAGA being captured by Silicon Valley and Musk selling his brand as anti-establishment. Now that the second Trump White House has thoroughly exposed its pro-imperialist nature, the rightists who promote the “Jewish question” will be boosted more, as will the broader conservative alt media.

The leftism-aligned alt media types have declined in relevance, and that’s why they’re lashing out against Jackson. In this new stage, the right-wing alt media will be the main controlled opposition. And a big part of this media’s goals will be to sell an alternative to what Jackson does; these kinds of conservatives will present anti-communism as essential towards being patriotic, and towards opposing the deep state.

There are plenty of people who are receptive to a message like this, but today’s conservative base is also increasingly skeptical of Zionism. And because Jackson is able to find commonality with many conservatives on that issue, it may be that the collapse of Zionism’s narrative dominance will be what makes Jackson’s communist message win out. The USA’s communist movement is on the path towards victory; what we must do is continue building up this movement, and ensure that it will survive the state’s next crackdowns. Our enemies are learning that they can’t beat us in the narrative realm, so their next resort will be to try shutting down our operations. When they fully activate their plans for this, we must be ready to keep the struggle going.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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The pro-Palestine movement’s future is in organized labor, & U.S. workers can be reconnected to anti-imperialism

The next stage of the anti-Zionist struggle must be based within worker organizing. It will either take on this new form, or stay trapped in a cycle of stagnation and defeat. The Gaza student encampments were necessary for forcing the Palestinian genocide into the center of the discourse, but now the movement needs to shift towards different strategies and tactics. The movement cannot remain confined to the campuses, it has to expand into the broader masses. And these masses exist within the unionized workers, as well as the wider proletariat that’s not (yet) organized.

That the antiwar movement wasn’t already deeply connected to organized labor prior to October 7 is the reason why the pro-Palestine struggle ran into a wall. Without a broad base outside the inner activist circles, a movement is going to falter, and then it’s going to fragment. This is the conclusion Norman Finkelstein has come to upon investigating the student organizing spaces, and inquiring about why the Gaza occupations fizzled out after spring 2024:

By the summer, the encampments had been wiped out. And also, which was completely predictable, when you don’t have a broad movement, and you just are left with the core, everybody knows at that moment, the core begins to fragment. The so to speak “ultras” start gaining a too loud voice, and things fall apart. And I spent time, while I was speaking around the country, asking what happened to the encampments, and everybody said the exact same thing. First of all, people were obviously very scared by what happened at Columbia. The consequences, which now are much bigger than they were back then. And then on top of that, the fragmentation that set in when the core starts fighting over relatively trivial points. 

For the struggle to have avoided this setback, it would have needed to take advantage of the working class discontents from after 2008. Amid the economic disaster, the established left orgs could have been proactive in assisting and leading the workers within their struggles. And 2008 isn’t the earliest point in which such a project could have been started; the nature of capitalism is to have regular crises, and if these orgs had wanted, they would have started recovering U.S. labor’s vitality decades ago.

Since this isn’t how history has gone, the only thing we can do is begin to correct these mistakes today. And to understand the nature of this task, we must look at the history of how the American worker movement got crushed. With this context, it becomes apparent why the orgs that facilitated the Gaza protests weren’t willing to rebuild the workers movement. It’s totally necessary to hold orgs like PSL to account for their insular way of operating, but these orgs are not the central cause of the issue, only a symptom.

It’s not simply that the leaders of these orgs have an opportunistic character; it’s that these orgs were set up to fill a particular role in the effort at undermining mass movements. They’re what replaced the original U.S. proletarian movement, which was connected to the global anti-imperialist struggle and therefore anti-opportunist. For our ruling class to capture our social movements, and make them dominated by orgs that are detached from the masses, organized labor itself needed to be neutralized. And the way the capitalists did this was by turning America’s unions into weapons against the globe’s anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles.

A pivotal moment in this labor-based imperial sabotage was when the CIO, the U.S.-Canadian union federation, initiated a split with the anti-colonial World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949. In structural terms alone, this created a division within the global workers movement that fundamentally weakened it. This problem won’t truly be rectified until the worker institutions from the empire’s heart get reconnected with those from the peripheries; which is not a task that can be carried out within the confines of bourgeois law. Because another part of this sabotage campaign was when our government made it a crime for U.S. unions to link up with international communist organizations.

