-------- Forwarded message --------- From: Michael Novick <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 8:33 PM Subject: [change-links] Jan-Feb 2026 issue of Turning The Tide out and up on line Vol. 38 #1
TTT was first published in 1988, so this marks its 38th year of publication. Below is the text of the lead editorial. Articles include an exclusive interview with Jamal ibn-Mumia about his father, Mumia Abu-Jamal; Eric Mann's review of “Artificial Intelligence, Society and Religion: Crossroads of Algorithm, Neoliberalism and Faith”, the announcement of an important local event on February 7 - "A-I, Labor and the Future of Los Angeles and the World," 11 AM - 5 PM at the IAM Machinists Union Hall, 1261 N. Avalon Blvd. in Wilmington. There's coverage of Noam Chomsky's ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the conviction of the leader of the transnational neo-nazi terrorist group, the Terrorgram Collective, an expose of "Toxicollege", Bronx Community College in NY, and Yvonne Yen Liu's insightful analysis of how the movement from below can ensure that Mamdani's mayoralty can produce a solidarity economy in New York City. Here's the link to the PDF: https://antiracist.org/vol-38-1-jan-feb-2026-issue-of-ttt/ Though you can read it for free, subscriptions to the print edition are encouraged to subsidize the mailing to upwards of 1500 prisoners around California and across the US. Subs are $24 a year payable to Anti-Racist Action at PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232, via paypal to [email protected], or online at https://ko-fi.com/anti_racist_action_la And here's the text of the lead editorial: *Sinking Deep Roots of Solidarity and Resistance* by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART) Bloody repression is hardly a new phenomenon in the history of the US. >From the wars of extermination to carry out the thefts of Indigenous lands and the genocidal enslavement of millions of Africans and African-descent people, from the invasion and conquest of northern Mexico to the lynch mobs that enforced white supremacy after the Civil War and Reconstruction, from the massacres and executions of working people and labor organizers to the assassinations of scores of Black Panthers, Chicanos, American Indian Movement members, and Puerto Rican independentistas by COINTELPRO, from mass incarceration to deaths in custody, executions via the death penalty, and extra-judicial killings of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people by law enforcement, the US federal state and its component state governments have always been willing to take lives to enforce settler colonial capitalism and its global empire. Nonetheless the second Trump presidency marks a qualitatively more intense and troubling willingness by the Empire to violate all norms and restrictions in regards to civil and human rights and the use of military forces inside the US. ICE agents have been recruited with white nationalist slogans and unleashed not only on migrant workers but on anyone who expresses solidarity with them. Red-baiting depictions of even the mildest dissent or protest as domestic terrorism, and as an internal enemy that must be extirpated, emanate on a daily basis from the White House, enforced and implemented by executive orders and by military, paramilitary, and vigilante forces. These attacks are justified as “protecting the homeland” from external threats, while military adventures like the invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and first lady are justified as using the armed forces to execute a Department of Justice arrest warrant. Under these circumstances, it is vital to overcome the weaknesses and illusions that have held back the movements of colonized, oppressed and working people in this country. The worst of these continue to be white supremacy, male chauvinism, and identification with the oppressor and the empire. One example, is that, even in Los Angeles, rallies that denounced the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis failed to even mention the New Year’s murder in LA of a Black man, Keith Porter, by an ICE agent. (One positive sign is that most of those demonstrations linked the issues of ICE repression and war.) The failure to take note of Porter’s murder reflects a debilitating disregard of the Black freedom struggle and its critical importance in the US, historically and today. It’s paralleled by the relative disregard of the genocide in Sudan compared to the concern about the genocide in Palestine. This is a potentially fatal flaw, because the underpinning of all Trump’s lies is the big lie of white supremacy. We need to internalize how to function under conditions of increased repression, techno-fascist surveillance, and untrammeled and dictatorial presidential power and war making. These have been augmented by “civil society” operations and reactionary political formations targeting thought crimes, labor organizing, education, communications media and journalism. We need to internalize “security culture,” learn how to operate below the radar, figure out how to