New York City

Trump Justice Department sues NYC over Sanctuary City law

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed a complaint against New York City, its Mayor Eric Adams, and other officials over the municipality’s Sanctuary City laws, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate federal immigration enforcement statutes. In a press statement in response to the complaint, Adams distanced himself from his own city’s sanctuary laws, saying they “go too far when it comes to dealing with those violent criminals on our streets.” He said that he has “urged the [City] Council to reexamine them… So far, the Council has refused.” (Photo via TripAdvisor)

New York City

Zohran Mamdani and municipal resistance II

As a dictatorship consolidates in Turkey, aspiring strongman Recep Tayip Erdogan is launching a special attack on municipalities, arresting the mayor of Istanbul and removing elected governments in hundreds of cities and towns across the country—mostly in the restive Kurdish east. In the United States, aspiring strongman Donald Trump is now threatening to similarly remove Zohran Mamdani if he becomes mayor of New York, and order a federal take-over of the city government. Border czar Tom Homan says he will “flood the zone” with ICE agents in “sanctuary cities” such as New York and Los Angeles. In Episode 287 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that Trump forcing the issue could accelerate the breaking point in which localities coast-to-coast assert their autonomous powers in repudiation of the fascist-coopted federal leviathan—vindicating Murray Bookchin’s theories of radical municipalism. (Photo: Wyatt Souers/Peoples Dispatch)

New York City

Zohran Mamdani and municipal resistance

Amid an amusingly paranoid reaction from the MAGA right, Donald Trump is threatening to have Zohran Mamdani denaturalized and deported under the archaic Cold War-era Communist Control Act if he continues with New York’s “sanctuary city” policy as mayor. A Justice Department memo has already set the machinery for “denaturalization” of citizens in motion. But the Islamophobic, xenophobic and old-school Red Scare backlash to Mamdani’s political rise could provide the breaking point in which localities coast-to-coast refuse to cooperate with Trump’s fascist agenda—vindicating Murray Bookchin’s theories of radical municipalism. In Episode 285 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that Mamdani’s ascendance, whatever the limitations of his personal politics, heightens the contradictions in American society in a salubrious way, and may even open revolutionary possibilities. (Photo: Jim Naureckas/Flickr via The Jewish Angle)

New York City

Podcast: Zohran Mamdani and the weaponization of anti-Semitism

New York City’s mayoral race has become embroiled in the national and global dilemmas, with progressive candidate Brad Lander getting arrested by ICE and progressive frontrunner Zohran Mamdani being aggressively baited as an anti-Semite by the campaign of the overall frontrunner, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. Joining Cuomo in this propaganda offensive, not surprisingly, is the pro-Israel doxxing operation Canary Mission. In the current fraught atmosphere, this is a serious matter; Mamdani has received death threats and his campaign is boosting security measures. In Episode 283 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the accusations against Mamdani that have been hyped by the New York Post and even the supposedly more objective Politico, and weighs them against Mamdani’s own responses. (Photo: CounterVortex)

Planet Watch

Podcast: yet further thoughts on the common toad

The digitization and literal disembodiment of every sphere of human reality advances with terrifying rapidity—from the Social Security system to the New York subway system. Rather than dropping swipe-cards and bringing back tokens, returning to what was a manifestly superior and more rational system, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority moves to a still more dystopian “contactless” credit system. Similarly, rather than phasing out automobiles, our corporate overlords are now imposing driverless cars, a further step toward making the human race redundant altogether and portending the ultimate abolition of humanity. In Episode 270 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues his Spring ritual of reading the George Orwell essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad“—which brilliantly critiqued technological hypertrophy and articulated an imperative for humanistic revolution and scaleback of the mega-machine way back in April 1946. (Photo: Partonez via Wikimedia Commons)