Now that U.S. labor was overwhelmingly isolated from the workers in the exploited countries, the next step was to psyop America’s workers into joining with the counterrevolutionary effort. In 1955, after McCarthyism had emerged, the CIO and the AFL carried out a merger. It was ostensibly about uniting to beat back the growing right-wing attacks, but it was also expressly done with the aim of rallying U.S. workers towards fighting communism. And this narrative manipulation worked, with the mid-20th century having been an era when communism was highly unpopular among the U.S. masses. The post-war rise in living standards was absolutely a factor in this, but the prevalence of anti-communist ideology would not have been as substantial if not for this campaign to change the culture of U.S. labor organizing. This was the factor that caused U.S. labor to discard its communist, anti-imperialist ties from the previous generation, and become a tool for the wars the hegemon was waging.

It was this hole in U.S. revolutionary politics that allowed the CIA to replace the actual workers movement with the anti-Soviet “New Left;” that let left-wing anti-communism, alienation from the masses, and the dismissal of class struggle become so normalized within modern “socialist” spaces. Groups like PSL have the role of aesthetically imitating what a genuine popular movement would look like, while keeping the struggle confined to a leftist niche. Of course these groups haven’t prioritized building a workers movement; organized labor in this country became thoroughly co-opted generations ago, and groups that are driven by self-interest won’t pursue the hard task of correcting this problem.

Union organizing is not an adequate solution on its own. Our tasks are to repair the fissures created by the imperial union split, bring the workers movement into the pro-Palestine struggle (among all other anti-imperialist struggles), and give U.S. workers the means for overthrowing their capitalist dictatorship. These things can only be done if we escape the reformist traps that enabled the state to undermine the workers movement in the first place.

McCarthyism wouldn’t have been able to happen if the communist movement had remained as strong as it had been previously, and kept building on that strength. It was because of the policies of Earl Browder, who sought to liquidate the party into something subservient towards capital’s liberal wing, that the communists were left too weak to handle repression. To rectify this error, and all the other errors it’s since led to, we must carry out this worker organizing project while truly acting like revolution is our goal. 

We have to commit to building these ties with the union workers, and to constructing an independent organizational force for the proletariat. The more successful we are in this, the more the state will target us, and as this happens we must be ready to adapt. We must make the preparations to keep operating no matter what, even in an environment where our work has been made fully illegal. The idea which set back the U.S. communist movement was that we can win by compromising with the ruling class. We must reject this notion, and stay on the revolutionary path. This is the sole path that can let us overcome the imperial state’s crackdowns, and fulfill our role in the global liberation project.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Our ruling oligarchs have made class war inevitable, & the response to Luigi shows where the masses will side in this

Image from TRT World

There is no stopping the social trend that Luigi Mangione represents, because he’s the kind of person who emerges in a situation of tremendous class-based injustice. This is something we need to understand about the conditions we’re now in: it’s inevitable that these conditions will produce a wave of political unrest, comparable to the “Years of Lead” which happened in Italy from the 1960s to the 80s. And though communists can’t adopt the adventurist tactics that this trend represents, we also must recognize why so many of the people have sided with Luigi, one of the trend’s first initiators. And we need to translate this popular sentiment into workers struggle, which can only be done when we grasp what the masses are looking for. 

They aren’t hoping for civil conflict; rather they’re hoping to stop the violence that the ruling class is committing against them. That’s what communists have to offer the people as our social order breaks down, and incidents like Luigi’s act accelerate the system’s dissolution.

Over one in four Americans say they support Luigi. Which isn’t a majority, but it does represent a trend in mass consciousness, one that’s more than big enough to change the direction of history. If these many of the people are sympathetic enough to Luigi that they would openly express this, then there would absolutely be enough popular support for an effort to overthrow the capitalist state. The elites know this, which is why they’re working to preempt such a revolt by instigating violence that serves their own interests. They want to make the American years of lead include massive amounts of right-wing terrorism, violent crime, and false flags that get blamed on foreign powers.

There are theories about the killing of Brian Thompson having been a false flag, or about Luigi having not really been the culprit; but if that were true, Luigi’s case wouldn’t be so public. Luigi caught the ruling class by surprise, and the cultural shift he helped create is something the system now needs to manage; it’s shown how advanced the USA’s people are, and forced the oligarchs to go on the defensive. With Luigi, there aren’t any of the warning signs of federal manipulation that we’ve seen in other cases. 