encourage and protect whistle-blowers, and work on building organic connections and solidarity in communities, workplaces, schools, prisons, and even within the military and paramilitary state organizations. These are lessons that anti-colonial movements inside and outside the US have learned through bitter experience, and that leadership must be recognized and absorbed by the peace, labor, gender equity, and environmental movements. We also need to recognize that “fascism” implies and is based on not merely dictatorial measures by the state apparatus but the activity of a mass base. That base includes white Christian nationalists in the MAGA movement and open neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates, because white supremacy is central to the settler colonial and imperial project. But it also incorporates right-wing elements within many immigrant communities -- “gusanos” among Cuban-Americans who have carried out acts of terror; right-wing Venezuelan emigres who welcomed Trump’s attack on their home country; monarchist Persians in LA who want the US to place the Shah’s son in power in Iran; anti-communist Vietnamese in the US who have killed opponents; former members of Central American death squads or Eastern European elements that collaborated with the German Nazis; Zionist thugs who served in the Israeli military and have attacked Jews and others who support Palestinian rights. On all those fronts, we must define wedge issues that can begin to split away some of the base of the MAGA movement and other reactionary formations, just as a younger generation of Cuban-Americans has sought to end the blockade of Cuba, or many young US Jews have denounced Israeli genocide and settler colonialism, and sought to end US support for it. Anti-globalization struggles once united “teamsters and turtles,” environmental struggles have created “cowboy and Indian” alliances. We can and must rebuild such solidarity and revolutionary inter-communalism. Simultaneously, we must enable solid, rooted, and transformative organizing in working class communities, Indigenous nations, and among people of color in the US. Black and Brown leadership and unity will be vital in that regard. These combined efforts must help heal the urban/rural breach. Start by listening to as well as speaking to the concerns and needs of working people, whether blue collar, white collar, pink collar or agricultural, overcoming isolation and division with a pro-social, anti-capitalist approach. If white, Black, Native, and Mexican prisoners in California and other penitentiaries could overcome their own differences and the strategy of guards and prison authorities to foment racism and division as a way to maintain control, and thus unite -- thereby ending self-defeating racism, internal strife, antagonistic gang identifications and other hostilities -- those of us out here in minimum or medium security should be able to do the same. Fascist-like conditions and dictatorial power have always existed not only in the prisons and jails, but at many workplaces and in many schools. These include the use of snitches cultivated and rewarded by authorities, the use of the carrot and the stick, repression and cooptation, and the use of privilege to divide and control prisoners, workers or students. Fascism has always promoted masculinism and sought to confine and coerce women, LGBTQ and non-binary people. Bullies, as is well known, are actually cowards, and the fear that they seek to induce in us is a projection of the fear that they feel. This is true of Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, Bannon, Musk, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the techno-fascist crowd. They understand better than we do the potential power of the people to bring this system down and to replace it with a new and different society and economy, one that is not at war with the planet but promotes regenerative and restorative agriculture and other productive enterprises that are democratically determined to meet human needs in a sustainable way. Trump et al cannot brook any opposition, because they understand in what critical condition and how brittle and vulnerable their system actually is. Mutual aid, cooperative economic projects, communal child care and kitchens, urban eco-agriculture, community self-defense, restorative and transformative justice procedures, popular assemblies and budgeting processes, defense of political prisoners of earlier periods and support for the new resisters facing frame-ups and set-ups, and similar activities, can prefigure that future society. They give people an empowering sense of what we are fighting for and what we are capable of creating. Boycotts and general political strikes can give our exploiters and oppressors the feel of our teeth and of our capacity to undermine their power and wealth. We need our own media, our own technology, and our own means of defending ourselves. We need people-to-people solidarity on a global level, exemplified by efforts like medical and other aid to Cuba, to Palestine, and other front-line targets of imperialism. Solidarity