New York City

Podcast: Cantonese & Toisan language promotion with Kim

In Episode 264 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Kim of New York City’s Chinatown Cantonese Toisan group about her efforts to promote Cantonese and Toisan language and culture. Indigenous to China’s Guangdong province, these tongues are spoken by millions in a global diaspora. Thanks to the efforts of State Sen. Iwen Chu, Feb. 12 is now Taishan (Toisan) Day in New York state, commemorating the day in 1499, during the Ming Dynasty, that Toisan County was officially created—and honoring the contributions of Toisan immigrants, most notably in the dangerous work of building the Transcontinental Railroad. It was a Toisan man born in San Francisco, Wong Kim Ark, who won the 1898 Supreme Court case that established birthright citizenship as a constitutional right. Yet in China, Cantonese and Toisan are relegated to the status of fangyan (regional dialects) and officially discouragedin favor of Mandarin—leading to protests in provincial capital Guangzhou in 2010. Even in the US, the children’s book Coolies, about the Cantonese railroad workers, has been banned from public libraries by local forces of intolerance. Through exhibits, social gatherings and a weekly language class, Kim works to keep Cantonese and Toisan heritage and pride alive in the New York metropolitan area. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Planet Watch

New York state climate law makes polluters pay

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law empowering the state government to levy heavy fines on fossil fuel companies. The fines will go to a “superfund” that pays for addressing environmental damages caused by human-driven climate change. The Climate Change Superfund Act creates an adaptation cost recovery program which will be paid for by fossil fuel companies and is estimated to raise $75 billion over 25 years. Climate change is expected to cost New York taxpayers half a trillion dollars in repair and preparations for extreme weather between now and 2050. (Photo of East River Power Plant, New York City, via Wikimedia Commons)

Watching the Shadows

Malcolm X daughters sue US over assassination

The daughters of civil rights leader Malcolm X filed a civil action against the United States government, the City of New York, and the estates of various former federal agents for their alleged role in concealing, condoning and facilitating his assassination in 1965. The suit accuses agents, officials and informants for the US Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York City Police Department of acting “individually, jointly, and in conspiracy, to proximately cause” the assassination of Malcolm X. The complaint further accuses the government and various agencies of purposely failing to intervene in the assassination and working to cover up their involvement. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

New York City

Appeals court rejects challenge to NYC curfews

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of protest curfews in New York City. The curfews, imposed in response to demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, were in force for a one-week period in June 2020. Lamel Jeffrey, Thaddeus Blake and Chayse Pena were each arrested and charged with violating the curfew. In a subsequent lawsuit, they alleged that the city’s protest restrictions violated their First Amendment right to free assembly and their Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful arrest. In 2022, a federal district court dismissed the case, stating that the curfews constituted a valid public safety regulation that “left open ample alternative channels for expressive activity.” The Second Circuit has now upheld this ruling. (Photo: The Village Sun)

New York City

Podcast: Bill Weinberg’s neo-Yippie memoir

In Episode 233 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis “smoke-ins”—and won a landmark Supreme Court ruling for free speech. The Yippie clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street, the hub for all these activities, has long since succumbed to the gentrification of the East Village, but it survived long enough to provide inspiration to a new generation of radical youth during Occupy Wall Street. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo from the CounterVortex collection)

Watching the Shadows

Anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism: beyond parsing

The Zionist propaganda machine continues to weaponize the accusation of anti-Semitism to delegitimize any effort to resist Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. This increases rather than decreases the responsibility of activists to distinguish—and oppose—actual anti-Semitism. Yet in recent weeks, sectors of the activist response to the Gaza genocide in the United States have utterly surrendered to the most abject, undisguised, unambiguous anti-Semitism—playing right into the hands of the Zionist calumnies. Bill Weinberg discusses this difficult reality in Episode 231 of the CounterVortex podcast. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image via frgdr Blog. Hebrew lettering in background spells names of places in Europe where Jews were exterminated.)

Greater Middle East

Netanyahu’s new map flap: multiple ironies

Israel was forced to apologize to Morocco after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seen in a video displaying a map of the Middle East and North Africa—that failed to show the occupied (and illegally annexed) territory of Western Sahara as within the kingdom’s borders. Netanyahu brandished the map in an interview with a French TV channel, showing what he called “the Arab world” in green, a swath of near-contiguous territory from Iraq to Mauritania—contrasting small, isolated Israel, “the one and only Jewish state.” The goof was especially dire because in 2020 Israel joined the US as the only two countries on Earth to recognize Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara, in exchange for Moroccan recognition of the Jewish state under the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords. This was a cozy mutual betrayal of both the Palestinians and Sahrawi Arabs, the indigenous inhabitants of occupied Western Sahara. (Image: Twitter via Middle East Eye)