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who almost shot Trump, had been communicating through encrypted platforms during his mental health spiral; the feds also did everything they could to hide information about him, which they didn’t do with Luigi. Undercover FBI agents regularly form relationships with psychologically vulnerable people in order to set them up for terrorist plots, which means it would make perfect sense if they were manipulating Crooks. But with Luigi, all the signs point to him having been self-motivated; and self-motivated in a way that aligned with the desires of much of the working class. 

There’s a reason why so many people have connected with him, whereas every nihilistic shooter or far-right terrorist is hated by the vast majority of the people. The workers relate to Luigi’s yearning for justice, so they’ve in large part cheered him on. Crowds have gathered to advocate for him being freed, and their demonstrations have taken on the aesthetics of a political movement; this is what it looks like when a proletariat that’s looking for revolutionary leadership has found a face to rally around.

Communists must recognize the mass revolutionary consciousness that Luigi has revealed, and lead the people towards the next phase in the class revolt. All U.S. communists should have responded in this way to the rise of MAGA, or the Bernie Sanders movement, or any of the other trends where Americans have been drawn towards a source of hope. Many Marxists did this with the Sanders movement, but at the same time they joined with the Democrats in ostracizing MAGA; it was only later when the MAGA communism synthesis emerged, and many came to truly understand what it means to reach the masses. It’s this lesson that’s equipped us to take advantage of the pro-Luigi sentiment.

This is a consciousness shift that’s different from what happened with MAGA, or with the 2016 Sanders campaign. In those cases, the figures leading the shift revealed their true nature as tools of the establishment, and large parts of their support bases became alienated. This is beneficial to the revolutionary cause, because it’s left many disillusioned people who can be brought into the class struggle; but it’s also come with a cost. When somebody leaves a cause that they believed represents hope, they often become burnt out or hopeless, and revolutionary agitators need to bring them out of that state. With the trend that Luigi represents, this won’t happen. The movement’s central figure can’t fail, meaning the movement will simply keep building off the event which initiated it. The trend can only continue to gain more momentum over time, and its driving idea of class revolt can only grow more popular.

If many of the people have already come to an advanced consciousness on class war, and this consciousness is sure to keep proliferating, then the question is what form these popular beliefs will take on next. There’s a widespread awareness that our ruling class is inflicting violence on us; where’s this awareness going to lead? The system’s narrative managers hope it will lead to division, atomization, and paranoia. That’s why there’s an effort to instigate far-right terrorism and nihilistic violence: the rulers want to steer America’s years of lead in a direction which undermines revolutionary progress.

Communists need to show ourselves as defenders against this project to collapse our society. Our role is not to start violence, but to end it. And we must recognize that this is the same idea which drives Luigi’s supporters. They’re not people who simply love the idea of violence; they’re looking for a way to stop the violence that the system subjects us to. Despite the efforts of the ruling class media to vilify these people as perverse violence-lovers, the true nature of their motives and beliefs is widely understood. Because even if most Americans won’t call themselves Luigi supporters, it’s not hard to see the reasoning of those who do. 

The discourse around this issue is only getting started, because our ruling class has made it inevitable that more of the people will adopt these attitudes. And within this discourse, communists must take on an active role. We have to lead the pro-Luigi side to the next stage in consciousness; a stage where these masses have been able to find collective workers organization, which is how they can win the class war. We can become leaders of the workers, but only if we show we truly respect them, and share their desire for bringing the violence to an end.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Syrian regime change let the Gaza genocide accelerate, & the organized left refused to take this threat seriously

This is from Chapter 2 of the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.” The image above shows the “earthquake bomb” that the Zionist entity dropped on Syria after the U.S. overthrew Assad.

Though there is a path to victory for the pro-Palestine struggle, we are now operating within a situation where the imperialists have been able to exact historic amounts of damage, both on a material and human level. By the end of the 2024 U.S. election cycle, the empire and its Zionist proxy had already been able to inflict harm which was comparable to that of the Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands lost their lives. 