begins at home by upholding the self-determination of Black, Chicano/Mexicano, Indigenous, AAPI and other struggles and movements. The flailing of the dinosaur, though deadly, is a manifestation of its weakness, and in fact its death throes. In the words of the old Motown song, the darkest hour is just before dawn. We can and will build a new world atop the ashes of the old. Only a rooted, revolutionary resistance based on solidarity can overcome fascism. Here's the info about the event on A-I and Labor: *A-I, Labor, and the Future of Los Angeles & the World* *Saturday, Feb. 7, 11 am - 5 pm, IAM Hall, 1261 N. Avalon Bl., Wilmington* The first thing to understand about “artificial intelligence”, A-I, is that it is military technology. The techno-fascist moguls promoting it are all military contractors with Trump’s War Department. The principal driver of research and development in autonomous vehicles has been the US Army Tank Division. Elon Musk’s Space-X is mainly involved in launching military spy satellites, not uber-rich space tourists. All branches of the US military are engaged in developing, deploying, and training robotic weapons -- autonomous tanks, naval vessels, and airborne devices capable of identifying targets and executing kills without human oversight. A-I relies on sweated human digital labor and the expropriation of previous human creative efforts. Its application to domestic economic purposes in production and consumption reflects the steady transfer of military technology to daily life, just like Tang, Teflon, and teargas. In the fifties, the interstate highway system was planned and financed by a Defense authorization, justified for the transport of troops and materiel during the Cold War. Not coincidentally, it enabled white flight to suburbia, and displaced and isolated Black communities in cities across the country. The Internet was a product of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (https://darpa.mil -- as in “military”) to coordinate military research at universities around the country. Not coincidentally, it generated a geographic, racial, and class-based “digital divide” between urban and rural, white and Black, and rich and poor people and communities. The rapid and unregulated development and adoption of A-I in every aspect of daily life poses a threat to human agency and intelligence, to privacy, to jobs, to freedom of expression, and to higher education, not to mention traffic safety. This is a reflection and manifestation of the drive towards cyber-warfare, control of space, and technological supremacy versus China, which US imperialism perceives as an existential threat. Israel used A-I to carry out genocide against Palestinians. We are all in line to be collateral domestic damage to that global war-fighting capacity. Come to a critical gathering, with a panel of knowledgeable presenters and an opportunity for strategic planning and discussion on Saturday, February 7 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the IAM Machinists Union hall, 1261 N. Avalon Boulevard, Wilmington CA. Sponsored by ARA-LA/PART, Work Week, LaborNet, and the National Writers Union. During the last SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild strikes, members said A-I was an existential issue for their craft and their unions. This is even more true today. Millions of workers face elimination of their jobs, from Uber, Lyft, and truck drivers, to healthcare and education workers. Delivery drivers are forced to work with Infrared cameras on their eyes 50-60 hours a week. CA Governor Newsom has deregulated autonomous vehicles and has also allowed A-I companies to partner with UC, CSU and community colleges to introduce A-I and use it to eliminate faculty and staff and revise course content. The US military is driving the use of A-I in aircraft, vehicles and ships and police departments are using A-I tools for surveillance and criminalization of targeted communities. This meeting will bring together teachers, healthcare workers, writers, logistics and transport workers to report on the effects of A-I on them and fellow workers. Goldman Sachs has said that 350 million workers will lose their jobs and the tech billionaires who run the government want the total elimination of any regulation of A-I and its effect on working people. 500,000 tech jobs have already been purged since the introduction of “large language model” chatbots. These techno-fascists are using the state to spy on working people, and the general public, and profiting from war and genocide abroad. Lets educate ourselves and our siblings about what is happening now with A-I and what we can do to defend our jobs, lives and families. For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected]. Michael Novick 323-636-7388 https://www.antiracist.org <http://www.antiracist.org> http://www.change-links.org -- JAI -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40214): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40214 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117305521/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