According to a July 2024 study by The Lancet, the Gaza death toll was at that time potentially as high as 186,000, when accounting for all of the disease, starvation, exposure to the elements, and untreated injuries which were killing massive numbers of people. As of December 2024, the Zionist entity had had almost five months of time where Gaza was out of the news cycle, and where it could commit atrocities without even the most superficial restraints. Then the entity received another massive gift, even greater than the nomination of Kamala Harris: the successful overthrow of Syria’s President Assad by the United States and its proxies.

During the weeks prior to Assad’s departure, “Israel” was already acting as if it knew that major defeats for the resistance were about to occur, and that it would be able to get away with practically anything for the foreseeable future. On October 25, it struck an Iranian nuclear facility, even though this was supposed to be Iran’s red line. Right after it reached a ceasefire deal with Lebanon in November, “Israel” immediately began violating the agreement. Then, when Washington and Turkey overthrew Assad, the entity was enabled to go on one of the most widespread campaigns of aggression it’s ever carried out. It invaded Syria, seizing the country’s sacred peak Mount Hermon and setting up new settlements throughout the newly stolen lands. On December 15, it detonated the “earthquake bomb,” which created a blast so massive that it caused Syria’s ground to shake. It was carrying out an unmitigated assault upon the region, and it seemed like no one would be there to challenge it; Washington’s puppet government in Syria had no desire to fight the Zionist entity, and Iran had lost an important passage for transporting weapons to Hezbollah. 

As ever-more of the people throughout West Asia were coming under threat from the Zionist war machine, the entity felt more emboldened than ever when it came to Gaza. In a lament from the last day of the year, the anti-imperialist writer Caitlin Johnstone observed this connection between the weakened state of the regional resistance, and how brazenly the Zionist entity was now violating the rights of Gaza’s people:

The IDF has built a beachside resort on the coast of northern Gaza where its soldiers can take a break from committing genocide to relax, get massages, drink iced coffee, and eat ice cream and cotton candy by the shore. Meanwhile, the last hospital in northern Gaza has been burned down by the Israeli military after days of violent siege warfare on the medical facility. The IDF is now saying that it may stay in southern Lebanon past the 60-day limit it agreed to in its ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, which means we may soon be looking at yet another protracted illegal Israeli military occupation…the US-backed al-Qaeda affiliates who are now in charge in Syria announce that they probably won’t be holding elections for another four years…The US-centralized empire thrives on lies, manipulation, callousness, and stupidity. The entire world is made worse by its existence. It degrades the collective soul of our species. It’s bad for Americans, and it’s bad for everyone else. Humanity will be much better off when this murderous power structure finally crumbles.

The empire’s defeat had been delayed, letting the extermination intensify and expand into new territories. Washington’s overthrow of Assad had ramifications which were so horrific, on such a widespread scale, that the empire’s spokespeople have needed to continue heavily managing the narrative on Syria even after Assad has left. This is apparent from how as Syria’s post-Assad Salafist regime has begun a mass murder campaign against Alawites and other minorities, the regime’s state media is portraying the victims of the massacres as pro-Assad partisans.

This cover story mirrors the Zionist rationale about how all of the civilians “Israel” has targeted are Hamas combatants; the ideology behind the Syrian atrocities is in many ways a mirror of Zionism, so their propaganda often employs the same dehumanizing tropes. This display of violence has exposed the true nature of the liberal order which installed the Salafites to power, like the Gaza genocide did; and because Syria has been brought to this state, the Zionist entity can further advance its own genocidal campaign. Both projects of evil are interconnected, meaning the “revolution” that ousted Assad was a pivotal event in the story of Palestine’s holocaust. The Palestinian genocide simply couldn’t have gotten this far without the Syria regime change project’s participants and supporters; this is the conclusion Scott Ritter came to. On December 13, Ritter said that the plans of the martyred Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar partly relied on there being a strong Hezbollah, making Assad’s fall instrumental in prolonging the genocide:

To wear down Israel, Sinwar needed the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance to carry out a delicately balanced war of attrition with Israel designed to break Israel. It almost succeeded. The key was always Hezbollah. The ability of Hezbollah to engage Israel in a costly war of attrition which never crossed the line into a full scale conflict was what made the Sinwar gambit almost succeed. Hassan Nasrallah’s leadership was critical. In the end, Nasrallah’s death at the hands of Israel served as a precursor for the balancing act to fail. A ceasefire agreement was agreed to so that both Israel and Hezbollah could regroup. This was not a strategic victory for Israel—far from it. The potential of renewed fighting was a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel’s head. But this potential only existed if Hezbollah remained physically connected with Iran. Syria was the linchpin for this connectivity…The loss of Assad’s Syria dealt a huge, perhaps fatal, blow to the Axis of Resistance. Iran’s ability to meaningfully threaten Israel hinged on Hezbollah acting as a loaded pistol aimed at Israel’s head. But this pistol depended on the physical connectivity between Iran and Lebanon. Which means it depended on Assad's Syria.

This would have been avoided if the left, the political force which was supposed to be leading the pro-Palestine movement, had mounted a serious opposition towards the CIA’s dirty war in Syria. But the left overall refused to do so, and this was a crucial factor behind why the empire succeeded.

When I place this blame upon the left, I’m not just talking about the “progressive” and “socialist” figures who repeated all of the atrocity propaganda about Assad. Another indispensable player within this story of left-wing complicity is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which countered the Syria narratives in form while failing to resist the war in substance. Since Washington activated its jihadists inside Syria in 2011, the PSL had been objecting to the “chemical attack” accusations the empire was leveling against Assad. 

The PSL did take the correct position, in that it didn’t affirm the “Assad gas attack” narratives either from the war’s earlier years or from the post-Douma era. The problem was that during the most crucial moments, the PSL didn’t take an active role in leading the movement to resist the war on Syria, and functionally helped lead people away from this movement. What the PSL did was pivot its focus towards anti-Trumpism after the initial Palestine protests died down, rather than working to revive the anti-Zionist movement. This enabled the empire managers to keep Palestine out of the discourse, as well as propagate the psyops about Syria’s “revolution” without meeting any significant challenge.

When I say that PSL helped de-center the anti-Zionist struggle, I don’t accuse it of having stopped talking about Palestine entirely. It still brought up Gaza in its rhetoric, like it still objected to the Syria regime change narratives. The issue was in how it chose to lead the protest movement amid 2024’s expansions of the genocide. The PSL has a significant role in protest organizing, with its front organization ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) having been a prominent facilitator of the Gaza marches. PSL is the primary face of the Palestine protests; when someone sees these demonstrations in the news, often the signs from the crowds feature PSL’s name at the bottom. 

The PSL also has considerable ideological influence over the most theoretically advanced sections of the antiwar movement. PSL has been able to gain respect from many of the activists who have a serious anti-imperialist analysis, because its rhetoric on imperialism is better than that of most other left orgs. Yet in terms of its practical activities, the org has chosen to tail behind the Democratic Party. Thereby, it’s led many people with great potential towards embracing this backward strategy. It’s gotten them to focus on building an anti-Trump movement, making it so that Palestine hasn’t gotten enough attention. 

When the PSL took part in the January 20 “We Fight Back” protest project, this was the effect that its efforts had. The problem with this project wasn’t that its rhetoric omitted Gaza; Gaza was certainly one of the things it focused on. The problem was that it made Gaza into only one among a series of topics which it emphasized. When Gaza was no longer the most “trendy” thing to talk about, the PSL came to treat Gaza as a secondary issue, placing it alongside a series of other issues which related to anti-Trumpism. And history had already shown that doing this would set back the Palestinian struggle. This was the same model of operating which led PSL, and the other groups within the antiwar coalition, to fail in their task of ending the Iraq war.

In 2013, the author Ron Jacobs described the essence of why the 2000s antiwar movement failed; namely that its leaders had linked their efforts to the Democratic Party, whether directly or indirectly:

The closeness of some members of the larger coalition, UFPJ [United now For Peace and Justice], to the Democratic Party essentially insured that anti-imperialist elements within the antiwar movement would ultimately be marginalized. Although ANSWER’s analysis was (and is) more consistently anti-imperialist, it has its own problems, especially in its appeal to many in the antiwar left…In my opinion, it is virtually impossible to oppose the machinery of US imperialism without an anti-imperialist understanding of the US role in the world. Any other approach limits the success and the goals of any antiwar movement. This is exactly what happened. The presence of the Democratic Party in the antiwar movement and its ability to siphon off so many activists into various politician and single-issue campaigns pretty much guaranteed the election of a Democrat in 2008

Though ANSWER and PSL weren’t the orgs with the most substantial ties to the Democratic Party, they did contribute to this problem where social movements become dependent on the Democrats. PSL’s standard practice is to appeal to liberals, or to radical liberals, rather than working to connect with the broader masses. This is apparent in how during the first months of the Gaza protests, PSL was the primary org that pushed for the use of street blockages. By employing this tactic, the PSL could realistically only hope to win over the kinds of people who were already connected to the movement, and who were looking to take big actions (whether or not these actions were strategically sound). This kind of insularity is what Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA leader, called “petty bourgeois radicalism”:

The very premise of petty-bourgeois radicalism is that it is impossible to win the working class in the struggle against capitalism. From this it follows that mass concepts of struggle are not possible, necessary or realistic. This leads to actions based on small elite groups––or to individual action. Because this concept is not concerned with winning over masses, it promotes and condones actions that alienate masses. There is an inner logic to this path. Specific actions are taken because there is a lack of confidence in mass–in class–actions. These ill-considered actions result in widening the gap between the petty-bourgeois radical movements and the masses. This widening gap then becomes “proof” that you cannot win masses and therefore the line of conduct of these movements is justified. Each step leads to a further isolation. This is the inner logic of petty-bourgeois radicalism.

These two problems within the movement–dependence on liberals, and adventurist tactics–go along with each other. Actions that keep organizers isolated also keep them from expanding their circles beyond the spaces the Democratic Party controls. This further incentivizes them to use messaging that will exclusively attract liberals, which leads them to promote the same distractions which keep the genocide out of mainstream discourse. The leaders of the “protest cage” tied themselves to the Obama-style political brand, and this brand underwent its total collapse with Trump’s second victory. Now the genocide’s perpetrators are in place to accelerate and expand their extermination campaign, while feeling confident that this time they won’t experience as much of a backlash as earlier.

While I was writing this chapter in March of 2025, “Israel” carried out a bombing campaign throughout Gaza where well over four hundred people were murdered. This comes after “Israel” has largely dismantled the UN’s humanitarian aid networks for Gaza, and shut off the electricity for Gaza’s one remaining desalination plant. More children keep dying of sickness, untreated injuries, hunger, and exposure to the elements, which all further encourages the Zionist entity to pursue its ethnic cleansing plan. In the same week, the Trump White House started a massive bombing campaign against Yemen, bringing the Gaza model of destruction into another country. That’s the true purpose of these latest U.S. strikes: to make Gaza the “new normal.” The imperial strategists hope that by attacking the West Asian region so brazenly, they’ll pressure Iran and Russia into appeasing Washington, leaving China more vulnerable to U.S. attacks. 

How far the imperialists will get in this scheme depends on the success of the global workers movement. It’s this movement that drives anti-imperialist resistance, and that threatens the imperial state from within; which shows that our top priority, alongside the pro-Palestine mobilizations, must be to advance the class struggle. To carry out this task, we will need to do away with the practices that have created so many setbacks, both for the pro-Palestine struggle and on all other fronts. This doesn’t mean trying to outcompete the PSL over who gets to guide the protest cage; the protest cage is a trap, and protests must not be what  we center our practice around. Our primary task is to build organizational power for the workers, not just through the unions but also through our own independent proletarian institutions.

The PSL’s liberal-adjecent messaging is only one part of why it failed the pro-Palestine movement. The deeper reason behind its failure is that it never tried to establish a serious presence within the unions, or to take a truly active role in the proletarian struggle. Its work has been almost exclusively limited to protests and electoral campaigns, and the failures of the pro-Palestine movement prove these things are not sufficient. They can even set the struggle back when carried out for the purpose of liberal tailism, like PSL does. Yet from the perspective of PSL and the other established left orgs, this organizing model was their only option, because they hadn’t already established the institutional workers power which would have allowed them to do more.

The organizations that carry the pro-Palestine cause forward will be the ones that have prioritized assisting and leading the workers’ struggles. They’ll have gained a substantial base within the masses; they’ll have gained the power to rally large numbers of workers towards leveraging their economic strength; and they’ll be free from the corrosive influence of the NGOs, letting them build a movement that’s truly independent from the Democratic Party. If we orient our practice around these goals, we’ll be able to mobilize the masses in a sustainable way, making the empire unable to distract from its crimes or break up the movement’s efforts. 

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